Tag Archives: KDE

Burlesque Burglary music video released

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I’ve just released my last video project: a music video for Burlesque Burglary by Cool Cavemen. Here is the official announcement on the band website, and here is the video:

It’s also the first time I produce subtitles, since I found out about Subtitle Composer last week, which is a great and simple subtitling software for KDE. This software was so good that I basically added subtitles to all Cool Cavemen’s video on YouTube over the week-end. BTW, if you want to contribute to this effort and offer us translation of lyrics and subtitles, send me an email and I’ll help you.

I’ll try to produce detailed production notes in an upcoming article. So don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed of that blog to not miss it ! :)

And finally, here are some stills from the video:

How-to fix Flash on Kubuntu

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If like me you want the greatest and latest Flash version on your Kubuntu, you probably added the SevenMachine’s repository to your sources. Else, you should, as it’s where you’ll find all the fresh Flash packages, for both 32 bits and 64 bits architectures.

Everything will be great after that. Until the day this repository is updated, which will break the Flash plugin if you attempt an upgrade with KPackageKit.

The Flash package does not contain the binary plugin itself, but is just an empty shell which download the plugin from the web to your machine. And for this operation to work as expected, the package need to be in a terminal environment.

To fix this, you’ll have to remove all previous Flash package (as a prevention measure), then install the latest with the command line. Here are the commands to do exactly this:

sudo apt-get remove --purge flashplugin-installer flashplugin64-installer
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install flashplugin64-installer

Commands above are for a 64 bits distribution. If you’re still running a 32 bits Linux, just replace the last reference of flashplugin64-installer by flashplugin-installer.

Now restart your browser and YouTube videos and other Flash stuff should work again.

Web commands

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  • Download a web page an all its requisites:
    wget -r -p -nc -nH --level=1 http://pypi.python.org/simple/python-ldap/
  • Create a PNG image of a rendered html page:
    kwebdesktop 1024 768 capture.png http://slashdot.org/
  • Search in all files malformed HTML entities (in this case non-breakable spaces that doesn’t end with a semicolon):
    grep -RIi --extended-regexp '&nbsp[^;]' ./
  • Here is a one-liner I use to ping some pages on internet to force our corporate proxy to refresh its internal cache:
    for EGG in BeautifulSoup PIL Plone; do wget --server-response -O /dev/null http://pypi.python.org/simple/$EGG/; done
  • Create a minimal self-signed unencrypted SSL certificate without issuer information and a validity period of 10 years:
    openssl req -x509 -nodes -subj '/' -days 3650 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout self-signed.pem -out self-signed.pem
  • Create a pair of SSL self-signed certificate and (unencrypted) private key (source):
    openssl genrsa -out private.key 2048
openssl req -new -subj '/' -key private.key -out certreq.csr
openssl x509 -req -days 3650 -in certreq.csr -signkey private.key -out self-signed.pem
rm certreq.csr
  • View certificate details:
    openssl x509 -noout -text -in self-signed.pem

Fuse and sshfs on MacOSX Leopard

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I’m used to access distant machine’s file systems via ssh. My favorite environment, KDE, makes things easy thanks to the support of sftp:// URLs via a kio_slave. MacOSX is not as friendly and don’t have any built-in mechanism of that kind.

To get similar features in Leopard, we have to rely on MacFuse and sshfs. I’ll explain here how I’ve installed these components on MacOSX 10.5.

MacFUSE_Banner

First, download the latest MacFuse dmg and install it. FYI, the version I’ve got was MacFuse 2.0.3,2.

Then, download the sshfs executable for Leopard, either the gzipped version or the binary from the SVN as explained in the MacFuse wiki.

From a terminal, rename the binary:

sudo mv ./sshfs-static-leopard ./sshfs

Then allow the binary to be executed and place it in the system:

sudo chmod +x sshfs
sudo install sshfs /usr/local/bin

From now you can test sshfs mounting with the following command:

sshfs user@myserver.net:/folder/ /Network/distant-folder -p 22

I personally had a problem here: sshfs complained about a missing library. I fixed this by downloading the required file from the MacFusion project and copying it beside the sshfs binary:

sudo wget http://www.macfusionapp.org/trac/export/86/trunk/SSHFS/sshnodelay.so
sudo mv ./sshnodelay.so /usr/local/bin/
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/sshnodelay.so

If this fail you can also check:

  • that the current user you’re logged with has access to the distant server with the ssh user@myserver.net command;
  • or that the local mount point exists (you can create it with mkdir -p /Network/distant-folder);
  • and finally, you can add the -o debug option to the sshfs command above to get additional clues.

Now we will automate the mounting of sshfs at every start.

At this point I recommend you to register the root user of your MacOSX system to the distant server:

sudo cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | sudo ssh -p 22 user@myserver.net "cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"

If doesn’t exists, we have to create the /etc/fstab to edit it:

sudo touch /etc/fstab
sudo vi /etc/fstab

And add the following directives:

dummy:user@myserver.net:/folder/ /Network/distant-folder sshfs allow_other,auto_cache,reconnect,port=22,follow_symlinks,volname="Distant folder" 0 0

As you can see I’ve added lots of options to accommodate my uses. You can get more informations about sshfs options through traditional help pages:

sshfs --help

MacOSX’s automount daemon will look for a script called mount_sshfs at start. Actually it doesn’t exists on your system, but sshfs command line is compatible with what automount expect. So creating a symbolic link will do the trick:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/sshfs /sbin/mount_sshfs

Finally, we can tell automount to acknowledge all our modifications:

sudo automount -vc

How-to import a Maildir++ folder to Kmail

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Let’s say you have a local copy of a mail folder you want to browse with Kmail. This folder is normally found on a dedicated mail server and you access it through the IMAP protocol. I was in this situation some days ago and I will tell you how I’ve done it.

Instinctively, I assumed that my folder was of the Maildir format, and Kmail local mails too. So I tried to copy my ~/Maildir folder from the mail server to my local machine (~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail/). And that was the result in Kmail:

kmail-no-sub-folders.png

It looks good but it’s not: there is no sub-folders !

After some googling, I found what was wrong: my ~/Maildir folder is not a Maildir, but a Maildir++ folder. This kind of folder is handle by popular IMAP MTA like qmail, Dovecot and courier-imap (which was used on the mail server where my ~/Maildir come from). There is some advantages of using the “++” flavor of Maildir over the classic one, like quotas and sub-folders. Unfortunately Kmail is not able to read the Maildir++ folder structure.

To fix this, I’ve created a tiny python script to migrate a Maildir++ folder to Kmail.

How-to use it ? Simply:

  1. Download it to your disk,
  2. Edit it and change the MAILDIR_SOURCE and KMAILDIR_DEST variables to match your local configuration,
  3. Give it execution privileges,
  4. Run it !

I advise you to try it first in a safe environment (like under a temporary user account). And don’t forget to backup everything before playing with it: because this script work for me doesn’t mean that it will work for you ! ;)