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:

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.

Then, regular crashes of the Finder and Safari.

Now, weird font bugs:

My 6 months test period of Leopard is over. Time to switch back to a Linux/KDE desktop.

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.

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

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:

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 !

Packages are downloadable from my RPM repository for i586 and x86_64 architecture and both build support SQLite, MySQL and Postgresql as database backend.

I was looking for a way to get an error message in english instead of french. After reading the following discussion, the solution is quite obvious, but at that time I was probably too tired to think efficiently…

<kev1> Hi ! I use amarok in french and I would like to run it in english. How can I do ?
<kev1> Things like “env LANG=en amarok” doesn’t work…
<shining> kev1: LANG=C amarok
<shining> ho no
<shining> kde apps don’t use the locale env, do they? they use kde-i18n stuff
<Blissex> kev1: download the package with the amaroK english messages if your distro makes it a separate one. Else download the general KDE english stuff.
<Blissex> shining: they use both. They need the right package to get the actual messages/names, and then the env variable to select among them.
<kev1> Shining: doesn’t work either…
<shining> Blissex: ho I see
<Blissex> shining: problem is, they all use the language set when KDE started
<kev1> Blissex: ok I see…
<shining> kev1: why do you want that though? it’s a bit strange
<Blissex> kev1: it may be possible to run some KDE apps in one locale and others in another locale, but I would be surprised.
<kev1> Shining: I have some error messages in amarok but they are translated in french. I need the english version to search on google and/or make a bug report if necessary
<kev1> (I use amarok 1.4.2-beta1)
<Ardonik> kev1: kcontrol -> Accessibility -> Country
<kev1> Ardonik: ok, let me try it
<shining> kev1: ha yes, I had the same problem for other apps, where LANG=C worked fine
<kev1> Ardonik: thanks ! it work perfectly and immediately ! Quite impressive
<Ardonik> No problem
<Blissex> kev1: what you can do is to change the locale in ‘Regional&Accessibility’, start amaroK, and then change it back.
<kev1> Blissex: yes, that’s what Ardonik suggest me and it work perfectly.

1. Dowload the latest Filterset.G regexp set. The file which contain all rules is located at http://www.pierceive.com/filtersetg/ under the name YYYY-MM-DD.txt.
2. Go to Settings > Configure Konqueror... menu.
3. Then go to AdBlock Filters panel (the one on the screenshot).
4. Check both Enable filters and Hide filtered images options.
5. Use the Import... button to load the “Filterset.G” file you previoulsy downloaded
6. Enjoy ad-free web sites !

By the way, I hope to see the feature suggested by Andreas Frische to get some attention by the Konqueror community: it would be nice to have an integrated auto-updater of filter set in Konqueror (and make this how-to deprecated).