Since I’ve been working on the windows installers for arora – I realized there were no arora rpms for moblin.

Presenting arora 0.10.2 rpms on moblin. Fast, lightweight and excellent flash support too (flash seems to play faster in moblin than on firefox).

Get it from the ibiblio moblin repository now.

Here’s something that you don’t see anyday:

This will definitely make the news!

Interestingly, The embedded videos which still ran properly, a while ago, now do crash (flash app is still loading though):

For those finding the latest git windows build of arora is too buggy for you, here’s some great news.

I have compiled openssl 0.9.8n dlls on windows, and used them for the arora 0.10.2 stable build. With these in mind, arora 0.10.2 is running as sweet as ever.

You may download the stable binary for windows installer at the ostalks ibiblio mirror

Arora is a Qt browser that uses webkit (rendering engine used in google chrome and safari) as it’s html engine. It’s small, and fast too.

The current version of the windows build of arora (0.10.0) is not the latest version.

Presenting the windows build of arora 0.10.2 – git build version as of march 24, 2010. I myself have compiled it under Qt 4.6.1

Get the installer at the ostalks ibiblio site

Short post: just had a first taste of the Proposed Repository Working Group meeting for Meego over irc. Nothing much yet, there’s still stuff the group have to find out more on the build system, but at least progress has been made.

Anyways, initial writeup for the draft of mission and scope of the team will be presented to the TSG the meeting after the TSG’s meeting on Wednesday.

I’m still getting the hang of how things are done in meego, but I’m sure I’ll get there soon enough.

Just to let you know what was discussed (at least some of it – had a flakey connection and got cut off on some portions):
1. All apps in Meego repository makes use of official or community provided APIs.
2. If a proprietary vendor has proprietary APIs it will have a proprietary store.
3. Some suggestions were made about splitting libraries into Stable and Experimental/Unstable. Stable is where official APIs and few well supported community APIs are placed. The experimental/unstable stuff is where not well maintained but useful libraries are placed.
4. Apps should avoid forking at all costs. External dependencies on the apps should mostly be Qt based.
5. A possible problem seen would be on how to deal with vendor APIs.
6. lbt (coming from the maemo side, .deb) and th0br0 (Fedora packager, rpm) will be the coordinators/representatives to the TSG for now.

There are other stuff mentioned, but basically all draft – all have to be presented to TSG. Since there is so little info yet on the Build System, all these things will most probably be subject to change in once TSG guidelines for meego emerges.

I’ve always been fascinated with Japanese culture. Especially with anime and manga.

For those who don’t know, manga is the Japanese equivalent of comics; anime is animation, heavilly influenced by manga styles and typically includes characters with large eyes, big hair and elongated limbs, among other things. What I find amazing with these forms of art is that they compass all subjects, from typical romance, sports, drama, comedy, and other things as well!

If you have some friends that like these kinds of art (I’m pretty sure a lot of people nowadays like anime and manga), and would like to introduce linux to them, why not give them a manga-styled comic that teaches them linux?

Introducing Ubunchu!

This manga is all about the adventures of three school students in a system-admin club learning ubuntu. All the chapters of this manga are presented in a fun way, that any manga lover would appreciate.

The neat thing is, the one promoting linux (or ubuntu) is a girl! Not the guy – he’s a PC user (weird guy, weird guy, boo!)

Don’t worry though, he gets it more or less as the series progresses.

There are currently 5 chapters to this manga. In the spirit of open-source collaboration, these are translated into different languages by volunteers.

Each manga chapter introduces different topics; the first chapter for example, we see how linux has come a long way from it’s command prompt days, to a point where it is now easy to install. Moving forward to chapter 4, we are introduced to licenses. All of it is done in a funny and light way too.

Got you interested? Head to http://www.ubunchu.net/ now and download these chapters for free!

One of those very short postings. I created a metapackage rpm for the Open Office 3.2.0 suite in aLinux and passed it through the contribs section of aLinux.

Should have Open Office in aLinux soon enough.

Update: Ok, it’s now in the contribs directory in the aLinux site (ibiblio): http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/peanut/contribs/RPMS/COMMUNITY/Clint/

Funny, I see my last rpm contributions from aLinux 12.7 – it should work there I think… I really need to update those!

Ok, ok… you might wonder, what’s a blog post about William Shatner making a social network doing here?

See the tag line of my site? “Open Source, Operating Systems, Offtopic Stuff!”. This definitely counts as “Offtopic Stuff!”. And I’m a big Star Trek fan – well, TOS and NG, as well as some other non Startrek stuff like SG-1, starring mostly my favorite actor in the first few seasons Richard Dean Anderson – the “MacGyver” guy.

Well, it’s not a social networking site (http://www.myouterspace.com) per se, for me, it looks like Mambo/Joomla with a custom template and social networking module tacked in (hey, it’s an open source CMS, at least we got the “open source” aspect in!), it is a site more geared with getting people with an interest of creating sci-fi films and games together into one site. This isn’t a site just for Trekkie (or Trekker) people… it’s more of a sci-fi community.

I’d like to think of it as a deviantart site for sci-fi people. Or CGTalk.

I’m more inclined to think that the Shat would like to look into opportunities for making sci-fi films or ventures in the future. Well, I’m all for hoping that I’ll never see a scene again where Spock, Mccoy and Kirk sing row row row your boat over a campfire again. Just a joke, I’m wishing him all the best, after all, he’s my all time favorite Star Trek captain (although I prefer Spock or Scotty as my favorite TOS character).

Come on, who could ever refuse Kirk inviting guys to join in the site in a futuristic, cheesy, red spaceship?

I received a question from an email on how to create your own yum repository.

I am basing it on Moblin/Meego, but should mostly work on Fedora/RedHat too.

I am assuming that you have already installed the development tools of Moblin in your installed Moblin distribution by using this command:

sudo yum groupinstall “Development Tools”

To start, we install the createrepo package – we can get it from the Manage Apps application in the Moblin Applications->Settings tab.

Once installed we can now create the repository using the commands:

mkdir -p /[path of your moblin repository root]/Moblin/[moblin-release version]/{SRPMS,i586}

We use i586, because Intel atom processors are basically of arch type i586.

You may want to create i386 generic files for whatever use you want, so you can use {SRPMS,i386,i586} instead above.

If you do so, you may want to automate the process by creating a bash script named createrepo.sh and writing in the following code:


#!/bin/sh
destdir="[path of your moblin repository root]/[moblin-release version]"
for arch in i386 i586
do
pushd ${destdir}/${arch} >/dev/null 2>&1
createrepo .
popd >/dev/null 2>&1
done


Every time you add a package, call this script and it will create the metadata using the createrepo tool in the i386 and i586 directories.

Upload this directory structure to the server where you’ll be hosting your repository.

The .repo file you will create will most like be similar to this:

[mymoblinrepo]
name=My Repository
baseurl=http://myserver.com/repo/Moblin/2/$basearch
enabled=1

$basearch will be the arch type of the distribution. For Moblin you can hardcode it to i586 instead.

Anyways, that’s about it. Cheers!

Another one of those very very short posts. If you have moblin installed on your netbook, and want to develop rpms on it, you can type in this command:

sudo yum groupinstall “Development Tools”

It should install all tools necessary for basic Moblin development. Ciao.