Yuijim's Scratch

Few comments about Moblin

2009-12-17T17:58:00.000+01:00

For some time I was going to write about my impressions on Moblin v2.1, Fedora-based operating system for netbooks, an finally here it is.

First of all, if you can't live without Gadu-gadu protocol (widespread in Poland), then forget about it. Empathy (instant messenger integrated into Mobllin) only seems to allow using it. You can't change contacts' aliases, which is bothersome, as Gadu-gadu uses numbers, which are almost impossible to remember. Also, even if you accept this drawback, your contacts won't stay in contacts list - every time you shut Empathy down they disappear. Of course, you can always install Pidgin, but it won't be integrated into system (i.e. one status message on all accounts, as well as Twitter, managed from status panel; list of people talking to you in your people panel) so what's the point?

Address book isn't what I expected too. It isn't at all integrated with Empathy and of course it doesn't allow storing GG number.

Another small thing I find irritating is that battery panel don't show estimated time left - you need to guess if 20% will allow you to use computer for 20 or 40 minutes.

Another thing that bothers me is Wi-Fi, or lack of possibility to set certificate in WPA2 to be more precise. Due to it I can't use high speed internet connection at university and need to take potluck - slow Wi-Fi access with no security.

PyQt4 on Moblin

2009-11-24T00:04:00.003+01:00

This was supposed to be an entry about Moblin from Polish user perspective, but since I needed to run PyQt4 application on it and spent some time working on getting it doable, I will write about it first.

To start, you need to get some sources. You can get them from http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk site. Here are the links: PyQt4 and SIP. Download the .tar.gz files and unpack them.

The rest of the software is available from Moblin repositories. You can install them with command:
su -c "yum install make gcc gcc-c++ python-devel qt-devel"

The next step is entering SIP dir and executing:
python configure.py make su -c "make install"

Make can take a while.

Now, enter the PyQt4 directory and write:
python configure.py -q /usr/lib/qt4/bin/qmake -g make su -c "make install"

Again, make can take (really) long time.

And that's it, PyQt-driven apps should be working.

Comparison of Mercurial (hg) and Subversion (svn) most useful commands

2009-11-22T19:21:00.003+01:00

Since recently the only code versioning tool I've been using was Mercural, but recently I was forced to use Subversion. When that change occurred I was looking for a short comparsion between hg and svn commands, but was unable to find one. Therefore, I decided to write it, in hope someone else will find it useful too and as a note-to-self for the future.

hg	svn	comment
`hg clone http://username:password@ the.repository.url`	`svn checkout http://the.repository.url --username username --password password`
`hg pull hg update`	`svn update`	`Pull` is used to download changesets from remote repository, and `update` to get a working copy.
`hg commit hg push`	`svn commit`	When you use `commit`, you approve your changes, but don't send them to server. It's `push` job.

The rest of the most useful commands (or their aliases) is the same in both tools: status (st), rename, add, remove (rm), help. The tricky one can be revert - I suggest reading help/documentation.