Developers' Blogs: boobaa

No, it is not about the "nightly revolution with umbrellas" (Hungarian). It is simply about the fact that we will have a second baby by the end of next spring/beginning of summer, if God permits and we are alive. Doc says he/she is so little by now that he can't say whether he/she is healthy or not.

Last Saturday I have fed up with the fact that I could not give a Frugalware LiveCD to my boss with OpenOffice.org on it. I have killed a fairly great amount of time since then with regenerating the iso several ten times, but it has been "finished" by now.

Main issues: dropped Gnome, dropped XFCE, dropped a plenty of file managers, dropped a lots of things. But there is KDE with educational programs (as I work in a secondary school), there is OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird, K3b, Gaim, XMMS, MPlayer, GIMP, XChat, amaroK, there is a dhcp-based network by default, there is a working mouse wheel (at least my USB one does work) - and every one of them in Hungarian.

Nevertheless there is a little glitch: the keyboard is only half-Hungarian, as I got question marks instead of hungarumlauts, and the AltGr behaves as Alt. So there is more work to do - if it suits one's fancy, who has big bandwidth (the CD contains about 5-600 packages, can't remember the exact number), big place to kill (the build needs about 2,5GiB in /var/tmp/livecd, and an additional ~800MiB in the working directory), and terribly great amount of time (after compiling kernel and sysconfig, and downloading the fpm's, it costs a little bit more than an hour over here at me).

I have modified the build process a bit. Before this release it behaved like installing this package groups, then that ones, then install some additional packages - but yay, we have run out of space, so let's remove some packages. Now only base and xorg-core groups gets installed as a whole, then several more applications - there is no removing step, so the build consists of only two steps. I have prepared a Makefile as well, so one should work through to the iso by issuing only one make command.

If I can recall correctly, I did not touch anything else - I tried xconfig's --live switch, but this does not work from init scripts for unknown reasons. Er, the stuff can be reached here.

I am beginning to fed up with digging my mail all the time: did I finish working on an issue in one of my growing-number-of-projects or not? So I needed a bugtracker... But which one?

I can't stand Flyspray, and I am not alone with this attitude among users of frugal (given that IroNiQ doesn't know about all of our complains). After some hit-and-try test I came up to Mantis, but it's latest stable version does not have a usable Hungarian translation. There are only a few strings translated by several guys, so it is a bit inconsistent. In addition there are some issues with handling the codepages: while there are ISO-8859-2 encoded accents and stated accordingly, error messages regarding to codepages take up the bigger place of the pages.

That's why I made a brand-new Hungarian translation - from scratch, to avoid pressure of the old one. I tried to be consistent and solid, but I can't say I have finished the job: the error messages and JPgraph-related stuff are still awaiting to be translated. Nevertheless practice says it's just much more useful than it was before.

Target: When one inserts a DVD, it should be automatically - without any question, popup spam and other annoying effects - mounted under /media. Requirements: kdebase package (the rest will be pulled in by kdebase).

Under GNOME, ivman handles this function (if it does anything, besides writing to stderr). When you insert a media, KDE displays a window: "Open in new window" or "Don't do anything". The first is obviously not ok, the sencond does not mount at all. Let's start hacking...

Create the file named ~/.kde/share/config/medianotifierrc with the following content (this will ensure the automatism; unfortunatelly you can't use ~ in the path):

[Auto Actions]
media/dvd_unmounted=#Service:/home/boobaa/.kde/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/PMount_this_stuff.desktop

Then create the file named ~/.kde/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/PMount_this_stuff.desktop with the following content (this links the DVD insert event with the script):

[Desktop Action PMount this stuff]
Exec=~/bin/mypmo %u
Icon=button_cancel
Name=PMount this stuff

[Desktop Entry]
Actions=PMount this stuff
ServiceTypes=media/dvd_unmounted

Finally create the script named ~/bin/mypmo with rights 0700:

#!/bin/bash
pmount `echo $1 | sed 's|.*media/\(.*\)|\1|'`

This script is necessary because kded uses the parameter format system:/media/hdc, and pmount won't like that.

(Thanks for VMiklos translating the original post from Hungarian.)