typeX-press Filebrowser “standalone”

Wednesday, 9. May 2012

In the last few days i found some time to work on the typeX-press Filebrowser again.

I made a standalone version of the filebrowser. It still has the full usermanagment and all the other features except the file editing feature. I fixed o lot of bugs and added some useful features like “download folder as zip” or a little image gallery (work in progress)

Filebrowser – Features:

  • Folderlist
  • Breadcrumb Navigation 
  • DragAndDrop Files (move, copy) 
  • Create Folder
  • Rename Folder/File 
  • Delete Folder/File 
  • File Uploader (html/ajax/flash)
  • Sort Columns (by Name, Size, Date) 
  • Show proper Filesize/Filetime information
  • Download folder as .zip file (subdirectories included)
  • Fancybox jquery image slideshow
  • Imagepreview on mouseover
  • resizeable UI elements
  • Image Gallery

> download 

 

 

 

 

 

relinux & (k)ubuntu 12.04 – custom username/hostname and other obstacles

Thursday, 12. April 2012

it seems that relinux needs a major rework to function properly on 12.04 ( afaik the team knows about this and is already working)

 

for relinux “iso” to work i had to write the following lines into a terminal first:

sudo bash
WORKDIR=/home/relinux
rm -rf $WORKDIR
mkdir -p $WORKDIR/ISOTMP/casper
mkdir -p $WORKDIR/ISOTMP/preseed
mkdir -p $WORKDIR/dummysys/dev
mkdir -p $WORKDIR/dummysys/etc
mkdir -p $WORKDIR/dummysys/proc
mkdir -p $WORKDIR/dummysys/tmp
mkdir -p $WORKDIR/dummysys/sys
mkdir -p $WORKDIR/dummysys/mnt
mkdir -p $WORKDIR/dummysys/media/cdrom
mkdir -p $WORKDIR/dummysys/var
chmod ug+rwx,o+rwt $WORKDIR/dummysys/tmp

 

because of a recent change in CASPER it tries to determine username and hostname in a really bad way that leads to errors .. (it takes the livecd lable for username AND hostname or something like that)

 i therefore had to hardcode USERNAME and HOST in 

/usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/casper (lines 692-693)

 

today i encountered a new problem :  

vesamenu.c32: Not a COM32R image

in order to solve this problem i had to overwrite the file “vesamenu.32″  located in /syslinux/  on the usb thumbdrive with the original file located in  /usr/lib/syslinux/  on my “relinux” system. 

 

 

KDE SC | Plasma KIOSK Framework – far from perfect but functional

Tuesday, 3. April 2012

did you install a kde-centric distribution on your parents pc? do you want to set up an internet terminal in a public area or in your office and you are tired of being called because a toolbar or an important widget has suddenly disappeared ?

the solution is easy..  lock down kde (plasma-desktop) !

there are several ways to do so..  

the bad:  take away the file permissions of .kde (don’t !  seriously.. if you have to, then make plasma-desktoprc and plasma-desktop-appletsrc read-only.. nothing else! )

the other:  use the kiosk framework

http://techbase.kde.org/KDE_System_Administration/Kiosk/Keys

to do so you create a file called  /etc/kde4/kdeglobals (or add your options to ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals) and write something like the following in it:  (there is a GUI for that in development but it’s still in “extragear”)

[KDE Action Restrictions][$i]
action/lock_screen=false
movable_toolbars=false
run_command=false
plasma-desktop/add_activities=false

the [$i] will make the whole section immutable - that means it will not be overwritten by any user configfiles read afterwards. (the given example will remove the lock-screen option, disable the run-command interface (krunner), lock application toolbars and disable the add activities feature)

unfortunately some of the options in the kiosk documentation (especially the plasma specific ones) are not up2date (i am trying to talk with developers about this issue) therefore you will not be able to lock down plasma completely just by using something like plasma/containment_context_menu=false  (it doesn’t work)   but there is another solution to lock down plasma and make the “unlock widgets” entry disappear !

just write a single [$i] in the first line of  ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc  – this will make the whole file immutable and hide the unlock widgets context menu entry. of course [$i] can be used to lock down specific widgets(sections) or just single options like height or width of the folder view widget for example.

be aware that anybody who knows how to find those config files is still able to alter them! 

in order to secure the desktop completely you’ll have to write those changes to /etc/kde4 and lock down every single section by hand (or at least remove the filemanager icon ^^)

 

Unity? No it’s not – it’s KDE Plasma Desktop

Saturday, 24. March 2012

This is just a little bit of unity in kde but since kde is configurable to the max you may choose the level of similarity on your own…  There even is “takeoff” launcher, krunner and a HUD – like plugin in development. (And a bunch of other useful widgets for your enjoyment )

I still don’t understand why canonical is using gnome as their base instead of kde..  here is just an other video that shows off kde’s capabilities to mimic unity right out of the box. (but rockstable ;-) )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEXk-ClMO-8

Help them to exceed their goal

Wednesday, 21. March 2012

http://www.kdenlive.org/features

 

Kdenlive is one of the greatest video editors out there… its free… its open source.. it just..  great!

The kdenlive team is collecting money for being able to work on their video editing software fulltime..  all you need is a paypal account or a credit card and you are ready to help.

If you love kdenlive as much as i do..  spend at least a few beers or a pizza to make the coding more fun :)

http://www.indiegogo.com/kdenlive-re?a=505401

 

ps:  had some problems with paypal but there it is .. wow… they already have more than 5000.–  

How to speed up persistent Kubuntu USB LIVE installation

Wednesday, 7. March 2012

long story short:

  • DO NOT use the persistent file!  set up an explicit partition formatted with ext4, labeled casper-rw
  • use the following boot parameters in your /syslinux/syslinux.cfg on the first partition (all in one line):

 

append noprompt floppy=off cdrom-detect/try-usb=true boot=casper persistent locale=en_US.UTF-8 file=/cdrom/preseed/custom.seed initrd=/casper/initrd.gz live-media-path=/casper/ quiet splash ignore_uuid --
 

This does not iron out the problem with the /dev/sr0 message (you could try to disable the floppy in your bios to get rid of this messages) it also leaves the ssl random generator error message and other contradictions you’ll get while using casper and the persistent mode (nothing serious – just not as clean as it could be) but it boots faster than windows7 on my test machines and the kde start, which needs more than 4 reeeeeaaaallly long minutes when using a casper-rw FILE is almost as fast as you would expect it on a hdd install. (still nothing compared to my sdd install ^^)

i would appreciate some ideas for enhancements from someone with more insight on this matter

thx

glhf 

 

PS:  my   syslinux.cfg

dd with progress bar

Friday, 3. February 2012

 

if you need a progress indicator while using dd you will find this interesting.

sudo dd if=/dev/zero bs=2048 | pv -s 8G | sudo dd bs=2048 of=/dev/null

just give “pv” the size of the input device (image) and pipe dd through.

 

Get device name of the newest usb-thumb-drive in the system

Thursday, 2. February 2012

this post is just a note to myself (like many others on this blog)

ls -t /dev/sd* | head -1 | /bin/sed -e 's/^\/dev\/*//' |cut -c 1-3
 

i had to figure out a way to determine the name of the usb-thumb-drive i JUST connected within a script – well.. it works but im open for suggestions :)

first i list all devices that begin with “sd” sorted by creation time/date 

then i filter the newest device and cut off  the string “/dev/”

at last i cut the first 3 letters of the string because that’s all i need (i do not need to know the partition number of the device)

gimp 2.7.4 ppa

Thursday, 5. January 2012

 Um dieses PPA hinzuzufügen öffnet man entweder einen Terminal (Konsole) und kopiert folgende Zeilen…

sudo apt-add-repository http://ppa.launchpad.net/matthaeus123/mrw-gimp-svn/ubuntu
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gimp

 

… oder man nimmt den grafischen Weg über den Paketmanager (Muon Packet Manager – Settings – Configure software sources – other software – add) und fügt folgendes PPA hinzu:

ppa:matthaeus123/mrw-gimp-svn/

 

Laut Entwickler könnte 2.7.4  das letzte Release vor der finalen Version 2.8 sein.

Der OneWindowMode scheint nun zu funktionieren !!

:)

solve account connection error on meego harmattan (n9)

Monday, 5. December 2011

After the upgrade of the n9 meego harmattan software to pr1.1, i ran into a problem with my accounts.

autoconnection didn’t work anymore, i had to do it manually and even then i had to try it twice till it worked.

 

With these three lines the connection problems are gone!

gconftool –recursive-unset /system/http_proxy
gconftool –recursive-unset /system/proxy
gconftool –recursive-unset /system/osso