[HOWTO] Run scripts in KDE before KDE starts

One annoying little things about being a KDE user, whether I’m running LMDE or any other version of KDE is that it seems to ignore my setting to leave my system’s NumLock setting (on) alone when it starts. The problem is that KDM, the KDE Desktop Manager and also known as the Login Manager, loads in before the main part of KDE does so the BIOS setting is already changed by the time KDE ignores the possibility of changing the setting. Thanks to the good folks over at Make Tech Easier I’ve found a trick that fixes the misbehavior.

KDM has its own startup script called Xsetup, and will execute anything in that file before KDE itself launches. To make sure KDE turns on the NumLock, or to make sure it stays on, you can install an app called numlockx and use the app to turn the NumLock on before the main part of KDE even loads. To do this just follow these steps:

• Install numlockx. You can do it via a package manager or open up a Konsole window and run sudo apt-get install numlockx .
• Open Xsetup as root by pressing Alt-F2 (or whatever key combination you’ve set to launch the Run  Command Interface) and run kdesudo kate /etc/kde4/kdm/Xsetup .
• At the bottom of the file* add numlockx on and save the file.

That’s really all there is to it. The next time you boot your system into KDE the NumLock will be enabled for you automatically. Please remember that anything you put into Xsetup will be run as root and will be available to any user who boots into KDE on your computer so be very careful not to put anything into that file that could break your system. But you’re not restricted to using Xsetup for things like turning on your NumLock. The article from Make Tech Easier uses the example of configuring your display settings before KDE starts, and I’m sure there are other things that could be done this way.

*-If your Xsetup includes the line

x/sbin/initctl -q emit login-session-start DISPLAY_MANAGER=kdm

you want to put whatever you’re adding to the file before this line.

[HOWTO] QuickTip: Change the image for the cap on KDE4′s desktop cube

KDE4 is known partly for it’s lovely eye candy, and one of the things former GNOME users love is the ability to have a desktop cube like you can have in Compiz. The one problem is that while you can change the background image (like Compiz’s skydome) you can’t change the image use for the top and bottom of the cube.

Except that’s not entirely accurate,it turns out. I did some searching to see if I could find any way to replace the image and I found two different sites with the information I needed, one in Italian and one in English. Here are the steps you need  to follow.

• Open your favorite image editor and create or resize an image so that it measures 800×800 pixels. Make sure the image has a transparent layer . In Gimp you want to use Layer > Translucency > Add Alpha Channel. Save the file with the name cubecap.png.
• Copy the file to /usr/share/kde4/apps/kwin, replacing the image already there. I strongly recommend making a copy of the current cubecap.png so you have it in the event you want to get back to the default.
• Open the Desktop Effects settings, select the Desktop Cube effect and open the configuration window by clicking on the wrench button. Go to the Advanced tab and clear the checkbox for Display image on caps, then then check it again. Click on OK to close out the settings dialog.
• Hit the key combination for using the desktop cube, Ctrl-F11is the default, and drag your cube down to show the cube cap. Voilà! If you did everything correctly you will see your new cube cap.

You will have the same image on the top and bottom of your cube, and unlike with Compiz there’s no way to use different images for the top and bottom of your cube, but at least you can change the image you use for your cube cap.

If you use a desktop sphere rather than a cube you can see KRAM’s post on the PC Pitstop Forums for information on not only how to change your car but also how to fit your image for the desktop sphere.

Thanks to KRAM for the English language instructions and to NiCo on the Mandriva International Backups forum for the Italian version of the instructions. that first showed me the change was possible.

[HOWTO] QuickTip: Install packages graphically on LMDE running KDE

Just a quick post to pass something along I just discovered. When I got my laptop with LMDE on it I had no problem double-clicking on Debian packages I had snagged and having Gdebi launch so I could install them, but the moment I installed KDE I lost that ability and couldn’t figure out how to get it back. Yes, I know I could install packages from the command line with a simple sudo dpkg -i [package name], but that’s a bit of a pain in the rear for someone who prefers to use GUIs for things whenever he can.

This morning I was checking out the latest post on Linux Mint 12 on the Mint blog and I noticed that “packages now open with gdebi” and just on a whim I fired up the Software manager and did a search for “gdebi.” Sure enough, I found gdebi-kde, and installed it, then I checked my theory by double clicking on a package I had installed. As I hoped, Gdebi opened in a window and asked me if I wanted to install the packge.

I’m a happy penguinista.

TweetDeck died when I switched DE’s, but there’s a fix

I usually use the websites for keeping up with both Twitter and Facebook but sometimes I want to post something to both services at once., For those times I fire up TweetDeck (TD), a great cross-platform microbloging solution that uses Adobe AIR to deal with the details for each operating system whether you’re on GNU/Linux, MacOS X or Windows. TweetDeck can be used for Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and other social networking sites.

When I switched from GNOME to KDE I didn’t expect a problem but when I fired up TweetDeck last week I got error messages. (Sorry, I forgot to snap a screenshot of the errors.) Yesterday I was posting the first part of my posts on the migration to KDE and decided to try reinstalling TD to see if it would resolve the issue. It didn’t, but there was a URL (http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/492/cpsid_49267.html) in the error message so I entered it into my web browser.  The page is about problems with their Encrypted Local Storage (ELS) and a little more than half way down the page I saw a section about Using ELS while switching desktops. This is exactly what I was looking for.

Currently ELS supports a single desktop environment either Gnome or KDE on a machine. If the desktop session is Gnome and an application stores some data in ELS, when the desktop is changed to KDE, the same application will not be able to access the data that was stored earlier when the desktop session was Gnome.

This is because AIR Linux supports GnomeKeyring on Gnome and KWallet on KDE, and there are no standard method to transfer data among these two password managers.

I needed to reset the ELS by deleting the directory where it’s stored, ~/.appdata/Adobe/AIR/ELS, with ~/ standing in for your user directory (/home/[YourUserName]/). I deleted the folder in Dolphin but you can do it by very carefully running this command in a terminal:

$ rm -rf ~/.appdata/Adobe/AIR/ELS

Once you delete that folder you should be able to run TweetDeck without a problem.

[HOWTO] Quick Tip: Opening Adobe Illustrator files in Linux

A couple of weeks I was looking for a good graphic of the LA Dodgers’ logo to use as a “bug” for wallpapers I make from images from Dodgers games and I found a nice pack of vectors for all the MLB teams. There was just one problem. It was an Adobe Illustrator image file with an .ai filename extension. How the hell do you open those in Linux? After doing a bit of searching I found ai2svg, a script that converts .ai files to .svg files that Inkscape can open without a problem.

Today I was checking for updates to threads I follow at the Ubuntu Forums and found some great news from davim in the thread for Gloobus, an app that brings an OSX-style “Quicklook” file previewing to Linux, and found some great news.

You can open adobe illustrator files by changing their extention from ai to pdf, gloobus showld [sic] be able to preview .ai files by treating them as pdf files  what do you think?

Hot diggigity damn! Not only do I get a thumbnail of the image in Nautilus but I was able to import it into Gimp to select just a part of the overall image, such as the Dodgers logo from a page of 40 or so team and league logos.

And for lovers of Gloobus badchoice has asked davim to file a bug to track the feature request.

Yooouge thanks to davim for this incredibly handy tip.

Torley rolls out a new Tip of the Week, but not to the SL blog

I love Torley Linden’s Second Life Tip of the Week videos, but the devs are working on the site so he can’t post to it yet. Here’s Torley’s explanation of why it’s on his blog rather than on the SL blog.

If you’re wondering why this is on my personal blog instead of the official Second Life Blog and why you haven’t seen the KB Article of the Week lately either, it’s because Linden Lab is undergoing changes in communication policy and preparing for future improvements.

As much as that doesn’t seem to make sense, I can’t go into details now, and I would’ve let you know earlier were it not for events beyond my control. Please pardon me, I promise to share more if/when I can do so. In the meantime, if you have ideas for how I can better help you by making video tutorials broadly visible in places I’ve missed, let me know!

Awww! But this week’s video tip is a cool one, so I wanted to make sure you guys knew about it. This week’s video tip is about Custom Collision Sounds in SecondLife. That’s so cool I’m going to have to play with it one day.

In case you missed last week’s tip on reporting abuse, you should definitely check it out. I meant to blog it but RL got in the way.

Don’t forget, if you miss any of Torley’s tip videos you can see them again in the SL wiki, and you can always download high quality versions of the tips so you can always have them on your hard drive for the next time you want to refer to them.

Peng’s links for Wednesday, 6 August and a Gmail tip

I discovered something in Gmail yesterday that I meant to mention that some of you will say, “Well duh, Peng. I’ve been known about that for a while.” I’ll give you a gold star, but if I just found it yesterday than I bet others don’t know you can do it either. First let’s get today’s links out of the way.

• Ubuntu Productivity: Better backup, syncing, and sharing. Windows and Mac users know about the Dropbox service but Linux users have been left out in the cold. There’s a Linux version currently in alpha testing, but you can request an invite. The author lets you know why that’s such a big deal, and after reading his post and checking it out I’ve requested an invite myself.
• Asa Dotzler: consumer reports: stop using safari, get firefox. This isn’t just Asa being a Mozilla evangelist (his job), this is a major consumer testing organization saying that safari shouldn’t be used. At all, alt least for now.
• Steven Rose: Ultamatix – Ubuntu NL warns against. The Ubunteros in the Netherlands (and Flanders) have looked at the Automatix replacement and don’t just say “Danger, Will Robinson!”, they tell you why you should avoid it.
• Scott Ritchie: Wine sucks and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. The WINE maintainer (it really is supposed to be in all caps since it’s a recursive acronym) for Ubuntu has some major beefs with our favorite Windows programming layer for Linux. Luckily tomorrow he’ll post his plan for fixing the issues, which I’ll post, but I wanted to post this link today to give you reasons to watch for tomorrow’s link.

A Gmail Tip

Like many of you I have filters set up on my Gmail account to help store my email in a way that I can hopefully find it again later. But I don’t save all of my email in Gmail, since I download all of it into Evolution at least once a day. So I end up having to select Unread messages, then deselect the news emails since they get deleted once I read them, and start reading my new emails. But it turns out I don’t have to select then deselect. Instead, since messages are already labeled thanks to my Gmail filters, once I read them I simply click the X box beside the Inbox label.Voila! The message has been archived without dumping you to your inbox.

Do you use Google Translate to translate web pages in a foreign language? There are bookmarklets available to give you one click translations of web pages. I only wish I had found those sooner. It would have saved me a ton of time even sooner.

/me checks his email and RSS feeds one more time

Yep, that’s a lid. I’ll post if I find anything that just won’t wait until tomorrow. Enjoy your Hump Day.;)

[UPDATED] SecondLife finally rolls out 1.20 viewer

[Added a link to another video from Torley. - Nanci]

It took LindenLabs 14 release clients (although many of them were misnamed betas IMO) but SecondLife version 1.20 came out last week. I was waiting to blog it until I could confirm that VWR-2778 (the annoying invisible skirt bug) is truly fixed, and when I fired it up I had to rebake my textures (Ctrl+Alt+R) and sure enough, it seems that skirts are finally showing up.

They’re calling 112 bugs as being fixed in this new version, plus we finally have the ability to use different skins, although I’m still trying to find out how to add skins to the ones available. I miss my Retro skin.

There are more things available in SecondLife 1.20, such as the appearance of “cloud people”, and there’s a handy wiki page to discover ten things you’ll want to check out in the new viewer.

This new viewer is completely optional, but I strongly recommend any female in SecondLife to upgrade to this new version, even if only for the fix to the system skirt issue that has been bugging the daylights out of many of us since last October.

While you’re updating your SecondLife don’t forget to check out Torley Linden’s seventh set of QuickTip videos. I definitely want to check out the Customized Speech Gestures, Lip Syncing (while talking, not singing, naturally), sitting tricks and a whole lot more. YAYZERAMA, indeed!

Updated 28 July 9:12am: Woops! I knew I had a video from Torley that specifically addressed this new release but I had it flagged wrong so it didn’t come up when I was looking at the tings I wanted to blog. It’s Torley’s Video Tip of the Week #43 – What’s new in SecondLife 1.20! Sorry about that.

Peng’s links for Monday, 7 July

I think it was a good thing I took the weekend off after Saturday’s final post. Yesterday Comcast crashed so hard that we were without not just Interweb but also cable and phone all day long. Luckily we had some things saved on the DVR or else the three of us would have been bored out of our gourds. It finally came up after nine last night making Comcast offline for around a dozen hours, but I haven’t been able to see any reports on what went wrong. If anyone knows what happened to Comcast in the Malden area please post it in the comments.

• Alan Pope: Is that a Paul Smith shirt? Alan wore the tee that Nanci and I want and got a great response from one of the other parents at his daughter’s ballet school.
• Dante Díaz: How to Install Linux Media Center Edition step by step. Yes, Virginia, there is a Linux Media Center Edition, and Dante’s vid shows how to install it on a KDE-based distro. I suspect it will be similar on GNOME desktops.
• Bill Dwyre: Where have you gone, Ernie Banks? Do you remember baseball’s double headers? I don’t mean the ones caused by rainouts, but the ones that give fans the chance to see two games in a single day, usually around a holiday. Dwyre remembers them, and wonders why we don’t have them anymore, as do I.

I do have one other thing I want to blog about, but it deserves a post of it’s own. But before I close this post I have to pimp my new favorite place to get coffee in Boston. I love Starbucks, but I also like having a place closer to home to be able to get a cup of joe as I hop on the subway every day. I used to get my coffee from Mike’s Donuts in Forrest Hills Station but after three straight cups of coffee that weren’t what I ordered, as well as trying to talk with the owner but having to wait while they took care of customers I decided to find a new place to get my coffee. It’s too bad, too, because I’ve known the owner’s wife for over a decade but when I told her I’ve had problems with getting coffee the way I ordered it she didn’t even take the time to find out what was wrong.

I finally tried Java Jo’s, which is not just across the street from the station but also on the side of the station that bus drops me off to get on the subway. I found it was more like a Starbucks than a Dunkin’ Donuts (Mike’s takes your order, and hands you a supposedly ready to drink cup of brew), but I don’t mind putting my own cream and sugar in my coffee, especially when the cream is cool enough to make the coffee immediately drinkable, an issue that prompts me to ask for a little ice in my coffee from Mike’s although lately they don’t fill that part of my order well. Which is part of why I tried to speak to the owner in the first place. The owner likes ice in his coffee, and his wife, who runs the Forrest Hills store, respects a customer’s wishes in that respect. Alas, her employees don’t have the same idea of customer service that she has. I still get coffee at Mike’s on the weekend and on holidays, but only because Java Jo’s doesn’t open as early on weekends and I’m on the road pretty early seven days a week. After having to go without Java Jo’s coffee over the recent three-day weekend I really missed my proper cup of coffee as I got on the subway.

One thing that makes Java Jo’s even better is that their coffee, a rich, bolder coffee than Mike’s sells, is so good that I don’t have to run through Back Bay to hit Starbucks in the morning any more. And their food is delicious, too, so you may want to take advantage of their catering service for your office one day.

If you’re in the Forrest Hills/Franklin Park area of Boston and you’d like a good cup of coffee or some delicious food check Java Jo’s out. You’ll thank me for it.

Peng’s links for Wednesday, 2 July

• Markus Thielmann: Neat trick: Faster access to Ubuntu’s menu entries. It was posted by a colleague on Planet Ubuntu Users but it’s such a handy post that I wanted to make sure my readers see it.
• Mariano Iglesias: Transparent chat windows. Another PUU post that’s great for those who want a transparent window for their buddy list. Or any other window, for that matter. Although his blog theme needs a little tweaking.
• Launchpad News: Launchpad 1.2.6: code review by email and improved bug page Ui. Launchpad, the bug tracking site for Ubuntu, got an update for the start of July that makes the site even easier to use.
• Softpedia News: Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 1 Screenshot Tour. The next version of Ubuntu has reached Alpha stage and Softpedia has posted a collection of screenshots from it. Feel free to discuss it here or in this topic on the Ubuntu Forums.
• CNET: CBS closes CNET Networks acquisition. I meant to post this sooner, but the Eye net has officially bought one of the top sources of tech news, as well as Gamespot, MP3.com, ZDnet and TV.com. For more information on how it will impact CBS’s coverage you can check out this story from the Boston CBS owned-and-operated station.
• New York Times: Starbucks Announces It Will Close 600 Stores. In January Starbucks announced that they’d be closing 100 US stores, but yesterday the number of underperforming locations to be shuttered jumped to 600. The closures, 70% of which have been open less than three years, will lay off over 12,000 employees. Starbucks chairman and CEO Howard Schultz stated that he expects to notify the specific locations of the impending closure by mid-July.