Skype 4.0 on Linux is out – How to run multiple Instances simultaneously

Hi!

Skype 4.0 for Linux has just been released! Thought it wouldn’t happen anymore 🙂

So.. how do you keep your multiple instances of Skype running on Linux?

As Skype 2.1 saved everything to $HOME/.Skype personally I prefer to keep my history so I copied $HOME/.Skype to $HOME/.Skype.profile1 and $HOME/.Skype.profile2

After that you can just start Skype using the following commands:

skype –dbpath=~/.Skype_profile1

skype –dbpath=~/.Skype_profile2

Login and have fun 🙂 It is as easy as that 🙂

I love Arch Linux!

Hi!

Again some time has gone by since my last blog =( sadly I didn’t have much time lately to blog so I’ll just give you an update on what I was doing today.

I updated my 6 month old Arch Linux installation on my old notebook to the current testing (running testing before). I started yaourt -Syu and it ran through without any hickups, rebootet and I had a fully working system on bleeding edge technology again… now THAT is what I call seamless rolling release distro 🙂

I’m also using Arch Linux on my current notebook which I regulary keep up2date which works also great =) and my buildserver is also running Arch Linux but not testing and it is also working really reliabe =)

I just love Arch Linux!

Although I’m really curious about other current distros like Fedora 15 or openSUSE 11.4 or even Ubuntu… each has their own great strenghts but I still think I’ll always come back to Arch 🙂

Cya soon hopefully

N900 – No sound after boot

Hi!

Just wanted to save this information somewhere in the hope of it being useful to someone sometime 😛

If you have no sound after boot and increasing volume doesn’t work it is likely pulseaudio failed to start. Some minutes after boot it is possible to start pulseaudio via terminal (as root) (

start pulseaudio

) but if you forget you end up with no sound which is I’d say pretty bad for a phone… -.-

So what do you have to do?

Execute this command as root:

cp /opt/maemo/usr/lib/libFLAC.so.8.2.0 /usr/lib/libFLAC.so.8.2.0

What causes the problem seems to be that pulseaudio wants to start when /opt is not mounted yet and libFLAC seems to have been (accidently) moved to /opt when it should have stayed out…

I do not guarantee it works but at least for me (and some guys on tmo) it worked 🙂

After some googling I found the solution here (no it is not from me)

Hope this helps you 🙂

Qt Creator Buildservice Plugin aka Project Bretzn

Hello!

I recently found out about the buildservice plugin (OBS, Meego) for Qt Creator (branch: buildservice). I wanted to give it a try and sadly I had to compile an old instance of QtCreator as it was based on an old version of QtCreator.

Therefore I just patched it to work with current master of QtCreator.

You can find the patch here. (okay I actually wrote this article 5 days ago but I had to overcome some hurdles to setup my server… -.-)

I’ll lo0k into contacting the project Bretzn developers to rebase their repo onto the current master of QtCreator. Will report back if they plan to do it soon 🙂

PS: this patch should apply cleanly to qtcreator master – it is only a small diff compared to the buildservice branch (I think only one cpp file changed (changed a list to a custom class as an interface in QtCreator changed))

OVI Maps with Voice Navigation coming to N900! Unofficially…

In case you are not an active reader of talk.maemo.org I have something very interesting for you.

You already read the title of this post (or you probably wouldn’t have read the post) so you probably… maaaybe are already going to know what I’m writing about.

THIS – will hopefully grow into a full blown navigation solution. They are working on POI showing/hiding (including different categories), voice navigation with nokia provided speech files and automatic language detection – as well as reading out street names using espeak or other solutions. And what is also on their TODO is offline routing support =)

Sounds great doesn’t it? 🙂 The project is still pretty early – and I don’t think it will help OVI maps get faster on N900 but it for sure will help boost its features =) For those not knowing: OVI Maps is based on HTML/JS! So they are just editing one single index.html which originally was about 800KB and is now already up at 1.2MB.

Tracking the GPS position and automatically following the map already works but I couldn’t get speech to work. Also it has problems with loosing GPS connectivity (e.g. in tunnels) or if you choose another route (no automatic route recalculation yet).

Still it is REALLY great someone is working on this 🙂 On the other hand it is really sad that some volunteers who are not even programmers succeed at something Nokia failed to do for quite some time…. I hate business…

To end this post with something nice… here a screenshot 🙂 (yeah I know those were rare lately on my blog)…

Yeah I know this isn’t a picture of my (at least I didn’t know I live in taiwan…) – but taking a picture while driving may not be the brightest idea… 😉

How to install (as of 23.1.2011)

Integration is wonderful

Hi!

Just a short one this time… I was browsing the internet looking up some news about maemo when I found a document describing the requirements for submitting a package to the Ovi Store. It was a pdf file and I clicked on “Download” in firefox – it suggested to open the document with $some_application… didn’t look at it… I read the document – and pressed the middle mouse button and held it to drag the page down… When I suddenly realized: when did Okular get this functionality? oO

I looked up into the menubar – opened the Help menu – pressed info – to suddenly realize Firefox had opened Evince instead of Okular. The style perfectly matches those of my kde programs =) So THANKS to all oxygen-gtk contributors!

For those not knowing: oxygen-gtk is a native implementation of the oxygen style with a new gtk style engine. Its goal is to create a style perfectly the same as the KDE one – and to also use its settings. 🙂

Works great for Firefox, Thunderbird, and it seems like all other programs are doing good as well =) … only vuze seems to have problems (crash) 😦

For ArchLinux there are some pkgbuilds in AUR available as well as the 1.0 release (don’t know how old it is already) in the repositories.

Thanks for reading =) I’ll soon post an update on the Dinjam progress as well.

Dinjam Qml progress

Hi!

It is late already, I have to go to work tomorrow… today… so this will be a short status update. Today I had enough motivation to work on the Qml frontend of Dinjam again 🙂 and it shows off with SOME results 🙂

We can load scripts and they can actually do something. So this Dialog (with the white area in it) is actually a QGraphicsView subclass created by the Base script (the same script used in the desktop version) YAY 🙂

So that’s it for now =) Hopefully I can soon continue working on it…

Btw: happy new year 😛 hope everyone had a good start 🙂

Dinjam Status Report 12/2010

Hi!

Just a short update on the current status of Dinjam. I didn’t have much time recently but still there was some progress. First of all I want to welcome back Peter, a member of the original Dinjam team – he recently joined back by contributing 2 patches to the build system. Thanks.

Hopefully there is much more to come 🙂

On another note I invested some time into fixing the Scriptmanager interaction as well as Document interaction across library and the frontends. The functionality is still not 100% (I think) and it is pretty hackish/not yet cleaned up – but it is working initially – maybe not yet as good as master but we are getting there 🙂

And because Christmas is nearing here a little Screenshot of the latest version of Dinjam mobileui branch.

What is often forgot by opensource projects is their homepage. I try not make the typical mistakes and create a easy to keep up2date site early on. Therefore I’m in the process of setting up joomla on Sourceforge (see dinjams project page).

See ya soon hopefully with more updates 🙂

Meego Conference 2010 Videos download links

Hi!

As I’m pretty busy now with work and private stuff atm but I still want to stay up2date with current ongoing topics in the free software world I was looking for the videos of the (not so) recent Meego Conference 2010. After some searching I found them on the linuxfoundation homepage.

Sadly you would have to click through all of them and there was no possibility to download all of them at once (at least I didn’t find any).

So I searched the server and found a xml file containing all filenames. I quickly downloaded that, parsed it and now we’ve got the file lists which you can feed into DownThemAll or some other download client.

See below for the download links.

N900 Maemo 5 – PR 1.3 available

PR 1.3 is available since yesterday. See for example this post for more details. For a list of bugfixes see this one. Not that long/impressive – but we take what we get 🙂

What else does it contain? Updated Qt, Qt-mobility… though I can not yet confirm that dualbooting Meego has become easier… we’ll see…

For the moment I’m busy reinstalling/reconfiguring all my programs as I had to do a update via Nokia PC Suite which erased all my programs (as I had not enough space on root…)

Stay tuned for updates on how to boot Meego using PR 1.3.

PS: no OVI maps hasn’t received any visible updates =(

PPS: PR 1.3 now supports syncing with OVI Suite (not tested yet)