Subversion problem with case insensitive filesystems

If you are using SVN with Linux/Mac and Windows XP you may run into this problem sooner or later. The cause of the problem is the case-sensitive characteristic of Linux/Mac systems not getting along with the insensitive Windows XP, which results in an error message like this:

 svn: In directory '.'  
 svn: Can't open file '.svn\tmp\text-base\qt_temp.N19845.svn-base': The system ca  
 nnot find the file specified.  

Fortunately the solution is quite simple, first access the working copy through Linux/Mac and remove from the repository the file that is causing the problem with the following command:

 svn delete --keep-local the_file  

Then commit your changes:

 svn ci  

Now go to your Windows XP system and everything should be working.

Removing MySQL from the Linux boot sequence

Do you want to speed up your boot time? maybe you are a software developer that doesn't require MySQL server to be up and running eveytime you turn on your laptop, and if you are running Kubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.4) like me, you probably already noticed that configuring the startup scripts via sysvrc conf doesn't work anymore.


You can read more about the change in this link, but the important thing right now is how to stop MySQL from loading next time you boot the computer:

• cd /etc/init directory
• sudo editor mysql.conf
  
• At the beginning of the file add a comment to the "start on" line (actually two lines)

In the same folder you will find other services that may be stop in a similar way.
 

Creative Web Cam VF0330 not working with Skype

This weekend I tried to have a video call with my sister that unfortunately didn't work. What happened? Skype didn't like my Creative Webcame VF0330! why do I blame Skype? cause Kopete doesn't have to have any issues with it ;)

So after a couple of hours of googling and I ended up stuck while trying to compile the Ov51xJPEG hacked driver, then after reading a little bit more I found the following forum entry with a pretty simple solution to my problem:

First I renamed the old skype executable:

 sudo editor /usr/bin/skypemv /usr/bin/skype /usr/bin/skypewithoutcam  

Then I created the new executable

 sudo editor /usr/bin/skype  

And included the following code

 LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /your-skype-folder/skypewithoutcam  

That's it! enjoy your video calls ;)

OpenJDK or Sun's JDK?

Did you just install Ubuntu and noticed that OpenJDK is the default Java Virtual Machine? I have nothing against OpenJDK but some programs require the Sun version.

The good news is that you don't have remove neither of them cause both can live happily next to each other and all it takes to switch from one version to another is the following command:

sudo update-alternatives --config java 

Number of files and folders in a Linux folder

Recently I transfered a folder with big a mount of archives and something seemed to be missing, obviously I wanted to verify that the amount of files was correct and probably just like you, I couldn't find a simple Linux command to help me with this, in fact I found crazy commands like:

"echo $(($(ls -l | grep -v ^d | wc -l)-1))"

Until I found the simple and elegant "tree", if you don't have it already just run a simple:

"sudo apt-get install tree"

And then you'll have the simple response you were looking for:

"234 directories, 1786 files"

First 5 minutes with Kubuntu Lucid Lynx

                         

During the weekend I ran into the news that Lucid Lynx 10.04 LTS, the new upgrade of Ubuntu, was already available. As a Linux fan this is always good news, but at the same time I'm wary about bugs an problems that can delay what I'm doing at the moment or even break something and make my system unusable for a couple of days.

  

It was time to check the features included in this version and see if they were interesting enough to make me go “lucid”.

It turned out that most of the things were already somehow available for me, but what mainly caught my attention was the new Ubuntu One music store, open for many European countries including Estonia, unfortunately not so sure about Venezuela and other Latin American countries yet.

One of the best things of the store is that it will be synched with Ubuntu One, the cloud storage solution offered by Canonical, which means that all my songs will be available in my work and personal computer automatically. Besides this, if you buy through the store you’ll get to help the Iberian Lynx:

“To contribute to the charity all you have to do is buy a track at the normal cost. That's it. Canonical will give away 50% of our take of the revenue up to a total of $1004. You can of course directly contribute to the charity if you prefer.”

After reading all this I decided to go for the upgrade, which took around 7 hours with a 80KB/s average download speed and around 1 hour to install, remove deprecated packages and configure the whole thing. In the end, it was the smoothest upgrade ever! Though I have to warn that some people with dual partition (I removed Windows a while ago) have had problems after reboot, so it might be wise for you to check this out before doing it.

My first impression? Awesomeness! The UI seems more stable and integrated, boot up time reduction is obvious, in general you can feel that it was totally worth doing the upgrade J

So that’s it, I hope this gives you enough interest to give a try to the new Lucid Lynx!

How to synchronize FTP files using Notepad++

Lately I have been working on the migration of a website to a new platform, which required me to modify many files through FTP or remote desktop, most of the times I do this on my Linux computer using Kate which already updates the file on the FTP folder without any issues.

This time I'm working on a Windows XP machine and Notepad++ doesn't include this feature out of the box. Fortunately there are many plugins for Notepad++ and FTP_synchronize can solve this problem for me, here goes basic info on how to install it and use it;

1.- Download FTP_synchronize here
2.- Unzip it and depending on your system copy the file "FTP_synchronizeA.dll" (Win9x/WinME) or "FTP_synchronize.dll" (Windows NT) to "C:\Program Files\Notepad++\plugins"
3.- Restart Notepad++
4.- Click on the new button in the toolbar that says "Show FTP folders"
5.- Click on the "Settings" button
6.- Add a new profile using your info (user, password, server, initial folder, etc) and click on "OK"
7.- Click on the "Connect" button and choose the profile you just created.

Now you have access to your FTP folder from within Notepad++ and every time you  click on "Ctrl + S" the changes will be updated in the server.

Windows Movie Maker app on Linux

I was about to upload a video on YouTube for the first time (ever!) and I noticed that I was missing Movie Maker type of application in Linux,  After searching for a few minutes I found this post about "Top 10 Free Video Editors for Ubuntu Linux", well I decided to try some of them.

if you want a quick recommendation for a simple app, go for Avidemux, in case you are looking for more advanced features go for Cinelarra. Finally Kino maybe somewhere in between.

Smb4k "org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply" problem in Kubuntu Karmic Koala

I was trying to start Sbm4k today and after running the command I noticed that the application was doing nothing besides creating an entry in the task bar that disappears in a while. After executing Smb4k from the console I got the following error:

(4408)/: Communication problem with  "smb4k" , it probably crashed.
Error message was:  "org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply" : " "Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus)" " 

Well it seems that there is a bug related to this problem in launchpad that has been fixed but obviously doesn't work in my system and after reading for a while I found the following suggestion:

"remove the ~/.kde4/share/apps/smb4k/custom_options.xml"

Smb4k is running on an infinite loop mounting things on startup. In my system I couldn't find such file and I noticed that I have the fixed version of this application as described in the launchpad bug, but since this is the first time I run Smb4k since the update, the old setting that was causing the bug was still being used and it was trying to remount old bookmarked  locations on startup hence falling in the infinite loop.

The solution in my case was to rename the bookmark file before starting smb4k:

"/.kde/share/apps/smb4k$ mv bookmarks.xml bookmarks.xmlBAK"

Then changing it back to its previous name, I hope it helps ;)

How to disable Kubuntu login sound

I don't know about you, but in my case the login sound can be a problem at home while rebooting the system when my wife is sleeping, so I took a couple of minutes to find out how to disable it and here it is.
 

1. Go to "System Settings"
2. Click on "Notifications"
3. Select "KDE System Notifications" from the drop-down menu
4. Find the "Login" event
5. Untick the "Play a sound" option and that's it.

Here you can check the screenshot

Remove svn folders recursively

Today I was about to zip and send some code folders to a co-worker, at that point what I needed was a simple feature to remove all svn related things from this folder and recursively through all subfolders, I still don't know isn't this included as a feature by kdesvn, eSvn, QSvn or RapidSVN.

I'm a Linux user so this will do the trick:

find . -name ".svn" -exec rm -rf {} \;
 

In case you are using Windows and probably Tortoise you can go this way:

Export the current copy and choose a different folder, it will copy the code there and it will remove all svn things. Beware that if you choose the same folder Tortoise will just remove things without copying anything.

Well I hope this helps ;)

Removing old Linux Kernels

After a couple of years using Linux as my main operative system I noticed that the size occupied in the hard was growing and growing with each upgrade, also my grub list was including more and more kernel options that I don't use anymore so I decided to remove old kernels to "clean" a bit my hard drive.

First you should check your current available kernel version with this command:

"uname -r"

You will get a reply similar to this one:

"2.6.27-9-generic"

Open "Synaptic" package manager and search for "linux-image" and after scrolling down you'll find options similar to this:

linux-image-2.6.24-21-generic
linux-image-2.6.22-14-generic

Remove kernel versions you are not using anymore, in my case I decided to keep the current one and the previous one just in case I need it.

Just make sure you don't remove the current version otherwise you'll have a long week ;)

Removing files in Linux

The best thing about Linux is the console, one of the many useful uses is the way you can handle (find, move, create, delete) files, a quick example of this is removing all hidden .svn directories:

rm -rf `find . -type d -name .svn`

Make sure that you use "`" and not "'", you can also try removing all java files in a
folder using this one:

rm -rf `find . -type f -name *.java`

Simple and painles ;)

How to turn Linux bell off

This is quite simple but yet pretty annoying, if you tend to work till late or early in the morning and you don't want to wake up people, is useful to turn off the default Linux bell sound, do this with the following command:

lfbarragan@theanswer:~$ xset b off

In case you want this to be the default behavior every time you turn on your laptop add this line to your /etc/profile file, check the xset documentation in case you want to customize more things.

JavaFX 1.1 on Linux using Netbeans 6.5 or Eclipse 3.4

If you are looking forward to try javaFX and you are a Linux user, probably you already know that the released versions are for Windows and Mac, fortunately there are already some hacks available to make the Mac version work on Linux. Not all the features are available and we'll still have to wait till Sun releases the official version, but in the mean time you can give it a try in Netbeans this way.

If while trying to install the linux sdk .nbm file in Netbeans, you get the following error "Some plugins require capability javafx.sdk.v1_1 No plugin providing the capability javafx.sdk.v1_1 could be found", check the content of the file org-netbeans-modules-javafx-sdk-lin.nbm (using unzip -l), probably the zip process failed and some files are missing.

To use it in Eclipse, first download and install the plugin here using the update site. Then unzip the file org-netbeans-modules-javafx-sdk-lin.nbm used previously for the Netbeans installation. Inside you will find the follwing folder "netbeans/javafx-sdk/", move the folder to your preffered location. Now in Eclipse edit the new classpath variable JAVAFX_HOME in Eclipse at Preferences -> Java -> Build Path -> Classpath Variables by pointing to the javafx-sdk location.

That's it, now you can use javaFX 1.1 in both of your IDEs, as I told you before, is not a complete version but it's a good way to start working on it until the new version is released.