My enlightenment desktop

A blog post after a long period. But this time I have some nice thing to share about my Linux desktop. This is about new window manager Enlightenment another astonishing window manager. My hats off to the opensource development community behind this. After some sought of initial hickups in getting this wm working, i had some glassy cool wm working right. I used pbone yum repository to get it installed. My attempt of compiling the package failed due to various dependencies. Very graphical classy desktop with with less memory consumption, that impressed me a lot. A top show this wm is using only 3% of my system memory and a watch on cpu cycles also reveals the fact that this wm is awesome. Good collections of themes, animated desktop wallpapers, easy interaction with online updation. Out of the themes i like a theme named as Grunge Good collection of desktop gadgets, including cpumeter, clock, temprature, weather forecast etc. Here are 2 screenshots i would like to share across. The 'e' in the middle is animated which is a rotating one.

Miro - The internet TV software

I was searching for one video library software for my linux box for the past couple of month, and i came to know about Miro from this months Linux4u, the software impressed me a lot in the first look itself. One thing which is really exciting is the way how the software uses the web2.0 features. Webservice is being utilized quiet brilliantly in this desktop application. It will give you huge set of internet tv channels you can add, you search your favorite video from youtube, google video and other n numerous online video search engines. Another feature which i liked a lot is this software does have the ability to aggregate all my hard disk video files. All together this is one of the amazing software and all linux users should have one instance of Miro running in boxes

Vnstat GUI in JavaFX

After long analysis and exploration about the technology to use in developing the new gui project, i decided i'll go with the lates JavaFX. Evaluated java-gnome also. But the lot goes to JavaFX. One of the main thing which strikes me with JavaFX is the richness in creating gui applications and the easiness in porting the this app to web with less effort. The prototype is on her way and is in the very basic stage. Once the prototype is done, my plan is to create the project in google code and invite opensource developers around the world to contribute. All folks who are interested in playing with JavaFX and Linux can join and contribute. The prototype which really influence me is the StockWatcher sample application. The vnstat gui will also look similar to this interface only. Keep watch this space for more updates.

NetworkManager & network status

NetworkManager applet is one of the good network status tool i found with my Fedora box. One of the good thing with this tool is, its quiet easy to configure both wirless and wired network through this tool. I faced one slight problem today with my NetworkManager applet which prompted me to write up this blog post. I made some slight adjustments in my network configurations as i want to connect to my friends wireless network. After my job i turned back to my home and tried to connect to my wired network and see a problem with my NetworkManager applet, suddenly it shown me my network is not connected, After some debugging i came accross the nm-tool utility which showed me that my eth0 is disconnected. But the interesting thing is i'm able to browse and login to my chat servers. Whats going wrong with my NetworkManager applet? Hmmm yes i found some debugging commands of NetworkManager which is NetworkManager --no-deamon which throws some input about whats going wrong with the applet. After some googling and debugging i was able to fix the issue. The issue lies with my ifcfg-eth0 script. The NM-CONTROLLED flag is somehow got turned off. I simply changed the value to NM_CONTROLLED=yes Voila!! applet suddenly got the wake up and showed me, Yes I'm ready to serve you!!!

Swing application framework

Swing application framework - a framework which will really give swing application developers a second life. Over a period of time swing applications gain more maturity and stability, but lack a framework and I believe this is the one which fills the gap. Some of the very common problems faced by swing developers are well addressed in this framework and provided implementations for them. Some of the exciting features from my angle are 1. Application Life cycle managment 2. Action management 3. Task management 4. Saving session state of the application 5. Local storage 6. Resource management I'm planning to use the same framework for the creation of the swing based vnstat gui. I got some issues with my java install, my gui is not starting up properly. My AMD 64bit and java versions have slight hiccups with java gui's. google is telling me to upgrade my java to the latest one will fix the issue. I need to upgrade my java tomorrow and start working.

Internet usage using vnstat

My internet bill gave the first surprise yesterday. I got amazed after seeing my usage for the last one month. Unfortunately i do not have any option to check my usage from my provider. I decided to look for a good montoring tool in my opensource world itself. I came across nearly 15 good tools for monitoring the bandwidth usage, all are good but lacks some of the modules/functions i require. My search got ended up after seeing the cool small application vnstat. All the information i require is available at a single command. Just amazed to see such a wonderful command. But one thing which clearly lacks is a wonderful gui which alerts me whenever i exceed my daily usage, hmmm quiet an annoying requirement, but yes i need that. Finally i decided to come up with an interface for this cute command line in which I can incorporate my requirement also. I will be starting the work tomorrow. As a java developer, i need to find a real base for creating java desktop apps for Linux. I was evaluating some of projects for the past couple of days. One project which strikes me is the java-gnome project. But for developing an interface for vnstat i do not really require api's from this particular project. I believe core java api's can provide me the stuff what i was looking for.

Java development in Linux

Lot many folks have issues while getting start development in Linux 64bit. Here are some of the workarounds i did in my Fedora Core 9 for the favorite editor eclipse to start showing up it clumsy interface. The default java package coupled with FC9 is Open JDK 1.6.0-b09 (Nice to see Open JDK appearing when i type java --version). Hiccups starts straight away with your default eclipse installation, this does not contain any plugins required for web application. As a web application developer I need my editor equipped with all cool plugins to explore my potential. Okay for a second thought i must download one of the much respected eclipse ide from JBoss community which contain all the wtp plugins. Download the ide from jboss.org. Untar it in one of your specified location (I put it under /usr/local/). When you start eclipse, you suddenly see error in your console, eclipse will complain about the Gtk nodoka theme not found error. Even if you install the gtk-nodoka theme this error won't go off. For eclipse to run its requires gtk+-nodoka-engine.i386 package is required for an x86 architecture. Don't worry yum comes in handy here also, yum repository can install this package for you. yum install gtk-nodoka-engine.i386 After installing this package also eclipse may not startup, it sometimes can complain about about a linkage error which is related to libXtst not found. This package also you can install it from yum repository. Be careful this package also you need to install the i386 arch. yum install libXtst.i386 All the error logs while starting the eclipse can be found in the /workspace/.metadata/.log file. Its is pretty easy to rectify the problem once you understood the problem correctly. After installing all the required packages I was able to see finally the cute JBoss IDE splash. Happy coding

My Fedora box with compiz & xfce4

Okay its time to share my eyecandy desktop. I should explain some past history before going to touch up on. Xfce is the first window manager which impressed me a lot in my college days. Such a cool desktop with hell lot options and too runs with memory less than 100MB. When i joined my first company i was so lucky to work in the environment I admire a lot, but the real issue i faced there is the memory. I faced issues even with my eyecandy xfce also. (Real culprit java + eclipse), as a java developer i can live with out these bread and butter. When ever i run eclipse and starts my Jboss, my desktop starts drags me like a donkey carrying 1000 pounds in her :) back and climbing mount everest. I forced back to use twm.. hmmm not much eyecandy but still memory wise yes, i was able to find memory to my eclipse and JBoss. Yes now i installed FC (Fedora Core 9) kde as my window manager. But kde4 disappointed me totally, yes is should not expect much, its still getting matured. And i decided i must go back to my good old friend my Xfce. Woila the real yum, the updater yummy for fedora systems, installed xfce4 in just a matter of minutes. Yes i'm done I installed xfce4 in my desktop. Just for a second I thought xfce4 is not much updated coz i can still see the old looks for xfce4 also. Then i thougt I'll go my 3d windowing system compiz which can enhance my xfce4 like anything. yum helped more to install compiz from livna repository in just a matter of second. Okay its enough letmme copy couple of snapshots of my eyecandy desktop. A picture can convey more.

Got wonder with the woobly menu bar. Yes folks its not mac, its my linux box with xfce. Okay breaking the suspense, its is the application cairo which will give you this eyecandy feature. This too my yum repository picked it up for me. No more hickups in installing apps. No more lib dependencies and no more sleepless nights. Hats off to folks maintaining yum repository and the yum mmy updater tool. See couple more enhancements of my compiz managed desktop

Folks don't you really want something like this on your desktop too. Wait is over now, install Linux. Come to the opensource world.