Nozell, rhymes with Oh Hell » config

Building F-Spot from source on Ubuntu

Marc Nozell — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 17:56:57 +0000

The instructions How to Build F-Spot from HEAD are mostly correct for Ubuntu/Edgy and Ubuntu/Feisty, but leave out a number of packages that need to be installed before autogen.sh is run.

Be sure to also install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install mono-devel \ libglib2.0-dev libmono-dev libmono-system-runtime2.0-cil \ libexif-dev libgnomeui-dev liblcms1-dev libgphoto2-2-dev \ libusb-dev

And instead of make install, use make -k install since it will attempt to run scrollkeeper which attempts to update /var/lib/scrollkeeper/scrollkeeper_docs.

The offending line is: scrollkeeper-update -p /var/lib/scrollkeeper -o /home/marc/unstable/f-spot/share/omf/f-spot

Moving photos around behind f-spot’s back

Marc Nozell — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 01:44:45 +0000

I’ve been using f-spot since it showed up in Ubuntu/Breezy and have been keeping all my photos in a directory structure like this:
/PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.30/ /PHOTOS/Photos/2006.07.01/
But sometimes I’ve forgotten to unclick the “Copy file to the Photos folder” box in the photos import dialog and end up with photos under ~/Photos/. Recently I checked and found there were almost a gigabytes worth of photos under there.

So this is what I did to move them to under /PHOTOS/Photos/ and keep all the tags and metadata correct.

Back up /home and /PHOTOS to an external USB. I love rsnapshot.
$ rsnapshot daily
make an extra backup of the f-spot database
$ cp ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db photos-backup.db
Start poking around the f-spot database and updating it.
$ sqlite3 ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db sqlite> .schema photos CREATE TABLE photos ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL, time INTEGER NOT NULL, directory_path STRING NOT NULL, name STRING NOT NULL, description TEXT NOT NULL, default_version_id INTEGER NOT NULL );
See how many photos are in ~/Photos…
sqlite> select count(*) from photos where directory_path like '/home/marc/Photos/%'; 260
Take a look at a few of them to see the path names…
sqlite> select directory_path from photos where directory_path like '/home/marc/Photos/%' limit 0,10;
Update the pathname to my prefered one. I’ve added an ‘a’ to the end just so I won’t overwrite an existing directory.
sqlite> update photos set directory_path = "/PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a" where directory_path = "/home/marc/Photos/2006/6/22"; sqlite> .quit
Make the directory and move the files to the new location…
mkdir /PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a mv -v /home/marc/Photos/2006/6/22/HPIM117* /PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a

Repeat for each directory. I did it all within emacs’ shell so cut-n-paste made it a snap.

Another list of Ubuntu essentials

Marc Nozell — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 16:53:01 +0000

Mark Pilgrim has compiled his list of Ubuntu essentials — time to add some KDE goodness to ‘My Ubuntu/Dapper Configuration‘ page…

My Ubuntu/Dapper Configuration

Marc Nozell — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 15:13:14 +0000

I’ve posted some extensive notes on all the post-installation configuration steps needed to make an Ubuntu/Dapper standard install the way I like it — dual head, personal & corporate email, network manager, f-spot, etc

Check it out: My Ubuntu/Dapper Configuration

More on Dual Monitor with Ubuntu/Dapper

Marc Nozell — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 18:10:30 +0000

This is a follow on to last week’s post about Dual Monitor on Ubuntu/Dapper

I’ve been using the xorg.conf-ati.20060621 configuration at work with two monitors, but when at home the laptop didn’t degrade down to working with the one LCD monitor of the laptop. So, here is a new configuration that lets you switch between a single monitor mode (1024×768) or one large one (2048×768) that can be ‘slid over to’ by using the mouse. The key press is Control-Alt-+ (the + over on the side where the number entry is). On the laptop, it is Control-Alt-blue_Fn-?

Here the is xorg.conf file:

xorg.conf-ati-works-with-one-monitor.20060624

Dual Monitor on Ubuntu/Dapper

Marc Nozell — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 17:38:20 +0000

I’ve noticed a number of people asking about dual head support in dapper on #ubuntu, so here is my setup:

This hp/compaq nc6000 laptop/notebook that has an ATI card:

$ sudo lspci|grep VGA 0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10]

I have two head monitors working with both the ‘ati’ and the closed source ‘fglrx’ drivers.

Here are the configuration files:

xorg.conf-fglrx.20060621 — works when booting without the second monitor

xorg.conf-ati.20060621 — when booting with out the second monitor attached, it still thinks it is there. Some windows may pop up on the unreachable monitor.

Before you start hacking around with your xorg.conf, save a copy somewhere safe.

w32codecs for ubuntu ‘hoary’

Marc Nozell — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 23:23:58 +0000

The stock Ubuntu repositories don’t include the w32codecs (wmvdmod.dll, etc) so xine, mplayer can play WMV and other formats. Basically the package puts 127 DLLs in /usr/lib/w32codecs.

So, I temporarily added the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list

deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ testing main

And then did this:

apt-get update && apt-get install w32codecs

I then commented that line out since and apt-get upgrade would have picked up a bunch of updated packages from that repository.

Migrating to Ubuntu Hoary on my laptop

Marc Nozell — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 00:33:54 +0000

I’ve been running Debian/Sarge (now the stable branch) on my laptop for quite a while now and its time to try a new distro for dailyl use — Ubuntu. This week I’ve been running Ubuntu ‘Hoary’ and the transition has been very smooth.

The only configuration issue was I wanted to use ALSA on this HP Compaq nc6000 laptop. The install did detect the sound device, but did separate the speaker from
the headphone controls.

phzi on #ubuntu pointed me to the unofficial UbuntuGuide.org, specifically the section configuresoundproperly. Those instructions were perfect.

ipodder (v2.1) on Ubuntu ‘Hoary’

Marc Nozell — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 20:54:03 +0000

I’d upgraded to the latest iPodder (v2.1) on my Ubuntu (‘Hoary’) laptop today.

# tar jxvf iPodder-linux-2.1.tar.bz2

# cd iPodder-linux

# sudo ./install.sh

(take the defaults)

The only glitch is wx libraries aren’t in the default PYTHONPATH, so set this environment variable either at the command line, or pop it in ~/.bashrc

export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/wx-2.5.3-gtk2-unicode/:$PYTHONPATH-unicode:$PYTHONPATH

Now clean up a little bit…

$ cd ../

$ rm -rf iPodder-linux iPodder-linux-2.1.tar.bz2

Now, you are all set to start iPodder!


$ (nohup iPodder&)    # or add it to a menu bar button

Getting closer to not needing any special knowledge to get iPodder running on a GNU/Linux distro…

- – - – -

Just for searchers, this is the problem you see if you don’t set the PYTHONPATH:

$ iPodder Traceback (most recent call last): File "iPodderGui.py", line 38, in ? import iPodderWindows File "/opt/iPodder/iPodderWindows.py", line 4, in ? import listctrl as listmix File "/opt/iPodder/listctrl.py", line 296, in ? EVT_DOPOPUPMENU = wx.PyEventBinder(wxEVT_DOPOPUPMENU, 0) AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'PyEventBinder'

ubuntu upgrade hosed wordpress

Marc Nozell — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 19:42:17 +0000

A while ago I upgraded desktop/server at work that holds my work blog from ubuntu ‘warty warthog’ (initial release) to ubuntu ‘hoary hedgehog’ (current release). Everything
went just fine except apache2/php4/mysql had some problems and the blog stopped working.

The problem was WordPress 1.5 couldn’t connect to mysql, but phpmyadmin could connect just fine. Strange. This is what I ended up doing:

$ sudo apt-get --purge remove apache2 phpmyadmin php4 (and maybe a few others that depended on apache or php)


... verify that /etc/apache2/, /etc/php4 were gone...

$ sudo apt-get install apache2 php4 phpmyadmin

At appears that one of the configuration files for either php4 or apache2 didn’t get properly upgraded.