Nafcom's Personal Site

Always wanted to know what I do next to this Blog and my Twitter?

This can be heard now as there was an interview with me on the retro computing podcast 68000er

I tell about my hobby of doing stff for the C64 community that is in fact still alive.
I am also speaking about the C64 NTSC/PAL diskmag “Scene World” that I am releasing with friends since 11 years now.

The podcast is in German  but I got the permission to release an English version of it, which I consider for the future! 🙂

Technorati Tags: Nafcom, interview

The Linux Team of Skype recently released Skype 4.0 for Linux which sets a landmark as this means they are catching up with the Windows version  – one of the primary complaints of the Linux users has been that they are way too far behind the Windows and even the Mac counterparts.

Quoting Marco Commino:

With this release, we have finally filled the gap with our other desktop clients and we are now making many of the latest Skype features, as well as a lot of UI improvements, available to our penguin lovers. 

 You will find four major changes in this release: 

-We have a new Conversations View where users can easily track all of their chats in a unified window. Those users who prefer the old view can disable this in the Chat options;

-We have a brand new Call View;

-Call quality has never been better thanks to several investments we made in improving audio quality; and

-We’ve worked on improving video call quality and have also extended support for more cameras.

 Of course, we have loads of other small improvements and fixes. As you can imagine, the list is so long it would take too much time to write it all, but some are worthy of mention: 

 -improved chat synchronization

 -new presence and emoticon icons

 -the ability to store and view phone numbers in a Skype contact’s profile

 -much lower chance Skype for Linux will crash or freeze

 -chat history loading is now much faster

Now the Linux version has the same default GUI which the Windows users learned to hate so much already,

luckily they learned from the past and you can switch back to the old interface just like you can on the Windows release.

I have however to admit that I have managed to let it crash 3 times.

Now the question is, how do you install it on Mandriva 2011 x64? 32 bit is no problem, you simply copy the files of the static or dynamic release (whatever works for you) files to the folders as written in the enclosed readme file.

But this won’t work in x64. So here is how I did it:

-First I had 2.2. installed using the way I described in a blog post earlier
-Then I found that there is a 4.0 RPM for Mandriva (more info here)
If you find that the links don’t work you can find it at mandriva Users.ro

Voilla and happy Skyping! 🙂

Technorati Tags: Skype, Mandriva

Opera obviously changed his mind recently about loading the Mail database.

As mentioned in an earlier blog post of mine, they chnged from syncronious Mail database loading to asyncronious Mail database loading which causes that one has to wait 5 Minutes or longer (on a very large database!) sometimes until everything is ready.

As mentioned by burnout426 in this forum thread this changed now:

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2012/06/28/more-fixes-for-opera-12> has a Load Mail Databases Asynchronously option that you can uncheck to restore the synchronous behavior Opera had in 10.10 and before.

While that works for me, the UI is not showing for me for ~5 seconds when Opera starts up while in 10.10 with the same situation, the UI shows instantly. So, it doesn’t emulate 10.10 behavior perfectly (for me at least). But, I’ll take the 5 second UI block over the slow database loading any day.

I have tried it by myself and it works pretty flawlessly for me. Since it’s a Opera Next feature it cannot be said whether this is a temporary or permanent feature.

Technorati Tags: Opera, mail

I just noticed, Serpost (Peruvian Postal Service) now provides international item track & trace online

I noticed it when checking TrackIt that suddenly, one could select “Peru” as country. So I was interested to know how it was implemented. Checking it online on Serpost’s page one can see this result e.g.:

Checking the footer we figure out it’s an implementation of the system developed by the Postal Technology Centre, a sub-devision of the UPU, the Universal Postal Union.

2006 is quite an age, but hey, the Bulgarian Postal Service uses the same and it works.

Over here we are we still have no way to track international incoming registered letters and still have to rely on more or less friendly call agents on the telephone! (and it isn’t even a toll free number)!

Hooray to Peru, thanks for providing something that works.

Before you had only 2 options: write then an English email and wait for the reply (mostly a one-liner) or go the official way and do an international inquiry like you would for a lost or delayed or damaged item (minimum time of wait: 3 weeks).

 Technorati Tags: Serpost, Post

My blog is going to change soon!
The 3rd design is in the making (this time by Fee Schmidt-Soltau). I want to thank Martina Karlsson for providing the first, Kah Wee Teng for providing the 2nd and Christian Leuenberg for taking the time to fix the defaced and broken bits of my blog’s template!

Technorati Tags: Blog, nafcom —- Wanna discuss this post? Then do it in my forum! 🙂 —-

Opera released the final version of their 12th version of the web browser. It can be downloaded for free at http://opera.com/download . Unfortunately they released it with a pretty bad and unfortunate printer bug: When printing with my Canon LBP5050n the letters are printed over each other! Well, I have to admit I am pretty frustrated and unmotivated since Tim Altman left Opera Software and since then it appeared by the feedback I received from Opera, that nobody really cared anymore what was done and wrong with the Mail client they had. 2 years later I have a six-core CPU and updated HDDs and stuff and it’s still slow as shit. (Read my opinion about this here and follow the discussion there). Technorati Tags: Opera, Opera 12—- Wanna discuss this post? Then do it in my forum! 🙂—-

If you happen to have an ATI Mobility card and/or a SONY VAIO and wonder why you get get green stripes when you try to run the Mandriva 2011 live CD or Installation routine, then you are not alone.



Unfortunately Googling doesn’t help much as there is not much information regarding this, even if you do search after many different things. Just by poor accident and by being on my wits’ end, I stumbled over the “Dodgy Vga” post in the Mandriva Users Booard. 

Simpy hit “tab” key at the start menu of the CD and add a “nomodeset” at the end of the atttributes line.

When you installed the system successfully you would run into the same issue. To avoid this, add the same “nomodeset” command in the extended settings of the GRUB boot manager (final step of installation!).



Technorati Tags: Mandriva, ATI
—-

Wanna discuss this post? Then do it in my forum! 🙂—-

urpmi.addmedia tmp_Main_32_release http://mirror.yandex.ru/mandriva/official/2011/i586/media/main/release
urpmi.addmedia tmp_Main_32_updates http://mirror.yandex.ru/mandriva/official/2011/i586/media/main/updates
urpmi.addmedia tmp_MIB_Basic_64 http://mib.pianetalinux.org/MIB/2011.0/64/basic/
urpmi skype –allow-suggest –auto –force
urpmi.removemedia tmp_Main_32_release
urpmi.removemedia tmp_Main_32_updates
urpmi.removemedia tmp_MIB_Basic_64
echo SKYPE 2.1.0.47 has been installed: Enjoy!
echo It needs now some time to configure it properly
echo Greetings from all the MIB Team
echo bye, bye

(based on a script found on mib’s blog

Technorati Tags: Skype, 64bit Linux—-

Wanna discuss this post? Then do it in my forum! 🙂—-

TeamViewer released version 7 of their client for Linux now! Now you may wonder what do we Mandriva users do? Stick with the last version released for us (which would be version 6) or just moving to NetViewer which offers a Web based flash client. The solution is: Make sure the Windows emulator WINE is installed. After that download and use the CentOS5 version! It will automatically find WINE, adjust its settings accordingly ! Technorati Tags: Mandriva, TeamViewer—- Wanna discuss this post? Then do it in my forum! 🙂—-

Please note: I am writing this post basically for my own reference, i,e,:If I ever have to reinstall this crappy client in the future, so that I remember the do’s and don’t’s of this adventurous process.

I meanwhile got used to the fact that most of the Linux end user world is heading either towards SUSE or Ubuntu. But I prefer RPM based distributions over .DEB and I was always annoyed that SUSE did things so much different than other distros, but I found my fave in Mandriva. Easy to use, superior hardware support and absolutely fun to work with.

Since the wacky situation of the distro it’s even worse with RPM packages just for Mandriva.

When searching for an easy way to exchange files with my friends for working on the Scene World project I wanted to use a service that can be accessed from everywhere: Windows, Mac, iOS (iPhone/iPod touch/iPad), the web and I thought “Ah, there is surely simply a client to install in the package manager of Mandriva just like there was for Flickr.”).

So, yesterday night I got the brilliant idea to watch out for installing dropbox.

Ah, I was so happy! 🙂

I entered “dropbox” and found “dropbox-nautrius” . Okay, that’s for GNOME – I prefer KDE – but at least it’s something…. So I installed and started it. Then it would tell me that it requires to download and install the dropbox deamon.

From what I read, there should be appearing a GUI installer now asking you for your user name and password, but nothing.

So I had a look at what is actually happening. The dropbox application tries to run with the parameters “start -i”. Makes sense, probably trying to start the initialization.

Rebooting the machine, rebooting into GNOME and trying to start the application resulted into error messages of missing permissions to write to certain dropbox folders and files.
KFilebox (yeah the URL and some places still says “KDroobox” but who cares). The how to install page …..ah dejavu… the Dropbox daemon again with its nice setup GUI that never works on me.

Googling for other options only resulted in helpful German manuals which I will refer to here, the solution is from them 🙂

Funrecycler’s Run Dropbox without a GUI blog post mentions the command-line utility. So I installed that one, when trying to run it it said “dropbox deamon not found, run “dropbox -i” to install it.”…….

….So I just did that which would result in a message that the paremeter “-i” is unknown and a list of known commands……NOOOOOOOOOOO

So what I did then is reinstalling all dropbox related RPMs in the Mandriva RPM packet manager and shutting down to go to sleep.

Next morning I ran the dropbox command line client again and it worked right away!

Qouoting the manual:

“If you’re running Dropbox on your server for the first time, you’ll be asked to copy and paste a link in a working browser to create a new account or add your server to an existing account”

(reminder to myself: Don’t start as root user…)

Once done that, the files should be synced to /home/user/Dropbox

Now I set symbolic links to sync the folders wished or to enable other users access to the dropbox shared folder. (hint found on Fene’s blog post Setup Dropbox under Linux (Debian) without GUI.

Interestingly, in contrast to this manual, the service deamon is already starting automatically during startup of Linux. Last but not least I will download and put the CLI script to be able to control it.

Reminder to myself: There are no RPM packages (despite mentioned in the installation instructions) of KFilebox on its homepage. Probably because he gave up on it.
So use RPM Search and download latest version for Mandriva.

Thanks to funrecycler for his speedy replies to my emails and helping me to get this thing working! Thanks a lot!

Technorati Tags: Dropbox, Mandriva

—-
Wanna discuss this post? Then do it in my forum! 🙂
—-