Self Musings

With Yet Another Linux Blog silently turning 4 years old this past December, I began to examine what I’ve posted over the years and have tried to take a step back to examine what I’ve accomplished here…first, from a design perspective:

• How Yet Another Linux Blog looked in 2004
• 1st Major Redesign of YALB - Happened around April 2006.
• 2nd Major Redesign of YALB - Around August 2006
• 3rd Major Redesign of YALB - Happened around February 2007
• Current State of Redesign is how the blog looks on the date of this post is how you see it today, March 18, 2009.

Next, I looked at some of my most popular posts. Most of these were written quite a while ago. 2 of them are reviews, one is an opinion piece and the last 2 are how-to’s:

• Enlightenment e17 Review (an older review done by guest editor Misunderstruck)
• ClarkConnect, Enterprise Linux for the Home. A Review of version 3.2
• Installing Extra Themes and Icons in PCLinuxOS
• What Sets PCLinuxOS Apart from Others?
• KDE and XOrg, Fonts and DPI
• Host Your Own Webserver at Home

And then, there are the most commented articles. The winner here is Ubuntu articles…but that’s a dubious honor in my opinion as most of the comments weren’t particularly friendly:

• Why Ubuntu ISN’T for New Users - Done in 2006 and why I felt at the time, Ubuntu didn’t offer new users the best out of box experience.
• Ubuntu 5.04 Final Rating - An experiment where I took my wife and made her use Linux for a week and give each distro a rating. Ubuntu bombed on this one. Of course, the community came back with lots of name calling and “why didn’t you do this dummy” to help her as a new user. To this day she despises Ubuntu for the comments left there by their community members.
• Enlightenment e17 Review - Once again, guest editor Misunderstruck’s review of e17. Lot’s of positive feedback and some questions.
• Is Ubuntu CE Needed? - I questioned what the point of having a separate distro versus a Meta-Package. If you recall the release of Ubuntu CE, you’ll remember that there was some controversy surrounding the motivation of doing this as well as a quick release of Ubuntu Satanic Edition.
• Why Open Source Isn’t Succeeding - My take on what made open source fall short of achieving its goal…in 2004
• Why Open Source Isn’t Succeeding, Part II - A follow up and clarification of the first article…done so boneheads that “don’t read too good” could understand “more better” what the article intended.

It’s been many years, many reviews, many editorials, and many blog revisions. Through it all, I’ve tried to stay focused on what matters to me…sharing knowledge with others. I don’t have any plans to stop blogging and am looking at starting another blog soon that covers Windows administration stuff as well (I work in a mixed environment of Unix/Linux/Windows now as a server admin). I feel that even if the software isn’t free, the knowledge on how to use it should be. Thanks for reading!

Tell Others About This!

No related posts.

Self Musings - Yet Another Linux Blog

Read More...

[Source: Linux Blogs2k - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

wicd error: cannot connect to dbus

First a small introduction about wicd for those who are not familiar with it, it is a deamon/client application that manage your networks connections, more or less like Networkmanager which is the default in Ubuntu, I was using wifi-radar untill I discovered wicd reading the ArchLinux wiki, well now lets go to the problem I got while running it on Debian and how I solve it.

I have installed wicd to manage my network connections on my Debian Squeeze, the daemon started OK, but when I was trying to start the client I got this error.

Loading...Attempting to connect tray to daemon...Success.ERROR:dbus.proxies:Introspect error on :1.46:/org/wicd/daemon: dbus.exceptions.DBusException: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied: Rejected send message, 1 matched rules; type="method_call", sender=":1.49" (uid=1000 pid=4108 comm="python /usr/share/wicd/wicd-client.py ") interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Introspectable" member="Introspect" error name="(unset)" requested_reply=0 destination=":1.46" (uid=0 pid=3831 comm="python /usr/share/wicd/wicd-daemon.py "))Traceback (most recent call last):  File "/usr/share/wicd/wicd-client.py", line 565, in    main(sys.argv)  File "/usr/share/wicd/wicd-client.py", line 546, in main    tray_icon = TrayIcon(use_tray, animate)  File "/usr/share/wicd/wicd-client.py", line 102, in __init__    self.icon_info = self.TrayConnectionInfo(self.tr, use_tray, animate)  File "/usr/share/wicd/wicd-client.py", line 127, in __init__    self.update_tray_icon()  File "/usr/share/wicd/wicd-client.py", line 184, in update_tray_icon    [state, info] = daemon.GetConnectionStatus()  File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/dbus/proxies.py”, line 68, in __call__    return self._proxy_method(*args, **keywords)  File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/dbus/proxies.py”, line 140, in __call__    **keywords)  File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/dbus/connection.py”, line 622, in call_blocking    message, timeout)dbus.exceptions.DBusException: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied: Rejected send message, 1 matched rules; type=”method_call”, sender=”:1.49″ (uid=1000 pid=4108 comm=”python /usr/share/wicd/wicd-client.py “) interface=”org.wicd.daemon” member=”GetConnectionStatus” error name=”(unset)” requested_reply=0 destination=”:1.46″ (uid=0 pid=3831 comm=”python /usr/share/wicd/wicd-daemon.py “))

The solution was pretty easy, but it was hard to find on google, that is why I want to put it here.

This is the content of my /etc/dbus-1/system.d/wicd.conf

< busconfig >        < policy user="root" >                < allow own="org.wicd.daemon"/ >                < allow send_destination="org.wicd.daemon"/ >                < allow send_interface="org.wicd.daemon"/ >        < /policy >        < policy at_console="true" >                < deny own="org.wicd.daemon"/ >                < allow send_destination="org.wicd.daemon"/ >                < allow send_interface="org.wicd.daemon"/ >        < /policy >< !--        < policy context="default" >                < deny own="org.wicd.daemon"/ >                < allow send_destination="org.wicd.daemon"/ >                < allow send_interface="org.wicd.daemon"/ >        < /policy >-- >        < !-- If you would like to restrict usage of the wicd daemon to some             subset of users, then you can do something like this after             commenting the above  block        -- >        < policy group="netdev" >                < deny own="org.wicd.daemon"/ >                < allow send_destination="org.wicd.daemon"/ >                < allow send_interface="org.wicd.daemon"/ >        < /policy >< /busconfig >

As you can see in the last block it is restricting the use of wicd to the netdev group, so I only had to add my user to that group and it start working, to do that run:

usermod -a -G netdev youruser

read more about usermod

Read More...

[Source: Linux Blogs2k - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

Laptop Multimedia Keys and PCLinuxOS 2009

I installed PCLinuxOS 2009 recently on a Dell D630 Latitude and was disappointed to see that I couldn’t get the hardware volume (up/down/mute) buttons didn’t work out of the box. I thought a bit about kmilo, a program that was previously used for laptop buttons (thinkpad buttons though) and I searched around a bit inside the KDE Control Center for keyboard shortcuts to see if I could assign the keys manually. However, I couldn’t find any volume setting inside this menu.

Then, it hit me, I had remembered seeing volume settings before…inside kmix; there is an area for assigning global shortcuts for volume and mute! This should work for anyone running KDE 3.5.8 and above (I think). Left click on Kmix in your tray and choose the mixer button. From there, choose Settings >> Configure Global Shortcuts. Now assign the volume up, down, and mute keys manually by clicking in the blank and pressing the hardware button. This should work for a majority of people out there. For me though, this didn’t work. When pressing the keys, nothing happened. I thought I was doomed.

I researched a bit more and found that installing a program called keytouch would allow me to, at the very least, program my keyboard in any way I wanted to program it. I opened Synaptic and installed keytouch and keytouch-editor. After install, I went to Kmenu >> System >> Configuration >> Hardware >> Keytouch. It prompted me to choose my keyboard. Since it didn’t have the Dell D630, I chose the closest thing which was the Dell D800. I closed the application and now the volume buttons and mute button works! Keytouch also has the ability to manually edit and also to import keytouch ’schemas’ to give maximum flexibility. Hopefully, this helps some of you out there that cannot get your multimedia keys working in PCLinuxOS and KDE to work!

Tell Others About This!

Related posts:

1. KDE Shortcut Keys Most people know shortcuts in Windows but neglect to find…
2. New Linux with an Old Laptop: Fedora Core 4 Guest Editor Apostasy has decided to take a look at…
3. PCLinuxOS 2007, USR5411 MaxG Wireless Primer So you’ve just installed PCLinuxOS 2007 TR4 on your laptop…

Laptop Multimedia Keys and PCLinuxOS 2009 - Yet Another Linux Blog

Read More...

[Source: Linux Blogs2k - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]