Thoughts On Rails

Good news!

There has been a long long wait for Google’s Picasa on FreeBSD / PCBSD. And the wait is now over… if you are running PCBSD, just go get the latest Wine 0.9.32

Step 1: Install Wine - double click on the .pbi file and follow on-screen instructions.

Step 1.1: Install arial.ttf in c:\Windows\Fonts ( /home/username/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts )

Step 2: Install Picasa - start up konsole, navigate to the directory where your Picasa installer is located ( cd /home/username/Desktop/ ) and run the installer by typing ( wine picasa2-current.exe )

Step 3: Thank the Wine Team and enjoy!

For the FreeBSD users, there’s a bit of a problem when using laptops -
the special volume buttons are usually not automatically recognized.
The following page helps in configuring that:

http://blackk.union.edu/~black/freebsd/

For configuring the keypress/command association, we use the following port:

x11/xbindkeys

You might want to install the following port for making configuring
xbindkeys easier:

x11/xbindkeys_config

Now, there’s only one issue - the volume cannot be muted and unmuted
to its original setting automatically, here’s a small shell
script that resets volume to 60
[http://blackk.union.edu/~black/freebsd/xbindkeysrc]

I wrote a python script that uses commands from above file and
adds persistence of volume setting while automatically muting or
unmuting each time the script is called, also it relies heavily on
UNIX commands - since this script is necessary only on UNIX/FreeBSD.
It will not work under windows.

It also has a nice feature - soft fade-in / fade-out (configurable via script). Especially useful when you mute at high volume and forget it… then play some loud music and unmute - if done using this script, it might not shock with you with sudden loudness. :-)

All configuration is kept inside the script to keep usage of the script as easy as possible - just a call:

./mutetoggle.py

Hope it is useful to anyone looking to solve this or similar issue…

Here’s the file: mutetoggle.py.txt

Digikam has issues with albums on a network share. It uses sqlite database, and it seems that the database file cannot be stored on a share.

Click here for the bug report…

Now, I was stumped when Digikam refused to work the first time, I thought it was because of the overwhelming number of photographs that I threw at it - 30GB, over network. So I reduced it to 12MB… nothing happened. That’s when I sensed that something is wrong.

The above bug report almost washed away all hopes of having my files on a central fileserver and accessing them from the various machines around me. I went to sleep at 6 am, thinking about this… woke up for lunch, and woke up with an idea - I mounted the share on a directory which is outside the path of Digikam’s library, then I symlinked the directory into the library. So now basically, the sqlite database sits on my local harddisk, but the files are accessed from the server - problem solved!

Library: /home/harshad/images/

Share mounted on: /home/harshad/shared/

Actual photos on: /home/harshad/shared/photos/2007/

Command:

ln -s /home/harshad/shared/photos/2007 /home/harshad/images/shared

I should mention that it works fine when I have the sample images amounting upto 12MB… when I gave it the whole library, it loaded the information into the database, but after showing no further progress for more than 30 minutes, I terminated it.

I think I’ll have to have various symlinks for smaller sections of my library and have shell scripts to create / delete these symlinks before loading digikam to make it lighter on the software and network!

Hope this issue is solved and we don’t need this workaround.

Note: Edited on 5 March 2007 for some typos.

I have tried looking for this information on the Internet but have successfully managed to make myself look dumb. I found nothing for three consecutive days (nights, actually - mostly I sleep in the day, work at night!) I proudly say this - “I may not know everything, but I know where to find it.” But these three days left me increasingly frustrated at the inability to solve a simple problem. Recent trends are showing that I am finding less and less relevant information in my searches. I’m afraid… am I losing the search-fu skillz?

So anyway, rants aside - this is what I was facing:

I have set up samba on my computer named Jaguar, it runs PCBSD 3.3, I wish to access the samba share from Panther, which also runs PCBSD 3.3. I can simply point Konqueror to “smb://192.168.0.2″ (the IP address belongs to Jaguar) and I am able to read and write to the share.

Trouble begins when I try to mount the share using mount_smbfs command. I have configured the share to be public, writable and also allowed guests - also, security is on share basis - so no passwords are required. I add the “-N” switch to my mount_smbfs command to disable password prompt.

mount_smbfs -N -I 192.168.0.2 //guest@192.168.0.2/shared /home/harshad/shared

It mounts the samba share, I am able to read the files… but I cannot write to them. And trying to solve this problem took a good amount of time. I know - it should be simple. And trust me - it is simple. You only have to know how to use two simple switches - “-g” and “-u”.

They tell mount what should be the group id and user id for the mounted filesystem. So, go ahead, look up your user id (uid) from /etc/passwd and group id (gid)for whichever group you wish to allow write access to and substitute in the following command:

mount_smbfs -N -u 1002 -g 10 -I 192.168.0.2 //guest@192.168.0.2/shared /home/harshad/shared

That sure fixed my problem - and I hope it can help you too.

Thanks to: ##FreeBSD channel on freenode.net (IRC)