I read that Blender and the Space Navigator worked under Linux and managed to borrow a Space Navigator from work over this long weekend.

I downloaded the 32bit drivers (3DxWare for Linux (i386)) from http://www.3dconnexion.com/service/drivers.html as well as the “Blender plug-in for Linux i386 (beta)“

Installing the Space Navigator driver

I extracted the 3dxware-linux-v1-4-3.i386.tar.gz file to /tmp/3d/

tar -xvzf 3dxware-linux-v1-4-3.i386.tar.gz -C /tmp/3d/
cd /tmp/3d/
sudo ./install-3dxunix.sh

I then recieved an error saying libXm.so.3 was missing.

/etc/3DxWare/daemon/3dxsrv: error while loading shared libraries: libXm.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I pressed CTRL-C to abort the script.

After a little checking I found that I have libXm.so.4 but not 3, so I created a symbolic link from libXm 4 to 3.

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libXm.so /usr/lib/libXm.so.3

I then re-ran the install script again.

This time it all worked.  I did not configure it to auto start though.

Now I simply started the driver via

sudo /etc/3DxWare/daemon/3dxsrv -d usb

and was greeted by the blue lights on the Space Navigator and the messages

3DxWareUNIX = V1.4.3
Device      = SpaceNavigator
Firmware    = V3.17

there was also a minimised window called 3DxWare 1.4.3, which appears the be the settings dialog (like the Windows Control Panel control)

I then ran the xcube example from /tmp/3d/ and the space navigator worked great.  I changed a few settings as I prefer pressing and pulling to be zoom in and out.

Installing the Blender plugin

I was a little surprised by this, as the forums said I should have a ~/.blender/ directory and I didnt.

I decided that creating the directory couldn’t cause any problems so I created a directory

mkdir -p ~/.blender/plugins/

and copied the 3DxNdofBlender.plug file into it.  The new NDOF icons appeared at the bottom of the viewport.  See http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-246/ndof-support/

Most of the setup was easy, the only issue I found was that Ubuntu uses Alt-Middle Mouse to resize the windows. I have used xfce for years and I just couldn’t get used to this change in Ubuntu.

I did alot of searching and could not find out how to change it.

…. some hours later …

Well I finally managed to get Ubuntu to resize with Alt-Right Click (button3).

By default Ubuntu resizes with Alt-Middle Mouse Button, my laptop mouse has a very small middle mouse button. I use xfce on my other linux boxes and I wanted all the Window Managers to function the same.

I tried installing the CompizConfig Settings Manager. I then disabled the Window Menu which was using Alt-Button 3 and went to the resize window setting and made that Alt-Button3. This seemed to be ok, until I tested it. The Alt-Button 3 was still showing the Window Menu.

I tried disabling the Window Menu totally, but the settings simply wouldnt stay.

After a bit of searching I found this.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compizconfig-settings-manager/+bug/146736
where it says:

open ccsm, go to Preferences, and if gconf is selected as a back-end, then make sure that the checkbox “Enable integration into the desktop environment” is unchecked.
Now you change change the bindings.

I’m not 100% what the “Enable integration into the desktop environment” checkbox provides, but everything seems to work ok with this checkbox disabled.

Also see http://wiki.compiz.org/CCSM#Backends_and_Integration

This workaround only works when you have the visual affects no though.  If you turn off the visual affect then compiz isnt controlling the right click any more and it goes straight back to opening the Window Menu.

I’m still trying to get the window manager to resize on right click without the visual effects being enabled. If anyone know, please let me know.

(defun indent-buffer ()
    "Indent the current buffer"
    (interactive)
    (save-excursion (indent-region (point-min) (point-max) nil))
)

I found the above function at http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/ReformatBuffer

Recently I noticed that it was leaving tabs in (which I hate) and trailing spaces.  It was simply just indenting the buffer.

After some more searching today I found the untabify command and I created the following commands.  Mainly because I expected the command to be called something like tab-???

(defun untabify-buffer ()
    "Untabify current buffer"
    (interactive)
    (save-excursion (untabify (point-min) (point-max)))
)
 
(defun tab-to-spaces ()
    "Convert tab to spaces"
    (interactive)
    (save-excursion (untabify (point-min) (point-max)))
)

I then found this page, http://emacsblog.org/2007/01/17/indent-whole-buffer/ which has the best indent/format buffer function.

(defun indent-buffer-2 ()
    "Indent the buffer 2"
    (interactive)
    (save-excursion
        (delete-trailing-whitespace)
        (indent-region (point-min) (point-max) nil)
        (untabify (point-min) (point-max))
    )
)

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I also had the same issue at home using rxvt-unicode

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on gentoo.

After lots of search last night I finally found the fix for urxvt.

Simply add this to your ~/.inputrc file

# home and end keys for rxvt
"\e[7~":beginning-of-line
"\e[8~":end-of-line

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I then tried this at work this morning and found it works on cygwins rxvt too.

watch life less ordinary a online As I have a linux box at work and a linux box at home I decided to try and setup some simply one way mirroring system.  I.e. mirror documents from work to my home PC.

I looked at using unison, which I used to mirror many other directories but I couldnt get it to connect out from my work PC.   It appears to lack socks support.  I know I could use ssh port forwarding to sync via sockets but this would be more complicated.

I decided to use rsync

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via ssh.

There was one main issue though, I needed to get ssh to work over our proxies.  We have a few http proxies and 1 socks proxy.  The http proxies will not connect to arbitrary ports so I ended up using the socks server.

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I knew the socks server worked as I’ve used it with putty watch hannah montana the movie online for years, so I just needed to figure out how to setup ssh to use it.

After lots of search and finding articles regarding port forwarding and nothing about using a socks proxy I found 1 good article.

I use gentoo linux so I emerged net-misc/connect which supports socks servers.

emerge -auv net-misc/connect

Once I had the connect utility installed I needed to edit my ssh config file.  I only have 1 user configured on my linux box at work so I edited the ~/.ssh/config file.

This is what I added

Host stokebloke.com
ProxyCommand connect -S user@socks-server:1080 %h %p

Host www.stokebloke.com
ProxyCommand connect -S user@socks-server:1080 %h %p

Host homebox.homelinux.net
ProxyCommand connect -S user@socks-server:1080 %h %p

You can also do the same thing with cygwin too.  Instead of using connect program its called connect-proxy in the network section of the cygwin installer.

After I got this far I needed to configure rsync to work via this ssh connection which, it turns out, is very simple.

rsync --progress -avrz -e ssh src_dir/ user@homebox.homelinux.net:~/dest_dir/

This results in the src_dir existing inside the dest_dir.

I found FlowPlayer and it works really well. I used to use flvtool to encode videos as flv files but it is not part of gentoo and I had to keep manually downloading and building it all the time to get the updates.

I recently found this article which shows how to use ffmpeg to encode videos as flv files.

ffmpeg -i video.avi -ar 22050 -ab 32 -f flv -s 320x256 video.flv

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I then use the flv with FlowPlayer like this

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
    data="/include/FlowPlayer.swf"
    width="320"
    height="284"
    id="FlowPlayer1">
  <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
  <param name="movie" value="/include/FlowPlayer.swf" />
  <param name="quality" value="high" />
  <param name="scale" value="noScale" />
  <param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
  <param name="allowNetworking" value="all" />

  <param name="flashvars" value="config={
		autoPlay: false,
		loop: false,
		initialScale: 'scale',
		showLoopButton: false,
		showPlayListButtons: false,
		playList: [
			{ url: '/media/tux_07.flv' }
		]
		}" />
</object>

See Hintertux 2007 for an example.

I have started watching the clips and chopping them up into little clips in Cinelerra. Its really a very good application. In my opinion its better than most. The motion tracking and stabilisation is really good.

download hard boiled online download bug s life a movie I did have one problem and it didn’t really like using the XVID AVI files which my helmet camera made so I converted all the files to raw DV files. I used ffmpeg to do this.

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I’ve been processing for days already and I still haven’t processed half of the footage.

Today I installed foxmarks on my Windows OS, hours later I tried to install it under linux and it kept failing.

I was really losing my patients. I could not figure out why it wasnt working. I disabled all other plugins, closed all other tabs, everything I could think of.

revolutionary road online Finally after searching for too long I found this post on the ubuntuforums.

It shows lots of other people were having the same problem.

The solution is to add

64.50.236.214   releases.mozilla.org

to you /etc/hosts file.

It appears that mozilla are having some issues with either the DNS entry or the servers behind releases.mozilla.org

I just know that this change will cause problems in the future though.

Firstly I needed to unmask bootchart

echo "app-benchmarks/bootchart" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

I then enabled the java use flag so I get the java code to generate png files

echo "app-benchmarks/bootchart java" >> /etc/portage/package.use

then I emerged it

emerge -av bootchart

I had to add init=/sbin/bootchartd to the end of the /etc/grub/grub.conf kernel line like this

kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.23-tuxonice-r11 root=/dev/sda3 init=/sbin/bootchartd

Then I editted the /etc/conf.d/rc and changed

RC_USE_BOOTCHART="no"

to

RC_USE_BOOTCHART="yes"

I enabled the auto chart creation by editing /etc/bootchartd.conf and changing

AUTO_RENDER="no"

to

AUTO_RENDER="yes"

This is what I got the first time.

Virtually all of my boot time is spent checking the internal tree of the 2 300Gb disks. One disk took around 17 seconds to check and the second one too around 15 seconds (its slightly smaller). Both are reiserfs. Both disks were unmounted cleanly and the fsck knew they were clean file systems, but the tree check still takes some time.

Do I really want it to not check the file system when it boot? That is the question…..

Heres the bootchart with the check disk disabled

I just changes the /etc/fstab entry from

/dev/sda3		/		reiserfs	noatime		0 1

to

/dev/sda3		/		reiserfs	noatime		0 0

I didnt enable the Process Accounting part so some short-lived process may not appear in the bootchart images. Ill try this next and see if I anything interesting.

The problem was that I only had stereo speakers connected to the front channel and I had to keep opening alsamixer to set the volumes for this channnel.

If I changed the volume in any applications it only updated the PCM channel, which didn’t affect the front channel and didn’t affect the speakers connected to it.

I finally decided to fix this today.

After a little searching I found this HOWTO Surround Sound document, via the gentoo forums, on the gentoo wiki.

After reading it and giving a few failed tries, I used the following for my .asoundrc settings.

# cat ~/.asoundrc
pcm.!dmix {
        type plug
        slave {
                pcm surround51
                channels 6
        }
}
pcm.!default {
        type plug
        slave.pcm "dmix"
        slave.channels 6
        route_policy duplicate
}

I then rebooted. In Alsamixer I set the front channel at 100, and pcm at 50. I then fired up mplayer, when I changed the volume the pcm channel was affected and it did affect my stereo speakers plugged into the front channel.

Additional info

# lspci | grep Audio
00:0f.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP55 High Definition Audio (rev a2)

# cat /proc/asound/card0/id
NVidia

# cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#0 | grep Codec
Codec: Realtek ALC885