Don’t fret, of course you can run this application with Wine:
The only thing to notice here is that you need to set your Windows version to Windows 98, otherwise the application will always go haywire when loading a picture.

All features are working perfectly, no native DLLs needed.

That’s pretty annoying if you don’t know that the contents does indeed come from Klipper. So, just clear your Klipper history and you should be fine.

While I had great success in doing so with Acronis True Image’s “Clone Disk” feature I had a little hickup while mounting the disk into the storage cage of my case. So for the time being I had to use the broken drive for another 2 days (don’t do this at home, kids!). As you can imagine the data became desynchronized and since I didn’t really have the time to clone the disk again I opted for another, more time saving method.

Everyone knows how to pack an entire system, store it somewhere in the network and restore it – all thanks to Linux live CDs and my good ol’ friend tar. tar is great for a lot of reasons: It processes .files, it keeps permissions and ownership intact… oh yeah, and it packs things.

So, this time I didn’t need to pack my entire system but only a few selected folders. And I didn’t really need to pack them either. But tar makes a great companion for moving sensitive data between disks, no less. Just start your machine in single user mode (or with a Live CD if you plan on moving your root partition around), mount target/destination, cd into the directory you want to move and use this nifty little command:

tar cd - . | (cd /my/new/home; tar xvpf -)

Yep, that’s all that is to it. Keeps all properties intact, which is important for, well, just about any kind of file/folder.

Before you can install this new version you do have to uninstall your old AIR applications (as they won’t work with the new version anymore) as well as the AIR runtime itself. Both can be done through your package manager.

Features now include working trayicon support, kwallet integration and some other goodies.

It is still far from the beauty that ATI users can enjoy (in terms of performance) but it’s an immense improvement over the old, totally unusable slideshow.

There still is a way to compile Mplayer with the modification, though: Mithun Diwakar altered a patch to work against current subversion checkouts. How long this one will hold… we don’t know. But I think it would be preferable to fix up the patchbuilder. Maybe I’ll hack around on it during the weekend (no promise ).

Sure, there is the /etc/environment file but it seems rather limiting to me. I needed a little more control, so I came up with the following the little scripting:

Create a new folder /etc/environment.imports, in the folder just have a ordered/leveled number of scripts (i.e. 01_qt, 02_java). Add the following code to your /etc/profile:

# Custom PATH and LD_LIBRARY additions
xdg_source_list=`echo /etc/environment.imports/*`
for source_file in $xdg_source_list
do
        source $source_file
done

Now you can just export all the necessary additions through the files in /etc/environment.imports:

#!/bin/sh
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/wine/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=/opt/wine/bin:$PATH
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/wine/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH

export XDG_DATA_DIRS=/opt/wine/share:$XDG_DATA_DIRS

This way it’s extremely easy to maintain a large number of custom-prefixed software for a complete system without touching the user’s custom profile.

Now, as you may know KDE 4.1 comes with a handy little twitter client plasmoid itself but the functionality is really limited, the plasmoid is a little buggy and overall can’t compete with twhirl. So, let’s install twhirl then, eh?

First thing you have to do is installing the Adobe Air for Linux alpha. Since the installation is pretty straightforward and the package is an RPM I’ll skip the details.

After installing Air just navigate to the twirl website, look for the “manual installation” paragraph on the right handside and click “Download and install the latest twhirl release”. The installation will start and you’ll be able to start the application afterwards by executing (if you installed it to /opt) /opt/twhirl/twhirl.

You probably want to get rid of the pesky taskbar entry now: With KWin all you’ve to do is press ALT+F3, select Configure Window Behaviour and choose “Window Specific” in the dialog. Create a new rule by clicking New, click “Detect Window Properties” and select the twirl window. Just accept the settings in the upcoming dialog, and close it. Time to edit the rules a bit: Double click the new rule in the list, go to the Preferences tab and select “Keep below”, “Skip taskbar”, select “Force” for each item and don’t forget to enable the checkbox at the end. Apply the settings and voila – a nice, widget-like twirl on your Linux desktop.

The nice thing about twhirl is that it comes with different color schemes and the “Black Magic” colorset matches the dark Oxygen plasma theme almost perfectly.

Yeah, this post is pretty sketchy, I wish I could upload media to illustrate it – but that functionality is still broken.

While it is generally a bad idea to limit applications in that department, it is indeed quite easy…

Install the tool cpulimit (most modern distributions should have a package ready in their repositories!) and launch it with the correct parameters:

cpulimit -P /usr/bin/foobar -l 10

The command above would wait for program /usr/bin/foobar to be started and limit the CPU consumption of the application to a maximum of 10%.

Note that without further configuration you’ll need to sudo cpulimit or start it as a root. The specified application can be started in a normal user context, though.

That is pretty annoying, especially when watching movies with subtitles and half of the subtitle is unreadable just because of that.

Now, the following is a little something that works fine at least for Mplayer…

Mplayer provides the command line switches -screenh and -screenw which you can use to rescale the movie on the TV a little bit. For me, the following command line works out pretty fine:

mplayer -screenh 725 filename.mkv

Give it a try, play with the values and let’s hope nVidia will fix this nasty issue one day…

It is great to see that Adobe does release a Linux version, this should help adoption of this technology a bit. Even better, of course, would be a simultanous release on all platforms.

PPF! doesn't work on Linux as of yet. With a no-cd crack the game starts up but fails to initialize some filters/codecs and simply stays in the dark (requiring a wineserver -k).

Of course it is in my interest to get this awesome game up and running in Linux aswell, so I'll be glad to post follow-ups to this as soon as I get it working or find helpful hints.