Pioneer Mind

From now on Tehran LUG sessions will be held at dpi college. It started on sunday, last week. Not too many people attended at the meeting but it was great for beginning. The subjects were OpenSource, Free Softwares, GNU, LUGs and free software development. My dear friends, Siavash and Behnam (Blix), were the lecturers of the session. We are going to have an install fest on our next session at 21st of december.

After a long time I’m going to write a post. It’s a bout a unix command called ‘calendar’. I found it by accident while palying with ‘cal’ command. It’s a very interesting command showing you the events on today’s date and tomorrow. ‘Calendar’ is installed by default on a Debian GNU/Linux but it can easily be installed through:

# apt-get install calendar

As the manual says “The calendar utility checks the current directory or the directory specified by the CALENDAR_DIR environment variable for a file named calendar and displays lines that begin with either today’s date or tomorrow’s.  On Fridays, events on Friday through Monday are displayed”.

You can even give a specific date as an argument to the command (using ‘-t’ option) to see the relative events. I gave my birthday as the argument:

$ calendar -t 25.05.1985

And I got the following result:

May 25     Oral Roberts sees 900 foot tall Jesus Christ, Tulsa OK, 1980
May 25     Successful test of the limelight in Purfleet, England, 1830
May 25     African Freedom Day in Zimbabwe
May 25     African Liberation Day in Chad, Mauritania and Zambia
May 25     Anniversary of the Revolution of 1810 in Argentina
May 25     Independence Day in Jordan
May 25     Memorial Day in New Mexico & Puerto Rico
May 25     Revolution in the Sudan in Libyan Arab Republic
May 25     International Towel Day, in honour of Douglas N. Adams
May 25*    Omer 38th day
May 25     Aujourd'hui, c'est la St(e) Sophie.
May 25     The belgian government moves to France, 1940

Firefox and Compiz-Fusion

After installing compiz on my debian lenny, I found that while running compiz, Firefox rendering consumes a lot of processing resources. It was a strange effect. After a lot of search specially in compiz related forums I found that it has something to do with my xorg.conf. And a little bit more search made me found that not only by running compiz but also with metacity I have problems with my graphical processes. The problem fixed with a line in my xorg. I added this line to xorg.conf under the ‘Device’ section:

Option        "AccelMethod"    "XAA"

But becareful as I told in previous post my graphic card is Intel Integrated. So it may vary due to your graphic hardware and even your distro.

I recently installed compiz-fusion on my Inspiron 1520 laptop. I decided to write a how to of the installation I did. My laptop is using ‘Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller’. I made a lot of search to find what’s the best installation for my hardware and ditro. I also use linux kernel 2.6.24 on Debian lenny. So there is no guarantee that this installation guide work on all distros and platforms. Besides it can be a very unstable installation because it uses the latest development repository of compiz-fusion.  First of all you should add the following installation repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/shames/debian-lenny/desktopfx/unstable/ ./

Then:

# apt-get update

If you have any error related to gpg keys use:

# wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/shames/A42A6CF5.gpg -O- | apt-key add -

And now it’s time to install compiz it self:

# apt-get update && apt-get install compiz-fusion-gnome fusion-icon

Surely it’s for Gnome desktop environment. It’s also possible to download tarballs of the source or even install it using your official packages of your distro. But the problem which I face with this method was that, after updating my debian repository many incompatibilities happened between compiz packages. So I prefer to use the above installation.

Now this part is for those who have the same graphical card as mine. We have to customize our xorg.conf to work probobly with our hardware configurations. I prefer to redirect you the main page of this article in compiz-fusion offical wiki, because it’s much more nicer explained. To read this article click here.