KNotes Again

Tomorrow I am leaving for a 5 week vacation. Probably wont be blogging till I return (unless I think of posting some nice juicy rasagulla photos; OMG - there is no wiki entry for Rasgulla!!! Somebody please add).

So to find further news about the looknfeel update of knotes (Kudos to Michael), look here.

PS: I checked Prince of Persia 3 (or POP-6) videos yesterday. They were soooooooooooo good that I had to download POP-5 Warrior Within demo-2 and play/finish it yesterday night. Wish I had a decent video card/laptop/console ;-). Ohh.. wait, with XBox 360 around the corner delivering 1 Teraflops I should start saving money.

Beagle and JPEG Comments

Yeah you might have guessed it ... I am using Beagle extensively to find stuff amoung my photos and PDF papers (I would also love to use it for KMail mails and source codes but due to lack of space all source code reside outside my home directory).

Anyway, I use digikam for digital photo management - it can do more or less all the basic stuff. I generally add comments to some of the images via digikam and I would like beagle to index the comments in the photos. Unfortunately beagle-0.0.9 doesnt do that. Hour long of investigation revealed that JPEG files can have comments in multiple places. Digikam adds comments as JPEG comments and Beagle used to index only the exif comments. Quick patch followed.

- d.

Qot

A post from Your Hard Drive Lies to You

I really hate this damned machine!
I wish that I could sell it.
It never does quite what I want,
But only what I tell it!

cpu speed control

I rarely use my laptop as a mobile device :-( but still I would like to scale its CPU speed according to its load. Till today I used to use cpudynd (or manually set the throttling via klaptopdaemon). Upon doing lsmod recently I noticed a whole set of modules called cpufreq_ondemand, cpufreq_userspace and cpufreq_powersave. While I knew that my earlier kernel had the userspace and powersave governors (and I hoped that cpudynd used them) I didnt knew of the new ondemand governor.

Its an automatic scaling facility added in 2.6.9 which means that now I can get rid of cpudynd (one more startup service gone...). This page has a decent description and usage.

Keep your CPU cool,
- d.

kompose patch

Kompose allowed me to remove pager from my KDE kicker and save an inch of taskbar space. One thing I found lacking after that was my current desktop number. I became hard to know which desktop I am currently working in. I used some code from aKregator to patch kompose so that it shows the current desktop number on top of its systray icon. Its working for me at least (kompose v0.5.1).

- d.

ACPI Events bug fixed but not for me

I dont get any ACPI interrupts like lid events, power button events. They are however properly registered as wakeup devices as seen in dmesg:

May  3 17:38:36 dbera kernel: ACPI wakeup devices:
May  3 17:38:36 dbera kernel:  LID PBTN PCI0 USB0 USB1 USB2 USB3 MODM PCIE

and in /proc/acpi/wakeup:

Device  Sleep state     Status
 LID       3            *enabled
PBTN       4            *enabled

so if I open the lid or press the button I wakeup my computer. As a result, I had to use klaptopdaemon which just polled to find out when the lid was closed.

Months ago I checked out the kernel bugzilla and found that there is indeed such a bug. It had to do with the dell BIOS (I have the latest BIOS - A32 for my Dell Inspiron 1100).

I checked today and it seems the bug is fixed: using acpi_irq_balance as a boot param and with BIOS A38 (for Inspiron 5100). This guy claims to have success even for A28 BIOS for 5100. Sigh... I checked immediately, the kernel param doesnt help me with my A32 BIOS. My last BIOS update was months ago, its time that Dell comes up with a BIOS update. Hoping they do ...

- d.

A week l8r: beagle

Beagle is working nicely now. However, MDK2005 comes with beagle-0.0.8 which wasnt indexing properly. So, I had to upgrade to beagle-0.0.9. Since I also wanted to use the power of inotify, I upgraded my kernel from the default 2.6.10-3.mm.23mdk to 2.6.11-7.mm.2mdk (from cooker); 2.6.11-7.mm.2mdk uses inotify 0.21 which is required by beagle-0.0.9. Had to remove the .beagle directory ... and now everything is nicely indexed.

Need to figure out how to make some things work:
1) How to ask Best to use kde/konqueror to open the search results. Currently I dont use the Best GUI but use the command line beagle-query to search for files.
2) How to ask the indexer to index jpeg exif data. From the CVS it seems it does that, but beagle-query is not returning the appropriate results.
* Initially beagle indexer was not indexing jpeg files, and the log file at ~/.beagle/Log/current-IndexHelper showed: System.DllNotFoundException:libexif.dll; I had to install libexif-devel (according to this chat-log)
3) mono-1.0.6 is a bit slow; but that will probably improve with the later releases.
4) Find out how to enable indexing of mails :P