[RO] FlossCamp 2010

Salut lume. Am fost ocupat o vreme pe aici şi n-am mai dat semne de viaţă pe acest blog. După cum observaţi din acest post, blogul s-a facut bilingv, dar deoarece îmi e incredibil de lene, nu voi edita posturile anterioare şi voi adauga [EN] doar la posturile viitoare.


*** Even if I don't really expect any foreign readers, this blog has gone bilingual, so from now on Romanian posts will be preceded by [RO] and English posts by [EN]. ***

Floss Camp a fost o ieşire genială cu cortul la munte unde în sfârşit am ajuns să văd cine sunt oamenii din comunităţile Open Source din România. Am avut parte de multe tech talks, un gulaş bun, o plimbare faină prin pădure, pistoale cu bile, banere, vreme bună, vreme proastă, un majorat neaşteptat la o cabană apropiată de camp site la care ne-am infiltrat şi noi şi aşa mai departe.

A fost şi o seară în care s-au ţinut nişte prezentări draguţe în care s-a discutat (printre altele) despre http://fii-liber.ro/ un „blog” destul de nou despre programe şi sisteme libere. De menţionat un acelaşi fel de blog cu vechime: http://incearca.softwareliber.ro. S-a mai vorbit şi despre un proiect mai vechi (anul trecut cred) de promovare Open Source şi GNU/Linux în şcoli prin Sibiu, care ar fi foarte frumos dacă s-ar extinde în toată ţara.

La întoarcere a fost superb iară, că am avut tot vagonul pentru noi. În fine, a fost o experienţă superbă şi vreau să o repet şi la anu.

Yes, we're getting cool games on Linux

Valve has announced they will be releasing a Linux version of their Steam content delivery platform and Source Engine. That's epic news for every Linux gamer out there, and every windows user not giving up because of games. There's not really much to discus about the subject, but here's the original post for those interested: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve_steam_announcement&num=1

Have a nice day!

Conky - Rediscovered

Hello everyone. I know it's been a long time, but I've pretty much forgotten about posting all together : ).


It was a very nice Friday morning when I decided (again) that I don't like my damn desktop (too boring), so I started looking for a new wallpaper. After about 20-30 minutes searching (I was reaaaaly slow and didn't know what I wanted) I got here http://lyx91.deviantart.com/art/Techno-wallpaper-60142158 and loved the way the artist made that overlay over the wallpaper. It bugged me for a while, but then I suddenly realized I should resurrect conky and try to integrate it with the wallpaper.


What is conky?
Conky is a lightweight system monitor for X. It uses configuration files to gather information about window placement, transparency, fonts and other display options and, of course, information about what is to be rendered. It provides a HUGE variable database to work with ranging from battery, CPU, RAM, Swap, time data, to information about current processes, network graphs, mpd and xmms2 support (and probably a few other music players) and it even has an EvE Online skill monitor which shows how long you have to wait for your current skill to be done (PS. I don't play EvE though I could make another post about it's awesomeness). And if that's not enough, it has a few commands to execute external programs and do whatever it wants with the output.


What did I do?
I started out nice and easy and added some data on screen about the time and basic system information (like kernel version, hostname, distribution, available updates...) and placed them around that circle in the top left corner.
Next, I placed some information about the CPU usage: some CPU graphs, RAM and Swap data and a top processes list sorted by both CPU and memory usage.


Then I got to the hard part. I wanted weather forecast displayed so I started looking for some scripts to do that. After a long and winding road, i got here, found this guy who had some really cool scripts designed for conky including one made for forecasting. It required registering with some weather website and setting up some data feed from there, so no cheap hacking involved, but the script was brilliant and used some conky templates to set up the layout.


The only other problem I faced was with displaying data about the current song in Rhythmbox. Again I had to find a script, but the same guy had one so I used that.


So, this is what came out of my bored morning. I hope you like it.

Now I'm looking fore some really cool Ubuntu theme to go with this. If anyone has any ideas, please leave a comment ^_^.

Enjoy, everyone!

Linux foundation video contest

A few days ago, The Linux Foundation announced their second video contest. Last year, they called it the "We're Linux" video contest and it focused on showing what people find nice and attractive at Linux, but this year, they spiced it up a bit. The contest is about making a Super Bowl (which is some american event I don't get) ad. They want to see how a Linux ad running during this event would look like.


Here is the link to the contest if anyone is interested.
http://video.linuxfoundation.org/contest/we-are-linux-superbowl-ad-contest


Last year, they had some pretty impressive videos, although just a few, as most of them were quite bad. Although the winner is really great and I just have to insert it here:





Meanwhile, while Europe embraces open source alternatives, Romania is loosing all senses in economics and intends to pay microsloth 90 milion euros until 2012 for 163,427 windows licences for more than 30 public institutions. I know this is not really related to the video contest, but I must complain somewhere, and I don't want to make another post. I really do not understand this move, because it's the one place where we can easily save some money as a country buried under debts to the EU.