Or,
"Why 2014 will NOT be the year of Linux in the desktop".
So, it happens that my mum (66 yo) has been a Debian user for over a year now. With highs and lows, she manages to do what she needs; sometimes I need to intervene.
Today I thought I could send her a quick email explaining how to download using BitTorrent, because of reasons. So, as I was writing, I realised that in many torrent sites, you only get a magnet link these days. No problem! Click on the magnet link, at it should work automagically.
Then I remembered: it works on my computer, because I've spent a couple of hours some time ago researching how to make FireFox work with magnet links, creating a custom script, etc. I hoped that by now this must have been solved, at least in Debian unstable.
Wrong again. I created a new user in my computer, launched IceWeasel/FireFox and boom: I get a dialog asking me to select a program, not from a list of desktop applications, taken from one of the gazillion sources where applications are defined, but just from any place on the file system! (At least, now you don't need to go tweaking with the hidden FireFox configuration editor).
I was very angry at the brainiac at Mozilla who thought it was a great idea to ignore the host system and do their own MIMEtype handling. And then, tried Chromium to see what would happen... And I get first a scary message telling me that it is going to use the super-obscure
xdg-open program to open my link, and that it could harm my computer! It was followed by another very helpful dialog telling me something like:
Unable to detect the URI-scheme of "magnet:?xt=urn:btih:diePh6iengei4quaep4shai8ahshahnae9 oolahtetheir2bohmu1eelaChui1ohdahruegh4wief6PusahDae4ho oshahjoogai7bae9shuvei9shufeX4boog8neichi3OoDee5ei9Uori c6aingairepon9gok8Mee7uRahphah4EucoopheiYin4xe4lahn0goh"
Then the real fun started...
I starting looking around to understand how this is supposed to work, I wanted to provide a patch! So, it turns out that if you add some values to GConf this should work.
So, try to find where would that be. Read about GConf schemas, default and mandatory values, and their 10 possible locations. Find that Azureus provides an schema, use that to create one for Transmission. Then find that in fact, Transmission was providing defaults, which are not the same but work the same, and that they had an error there: yes, problem found! (
#741069)
No! It turns out that the Gnome desktop does not use that any more, and now they scan the
.desktop (who knows in which of the 100 directory tress where
.destop files are present) files for MIME handlers, and the
transmission-gtk.desktop file had that correctly. So why does it not work?
Well, it turns out that if I used
gvfs-open instead of
xdg-open, it did work! The thing is, I am running XFCE here, which is GTK based, but it is not Gnome: instead of
gvfs-open, I was getting
exo-open, which is it's brain-dead cousin, and can't do anything but files, email and web.
It is fecking 2014, and we still don't have a sensible, unified way to select preferred applications. We still have incompatible, duplicated, incomplete, competing implementations. We have FreeDesktop doing one thing to try and unify criteria, which is then ignored or mis-implemented up and down by some desktops and applications.
Some days I get really angry at the Free Software world.
PS: I guess I will tell mum to copy&paste the links from the browser to the torrent client, but not today. I have already lost 4 hours of sleep on this.
A couple of weeks ago, Gunnar Wolf mentioned on IRC
that his CuBox-i4 had arrived. This resulted in
various jealous noises from me; having heard about this device making the
rounds at the Kernel Summit, I ordered one for myself back in December, as
part of the long-delayed HDification of our home entertainment system and
coinciding with the purchase of a new Samsung SmartTV. We've been running
an Intel Coppermine Celeron for a decade as a MythTV frontend and encoder
(hardware-assisted with a PVR-250), which is fine for SD video, but really
doesn't cut it for anything HD. So after finally getting a TV that would
showcase HD in all its glory, I figured it was time to upgrade from an
S-Video-out, barely-limping-along tower machine to something more modern
with HDMI out, eSATA, hardware video decoding, and whose biggest problem
is it's so small that it threatens to get lost in the wiring!
Since placing the order, I've been bemused to find that the SmartTV is
so smart that it has had a dramatic impact on how we consume media;
between that and our decision to not be a boiled frog in the face of DISH
Network's annual price increase, the MythTV frontend has become a much less
important part of our entertainment center, well before I ever got a chance
to lay hands on the intended replacement hardware. But that's a topic for
another day.
Anyway, the CuBox-i4 finally arrived in the mail on Friday, so of course I
immediately needed to start hacking on it! Like Gunnar, who wrote last
week about his own experience getting a "proper"
Debian install on the box, I'm not content with running a binary distribution
image prepared by some third party; I expect my hardware toys to run official
distro packages assembled using official distro tools and, if at all possible,
distributed on official distro images for a minimum of hassle.
Whereas Gunnar was willing to settle for using third-party binaries for the
bootloader and kernel, however, I'm not inclined to do any such thing. And
between my stint at Linaro a few years ago and the recent work on Ubuntu for
phones, I do have a little knowledge of Linux on ARM (probably just enough
to be dangerous), so I set to work trying to get the CuBox-i4 bootable with
stock Debian unstable.
Being such a cutting-edge piece of hardware, that does pose some challenges.
Support for the i.MX6 chip is in the process of being upstreamed to U-Boot,
but the support for the CuBox-i devices isn't there yet, nor is the support
for SPL on i.MX6 (which allows booting the variants of the CuBox-i with a
single U-Boot build, instead of requiring a different bootloader build for
each flavor). The CuBox-i U-Boot that SolidRun makes available (with source
at github) is based on U-Boot
2013.10-rc4, so more than a full release behind Debian unstable, and the
patches there don't apply to U-Boot 2014.01 without a bit of effort.
But if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right, so I've taken the time to
rebase the CuBox-i patches on top of 2014.01, publishing the results of the
rebase to my own github
repository and submitting
a bug to the Debian U-Boot maintainers
requesting its inclusion.
The next step is to get a Debian kernel that not only works, but fully
supports the hardware out of the box (a 3.13 generic arm kernel will boot on
the machine, but little things like ethernet and hdmi don't work yet). I've
created a page in the Debian
wiki for tracking the
status of this work.
Zoe slept through the night for the first time in recent memory, and was up at
around 6am. It was lovely. I'm thinking the slightly lower temperature helped.
I'm definitely going to explore air conditioning for the bedrooms before next
Summer.
I'd picked up some egg cups on the weekend, so we did soft boiled eggs in the
Thermomix for breakfast. They turned out lovely this time, and Zoe seemed to
enjoy eating hers. She dressed herself while they were cooking. Her
Kindergarten t-shirts arrived yesterday, so now she looks like all the other
kids. It's very cute.
It rained on and off in the morning, and I was in two minds about whether to
chance it on the bike or not. As it happened we ended up messing around a bit
before leaving, so we drove, and it was a good call, because it started raining
again as we pulled out of the driveway.
Drop off was super smooth. Megan had been away yesterday, but was back today,
so Zoe was very happy to see her.
My financial advisor came out for a chat about investments mid-morning, and
then I got stuck into my US taxes. I will not miss having to do these tax
returns. The 2013 one is going to be particularly complicated by the fact we
sold our home and were only in the country for like 80 days.
I biked over to Kindergarten to pick up Zoe, as the weather had improved.
Surprisingly, she was awake, but her teacher said she'd just woken up from a
nap. We managed to clear out pretty quickly. I stopped at the health food shop
on the way home to get some peanut oil for the dinner I was making.
Due to a miscommunication, Zoe had missed her Saturday swim class. I explained
to the swim school the error, and they were kind enough to allow Zoe to have a
make up class anyway, so we went to that after Kindergarten.
Zoe wanted to do some more practice riding her bike. She's got a little 10 inch
bike with no training wheels and a 
I finally managed to package 
Each year the 
I've spent a while trying to make GPU switching work more reliably on Apple hardware, and got to the point where my Retina MBP now comes up with X running on Intel regardless of what the firmware wanted to do (test patches 
A new bug-fix / maintenance release 
DebConf15 to be hosted in Germany
In their last 
DebConf15 to be hosted in Germany
In their last 
As a followup for my 
If you re the sort that cares about federation, the