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OpenOffice.org building day

Posted by: david in old-invention-blog, tech 18 years, 10 months ago

Had an OpenOffice.org building day yesterday. Up to four concurrent builds. My Fedora machine seems to overheat in such a circumstance and turn itself off poof! Then won't turn on again for a few minutes. Frustrating.

All South African locales in OpenOffice.org

Posted by: david in old-invention-blog, tech 18 years, 10 months ago

All 11 South African locales

Where's the beautiful Nivo from Ndiyo?

Posted by: david in old-invention-blog, tech 18 years, 11 months ago

In about May I read about Ndiyo, a non-profit that's making ultra-thin clients called Nivo (Network-In, Video-Out). They're basically designing an FPGA that can support VNC or RDP and so creates a tiny little box that has a network connection, keyboard and mouse connectors, and a VGA out. Some of the team are the original VNC developers, which must help.

Session Saving

Posted by: david in old-invention-blog, tech 18 years, 11 months ago

SessionSaver is the most useful extension I know of for Firefox, and it's surprising it doesn't have a real home - it seems it gets passed from person to person to fix things up for different releases.
Basically it records the set of windows and tabs you have open in Firefox (including the history etc) so that if you quit or the browser crashes, they can be restored on startup (you can also save named sessions and switch between them). (It stores this in prefs.js which is arguably not the best for performance but seems to work fine without corruption).
Now, I just crashed my X server for some inexplicable reason. Which led me to think again to myself, I wish I had a SessionSaver for Konsole. I tend to use both Firefox and Konsole as task lists - web pages I must look at / process, shell operations I'm busy doing.
A long time ago I coded up a Python program to periodically dump the different tabs open in Konsole along with the processes running in them, current directories and open files. The idea being you can run this in a cron job and at least be able to see what was happening if Konsole crashes rather than losing track.
I've now fixed this up and got it running again. It could do with improvement but it definitely counts as helpful. The file is at http://davidf.sjsoft.com/files/konsolesessions.py and it gets run like this in a cron job:

  export DISPLAY=:0.0
  su username -c "python2.4 -m konsolesessions --html --output" 2>&1 | tee -a /tmp/konsole.log

This then produces an index of konsole sessions in /home/username/konsolelog/index.html, each of which has its own html file like this:

Konsole session at Mon Dec 5 16:47:02 2005

Interesting articles...

Posted by: david in old-invention-blog, tech 18 years, 12 months ago

Some interesting articles to read when I came back from holiday. It seems Swahili free software stuff is moving forward in lots of fronts. Tomorrow I'm going up to Pretoria to train some of the KiLinux team on using ooo-build for building localized OpenOffice.org.

translate-toolkit 0.8rc5 and a holiday

Posted by: david in old-invention-blog, tech 19 years ago

Well I clearly didn't manage to release 0.8, there has been a fair bit of patching and adding tests (particularly ensuring round-trip maintenance of source files in Mozilla, David Farning has been filing many bugs). And quite a few bugs in our bugzilla have been fixed.

Complete Office Suite, now with Chutney

Posted by: david in old-invention-blog, tech 19 years ago

I got one of our OpenOffice.org 1.9.128 CDs, and I must say they look very nice. Very South African.
The thing about this OpenOffice.org is, it comes in all 11 South African languages.
Would you like Mrs Balls Chutney with that, sir?

Translate Toolkit now working on Firefox 1.5 xpis

Posted by: david in old-invention-blog, tech 19 years ago

I have finally gotten round to fixing up the Translate Toolkit so that moz2po / po2moz can be properly used with language pack xpis from the Firefox 1.5 series.

Qemu and Qvm86 rpms for Fedora Core 4

Posted by: david in old-invention-blog, tech 19 years, 1 month ago

Wanting to run virtual machines on my Linux machine, I decided to hunt for a QEMU rpm. I found this nice page that explains how to build QEMU rpms for Fedora Core. However he uses the kqemu accelerator which is not open source and I would rather use qvm86 which is.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 released (and South African builds)

Posted by: david in old-invention-blog, tech 19 years, 1 month ago

So, OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been released. If you've tried the 1.x series, this is much, much better. There's a very interesting interview with Louis Suarez-Potts available.

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