Bzrweb 0.1.2 Released

The end of my own "summer of code" is here. Seriously, this summer I took it upon myself to clean up my act and move whole heartedly to the Bazaar version control system for my private projects. Needless to say, I didn't get far.

Being quite lazy I haven't upgraded this server yet to the latest shiny Debian 4.0. This made it a bit hard to setup the new shiny Loggerhead web gui (see it in action here) for Bazaar -- so instead I started fixing up the old bzrweb that I already had setup a few years ago.

I'm new to Python, but, as I said, I'm quite lazy and Python seemed to suit me perfectly. Whipping up Bzrweb to support the bzr 0.15 I had on my laptop (Ubuntu 7.04) was just enough to fiddle with in the warm summer evenings of my vacation. Now I find myself really enjoying Python. :-)

So I decided to try and take up maintainership of Bzrweb. I like it for its simplicity and small list of dependencies (only Python 2.4). Which is something I will honor and continue to evolve.

Oh well, here it is:

No GPG signing yet, I've yet to figure out how GPG works, again.

Bug reports can be sent to me directly, see my address in the tarball or online.

Tuesday, 31 July 2007 at 23:33 | /hacks | permanent link to this entry

Netapplet Patchwork

I think I've finally done it -- achieved my ultimate goal of combining the awesome powers of the Debian /etc/network/interfaces file with guessnet, wpa_supplicant, ifplugd and now also with netapplet!

I've been looking for a way to just point-and-click to select a different access point, both at home and at work. To that end I have a pretty advanced interfaces file that automatically detects where I am, what I am connected with (cable/wireless) and then, like magic, sets it all up.

Several times now I have tried, really hard, to get used to and live my life with Network Manager, but it's just plain impossible. It still doesn't integrate well with Debian ifupdown et consortes and until now I've been using ifup to select different wireless mappings: 

$ sudo ifdown eth2; sudo ifup eth2=WLAN
Password: ***********
[Use crappy work AP to access VPN tunnel]
$ sudo ifdown eth2; sudo ifup eth2=NETLET
Password: ***********
[Use family WRT54GL access point]

For the last couple of days I've been looking into getting the old (obsoleted?) Netapplet from Novell. Since I'm a Ubuntu user I'm using the Debian patched-up version by Matthew Garrett (thanks!). I remember using it a couple of years back, at that time I think it worked but now it didn't -- not well at least. I found several bugs and quirks that I have now fixed and published in my own "repository".

I have published everything as a Bazaar branch, using one changeset per patch (small patches), at http://vmlinux.org/jocke/bzr/netapplet-1.0.8, which can be viewed here using bzrweb.

Thursday, 12 July 2007 at 11:37 | /debian | permanent link to this entry

Making bzrweb work again

During the past weekend and the last couple of evenings I've been studying the Python code in bzrweb -- which I've been using for online repository browsing. It broke sometime last year due to not keeping up with the development of bzr. Yesterday I got it working again!

Having only programmed Python very little earlier I must say that it's really easy to get in to. I usually hack scripts in sh or Perl, but Python is really something that could be used for real programs.

I plan on doing some more bzrweb hacking later. I'm not sure yet what it'll be, but I guess a file-view would be useful, plus some minor CSS cleanup.

Wednesday, 11 July 2007 at 10:35 | /hacks | permanent link to this entry

Buggy Gnome Main Menu

I've been living with the new Gnome Main Menu for a while now. Like many others I run Ubuntu these days and I've found the version in Feisty Fawn to be extremely slow and buggy.

I tried manually installing (dpkg -i) the latest version in Gutsy but it had too many dependencies. So I decided to try and backport it, and it worked!

I haven't set up any repository, so just download the below two .deb files and install them with "sudo dpkg -i *.deb" in a terminal window:

The md5sums for these files are: 
  3f0a962ffdd2974663f2f425eed5f541   libslab0_0.9.8.svn.20070430-1ubuntu1_i386.deb
  1d11fcace33bab707e28c230c85ea1ba   gnome-main-menu_0.9.8.svn.20070430-1ubuntu1_i386.deb

Saturday, 07 July 2007 at 09:52 | /gnome | permanent link to this entry