Have a break, have RSI-Break

www.kde-apps.org is a great site, has tonnes of great new small big applications for the KDE user. I was browsing through it, and found so many new and great applications.

Some of them were Hydrogen (some kind of audio mixing tool for guitarists), a couple of tools like FruityLoops, a lot of tweaks and shortcut apps for doing varied jobs, like KCleanup to remove unwanted files, etc etc.

Another one was RSIBreak. Its a tool that helps people like me. Generally working continuously on the computer can cause so many problems. It keeps running in the background and after a scheduled amount of time, it asks the user to take a break. There are two types of breaks, a short break (for me its after every 10 mins, for 20 seconds) and a long break (for 3 mins after every hour). It looks for keyboard and mouse activity when its break time, and resets to 20 seconds or 3 mins if it detects activity. IF the user keeps working, after 3 activity detection events, it locks the system and freezes. The user has the option of ’skipping’ the break or ‘logging off’, but I think most users will then at least stand up, and stretch instead of taking off the break signal. Really cool thing for those who stress a lot. RSI means Repetetive Strain Injury, and this app is to prevent that.

I also came to know that my KOffice contains a nice component called Kivio. Its the same thing as MS Visio. I just opened it and was amazed to find the same interface and functionality. Really cool app and a good answer to people who keep telling me to make them count a replacement of Visio in Linux. Cheers!

KDocker is nice!

I am not able to use Gaim these days because of the network problems. So, I have to use the silly Yahoo Messenger for Linux. It doesn’t even know how to go into the system tray. No problemo! I can make it do that. Just go to www.pbone.net and look for kdocker. Install the one matching with the architechture, or which is the closest to it. I installed.. kdocker-1.3-0.1.3.kde.i386.rpm. Now, I can write “kdocker” in RUN and click on a Window, and it goes into the taskbar. Can be done with my yahoo messenger, my terminal, firefox even! Is really cool

Repairing some minor flaws in Amarok! (MPEG Head parse error)

Fix for amarok build collection crash
————————————-
Amarok was crashing badly because of a lot of errors,
so I fixed it. One of the errors was a corrupt “taglib” package.
So, I compiled it from source and installed.

rpm -hiv taglib-1.3.1.src.rpm
cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS
rpmbuild -bb taglib.spec
cd ../RPMS/i386
rpm -Uvh –force taglib-*

I had to use force because it was exactly the same version which was installed.

——————————————–
Fix for gstreamer
—————–
I got to know that apparently with gstreamer in FC2,
there is no mp3 support, so I downloaded
gstreamer-0.8.7-0.1.fc2.fr.src.rpm and…

rpm -hiv gstreamer*.src.rpm
cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS
rpmbuild -bb gstreamer.spec
cd ../RPMS/i386
rpm -Uvh gstreamer*

Still gstreamer-plugins is the old 0.8.5-1 package,
and I am looking for rpms.

———————————————
Finally, I just did
rm -rf ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok
rm -f .kde/share/config/amarokrc

and then amarok worked fine!!

Installing Amarok over KDE 3.4 In FC2

Installing Amarok
—————–
I installed AMAROK on my Fedora Core 2 system after installing KDE 3.4.
First I downloaded the prerequisites, and installed them, and then followed the steps.

Also, on the first run, amarok needs to be configured to use the “arts engine” for audio. And then it works fine.

This one is compiled “without mysql support”.
I could not enable it because compiling it with a –enable-mysql option gave an error in the admin/config.pl script,
saying that @mysql_enable_FALSE@ is a malformed pattern.

Anyways, it still works very fine.

Prerequisites
————-
amarok-1.2.2-1.src.rpm
libvorbis-1.1.0-2.i386.rpm
taglib-1.3.1-1.i386.rpm
taglib-devel-1.3.1-1.i386.rpm
libvisual-devel-0.2.0-2.i386.rpm
libvisual-0.2.0-2.i386.rpm
gstreamer-0.8.7-0.1.fc2.fr.i386.rpm
gstreamer-plugins-0.8.5-1.i386.rpm
gstreamer-devel-0.8.7-0.1.fc2.fr.i386.rpm
gstreamer-plugins-devel-0.8.5-1.i386.rpm
gstreamer-plugins-mp3-0.8.5-0.lvn.2.3.i386.rpm
libid3tag-0.15.1b-3.1.fc3.rf.i386.rpm

Steps
—–
cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS
rpmbuild -bb amarok.spec
cd /usr/src/redhat/RPMS
rpm -hiv amarok*

Warning
——-
Please remove following packages from the system. They conflict with qt’s libraries, and amarok fails to run.
- qt3-3.3.4-8.i586.rpm
- qt3-non-mt-3.3.3-36.i586.rpm
- qt3-non-mt-3.3.4-8.i586.rpm