This is one of those things that make me love and feel proud for open source software – innovation. I came across this new way of software development here. In reads like this:
As of today my new hobby is to run up to a developer and say “Hey, I have an icon that I need a program for!”
Beat that you miserable top-to-bottom emptyheads!
Gnome users might be a bit luckier than KDE users when it comes to image viewers and browsers. Gnome features an excellent application – Eye of Gnome (eog). Another good alternative that many people find satisfying is GQview (gqview).
KDE also ships a couple of image viewing and browsing applications, but they need some work.
Firstly, one could always use KDE’s file manager Konqueror (konqueror). It can browse through the directories nicely, generating thumbnails for preview, and even editing EXIF comments via the Properties dialogue. Scaling image to fit window is not trivial, but can be achieved. And it is somewhat slow. I wouldn’t spit on better keyboard navigation too.
Secondly, KView (kview). This is a pure image viewer. All it knows about browsing is “Previous image” and “Next image”. For a simple program that it is, I can’t stand its startup times. It takes ages to start and load the image. If I have to go through a collection of pictures, I am reading to kill myself by the time I reach the third image.
Thirdly, Kuickshow (kuickshow). This one is both a browser and a viewer. It shares the slow start up time with KView. It also has a rather limited functionality and poor keyboard navigation. My biggest problem with this one is absense of “Delete” in the viewer. Which means, I have to switch back to the browser to delete an image and than go back to the viewer to see the next picture. That’s simply annoying.
I have asked for suggestions in #kde today and some people pointed me towards Gwenview. I looked through the website and decided to try it. Luckily, it is also in Fedora Extras, so all I had to do to install it was to run yum install gwenview.
Gwenview (gwenview) is a really nice application. It works fast. Navigation is extensive, flexible, and natural. It also has all the usual functionality for simple image manipulation (rotating and flippig) as well as configurable menu of external tools (edit in Gimp, set as wallpaper, open in Konqueror, etc). EXIF comments can be edited via same old “Properties” dialogue. Image viewing is avaiable in a number of forms (thumbnail, small preview, full size, full screen) with an easy keyboard-oriented switch between them. Bookmarks are available as in most of KDE applications that deal with file browsing.
Gwenview also has support for Kipi plugins. Kipi, in case you don’t know, is the KDE Image Plugin Interface. It is an effort to create a base for exchange of plugins between several graphical KDE applications (Digikam, KimDaBa, Showimg, and Gwenview).
With all those nice plugins available I am still missing the historgram preview.
During the last few days I’ve been trying out Sim. Sim is yet another open source Instant Messaging (IM) client that supports a variety of protocols (ICQ, Jabber, AIM, and MSN). I am currently interested only in ICQ though.
Before Sim I’ve been using Licq for a long time and centericq before that.
I switched from centericq to Licq because I wanted to have annoying notifications on new messages while in graphical mode. Otherwise I was constantly forgetting that centericq was running in one my konsoles and it stayed there abandoned for weeks.
Licq is almost perfect for my needs. And I wasn’t looking forward to jumping of off it. It’s just that a few people suggested that Sim is a better client in general, and that is solves a few of those issues that I have with Licq.
Continue reading Trying out Sim
KDE has an excellent helper tool – knotes. It a small application that allows one to create notes similar to yellow Post-it that are so familiar to everyone. With knotes it is possible to create notes in all fonts, colors, and sizes as well as set alarms on those notes, display them over all desktops, above or below all windows, etc.
I knew about this application for a long time now, but never got used to using it until recently. After thinking a bit about what kept me away from it, I realized that these were the shortcuts. Particularly, there are two shortcuts which can make all the difference – “New Note” and “New Note From Clipboard”. By default, some weird keys (Alt+Shift+N and Alt+Shift+C) are assigned to these actions. Very inconvenient and non-ituitive.
Using knotes’ configuration dialogue I reconfigured the shortcuts to be F12 for an empty new note and Ctrl+F12 for a new note with clipboard content. That feels way better now. Try it and you’ll be surprised…
P.S.: Now I wisht that knotes could have transparent window background…
If you are anything like me and don’t want to disable SELinux upon installation of Fedora Linux, then I have a hint for you.
List all files from selinux-policy-targeted and look at the output. You will the list of all files in the RPM package. Few of those files are SELinux manuals for better tweaking.
/usr/share/man/man8/ftpd_selinux.8.gz /usr/share/man/man8/httpd_selinux.8.gz /usr/share/man/man8/kerberos_selinux.8.gz /usr/share/man/man8/named_selinux.8.gz /usr/share/man/man8/nfs_selinux.8.gz /usr/share/man/man8/nis_selinux.8.gz /usr/share/man/man8/rsync_selinux.8.gz /usr/share/man/man8/samba_selinux.8.gz /usr/share/man/man8/ypbind_selinux.8.gz
I just fixed two problems easily after looking into the documentation.
One was with bind, which was complaining with “Permission denied” on any incoming zone transfer (slave zone). named had all the access there is to all folders, but still couldn’t write. This command (mentioned in man 8 named_selinuhelped immediately:
setsebool -P named_write_master_zones 1
Anoner problem was with Apache, which wasn’t showing anything in user’s public_html directory. man 8 httpd_linux suggested the solution that worked:
setsebool -P httpd_enable_homedirs 1 chcon -R -t httpd_sys_content_t ~user/public_html