A bit more useful, though, is the cvsmenu script for Vim. This is a fairly polished plug-in that will allow you to do all of the basic CVS tasks from inside your text editor. The supported CVS commands are: add, diff, commit, update, status, shortstatus, localstatus, and revertchanges.

Since the plug-in is poorly documented, I thought that I would take this opportunity to explain how to use it.

Installation

In Ubuntu, this is pretty simple.

% sudo aptitude install vim-scripts

% vim-addons install cvsmenu

This will install the package and enable the plugin for your user.

Usage

I will assume that you already have a versioned source tree checked out on your system. Start by opening a file in this tree. You can open a diff view by typing “,cd”. Note: that’s comma, C, D.

The local revision is shown on the right, the remote revision is on the left. This is a bit backwards from the Eclipse and Netbeans way of doing things. Typing CTRL+W+W will move your cursor between the two revisions. I haven’t found an easy way to move a change to the right, but I would be interested in reader comments.

Here is an index of the commands. They may be documentation somewhere but I was only able to find them by looking at the plug-in source code.

• ,ca – Add
• ,cd – Diff
• ,ci – Commit
• ,cu – Update
• ,cs – Status
• ,ch – Short Status
• ,cc – Local Status
• ,cv – Revert Local Changes. The odd thing about this is that it only updates the file on disk. It doesn’t actually revert the changes in the open editor.

Modern IDEs do ease the pain of performing mundane versioning tasks such as merging. But, this is a nice alternative to those heavy-weight tools.

This is a pretty simple thing to accomplish and it beats the heck out of the currently available Ubuntu twitter clients.

Start by installing the prism package.

sudo aptitude install prism

You can then setup a new application by starting prism either from the command line or from the applications menu. Setup is pretty self-explanitory but here is a screenshot for good measure.

If your looking for a good socialthing! icon, you can find one here. Then launch your new app and voila!

You might also checkout prism-facebook, prism-google-mail, prism-google-reader, and prism-twitter.

I think they really hit the nail on the head with this one. This quote caught my attention:

The overall quality and punctuality of an Ubuntu release are more important than any single feature, and a high-quality feature is superior to a hastily-added one, even if it arrives in a later release. Free software developers are passionate about their work, and it is easy to get carried away by a particular feature, losing sight of the greater goals of Ubuntu. Pause, breathe, and consider whether it is more important to get it now or to get it right.

I couldn’t have said it any better myself. Feature creep is difficult to avoid. When trying to deliver a release it seems that issues keep getting added to the pile. Eventually, the release has taken three times longer to get out the door than initially planned.

Software development needs to be flexible and respond to changes as they arise, but it seems like setting some hard deadlines can go a long way towards delivering useful software.

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400] (rev b2)

After trying to use the ‘Screen and Graphics Preference’ utility, I was not able to get a resolution of 1400×1050 that would actually stick around after reboot. Upon inspecting the xorg logs I found the following (it also appears in Xorg.0.log.old).

(==) Log file: “/var/log/Xorg.0.log”, Time: Thu Oct 18 23:12:59 2007
(++) Using config file: “/etc/X11/xorg.conf.failsafe”

The only way I have been able to get a high resolution that doesn’t boot into failsafe mode every time is by removing the xorg configuration file.

sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.wtf

After that, my machine happily boots into the highest supported resolution.

(==) Log file: “/var/log/Xorg.0.log”, Time: Mon Oct 22 22:42:18 2007
(EE) Unable to locate/open config file
(–) PCI:*(1:0:0) nVidia Corporation NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400] rev 178, Mem @ 0xde000000/24, 0xd0000000/27, BIOS @ 0xdfef0000/16
New driver is “nv”

The machine runs much faster with the nv drivers than it did in fail-safe mode. However, I would still like to get this thing using some real hardware acceleration. Any ideas?

Update Oct 27, 2007: I was able to use Envy to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers. Though probably not the ideal solution it was very simple and straightforward. After the reboot, things were not quite at the highest resolution. To fix this I ran the ‘Screens and Graphics Preferences’ setup utility. I chose ‘LCD Panel 1400×1050′. After logging out the X-server came up at full resolution.

% sudo update-alternatives –config editor

I personally prefer good old vim!

Anyhow, running the following command seemed to stop the screeching. The default is 8.

echo 2 > /sys/module/processor/parameters/max_cstate

First install the package with: sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

That may take a while since the package is 125MB. Once it is installed, you still need to make it the default:

sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

bash: ./catalina.sh: /bin/sh^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

After investigating for a while I found that I had two seemingly identical files. One would run fine, the other threw a “bad interpreter” error.

Apparently if a shell script gets opened and saved in notepad it will not run anymore.

A simple “dos2unix catalina.sh” fixed the problem.

In Ubuntu the dos2unix binary can be found in the tofrodos package.

The first issue is that by default, network printer auto-discovery is disabled. Though this is not necessary to be able to add a printer, enabling it makes the process much easier. To enable network printer auto-discovery, run

sudo ln -s ../backend-available/snmp /usr/lib/cups/backend/snmp

Now to see the detected printers use [url]http://localhost:631/admin[/url]. You should see a list of detected printers and be able to add them from there.

The next problem was that the cups admin won’t accept your login. This is supposed to be your root user and password. To work around this just open the cupsd.conf file in your favorite editor.

sudo gedit /etc/cups/cupsd.conf

Then comment any lines that begin with AuthType or Require. I found 6 lines that needed to be commented out. So the following lines in cupsd.conf.

…
AuthType Basic
Requre user @SYSTEM
…
Require user @OWNER @SYSTEM
…
AuthType Basic
Require user @SYSTEM
…
Require user @OWNER @SYSTEM
…

Needed to be changed to the following

…
#AuthType Basic
#Requre user @SYSTEM
…
#Require user @OWNER @SYSTEM
…
#AuthType Basic
#Require user @SYSTEM
…
#Require user @OWNER @SYSTEM
…

After enabling network printer auto-discovery and disabling the password authentication in the cups manger, I can easily add network printers.

% sudo apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree… Done
E: The package jedit needs to be reinstalled, but I can’t find an archive for it.

If I tried to uninstall the package I would get the following.

% sudo dpkg –remove jedit
dpkg: error processing jedit (–remove):
Package is in a very bad inconsistent state – you should
reinstall it before attempting a removal.
Errors were encountered while processing: jedit

The only way I was able to get the package manager working properly was to run

% sudo dpkg –force-remove-reinstreq –remove jedit
dpkg – warning, overriding problem because –force enabled:
Package is in a very bad inconsistent state – you should
reinstall it before attempting a removal.
(Reading database …
dpkg: serious warning: files list file for package `jedit’ missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.
107365 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing jedit …