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Simple File Sharing in Linux – revisited December 24, 2009

Posted by Rajeesh in linux.
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9 comments

Meiga, the lightweight and easy to use content sharing software appeared in Fedora updates (Fedora 11 and 12) as of November 30, 2009. Thanks to Enrique, maintainer of Meiga and  Thomas, who reviewed and approved Meiga for Fedora. So, now onwards just use the package manager to install Meiga on Fedora.

Furthermore, Enrique requested to send a patch for adding the SPEC file to the source, so that any user who obtain the source can also easily build the RPMs. The result is here, and another patch to modify the build script to include this feature is here. I have also created the DEB package for Ubuntu 9.10, which is yet to appear in the Meiga website.

Now, in my previous post detailing the necessity which resulted in the discovery and packaging of Meiga, I have mentioned that I couldn’t find a very easy Linux-to-Linux file sharing tool (as easy as you can do in Windows, using Samba). Enter Dolphin.

Since KDE 4.3, I’ve been ~exclusively using KDE as the primary desktop environment, and it is awesome. While wandering through the unknown and unexplored realms of the default file manager in KDE, I came across a handful of very useful features.

  1. Split View : Within the single window (rather, single tab) – two views of folders are possible. This is very handy when I want to compare and/or copy files from one folder to other.
    Dolphin Splitview

    Dolphin's Split View feature

  2. In-Shell access : Press “F4″ from any folder, another view with the terminal will open – now run your favourite rsync command from there and synchronize your personal files.

    Dolphin's In-Shell feature

    Dolphin's In-Shell feature

  3. Fish : Fish is the protocol to transfer files over SSH (or RSH). KDE/Dolphin implements and integrates the Fish protocol, which makes to share and/or copy files over the network damn easy. So, whenever you have two Linux boxes, start sshd (the OpenSSH daemon) on the system where files are to be shared, and just point to “fish://<ip_address_of_host>/” in the location bar of Dolphin. Dolphin will then ask the username/password for the host machine, and once logged in, browse all the files/folders the user has access to.

    Dolphin Fish authentication

    Fish asking for authentication

    Dolphin copying files over Fish

    Dolphin copying files over Fish

GNOME/Nautilus users can use the “sftp://” protocol for the same effect.

ExMan release 0.3 November 24, 2009

Posted by Rajeesh in linux.
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3 comments

I have been hindered by some reasons for sometime and couldn’t give much attention to many projects, let alone writing blog posts. Good news is that I resumed working on them again, and have been fixing bugs and adding new features to ExMan.

ExMan is now tagged with version 0.3 which includes the following bug fixes and enhancements:

  • ExMan is now available as source tar ball, RPM, and DEB for Ubuntu. Ubuntu packages were requested by many, so tonight I went ahead and downloaded Ubuntu 9.10, installed it in VirtualBox on Fedora 12, then installed the qt-dev-tools packages and built ExMan, learned creating DEB packaging in an hour (it was much simpler compared to learning how to prepare RPMs), and created .deb for Ubuntu.
  • Drag-n-Drop capability: You have added an entry, now you just drag-n-drop it down, ExMan will automatically create a new row. If you dropped it into an existing row, the contents of the dragged columns are copied.
    • Drag and Drop to create a new entry

    Drag an existing row and drop into empty area

    Dropped into empty cell

    Dropping into empty area created a new row

    Drag and Drop contents

    Drag and Drop contents into existing entry copies them

  • Cut-Copy-Paste: Now you can do those fancy ‘cut-copy-paste’ with familiar keystrokes – Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. [This was the toughest to implement, as QTableWidget or QTableWidgetItem do not implement them by default]
  • Proper Unicode storage support: Write entries in your native language. ExMan will store them and display them back properly now. There was a bug which prevents Unicode characters not being displayed back properly, which is fixed now.
  • ExMan used to crash while deleting some rows with the Delete (“X“) button. Fixed in this version.
  • There was a bug which didn’t modify the amount when it changed multiple times. Fixed in this version.

Go ahead and try it. If you find any bug, or want to add a cool new feature, do let me know. For developers, the git repository is available at git://exman.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/exman/exman

smc-fonts (Meera) updated August 19, 2009

Posted by Rajeesh in linux, malayalam.
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1 comment so far

Meera is the default font for Malayalam in Fedora. Lately, a few bugs causing wrong rendering of some complex conjuncts were identified and reported – 1, 2.  There was another bug reported in RedHat bugzilla. As Unicode 5.1 is not supported by smc-fonts, glyph Ⓡ was being displayed for Atomic Chillu letters. To make the font Unicode complying, it was suggested to remove this.

Yesterday a new release of Meera fixing all these bugs was made available by Suresh, and I’ve uploaded a new upstream source file at Savannah repository. Then the RPMs were rebuilt for rawhide, which can be found here.

And the ChangeLog reads:

* The glyphs(an R inside a circle) at unallocated Unicode code points are removed.
* Wrong glyph for 'th1s1r3u1' (ത്സ്രു) fixed.
* Breaking up of conjunct 'l3k1k1' (ല്ക്ക) fixed.
* Shaping issues for 'r3cil'+'l3l3' (ര്‍ല്ല) context fixed.

Thanks to Suresh, Ani Peter, Santhosh Thottingal and Pravin Satpute !