Share your bookmarks with Foxmarks

I fell in love with foxmarks as soon as I started using it, as I had already said in this blog :-)

It looks like lately they've added some new cool features, in particular, what stroke me most was the possibility of sharing only specific folders of your bookmarks (actually, I've just discovered this feature, but it might have been around for some time now...)

If you go to your bookmarks in the foxmarks site, you can see the "Share" menu, and after you selected a specific folder you can share it (including subfolders):


Then you can provide your friend with the public link to see that specific bookmark folder (which, of course, will be kept up to date when you modify the bookmarks in that folder), and also an RSS link!


They also provide you with html or javascript code that you can add to your site or blog to show a nice widget with some of those bookmarks!


Isn't it nice? I find this feature delici... ehm... really amazing ;-)

Svn problems in Sabayon with https

On the new Sabayon installation (I guess the problem is in Gentoo too, though), I'm getting errors when accessing to an https repository which does not have a valid certificate (of course I trust that site):

svn checkout https://xxx svn: OPTIONS of 'https://xxx': SSL negotiation failed: SSL error: Key usage violation in certificate has been detected. (https://xxx)

I found this post on ubuntu forums which seems to be related to this very same problem: the neon library, which svn uses to access https sites, uses GNU TLS which does not like this kind of certificates (that's may be fine, but at least, I should give the possibility of choosing, shouldn't I?).

In Sabayon it's pretty easy to solve this problem because you can use emerge and use flags to rebuild the binaries as you wish :-)

In particular, you need to rebuild the neon package disabling the gnutls use option. I did this by changing (or adding) in /etc/portage/package.use this line:

net-misc/neon -gnutls

and then I emerged neon and subversion packages.

Hope this helps :-)

Linux Mint

I happened to try the live version of this ubuntu-derived Linux distribution, on my laptop, a Dell D630: Linux Mint. I was quite impressed: the aspect is really elegant e beautiful, in a word, mint :-)

The main menu seems to be based on KDE 4, but I think it's better organized.

Then I tried to enable those cool compiz effects, and that's what you get :-)

Probably I'll go on with the installation in the future.

KWin is not restored after removing Compiz

I tried Compiz on a desktop computer, but this made the system pretty slow, so I removed it with synaptic... after a restart, all the windows of the KDE desktop were shown without a frame (thus it was pretty useless). This seems to be a known bug in (k)ubuntu, but the solution

sudo aptitude reinstall kwin

did not work for me (all the windows were still frameless).

The only solution that worked for me was also to remove all the compiz configuration files in my home:

find ~/ -name "*compiz*" -exec rm -rf {} \;

hope this helps :-)

CVS, Eclipse and Sabayon

When I started to play with Sabayon I started to struggle with a problem using Eclipse and CVS (on a local repository).

I kept on getting this error (using extssh):

Problems reported while synchronizing CVS Workspace. 0 of 1 resources  were synchronized.
   Unknown response received from cvs server: 

On many parts on the web I had read that this is usually due to a "misbehaving" cvs client, typically under windows, or a misbehaving ssh client (again under windows), but since I'm using Linux...

Well, it turns out that the cvs binary that is shipped with Sabayon is not compiled with the --enable-server flag, which is the default for cvs program. Installing cvs using emerge does not solve the problem, because, again, that flag is not enabled by default.

Thus, you need to enable it, adding the line

dev-util/cvs server

to the file /etc/portage/package.use. I've also opened a bug report; hope this saves some headaches to eclipse users :-)

Xerox Phaser 4510 in Linux

I had struggled in the past already with a Xerox Phaser 4500; now a new printer, a Xerox Phaser 4510 was brought at work and so I was already worried about its installation with cups, in kubuntu, since no driver is provided by default by cups.

However, this time was quite easy, since the Xerox site provides some new drivers that can be downloaded freely here.

You just need to untar the package and use the right .ppd file, and in my case it is xrx4510dt.ppd.

I installed this printer with the CUPS web interface (with the configuration procedure of KDE it failed to correctly set this printer, don't know why), and when you come to select the model you provide the above ppd file.

Everything then worked like a charm!

Optiplex 330 won't reboot in Linux

My new desktop at work is a Dell Optiplex 330, where Linux made its way from the very beginning. I started with my beloved Kubuntu, and then tried also Sabayon. With both distributions I soon noticed a boring bug: the computer does not reboot. After terminating the reboot operations the system just hangs and the computer does not reboot. Fortunately, this is a known bug for many computers, and the solution was quite easy: add the option reboot=b to the kernel line in the grub configuration list. This worked for me both for Kubuntu and Sabayon :-)

Texlive (Latex) in Sabayon

I'm experimenting with Sabayon Linux 3.5, and now I was trying to compile some of my papers, which of course are written in LaTeX; however I found no preinstalled binary for latex. Thus I tried to install, with equo, using the package latex-base, but again, no latex binary.

Thus, I emerged it. First, however, you need to unmerge tetex (the previous latex distribution). After that, it's just a matter of emerging texlive, and wait for some time (due to the compilation of many packages).