Goodbye ATI, welcome NVIDIA

I recently bought a new desktop, a slim one: the s3530.it HP Pavilion slimline, which I've really enjoyed since the very first moment! It is very small, compact, silent, and it provides basically everything!

When I bought it I noticed that it was endorsed with an ATI graphical card, but I said to myself "ATI? Never owned one... but it is well supported in Linux as far as I remember..." Gosh I was quite wrong!

If supported means that you need to get stuck with 2d or experience very sloooow motions in 3d then, it is right, it is supported, otherwise... :'(

I had always had nice experiences with Nvidia, and I didn't want to give up compiz special effects (after all I have a powerful desktop!), so after a quite hard research to find someone selling an Nvidia lowprofile graphic card, I substituted that crap of ATI with an Nvidia GE-FORCE 8400 GS graphical card, and now everything works like magic, with a very fluent graphic!

Of course, Ubuntu provides the driver for that! Well it did it also for ATI, but that driver really sucks!

I'll never buy another computer again if endorsed with an ATI, this is for sure! :-)

GPRS connection in Ubuntu Jaunty

I've been using this beta version of Ubuntu Jaunty for a few days now, and today I wanted to establish a GPRS/GSM connection with my Nokia, using a USB cable. I had done this in my other Kubuntu distribution, and I only needed to set the parameters right in kppp.

This time I had a very pleasant surprise: as soon as I connected the USB cable, a pop window showed up:


after pressing Forward:


it already had all the parameters I needed, I just had to select the right voices in the Country and Provider, and I'm on-line!

Well done developers :-)

Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 beta on a Dell Latitude D630

I've been using this laptop, a Dell Latitude D630 for more than one year now, and I've always used Kubuntu (but always up to 8.04). Today, I decided to give a try to Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 (still in beta); I preferred Ubuntu instead of Kubuntu because the same version of Kubuntu has a bug at the end of the installation process which does not let you decide whether to install the boot loaded on a specific partition instead of the MBR.

I tested the system live first, and experienced no problems. Thus, I installed it on the hard disk (on another partition, since I'm still keeping the kubuntu 8.04 installation).

The first nice thing I noticed was that now it's much easier to select your time zone, and the Region and City lists are neater (you can select the time zone with a few clicks now).


Also the suggestion of the keyboard layout works fine!

Then we come to the partitioning step:

where I preferred to do a manual partitioning (having already some existing partitions I needed to keep):


I also specified to mount my other linux installation in a specific directory



The installation also offers the possibility of importing existing accounts (note that it detected windows and other Linux installations), but I preferred not to.


Then, before starting the installation...


remember to click on the advanced button, to setup the boot loader as you prefer, otherwise it will be installed on the MBR.


Now, since I already have grub installed (from my main kubuntu 8.04 installation), and want to keep that that way, I chose to install the ubuntu boot loader on the first sector of the installation partition (in my case (hd0,5) or /dev/sda6):


Now, I'm read to start the installation:


Of course, I had to change the grub menu.lst file of my main linux kubuntu 8.04 installation in order to add a menu item to boot this new Linux installation:

title        Ubuntu Jaunty
root        (hd0,5)
chainloader    +1

By selecting this grub menu item, I can boot the new Jaunty installation.

The first impression was really good! Everything seems to work fine: ethernet (Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5755M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)), wireless (Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection (rev 02)), bluetooth, graphic card (Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)) with special effects on!

It also looks like the infamous bug concerning too many load/unload cycles is not there anymore!

Stay tuned, as I'll keep this post up to date with new information :-)

Qt Eclipse Integration

Recently, I started to play with Qt 4 also under Windows, in order to be able to port some of my Linux applications that use Qt. Usually, I'm using KDevelop under Linux to develop Qt applications, but under Windows? Then I noticed that Trolltech provides Qt Eclipse Integration, i.e., an Eclipse plugin to program Qt programs with Eclipse. So I gave it a try...

IMPRESSIVE, really a nice piece of software!

The installation is immediate, and you get a menu item to run Eclipse already setup to start programming with Qt (relying on the CDT plugin for the C++ part). To try it, I followed the tutorial you find here.

The new project wizard now provides also Qt project options:

I chose the Qt Gui Project, and you'll have a skeleton project with an ui file (and you can then choose possible further libraries you might want to use):

If you haven't done that already, you'll need to configure a Qt version by providing the paths of your Qt installation:

Building the project relies, obviously, on qmake:

If you open the ui file, you'll see the nice integration with QtDesigner, perfectly fit in Eclipse, with all the useful views:

You can then create new files, classes and in particular UI classes:

And note the nice project file editor

And here's how you can easily manage signals and slots:

Following the tutorial you'll get an address book application that looks like this:

Summarizing, the qt eclipse integration plugin really impressed me in a positive way! And now I want to try it also under Linux. :-)

PDT, XDebug, Eclipse in Linux

I finally had a working version of PDT (Php eclipse plugin) and XDebug, so that I can finally debug, not only php script, but also php web sites! :-)

This blog post helped me a lot, but I must also admit that pdt people did a wonderful job, and now everything seems to work out of the box!

First of all I relied on the pdt all in one version (i.e., eclipse together with all the requested plugins and the pdt plugin), that can be found at http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/downloads.

However, you also need to install xdebug and (k)ubuntu already has a package for this, so you just need to type

apt-get install php5-xdebug

Now just check the path of the xdebug.so library file, in my case it is

/usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs/xdebug.so

then you'll need to add some parts in the php.ini configuration file, so you need to add at the end of your /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini these lines (use the path of xdebug.so above):

; XDebug
zend_extension="/usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs/xdebug.so"
xdebug.remote_enable=true
xdebug.remote_host="127.0.0.1"  ; if debugging on remote server,
                                ; put client IP here

Also, set implicit flush on in the same php.ini file, so you need to search for implicit_flush in the file and make sure it is set to on:

implicit_flush = On

Now you're set and you can run eclipse, and try to make a new Php project with a simple file, and try to debug it!

You need to create a new debug configuration, in particular a "Php Web Page" debug configuration. Also make sure that the server debugger is set to XDebug. Then specify the php file you want to test (in this example is newfile.php). Unless the project and all files are already in the root directory of your web server, you need to manually set the URL, so uncheck "Auto Generate" check box and write the complete path (starting from the root of your webserver directory, or, as in my case, a path relative to my user web space); this is also a way of passing, for instance, some GET arguments in the URL, as in this example: xamplevar=30&other=foobar.


Before starting the debugger, make sure you have the web browser set in eclipse; I'm using the internal web browser (actually the only one available in this eclipse installation). NOTE: sometimes, when starting eclipse, the web browser seems to have been lost, and you'll get an error when starting the debugger; in this case I simply restart eclipse.

Now let's run our debug configuration and debug our script!

Note the values of the variables (including the GET variables) and the output in the browser view! You can also see the output as the actual text, in the debug output window.

Remeber, when your program comes to the end, the debugger session is still active, and you must close with the red button, after selecting the "Remote Launch":

HAPPY PHP WEB PAGE DEBUGGING! :-)

SourceHighlightIDE 0.3

Shame on me, I had almost forgotten this software, SourceHighlightIDE, an IDE for GNU Source-Highlight, that I hadn't even released version 0.2! Well, this software still lives :-) and I've just released version 0.3, which, besides many improvements to the GUI, can now handle the new debug output of Source-Highlight.

Compiling Qt with MinGW in MSYS

Since I wanted to port some Qt4 applications (I always developed under Linux) in Windows, I downloaded from the trolltech site the Qt libraries for Windows (already compiled) which come with a minimal MinGW compiler to build windows applications. This was the first time I was using mingw, since I've always used cygwin instead.

The Qt installation comes with a start menu item called Qt Command Prompt, which sets all the environment variables for you in order to start building Qt applications.

However, being used to the comfortable Unix shell, I couldn't stand using the DOS command shell, also because I wasn't willing to use qmake: I need to use autotools instead. Thus, I installed also the mingw shell: msys.

I tried to build a Qt tutorial example with qmake in msys, and here comes the bad surprise: the Makefiles generated by qmake contains windows paths (e.g., for calling the moc compiler), which the Unix shell does not understand. Here's a screenshot with the error:

Everything works fine if you don't use the moc compiler, but as soon as Makefile invokes it, you get the error due to the windows paths:

C:\Qt\4.4.3\bin/moc.exe -DUNICODE -DQT_LARGEFILE_SUPPORT -DQT_DLL -DQT_GUI_LIB -DQT_CORE_LIB -DQT_THREAD_SUPPORT -DQT_NEEDS_QMAIN -I'c:/Qt/4.4.3/include/QtCore' -I'c:/Qt/4.4.3/include/QtCore' -I'c:/Qt/4.4.3/include/QtGui' -I'c:/Qt/4.4.3/include/QtGui' -I'c:/Qt/4.4.3/include' -I'c:/Qt/4.4.3/include/ActiveQt' -I'debug' -I'.' -I'c:/Qt/4.4.3/mkspecs/default' -D__GNUC__ -DWIN32 cannonfield.h -o debug/moc_cannonfield.cpp
make[1]: C:Qt4.4.3bin/moc.exe: Command not found
make[1]: *** [debug/moc_cannonfield.cpp] Error 127

I then asked on the nice qtcentre forum, and they pointed me to this blog post where they says it's a well known problem, and that recently Qt can be used also from msys (since qmake will generate Unix shell paths). What wasn't clear to me was that you must recompile Qt libraries yourself to make it work also from msys.

That's what I've done, downloading the sources of Qt and compiling the libraries from msys.

IMPORTANT: I wasn't able to compile the Qt libraries with the standard MinGW distribution; I had to use the MinGW that comes with Qt installation (i.e., the file qt-win-opensource-4.4.3-mingw.exe).

I did this procedure:

1. Set some environment variables (assuming that you unzip the sources in C:\qt-win-opensource-src-4.4.3:
   

   export QTDIR=/c/qt-win-opensource-src-4.4.3/
   export PATH=/c/qt-win-opensource-src-4.4.3/bin:$PATH
   export QMAKESPEC=$QTDIR/mkspecs/win32-g++

2. then you can run configure.exe (this will create the qmake binary and all the Makefiles)
3. now run make and wait for about 3 hours!

By the way, be ready to restart the make process some times (for me it's always twice), due to this error:

Couldn't reserve space for cygwin's heap...

(I don't know why this happens, but restarting make simply keeps on compiling from where it left).

Now, if no other errors take place, you'll have your compiled Qt libraries, and binaries, that generate the right Makefiles.

Remember to always set the above environment variables (e.g., in your ~/.profile), so that you'll use your version of Qt.

By removing the previous Makefiles, running qmake again (this time it will generate Unix paths to executables), and then make, everything works fine, and you can build qt applications from the comfortable Unix shell: indeed, now, the moc invocation command line is:

C:/qt-win-opensource-src-4.4.3/bin/moc.exe -DUNICODE -DQT_LARGEFILE_SUPPORT -DQT_DLL -DQT_GUI_LIB -DQT_CORE_LIB -DQT_THREAD_SUPPORT -DQT_NEEDS_QMAIN -I'c:/qt-win-opensource-src-4.4.3/include/QtCore' -I'c:/qt-win-opensource-src-4.4.3/include/QtCore' -I'c:/qt-win-opensource-src-4.4.3/include/QtGui' -I'c:/qt-win-opensource-src-4.4.3/include/QtGui' -I'c:/qt-win-opensource-src-4.4.3/include' -I'c:/qt-win-opensource-src-4.4.3/include/ActiveQt' -I'debug' -I'.' -I'c:/qt-win-opensource-src-4.4.3/mkspecs/win32-g++' -D__GNUC__ -DWIN32 lcdrange.h -o debug/moc_lcdrange.cpp

and you can run the Qt application :-)