The DF Lab

This evening, with a few helpful suggestions on IRC at #gnome-do on freenode, I was able to work around (but not solve) an issue I’ve been having with Gnome Do, the Quicksilver-like launcher for GNOME.

My issue was as follows: every time the program started up on GNOME session start, it would revert to an unfashionable theme that I didn’t want. The configuration showed that it was on the Glass theme, as I wanted, but it was clearly not. Every time I ran the program otherwise, it would successfully take on the appropriate theme.

Long story short, it turns out the issue is likely related to compiz not being fully started yet, so it defaults to its non-pretty theme. I first wrote a script that waits for compiz to start then runs, but the process “compiz” existing was not good enough. So I created a 3-line script to delay Gnome Do’s startup by 2 seconds, and it works:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 2
gnome-do

Heck, this could be a one-liner, but whatever. I actually tried to use GNOME’s built-in session manager to invoke the sleep, but it didn’t work out for me at first and I didn’t feel like trying again, so this works just fine.

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This is just a small tidbit, in good part for my own future reference, on what I’ve been spending the last number of hours figuring out. I’ve actually done a lot of configuration of my new Gentoo install I wish I’d documented now, but alas, it’s too late.

In any case, I have two hard drives in this machine, and none of them were mounting automatically on my shiny new GNOME desktop. I thought it was a problem with NTFS, then with the gnome-volume-manager. I spent a bunch of time verifying I had the right drivers (ntfs-3g) and the latest software installed. Turns out I found my solution in an unlikely place: the Arch Linux wiki. Anywho, the fix was to change around some policy setting. A one-liner fix, as so many of them seem to be in the end. *sigh*

In order to make this experience even more exciting, I decided I’d try and use the same file and configurations to have HAL ignore /dev/sda1, which is my Acer recovery partition. I don’t particularly want to see that from Linux, and I certainly don’t want to mount it in case I accidentally end up doing something horrible to it. I came across this blog post, and adapted its instructions like so (for the file /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-ntfs3g.fdi) by adding the following section:

<device>
<match key="block.device" string="/dev/sda1">
<merge key="volume.ignore" type="bool">true</merge>
</match>
</device>

Much to my surprise, it worked! (after I changed my bleary-eyed mistake of “/dev/hda” to “/dev/sda1″ ).

I probably should make a point of posting some more of these gems, and where I found their solutions. If it takes me more than 20 minutes to find them, it can’t be all that easy to find. In any case, I’d say this is a job well done!

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With what has probably been a couple of years in the making, I finally have a blog. The idea went through a number of iterations, with first me being too lazy, then deciding I should design it myself and host it on a shared server, then deciding I would design it myself and host it myself (which is probably, incidentally, against Cox’s terms of service). Finally, however, at 4 o’clock on a Saturday morning, I find myself too lazy to go through the minutae of setting up a web server, but not quite lazy enough to want to tell the world about an inane discovery I made. And so comes the purpose of this blog.

I’m planning to maintain this blog primarily so I can share the tidbits of technical (usually Linux-related) knowledge that I acquire over time. I’ve had so many moments where I spend hours trying to figure out a problem before I read the right man page, or find a blog entry that helps. On those occasions, I want to shout out to the world and put out another beacon to help anyone else who may have such a problem in the future. That being said, I don’t know for sure I won’t digress into other topics or purposes, technical or otherwise. I have great interest and enthusiasm (some might say “zealotry”) for free and open source software. I run Gentoo Linux. These things will surely come up over time.

With all that out of the way, welcome to the DF Lab! If you’re not familiar with Pillerspeak, that’s the Dan Fego Lab. Enjoy and frequent my writings!

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