I like Sonars. I like computers. I like science. I'm a geek

The default text in the GLText screensaver in Ubuntu is “Host-Name, Kernel Version”. To change this, go to the screensaver folder in the terminal, and copy the gltext.desktop file to your home directory. Open gltext.desktop for editing (using emacs, for example), and change the line that reads:

Exec=gltext -root

to

Exec=gltext -root -front -text 'whatever text you like'

Might need to change permissions. I just ran chmod 777 and that did the trick.

This worked for me using Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).

I just happened to wander over to the Ubuntu website for the first time in ages, and just realized that there’s a new version of Ubuntu out – Ubuntu 10.04, codenamed Lucid Lynx.  It looks pretty cool!  Check out the official site here.  It looks like they’re working on re-branding – the design looks very different than before.  Very stylish.  Less brown/orange in the color scheme.  And there are a few features that look really cool – perhaps the one that I am the most excited about is the built in video editor!  They’re using Pitivi, which I think I probably came across during my search a couple of months ago, but never pursued it.  I wonder how it will compare to iMovie.  Maybe I’ll test it out with the video footage I got from the Pourquoi-Pas? last month.

They have also added this whole social network thing, where you can update your social networks right from the desktop.  I’m not sure that is something I would consider necessary.  There’s also an Ubuntu music store (and player), I’m curious as to what that’s all about.  I mean, it is obviously supposed to be their version of iTunes.  But how will it measure up?

So now my question is – should I upgrade?  It seems silly not to.  But last time I tried to upgrade an Ubuntu release without doing a full re-install, it didn’t work so well.  In fact, things were so messed up that I had to just re-format and re-install anyway.  There are some instructions here showing how to do the update.  It doesn’t look too scary… maybe I’ll backup all of my stuff just in case, and then give it a whirl later.

Lucid Lynx

hmm… looks a bit MAC/OS-ish to me.

My cousin Alexandra created this AWESOME video of her scooter road trip… check it out!

Scoot Scoot from ABEK on Vimeo.

This was great especially great because I have been meaning to look at what’s available for linux video editors. It used to be so easy to put together a nice home video using my old Powerbook.  But alas, the Powerbook is not in working order these days… But surely there is an open-source, linuxy solution!  A quick google search turned up this webpage, listing the author’s top 10 free video editors for Ubuntu (and presumably any flavor or linux). After having a look at the comments, it sort of seemed like the best one of the lot is KDEnlive, so I downloaded it.

I am in France for work, and am collecting video in the hopes that I will have a chance to put it together using KDEnlive (or maybe one of the other ones in the list).  I am not sure, but I suspect I will run into issues trying to do video editing using my little netbook – I’ll find out soon enough!

After trying for quite some time now to install MB-System and GMT, I’ve decided to make an effort to organize my file system a bit. So far – not really knowing any better – I have been installing my software in all kinds of different places, basically in whichever folder it ended up, based on mish-mashing instructions that I only half understood from different forums, etc. Figuring out how to build software from source has been a bit frustrating, since I don’t really know enough to have very effective troubleshooting skills. This is a small step, but I’ve been putting my installed software all into my /usr/local/ directory. So I now have:
/usr/local/GMT452
/usr/local/mbsystem512
/usr/local/netcdf363

I then had to change the references for this software in my .bashrc file:
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/GMT452/bin:/usr/local/GMT452/src:/usr/local/GMT452
MANPATH=/usr/local/GMT452/man
export NETCDFHOME=/usr/local/netcdf363
export GDAL_INC=/usr/include
export GDAL_LIB=/usr/lib
export GMTLIBDIR=/usr/local/GMT452/lib
export GMTHOME=/usr/local/GMT452
export MGD77_HOME=/usr/local/GMT452/share/mgd77
export X2SYS_HOME=/usr/local/GMT452/share/x2sys
export MBSYSTEM_HOME=/usr/local/mbsystem512

The only one that I didn’t change was the GDAL install, because I don’t really know why the include and lib directories went where they did, so I don’t want to make any changes. (although maybe I should since it’s the one thing that is still giving me trouble).

After getting some advice from Monica I felt I was ready to attempt installing GMT and MB-System again.  It looks like my problems might have been due to some incorrect path names.  My install_gmt script keeps crashing in the same place – at the part where it looks for GDAL files (ie gdal.h, and others).  I think it assumes that GMT lib and include subdirectories are under the same folder.  This doesn’t seem to be the case when I used the default Synaptic install.  So I uninstalled it, and am trying to install from source.

I grabbed the tar file from here:
http://download.osgeo.org/gdal/gdal-1.7.1.tar.gz

I extracted it, navigated to that directory in a terminal window, and ran the following commands:
./configure
make
sudo make install


Summarizing what these do:
./configure: checks for required dependencies, reports an error is they’re not there
make: compiles the source code
make install: installs the program

This time, my GDAL lib and include directories were put into /usr/local. Unfortunately, they are also still in the previous location, and I think I will need to manually remove them.

I added a couple of things to my .bashrc environmental variables – including the MANPATH, and the NETCDF path.

Next – installing MB-System! Finally!

First I installed the following packages using apt-get install:
xorg-dev
libmotif-dev
libxp-dev
mesa-common-dev
libsdl1.2-dev
libsdl-image1.2-dev

Downloaded the MB-System.tar.gz file from the ftp site.

…to be continued