System Updates With Mixin

If you use ClearLinux’s mixin to add custom bundles to your installation, you will still be able to update your upstream bundles, however it will nolonger be as simple as doing a sudo swupd update. Here are the step’s you need to go through, assuming you defined your mixin repository in ~/mixin-repo: cd ~/mixin-repo createrepo_c . sudo mixin build sudo swupd update --migrate … this is at least the process I have used, and which worked for me....

Wed May 15 2019 · Geoffrey J. Teale

Enabling H.264 playback in Firefox on Intel's Clearlinux

In common with most Linux distros, Intel’s ClearLinux doesn’t ship H.264 decoding by default. Given the novel nature of ClearLinux there isn’t a nice off the shelf solution to this yet, so we have to use a workaround. I’ll try and find a better way to achieve this, but for now this will get H.264 video working in YouTube / Twitter etc, for now: wget http://ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-snapshot.tar.bz2 tar xf ffmpeg-snapshot.tar.tz2 cd ffmpeg-snapshot ....

Wed May 15 2019 · Geoffrey J. Teale

TrueType fonts in GNU Emacs

Listing installed TrueType fonts in Emacs In this new fangled age of TrueType support in Emacs it’s really useful to know the names of the Monospace fonts installed on your system in the format that Emacs understands. If you are on a Linux/UNIX system running Xorg with fontconfig installed then add this function to your .emacs file (defun list-monospace-truetype-fonts () "Provide a list of available monospaced truetype fonts on this machine" (interactive) (set-buffer (get-buffer-create "Monospaced Fonts")) (call-process-shell-command "fc-list :spacing=mono:scalable=true family | sort" nil t) (setq buffer-read-only t) (switch-to-buffer-other-window (current-buffer))) You can set these fonts in a number of ways, currently I am getting the most joy using this form:...

Thu Jul 3 2008 · Geoffrey J. Teale

Ikarus ascends

If you follow scheme or lisp news in even a passing fashion you can’t have failed to notice the arrival of Ikarus Scheme, the nifty incremental, native scheme code compiler. It’s an lovely new version of scheme based around R6RS. That means it supports a nice clean library system (standardised!) and scripting in the manner of Perl, Python and Ruby. Though it lacks the maturity and library base you’d find in chicken or PLT, it’s still a very attractive proposition, and the quality of the product thus far, combined with the nascent community feel around it has certainly got my spider sense tingling....

Mon Dec 17 2007 · Geoffrey J. Teale

Project Indiana Wishlist

OK, so many, many people will be saying many things about project Indiana before we ever see anything concrete, and then many more people will inevitably form two camps - the “Indianaphiles” and the “Indianaphobes”. All of that is inevitable and I guess we should just enjoy the ride. However, given the scope for Indiana thus far expressed is “Make a Sun branded Solaris distribution that’s a lot more like Linux”, and that the top man is Ian Murdoch, I have exactly one wish for this project....

Sat May 19 2007 · Geoffrey J. Teale

Making ZFS work on removable media

I’ve been playing around with ZFS for quite a while now and I’m very impressed. Everything that’s claimed of it holds up under my limited investigation. I’ve been working with both the OpenSolaris native version (thank you Nexenta!) and the ZFS-FUSE implementation for Linux. The one thing that proved hard to do was to build a ZFS pool on my USB2 hard drive and move that pool between machines. For a couple of days I struggled in vain to see why I couldn’t ZFS export from my linux box and ZFS import on my OpenSolaris box (or visa versa)....

Tue May 1 2007 · Geoffrey J. Teale