Dick Turpin's Arch Linux Blog

The partys over

dickturpin — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 19:34:22 +0000

Yep the party’s over for archlinux.org.uk we tried we really did but the interest was not there. I think there was a number of reasons obviously the main one being that there is already an English speaking location www.archlinux.org it was a nice idea to have a UK based home but as I say why bother when you can join the main site? Its a different matter if you’re French or German although most Europeans can speak English to be fair.

We did manage to get into double figures for membership and had something like 30 odd posts but it was just not enough. The site was very kindly hosted by my friend Dave in the United States he has some hardware plans and asked me if I wanted to continue with the site which is totally my responsibility but I made the decision to pull the plug there is a cost element to the site hosting and given the almost stagnant state of the forum I could not let good money run after bad.

I’d like to thank everyone who signed up and gave some contributions also thanks to Dave for hosting it and putting up with my requests for housekeeping tasks that was required now and again. The domain is not dead and I/We may well do something with it next year, there is still the IRC channel Freenode #archlinux.org.uk but only myself and a couple of others ever seem to turn up in there.

Anyway it was a good learning experience and I enjoyed the last 12 Months so once again “So long and thanks for all the fish”.

Microsoft Fingerprint reader

dickturpin — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:33:27 +0000

My mate Dan gave me a Microsoft fingerprint reader as it only works under XP or Vista and he now has Windows 7 anyway my first thought obviously was “Can I get it working on my Arch box?” I had a quick look on the Forum and wiki but unless I’m blind I couldn’t see anything specific to this model.

It seemed a safe bet that I needed ‘fprint’ so I just plunged in hoping that would sort me out and issued pacman -S fprint this installed libfprint, fprint_demo, pam_fprint and imagemagic

By running /usr/bin/fprint_demo I could get the GUI to run but the reader was not working obviously I needed a driver. The one I needed was libdpfp http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=5701

Once downloaded
tar -xzf libdpfp-0.2.2.tar.gz
cd libdpfp-0.2.2/
./configure –prefix=/usr/local
Make
Make install

Test that everything works
cd examples
./capture_finger

Success! It scans in my fingerprint, I closed that and ran fprint_demo and enrolled my fingerprint now I need to work on incorporating this for logging into Gnome.

[Incomplete more to follow]

Gwibber Installation on Arch Linux

dickturpin — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 10:49:41 +0000

Gwibber is a Micro Blogging client allowing you to read and send to services such as http://identi.ca and http://twitter.com Installing Gwibber on your lovely Arch system can be a little bit of a pain I generally use a wiki to help me install and configure however this time around I had to do some extra work so I thought I would write it up in case others had the same problems.

First of all you will need to install yaourt this will enable you to use the AUR repository. As you can see there is a couple of ways of installing it choose whatever method is best for you. Once that’s done we will need to do the following;

su -

yaourt -S bzr
yaourt -S python-simplejson dbus-python python-notify pywebkitgtk-svn python-egenix-mx-base
yaourt -S python-feedparser pyxdg python-distutils-extra pil desktopcouch python-pycurl python-mako

bzr branch lp:gwibber
cd gwibber/
python setup.py install

I'd suggest starting it from a terminal 1st time around just in case there are any errors, add your services such as identi.ca and away you go.

What's happening?

dickturpin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:06:48 +0000

What’s happening? That’s a good question I was really busy with LugRadio Live 2009 but that finished two weeks ago! Thing is I’ve had lots of projects that I’ve also put on hold so I needed to get those out of the way.

There has not been a lot happening with www.archlinux.org.uk the membership has grown and I have had some offers of help, I’m hoping to to some work with the site and the members next week.

Somebody is having a laugh

admin2 — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:38:18 +0000

1ubuntu the iso is out before the torrents!

Ubuntu Hogs

admin2 — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:38:10 +0000

OMG you cant hear yourself think in #ubuntu-release-party its like feeding time in the lions enclosure

Compaq Burn out

admin2 — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:13:16 +0000

Me thinks the CPU on this Compaq D5s with !opensuse on it is about to commit Harikiri 腹切 very very soon :-/

Encrypted passwords

admin2 — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:05:35 +0000

Busy sorting out passwords and using 128 bit encryption its all @johntheniceguy ‘s fault

IRC here we come

admin2 — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:23:57 +0000

IRC here we come

Back to work

admin2 — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:20:41 +0000

Back at work today I feel like I have Linux Jet lag or something #lrl2009 !lrl2009 #oggcamp !oggcamp