Feb 20 2010

Quick note to users installing ~arch KDE4

Hello all,

As some of you may know, I prefer Openbox to the larger desktop environments. However, I went to install KDE4 today on someone else’s computer, and ran into a problem with circular dependencies involving CUPS, GTK+, poppler, and cmake. The simple solution to the problem is to:

USE=”-cups” emerge -av kdebase-meta

and then go back later and do:

emerge -avuDN world

in order to add in CUPS support.

This issue was actually discussed recently in this thread on the fora. I can’t say whether or not this circular dependency problem will affect stable branch users or not, as I haven’t tried to emerge KDE in such an environment. Also, if you don’t have the cups in your USE flag declarations, you won’t be affected by this problem.

Hope that helps someone.

|:| Zach |:|

Feb 14 2010

Quick Openbox HOWTO update

Just a quick update to let everyone know that I made some changes to the Openbox HOWTO in the documentation repository, and that Josh was blazing fast at getting it committed; thank you Josh! I addressed submenu delay that came with >x11-wm/openbox-3.4.7.2, and how to fix it in the rc.xml configuration file, updated the external links to reflect the change in the Openbox wiki, and provided an example of a menu item that links to an application with startup options.

|:| Zach |:|

Feb 10 2010

A quick privacy note on Chromium

Yesterday, I became a bit peeved about the speed of page rendering in Mozilla Firefox as compared to Uzbl. While Uzbl is a fantastic browser, it is not my preferred choice for a daily-use browser (yet). Further, as it is built on WebKit, I figured that that might have something to do with its great speed. Seeing as Chromium is also built upon WebKit, but has a more polished and readily recognisable GUI, I decided to give it a go, and I emerged 4.0.266.0-r1. It is a very snappy browser indeed!

I did notice something about it though; privacy concerns. It seemed to be a pain to browse in a “more secure” style (and by “more secure,” I mean that–no browsing is completely secure for a multitude of reasons). After perusing the settings for a while, I noticed the “Incognito” mode for Chromium. I opened it up, and it seems to be a bit more secure than the regular browsing mode. However, it seemed like quite the burden to have to open up the browser and select that option every time I wanted to browse the web. Looking through the man page yielded no help, but I did find that incognito mode IS an option accepted at the terminal:

/usr/bin/chromium –incognito

or just

chromium –incognito

Using that option, Chromium will start in incognito mode automatically. Now, if you want your shortcuts to start in this mode as well, you will probably need to consult documentation regarding launcher modification in your window manager or desktop environment. If you use Openbox though, here is what you need your menu item to look like:

<item label=”Google Chromium”>
<action name=”execute”><command>/usr/bin/chromium –incognito</command></action>
</item>

If you have any comments, questions, or concerns regarding Chromium’s privacy or such, please post them below.

|:| Zach |:|