Last night, between 0000 and 0700 my internet provided was servicing it’s networks. Due to this, segfault, and all the sites it hosts, has been unavailable between these hours. Sorry for that, but hey, maintenance has to be done. Segfault itself is still running strong:
segfault [r3boot]$ uptime
2:29PM up 112 days, 5:10, 1 user, load averages: 0.36, 0.46, 0.48

I’m in the process of leasing a new car. Currently I’m driving a Citroen Xsara Picasso (nicknamed “Whale”), but if all goes well, I’ll be driving a Seat Ibiza FR within some time. Let’s hope the negotiations work out ok, so I can drive a nice and small diesel powered 130HP car I’m about to schedule myself for a test drive coming saturday, so if you’re on a dutch highway near Utrecht then, beware >:)

I’ve switched to the cvs version of Wordpress today. This means that all rss/atom feeds are working again, and the xmlrpc api is working. This means that I can finally post from the comfort of my desktop (Hi from w.bloggar btw ). I’ve detected some errors here and there, most of them in the admin interface. I’ll make some auto-updating scripts this evening, so I can easily track cvs changes.

Last friday me and my girlfriend went to the Peppel in Zeist (review in dutch here). We parked the car in a parking lot called “Par-Cour”. When we went home, at around 01:30 we found out that the parking lot was closed. Normally you can run your parking card through a machine and still get access to the parking lot but not at this parking lot… Turned out the parking lot closes it’s doors at 2200 on friday, and refuses access till 0600 (or something) the next morning… We could get to the car by calling a number, wait for a hour and paying 35 euro’s to have a parking attendant open the parking lot and let us drive out.

Thanks anyway to the parking attendant (who was very nice), but beware for Gemeente Zeist, with it’s absurd parking policies. Please, how much trouble is it to install a machine which allows you access to the parking lot when you’ve purchased a valid ticket :r

Oh well, it’ll probably be easy money for them …

I’ve loaded Gnome 2.8 experimental onto my debian/unstable laptop yesterday night. All went okay. Just do the following things on your debian/unstable system to get things running:

Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following entries:
deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ ../project/experimental main
deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/ ../project/experimental main
deb http://pkg-gnome.alioth.debian.org/debian/ experimental main

Edit /etc/apt/preferences and add the following (create the file if it does not exist):
Package: *
Pin: release a=experimental
Pin-Priority: 650

Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 600

After that, edit /etc/apt/apt.conf and add the following lines:
APT::Default-Release "unstable";
APT::Cache-Limit 10000000;
Apt::Get::Purge;
APT::Clean-Installed;
APT::Get::Fix-Broken;
APT::Get::Fix-Missing;
APT::Get::Show-Upgraded "true";

Now you are ready to apt-get gnome2.8 Run the following command to get all the core libraries and files:
apt-get update && apt-get -t experimental install libgnome2-0

Now restart your X session and install the following packages:
apt-get -t experimental install at-spi bug-buddy capplets capplets-data contact-lookup-applet epiphany-browser epiphany-extensions evolution evolution-data-server evolution-exchange evolution-webcal file-roller foomatic-gui gabber galeon galeon-common gdesklets gedit gedit-common ghex gnome-about gnome-accessibility-themes gnome-applets gnome-applets-data gnome-applets-dev gnome-control-center gnome-desktop-data gnome-games gnome-games-extra-data gnome-keyring gnome-netstatus-applet gnome-panel gnome-panel-data gnome-session gnome-terminal gnome-themes gnome2-user-guide gnomemeeting gok gthumb gtk2-engines-glider gtk2-engines-highcontrast nautilus-cd-burner totem totem-xine

Again, restart your X session and log back into a fresh gnome 2.8 desktop. Enjoy

As you can see from the screenshot below, there’s still some rendering issues here and there, but overall it feels good. I’ve also run into some problems:

- Nautilus ftp browsing does not work in binary mode, just ASCII
- Nautilus crashes every now and then when doing ftp browsing
- Setting volume through alsa is badly borked. I haven’t been able to change the volume through the speaker icon.
- battery_applet does not really get rendered nicely

Overall it looks and feels good. Nice work gnome and everyone who contributed to this project. A big thanks goes out to LinuxQuestions for pointers in the right direction.