Into.the.Void.

Yesterday I updated audacious on my gentoo box from ver 1.1 to ver 1.2.1. The result that was all my songs with greek tags became unreadable.
It seems that in the 1.2.1 version a new use flag was introduced: “chardet”.. So the solution is:

echo "media-sound/audacious chardet" >> /etc/portage/package.use
echo "media-plugins/audacious-plugins chardet" >> /etc/portage/package.use
emerge -avt audacious audacious-plugins


then open audacious–>Preferences–>Playlist–>Metadata–>”Fallback Character encodings” ISO-8859-7

hope it helps some of you…

Filed by kargig at 18:26 under Gentoo,Linux
No Comments | 4,045 views

It’s been a while now, since May 2006, that me and some others from the local Ioannina LUG are trying to create a new livecd, the Guli LiveCD. This livecd is geared mostly towards students, scientists and developers. It’s geared towards us…it’s something that will make our lives easier while travelling or while visiting a friend or … or … or …

It is Gentoo based, severy influenced by DSL (damn small linux) as well as other minimalistic livecds, but it’s size has grown to a full CD due to the hundreds of applications we wanted to add. There is of course X windows support, with fluxbox as a window manager, but it is not started by default, yet.

There are a few main categories of applications:

There are a lot of networking tools inside this livecd what will help you identify and correct problems inside your network. These include scanners, packet sniffers, tunneling software, and so on…

Scientific applications were included in order for some of us to be able to travel and still have a way to implement a new idea that strikes us. The main interest so far is Chemistry, Mathematics and Physics. Full tex/latex support is included.

Since many of the ILUG members are students of the Computer Science department it was inevitable that many development tools would be included. There is support for many languages (C, fortran, Java, Haskell, prolog, php, python, perl, ruby,etc), with their compilers and debuggers. The full man pages are also kept so that they serve as a reference for those who want them.

Last but not least we have included a lot of tools that could salvage your system in case of an emergency. These are file recovery tools, password reset tools (even for windows) and lots of others.

There are of course applications like firefox, sylpheed, abiword, gnucalc, gaim, skype, etc included on Guli for everyday tasks.

The total number of executables on this LiveCD is quite large, a double tab pressing on the console will give you something like this:
Display all 3355 possibilities? (y or n)

And there are more to come…

The current version was released yesterday and it is an anniversary edition for ILUG’s 1 year of existence. You can find more information, full list of packages and the download link about this live cd at ILUG’s forums (currently only in Greek, until Guli gets a proper website).

This liveCD is not geared towards new users who want to see a fancy livecd with XGL and stuff like that. People who have never before used linux might find it a bit diffucult to navigate through the livecd.

We would appreciate any comments/bugs either on the forum or on the bug tracker

Filed by kargig at 15:50 under General,Gentoo,Internet,Linux,maths,Networking
2 Comments | 4,380 views

I was at an electronics store this morning and a guy walks in and asks for a wireless monitoring/security camera. The salesman happily starts showing him some products. The cameras ranged from 400mW to 1W power operating at 2.4GHz. The salesman told him that the 400mW is for a distance of “2 floors” and the 1W is for a whole building (!?!?!). These cameras are probably using the same frequencies that community wi-fi networks are allowed to use.
Say that you don’t care about community wireless networks and the interference that such a device would cause to them, there still is a HUGE issue behind this sale:
If the guy buys one of them, and operates it he is instantly doing something illegal, since the maximum power of wireless devices at 2.4GHz in Greece is set at 100mW. So the salesman has the right to sell something illegal that the buyer is not supposed to use, or could be imprisoned if he used it. That’s like legalizing the sales of drugs but imprisoning people that use them. This kind of scenario used to happen with the “anti-police-radars”. Lots of electronics shops used to sell them, but if you got caught byt the police owning one of those devices you could go to jail. So the government lets shops make money out of selling something illegal that could cause customers law problems. Shouldn’t shops be also punished for selling these “electronic drugs” ?

Go Greece go! Excellent trade laws.

Filed by kargig at 16:07 under General
3 Comments | 4,062 views