Xannotate, a desktop annotation tool

I like gromit, but unfortunately it is not working for me. The code itself is good, the bug is probably due to the subtle changes of GDK/GTK behaviour over the years.

Anyway, I decided to write my own, and call it xannotate; because it does "annotation" and it only depends on Xlib.

Here's a shot:


More details (with download links) here.

Posted on 26 Jul 2014, 5:05 - Categories: Linux General
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Alternative URL for this site

Recently there was a fiasco between No-IP and Microsoft. You can google that yourself. The end result is, this blog went down for a couple of days.

To avoid that in the future, I'm planning to get my own domain; but for the time being if this site is down again, you can try to access it from http://jamesbond3142.ddns.net/blog instead.

Posted on 8 Jul 2014, 3:24 - Categories: General
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FatdogArm on Cubox-i - update

FatdogArm now runs with Cubox-i i2w and i4p; supporting all features of FatdogArm plus i.MX6-specific hardware acceleration (vivante video driver, VPU, gstreamer, ALSA hardware resampler). Cubox-i is the *the only* ARM platform I have where you xrandr works correctly and you can change resolution on the fly. Kudos to Freescale to make this happen.

On the other hand, the only thing currently not working on Cubox-i is the GPU (OpenGLES stuff). I have an open thread in the forum here: http://www.solid-run.com/community/post9713.html#p9713. All my other ARM platforms have their GPUs running, this is the only platform which it isn't (you've got Xorg hard lockups when trying to run any OpenGLES programs with GPU acceleration).


Posted on 8 Jul 2014, 4:23 - Categories: FatdogArm Linux Arm
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Woof-CE Next Generation

Woof-CE is the Community Edition (CE) of Woof build system. Woof build system (currently at version 2, so often called as Woof2) is the meta-distribution of Puppy Linux. It enables one to build a fully customised Puppy Linux distribution from many parent distros.

I have been working on the next generation of Woof build system. It initially started as a tool running on top of Woof2 infrastructure (original blog post here and here; the original branch holding the code is called "deb-build" on my github Woof-CE fork) - and now I have modified them to *replace* the Woof2 infrastructure and completely run on its own.

Front-ends have been added, so deb-build is now only one of many (future) builders to build Puppy Linux from different parent distros (deb-build builds from Debian-like distros, like Debian, Ubuntu, and possibly even Mint - I haven't tried that, though).

The main premise of the new build system is that puppy adapts to the parent distro, rather than the other way around. Doing this means the original parent distro is kept as close to its original design (including the use of its original package management system) and thus making more of the parent distro packages usable in Puppy derived from it - because as far as I can see, that is the reason for having Puppy as a derivative anyway (if you're not interested in using parent distro packages, then may as well build Puppy from scratch where you control everything and can optimise everything).

The links section of this blog points you to the most recent and experimental version of this build system ("woof-next-james" branch on my github fork of Woof-CE - this branch supersedes the original "deb-build" branch posted in my earlier blog posts). As they mature they will be posted to the official Woof-CE repository under the same name; and finally the most stable code would be merged to "woof-next" branch of Woof-CE (note that "woof-next" is an integration branch and contains changes and contributions from others too)

"woof-next" currently builds an ISO capable of booting to Xorg. There are some little modifications I have not yet ported from deb-build, but they will be soon.

In the experimental branch, you will find builder for building Slackware-based puppy too. The builder works but the resulting ISO will not boot because of it is missing puppy-specific packages that are not available from standard Slackware repository (e.g. busybox, mingetty, etc).

Note that this woof-next is still in its early phase. It lacks both the diversity (not many distros supported as parents yet) and versatility (it will only build x86 puppies, x86_64 being experimental and arm is completely unsupported yet) compared to the Woof2 build system. In time, I hope to address all of these.


Posted on 15 Jun 2014, 18:25 - Categories: PuppyLinux Linux
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FatdogArm on Cubox-i

As part of an on-going project that I'm doing with someone, I have received Cubox-i devices and is currently porting FatdogArm to them. It is still early days, but I've got FatdogArm running on Cubox-i i4p.



Posted on 12 Jun 2014, 4:35 - Categories: FatdogArm Linux Arm
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Updated links

I have updated my links with some of the projects that I maintain. They are mainly small, old projects that use GTK2. Some of them have disappeared completely from the web, so I suppose I just publish them so people can grab the source if needed.

The one I've just worked on recently is Xarchiver. I have fixed on the bugs that cause crashing when command line parameters are used, I've also updated the rar module to work with the new unrar 5.x.


Posted on 12 Jun 2014, 4:37 - Categories: Linux General
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End of the road for Fatdog64 600 series

Today I have switched to an early build of Fatdog64 700, in the interest of testing early and iron out all the obvious bugs. I still have 631 installed for emergency purposes, but I will not boot it up unless absolutely necessary.

It also marks the end of the development for Fatdog64 600 series, as from now on I will be concentrating fully to make 700 stable and feature-complete. The last of the 600 series, 631, will probably live for quite a few while, but there will be no further development on it. I will be depending on the community to provide support for those users who choose to remain on 631.


Posted on 10 Jun 2014, 4:18 - Categories: Fatdog64 Linux
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Puppy Linux build script - released

And here is the script: here.
The announcement is here: here.

The script is now close to 400 lines, but it has added the ability to use multiple repositories, and it now register packages properly enough for apt to work with it. Xorg is now working, one can boot to desktop with jwm and rox-filer. Not bad for such a small script, I reckon


Posted on 3 Jun 2014, 17:05 - Categories: PuppyLinux Linux
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Puppy Linux build script

Last evening, I took a stab at building Puppy Linux using Ubuntu base. I could have used Woof-CE's scripts directly, but it didn't work smoothly for me. I had a choice of debugging it - but I thought, it was more fun to write my own build script, I mean, how difficult could it be?

Well, it turned out, not too bad. In a couple of hours that evening, I managed to write a script, less than 300 lines, which pulls out Ubuntu packages off its repository, does dependency checking, install the packages with proper dpkg records and build myself a nice Puppy - command line only. I took Puppy base (rootfs-skeleton and initrd-tree0) from Woof-CE, the rest was done by my script. I announced that to the forum and it was generally well-received.

I will probably polish it a little bit (perhaps to the point that I can get Xorg running) before releasing the code (in my github fork of Woof-CE). Watch this space.


Posted on 2 Jun 2014, 4:06 - Categories: PuppyLinux Linux
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Fatdog64 631 released

A minor release, mainly updates for firefox/seamonkey and the flash player.

Release notes here.

Forum announcement here.

There is also a special version of Fatdog64 631 for Acer Chromebook C720. Details here.


Posted on 14 May 2014, 3:39 - Categories: Fatdog64 Linux
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