Archive for the ‘mono’ Category
Smuxi – mono based irc client
Smuxi is an irssi-inspired, flexible, user-friendly and cross-platform IRC client for sophisticated users, targeting the GNOME desktop.
Smuxi is based on the client-server model: The core application (engine) can be placed onto a server which is connected to the Internet around-the-clock; one or more frontends then connect to the core. This way, the connection to IRC can be kept up even when all frontends have been closed. The combination of screen and irssi served as example for this architecture.
Smuxi also supports the regular single application mode. This behaves like a typical IRC client; it doesn’t need separate core management and utilizes a local engine that is used by the local frontend client.
Smuxi currently supports the following features
- Detachable Frontend (frontend can be detached from a smuxi-server)
- Multiple Server Support (you can connect to more than one server)
- Unified Nickname Colors (identical color across channels and networks)
- Caret-Mode (keyboard navigation through messages)
- Regular and Bash-Style Nickname Completion
- Full Keyboard Control
- Startup Commands (when Smuxi starts)
- On Connect Commands (when connecting to a server)
- Message / Command History
- Configurable Encoding (ISO-8859-1/15, UTF-8, etc)
- Configurable Command Character
- Auto Connect (automatically connect to defined servers)
- Quick Connect Dialog (simply connect to any server)
- Open / Join Chat Dialog
- Find Group Chat Dialog
- Sorted and Reoderable Tabs
- Colors are checked and adjusted for optimium contrast
- Clickable URLs
- Word Wrapping
- Logging Support
- Fully customizable filters to ignore messages or events
- Configurable Highlight Words
- Markerlines which divide old messages from new messages
- Themeing Support
- Configurable Font
- Foreground / Background Color
- Userlist Position
- Tab Colors / Position
- Configurable Timestamps
- Configurable Tray-Icon Support
- Translations
- British English
- Czech
- Catalan (patial)
- Danish
- Finnish (patial)
- French
- German
- Italian
- Portuguese
- Spanish (patial)
- Swedish
- Multiple Network Protocols
- IRC Support
- Stripping Colors and/or Formattings from Messages
- Showing mIRC Colors
- Splitting oversized messages
- Channel List / Search
- CTCP Support including a Menu
- Invite To Menu
- Lag Indicator
- Twitter Support
- Reading and Posting Tweets
- Friends Timeline
- Replies
- Direct Messages
- IRC Support
Themeing & UI
Love the way it handles tabs and userlist. First of all, userlist can show on left side or right side. Tabs can be showed at upper, bottom, right and left side. My pic above has tabs at left side. Colors and fonts are changeable too. background images and tab colours are changeable.
Download
To download Smuxi for Arch, Foresight, Debian, OpenSuse, Gentoo, FreeBSD… Go to: http://www.smuxi.org/page/Download
GtkBuilder & IronPython
Weekly Rewind #22
The Weekly Rewind
Howdy, welcome to another Weekly Rewind. Number 22 we’re up to now and I can’t think of any good jokes for that number, sorry. Apart from maybe some Bingo lingo “two little ducks… twenty two” and all that. Anyway, lack of jokes aside, let’s get into what happened this week:
On Monday we got back to recording the first regular Linux Outlaws episode in a while, about 3 weeks actually. Damn, it was a long one at 2 hours running time! We had lots of technical problems before starting and so were pretty delayed. It was fun as always though and luckily lots of people came to join us live in the IRC and on Ustream. I’m thankful for all the support and I hope everyone else had as good a time as I did. On Tuesday I did a lot of work on my DanLynch.org website. I sorted out the Drupal install a bit, upgraded to 6.13 and made sure all the modules were up to date. This blog actually runs on Wordpress but it’s a sub directory of the main Drupal site. The master plan (if you can call it that) is to have one place where everything I do resides. A proper hub for all my activities online where you can find music, podcasts, articles and assorted gubbins. The site is making progress very slowly, I’ve got it to the stage where it pulls in podcast items automatically and at least has a list of the latest blog posts in the sidebar. There’s still a hell of a long way to go. The structure of the Drupal nodes and flow is pretty much done but I need to fix up one design that works for the whole site, including this blog. I have an idea and I’ll be digging into some XHTML/CSS stuff in the near future. It’s been a while so it’ll be good to get back to it. If anyone has ideas or suggestions of what you’d like to see on the site feel free to chip in with a comment or email.
On Wednesday I continued development work and also found time to write a bit about the latest developments in the Mono saga. I won’t go into the details again here, you can read the post. Some people didn’t like what I said and I’m always up for a healthy debate about these issues. I also developed quite a bad cold this week. This isn’t a man-flu thing and I’m not usually one to complain about these things, honest. I’ve had chronic sinus trouble since I was a kid and I’ve been advised recently to try a Neti pot. It’s an Indian thing and part of the whole Ayurvedic medicine movement. It’s like a small tea pot in many ways and you use it to pour salty water through your nose. It’s supposed to help clear blockages and generally promote health. I figured it was worth a bash, I’ll try anything once. They say in the instructions it’s a “warm pleasant sensation”, is it hell!! Whoever wrote that is a lying git, it makes your eyes water and it’s not what I would call enjoyable in any way, but having said that it’s not really painful and I shall perceiver for a while to see if it works. I’ve done it 3 times so far and I’m sticking to once a day. I’ve included a video below so you can see what I mean.
Later in the week my laptop started playing up a lot. Strange lines on the screen, flickering display and other intermittent faults. I figured it was just a quirk in Fedora but I now think it might be a hardware problem. I moved very briefly to PCLinuxOS 2009 which I wanted to review. That didn’t help and I ended up installing an old image of Mint 7. I’ve been running that a couple of days and since yesterday it hasn’t had any display problems. I thought perhaps it was the faulty Nvidia card which has caused a lot problems for Dell. They’ve even extended the standard warranty of this machine by a year for this issue, it’s been quite high profile. I was convinced I’d have to send this laptop back to Dell for repair until yesterday, but if it keeps working as it is I might be lucky. It could have been a loose connection that I inadvertently knocked back into place. We’ll see.
I spent the rest of the week nursing my cold, working on websites, writing, moaning and preparing my playlist for the next Rathole Radio. As I write this it’s actually very early Monday morning and I did the show live a couple of hours ago. It went really well I think. Many people turned up and I’m pleased with the results. You can hear the podcast very soon. I’ll publish it tomorrow, between other work.
Upcoming:
Next week I’ll be doing Linux Outlaws as usual, we had a chat to Bradley Kuhn of the SFLC about the implications of the recent Mono patent promise by Microsoft. You’ll be able to hear that on Wednesday hopefully, I’m editing this week and I hope to get the bulk of it done on Tuesday. I’ll also be working a lot on my presentation for Manchester Free Software on Tuesday July 21st. It’s at 7pm and more details can be found here. I’ll be talking about audio production on Linux, it should be a lot of fun. If you’re in the Manchester area come down and say hi, I’d be pleased to see you. Who knows maybe the talk will even be interesting, I’m planning all kinds of live demos which could go horribly wrong. I’ll release this new Rathole Radio tomorrow, keep working on the website and many other things during the week. So I’ll see you next Sunday I hope. Take care till then
Dan
P.S – Can you smell salt? … I can, everywhere I go 
Mono is not a Wolf in Sheeps Clothing
I think people are missing the mark a bit on what .Net and Mono are, in terms of whether they’re a threat or not a threat to Linux and F/OSS. Hidden in all the speculation and conjecture of why Microsoft is budding up with Novell and SUSE to help support Mono is this one unarguable fact.
Without Mono, .Net is a one trick pony. .Net can only run on a Windows server stack. Java, the piece people seem to be missing here, can run on pretty much any stack. In fortune 500 land, Java == Enterprise. Microsoft wants a piece of this pie, but .Net all by itself on a Windows stack, is no Java.
I think Microsoft saw they had a weakness with .Net vs. Java, and tried to close this gap by extending a olive branch to Mono. Think about it, Microsoft had been slamming Linux and F/OSS prior to the announced deal with Novell, they could never create this capability directly in house, without losing all credibility. What’s their next best move? Partner with someone on the outside who can deliver .Net capabilities on other OS stacks. All the while Microsoft can keep bad mouthing these other OS stacks, just enough so they remain credible with their customer base.
The real battle ground? I think going forward the true battle ground for Linux and F/OSS is in delivering solutions that are F/OSS. What do I mean by this? I mean that we as a community need to make sure that we implement solutions that use generic off the shelf open source bits for whatever we deliver. By doing this we guarantee that nothing we implement can be locked in by any one vendor.
So, for example, if you need to create any software for a client or for yourself, you should be using things like Java, or Ruby on Rails, or Perl, or Python, or Mono. You shouldn’t be developing directly against the latest version of .Net on the Windows stack. In using any of the above software stacks that I just mentioned, you can pretty much be guaranteed, your software project will be portable to any OS stack.
Moonshine
You might remember Miguel de Icaza hinting at a new, secret project from Aaron Bockover in our interview with him in Episode 75. Well, Aaron has now released that project under the name “Moonshine” — which I must say is 100% Outlaws Approved! 
Apparently Moonshine harnesses the Moonlight plugin for Firefox to enable you to automatically play back Windows Media files on your Linux desktop. Right now you still have to compile the thing to get it to work, but I can’t wait for packages to crop up for all the major distros. This might be another important step on the way to enabling casual users that just want “things to work” to make an easy transition to Linux.
