Lubosz's Blog » ubuntu

Pushing only two times for Caret emoticon in Ubuntu ^^

lubosz — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:09:56 +0000

I always had to push 2 times the ^ key to get a ^ (Caret) in Ubuntu Linux / Gnome.
So for my favourite emoticon ^^, i had to press the Caret button 4 time! What a waste of life. I asked myself, how can i reduce this to 1? Since i know this works in other OSes, i wanted to change it.

By default, ^ is a dead key to generate following symbols: êô⁰¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹⁰ŵêẑûîô⁺ĵĥĝŝâŷĉ. But i don’t need them, i want to generate my favourite emoticon ^^ without pressing 4 times ^…

I’m on a German layout, and tried all of them in gnome-keyboard-properties.
Maybe the keyboard model is related to this, I always choose Asus Laptop, since i use one ^^.

It’s btw a pain in the behind that gnome-keyboard-properties only stores 4 possibilities, and I can’t edit them. I have to remove them an add a new one, and select Germany all the way again T_T. After getting that I had to restart gnome-keyboard-properties to really change the layout, I was able to really test them D:
Same thing for other apps. I had to restart gedit to get the new layout working. This is very confusing and has to be said somewhere… Like in the gnome-keyboard-properties dialogue… And if its not meant to be like this, then this is a bug

Did you know that Google does not search for Caret? http://www.google.com/search?q=^
It is used for the power of a number: http://www.google.com/search?q=2^3
Why can’t you escape this with \, like in every other sane application?
More about Google’s lack of special character support can be found here.

I tested some the layouts:

Germany	Works, but i have to push ^ two times to get one.
Germany Dead acute	Seems to work the same as Germany (but gnome-keyboard-properties was not restarted, so it was untested)
Germany Dvorak	Wrong layout, but ^ is not dead anymore, this would be how i like it.
Germany Sun Dead Keys	Seems to work the same as Germany (but gnome-keyboard-properties was not restarted, so it was untested)
Germany Dead grave accurate	Yeah This is it!!

So have fun on your keyboards.

Some screenshots

lubosz — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:43:38 +0000

These are some screenshots i made during the last year, that i wanted to share with the world.
In alphabetical order. Enjoy.

1337 Ubuntu

ceBIT Linux Ad

Compiz Fusion Sphere

Lawl File

OS Ad

multiple virtualisation

google did you mean

windows bad timer

windows setups

windows 2

ICQ blocks alternative Clients: Why we can’t have nice things…

lubosz — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:52:40 +0000

Today ICQ blocked alternative clients, like Pidgin, Adium and Kopete for KDE3 (Kopete KDE4 still works). Some users experienced problems in Miranda too. But i tried the newest Miranda version in Wine, and it worked.

ICQ tells the Client that it’s Version is too old. The message was: “The Client version you are using is too old. Please upgrade at http://pidgin.im”. Thats why the Users did a DDOS Attack to Pidgin.im

In german: “Die Client-Version die Sie nutzen, ist zu alt. Bitte updaten sie unter http://pidgin.im/.”

Here are some screenies:

Adium X

Kopete KDE 3

Pidgin 2.4.1 Ubuntu Linux

Pidgin 2.4.2 Windows XP

Fixes:

Pidgin Windows: Mirror 1 Mirror 2

Pidgin Linux (ubuntu): Mirror 1 Mirror 2 Alternative Version

Kopete KDE3: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=165502#c26

Adium: http://alexmak.net/downloads/Adium_1.1.2.dmg

Moar fixes: http://www2.hs-esslingen.de/~hoadit00/pidgin/

So ICQ tried Users to convert to ICQ6, but free software works fast… Hack the planet

Currently you have to recompile libpurple for adium. If you want support for that, try the #adium chanel on irc.freenode.net