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Mar

27

Beagle capers – help needed.

Linux, Off-Topic, OpenSource | Leave a Comment

I’ve been trying to get Beagle up and running on my computer for a while now. There’s so much information on my hard disk, I’d love something like Google Desktop Search for Linux, and Beagle seems to be just what I need – and more.

The following is only for those who’ve had some experience in Beagle-related matters. The rest, come back later… I’ll come up with entries that make sense to you – I promise. Now, scram!

OK – with Beagle, as you know, things aren’t that simple. Beagle requires d-bus, an inotify-enabled kernel (now optional), and mono. I have all of those installed, and working fine:

dbus – version 0.23.4 (the latest one, 0.31, requires gtk+ 2.6, and I’m still running Gnome 2.6).
mono – version 1.0.6 for SUSE 9.2
kernel – an inotify-enabled 2.6.8 kernel.

I launch dbus with
$ eval `dbus-launch –auto-syntax`

Then, beagled
$ beagled –fg –debug

This connects to the dbus session just fine, and begins indexing all of my data. I now launch best, the nice GUI to beagle. That loads fine too.

The problem is when I type in a search query. If I search for “rahul”, for instance, here is what I get:

The query for rahul failed.
The session bus isn’t running. See http://beaglewiki.org/index.php/Installing%20Beagle for information on setting up a session bus.

I have no idea what the problem is now. Why best can’t seem to detect that a session bus is indeed running, fails me. Someone on Ubuntu’s wiki here had the same problem, but a reboot seemed to fix that for him. I’m not that lucky. :-(

Does anyone have a clue?




Mar

26

Notes on digital cameras and Linux.

Linux, SUSE | Leave a Comment

The first thing I consider when buying any piece of hardware, is whether it’ll play well with Linux. Yeah if you’re a Linux user, you know the feeling. The “extra” research you need to put in. Thankfully, the rather expensive digital camera I bought last week works excellently with the SUSE Linux 9.2 Professional on my Thinkpad.

The first time I plugged it in, it was recognised as /dev/sda1 (where’d that come from?), and mounted under /media/usb-Sony-SonyDSC:0:0:0p1. I’d actually prefer a nice /media/camera or something similar. Anyways, from there on, I could use it like a normal folder – add, view, delete files. The only hitch was that to use the camera multiple times between reboots, you had to unmount it cleanly before disconnecting it – and that involved opening a terminal window and typing “sudo umount /dev/sda1″. Most inconvenient, if you ask me. In the “Computer” window on the GNOME desktop, an entry for “USB Hard Disk” would appear a short while after the camera was plugged in.

GTKam, a nice application for downloading and importing images from your digital camera, refused to recognise the camera. This was a pain – I didn’t want to go through the elaborate ritual of waiting for the camera to be automounted, navigate to a complicated drive path, more layers of folders beneath, and then drag and drop them into a folder in my home directory. No, sir – what I want is to plug in the camera, fire up gtkam, look at a preview of all the pictures in the device, and transfer them to my photos folder with a single click.

I observed that most of the Sony camera models listed in the gphoto database had PTP mode in brackets appended to the model numbers. I wondered if there was a “PTP mode” for my camera. A little poking around in the fat manual revealed that I could, indeed, enable PTP mode. And voila! The camera works fine! it doesn’t show up as /dev/sda1 anymore in the mount listings, and GTKam lists images like a charm! Of course, the camera’s recognised as a DSC-F707V, which it most definitely is NOT (it’s a DSC-W1), but hey – it works, and that’s all that matters! I wonder how things are for Windows users.

In a couple of days, I’ll post about digital photo management software for Linux.