Month: August 2007

Sudoku programs

Sudokus in the free newspapers are a great way to pass some time in the train/metro (when you have no book left to read). Sudoku programs can be fun too, but some of them lack interesting features (like writing down possible numbers, giving just a hint and not the entire solution)

Gentoo portage has ksudoku, with some special sudoku types (including 3D ones), and a “Give hint” button, that reveals one of the missing numbers. KDE application though…

GNUstep users, there is a new application under development, it only has classic 9-by-9 sudoku formats, but the author is rapidly adding new features. Available in the gnustep overlay (and soon in your favorite portage tree)

And now another new application (spotted on the linux game tome): Sudoku Sensei. It allows custom sudoku formats, including the Samurai variant (9 grids in one), a great hint system (that lists all “rules” that can be applied to rule out a number), tutorials, undo/redo, basic printing, … You can find a not-so-pretty ebuild in my overlay

Now I just need to get my printer back in working order to print some nice grids (another item on my TODO list)

GNUstep in portage (finally) gets updates

After some months filling up the gnustep overlay, I am glad to announce that the new series of gnustep ebuilds are finally making their way in portage 🙂
grobian added the new eclasses and all the gnustep-base packages (on which all other gnustep packages are built). Now we wait for arch teams to say “OK, everything’s fine” (bug #189372 for the curious), and then we’ll start moving in applications ebuilds
This will give me some time to complete the etoile ebuilds, the versions in the overlay work fine, but are still rough. By the way, if you try etoile and don’t get the nice and shiny background, check that you are not running a 1280×1024 resolution (or another with the same aspect ratio): the background image for this ratio does not exist yet.
Another good news for GNUstep fans: the gnustep herd is now 3-persons strong, with truedfx joining our forces! And now for the dockapps fans: wmforkplop is a nice dockapp that displays animations reflecting forking activity, while listing the top cpu consuming processes (and a “process browser” to kill the offending ones). There’s an ebuild available in my overlay, it looks better animated than in this screenshot:

FreeNX 0.7 in portage, Etoile 0.2 (almost) in the gnustep overlay

For the (free as in speech) remote desktop enthusiasts, nxserver-freenx-0.7.0 is now in portage. What’s new in it? Well, most patches from 0.6.0 ebuild were merged upstream, a few other bugs were fixed, and it has much better printing support (mostly untested by me, though, this requires a printer…). A patch submitted to the freenx mailing list by google folks also allows better font display (older versions displayed smaller fonts than in the commercial NX servers). One last thing, those with USE=xcb should have a working freenx again 🙂

If you wonder about it, no freenx 0.7 does not use the new NX 3.0 features. However a full rewrite is under way, with modular design, NX 3.0 support, …

GNUstep users now… The gnustep overlay now holds an (almost complete) series of packages for Etoile 0.2. Run emerge etoile and remember to do as the emerge output says 😉

Also remember that:
1. this is still a 0.2 version, do not expect macosx-on-linux (that said, the work already done is really impressive)
2. the ebuilds are still Work-In-Progress, they will probably change some more before the ebuilds work fine. As usual, feedback is welcome!

OK, next thing on my TODO list now: expat upgrade on my server!

GNUstep overlay progress

GNUstep on Gentoo users, this is for you! (other interested people can read on, of course)

The gnustep overlay is now almost 200 commits old, so it’s time for a status report (ie what’s the overlay usability status?)

  • New gnustep eclasses

These are more or less complete now (some changes still get in here and there), and are quite usable now 😉 They still need some proper self-review, before getting reviewed by gentoo-dev folks

  • Updated base packages (and gnustep on gentoo organization)

These packages have not been changed for some time now and run fine, they’ll be ready for portage inclusion when the eclasses are

  • Packages updates

GNUstep ebuilds using the new system are easier to maintain, so the apps in the overlay behave quite well, and are up-to-date. People interested in ProjectCenter will most certainly like the the SVN pre-0.5 version available, quite an enhancement compared to stable 0.4.3 (for example this one works on ~amd64) As an enhancement, some of the gnustep-libs packages could change to the gnustep-base eclass (which does not require gnustep-gui and gnustep-back installed) instead of gnustep-2

  • Étoilé packages

The Étoilé project recently released their 0.2 version. Some packages were already in the overlay (popplerkit/vindaloo for example), I am now working on the missing ones, and adding a global ebuild to easily set it up for the user For now, all frameworks are available, most of the user applications (typewriter, grr, …) too. What’s still missing is Azalea and friends (the window manager), the Etoile background systems (that allow for macos-x style menus on top), and some integration

If you are curious about Étoilé, a livecd should soon be available (probably before all packages are integrated in the overlay). Or of course, the web site