» Disable middle mouse pasting (sort of)

Someone asked on IRC how to disable middle mouse pasting in X. Seems like it's a mystery to almost everyone as it's asked on quite a few forums but always left unanswered. I wouldn't want to miss that feature, personally, but well, here's a trick to disable middle mouse pasting in X:

1. list your current mouse pointer X mappings using xmodmap -pp (look at the 2nd column)
2. swap the button 2 with some unused one, typically the highest number
3. add a line e.g. "pointer = 1 9 3 4 5 6 7 8 2" (if you have 9 buttons, for the sake of an example) to ~/.Xmodmap

Note that it will completely disable the middle key (but you'll still be able to use it to scroll as scrolling up and down is mapped to two other distinct pointers in X (4 and 5, actually)) To automate the process, just copy/paste the following snippet into a shell (and execute it):

xmodmap -pp |perl -ne 'BEGIN{@a=();$h=0} {next unless /^\s*\d+\s+\d+\s*$/; ($v)=/^\s*\d+\s+(\d+)\s*$/; push(@a,$v); if ($v gt $h) {$h=$v}} END{@b=();foreach(@a){ if ($_ eq "2"){push(@b,$h)} elsif($_ eq $h){push(@b,"2")} else{push(@b,$_)} }; print "pointer = ".join(" ",@b)."\n";}' >> ~/.Xmodmap

» Packman: lots of multimedia package rebuilds

We're currently busy rebuild lots of multimedia related packages for openSUSE in the Packman repository due to an API-breaking update of x264. At the same time, we've adapted the x264 package to the openSUSE Shared Library Packaging Policy and renamed it to libx264-SONAME to avoid going through dependency breakage again. If you experience broken/unfulfilled dependencies while attempting to install packages such as MPlayer or VideoLan Client, then please try again in a couple of hours. Our build server is busy rebuilding all those packages that depend on x264, and the queue is pretty long ;) Sorry for the inconvenience.

» Translating the Packman website

The Packman website now has translations for german, french, dutch, portuguese, brazilian portuguese, spanish, danish, czech and italian. If you'd like to contribute another translation, the procedure is as follows:

• download the gettext .pot file and translate it into your language (e.g. using kbabel, emacs, vim, ...) -- except the "cat_..." messages, they shouldn't be left as-is
• translate the welcome and documentation HTML fragments and translate them as well
• also send me how to translate "twenty" (20) in your language (that one isn't in the pot file)
• send the whole thing to me [1] or to the packman mailing-list

That would be a much appreciated contribution :) [1] My email address is Update: thanks to Chen Swyear and Dinar Valeev for sending in a traditional chinese and russian translation, respectively Anyone for polish, japanese, hungarian and croatian, maybe ? ;)

» Updated website

As announced quite some time ago, I now maintain my packages in the Packman repository and the openSUSE Build Service. I finally decided to reflect that on my website. I guess an era has passed... ;) The nice thing is that nowadays, a lot more packagers are active in the community. The Build Service has greatly facilitated that by lowering the barrier in terms of local infrastructure (you need none, except a command-line script if you prefer CLI to the nice web interface). A few folks at Packman (including me) developed a nice, lean build server of our own, that is less capable than the almighty openSUSE Build Service but is more lightweight (as we currently only have a single server to build on). A few but valuable people have also joined the Packman team and taken over the maintenance of a few of my packages, which gives me a little more time to spend on other things (such as FOSDEM, the openSUSE Board or the Software Portal) -- I still need 72 hour days though ;)

» FOSDEM 2008: announcing developer rooms

Here you'll find the list of developer rooms that made it for FOSDEM 2008: http://fosdem.org/2008/devrooms Note that the individual schedules and speaker bios are not available yet, as they will be updated when the respective projects send them in. And there's an openSUSE devroom too ;)

» FOSDEM 2008: announcing keynote and main track speakers

Nuff said ;)