Xfce Power manager version 1.0.0 have been released, this version is based completely on upower, means that batteries information are read from upower daemon, upower is also used for hibernate/suspend operations, polkit is an optional requirement for the new version, since it helps the power manager to figure out if the user is authorized to do some actions, if you are not able to use suspend/hibernate and you are sure that your laptop can do suspend/hibernate, then you need to check your polkit authorizations, usually the setup are done by you distribution provider, but if you are compiling from source then see man pklocalauthority for more details, but as a quick howto get authorizations you need to create authorization files in /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d

for example, org.freedesktop.upower.pkla will contains

[Local Users]
Identity=unix-user:YOUR_USER_NAME
Action=org.freedesktop.upower.*
ResultAny=yes
ResultInactive=no
ResultActive=yes

Create as well another file for consolekit (used for shutdown) Action org.freedesktop.consolekit.* and for udisks (used for spinning down the hard drive when on battery power) with Action org.freedesktop.udisks.*

With the new version xrandr is the backend used to handle display brightness, but HAL support can be enabled at compile time to be used as a fallback in case xrandr fails to handle the backlight panel (which is the case for losts graphic cards, unfortunately )

I'm very happy to announce that the first stable version of Parole is out today Download Here— Ali Abdallah 2010/01/05 10:30

I'm very happy with what i got with this first release, the project started to find its way, shortly after this release i wanna implement easy to use DVB-T support for Parole, and improve the browser plug-in to have some nice features like those present in flash plug-in.

Again i will blog about my favorite baby, Parole, few days after its first stable release, brainstorming ideas on Xubuntu started to ask for Parole as a default media player, many people already blogged about Parole, these things make me feel extreamely happy, yes my baby is growing in the right direction .

Despite the fact that my life is getting complicated these days , i deiced to give Parole more love, i prepared a 0.2.2 branch for the upcoming version of Parole, i already implemented some nice features, like a setup wizard that opens for the first time you run the player to help you configure some options, and now my focus is on DVB-T support, it is easy to use Parole to watch DVB-T channels, even with the current versions, but what i wanna have is a very simple DVB-T channels scanning, a feature that will promote Parole as a simple stable featureful media player.

I finally got rid of my old P3 800 MHz desktop PC, which this website was running on, i replaced it with a packard bell imax mini.

This computer is equipped with 1.6 Intel Atom processor, 2048 MB ram, 160 GB HDD, Ethernet, Atheros wifi, NVIDIA Ion+HDMI VGA output, very small and completely silent, low power consumption, simply it is a very good choice as a desktop or a small filesystem server.

The price of this computer is around 269 euros (09-10-2009), when i got the computer it had windows vista home premium SP1 installed, i immediately called the client service of Packard bell, because i know that windows license refund is possible with this company without much of pain, after explaining that i actually refuse to accept the license of windows vista, i had to send the computer for them to format the hard drive and to extract the windows license sticker, procedure is straight forward with this company, shipping fees are on their charge, and i got my computer back 4 days after i send it, the refund is 40 euros, prices were reduced because of Window$ 7, but anyway it worth it.

Of course i installed Arch Linux on it with sshd, apache, php, and i put my website which contains my blog+gallery, … .

Almost all modern window managers have compositing capabilities, this is nice, but in the other hand it is very annoying for softwares like image viewers or media players…

The _NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY_LOCKED hint tells the window manager that the opacity is locked on a specific window, so the window manager would use this hint to keep the window opaque, unfortunately this hint is not standardized yet, but the Xfce's window manager supports it, so here is how to set this hint on a top level widget, the widget has to be realized of course.

static void
set_wm_window_opacity_locked (GtkWidget *widget)
{
    Display *xdisplay;
    GdkScreen *gdkscreen;
    GdkDisplay *gdkdisplay;
    GdkWindow *gdkwindow;
 
    Atom atom;
    char mode = 1;
 
    gdkscreen = gtk_widget_get_screen (widget);
    gdkdisplay = gdk_screen_get_display (gdkscreen);
 
    xdisplay = GDK_DISPLAY_XDISPLAY (gdkdisplay);
 
    atom = XInternAtom (xdisplay, "_NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY_LOCKED", TRUE);
 
    /*Check if the atom is valid */
    if ( atom == None )
        return;
 
    gdkwindow = gtk_widget_get_window (widget);
 
    XChangeProperty (xdisplay, GDK_WINDOW_XID (gdkwindow),
                     atom, XA_CARDINAL,
                     32, PropModeAppend,
                     (guchar *) &mode, 
                     1);
}

Or even simpler

static void
set_wm_window_opacity_locked (GtkWidget *widget)
{
    GdkWindow *gdkwindow;
    GdkAtom atom;

    char mode = 1;

    atom = gdk_atom_intern ("_NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY_LOCKED", TRUE);

     /*Check if the atom is valid */
    if ( atom == None )
        return;

    gdkwindow = gtk_widget_get_window (widget);

    gdk_property_change (gdkwindow,
                         atom,
                         gdk_x11_xatom_to_atom (XA_CARDINAL),
                         32,
                         GDK_PROP_MODE_APPEND,
                         (guchar *)&mode,
                         1);
}

Getting frustrated from having unorganized HTML pages, separated blog and gallery services that forms this site, i decided that it is the time to have a simple content management system (CMS), i wanted a wiki based CMS, something simple, with no database or probably just sqlite files, with mathematics markup support, simple blog and picture gallery.

Searching on Wiki Matrix and CMS Matrix i found very few that fit my needs, one of them was Bitweaver 2.7, Bitweaver is a wiki based CMS with sqlite database (or mysql), it doesn't have mathematics markup for its wiki, but that's was easy to hack based on other wiki plugins, i used it for few days, but shortly i realize that it is very very slow, even with cache enabled and lot of modules disabled and even deleted, in addition, the photo gallery that comes with it did not work out of the box, thumbnails generation was broken. I spend considerable time trying to get things working okay with this CMS, but after that i realized that its css style was not rendered under Midori despite that the style was okay under Firefox, bit of investigation showed that the css style file wasn't present in the head tag when showing the page source with Midori, no idea why+some times admin links in its settings were no working even under firefox, … too much problems for a simple personal site, i gave it up.

I spend some more time trying to search more CMSs with no luck, i decided to try Dokuwiki as a CMS, and i'm quite happy with the result, Dokuwiki is very nice as a Wiki and also good as a simple personal CMS, well better than a lot of dedicated CMS engines.

Today — 2010/02/02 11:55 The first HAL free beta version of Xfce Power Manager is out, the new version uses DeviceKit Power to get information about power devices, and also it uses DeviceKit Disks to spin down the hard disks when running on battery power.

Since DeviceKit Power does not have a brightness back-light support like what HAL had, the brightness support is handled via xrandr, an optional compile time flag was added to enable HAL brightness fallback in case xrandr failed to manage the back-light panel

This release was supposed to go in public by the beginning of 2010, but a stupid decision of renaming DeviceKit Power to UPower and DeviceKit Disks UDisks delayed the release a bit, since the bus name and services name have been changed, now with this version, Xfce Power Manager will automatically detects the correct D-Bus name to use.