Today, enspied by a posting in Peio’s blog (in Bulgarian) I decided to install Rhythmbox on my Fedora.
I want to mention here the problems, which I’ve gone through. Just

yum install rhythmbox

does not solve the case. I got really mad when having no MP3 files support. Actually, I became mad because I unable to understand for a long time that this was my problem when trying to open any MP3 file. I was getting this crazy message:

failed to create mad element; check your installation

when trying to open an MP3. I suspected the MP3 problem when I saw that my OGG files ran fine.
So, after some Google search, I found this great article, which showed me the exit of the tunnel.
In brief – if you want Rhythmbox and MP3 support, you should do:

yum install gstreamer-plugins-mp3 rhythmbox

Have fun!

Hello Friends,
I intentionally write this article in English, because I want to do two things in it:

1. To announce the availability of my first GPL project – KeePass for Pocket PC;
2. To share with you how frustrated I was to see the Google search from this morning!

About KeePass – it’s simple – this is my first GPL application for Pocket PC. It’s password safe, fully compatible with the OSI-certified KeePass for Windows. I needed to have a good password safe for my Pocket PC – and I did this one, based on the Dominik’s KeePass application. Take a look on it – you will not regret it. Until the Linux version comes (something tells me that the Linux version is already in a development) – you can run the Windows version under Wine – I’ve tried it – it runs pretty well!
The more interesting thing in this article is how Google spell checking reacted, when I decided to search this morning to see if Google has already indexed my site. Take a look at this image (please mention the Search text box, and how it “spell checked” it!):

You will see my initial search, and how Google decided to correct it. I’m frustrated! Hmmm – these guys from Google maybe will ask for money to correct this one, ah?

It was my third day after I’ve switched to Fedora. After all the initial installation/configuration and KDE 3.2 upgrade, I decided to enable the multiple sessions support, because that’s one of the core features, needed to replace one Windows XP installation I’m shame about!
However, first I visited the FedoraNews site (recommended by Yovko), and I found there an article about how to get the Start New Session option to work under KDE 3.2. I did all what was mentioned in that article and… hmmm… it won’t show (the Start New Session menu item).
I red the article again. At the bottom the guy was talking that he’s not sure if this hack would work on display manager, different than KDM.
I briefly checked mine – it was gdm (logically, this is the default display manager for Fedora). So, I had another task to finish – how to change the default display manager.
After consulting with Yovko again, he suggested taking a look at the /etc/X11/prefdm. It was a script, which was calling /etc/sysconfig/desktop script, and expecting the $DISPLAYMANAGER variable to be set correctly.
First I made the wrong assumption and I onyl changed the $DESKTOP variable to “KDE”. Nope – nothing happen. After that I added the following line:
DISPLAYMANAGER=”KDE”
And all went fine.
I still have my DESKTOP variable set to “KDE”, and I’m not sure if it will work if you leave it to be “GNOME”. You are free to try it as you want.
So, I had my installation working in two easy steps: applying the patch and adding the DISPLAYMANAGER line.
If you decide to follow my advice here, please have in mind that:

1. I do not give any guarantee that this article is usable at all. You take any risk for doing any kind of damage to your computer
2. I assume that you always make backups of all the files, which you have to modify. When I speak “changind”, “adding” or whatever else, I always presume you did backup of the file you modify, in case that something goes wrong
3. Any of the mentioned steps require restart of the currently running display manager. The best is to do all the steps in runlevel 3! After each step you have to do “init 3” and after that “init 5” as root, in order changes to get applied.

I wish you success!

Yesterday one of my friends, Georgi Chorbadzhiyski has paid attention to my new blog RSS feeds, and has informed me that they suck. Especially the cyrillic support there.
Because WordPress is initially lacks cyrillic support (see my article about how I did it working with help of the community), it seems I either forgot, either there it was initially missing, to tune up the RSS feeds.
So, I had to dig the sources. And I digged out the following problem: WordPress RSS feeds output no encoding tag. So the browsers assume what they want, and mine was assuming UTF-8. I had to add the encoding tag to the WordPress RSS source.
If you have the same problem, this is your solution (it’s divided on two):

1. Modify wp-rss.php, located in your main blog dir. Put the following text:

    encoding="windows-1251"

   immediately after the following text:

   <?xml version="1.0"

   Please note that between the text above and the encoding word you must put one space.

2. Modify wp-rss2.php, located in your main blog dir. Put the following text:

    encoding="windows-1251"

   immediately after the following text:

   <?xml version="1.0"

   Please note that between the text above and the encoding word you must put one space.

3. Modify wp-commentsrss2.php, located in your main blog dir. Put the following text:

    encoding="windows-1251"

   immediately after the following text:

   <?xml version="1.0"

   Please note that between the text above and the encoding word you must put one space.

After the modifications your RSS output should be in windows-1251 encoding, which should solve the cyrillic troubles you may have.

This posting is inspired by my admiration from the WordPress – maybe the nicest blog I’ve seen for all my current web experience.
WordPress was suggested to me by Yovko Lambrev, or by he’s blog (to be exact).
Althou WordPress is one very nice tool, I had severe problems with Cyrillic support in it. I preffer to write in cyrillic when I write in my native Bulgarian language, so I had to find a solution to my problem. I started to google and I immediately found the following article: WordPress Support » Design » Cyrillic in WordPress.
I decided that this is my solution. However, I did not started with it, because I had other things to do. I decided to leave this for today.
Meanwhile, I had a talk with Yovko, who mentioned to me that the guy, who suggested him (and me) WordPress has applied some cyrillic support patch. But, unfortunately, Yovko was not online today, and I could not receive that patched version.
On the other hand, I’m a programmer myself. I felt shame for me waiting to use some other’s work, and I decided to apply all the necessary actions myself. I did it – and here is the result – WordPress with nice, working cp1251 codepage.
For anyone interested: I’ve uploaded the following files:

• The Patched WordPress 1.0.1
• The patch (temporarily removed until I update it with RSS patches too) against release 1.0.1-miles.tar.gz

Thanks again to Yukki Pospel for making this research, and to Anton for writting this article.