[fewt]

For me it was alien.

I have used alien before, but today I found a new feature that makes it infinitely more useful. With this new switch and a few minutes of my time I have converted every one of my personal debs to RPM packages.

The switch? -g

What this does is generate a build tree, when you use it with -r it will extract a deb, and generate the spec file which can then be edited and used to build an RPM.

To convert my entire software library from deb to rpm I used the following simple scripts:

Extract and build specs for all deb files in the directory:

for i in *deb; do
  alien -r -g -c $i
done

Change to an extracted directory, and edit the .spec to suit.

Build an i386 and x86_64 RPM with the following simple script:

#!/bin/bash
DIR=$(pwd | sed s#/.*/##)
SPEC=$(ls | grep spec)

if [[ ! "$SPEC" =~ "$DIR" ]]; then
  echo "[$DIR] [$SPEC]"
  echo "Please enter the build directory"
  exit 1
else
  for i in i386 x86_64
  do
    rpmbuild --buildroot=$(pwd) -bb --target $i $SPEC
  done
fi

I was able to convert about a dozen debs in less than an hour, including the time to install them in Fedora to test that they worked.

[Twitch6000]

I love alien. It has helped me alot in the past.

[vanilla]

ipython, the interactive Python shell, is quite useful when doing math, text processing, or plotting in Python.

[Kapitan.Y.A]

For me it would be either Nano or thttpd.

[Vir Invictus]

Chrome and Feed Demon have been my companions for the entire bout of my stomach bug.

[Neken]

computer janitor.

[Chlorus]

Neken, on 08 February 2010 - 04:40 AM, said:

computer janitor.

I'd vote VirtualBox. Its pretty crappy compared to commercial offerings, but its decent for the price of free.

[Twitch6000]

Chlorus, on 08 February 2010 - 01:09 AM, said:

I'd vote VirtualBox. Its pretty crappy compared to commercial offerings, but its decent for the price of free.

I disagree the closed source version of it is very good. Still not as good compared to others,but I wouldn't say crappy.

[ViperChief]

What software did I use to make my day better? Does the "Sleep" choice in the shut down menu count? Because that's what I hit earlier before I did shit in real life.

[King Beetle]

Twitch6000, on 07 February 2010 - 09:31 PM, said:

I love alien. It has helped me alot in the past.

I have installed quite a few .deb packages in Slackware using alien. It has always worked great for me too.

[Neken]

Chlorus, on 08 February 2010 - 02:09 AM, said:

I'd vote VirtualBox. Its pretty crappy compared to commercial offerings, but its decent for the price of free.

I've had a WAY better experience with VirtualBox with usb devices / shared folders / stability / speed than vmware.

I've always used the windows installer version, not the open-source one, i know there's less features in the open-source version.

[timestandstill]

I <3 Chrome. The spell check is a big help for me.

[SimonSeventeenOrDie]

+1 for Chrome. Last night, I realized that I was fresh out of porn. Chrome really saved the day!

[timestandstill]

simon17, on 08 February 2010 - 06:23 PM, said:

+1 for Chrome. Last night, I realized that I was fresh out of porn. Chrome really saved the day!

How could I forget the porn? Thank you, Chrome!

[Goat]

Zsh

[Jones]

Crap to make Twitter suck less if you absolutely have to use Twitter.

Twitter annoys me, but I use it for work so I was looking for a way to make it less annoying. All I pretty much need is a running list of status updates (for actual interaction I hop on over to the web interface).

Lately I've been using Spaz, a Twitter client using Adobe Air on my Windows box, and Gwibber in Linux (not using Air since Air* apps run like ass on my Jaunty box).

I've tried a few clients for Windows, mostly Air based (maybe all Air based, don't remember) and even though the popular favorite is Tweetdeck it's way more than I need. It feels like some pimped out caddy with lime green fuzzy dice, boom rattle sound system and a lacucuracha horn. Totally in your face. Fuck that.

On the extreme other end is throwing your shit into Rainmeter (Win) or Conky (Linux) which is pretty cool to just make it part of the desktop and it makes you look extra leet if you give a shit about those kinds of things, but then I found I didn't pay *any* attention at all to the all the self-appointed New Media Gurus begging folk to read their newest blog entry on Developing Relevant Personal Brand Strategy for your Dog or something that and also be sure to attend their next seminar at the Holiday Inn banquet room- and not reading at all (while making my life a much more enjoyable experience) kind of defeats the purpose.

Somewhere in the middle Spaz, Destroy Twitter, Twhirl, Gwibber and the other small clients come in. I have no idea who makes most up the names for these things, maybe it's people who write apps to show their friends that people on the internet will use things named after whatever's left in the scrabble reject pile then put in some order that makes just as much sense as a parent service called "Twitter". "Spaz" actually makes sense because it goes with the ADD style of Twitter, but the developer has gotten at least one complaint about it from what he left open in his public work directories that also include a chick in a thong being carried by some dude at a trade show over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes if I remember right and assorted and possibly offensive image macros. Developer guy, if you ever end up reading this- as a suggestion, you may want to look into locking your shit down, just sayin.

Anyway, I think Spaz is my favorite right now. It's not fancy at all but once you fix it up a bit it's actually kind of nice. First thing is fixing a theme bug if you're not using the default (the Whitespace theme had a broken path to the interface images), add your own CSS in a user CSS box built in to use the fonts you want and set the transparency to something still readable but not too bright. Oh- and turn off the notifications and sounds. This app will literally freaking yell at you with some "Wilhelm" scream sound if you hit the character limit, and turning off desktop notifications is a personal preference, the only time I want shit flying out to tell me about itself is that maybe something on one my crappy PC's is about to melt and die, otherwise, just shut the hell up.

But Spaz is a keeper until I change my mind. Which could be tomorrow to next year, who knows.

* Yeah, I know "Air" is supposed to be "AIR" but that just looks obnoxious.

[King Beetle]

jones, on 08 February 2010 - 09:12 PM, said:

I found I didn't pay *any* attention at all to the all the self-appointed New Media Gurus begging folk to read their newest blog entry on Developing Relevant Personal Brand Strategy for your Dog

LOLZ

[DeadSuperHero]

The AGS-linux runtime. Due to me not knowing dick about real programming (Unless you count AngelScript as a programming language, lol. I'll save actually learning real shit for college), I use a Windows IDE called Adventure Game Studio. The neat thing here is that the runtime for the engine itself got ported to both Linux and Mac OSX, but it's especially delightful because it's proprietary. Meaning I can make fucking retarded games, and no one gets any source code. Yay. What's that, you say? Charge out the ass for the Mac version? Brilliant!

And uh...yeah, Gwibber's pretty nice.

Oh, fuck it. Most of the things I install are kind of crap.