Packaged Tomboy add-ins for Arch Linux

The wiki-like note taking application, Tomboy, maintains a list of user-written add-ins on its website, almost none of which were available in the Arch Linux repositories. Recently I learnt how packages are created for Arch Linux and read up on the standards, so I ‘adopted’ an ownerless add-in package from the Arch Linux User Repository and packaged 6 more.

Finally, I created a meta-package called tomboy-extras which contains nothing but depends on all the working Tomboy add-ins (tested on my laptop) in the AUR, to easily install all add-ins at once. I created a gist on GitHub for each package’s build script and made a repository containing the meta-package’s PKGBUILD file and each gist as a git sub-module named after the package name. The README file in tomboy-extras’ git repository contains links to the gists for the add-ins’ PKGBUILDs so that they can be found easily.

So, if you would like to contribute to one of them, feel free to fork the relevant gist, or leave a comment there, and if you would like to contribute to tomboy-extras itself or have an add-in included, just fork tomboy-extras and send a pull request; I’ll probably be adding more add-ins to it myself already. Also, if you do use any of these packages, please give them a vote on AUR so that we can see how many people use them. If they’re popular, they may be included in the official repositories, who knows!

Steam available in Arch Linux repositories

This news is at least a few days old by now, but it seems the official Steam client for GNU/Linux is now out of Beta and ready for use! Ubuntu users could already download the deb package from the steam website. However, if you’re an Arch Linux user, like me, then you’ll find that since the 26th of February, the steam client is already in the official Arch repositories and can be installed with a simple:

# pacman -S steam

Of course as soon as it’s installed it’s time for Steam to start its slow, perpetual update process, but except for that I think this is fantastic!

Free Software Day tomorrow

If Pockey Lam hadn’t pointed it out I probably wouldn’t have known it was Software Freedom tomorrow. Better than last year though, when I only found out after it had happened. Software Freedom is important to me —most of this blog is related to it— and I’d really like Namibia to participate in this event, especially the Polytechnic of Namibia where I study, as it’s one of the few universities on the African continent mirroring Free Software.

In this effort I’ve written a post on the PoNLUG site and sent some emails in an attempt to get people excited about organising something for an event this weekend or Monday, because I can’t do something like this by myself. I realise it’s probably a bit late to try to get something big going at this point but hopefully we can do something and next year the PoNLUG will be prepared for Software Freedom Day!

Icedove and Enigmail

A tip for any Debian user trying to get PGP to work in Icedove, Debian’s re-branded version of the Thunderbird Mail client: All the tutorials and forums on the internet telling you to install Enigmail from Thunderbird’s Add-on menu won’t work. It’s not there. Enigmail isn’t compatible with your version of Thunderbird, which is… Icedove. The solution is simple but not obvious; Enigmail needs to be installed from the package manager, a simple

aptitude install enigmail

should do the trick! 😉