Debian Package of the Day (static archived copy)

Article submitted by Anton Kavalenka.

Firebird SQL server is popular because it is free, open, lightweight and secure. Firebird is based on the Interbase SQL server, and can be accessed by the same client libraries.

FlameRobin is a X-platform GUI application that makes the life of Firebird/Interbase admins easier. It’s a very light-weight solution (implemented with wxWidgets) as opposed to Tora, which tries to be universal, but is very huge and takes a while to load. FlameRobin starts almost instantly, but being lightweight doesn’t mean to be poor in features. Some of them are:

• Create and drop database entities like tables, views, procedures, indices, domains, constraints, triggers, generators, etc.
• Powerful SQL Editor
• Perform SQL queries and view results in Unicode-aware GUI. Queries can be built by drag-and-dropping table columns in the SQL editor.
• Manage several server connections
• Perform queries on system tables RDB$xxxx (system tables)
• Manage database rights
• Get the DDL as text for automated table creation.
• Event monitoring. You can subscribe to one or multiple events and control when and how many of each event happened in the database.
• Create all the TABLES, DOMAINS, CONSTRAINTS, USERS, TRIGGERS, PROCEDURES etc, needed for database functionality.
• FlameRobin always displays the SQL statement it’s going to run, so you always know what is happening in your database and no under-the-hood mechanism obscures your actions.
• Editable data grid, you can modify existing data inside the grid and also add and remove rows. Blob values can be updated from files.
• FlameRobin can have multiple log files for a given database, one for each statement, making it easy to build update scripts for production databases.

Using Firebird and FlameRobin included in Debian it is possible to backup a database from Windows, restore it on Linux and take off SQL server load from workstation. This is the only way to move database between 32-bit and 64-bit architecture. It is a feature of Firebird (or maybe bug). On the same architectures database files can be simply copied.

The SQL Editor has syntax highlighting and auto-completion. SQL statements can be entered, load, saved and executed. You can prepare a query and view the execution plan without executing it.

Availability

FlameRobin is available in Debian since Etch and in Ubuntu since feisty.

Article submitted by Karl Erlandson. Do you think there are better alternatives to the packages posted here? Help us! Submit good articles about software you like!

No one likes to sit at home and wait for their favorite show to come on anymore and many have turned to buying hardware to record them for later viewing. Popular solutions to this problem include the expensive and proprietary TiVo and cable/satellite boxes with built-in TV recorders.

MythTV aims to solve these problems without the need to rent a cable box ($15/month) or buy a TiVo (~$200). An older computer can be used and all that needs to be purchased is a simple TV card, which can be found for under $30 on eBay. An HDTV card will cost you more, and will also require a more recent computer. If your TV card doesn’t come with a remote control, a controller will have to be purchased separately.

As of last year, the TV guide info used for MythTV in North America is no longer free. Unfortunately, if you live in the USA or Canada, you now have to pay a subscription fee if you want to access the TV guide info, but the cost is negligible at $20/year and going down with every new subscriber. There is a free trial period available. If you live in another country, you may find TV listings for your country in XMLTV.

Features

What MythTV gives you that those other boxes don’t is freedom, it’s open source so you can do whatever you want with your machine. For example, you can set it to automatically skip commercials (a feature that surprisingly works!).

MythTV can be divided into two main programs, the Backend and the Frontend. The Backend refers to the program that actually records programs and must be installed on a computer that has a TV tuner. The Frontend program allows you to view content from the Backend. Importantly, the Frontend program can be installed on the Backend or as a stand-alone program on any computer. With a Frontend only install, you can watch what you’ve recorded in any room of your house. They will also have the ability to watch live TV (with options to pause, rewind, fast forward).

MythTV also offers many recording options with the ability to record a show daily, weekly, once, only in a certain timeslot, etc. Since it is open source, various improvements have been added. An interesting plugin was developed that overcomes the problem of recording sports when games go on longer than scheduled. This program actually checks the web to see if the game it is recording has gone into extra time and adjusts the recording time to end later.

MythTV will organize your music and video libraries and allow all that downloaded content to be played on your home entertainment system. Album and DVD art can be automatically downloaded from IMDB. I have to say that the music system could use a lot of work.

Other options include the ability to schedule your recordings over the internet, watch your shows over the internet, display weather alerts, and notify you of new emails on screen.

Availability

MythTV is not available as a Debian package due to licensing/legal issues, but it is on debian-multimedia. To enable this repository, add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ stable main 

(instead of stable, put “testing” or “unstable” if you use that flavors of Debian). Now run apt-get update. The MythTV wiki provides instructions to install it in Debian stable (Etch), Debian unstable (Sid) and Ubuntu. The Ubuntu community has its own set of installation instructions. I found the KnoppMythWiki very useful in setting up my machine. They also offer a MythTV distribution.

Article submitted by Hugo Carrer.

As any other Debian user I love writing obscure commands on my terminal. I love too having so many open terminals that I have to come up with a special system to find the one where my favorite obscure command is running on.

To be able to enjoy this I need a very fast multitabbed terminal emulator: mrxvt.

Some of the things I like the most about mrxvt are for example,

• It is very fast and light.
• Fast pseudo-transparency.
• Background with your favorite images.
• Highly configurable keyboard shortcuts.
• You can have the same command typed on every tab at the same time. This feature is disabled by default. you can enable it by editing /etc/mrxvt/mrxvtrc and uncommenting the ToggleBroadcast macro (around line 171). After that, Ctrl+Shift+d toggles input broadcasting to all tabs.
• Automatic or “by-hand” tab labeling.
• It is independent of your desktop (no KDE or GNOME needed).
• Did I mention that is very fast and light?

After installing it would look something like this:

You can change this rather old fashioned look by copying the example config file from
/usr/share/doc/mrxvt-common/examples/mrxvtrc.sample.gz
And placing it in ~/.mrxvtrc

The file is full of comments helping you with the meaning of each option. Of course you can find all available options in the man page. Some useful shortcuts are Ctrl+Shift+t to open a new tab and Ctrl+Shift+m to show the menu.

So, after playing, trying and tweaking for a little while you can get a futuristic look for your terminals. Like this one of me sketching this article on an emacs session inside mrxvt (Note all those beautiful tabs up there)

Downsides? Well it depends on the kind of user,

• No UTF-8 support.
• It has no config menu.
• You have to remember the shortcuts or read the config file every now and then.
• And as with anything worth doing, to get things working the way you want to you’ll have to read through the man page and maybe scratch your head once or twice but it’ll work.

To sum up, it’s the perfect application to config during those boring rainy weekends and then show off to your friends at work.

mrxvt is available in Debian stable and in Ubuntu too.

Article submitted by Raman Pandarinathan.

DevTodo is a simple command-line-based package to keep todo lists. Lists are prioritized and hierarchical. Each task in the list has a priority (very high, low, medium etc.) and a given task can be linked to another todo database, making the list hierarchical. The lists are stored as an XML file (.todo) in the current directory, so if you manage multiple projects, you can have different todo lists and DevTodo will update the information based on your current working directory.

As the Todo list is stored in an XML file, you can use an XSLT template to export it to other formats. In Debian, you can find templates to export to HTML and PDF in /usr/share/devtodo.

Managing your todo lists

Basic commands are:

• todo displays the list of tasks pending in the order of priority.
• tda adds a task to the list. The optional argument -g links the task to another task (creates a subtask).
• tdd marks a task as complete (done) with comments.
• tde edit a task.
• tdr removes a task completely.

With the use of some small shell scripts, when you cd into a directory with a .todo in it, DevTodo can display the Todo items for that directory. There are scripts for bash and tcsh in /usr/share/doc/devtodo/examples. To enable it under bash, add this to your .bashrc:

if [ -f /usr/share/doc/devtodo/examples/scripts.sh ]; then
  . /usr/share/doc/devtodo/examples/scripts.sh
fi

Pros and Cons

• Pros
• Simple command line interface.
• Easy storage using XML.
• Fast and elegant.
• Oriented towards developers.
• Cons
• No GUI.
• No recent development (last commit was at the end of 2007), upstream seems to be inactive.
• No calendaring.

Availability

DevTodo is available in Debian since Sarge and in Ubuntu (universe) since Dapper.

Article submitted by Dominique Cimafranca.

EasyTag is a graphical utility to edit the descriptive ID3 tags for your music files. One will think primarily of MP3 files, but it also does other formats, such as Ogg, FLAC, MP4/AAC, MusePack, Monkey’s Audio files and WavPack files (APE tag).

EasyTag’s screen real estate is divided into three windows. The left window shows you the directories of your file system. The middle window shows you the music files in your currently selected directory. The right window is further subdivided into top and bottom information boxes: the top shows you the technical information about the file (bit rate, frequency, mode, size, and time), and the bottom shows you the actual ID3 fields.

The ID3 fields are pretty complete as they let you fill in all the relevant info you could want to put in, e.g., title, artist, album, year, genre, personal comments. You can also attach a photo to the file.

Once you start up EasyTag, it will search your home directory for any and all music format files. This behavior is either helpful or annoying; if it’s the latter, you can simply stop the search and go to the directory of your choice. It will resume the search from there.

Tagging files

There are three ways to tag music files with EasyTag:

• Manually.
• Automatically with the “Fill Tag” scanner.
• Automatically via CDDB, which is a database for software applications to look up audio CD information over the Internet.

Manual tagging is pretty much self-explanatory (and tedious.)

Automatic Fill Tag relies on the filenames of your music files to automatically fill in the ID3 entries. EasyTag has a couple dozen formats that cover almost every imaginable case.

Automatic CDDB tagging only works if files are sorted per album and if the actual CDDB entry exists. You don’t actually have to have the CD on hand: you can search for the album ID through EasyTag. Once found, it will label the files for you.

All in all, a great way to manage and maintain information on your music files.

Availability

EasyTag is available in Debian since at least Sarge and in Ubuntu (universe) since Dapper.