Installing Leksah IDE for Haskell on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

From this post -

1. sudo apt-get install cabal-install libghc6-zlib-dev libgtk2.0-dev libgtksourceview2.0-dev libglade2-dev
2. sudo cabal update
3. sudo cabal install cabal-install --global
4. sudo cabal install alex --global
5. sudo cabal install happy --global
6. sudo cabal install gtk2hs-buildtools --global
7. sudo cabal install glade --global
8. sudo cabal install leksah --global

Easy!

Converting videos for playback on Blackberry Storm 9530

Playing decent quality videos on the Blackberry Storm is no walk in the park!

File size is always an issue on a mobile device. You should convert your videos to smaller screen sizes to save space. A more serious issue is compatibility. I tried to play a bunch of my AVI files on the storm but with no cigars. So transcoding video files was a necessity.

There are a bunch of utilities for Windows to convert videos to a variety of formats but nothing equivalently easy exists on Linux. Or so I thought.

Then I discovered that Tablet Encoder (perl script) for the Nokia Maemo platform works equally well for encoding videos for the Storm! Infact I realised that the default options for conversion to MPG give you a decent enough video playback. So you can just do this -

./tablet-encode original_movie.avi converted_for_the_storm.mpg

and you are done.

It squishes a 1.5 GB movie into a 300 MB filesize with very decent audio and video quality. Try it!

Getting Mobireader to work correctly on Blackberry Storm

MobiPocket Reader is the best solution for reading ebooks on your Blackberry.

Unfortunately, the current Blackberry version of Mobireader available is not tweaked appropriately for the full screen touch enabled Storm experience and is an eyesore. So much so that it can be labeled unusable.

Fortunately, the MobiPocket team has indicated that they are working on a Storm version of their software. Till the time that version is release however, you can get by disabling compatibility mode, using the following steps -

1. On your blackberry, go to Options -> Advanced Options -> Applications.
2. Hightlight Mobipocket Reader and click the menu button
3. Select "Disable Compatibility Mode"
4. Perform a hard reset by turning off the Blackberry and taking out the battery.
5. Restart the blackberry.

At this point when you start the Mobipocket Reader application you would see a full screen interface that can be controlled effectively using the touchscreen. Opening any books would open in full screen but sadly cannot be navigated. To navigate you need to click the menu button and "Show keyboard". Then you can navigate using the Space key and the O/P keys on the keyboard.

That simple trick will make Mobipocket Reader pretty usable on the Blackberry Storm.

Pre built Erlang/OTP R13B04 Debian package for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid). Includes WX support and all documentation

While building the latest Erlang distribution from sources (R13B04 at the time of writing) is not too difficult on Ubuntu (see my last post on this blog), it is a royal pain to do so for all of your machines every time you upgrade your distribution. The bundled erlang with Ubuntu is always a few steps behind the latest official release of Erlang so doing "sudo apt-get install erlang" is not an option.

So for all the people who would like to stay up to date and yet not have to bother with configuring and building erlang from sources, I have created a debian package of erlang R13B04 with wx configured and with all the docs included.

Get the erlang deb file for Ubuntu 10.04 from freesoftwarefreeworld.com. The release has wx support (which is difficult to get configured correctly when building from sources) and the PDF docs, HTML docs, and the man pages are also included. This is the first deb package I created so it is admittedly a bit rough (though it should work fine). I will be refining the deb file every once in a while, and keep it up to date with the latest released erlang sources. So keep your eyes peeled for updates on this blog!

I'm thinking of building a deb package for bleeding edge erlang from it's git repository as well. Please let me know if you think it's a good idea.

Compiling Erlang OTPR13B04 with wx support on Ubuntu Lucid

Erlang R13B04 compiles and installs fairly easily on Ubuntu Lucid. The only tricky bit was installing wx dependencies. Here's how -

Make sure you do this first even before running configure -

sudo apt-get install wx2.8-dev freeglut3-dev libwxgtk2.8-dev

There is some problem with caching so if you have run ./configure before you have installed these dependencies, things will break with weird error messages. In such cases it is better to delete the otp_src_r13b04 directory completely and untar it from the tarball again.