Dublin, here I come (73 days until aKademy)

I registered for aKademy yesterday and payed the hostel today. I hope the bank transfer is processed in time.

In case you missed it on the lists:

If you have booked a hostel place to get some sleep from time to time, the money has to arrive until the 23rd of July or your bed is gone (link)

Not the organizers idea, but the hostels.

From last years experiences, please help the organizers and make up your plans now and register for aKademy2006. Having the number of participants increase a lot last minute does not help to keep the organizers happy. :)

I am really looking forward to aKademy this year. :)

Bash Prompting

I pasted my bash prompt some months ago on a KDE channel on IRC. Today I got a nice e-mail, asking for it, since it was lost in a hard disk format.

This made me realize how much I like that prompt and how used to it, I am. So i decided to put it here, to have a backup. :)

\[\e[32m\][\u@\h]\[\e[0m\]\[\e[37m\][\t]\[\e[0m\]\n\[\e[34m\][\w]\[\e[0m\]>

Obviously thats very bash.

Short explanation:

\[\e[32m\]

This turns on the green pen, everything is now in green ( Numerical code: 32 )

[\u@\h]

The user (\u) and host (\h) with some eyecandy provided by @ and square brackets. This resolves on my laptop to:

[physos@davinci]

\[\e[0m\]

turning off the green pen

\[\e[37m\]

turning on the grey pen

[\t]

printing the current time in square brackets

\n

adding a newline character which does what it says

\[\e[34m\]

turning on the blue pen

[\w]

current working directory

>

and a nice little bracket to sum it up (change that to $ to be more compatible with textbooks about Linux)

When you do not get lost in square brackets and backslashs, you get something like this.

screenshot of the described bash prompt

Write a export PS1= in front of it and put it into your ~/.bashrc. Voila, bash glamour.

If you want to experiment with colors, i.e. red for root (31), I have here a list of codes.

screenshot of a colored list

This is just a short glimpse into the world of the Bash Prompt. I learned all I know from the excellent Bash Prompt HowTo in the Linux Documentation Project repository of Linux wisdom. You can find floating clocks, bold text and other miracles inside an environment variable named $PS1 there. Thanks to Giles Orr for providing this nice HowTo and the bash authors for allowing to adjust my environment to my needs, not the other way around.

SBB

Switzerland train.

On the Rail again

I am on my way to Switzerland again. Looking forward to 2 days of teaching Linux to some very good administrators. I like Switzerland and I love my job for allowing me to go there and spread Linux. The 6 hours in trains and stations I am less enthusiastic about. Lets see if all connections work out.

worldwide.kde.org open for submissions

After a very short episode of spam due to unchecked user input, worldwide.kde.org is open for submissions again.

The forms for submitting data were written at a time when e-mail injection was not even on the horizon. When I took over the maintainership, I never added thorough checking of the user input. I know, bad move. Jonathan Riddell was so nice to deactivate the forms when the spamming started and I was sitting in a train without Subversion access. Thanks for your fast reaction. Some messages slipped through, but I hope I caught this fast enough.

The forms are back and I added some light regular expressions to prevent missuse of them. If you have any problems submitting your data, let me know.

This is a quick solution, ready to be tested. Not the final look and feel, but “it should work for now”(TM)

    Projects

  • 120 x 60 Developer Map
  • 64 x 64 docs.kde.org Icon