Martin Bailey did this at the beginning of this year, and I think this is an interesting way to hold on a moment and photographically reflect the last year.

It is not easy. I have months where I had difficulties to choose even one photo as I did not shoot much and the photos I shot aren’t photographically worth to be selected. Anyway I tried to select one representative photo for each month of 2008.

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There is a very good step by step tutorial how to build hugin on Ubuntu which can be applied on debian, too. Although, there are some issues:

• libpano13 is available now in debian unstable. So you don’t have to build it on your own. Just install the pacage libpano13-dev.
• wxwidgets2.8 is also available. But you have to make sure to uninstall all 2.6 versions you might have installed, hugin will not compile the gui components if it 2.6 is found. You will get a cmake output similar to this:

  -- Found wxWidgets: TRUE
  wxWidgets 2.6.x not supported
  wxWidgets was not found, GUI programs (hugin, nona_gui) disabled
  

• libboost_thread.so is not available. The new library file in debian unstable is called libboost_thread-mt.so. It works anyway if you create a symlink:

  sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libboost_thread-mt.so \
       /usr/lib/libboost_thread.so

That’s it.

Although, there seems to be a bug with libdrm-intel. It crashes while creating the control points.

../../../libdrm/intel/intel_bufmgr_gem.c:712: Error preparing buffer
map -1261963602 ((null)): Invalid argument .
hugin: vbo/vbo_save_api.c:216: map_vertex_store: Assertion
`vertex_store->buffer' failed.
Aborted

This is due to the GL fast preview I assume. Without this preview it works fine anyways, you don’t need this.

Update: And after upgrading some packages (on debian unstable) and recompiling it works without error. Not sure what caused this error.

By the way, if you want install hugin 0.8.0 on Windows, you can use a prerelease installer. It works on Windows XP, too. There is more information in the hugin blog.

Some updates on the addins for F-Spot I wrote about lately.

New Addin: Tabbed Sidebar

I announced that this wasn’t possible. Well, Ruben Vermeersch made the F-Spot Sidebar public, so that I can access it with a Service Addin. See my last post for a screenshot. This saves at least a click on each sidebar page change.

This is done using a service addin which accesses the F-Spot UI elements on startup. Restart F-Spot after installing this addin to to work.

Import Processed Files

• Fixed crash: API change in latest git 0.6

DateTime Format

• Added new config variable for long date display. F-Spot displays the date and the time, too, if the width of the thumbnails is wide enough. You can use this variables now:

  gconftool-2 --type string \
  --set "/apps/f-spot/ext/datetimeformat/shortdate" "yyyy-MM-dd"
  gconftool-2 --type string \
  --set "/apps/f-spot/ext/datetimeformat/longtime" "HH:mm"

  You have to restart F-Spot after installing this addin or changing the date patterns.

You can find the source code as always on Gitorious, the extension url here:

http://purecodes.org/f-spot/0.6

The addins for 0.5 did not change. The tabbed sidebar is not available for 0.5.

I tried it using a proxy to tunnel git through a firewall as described here and here, but without success. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough. But I found this mail on the comp.version-control.git mailing list explaining how to use git with a SOCKS. It works.

As the link to the connect.c file there is broken, you can use the link to connect.c on the page linked above.

Update: You may need to set and export the proxy variable every time before pulling.

export GIT_PROXY_COMMAND=/path/to/myproxy

I am not sure why, while upgrading, installing and uninstalling some stuff my system broke, so that on booting, just after the boot line selection in the grub(2) menu, the error “command not found: initrd” (or similar) appeared.

You can fix the grub installation again using any kind of live CD. I used the Knoppix CD.

• Boot the live CD
• Mount your boot partition, for example to /mnt. In my case

  mount -t auto /dev/sda1 /mnt

• Bind your /dev directory to the mounted partition:

  mount -o bind /dev/ /mnt/dev

• Chroot into your boot partition

  chroot /mnt

• Mount your proc directory

  mount -t proc proc /proc

• Mount your sys file system (/sys)

  mount -t sysfs sysfs /sys

• Ready, now you can use your system almost as if you booted in it. You can reinstall grub, kernel images, create initrd images, fix the menu.lst or grub.cfg or whatever you want.

And, by the way, if grub is giving you something like

error: the symbol grub_machine_fini was not found

on booting, it is installed to the wrong hard disk (or not installed). Install it to the master boot record of the hard disk (not to the partition!) In my case:

grub-install /dev/sda

(and not sda1)