lifesaving ROX tip, open file:// urls

Firefox has the feature of keeping links to downloaded files as urls using the file:// pattern. For example: file:///home/user/downloads/test.zip. If you choose ROX-Filer (/usr/bin/rox) to open these files you will get an error:

File doesn’t exist, or I can’t access it: file:///home/user/downloads/test.zip

One way to correct the error is to follow the instructions of http://lovingthepenguin.blogspot.com/2008/08/use-rox-filer-to-open-containing.html

Another way for Gentoo users, and much proper I guess, is to use /usr/bin/roxuri. roxuri is actually a shell script that uses the “-U” option for ROX:

-U, –url=URL open file or directory in URI form

For the non-Gentoo users, /usr/bin/roxuri is:
#!/bin/sh
exec "/usr/lib/rox/ROX-Filer/AppRun" -U "$@"

Create it and make it executable.

Go to Firefox Preferences/Applications/Content Type -> file and select /usr/bin/roxuri as the default application.

Now files from firefox downloads are handled correctly by rox which uses the proper applications to open them and containing folders open up with ROX-Filer. That means that while “file” is handled by roxuri, a .pdf will be opened by epdfview or whatever else you have chosen ROX to open pdf files with.

Both solutions work on ROX version 2.8.

halevt in portage!

Since yesterday halevt (HAL Events Manager) and its dependency, boolstuff library are in the official Gentoo portage!
halevt on Portage
boolstuff on Portage

They only thing it took was convincing hwoarang how much they were needed since ivman is pretty much borked. At first I asked him to add them to sunrise overlay but he insisted they go straight to portage.

The original ebuilds were taken from Gentoo bugzilla: new ebuilds for halevt and boolstuff -> supersedes ivman, they were refined a bit and then added to Portage. Thanks to Mike Gualtieri for the original ebuilds.

Hwoarang has added me as the proxy maintainer of these two packages. I hope that when updates go out, I’ll test them as soon as possible and then create new ebuilds for them.

The packages are currently only in ~x86 and ~amd64 (testing) branches. If you test the packages and think that they are stable enough please let me know and I’ll try to convince hwoarang to put them to x86 and amd64 (stable) branches.

Thanks again to hwoarang! Cheers!