mETzelPlatte

As some of you might know, windows has something similar to daemons, its so called “services”. Lately I have been able to find some free time and managed to make a true windows service out of gkrellmd. Running gkrellmd as a service instead of as a simple application has quite some benefits:

• No need to login in order to start gkrellmd (very important for monitoring servers!)
• You cannot accidentally quit gkrellmd by right clicking its (now non-existent) tray icon anymore
• Running as a service ensures having admin rights (needed for monitoring)

Because debugging services can be a bit complicated, I added a new commandline switch that will allow running gkrellmd.exe inside a standard console window. That way users can still track down problems easily.

On a sidenote, GTK+ 2.12.6 has fixed Bug #503326 which means I can finally release gkrellm and gkrellmd after some more cleanups.

I’m currently updating my build system and will look into some of the bugs that I found in the last release. I also spotted a few problems with the new release (mainly clock/calendar formatting) so it will take some more time before I can release something usable. Even though university currently keeps me busy (gotta hold a speech at dec. 21th, still busy with the slides for that) I hope to give you 2.3.1 as a xmas present

Update: Unfortunately GTK+ 2.12.3 crashes GKrellM 2.3.1 when changing the clock/calendar format, this will probably delay the release (no christmas present, sorry).

Second Update: I found GTK+ Bug #503326 to be the cause for the crash. I’m not yet sure if I should just ship GTK 2.10.x as done before, wait for this bug to get fixed or use GTK 2.12.1 which is said to not exhibit this crash.

As many bugfixes have been committed to the taglib repository in july, I decided to update the snapshot for windows. Please note: I removed the last snapshot and will do so for any future snapshot, only releases will stay online for a longer time.

Today I built and packaged GKrellM 2.3.0 for Windows. It is available both in form of a handy installer as well as plain Zip-File. As this is the first release made by me I’m very interested in any kind of feedback, even if it’s just as short as “it works”

More information about GKrellm for Windows can be found on
http://metz.gehn.net/projects/gkrellm/. General information about GKrellM is available at http://gkrellm.net. New versions and bugfixes will be announced on this page and on the GKrellM mailing list.

Finally GKrellM is back on Windows and available for everybody

Today I installed Eclipse 3.3RC4 and CDT 4.0RC3 in the hope that it wouldn’t be as dog slow as Eclipse had been on the MacBook I lent from university few weeks ago. Fortunately trying it out again was a huge success. Code completion works like a charm, as does the rest I tested so far .
My testing project was QLineControl which even made its way into a universal binary now (i.e. it will run on PowerPC-based machines running OS X as well).
Next is getting Qt 4.3 copied into the application-bundle so one can install QLineControl as easy as usual: drag it into the Applications folder an be done . Furthermore I plan to make QLineControl feel a bit more mac-like, right now it feels a bit weird compared to most other apps. For instance it shouldn’t quit just because you happened to close its mainwindow.