Tim Groeneveld

At Digital Pacific, where I work, I do all my work on three computers. It’s a nice life looking at three monitors all the time, however, it is not the coolest thing in the world when you have three keyboards in front of you.

When I moved here, I already knew about Synergy, it’s great software.

My setup is comprised of a Windows XP (32-bit) machine, Kubuntu [7.04] Intrepid (32-bit) machine and a Kubuntu [9.04] Jaunty (64-bit) machine. The machine that runs all my applications that I write is the new Kubuntu 9.04 machine. To allow my keyboard and mouse to be used over all three of these machines, I have the Windows XP machine run the Synergy server, and all the Linux machines run the client. The reason I have Windows XP run the server is because it’s usually the machine that’s off. That might sound strange, but I do alot of work from home, and it seems useless to have a server running that is not needed to be on the machine.

One thing that really used to annoy me with this setup however was the Windows machine would detect all keyboard repeats, but the Linux machines would not detect up, down, page up and page down repeated key presses. You could imagine as a programmer that this could get quite annoying while writing code.

This morning I got frustrated at the Linux machines and I decided it was time to go and compile my own version, with a few patches I found around the net to fix this issue.

Being the package Nazi that I am, I don’t really like to install anything, unless it’s installed with some sort of package management. This is how to rebuild Synergy, and get a perfect .deb that you can install

# wget 'http://internode.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/synergy2/synergy-1.3.1.tar.gz'
# tar -xvf synergy-1.3.1.tar.gz
# wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/s/synergy/synergy_1.3.1-5.diff.gz
# gunzip synergy_1.3.1-5.diff.gz
# wget http://coderazzi.net/linux/synergy.patch/synergy-coderazzi.patch
# patch -P0 <../synergy-coderazzi.patch
# sudo apt-get install patch build-essential
# cd synergy-1.3.1/
# patch -p0 <../synergy-coderazzi.patch
# chmod +x debian/rules debian/control

Edit debian/rules and after the line that says:
CFLAGS="$(CFLAGS)" CXXFLAGS="$(CXXFLAGS)"
Add the following line:
find . -type f -name Makefile | xargs perl -pi -e "s/-Werror//g"

# sudo dpkg-buildpackage
# cd ../
# dpkg -i synergy_1.3.1-5*.deb

After doing this, and restarting the Synery clients, you will have perfect key responses between all the machines.

Thanks to http://coderazzi.net/linux/synergy.patch/index.htm for providing the great patch for this post.

Today I was working on MyBanco when the thought came to me of what Linux needs to get a better market share (our ultimate goal, 100%). Then it occured to me! We need a promo, of course, not just any promo, a Li-Li-Li-Li-Linux 2.6.3 See 2:36

Some things were designed just to not run on a Windows platform. It gets me thinking – what if someone went and actually installed a trojan onto one of these babies? Scary if you ask me.

I am disappointed,as a user of both Linux *and* After Effects that After Effects refuses to run on Linux.

Let’s face it; After Effects, and other applications in the Creative Suite are the most requested applications to be supported by Adobe on Linux.

With a growing market share, and many companies putting in quite a few dollars into supporting it (such as ASUS, and I could name much more), I think that having Adobe apps supported on Linux could be a major plus for not only the Linux, but Adobe.

Let’s face it, the people who work on Linux are geeks. They are people who really work wonders in the computer industry. They are inquisitive and smart people, who have a deep passion for software.

Just because Linux itself is free does not mean that there is not a viable place for software to grow and evolve.

I use Linux because it gives me the control that I want. If something locks sound for other programs? Well, I can lsof /dev/sound and kill the program that is doing it. I want to know *everything* that happens on my computer when it happens? All I have to do is tail -f /var/log/* and move that window to my other screen!

Adobe creates free software, such as the Flash Player, which is Adobe’s most used application – something that is free. Giving the flash viewer away for free creates the need for development kits, such as Adobe Flash to be required, making millions of dollars!

Flash for Linux has been a great thing, I have seen it evolve from the days when it was poorly supported, and you could not play flash files if any other sound application was running, to now where I think it is *almost* better then the Windows version.

IBM for years has said that Linux is ready, and show this in what is my *favorite* ad, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwL0G9wK8j4 released in 2003, announcing to the world that Linux is ready. Its learning and it’s evolving.

Now, those terms have become the present. It has evolved. It has learnt.

I believe that releasing a version of Adobe Creative Suite for Linux could do some really amazing things. It would change the way that people think about Linux.

I, being a person who has many friends who work actively with computers, in many diverse areas knows what the usual response is when you talk to someone about Linux.

Usually, it’s one of two looks. There is the look that says straight away “There is no retail visual effects programs for Linux” or “There is no ‘uber’ professional photo editors for Linux”. The other look is the one of ‘Well, there goes Halo’.

I am of the belief that releasing Adobe for Linux would help it’s market share to grow higher, as it’s a highly available, stable operating system.

Please, think about a version of Adobe CS3 or future versions of the Creative Suite for Linux. It’s not that we want them, but rather, we need them.

The lack of having Adobe After Effects on Linux is *the only* reason I still have Windows on my computer. I don’t want Windows. I dislike it, I hate not being able to have an uptime of more then seven days.

With Linux, I have seen an uptime of around 120 days! Try and do that on Windows!

Linux is ready. Please, see that!

That is the contents of a letter I just wrote to Adobe. Please, if you read this, and you want to help support this cause, drop Adobe an email at one of their ways to contact them, or blog about how you would like to see Adobe supported on Linux.

I have just added a zip version of MyBanco at the download site, so that people who are not advanced enough for Linux or OS X (only mucking around… seriously) can download MyBanco and upload MyBanco to thier webhost.

You can download MyBanco from the usual place. Remember, it is licensed under the Affero General Public License, which is a special license saying that any source code that is changed in MyBanco must be shared with the network that the modified code runs on. That is, if all you do is run MyBanco on a local network, say for a University, you need to only share the modified code with the university. If the code runs on a public network such as the internet, the modified code must be shared with the internet.