Things happened in my life

I've just made a PKGBUILD (including the source code) for scim-unikey version 0.2a~20090218 to the AUR. On the main page of the project, the latest stable version you could find is 0.1.2, which is quite old at the moment, and they don't have a public Subversion url right now. The author runs a thread on Ubuntu-vn forum (in Vietnamese) to call for testers for the next release (0.2) of the project. The packaging process is a little bit tricky, because the project does not have a valid url to fetch the source code during the build process, so what I've done is to set the 'source' of the PKGBUILD file to the source tarball of scim-unikey in the same directory like this:

source=($pkgname-$pkgver.tar.bz2)

You have to make sure that the file scim-unikey-20090218.tar.bz2 is located at the same directory as the PKGBUILD file.
Then run the command:

makepkg --allsource

This will create a file .src.tar.gz, upload that file to the AUR to share the fun with others!
To install this package, simply run the command:

yaourt -S scim-unikey

Follow the instructions (on screen) after you install the package to configure scim-unikey.
There is a small toolbar pop up every time a new application is executed, it's very annoying, to disable it, just Right-click on the Scim icon on the system tray, select Hide Toolbar.
Troubleshooting:
-If you are a Java developer and Eclipse is your IDE of choice, it's likely scim-unikey will not work properly with "vanilla" Eclipse setup. Here is the my bug report. Solution is simple, just right-click on your main editor, select Input Method --> Scim Input Method or Scim Bridge Input Method depending on which one you are using.
Update:
13th March 2009: update scim-unikey to version 20090313 to the AUR.
16th May 2009: update scim-unikey to version 0.2.0 to the AUR.
11th July 2009: update scim-unikey to version 0.3~r32 to the AUR to fix a problem with scim 1.4.8+ on Firefox and Epiphany
14th September 2009: update scim-unikey to version 0.3.1

I just submitted my first package to the AUR, it's xvnkb-0.2.9a. If you are using Yaourt, you can install it by entering the command:

yaourt -S xvnkb

After installing, you have to put this to your .bashrc:

export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/xvnkb.so

That's it! Don't forget to vote for it after the installation :).
I have an annoying problem with xvnkb on Arch, it uses CPU a little higher than normal, I've never experienced this before on Fedora or Ubuntu.
Another thing need to mention is GIMP give me a segmentation fault at start up with the above LD_PRELOAD. This is expected as many people experienced this before. A quick and dirty workaround is to unset the LD_PRELOAD right before launching GIMP. In the terminal, do this:

unset LD_PRELOAD;gimp &

If you don't prefer the "command-line", create a small executable bash script file and put it in your PATH, I called it gimp-launcher.sh with the following content:

unset LD_PRELOAD;gimp $1 &

Next, find the .desktop file of GIMP (I'm using Arch and it's located at /usr/share/applications/gimp.desktop, your distro may put it in a different place), replace the line Exec and TryExec with:

Exec=gimp-launcher.sh %U
TryExec=gimp-launcher.sh

And now, you can use GIMP as normal.
I've filed a bug report about this, hopefully the GIMP developers will fix this in the next release.

Sound system on Linux is confusing, both for end users and developers. When I was using Fedora, I used Alsa for all of my sound needs, from listening to music, filming and gaming. Recently, I've switched to Arch Linux and installed OSS4 for my sound. The sound quanlity is quite better than Alsa but I've got an annoying problem: all the gstreamer-based music player uses CPU too much, about 40%-60% (rhythmbox, totem, exaile) when playing mp3 files. After googling, I found this, try this on my system:

/usr/sbin/vmixctl detach /dev/dsp
/usr/sbin/vmixctl attach -r /dev/dsp

What it does is to detach the virtual mixer and reattach without recording setting. The CPU usage down to 6-10%, cool!
But after reboot, the CPU usage of gstreamer-based music player still high. It seems that our hack is not persisted. So I have to edit the /etc/rc.d/oss to detach and reattach without recording ability, here is my /etc/rc.d/oss:

#!/bin/bash
. /etc/rc.conf
. /etc/rc.d/functions

case "$1" in
start)
     stat_busy 'Starting Open Sound System'
     if /usr/sbin/soundon
     then
             add_daemon oss
             /usr/sbin/vmixctl detach /dev/dsp
             /usr/sbin/vmixctl attach -r /dev/dsp
             stat_done
     else
             stat_fail
     fi
     ;;
stop)
     stat_busy 'Stopping Open Sound System'
     if /usr/sbin/soundoff
     then
             rm_daemon oss
             stat_done
     else
             stat_fail
     fi
     ;;
restart)
     $0 stop
     $0 start
     ;;
*)
     echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}"
esac

Now, all the gstreamer-based applications are now playing nice with my CPU, but my box lost the ability to record sound :(. If you have a better solution, please share with me.