After hearing about Ubuntu’s new (well, not quite) notification system, notify-osd, I checked Google to see if someone had built a binary for Debian. Unfortunately, nobody had, but I was still able to build it successfully. The only dependency missing was libwnck-dev. Anyway, it’s just the standard ./configure, make, and make install protocol. I appended ./configure with –prefix=/usr in order to have it installed to /usr/share/ instead of /usr/local/share/. Upon running as a regular user (won’t run with root privs) I received the error “Another instance has already registered org.freedesktop.Notifications.” It took me a while to figure out that since notify-osd is a replacement of notification-daemon, notification-daemon would need to be closed first (killall notification-daemon). After this, it finally worked. My only gripe that caused me to uninstall it is the fact that it draws a dialogue box when a notification has an infinite expiration. Dialogue boxes are ugly. After uninstalling, I had to re-install notification-daemon for it to be recognized again as the notification system. I had plans to build a Debian package for notify-osd, but didn’t care enough for it to do so, but if anybody asks for it I will build one.

After having installed many updates this past week, something along the way broke, which caused Debian to have a coronary. This is the fifth time I’ve had trouble installing Debian testing from a USB flash drive. I don’t know if it’s me or if the boot.img.gz is just buggy or what. Some time ago I spoke with a responsible maintainer about it and even he said there were issues. Anyway, I was able to get everything installed through setting up a TFTP server (netboot) on ALICE. I had never done this before but it was easier than I thought it would be. It just took two steps: tweaking my dnsmasq configuration and installing tftp-hpa. Setting the debconf priority to medium allowed me to choose to install from testing and that was that. I’ll probably use this way from now on.
I’ve never had a problem installing Flash from Adobe, but this time was an exception. I’m not sure if it’s because Debian has switched to EGLIBC or what, but I was getting errors from the script installer saying that my version of GLIBC wasn’t up to snuff when it actually was. I fixed this by just manually copying libflashplayer.so into /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins/. I hope this is worked out some time in the future.
I did finish up this past year with a 4.0 GPA, which was enough to get me finally accepted into UNC Charlotte as a transfer student, so I’ll be going there this Fall majoring in information systems and minoring in computer science. I think I’m more excited about leaving here than anything else.