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I've recently come across Referencer, a reference manager for GNOME (currently in version 1.0.0). A number of dependencies are listed in the README file (and on the homepage). The names listed are not the same as the relevant package names under Ubuntu. These can be installed on Ubuntu Edgy with the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install libpoppler-dev libgtkmm-2.4-dev libgnomeuimm-2.6-dev libgnome-vfsmm-2.6-dev libglademm-2.4-dev libgconfmm-2.6-dev libboost-regex-dev

For the installation itself, there's no ``./configure" step. A simple ``make" will build the application and ``sudo make install'' will perform the installation (although it can be run from the build directory without this if you're just testing it out).

*Edit:* There's now a .deb for Ubuntu available, so this information is pretty useless now.

From this post on linuxquestions.org comes a workaround for situations whereby adjusting the Master Volume on some Intel sound cards doesn't actually have any effect on the volume. This is particularly annoying where you have a keyboard shortcut to change volume that does nothing more than put a pretty volume-changing graphic on the screen with no other noticeable effects (it's the PCM that will actually change the volume).

The post suggests putting the following line in the /etc/modprobe.conf file. I'm running Ubuntu Edgy at the moment and the relevant file there is /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

options snd_intel8x0 ac97_quirk=hp_only

The Agent Factory framework has recently been divided into a number of sub-packages. While this gives far more control over the components each user wishes to install (rather than the previous ``all-or-nothing" approach), it does mean that management these individual packages will become an issue.

While it is possible that a cross-platform, Agent Factory-specific package manager may be introduced in the future (and I wouldn't be holding my breath), for the moment I'll be maintaining Debian packages of the individual Agent Factory components. This will mean that any new versions can be installed by means of a typical ``apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" routine, so users won't have to be on the lookout for new versions of each individual package all the time.

These packages should be suitable for any Debian derivative (Ubuntu, MEPIS, Xandros, etc.) but any testing that goes on is limited to Ubuntu and Debian itself. Bugs should be reported to the Agent Factory Sourceforge site.

Access to the repository can be gained by adding the following line into your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://www.agentfactory.com/debian current main

After adding that, you'll have to grab the archive signing key for increased security. This can be done by running the following (as root):

# wget http://www.agentfactory.com/agentfactory-archive-key.gpg
# apt-key add agentfactory-archive-key.gpg

After this, running an ``apt-get update'' will make the Agent Factory packages available for installation.

Currently, the available packages are:

agentfactory

Agent Factory Runtime - needed by all other packages

agentfactory-mts-local

Local Message Transport Service plugin

agentfactory-mts-http

HTTP Message Transport Service plugin

agentfactory-mts-udp

UDP Message Transport Service plugin

agentfactory-fipa

FIPA agent plugin

agentfactory-afapl2

The AFAPL2 Developers Kit

At present, all of these packages will cause the appropriate plugin to be installed globally (i.e. in the /usr/lib/agentfactory/lib directory), and so they will be usable by all Agent Factory programs on your machine.

It's only recently that I got around to properly exploring the use of EtText with WebMake. However, in recent times, I've been giving it a look (as well as implementing some bug fixes). The EtText documentation mentions that it takes care of ``header recognition", but gives no examples of this. In order to create a <h1> tag, simply underline a paragraph with three or more hyphen characters, i.e.:

This is a header
---

Note that there is no indent from the left margin. This is then translated into:

<a name="This_is_a_header" id="This_is_a_header">
<h1>This is a header</h1></a>

This not only creates the desired header, but allows you to link to it using an internal link. The same behaviour for the <h2> and <h3> tags can be obtained by using ``=" and ``~'' characters respectively instead of hyphens.

However, as Ralph Page notes in the mailing list, this is not valid HTML, as the <h1> block element is contained within the <a> inline element. Applying my patch causes these headers to be translated as:

<h1 id="This_is_a_header">This is a header</h1>

This achieves the same effect (including the internal linking) and passes the W3C validator.

Java developers running compiz with Xgl or AIGLX will have noticed a problem with running NetBeans 5.0 in that environment. In fact, there seems to be a problem with any Swing-based app running on Java 5.0 in that environment. A number of workarounds have been proposed (e.g. running a seperate instance of X.org using Xnest or switching temporarily to metacity while the application is running).

However, NetBeans 5.0 runs perfectly under Java 1.4.2, which doesn't appear to have any issues with compiz for some reason. Therefore, by installing Java 1.4.2 side-by-side with Java 5.0, NetBeans can be run as before.

Firstly, grab a copy of the 1.4.2 JDK from here (though I'm sure the JRE by itself will be fine). Then in the directory where you installed netbeans, find the "etc/netbeans.conf" file and change the "netbeans_jdkhome" option to the directory in which you installed your new copy of Java.