Today, March 28th 2009, will be that day that you can give back to the Earth by reducing your power consumption for one hour. The proposed plan is to turn off all your lights for 1 hour starting at 8:30 PM.

Personally I think that is too simple. I say step up and do more then what is asked of you. Turn off everything non critical! Turn off the TV, stereo, computers, cell phones, Internet gateways, media player, hand held gaming devices and more. I know that we are going to turn off everything but the refrigerator in my house tonight at 8:30 PM PST.  Ideally it would be great to see blocks of an hour on Identica, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks where there are no posts for an hour. The only way for everyone to know about Earth Hour and the VOTE EARTH movement is by spreading the word. So get to it!

Now you ask, “What the hell am I going to do for an hour with out my electronic devices!?!?!“.

Enjoy the time sitting in the dark with candles glowing entertaining yourself and loved ones with something simple. If you have kids, tell them stories of your time as a kid. Let them know of some of the crazy things you did. Let them know that you did know how to have some fun before you became a parent. How about playing a board game or some card games. If you don’t have kids, but you have a significant other. Maybe it is time to kick some romance back into your relationship. I wont provide suggestions on that topic. Just remember what you did to get into the relationship and recapture those ideas.

I was turned on to this idea from a post from Evan Prodromou on identica and wanted to make sure that I did my small part of spreading the word. If you want to learn more about VOTE EARTH and Earth Hour, visit their web site at http://www.earthhour.org.

Thanks for reading this post and make sure you turn off your unnecessary powered sucking devices tonight at 8:30 PM.

Ken

Update 2009-09-22: This post has been out of date for a while. I will write up and new post soon.

I am an Arch Linux user and have recently been getting more and more involved in microblogging using the Free Software based system called identi.ca. Identi.ca is base on the Laconica open microblogging framework. In order to have a richer experience using a microblogging web service such as identi.ca, it helps to have some type of a desktop client. There are Free as in Beer microblogging clients that run on top of Adobe Air, but I wanted a Free as in Speech microblogging application that runs on natively on Linux. The current application of choice is Gwibber Gwibber is an open source microblogging client for GNOME created by Ryan Paul (a.ka. segphault). Gwibber supports Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, Pownce, Identi.ca and other popular social web services.

If you are using a Linux distribution from one of the more “Popular” distributions,  the installation of Gwibber isn’t all that complicated. All you have to do is point to the identified repositories for your distribution and install Gwibber. But, for a rolling release distribution like Arch Linux, the process is a bit harder. The reason for the difficulty is that Gwibber is tailored towards the libraries that are currently available in the non rolling release cycle Linux distributions like Fedora & Ubuntu.

Here are the steps I used to install Gwibber on Arch Linux.

Tools needed:

1. Terminal Prompt
2. Super User (aka Root) privileges
3. Internet Access (that is a given, you are reading this blog post )

Dependencies:

1. Libwebkit 1.0.1 (as of this writing libwebkit is at version 1.1.0)
2. pywebkitgtk-svn between rev 88 to 100
3. Current version of all other dependencies (‘dbus-python’ ‘gnome-python’ ‘python-notify’ ‘python-simplejson’ ‘python-egenix-mx-base’ ‘python-distutils-extra’ ‘pil’ ‘python-feedparser’ ‘pyxdg’ ‘gnome-python-desktop’)

Installing Libwebkit:

Obtaining Libwebkit version 1.0.1

Libwebkit is generally available from the extra repository provided by Arch Linux. The only issues is, Gwibber is written against version 1.0.1 of libwebkit and not version 1.1.0 which is provided by the extra repository. To obtain an older version of an Arch package you can either look in the local cache on your system in

    /var/cache/packman/pkg/

and see if the libwebkit-1.0.1-1-{architecture type}.pkg.tar.gz exists. If it does not exist, then you will have to pull the package from one of Arch repo archives. I used the archive provided by Schlunix.org. Here are links to the i686 & x86_64 packages

Once you have obtained the libwebkit 1.0.1 package, lets make sure that no other version of libwebkit or webkitgtk is installed on your system.

    Run:
     $ pacman -Qs webkit

If results are returned

    Example:
        $ pacman -Qs webkit
        local/libwebkit 1.1.0-0.41121
        an opensource web content engine, derived from KHTML and KJS from KDE

remove the installed package

    Run:
        su -c 'pacman -Rd libwebkit'

Install libwebkit 1.0.1

    Run:
        su -c 'pacman -U {path to libwebkit}/libwebkit-1.0.1-1-{architecture type}.pkg.tar.gz'

Installing pywebkitgtk-svn:

Currently pywebkitgtk is only available from the AUR or directly from the pywebkitgtk web site. Source based packages from the AUR work well to get the latest version of from the development repository, but to get Gwibber to work correctly we need a specific revision from the svn repository. To accomplish this, `makepkg` has an option called “–holdrev”. This option prevents automatic version bumping from development centric PKGBUILDs. In other words, makepkg will use the specified revision identified in the PKGBUILD file.

Semi-automated install using Yaourt:

Steps:

    Run:
        yaourt -S --holdver pywebkitgtk-svn

    Type a `y` when prompted to "Edit the PKGBUILD".

    Change line 5 from pkgver=57 to pkgver=100. Save the file and close your editor.

    Type an `n` when prompted to "Edit the PKGBUILD" a second time.

    Type a `y` when asked "Continue the building of pywebkitgtk-svn ? [Y/n]"

    After the package is built
    Type a `y` when prompted to "Continue installing pywebkitgtk-svn? [Y/n]".

Manual install:

Download the pywebkitgtk-svn tar ball from the Pywebkitgtk-svn AUR page.

Uncompress the tar ball:

    Run:
        tar xzf pywebkitgtk-svn.tar.gz

Editing the PKGBUILD File:

CD into pywebkitgtk-svn

    Run:
        cd pywebkitgtk-svn/

Edit the PKGBUILD file with one of the following commands:

    vi PKGBUILD
        or
    gedit PKGBUILD
        or
    nano PKGBUILD

Change line 5 from pkgver=57 to pkgver=100. Save the file and close  your editor

Build pywebkitgtk-svn:

    Run:
        makepkg --holdver

Install the pywebkitgtk-svn package:

    Run:
        su -c 'pacman -U pywebkitgtk-svn-100-1-{architecture type}.pkg.tar.gz'

Installing Gwibber from bzr using Yaourt

Gwibber is not currently in the mainline repositories of Arch Linux. However, you can get the files needed to build Gwibber from this AUR page and then build package manually or by using application Yaourt.

Semi-automated Install using Yaourt:

    Run:
        yaourt -S gwibber-bzr

    Type `y` when prompted to "Edit the PKGBUILD" for gwibber-bzr.

    Edit `depends` values on line 11 from 'pywebkitgtk>=1.1' to 'pywebkitgtk'

    Type `n` when prompted to "Edit the PKGBIULD" for gwibber-bzr

    Type `n` when prompted to "Edit gwibber.install"

    Type `y` when prompted to "Continue the building of gwibber-bzr ? [Y/n]"

    Allow the install of any remaining dependencies and select `n` to Edit any of the remaining PKGBUILD files.

    Type `y` when prompted to "Continue installing gwibber-bzr? [Y/n]"

Manual Install:

Download the gwibber-bzr tar ball from the Gwibber-bzr AUR page.

Uncompress the tar ball:

    Run:
        tar xzf gwibber-bzr.tar.gz

Editing the PKGBUILD File:

CD into gwibber-bzr

    Run:
        cd gwibber-bzr/

Edit the PKGBUILD file with one of the following commands:

    vi PKGBUILD
        or
    gedit PKGBUILD
        or
    nano PKGBUILD

    Edit `depends` values on line 11 from 'pywebkitgtk>=1.1' to 'pywebkitgtk'.
    Save the file and close  your editor

Build gwibber-bzr:

At this point you have to make sure that you have all the dependencies of gwibber installed or the next step will fail. You can run the following step to see what dependencies you don’t have installed. Then you can install them using pacman, yaourt or if needed manually build the packages from their respective AUR page.

    Run:
        makepkg

Install the gwibber-bzr package:

    Run:
        su -c 'pacman -U gwibber-bzr-272-1-{architecture type}.pkg.tar.gz'

Starting Gwibber:

Using Gnome:

    Click Applications -> Internet -> Gwibber Microblogging Client

Using the terminal or a launcher:

    enter gwibber

Creating an account in Gwibber:

    On the menu bar click Account -> Create -> (select your microblogging service of choice)

Happy Denting, Tweeting or whatever other verb describes your microblogging actions.

-ks

UPDATE: Thanks to Usul’s comment. I have updated this How-To to not edit the gwibber-bzr package and change the pywebkitgtk dependency.