Google App Engine Launcher in Fedora

    Google App Engine launcher is a handy tool for GAE development. Although GAE sdk and command line are sufficient, one click execution\deployment is often more convenient. When I was installing GAE launcher I couldn't find a single guide for Fedora, hence this post. I am using  Fedora 16 + LXDE.  This post assumes that you already have GAE sdk.

Get the prerequisites:

sudo yum install wxGlade wxPython

Download source code:

The app engine launcher source is available on code.google.com.  If you have subversion installed, go to this link and follow the instructions. 
If you don't have subversion, you can use wget as follows:

wget -m -np http://google-appengine-wx-launcher.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ google-appengine-wx-launcher-read-only

This command will fetch the code and put it in ./google-appengine-wx-launcher.googlecode.com/svn/trunk You can move the code to another directory. I copied the content of trunk directory to /opt/appengine_launcher

Create a desktop entry:

Save the following text to /usr/share/applications/gae.desktop
(make sure you use correct path in Exec parameter)

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=App Engine Launcher
Categories=Development;
Type=Application
Exec=python /opt/appengine_launcher/GoogleAppEngineLauncher.py
Icon=AppEngine

Icon for desktop entry:

Copy AppEngine.png inside images directory to /usr/share/icons/ and Done!

GAE launcher should appear in the programming section. You'll probably need to configure path to gae sdk the first time you run it. Set it in GAE Launcher preferences.


Thats it! Happy Coding!

Low Power Consumption Mode for ATI cards in Fedora

     I have ATI Radeon HD 4570 graphics card. Ever since I started using Fedora, I couldn't properly install drivers for my graphics card. It's hell lot of difficult to get ATI drivers working on Fedora. Last week, when I installed proprietary ATI drivers on F16, the OS just stopped working. It would stop loading just before the login-prompt. This time I decided not to pursue the problem & did a rollback.

Somewhere on the internet I found this:

echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile

   
    It sets the graphic card to low power consumption mode. Upon using my laptop in this mode for a few days I noticed that this has solved the overheating problem to some extent. So I would definitely recommend it over installing crappy ATI drivers. Still its far from what I get on Windows Vista so I am considering switching to Ubuntu when its next LTS version is released.