If you are even a semi-geek you surely have heard of the Asus EEE PC – the tiny £200 Linux laptop that is selling like hot cakes.
Naturally I ordered one as soon as it was announced in the UK… and I have to say it’s brilliant. Coupled with a Huawei E220 mobile modem (the one that Three.co.uk are pushing in their “mobile broadband” campaign) it’s a go-anywhere marvel. I regularly use it for development while on the tube, commuting to and from work.
One of the fruits of this extra development time is Mercury, a very basic (at this stage) Quicksilver-type launcher for Linux, but with very few dependencies. Katapult, for example, is more full-featured, but on the EEE requires a huge amount of extra upgrades to allow it to run. Mercury runs without anything else (as far as I can tell :)
Anyway, get it here: http://www.marengo-ltd.com/mercury/
I’ve got a Garmin Vista HCx and I’m thinking about getting an Asus Eee.
I assume you’ve tried sending gpx data to your Garmin Edge using the Asus’ Xandros Linux? Any problems?
Hi Ron, it works fine, as long as you heed my latest post (see http://www.marengo-ltd.com/blog/?p=51).
Cheers!
Martyn
Ok, I try to launch documents automatically. This works OK for registered ones (like ooo docs and so on) but if I try this on a self-defined format (i.e. association of file type by user) it won’t come up. What exactly is going on? The extension_…=program in mercury.cfg doesn’t work either?
HELP!
Hi MiR – it works fine on my copy. Make sure you are using the latest release, and add a line like “extension_txt=kwrite” in mercury.cfg. You’ll also need to tailor update-database.sh to your requirements to harvest .txt files. But as a test, put in a line like “/home/user/mercury/readme.txt” (if that file exists) into mercury.dat. Typing “readme” brings it up in the list.
I’m using Mercury to index other file types, with great success. I’m running into a weird issue with .txt files, though: adding *.txt to the list of file types in update-database.sh doesn’t seem to add text files to the database. To diagnose the problem I typed “find -L ~ -name *.txt” into the console and received the error “find: paths must precede expression”. “find -L ~ -name *.htm”, on the other hand, gives me the paths of my .htm files. Is this some quirk of find or .txt that I am not aware of? (I am a relatively new Linux user)
That seems weird. If you type
find ~ -name '*.txt'does that work?
I have used Mercury successfully on my eee PC, when I was running Xandros Linux.
The Alt-Space keys popped up Mercury.
But I have now installed Xubuntu Linux, and the Alt-Space key is already used to pop up the Window menu (Maximize, Hide, etc.). So Mercury won’t show up at all.
How can I configure Mercury to use another key combination?
– Jeff
Hi Jeff, it’s not Mercury you need to configure, but Xubuntu. Mercury simply runs every time when you press the key combination. I don’t know about xubuntu and adding “hotkey” combinations, I’m afraid… but hopefully this gives you a clue where to now look for answers. Cheers!