Between Linux and Anime

I’m halfway through my Cosfest X.1 event post, but I bumped into yet another funny issue while working today, so I’m gonna do another quick solve-it post here. If you ever had the following error message shown to you when attempting to access an sftp location via dolphin or KIO in general:

“The host key for this server was not found, but another type of key exists. An attacker might change the default server key to confuse your client into thinking the key does not exist. Please contact your system administrator.”

This might be for you. In particular if you have successfully ssh-ed into the target host before. Following the discussion here, it appears that the problem, in summary, is KIO not being able to recognize a particular (new?) format of specifying a host in the ssh known_hosts list (a bug which has been filed here). Fortunately there is a workaround – since KIO is unable to recognize the known_hosts entry that ssh produces, we simply need to get KIO to be the one to produce the entry.

Back up your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file, then open it with your favorite text editor. Find and remove the entries associated with the host you’re trying to sftp into. If you cannot find it you can just delete everything in the file – with the side effect that you will be prompted again to add the keys back the next time you ssh into a previously known location. When you’re done, open dolphin and attempt to sftp into your desired target location. It should prompt you to add the host’s key – just tell it yes and you should be able to log in successfully.

That’s it! From then on you should be able to direct ssh or sftp-via-KIO into the location whenever you want.

Now I am and have always been a fan of the compiz snow plugin. I remember spending some of the earliest days of my Linux life haphazardly getting bombastic desktop effects running and joyfully ignoring how many of the plugins were in the “Bad” list. Those were the days. I sit on KDE’s elegant Plasma nowadays and although Kwin also sports a (not so “Bad”) snow plugin, it has never quite lived up to the compiz version that I knew and loved. Over the years it has matured and stabilized quite a bit, but the key feature that’s still missing for me is being able to swap snow out for autumn leaves and sakura petals – custom textures.

Not entirely sure why, but the other day it just suddenly hit me that hey, it shouldn’t be that hard. There’s a texture stored somewhere that Kwin uses – I just need to find and replace it right? Turns out that was precisely right. The snowflake texture used by the plugin is

/usr/share/kde4/apps/kwin/snowflake.png

So how do we use a custom one? Find a png image to use as custom texture, and simply rename it “snowflake.png” and copy it into /usr/share/kde4/apps/kwin/! Do backup the old one first though just in case. After you’ve done that, disable the plugin, click apply, reenable it, click apply, and when you toggle the snow it should descend with your custom texture.

Here’s a screenshot where I use this leaf to create lazily descending autumn foliage:

Next step would be to find time and see if I could write a patch to make a non-hacky way to do this :)