Google Earth Easter egg in linux too!

If you read any news online you may have heard about the Google Earth easter egg. If you haven't heard about it, then I will fill you in. Basically Google has a built in flight simulator in Google Earth!

But of course when I read how to use this easter egg it said:

To access it for the first time, hit CTRL+Alt+A in Windows or Command+Option+A on the Mac.

It only mentioned Windows, and Mac so of course I was like why not Linux......SO i took it upon myself to download the latest version of Google Earth for Linux here.

Real quickly its super simple to install just cd to the directory you downloaded it and type:

sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin

Anywho sorry about the suspense, just thought I should quickly mention how easy it is to install Google Earth on Linux. So now your like, "dammit tell me if this easter egg works on Linux!" Well you should already know what the answer is if you analyzed the title of my post, but juts in case you not that analytical today, yes it did work!

So stop reading and go try it yourself, its nifty.

Avatar Factory

Avatar factory is a nifty little cript that takes your album art from your music and makes what looks like real CD covers, or record covers.....yea what are records.......Anywho what it does is create what the maker of this script calls avatars or icons that look like CD covers, then when you click on CD cover it starts playing that Album in your music player. This creates some really cool looking icons:


Now as was pointed out on the Awn forum this is super cool when used with stacks, on Awn!! Unfortunately when I choose to take a screen shot stacks always closes....SO you will have to try this if you want.....actually just had an idea I can take a video of it then:



Now if you interested in using Avatar Factor go check out the Ubuntu Forum post here, it is very detailed and helpful.

libawn-effects Branch for Awn

So while browsing the Awn code page on launchpad I saw soemthign that mentioned a libawn-effects Branch. I really had no clue what that meant, but hey its sounded cool and important... Basically how I see it, it makes animation easier to do on Awn? Correct me if I am wrong....

But anywho if you grab the branch and get it workign it adds some nice little things. For example the trash now bounces along with all the icons! Also when Icons come on the dock they fall down onto and keep bouncing smaller until they stop bouncing.

So why not show you a little video of it:



Now After watching that and you want to install it do this:

$ bzr co http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mhr3/awn/libawn-effects libawn-effects
$ ./autogen.sh
$ make
$ sudo make install

I took that from this forum thread.

Want Fonts?

I needed some nifty looking fonts for something I was creating in Open Office. I only had a ton of plain boring fonts, So I went looking how to get fonts in Ubuntu. While looking I came across this great how-to for installing tons of new fonts in Linux. Also in the How-to it shows you how to install a Font viewer that will allow you to easily browse through and look at all your fonts.

So where did I get all this great information? Well from here.

New Awn Look Preview

Now a little while ago I posted about a new Awn mock up that looked really great designed by Awn forum user Meek. Well to be exact I posted about it on August 15. Now why is that date important? Thats about when the idea was first posted on the Awn forum. This is now 9 days later, and we have a working preview of this mock-up already! Now that is progress!

Anywho On this forum post here, you can find the patches to get this to work. There are two replies with patches, you want to use the reply with patches that is near the bottom of that 2nd page of the post. Just download those patches and apply them in order and Bam, you can get this nice new look of Awn. But I will warn you this is just a preview so Don't try it if you don't need it yet. Also once the patches are applied you are stuck with that look, you can't switch.

Finally I will provide you with a short video of me just quickly testing mine out. Now there is nothing really super cool in this video, I coudl have used a screen shot, but thought something moving was more fun:

Screenlets Update

So for the lack of posts lately but I was away. So now back to business. Screenlets Just released Version 0.0.10 and Now has a new website. There new website is located here:

http://screenlets.org/index.php/Home

Nice Non-COmpoiste Task bar

If you don't have the hardware to run xcompmgr or Compiz Fusion, but still want a nice looking task bar then Tint is for you. I think tint is the name of this app, because you use the command "tint" to start it via terminal. But on there Google page they call it ttm.....Anywho I go it to work, and here is what mine looks like, way on the bottom where the normal task bar would be:


Now for a zoomed in shot:



Now this taskbar app looks smooth and for me it does what a task bar should do; show all you open apps for you easily to choose which ones to open/minimize. Not only does it do what its supposed to do, but it looks slick and clean, and does not need any composite manager.

If you are looking for a task bar with lost of features this talk bar isn't for you, well at least maybe not yet. This seems to be very new, and still in early development.

Anywho so how did I install it? Well I got its deb from here. AFte rinstallign that, try to run it in terminal with the command:

tint

If that does not work and you get an error similir to this one:

mike@mike-desktop:~$ tint
Cannot open config file!
Copy config_sample to ~/.config/tint/tintrc

If you get an error similar to that one I think I can help you, that seems to mean that the installation didn't create a config file. Luckily for me Colin over at Streamy gave me a copy of his config file. You can get it from paste bin. Copy that and put it into a file and name it, "tintrc". The create a file called "tint" in your .config directory which should be in your home directory. Now tint should run!

Awn Manager Now in latest Bzr

A little while back I posted a preview of the Awn-manager that was being developed for Awn. Well now it's in the latest Bzr update for Awn, and seems to be working great! IF you want to know more about it's features read the preview article I wrote earlier.

Now with that done and said you can now create, save and share themes. So I will share a theme I made:


I call my Theme Glass Beach. I based it off of the clock screenlet shown to the left of my dock. The clock screenlet theme was ocean, and my desktop wallpaper is a beach. So I decided to go with the theme....and produced that. Now its nothing super spiffy looking but if you would like to download it for your awn-theme manager you can download it here.

Please create you own themes and share them with all of us. If you have created a theme post about it and a link to download it in the comments to this thread. If you are looking for a place to host the theme for download, I woudl recommend, Media Fire.

Gnome Main Menue Applet Preview

In my last post I made a quick little video of some of the New applets being developed for Awn. But there was one I couldn't get to work at the time, and that was the Awn Gnome Main Menu Applet. But Guess what i got it workign now....well kind of, I can't actually say it even show sup on my dock....but I can kind of use it.....

Basically last time I added it to my dock it was a white stripe, well now when I add it, it's just a blank spot on the dock. Is that an improvement you may ask? Well I will say it is cause I can kind of use it now. If I click the blank spot it opens up, and I can navigate through it and launch things from it. But it sis still very buggy. For example it randomly closes, and also closes when you mouse leaves it...so i will let you watch me trying it out now:

Some Awn applet previews

I have configured Awn-extras to get see what was goign on with new applets. Basicly if you configure it you get two new applets:

1. Clock
2. Wobbly Zini

I assume you know what the Clock applet does...But the Wobbly Zini you most likely haven't heard of before. Well before you get all excited, the Wobbly Zini doesn't do much, more for you to look at. It's Basically this little light thing going around in the shape of a star. It is probably a test/example for the developers.

So more about the clock. I think its idea is great but at the moment it looks kind of ugly? I am not sure but maybe there is a way to change its colors? Mine looks kind of out of place. But useful none the less.

So now that I have bored you with all my words, here is a short video clip. Doesn't really show much, just the clock ticking....how exciting, and well the Wobbly thing doing what ever the hell it does:

Awn Forum again.....

Sorry folks, aboput the downtime again with the Awn forum.....I emailed the creator of our great forum software and he contacted the host and they said:

"Sorry about the downtime experienced today. We have network and DNS
issues today. If you are writing in because your site is down please
hold off if you can. We are currently running an update that will fix
all of your domains, but unfortunately the update takes a while to run."

So just hang on a bit longer, and I will keep you posted on whats going on.

Some fun with Compiz Fusion

So while messing around in Compiz Fusion I found something that looked pretty funny/cool. To try this out you are goign to need a few things:

• Compiz Fusion
• Airplane Plugin
• Widget Plugin
• a Bunch of screenlets

This is very simple to do, make the close effect the Airplane, and then lunch a bunch of screenlets. Make sure the screenlets are set as widgets so they go to the widget layer. Now hit F-9 or what ever your key combo/mouse action is to bring up the widget layer. Now look at your widgets....how pretty....now close the widget layer and watch the fun!

If you having trouble visualizing what will happen or you do not have one of the things or any of the things to do this, well basically all the widgets fold up and fly away like a little army of planes....Ok well I found it cool!

Here are some screen shots, unfortunately my computer is too slow to allow me to record these at the same time as running Compiz so I could only try and capture some screen shots:

Streamy Rocks

The other day I finally received my invite to the amazing Streamy beta! Now I didn't post right away about it cause, I figured I wanted to get into a habit of using it and know most of the details. First I will start off with a screen shot of what the Streamy start page looks like for me:


That is streamy sitting in my Firefox yay! Ok so what is all the hype over this website? Well many have been calling it a Digg killer while some sites who had earlier invites like Tech Crunch say it's nothing like digg and is not a digg killer, well i disagree a little bit. Yes unlike digg the stories are not voted on my users but streamy is very much like digg in a way of Community news. What streamy I think is doing better then Digg is they are harnessing the community aspect of it.

The first thing that sticks out in the community aspect of streamy is the Networks list:



This is like your buddy list for the website, also it can have your aim buddies son there two so you can chat with them while reading and also sharing news with your aim buddies. So the networks has all your buddies from Streamy you can chat with, and organizes them by what groups they are part of. I will go into more about groups in a bit, but the nice things about streamy is how you can interact with everything. Like you have probably seen if you have watched the streamy video is that you can drag news article headlines on to a buddies name and they will be sent a nicely made up hyper link that can send them to that story. Well you can also click and drag buddies or groups from the network list:


As you can see in the above picture by dragging Jonathan's name 3 bubbles appear and I can drop his name on any of them which will perform different actions. The top bubble will bring me to his user profile, the left bubble will open a chat with him ( to open a chat you can also just click his name in the network list), and the right bubble will bring me to his save stream. The save stream is a list of all the stories that that user has saved. If you drag a group name from your network list then the same type of bubbles will appear. One will bring you to the groups homepage, another will open up the groups chat room, another will bring you to groups threads which are like discussions you can have within a group, and lastly there is a bubble for group save stream. The group save stream is what I will talk about next.

So how does digg work? Users vote up articles they like and they get to the front page. Basically the users are sorting out the articles....same idea over at streamy, the users are sorting out the articles. Yes on your start page at streamy you have recommended articles which have been determined by some backed formula which depends on what you have read over at streamy/saved. But like digg the users are sorting the articles, this is how groups come into play. You can join and crate groups for pretty much anything. By default I was in the Streamy Beta group, then I joined a Ubuntu group, and I created a Linux Group. So back to the whole concept of the sorting of Articles. If you see an article that relates to a group you are part of you just drag it onto the groups name in your network list and bam, it's now in the groups saved stream, which you can easily access by dragging the groups name to the saved stream bubble. By doing this all the articles start getting sorted into groups so you can easily find article that you would be interested in reading.

Now the group idea creates users sorting articles like digg, but also they create a sense of community. Here is a screen shot of a group homepage:


The middleish area shows you some of the members of the group, while beneath it is the group stream which I call the group wall cause it works similar to how your wall is on facebook. In the group stream recently group shared articles show up, and you can also post quick notes to the group. Now in the above picture if you look at the middle skinny column this is where group threads show up. You can start a thread for discussing things with group members. Just from all this you can see how streamy harnesses more of the community then digg, Streamy brings there community together.

Thats it for now, There is so much I could talk about and praise streamy for but this article would get to long for nay of you to finish. So maybe I will make another post latter unless it opens up to the public by then. I tried to make this review a little different then the ones you may have already seen, it seems to me most of the others talk about streamys slick looks and ajaxyness. Well they are very very nice, but I figured you all already knew about them. One note about the ajaxyness, it seems to me that the back buttons in your browser do work somehow....

How does this relate to Linux....well I can't wait to get everyone in the Linux group I created so we can share and discuss Linux stuff!

Nice Awn mock up

So now the Awn forums seems to be working well enough again, and there has been some discussions and progress on things already being made. I just thought I would share some of the things goign on there, just in case you don't go over to the Awn forum a lot, and maybe your just subscribed to my feed.

The first thing, I will write about are these amazing mock ups created by meek:


Now these are very very nice looking. It kind of takes the mac leopard look Awn recently got, and made it more elegant and smooth. The nice thing about this mock up is its very original. No other dock looks like this with the nice elegant curves. I find this important cause over at digg when Awn got the Leopard look and stacks, a lot of people were yelling this like, "Linux and open source just steals ideas." Anyone who ever used beryl or Now Compiz Fusion knows Linux and Open Source are very innovative. So I will enjoy very much to hear what people have to say if this gets put into Awn, cause its an original idea. I just find this look very simple and elegant, hope it gets implemented fast.

Awn Forums are down

It seems to me a lot of my readers use Awn or come from the Awn forums so I just thought I woudl let you all know the Awn forums are down at the moment, it seems the host servers are havign problems, all the sites they host apparently are currently having troubles. So be patient and hopefully the problem will be fixed soon.

Easy install/updates for Compiz Fusion

The average Linux user, most likely does not compile Compiz Fusion from git themselves. I am sure most of you use a repo or deb, or something similar for your other distributions. Well if you like me you want the latest and greatest and repos sometimes aren't that fast for updates. Well over in the Ubuntu forums I came across an amazing little script. It will download and install the latest Compiz Fusion, and update your existing Compiz Fusion every time you run it.

Now for a super quick review of the actual script, its fairly simple to use, just download it and run it in terminal. Then you will have to answer some question here and there and it pretty much does all the hard stuff. I will say some of the questions toward the end on what it it should install I was a little confused on, but I must have picked the right answers cause Compiz Fusion is working great!

One note when installing definitely choose yes for weather or not you want to install Compiz Fusion Icon. This is very nice, and gives you an easy way to start and manage Compiz Fusion. With this installed it will allow you to start Compiz Fusion my navigating to your, Applications>System Tools>Compiz Fusion Icon. Once that is run COmpiz Fusion will start and then a Compiz Fusion Icon will appear in your notification area. Upon clickign this icon you have many useful things right at your fingertips. Such as, Compiz Settings Manager, Emerald Manager, Select Window Manager, Compiz Options (Lets you select Loose bindings and or indirect rendering), and lastly a place to select your window decorator.

Now after hearing all that you probably are like "Give me this Script!" So I will give you a link to where I found it here. Just a note before you follow those directions you may want to remove your existing compiz fusion first, thats at least what I did....Have Fun!

update:

Also the author of the script mentioned Compiz Fusion would probably work smoother/faster if you compiled it yourself this way, but I didn't really believe it when I first read it. But ever Since I tried it Compiz Fusion has been running super smooth and fast. Maybe you wouldn't notice it on a nice high end computer, But on my slow desktop I sure as hell notice a difference. So If you try this please post a comment sharing you thoughts on this...

Update on Stacks

A bit ago I wrote about stacks on Awn well now it's been slightly updated. It looks nicer and has some nice new features but it is still a little buggy. First off here is a screen shot I took of the stacks icon on my dock:


As you may be able to see, you con now better see multiple icons of things from in your stack. I have a pdf text document then a patch and then the Google image from the Google homepage. And you can pretty much see all of them. From my own tests it seems like it shows you the last 3 things put into your stack. But I also noticed if you removed something from your stack it did not update with the change on the image.

Also when you open up the stack it looks a little bit smoother and nicer looking. Here is the image from the forum post about the new version of stacks:


Unfortunately when I try and take my own screen shot of this, it automatically closes...No clue why it wasn't workign for me. Now this is a lot more updated for the interface of stacks. The top arrow if pressed will bring you back a directory, and as you can see you can navigate into other directories, it is pretty much like a little file browser. Definitely pretty handy. Once the small kinks get worked out this will definitely be an amazing applet for Awn.

First Compiz Fusion Release

Just a quick post here, Compiz Fusion just had the first real release! But will it have fixes for all the stability issues that users have been complaining about? I will look into this more latter, but you cna go read about the release here if you want.

A new dock on the Block

So I have been gone the last couple of days and will probably be busting out lots of posts again, since a lot seems to always go one when I am gone. Anywho there is this new dock, like application which seems nice if you have loads of launchers. It seems that you just use your mouse scroll wheel and you just wheel the launchers around....looks like fun, will have to try it once i get settled here.

Compiz Fusion Update

Compiz fusion recently had a poll to vote on what there new icons shoudl look like.....and thi is the winner:
Well now, personally I am not a fan of this logo at all. I am more of the type that likes more brighter things then dark....willing to hear what you guys think of this logo. Also in this new release of Compiz Fusion is the paper airplane plugin I mentioned here before. Also there is a new plugin called skewer which is demonstrated in this video:



I can't wait to try out this new skewer plug in, it looks like it coudl be a lot of fun. This I guess makes up for the crappy icon set chosen....

New Comment system

Ok folks there are quite a lot of visitors to this blog, but you don't seem very chatty. So we got a new comment system that is beyond cool. So go check it out, and discuss posts!

Cool Ubuntu Screen Saver

I stumbled across this nifty Ubuntu screen saver some of you may like. It looks very nice and smooth, and is simple:



If you liked it, I also found this nice howto for easy installation of the screen saver.

Spotlight Video

I just enabled the spotlight patch for Awn which is still in development. I know I posted some video before on how spotlight works but here is one I made myself. It's my first Linux video so I just wanted to share. Nothing Special just shows how the spotlight effect works:

Awn Spotlight Effect Development

Recent talk on the Awn forum have been about more and different ideas for hover effects; when the mouse is over the icons on the dock. One of the effects is a spotlight effect with a light shinning up from below the icon, here is a screen shot taken from the hover effects post:



Anywho forum user dolfje has been workign on creating this effect and has given us some videos to look at:

Video 1

Video 2

$199 Linux Laptop

Now here looks like a pretty nifty laptop. This laptop is made by Asustek and will run a flash hard drive. The laptop looks sleek and light, but runs Xandros linux. Now there is nothing wrong with that, I am just used to Ubuntu. And I bet you could easily change it to any distro you want once you got the laptop. Anywho I could keep rambling on about this laptop when you coudl just watch a nice video demonstration of it over at PC World.

Quick tip for Patches

I figured I should share this tip I learned today. Since a lot of my readers tend to come from the Awn forum, a lot of you probably use Awn, and maybe have tried some of the patches for Awn. Well because if using Awn I learned how to apply patches, but today I had to do something different, I needed to remove a patch, without starting from scratch.

So I asked around on the Awn forum and user, nablaa came to the rescue, by sharing this with me.


patch -p0 -R < name.patch


Just cd into the directory the patch is in then use that command and change name to the patches name, and just that patch will be removed. Then re-configure /compile and you will be all good. Thanks again to, nablaa for helpign me with this!

Streamy Update

A couple of weeks ago I made a non-linux related post about a new web start-up Streamy. Anywho there home page has recently changed and now they have a blog! So if you are interested you can now watch there feed, and see whats going on. I can't wait until I can actually get into streamy, but I do think it will prove useful and fun when reading all the Linux blogs. And yes I read other blogs other then my own....

Stock Screenlet

I was over at the screenlets website and I have recently been noticing a pick up in the amount of useful screenlets coming out. I just wanted to point out these stock screenlets:


The three companies I happen to choose, all are going down....But anywho back to the Screenlet. It is nice and simple looking, but at the moment it only has one theme, that black one you see in the screen shot. Lastly it is very easy to set up to certain stocks as long as you know the companies stock symbol. If there was one thing I woudl suggest it would be to have a symbol look up feature built in and maybe charts....ok that is two suggestions. And if you woudl like to get the screenlet go here.

My Awn coverflow mock-up

I think it would be super cool if you took cover flow from itunes and smashed it into Awn! Basicly so you coudl use your scroll mouse to scroll through your launchers/open tasks on your dock. This would be good because you coudl hold many more things on your dock without it getting to wide. So here is my first mock-up ever:


So basically you can have how ever many icons you choose facing you. I have 3 in my mock-up facing you. Then all the rest are slanted at angles overlapping each other, on either sides of the icons facing you. Then the whole idea is to bring other ones to facing you, you just put your mouse over the dock and scroll with your scroll wheel. Anywho I posted about this in the Awn forum for further discussion if you interested.

Awn Manager Preview

So maybe a week or so ago I posted about the Awn theme manager, which was still in early stages but was nice. Well it has made considerable progress, and is now not only a theme manager but pretty much all the preferences, in Awn. In this it now not only has the theme manager where you can install and save your themes, but you can also change you launcher order, and other Awn preferences all from one place. So now its time for a screen shot:



Now as you can see in the screen shot you have different categories listed on the left. The first one General is just like the preferences you would get if you were to right click Awn and click preferences, but this one is a little bit updated. The little update to the general section as you may be able to see in the picture is that you can adjust the bar angle, the bar height, and the icon offset.

The next category on the left is applets, and it looks a little different then the one built in to awn, so here it is:


With the applets you just choose things from the right list and move them into the left list to get them on your Awn. The next catagory is the launchers section which actually is a bit innovative:


The great part about this launchers organizer is that you can drag the different launchers around in there, so there is no need like in the one built into Awn to click a launcher then use arrows to move it. Also I noticed after dragging an icon my dock automatically updated, so I did not have to hit the apply button to make it change my dock. There were to many times with the launcher organizer built into Awn when I organized all my icons then hit ok, without hitting the apply button and then I would need to start all over.

The last category in there is the theme manager which I wrote about in the last post. It pretty much looks the same and seems to act the same. But there may be a few bug fixes in there since the last one. The theme manager allows you to save and install themes from others. Here is a quick screen shot:



Well thats it for now on the Awn theme manager, go try it out!

Well I guess I should share how to get it....

Open a terminal and grab it with this command:

bzr co http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~awn-extras/awn-extras/trunk awn-extras

That will get you can awn-extra directory. Within the awn-extras directory navigate into the awn-manager directory and run the awnManager.py

Linux and Fonts

Ever since I started to use Linux I have always seen how to's on fixing the look of fonts. All of them claimed to make fonts look smoother and nicer. I never tried any of them because I thought, "my fonts look fine." Also I was to lazy to do any of the fixes....Anywho I came across a post today on an easy way to fix the fonts so I decided to give it a try. I got these instructions/shell script from this forum post. So basically go there and follow the instructions if you want to install it, there is no use on me repeating everything he wrote there, and it's simple enough.

So I followed it and it was fast and easy to install, but does it actually make your fonts look nicer is the question....So I decided to do a test. Before I installed it I took a screen shot of a paragraph from that post. Then after I installed it and restarted x I took another screen shot of the same paragraph. Here are my results:

Before font fix:



After Font Fix:




Now you you should probably click on the images or open them in a new Firefox tab to see them bigger and clearer to get the most accurate test results. But as far as I can see I do not see much of a difference if any.... But I would like to hear what you guys think? or perform your own tests and share with us how yours went.

Installing Rainlendar

Last post I did was a review of Rainlendar, and I said it could be a bit tricky to install cause it was a pain for me. Anywho when like I ever have problems I run to Qunu. On Qunu a nice person by the name of isaac_j87 was there to help me.... So here we go.

To install it normally, if you don't run into any problems you should first download it from here. After you download it you need to extract it, then you will have a directory called; "rainlendar2". In there there will be a file named, "rainlendar2". Now first try installing it, and see if it will work for you. To get it to run you just need to run the rainlendar2 file. Which I like to do from terminal so If it doesn't work I can see any errors. So I cd into the rainlendar2 directory then ran"

./rainlendar2

Now of course after I did this it did not work.....and I did not get any errors in my terminal output. So that is when I went to Qunu, and met isaac_j87 who I can not thank enough for helping me out!

So here is the fix for what went wrong with us. First you need to navigate to your home folder, and look in the directory called ".config" which is a hidden directory, so if you want to see it I know on Ubuntu you just pres, ctr+h on the keyboard while in your home directory and all your hidden files becoem visible. Now while in the ".config" directory you should see a ".rainlendar" directory if you already tried starting Rainlendar like I stated above. In this directory there should be a file or two called something like:

Rainlendar2-mike

and maybe;

Rainlendar2-root

Your first one probably ill not say mike, but your user name. Next make a copy of the Rainlendar2-"your user name" and paste it in the same directory as the other two. Next you will wan't to re-name the pasted file, "rainlendar2.ini". And make sure that is lowercase....

Now it should kind of work....So go back to the original Rainlendar2 directory and run the .bin again with ./rainlendar2 and you will probably get an error but the calendar should be working....the error I got was something like this (but if this does not happen scroll down and go to my note):

/home/mike/.config/.rainlendar/rainlendar2.ini', line 1: '=' expected.

So now lets fix this error. So type this into terminal but replace mike with your user name:

gedit /home/mike/.config/.rainlendar2

This will open gedit and you need to look at the text in this file. The second line of the file should say, [default] or something along those lines and right above it there should be a number....delete the number then save and close, and try running rainlendar again. Now it should work again but without that error. Congratulations you now have yourself a great desktop calendar to stay organized.

Note:

If you tried all of the above and it still didn't work your an unlucky fellow like I was. If after the file copy and name change it still doesn't run, then open up your .ini file in a text editor. See if it says anything... mine said this:

㘱㜶4

and nothing else....so after this we were stuck and I was frustrated so, I just opened up my .rainlendar directory and cleared all the contents...but make sure you are in the .rainlendar2 not the rainlendar2you want the one located in the .config directory. I just wiped out everything that was in it, so it was now just an empty directory. Then I tried running the ./rainlendar2 again in terminal and it then created the two files I mentioned before, and I copied it again and changed its name, and repeated all and bam it now worked! Go figure who know what happened....but it fixed it. If after all this it still don't work post a comment on your situation, and we can try and help you out.