briancarper.net (λ) (Tag: Linux)

Screenshot June 2010

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 12:27:44 -0700

I haven't posted one of these in a while. I've been in an 8-bit kind of mindset for a while:

What I actually stare at for 8 hours every day:

KDE4, Buuf icons, QtCurve, wallpaper is from somewhere on the internets.

Working remotely

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:59:46 -0800

I'm sitting here in Canada trying to work for my employer back in the US for a month. It's been a few weeks already, and I'm surprisingly pleased (or pleasantly surprised) with how well it's working. At the same time, certain aspects of this rather suck.

One huge obstacle so far is (of course) Windows. Aside from the Linux server that I convinced IT to let me run out of a closet, the whole place is Microsoft. Whatever MS VPN software we're using is slow, clunky, unreliable, and generally annoying.

At one point I tried to fetch a file from a network drive and watched it download at 0.2 k/sec. Then I had someone back home copy it onto my Linux box, and I downloaded from there at 120 k/sec. The Windows and Linux servers are in the same room in the same building behind the same network connection; I don't understand how VPN overhead slowed things down by that many orders of magnitude.

After connecting to VPN, there's about a 25% chance that Outlook will be able to connect to the Exchange server at work. Generally I have to fire up the VPN, turn it off, turn it on, turn it off, turn it on and then Outlook will find it. Sometimes I close Outlook, but it lives on as a zombie, futilely hammering away at the server but unable to find it, until I CTRL-ALT-DEL and kill it. This is with Office 2007.

But the work I do on the Linux server is (of course) easy. No problems whatsoever. Working over SSH is how I did things when I was sitting in my office anyways. I tunnel in and use local GUI SQL clients. I put VirtualBox on my laptop and I do a bunch of stuff in a Linux VM and rsync it back home with no problems. I can edit files over SSH right in Emacs as if they were on my local box, if I care to.

Sometimes I wonder if my dislike of Microsoft is irrational. Any belief that is caused by or results in a strong emotional response should be subject to questioning. Then reality comes waltzing by and reminds me that no, MS software really does suck.

I've worked for this company for over two years before moving. I don't know how well I'd be doing if this was a company I just started with. It's hard to see how important face-to-face communication is until it's impossible. Email is OK, but the benefit of knowing people in person and knowing how they talk and how they think really goes a long way to being able to interpret and understand plaintext communication.

Exaile

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 11:22:50 -0800

In my ongoing quest for a good audio player (after becoming an Amarok exile and refugee) I settled on aTunes. aTunes is really good except for two quibbles...

One, it's a Java app (a Swing app as far as I can tell?) and the GUI is enormous and unresponsive and certain parts of it really behave strangely. Like clicking in text fields to focus them sometimes requires multiple clicks. It's just annoying enough to constantly throw me off.

The second problem is that it crashes all the time. Music keeps playing but the GUI disappears. pkill java has become necessary far too often lately.

So now I'm trying Exaile. It's very Amarok 1.4-like. I can overlook the fact that it's GTK because it's otherwise so nice. Best part, when asked if Exaile is going to go the way of Amarok 2, the dev has this to say:

Never ever ever ever ever ever.

I'm having a hard time coming up with any deficiencies in Exaile so far. Everything in the GUI is laid out nicely. No crashes yet.

One of these days I'll find an acceptable app... Most of these apps are good, but I'm too picky. I love how Linux lets me be picky. There is a wealth of options, and everything is free. I am spoiled.

VMware: What's in a name?

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:05:01 -0800

VMware never ceases to confuse me. Not the program, which is a pretty good piece of software. Just the name of everything. Look at this list of VMware software; can you figure out what any of those things are via their names? The VMware official site is no less confusing.

Hilariously, all of these things seem to be named different things than a year or two ago when last I tried to install VMware. It seems this company, like many others, enjoys renaming everything at random, just to keep you on your toes.

If you search for vmware in Gentoo you get these results, among others:

app-emulation/vmware-dsp
app-emulation/vmware-gsx-console
app-emulation/vmware-modules
app-emulation/vmware-player
app-emulation/vmware-server
app-emulation/vmware-server-console
app-emulation/vmware-view-open-client
app-emulation/vmware-vix
app-emulation/vmware-workstation

The descriptions are wonderful:

Emulate a complete PC on your PC without the usual performance overhead of most emulators

In some cases, multiple packages have the exact same copy/pasted description, which is awesome. But maybe the Gentoo devs couldn't figure out what any of these things are either.

After some trial-and-error I narrowed it down to vmware-server, vmware-player and vmware-workstation. I think vmware-workstation is the non-free one, so that narrowed it down to the other two.

vmware-server required me to register at the VMware site and download something myself, after giving my name and shoe size and blood type to VMware and registering, then clicking a download link in an email. Then vmware-server installed via Portage OK. But it comes with a horrible web-only interface and the OS runs in a browser plugin. This crashed hard and often. I'd like a standalone client please.

There's vmware-server-console in Gentoo which sounds like it should let you connect to vmware-server, but ha ha, no, it doesn't. At least not the versions I ended up with via Portage. Then I read somewhere that you can't use VMware Server Console to connect to VMware Server 2.0, it only works with earlier versions. I think? I don't even know if this is true, all I know is vmware-server-console froze or crashed no matter what I tried.

I read on some random mailing list that you can use something called "VMware Infrastructure Client" to connect to VMware Server, but I couldn't for the life of me determine what this is or where to get it.

So I uninstalled vmware-server, made sure to rm -rf /etc/vmware /opt/vmware /var/lib/vmware first, and then installed vmware-player. This opened in a GTK2 GUI, which is what I wanted to begin with. But I couldn't create a new image. I could only open existing ones, which I could download from the official VMware site apparently.

Mind-bogglingly, an image in VMware isn't called an "image", it's called an "Appliance". Clearly someone in the marketroid department at VMware ran out of names, saw a toaster on the shelf and went with it. A washing machine is an appliance, not an OS image. Did you know the "Virtual Appliance Marketplace" has "Expanded Capabilities from the Largest Library of Applications for the Cloud"? Is there seriously someone in the world who can read this without needing to fight back a reflex to vomit? (Images are also referred to as "Solutions", to which I say only uggggggh.)

Anyways, it seems that they only added the ability to create your own images in VMware Player version 3.0; this feature was absent in previous versions. And 3.0 is not available through Gentoo yet.

So I uninstalled everything, rm -rfed any cruft I could find, and went and downloaded VMware Player 3.0 from the VMware site directly. I had to register AGAIN, but then I got it.

During the install, VMware Player 3.0 asks you for the location of your runlevels directory. It didn't accept /etc/runlevels on my box; I guess Gentoo's is non-standard. So I had to make a fake directory and go into it and mkdir rc0.d rc1.d rc2.d rc3.d rc4.d rc5.d rc6.d init.d and let VMware pretend that was my runlevels directory. All so the installer could spew an initscript into it, which doesn't even work. Oh well.

After trying to run vmplayer, failing because the kernel modules weren't loaded properly by the broken initscript, modprobeing the modules myself and restarting a bunch of times, then running vmware-networks --start manually, behold! I had a running VMware Player 3.0 and I made my own image and everything was good.

Are you confused yet? It's all free, so I guess I shouldn't complain. But I guess I just did complain anyways. Names don't have to be this confusing. So many companies do this, and why?

How about "light" (or even "lite"), "trial", "full", "free", "paid", "server", "client"? Those are nice words. We all know what those words mean. "VMware ESXi" might sound EXTREME or trendy or whatever, and maybe it really does "Deliver Enterprise Performance to Your Applications" (ugggggggggggh), but what the hell is it? What is VMWare ThinApp? What does it do? How am I supposed to buy what you're selling when you're speaking a foreign language to me?

Fluxbox, we meet again

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:32:59 -0800

I'm sort of tired of KDE4 crashing left and right and Plasma barfing all over me all day. So I decided to check out the current state of lightweight window managers.

Lo and behold, Fluxbox is still going strong. It was the first WM I used way back in 2000-something when I started using Linux full-time. Last time I tried, there were always weird compatibility problems with system tray icons and pagers working properly when running a mix of KDE and Gnome and other apps, but those seem to have cleared up nicely; I have yet to hit any snags. Here's a screenshot.

This took very minimal effort to install and set up. Maybe a couple hours total. I'm using ipager and conky. The wallpaper comes from the UniQ KDE theme. Vim and Emacs themes are my own.

The Fluxbox style is mydefcon_4 from tenr.de which is probably the largest and most thorough set of themes created by one person that I've witnessed. That fellow is motivated.

For all the bells and whistles of KDE4, what features did I actually use regularly?

A menu of apps
Taskbar + System tray + Clock
KWin's good window management.
Global keyboard shortcuts galore
One widget: current CPU/RAM/Network usage
Mouse/keyboard management, background-setting, etc.

Fluxbox gives me all but number 5, and Conky gives me that. Number 6 you can do with xset and feh and such.

And I like being motivated to use keyboard shortcuts for more things. I'm already halfway there. Maybe I can take the plunge eventually and try a tiling window manager. Not sure I've reached that level of nerditude yet though.

And now I can move and resize windows without my graphics card bursting into flames. Maybe when I can afford a few more cores worth of CPU I'll try KDE4 again. Honestly I think I have too much monitor real-estate for my ancient computer to handle smoothly in KDE4.

Not to knock KDE4; it's awesome and I'll probably go back someday. But everyone needs a break now and then.

Linux audio player comparison (nit-picking)

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:18:48 -0800

Given my inability to use Amarok 1.4 and my lack of desire to use Amarok 2.0, I tried loads of music players and for now I've landed on aTunes.

It's not perfect. It's far from perfect. But it's the best of the bunch. These are the features I MUST HAVE for a media player and which aTunes possesses.

Last.fm integration. aTunes has probably the best integration I've seen in a player, without going over-the-top and stuffing a whole web browser into the app.
System tray icon, right-clickable with song controls in the menu.
Commandline interface.
Able to display CJK fonts. In Arch (or in Gentoo using the icedtea6-bin VM) CJK fonts are displayed as empty boxes, but in Gentoo using Sun JVM, it works fine.
Tag editing. aTunes has a pretty nice tag editor for single songs or multiple at once.
Amarok-like tree of albums/artists/genres/whatever I want. I want a single expandable and collapsable tree-list, not 3 panes I have to click between.
Equalizer.
Skins are nice; aTunes has these.
"Collection" support and folder-watching/auto-updating when I dump music into ~/music. aTunes does this very well. Scanned a few thousand files fairly quickly, and does updates very fast.
Amarok-1.4-like spreadsheetish playlist layout.
Lightweight build process. No gstreamer. aTunes provides Mplayer and Xine backends and has few to no other dependencies (besides Java). The Mplayer backend didn't work out very well for me, but Xine works beautifully.

It also has some other nice bonuses, like the elegant way it uses the Album Artist tag for albums with multiple artists, the interesting statistics and bar graphs it can produce from your song listening history, playlist tabs, and so on.

Things I dislike about aTunes... well it's a Java app, so it takes a decade to start up. It also has horrid fonts and the widgets are clunky. But it's responsive once it's running, and I don't care how it looks as much as how sane the layout is. Searching is also clunky. But these aren't show-stoppers.

Here's a list of other players I tried, and why I didn't use them.

Amarok 1.4

I'd use this if I could. :( It compiles and runs on my Gentoo box but too much stuff is broken due to bit-rot.

Amarok 2

Covered in detail.

Banshee

It wanted to pull in about a billion and a half Gnome dependencies. This is not fun for a KDE user.

Songbird

So close. This is probably second place behind aTunes. It has a great plugin system, it's skinnable, the layout is extremely functional and compact and easy to use and customizable. But...

No system tray icon in Linux! This is a show-stopper. There's alltray but it doesn't let me right-click and have song controls.
It has a clumsy commandline interface which makes setting global KDE keyboard shortcuts annoying.
Bloat. Do you really need a full-fledged web browser in your media player?
XUL, ew.

gmusicbrowser

This is very customizable (almost absurdly so) and looks promising. However...

Still a bit beta-quality.
Crashed on me a couple times in the short time I used it.
Interface has a kitchen-sink feel to it. Too many tabs and widgets all over the place. I couldn't find a layout I liked.
Looks pretty good, but no real compelling reason to use this.
Written in Perl?

amaroq

Alpha-quality PyQt4 clone of Amarok 1.4. Looks promising. I will keep an eye on this.

MPD

Last time I tried MPD was years ago. If aTunes doesn't work out, I'll try this next. But aTunes has kept me going for a week now, and I have very few complaints.

If they do a complete rewrite for aTunes 2.0 and destroy the interface, I'll jump off a bridge.

Time to pay the Windows tax

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 01:39:13 -0700

Now that Windows 7 is out, it's only a matter of time before I'm forced to buy it. I don't want it. I won't use it. But as a programmer, it's nearly impossible to survive without owning a copy of the ~~latest and greatest~~ latest version of Windows.

Why? Because if you want a job, unless you're one of the fortunate few who get to pick your development platform AND dictate the platform for all of your users, you need to know Windows. You need to know how to navigate around it when you're forced to use it on your work computer. You need to know how to troubleshoot (to some degree) your users' Windowsy problems as they try to install and use your program. If you want to communicate with people in the world, inevitably they're going to send you a bunch of MS Word documents and nothing is ever going to read them properly 100% of the time except MS Word itself.

I have a copy of Vista Business on my laptop which I am deeply ashamed for having bought, but at the same time it helped me land a very nice work contract. Without being able to VPN into the company's network (via some MS proprietary VPN software that I tried VERY hard and failed to get to work in Linux) I wouldn't have been able to complete the job on time, and I might be living in a cardboard box under a bridge right now.

For this contract I actually developed the app at home entirely in Linux. I used only Linux-centric tools (Vim, Gimp, Firefox, Ruby etc.). Thank God most of those tools have Windows versions, because deploying it to Windows land at work and working on it there when necessary was (mostly) trivial. But I still needed Windows to finish the job. And all the users of this app were Windows users. The specs for the app were sent to me in Word and Excel documents. The website frontend is being viewed in IE much of the time in spite of my pleadings to the contrary, so I have to support it.

Such is the life of a programmer. I'll probably buy Windows 7 eventually but it'll sting. It'll rankle.

KMail is slow

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 13:38:48 -0700

KMail is a pretty good app, except that it's slow as glacier. If I select a few thousand spam emails in KMail (4.3.2) sitting on my IMAP server, and I try to delete them, KMail laboriously iterates through them deleting them one at a time and updating the GUI after every deletion. I'd say it averages about 4 or 5 emails deleted per second. Yes, for a few thousand emails this adds up to 10-15 minutes of waiting.

I got tired of waiting, so I decided to try out Mutt for the first time. In Mutt apparently you can delete a folder full of emails by pressing D and then specifying ~s .* as the search pattern. Mutt deleted 8,000 spam emails for me instantaneously.

This is what I get when I ignore the collective wisdom of the Linux group-mind. I've long heard that Mutt is good but I never bothered trying it, because Thunderbird and KMail and friends were "good enough".

Complacency, my old nemesis. You have beaten me again. But I am now going to give Mutt a good try. Next on the list is zsh.

Spam spam spam spam spammity spam

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 11:59:05 -0700

I woke up this morning to about 50 spam emails and some notifications from my host that my CPU usage was about 200% over the past four hours. Turns out spamd was going mental. Not sure what caused it but it seems to be working again after I restarted it.

One of the worst things about running your own mail server is spam. I don't much about how to do it properly. I have SpamAssassin running, I tweaked the settings and trained it well, and it works OK. Of 8,000 spams in the past week or two, I think only two made it through to my inbox. But I keep thinking there must be a better way.

For a while I tried greylisting. Greylisting means you pseudo-bounce every email you get, and force the mail server to resend it. Once it's resent, that server is added to a whitelist. The idea is that spam servers won't bother resending and genuine mail servers will.

I ran this way via Postgrey for a couple months. The good thing is that it works pretty much as advertised. I went from hundreds of spam emails per day, to fewer than a dozen. SpamAssassin caught all of those dozen and I never saw them. It was nice.

The problem with this, however, is twofold.

All mail from people you've never heard from before is delayed 5-10 minutes. This is very annoying in certain circumstances, e.g. registering for an account at a new message board or buying something from an online store you never used before. I'd rather like to see the receipt or user registration right away. So to get around this I had to go add them to a whitelist on the server every time, which was ridiculous.
Not all genuine mail servers bother resending after the temporary bounce, so you lose mail. You need only look in /etc/postgrey/whitelist_clients and see the enormous list of mail servers that Postgrey knows NOT to greylist, to be scared into never using Postgrey again. This includes yahoo.com, ebay.com, a bunch of airlines, and so on. The list goes back to 2005 and obviously is an incomplete list, since it only includes servers that people reported having problems with. I had to add gmail.com to it myself to avoid losing mail from my wife (domains that use large pools of mail servers will always be greylisted, it seems).

Losing mail is the reason I stopped using Postgrey. So I'm back to SpamAssassin alone and dealing with an occasional spam or two, while my spam inbox balloons.

Ker-crash

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:56:52 -0700

I can pretty consistently crash my X server nowadays just by opening too many programs. I think I need a new computer.

Or maybe my idea of "too many programs" has been warped by how well Linux multi-tasks. Let's see. I'm seeding 20 torrents in KTorrent, I have Amarok playing, Konversation has a few IRC channels open, Kopete is doing some Jabber for me, Akregator is fetching feeds every 10 minutes, Gimp has a dozen PNGs open, Emacs is visiting around 20 files (and running SLIME + Clojure obviously), Squirrel SQL is running so I can peek at mysql, I have maybe 5 or 6 Konsole windows open, and I have four browsers running (Firefox, Chromium, Opera, Konq) for testing my websites while I develop (multiple tabs in each obviously). And so on.

In Windows not only would the single, sucky taskbar be full to overflowing, but all of my programs would be slowed to a crawl. In Linux I somehow get away with this level of activity for days at a time, but eventually I do something wrong and something crashes. Just now, it was opening one Konsole window too many. I think it's KDE4 instability, or else my ancient video card can't handle the screen resolution I'm running. But I get crashes in Gentoo and Arch both so I don't know.

Buying a computer is such a pain. I never know what to get. I don't keep up with hardware news. Every time I turn around there are twelve new processor families. I know whatever I buy will suck in a month. My current computer is from way back in 2006 and I haven't upgraded it since. My geek cred is non-existent if judged by the computer I'm using. It's embarrassing.

Force Google Chromium to have a normal title bar in KDE

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 01:58:26 -0700

KDE is awesome largely because KWin is awesome. If I had to name one reason I gave up using Gnome and moved to KDE, it'd be KWin.

Some programs (for example, Songbird, aTunes, Google Chrom(e|ium)) try to manage their own windows in silly ways like hiding their title bars and window borders, or fiddling with how they appear in pagers or task managers / application lists, or trying to manage their own sizes and positions. KWin lets you override and force sane preferences upon such programs.

Chromium for Linux is nice enough to give you an option to "Use system title bar and borders" if you right-click the top. But this only changes how Chrome looks; it doesn't make the KWin title bar and borders appear.

Why would you want KWin title bar and borders? Because by default, Chromium's self-managed title bar only gives you Windowsy options like minimize/maximize/close. It doesn't give you Linuxy options like double-clicking the title bar to window-shade the window, or right-clicking the title bar to get the KDE menu to send it between desktops or make it Always on Top, and such goodness. If I wanted gimped up window management I'd go use Windows 95.

To get the normal KWin title bar to appear, go into System Settings, Window Behavior, Window Specific, then New...

Click the Detect Window Properties button and then click an open Chromium window to fill in the details, as in this screenshot.

(Note that for most apps you can right-click the title bar of the window, go to Advanced and Special Application settings and get to the same place, but in the special case of windows without normal title bars, you have to do it in this more roundabout way.)

Then go to Preferences and set No Border to "Force", and uncheck the box. (This is kind of confusing because it's a double-negative; a checked box means to hide the window borders, and an unchecked box means to show them.)

Once you save and apply all of this, Chromium will have a normal window title and border forever, whether it likes it or not. Rejoice as sanity is restored to the world.

You can use this dialog to do other helpful things like make your IM windows be sticky across all desktops by default. Or to sort your applications to always start (and stay) on certain desktops. Or to force applications to start maximized or have a certain geometry.

Another thing I find very helpful is to turn Focus stealing prevention to the highest setting for any program that likes to throw dialog boxes at me and demand immediate attention. Thunderbird used to be really annoying in this way.

Most other Linux window managers can do some of this kind of thing too with either built-in options or via 3rd-party scripts (last I checked Gnome was the latter but it's been a while). However few do it as well as KWin. The only thing I've used comparable to KWin is probably FVWM, and KWin's GUI configuration is orders of magnitude easier to work with than FVWM config files.

Flash: I hate you

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 15:16:09 -0700

If there's a version of Flash on Linux that does not crash my browser multiple times per hour, I'd love to know where I can get it.

When I want to browse more than 2 or 3 movies on Youtube at once, I switch over to Opera, because at least when Flash crashes in Opera, it just turns into a black box and Opera keeps going. Firefox on the other hand shuts down entirely.

But sometimes Flash even manages to crash my X server. That takes real talent. Flash cannot possibly die fast enough. We've been dealing with this atrocity for over a decade now.

Spriting and learning

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 13:57:09 -0700

In the mid-1990's I was really into Nintendo games, as was everyone. My favorite was the original NES Final Fantasy. Sometime in my teens I got my first computer, and I decided it would be cool if I had some sprites of that game on my computer.

Before

My first computer ran at 640x480 with 16 colors. I had Windows 3.1 and the most sophisticated image manipulation program around was MS Paint. How could I get sprites into my computer? Well, I had a strategy guide for the game, with blurry photos of all of the enemies, so I just opened up MS Paint, zoomed waaaaaaaay in, and drew all of the sprites pixel-by-pixel. Insane? Maybe, but it's a fun kind of insane.

This took about a year of off-and-on work, but in the end I had something I thought was great. I still have the file:

Note that my computer couldn't even produce sophisticated colors like "orange" and "brown", so I had to tile red and yellow together so it looks orange from a distance. Oh how computers have progressed since then.

At this point I loved computers but I literally didn't even know what programming was. I had never heard of the internet. I didn't even get a taste of programming until high school.

In 1999 I was in college but still largely ignorant of programming. I decided to start my first website, which was about the NES Final Fantasy that I still liked. I decided to put some sprites on the site. For the first version I chopped up my old image file from above into individual sprite files, but the quality of these was terrible.

So the way I got good sprites was by taking screen-captures of the game in an NES emulator, then in Paint Shop Pro I cropped out the backgrounds. This was much faster than hand-drawing, but it still took months.

This is an example of using a thousand-dollar piece of equipment as a hammer to pound in a nail. It's the most rudimentary form of computer use. It's the kind of thing I cringe at when I see coworkers do it today.

After

Last weekend, many years older and hopefully a tiny bit wiser, I pulled out my copy of the most recent remake of FF1, for the PSP. I decided it'd be cool if I could rip some sprites from this.

So, first I got an ISO of the game and mounted it loopback so I could view the files. In the ISO there's a 100MB BPK file. I didn't know what this is so I opened it in a hex editor and saw that it was some kind of archive. You could clearly see an initial list of filenames with byte offsets and some other flags for each, then a bunch of binary data.

A few google searches later and I found this where someone else had the same idea as I did. There's an extraction script there in some language I don't know, but it wasn't hard to figure out what it was doing.

So then I was going to write a script to extract the BPK but thankfully someone in Japan already did which saved me the trouble of even doing that. Some of the extracted files were themselves archives, but after running the script on its own output a few times I had a bunch of GIM files.

What's a GIM file? Never heard of it. But a quick google search for "GIM to BMP" will net you a program called gimconv. Sadly it's Windows-only, but a batch file or two later and I had a bunch of BMPs like this:

These files have solid backgrounds, but I want transparent backgrounds. But it isn't hard to make an image's background transparent in Linux using ImageMagick and its nice documentation. One snag is that all the images have different background colors, but I can tell ImageMagick to use the color of the top-left pixel as the transparency color:

for f in *.bmp; do convert -matte -fill none -draw 'color 0,0 replace' $f ${f/bmp/png}; done

Some of these images look like sprite sheets. So let's pick one, chop the sprites into individual files, then make an animated .gif from these sprites (while also adding a transparent border around it).

convert KURO.png -crop 32x32 +repage KURO%d.gif
convert -matte -bordercolor none -border 28 -compose Copy KURO?.gif -delay 25 -dispose Background KURO.gif

Giving us:

So after a matter of 2-3 hours (most of which was puzzling over some hex data and then googling around), I am already pretty much done. Barely any skill on my part required other than knowing what to look for.

The moral of this story is:

The internet is awesome. It's easy to forget how much better life is with so much knowledge at our fingertips. I can't even remember what it was like without the internet and I'd never want to go back to that.
Learning is fun. What was a year-long job became a few-minutes job with even a rudimentary knowledge of scripting.
ImageMagick is pretty handy.
Old school games are great. FF1 is still fun after 20 years. They keep re-making it for new systems for a good reason.
I got a late start in programming. I wish I would've started at a younger age. Think of how much more I could've accomplished with my time. I'm still playing catch-up in many ways.
Sitting here in front of 3840x1200 pixels worth of million-color monitor screen, typing a story people are going to read in a few minutes in countries I'll never visit, ripping sprites from a portable game device that's probably thousands of times faster than my old NES, I can't even imagine what we're going to be doing with computers in another 15 years.

Way to go, Arch

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:38:23 -0700

KDE 4.3 is available in Arch already. If the Arch MB is to be believed, it was available for install a few hours before KDE even announced it. Good job Arch devs. Arch seems to have pretty fast turnaround on new packages.

The stable release of KDE 4.3 is looking good too. I wiped my KDE profile because I think I've been running the same one since KDE 3.1 and the cruft was becoming noticeable. That helped resolve a lot of things (I can add widgets to the main panel without crashing things now).

One thing that has caused me tons of problems historically is CJK input in KDE. In KDE3 Skim worked OK, but I couldn't get it to work in KDE4. Instead there's UIM which so far has been better than Skim in terms of stability and predictability of interface.

As per a comment by knef on a recent post, you can set per-desktop wallpapers now (as in virtual desktops, workspaces, whatever you call them). You have to:

Zoom out (via the cashew)
Hope it doesn't crash
Go into the Plasma options there
Pray it doesn't crash
Enable the setting to make each desktop have its own "activity"
Yeah you probably crashed right here. In the off chance you didn't crash, once you zoom in you can set per-desktop wallpapers now.

Not just wallpapers, but widgets in general. This is kind of good, kind of bad. If you want to go back to a single wallpaper per desktop, you have to go back and screw with activities. Also I don't think you can "sticky" a widget to span all desktops. It's either everything per-desktop or everything global. I'd bet this will change in future versions.

But I read a suggestion somewhere (probably Slashdot) to set up a different Folder View on each desktop, each pointing to a different folder, and that's actually a great idea. You can set kwin to always open Gimp on a certain desktop and have a folder view of your pictures folder underneath, or something.

Kudos KDE devs, KDE is awesome and keeps getting better.

KDE 4.3 Looking Good

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 19:48:25 -0700

I just installed KDE 4.3 and it's looking good. Some features returned that I was missing. You can now once again display applications by name rather than description in the K-menu. You can now enable a nice kcontrol-like tree-view in the System Settings.

Some things are still missing though... like different wallpapers on different desktops. There are "Activities" which can have different wallpapers, but I can't for the life of me figure out how I'm supposed to be using them. I also lag and/or crash every time I Zoom Out in the cashew, possibly thanks to 3840x1200 screen resolution. I'm going to assume Activities are still a work-in-progress.

I was horrified to open Kopete and see that configuring the contact list window now uses the same completely broken configuration dialog that Amarok 2 uses for their playlist. Oh how I hope someone rethinks this.

There's a new Qt and Plasma theme in KDE 4.3 that looks pretty nice. Overall every release of KDE4 seems to become more stable, more polished, more eye-candy (if you want it).

Disabling Ctrl-Alt-Backspace

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 23:44:41 -0700

After being reminded the hard way yet again that C-S-Backspace in Emacs invokes the very handy kill-whole-line function, but that C-M-Backspace, while uncomfortably similar to that key-chord, does something very different, I have now officially added to my /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "ServerFlags"
    Option "DontZap" "True"
EndSection

to prevent me from accidentally murdering my X server at the worst possible times.

Trying Arch

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:52:41 -0700

Thanks to all who gave helpful suggestions about running VMs in Gentoo. The main reason I wanted a VM was to play around with some other distros and see what I liked.

But then I got to thinking, and I realized that I have over 250 GB of free hard drive space sitting around. So I made a new little partition and per Noah's suggestion, threw Arch Linux on there.

I'm fairly impressed so far. The install was easy. In contrast to the enormous Gentoo handbook, the whole Arch install guide fits on one page of the official Arch wiki. Why doesn't Gentoo have an official wiki? I know there are concerns over the quality of something anyone can edit, but in practice is it a big a deal? Is it worth the price of sending users elsewhere, to potentially even WORSE places, when the Gentoo docs don't cover everything we need? The quality of the unofficial Gentoo wiki is often very good but sometimes hit-or-miss, and it also sort of crashes and loses all data without backups every once in a while.

The Arch installer is a commandline app using ncurses for basic menus and such, which is more than sufficient and a good compromise between commandline-only and full-blown X-run Gnome bloat. The install itself went fine, other than my own mistakes. I'm sharing /boot and /home between Gentoo and Arch so I can switch between them easily. During the install Arch tried to create some GRUB files, but they already existed care of Gentoo, so the install bombed without much notification and I didn't notice until 3 steps later. No big deal to fix, but I'd have liked a louder error message right away when it happened. The base install took about 45 minutes.

Another nice thing is that the Arch install CD has vi on it. I didn't have to resort to freaking nano or remember to install vim first thing. A mild annoyance to be sure, but it bugged me every time I installed Gentoo.

After boot, installing apps via pacman is simple enough. KDE 4.2 installed in about 15 minutes, as you'd expect from a distro with binary packages. I found a mirror with 1.5 Mb/sec downloads, which is awfully nice. Syncing the package tree takes less than 2 seconds, which is also nice compared to Portage's 5-minute rsync and eix update times. Searching the tree via regex is also somehow instantaneous in Arch.

Oddly, KDE didn't seem to pull in Xorg as a dependency, but other dependencies worked fine so far. Time will tell how well this all holds up. Most package managers do fine on the normal cases but the real test is the funky little obscure apps. pacman -S gvim resulted in a Vim with working rubydo and perldo, which means Arch passed the Ubuntu stink test.

Another nice thing is that KDE4 actually works. My Gentoo install is years old and possibly crufted beyond repair, or something else was wrong, but I have yet to get KDE4 working in Gentoo without massive breakage. Possibly if I wiped Gentoo and tried KDE4 without legacy KDE3 stuff everywhere it'd also be smooth.

Regardless, it all works in Arch. NVidia drivers and Twinview settings were copy/pasted from Gentoo, and compositing all works fine. No performance problems in KDE with resizing or dragging windows, no Plasma crashes (yet), no missing icons or invisible notification area. QtCurve works in Qt3, Qt4 and GTK just fine. My sound card worked without any manual configuration at all. My mouse worked without tweaking, including the thumb buttons. Same with networking, the install prompted me for my IP and gateway etc. and then it worked, no effort.

I've mentioned before, but one nice thing about Linux is that if you have /home in its own partition, it's no big deal at all to share it between distros. With no effort at all I'm now using all my old files and settings in Arch, and I can switch back and forth between this and Gentoo without any troubles.

So we'll see how this goes. So far so good though. Arch seems very streamlined and its goal is minimalism, which is nice. Gentoo has not felt minimalistic to me in a while. Again, may be due to the age of my install, cruft and bit-rot.

Gentoo VMWare Fail

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:59:55 -0700

According to this bug, VMWare on Gentoo is in a sorry state, with one lone person trying to keep it going. I can't get vmware-modules to compile on my system no matter what I try, which is depressing. Kudos to all of our one-man army Gentoo devs who are keeping various parts of the distro going, but I wonder how many other areas of Gentoo are largely unmaintained nowadays.

KVM was braindead simple to get set up in comparison with VMWare, but I can't get networking to work. This is because I'm an idiot when it comes to TUN/TAP and iptables. I've read wiki articles that suggest setting up my system to NAT-forward traffic into the VM but I couldn't get that working and don't have a lot of time to screw with it.

On one of the Gentoo mailing lists I noticed that a dev has posted some KVM images of Gentoo suitable for testing. But I'm looking to start up an image from scratch and that doesn't help, and it's not going to help me get networking going any easier.

Why do I feel like this'd take 10 minutes to set up on Ubuntu? Look at this, or search for "ubuntu vmware" and see the hundreds of results. Given that it's a VM and it doesn't really matter what the host OS is anyways, I'll probably do that on my laptop, but it's still depressing.

Conky Goodness

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 18:52:59 -0700

I uploaded a new screenshot:

The conky with weather pictures in it is stolen from RAMC's conkyrc which you can find on the Gentoo MB and also apparently here. There's a python script there to fetch and display weather info.

Whoever thought up the idea of making a font that consists of little weather pictures was pretty clever. Whoever thought up making a font that consists of Linux distro emblems has a bit too much time on his hands.

Oddly enough, Unicode itself includes glyphs for weather symbols. e.g. this is Unicode character 2603:

☃

If your font supports it, it should show up as a snowman. If your font doesn't support it, it may show up as an ice cube.

Goodbye, sweet uptime

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:48:06 -0700

I finally had to reboot my Gentoo box today. My uptime as of reboot:

315 days, 54 min

Not spectacular, but not bad for a dust-covered desktop machine, and it probably could've gone another 300 days or so. I only had to reboot because I bought another 500GB hard drive.

Funny thing about rebooting after that long, you have no idea what's going to happen. I finally unmasked and compiled a newer kernel, and there were quite a few new options and features in there to root through. My disk hadn't been fscked for 396 days, and after rebooting and 15 minutes of grinding away, it found a few dozen orphaned inodes. A few init scripts having to do with modules gave me some warnings, but I fixed that up.

But I think I can spare an hour every year or two to update my system.

Uptime

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:29:35 -0800

How about that...

$ uptime
 18:19:53 up 208 days,  2:51,  2 users,  load average: 0.32, 0.16, 0.10

Not bad for my old crappy desktop machine running on the floor in my apartment without any kind of backup power supply or anything. I run it with the case off all the time, and wires and components are spilled out all over the floor. It's a wonder I haven't crashed it yet just by stepping on it.

Every couple months I notice my machine is running slow and look at top and it turns out X or some stray KDE app is using half a GB of RAM or something, so I restart it and I'm back to normal. Takes a long time to get to that point though.

Weird thing is, this doesn't even impress me any longer. I just take it for granted that Linux works.

Meanwhile my Vista machine locks up constantly. How can anyone at Microsoft sleep at night? (Answer: On top of huge piles of ill-gotten money.)

Gentoo still rules

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 18:56:44 -0700

The version of akregator I have always displays article link text in an ugly dark blue, which doesn't show up well against my dark Qt theme. I can barely read an ebuild to save my life, and the KDE ebuilds are full of all kinds of odd KDE-specific stuff, but it still took me just a couple of minutes to:

Find the sources in /usr/portage/distfiles
Cludgily patch akregator to use normal text color for links (underlines still distinguish them)
Copy the akregator ebuild into an overlay, throw the patch in there and add one line to the ebuild to read it
emerge away

Et voil?, custom-patched, package-manager-managed app. Gentoo is pretty good for this kind of thing, whatever its other shortcomings. Does any other distro make it this easy to do such things? (I'm genuinely curious.)

Copy/paste in Linux: Eureka

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:42:53 -0700

It's been a few years since I officially grasped Linux's (well, X Windows') weird concept of copying and pasting, with its multiple discrete copy/paste methods: the highlight + middle click version, and "clipboard" Edit->Copy" + "Edit->Paste version.

But once in a blue moon, copying and pasting in X still surprises me. Try this:

Open Firefox and a text editor. I'm trying with Vim.
Highlight some text in Firefox.
Middle-click paste it into the editor. The highlighted text is pasted, as expected.
Close Firefox.
Middle-click into the editor again.

Can you guess what happens at the end? If you said "Some random text from another application and/or nothing at all is pasted rather than the stuff from Firefox", you're right!

But today I read this article on jwz.org and finally understood how copy/paste works in X. Highlighting text doesn't copy anything, it just announces to the world "If any applications want to middle-click paste something, come ask me for it". So if you close the application you wanted to paste text from before you actually do the pasting, the application isn't around to give you the text you wanted any more, so you can't get it. The Edit->Copy / Edit->Paste version of copy/paste behaves the same way. You can't "Copy", close app, "Paste".

Note, this is different from how MS Windows works. When you copy some text in Windows it really copies to another location. You can close the app and still paste away. But Windows has a different (inconsistent) behavior when copy/pasting files in Explorer. There, it behaves like X in Linux: if right click a file and "Copy", it doesn't actually do anything with the data until you paste. If you right-click, "Copy", delete the file, "Paste", you don't get an error until you try to Paste.

In Vim in Linux, the "* register lets you access the "primary selection" (highlight / middle click selection), and the "+ register lets you access the clipboard.

In Vim in Windows, "* and "+ do the same thing, and use the clipboard.

Interview with a new Linux user

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 21:53:06 -0700

After countless, endless hours of nagging on my part, my girlfriend finally put Linux on her laptop. I thought it would be interesting to hear what a long-time Windows-using non-programmer thinks of Linux (Kubuntu in this case) after a few weeks of use. So I interviewed her. Read on. My thoughts and conclusions are at the end.

Q1: How would you describe your level of expertise or skill level when it comes to computers in general?

A: I think I'm better with computers (at least Windows) than the majority of my classmates (I'm starting third year accounting next week). I know my way around the internet, I'm decent with programs like Office and GIMP, and I know how to fix most problems that affect me as a lay user. As for Linux, I would know how to look for help, but I probably wouldn't understand it yet.

Q2: You used Windows for a long time in spite of my constant pestering. What kept you from using Linux until now?

A: A few years ago you tried to get me to use Gentoo. I was younger, and apparently Linux in general was more difficult to use, so I got frustrated pretty quickly. A lot of my reluctance was from remembering that time. I was also worried that I might do something wrong and lose all my schoolwork. At least in Windows I know it wouldn't be directly my fault if that happened (disregarding the fact that I'm slow at backing things up).

Q3: You decided to use Kubuntu. Why did you pick that distro instead of another?

A: I heard it was easy for Windows users to pick up. It's also the one you have on your laptop, so it's easier to get tech support.

Q4: Why did you pick KDE instead of Gnome, XFCE, or some other desktop environment / window manager?

A: I don't remember. Something about having multiple wallpapers on multiple desktops and being able to make them change randomly whenever I want. There might've been other reasons, but that one is the most enjoyable so far.

Q5: How hard was it to install Linux? Compared to Windows?

A: It was about the same.

Q6: How hard was getting everything set up the way you like it after Linux was installed? How long did it take you?

A: There's always a lot to set up on a clean install of anything. It took me a few days to find something I'm comfortable with. I mostly just ripped off your setup because I liked it, though, so that made it a bit easier. Getting SKIM to work was quite difficult, though, since I couldn't find good instructions for my version of Kubuntu (or Kubuntu at all, really). I think I just ended up making you fix it.

Q7: Does Linux have any features or applications you really enjoy, that Windows is missing? Can you do anything in Linux that you couldn't do (easily) in Windows?

A: Even just doing a small amount of image editing yesterday, I'm beginning to see the appeal of multiple desktops. I also like how easily it's detected various wireless networks so far. The package manager is pretty nice too. I wouldn't have a Gmail checker if you didn't write one for me, but the one you wrote is better than the one I was using before.

Q8: Do you miss anything from Windows? Is there anything you could do in Windows that you can't do (easily) in Linux?

A: It's easier to install programs in Windows than it is to install non-package programs in Linux. I still don't know the difference between a source and a binary. I don't miss playing games too much, since I'm more of a console person. But I do miss OtaClock. The default clock is boring and not cute at all.

Q9: How comfortable are you with using a command prompt?

A: Not very. I know how to chmod things, but that's about it. I need to look for a guide for basic bash commands that explains them in plain English.

Q10: How do you like the general look and feel of the Linux desktop compared to Windows?

A: It's a lot nicer looking overall. I like being able to use all the Buuf icons easily. At first I was resistant to using anti-aliased font, but it's growing on me. Windows displayed aliased fonts so nicely, and I still kind of miss it.

Q11: You have a dual-boot set up. What do you still plan to use Windows for?

A: I have a couple games that don't work in Linux. I also use my laptop for school, and my university is dominated by Windows, so I feel comfortable having it around for compatibility purposes if I ever need it.

Q12: It's been a few weeks since you switched to Linux. How has it been overall? Do you plan to stick with it long-term?

A: Overall it's been about the same as Windows. Something about Vista still creeps me out, so it feels good using an OS that doesn't feel evil. I like being able to get pretty much any program I want free and on demand.

Here are some Linux programs I know you've used... tell me something you like and something you dislike about each one.

Dolphin It's minimalistic, but it doesn't have the view options I like.
Konqueror I can get all the info on a file that I need just by mousing over it. It took me a while to figure out how to both display thumbnails and then sort them by size or date, though. I'm quite obsessive about collecting and sorting pictures, and in Windows that was how I used to see which pictures were new or duplicates.
Gwenview It finds duplicate pictures for me, making the above method obsolete. It even finds similar pictures, which is pretty intersting. So far I can't think of anything I don't like about it.
Amarok Win-B is my friend. There's too many unnecessary features for me, though. I don't care about album art or smart playlists. It's good that I can just ignore them.
Kopete It has custom themes. I really like the Metal Gear theme you made. For some reason I can't figure out how to make our text different colours, though. The text is different for my friends who use the real MSN, but for you it's the same colour is mine, so it's harder for me to read.
Kate It's like tabbed Notepad. I'm one of those people who actually likes Notepad, since I don't do much coding at all. I can see where Vim is better, but Kate is fine too.
KDE as a whole When it's set up properly, it looks really nice. The amount of stuff I needed to change to get it to look nice was quite overwhelming, though.

Thoughts and conclusions: I used to try to push Gentoo on people, and that was a mistake. Gentoo isn't for everyone. A bad experience can kill people's opinions of Linux.

It's a lot easier to make a big switch to a new operating system when you have knowledgeable people to back you up and help you out. This is one area where Linux shines: There are a LOT of people willing to help newbies. The community aspect of Linux is by far one of the best parts of using it. We're all doing this because it's fun and Linux people like to share the fun with others.

Is Linux ready for the desktop? I think so; I think it has been for a while now. A Windows power-user can find a lot to like in Linux. There are a lot of features and apps in modern desktop Linux that offer a lot of things many people would find very appealing if they only knew they existed.

KDE 4.1

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:29:17 -0700

I've been avoiding KDE4 for a while. But yesterday I threw KDE4 onto my laptop, because it runs Kubuntu and I don't really care if my laptop breaks.

When I first tried installing it, I accidentally got KDE 4.0 somehow. That version was massively incomplete. After I upgraded to 4.1 it was very apparent how much more work went into KDE between the 4.0 and 4.1 release.

Regardless, looking at 4.1, I know I'm echoing what a lot of others have already said, but I agree: KDE4 is nice, but it's nowhere near KDE3 quality yet, and nowhere near complete. Some issues:

The default theme is usable but bland. It's far better than some of the garish, loud, cartoony default themes KDE has had in past versions, at least. But it doesn't have a lot of life to it.
Most icons are missing or broken (showing up as "?"). This is probably due to KDE being packaged improperly for Kubuntu, or something choking during my install, but regardless, it's annoying. Given the behemoth size of KDE, I expect there will be a lot of this kind of problem for a long time. Who knows when KDE4 will be stable in Gentoo, for example. One good thing about KDE3 is that a lot of these little bugs have been worked out already.
Kickoff, the KDE launcher menu replacement, is no fun at all. There's way too much wasted space and you have to mouseover and click a million times to open anything. Same with the new-style control panel. You have the option of switching back to the old-style menu, which is a good thing.

There are a lot of funky compiz-like animations that you can enable. Transparency, desaturating or tinting or dimming windows, and fading / exploding / zooming window animations etc. At this point, given Compiz and OS X and Vista which have mostly the same things and have been out for a while, these features are nothing new or mind-blowing, but it's nice to have them built into KDE if you like that kind of thing.
Dolphin in KDE4 has some nice new features that my KDE3 version is missing, like a split-column view, and the ability to show thumbnail previews in more situations.
The panel configuration window is gone, replaced with a neat graphical WYSIWYG kind of thing. You drag the panel edges to resize it, and click some buttons to alter the justification (right, center, left). It's nice, but after playing around a bit, when I tried to resize my panel to be 100% of the width of the screen, I had a lot of trouble; I had a pixel or two between the panel and the edge of the window. That's the problem with WYSIWYG: it's not as precise or fast as just typing "100%" into a text field.

Many KDE apps aren't ported to QT4 yet, apparently. This introduces YET ANOTHER look-and-feel for Linux. Now I have to find a GTK2 theme, a QT3 theme and a QT4 theme. There are a few unified themes (qtcurve for example) that work for all three and look essentially the same, but there are only a few and the choices are limited.
With animations disabled, when I open a menu I get a second of garbage as my video card freaks out trying to render it, before the menu appears. I can't imagine what the problem is there. KDE3 never does that on the same computer.
Confusingly, deleting an icon from the desktop doesn't delete the file, it just removes the icon. Then I made a "folder view", which is a desktop applet that displays icons for an arbitrary folder, optionally filtering the folder by name. It's a neat idea. I'm unsure it's neat enough to replace the whole concept of a desktop full of files. Regardless, when I made one, it overlapped all the icons on my desktop to the point where I couldn't get it sorted out and had to remove it. What's the difference between icons directly on my desktop, and icons in a Folder View? It's very confusing to me, a long-time KDE user, so it's probably confusing to mostly everyone.
The version of KDM that comes with KDE4 looks nice, but also crashes randomly.

However, my biggest problem with KDE4 is how sluggish it feels on my laptop. KDE3 runs very smoothly, but KDE4 lags left and right, when resizing windows, opening popup menus, clicking icons to open applications, or doing much of anything. It may be I need to upgrade my video card driver (I'm not sure if mine is properly hardware-accelerated), but should I really NEED to, just to run a window manager? KDE was never what you might call "lightweight" but it seems to be even further from that ideal now.

It'll be a while before I switch from KDE3 to KDE4 on my main workstation. It looks promising and there's clearly tons of potential. But it wouldn't be my first choice of environment for getting work done at the moment.