Yet Another Computer Blog

Gnome: Just one more update

2011-09-02T18:59:00.001+01:00

Yep, I'm back again already. It turns out I made one little mistake when complaining about Gnome 3 Fallback.

You know I said there was no way to customise the panel, because the right-click menu for adding applets had gone?
Well, it does exist - it's just not discoverable. You have to hold Alt and click on the panel, or something along those lines.
But in discovering this, I've found something else - panel applets are now aligned as left, right or center - and you don't get to choose which.
Hmm. An undiscoverable means of customising the panel, and less choices for the applets? Seems to me like I just reported one bit of good news and two bits of bad.

I'm trialling Mate, the Gnome 2 fork, though. While there are a few bugs still in it, and the project is definitely in need of helping hands in nearly all forms, it does provide what it says it does; a fork of Gnome 2 that is functional. I hope someday through a community effort it reaches the point of becoming a well-maintained alternative to those who dislike Gnome 3 and Shell, like those who favour KDE 3.5 over 4.x still.
If you like what the Mate project is doing, help out - at the time of writing this, as far as I can tell it's a project with only one person involved. Help out, help de-bug Mate and bring Gnome 2 back to the masses.
And who knows, maybe, just maybe Mate will surpass Gnome 3/Shell for the point of one of the most used desktops, and people will talk about KDE, XFCE and Mate instead of KDE, XFCE and Gnome.

Gnome: A quick update

2011-09-01T14:42:00.001+01:00

Recently discovered. For those of you who want Gnome2 back, this is the fork project I'm aware of - the Mate Desktop Environment, with it's homepage here:
http://matsusoft.com.ar/redmine/projects/mate

And if you want to download it, read this page:
http://matsusoft.com.ar/redmine/projects/mate/wiki/Download_Mate

Archlinux has packages in the AUR and a custom repo already, so people who want Gnome2 back on Arch can go grab it right away!

Gnomes and Themes

2011-09-01T14:29:00.001+01:00

Some time back I trialled the Gnome Shell. To say the least, my views on it were not complimentary.
However, since Arch Linux has become my new current distro and it has Gnome 3 and by extension Shell in the repositories in favour of Gnome 2, and because this is a different system entirely from the one I originally trialled the Shell on, I thought maybe it was time to give it a second chance.
I thought that maybe since it had become a production and stable release of Gnome, there had to be some improvements, right?
Well, I'll concede the 'some' point of it. Improvement... that's questionable.

Let's start with Pulseaudio, now apparently a requirement for Gnome. Many, if not most distros, have told us this is so for a while now, but Arch had made it clear that it was optional in Gnome 2, but required for Gnome 3.
I do not like Pulseaudio. Perhaps it's just me, but sound quality seems to be lost, all sounds have a lag between when they're meant to happen and when you hear them, and I've always found it hogs system resources. What can it offer me that I'm going to use, and that ALSA can't handle? Nothing at all. ALSA has served me well and never once given me any trouble.
But this can be solved by installing 'gnome-settings-daemon-nopulse' from the AUR, which, as the name suggests, removes the Pulseaudio dependency. True, this also breaks the Gnome Shell's volume control, but I don't see that as any great loss - I never used any applets to control my volume anyway, since I have buttons on my keyboard that are set up to handle it already.
Next we have the Shell itself. With the addition of the Gnome Tweak Tool to ease some of the settings that should really have been made available with the Shell, and not as a separate package, it becomes slightly more usable. Since my original trial of it, improvements have been made to the performance of the Shell, and it runs much smoother than it did back then. However, I cannot change the panels, I have no way to edit the menu, no way to edit what gets shown where - I'm almost completely stuck with the basic layout and settings that Gnome has decided for me.
This is not good. This suggests a very Mac-like 'You will do it our way, you will never need to do it any other way' kind of philosophy which I detest. Don't hide options from your users - give them the choice. Don't hide it away in separate applications. Gnome 2 made nearly all of it's customization through the Gnome Appearance Properties, which came with Gnome Control Centre and was a requirement on almost every Gnome install I ever did. Shell does not offer the same.
Furthermore, the Shell is not intuitive, not helpful and is far from good at removing the clutter and such that it claims to, in fact making it far more difficult to use my computer than anything else I've ever run on here. And I've tried a lot of Window Managers of late. The Shell does not even merit consideration for inclusion in the top choices, let alone the secondary fall-back choices.
And lastly, we have GTK3.
GTK2 themes could be applied by almost any application. LXAppearance was perfect for handling it when not running Gnome. You didn't even need that sometimes, just create yourself a file in the right place with the right settings in, and it'll get picked up by all GTK2 apps that run after that.
But GTK3 doesn't do it like that. GTK3 settings, it seems, can only be applied by Gnome Tweak Tool, and only picked up on by any GTK3 apps if the Gnome Settings Daemon is running to tell them so. Without it, no GTK3 themes get applied or even noticed. They won't inherit a GTK2 theme, but they'll inherit the mouse and icon themes. So if you don't run Gnome or it's overweight Settings Daemon in whatever WM or DE you're running that isn't Gnome, they'll be with that all-too familiar blocky, ugly grey. And no amount of tweaking will change that.

Now, it's known that you can, once more through the Gnome Tweak Tool, force your session to default to 'fallback' mode. Which is meant to be Gnome Classic, or Gnome 2.
Oh, no it isn't.
You can't customize the panels for a start. No more panel applets for Gnome, just what they give you, again with the Mac-like philosophy of our way or no way. Once more, the Pulseaudio raised it's head, but as before, the keyboard keys offered salvation.
Like the Shell, you have to use the Gnome Tweak Tool to set the GTK theme and such. Why is this not included by default with Gnome? Do not want your users to be able to customize what it looks like? What is this, emulate Windows with it's one panel only, no icon theme changes without too much work, just the mouse, desktop wallpaper and very minimal changes even in Winodws 7?
Gnome is removing far too much choice from it's DE like this, removing too many things that made it such a widely liked DE on Gnome 2. I applaud the efforts of those who are taking a leaf from the KDE Trinity project, which forked KDE 3.5, and are forking Gnome 2 so those who truly want it back instead of the cheap rip-off that Fallback is can still use it. As soon as packages are made for Arch Linux, I will waste no time in getting them.
Give me Good Old Gnome 2 and GTK2 any day. Gnome Shell, Gnome 3 and GTK3 are just monsters that but for those who for whatever unfathomable reason like them, we would be better off without by a considerable deal. I maintain that they along with Ubuntu Unity are the biggest disgraces ever to be called a desktop.

Moving off again

2011-08-18T17:20:00.001+01:00

As so often happens with any box, little niggles crop up, gremlins find their way in and leave bugs strewn all over the system. We try our best to oust these pests, but sometimes they win.

This is such a case. Gentoo has it's good points, no one can deny that. The USE flags allow for instant removing or adding of functionality, compile-time optimizations result in a snappier system - but as time's gone past, I've found that it starts to become difficult to maintain.
So though it has served me well, and as always I've learned a great deal, I feel it's time I moved off it and began the search for a new distro candidate once more.

Some time back, I would have defaulted back to Ubuntu for a time until I found another one that caught my interest. However, with what I see as the stupid choices to go with Gnome 3, Gnome Shell and Ubuntu Unity, three of the biggest unmitigated failures I've ever seen disgrace a desktop, this is no longer an option. And that's not to mention the simple fact that I dislike Canonical's habit of hiding away things to make things easier for the users.

On Gentoo as it is right now, I've gone and nicked parts of Crunchbang to give me a nice Openbox desktop, and I like the minimal yet functional set up it gives me. Conky delivers what I want to know easily and tint2 provides a nice panel which neatly integrates running apps, the systray and a built-in battery monitor.
But the issue with Crunchbang is that they only offer torrent downloads, which are not a favourable method of downloading anything on my home network for many reasons.
Most of what it offers is easily obtainable in any distribution though, if one takes care to examine their wiki to obtain various config files.

Crunchbang is based on Debian, one of the oldest and most venerable distros out there. There's little it hasn't tried to do, and even less it's failed at. A great many distributions can be traced back to it eventually, though most through Ubuntu.
Debian is also an old friend to me, and somewhat of a frequent curiosity. Within it's vast repositories of packages lies nearly everything and anything one could ask for, and unlike Ubuntu it doesn't seem to want, need, or care much for third-party repositories. Certainly they exist, but seldom have I found reason to use more than a few.
But one of the most attractive features about Debian as I've discovered time and again is that it remains stable - nearly always with complete disregard to whatever you may be trying to do.

So where Ubuntu has made bad choices in desktops, and K/X/Lubuntu hardly seem to be much better most of the time, Debian takes over. Until I find another Distro out there that piques my curiosity, it's time for me to move back to the tried and tested, and get a stable system that doesn't take forever to set up and get configured.

If you have any non-Ubuntu based suggestions for other Distros to try, do feel free to suggest them.

Until next time folks.

Mix it up or stick to one?

2011-08-06T10:24:00.001+01:00

Obviously, I'm on about desktops again. This time it's not anything specific as such though.
One of the best points I've always held about Linux is that immense amount of choices you have - this Window Manager over that one, the text editor from there instead of there, and so on.
It could be said that in places there is too much choice, and that the overwhelming number tends to be, well, overwhelming. But that's a topic for another time.

Like anyone else, I like thing to work my way. This means that while I'm now running a KDE4 desktop - which hasn't managed to disappoint me yet, a fair feat given past experience with this troublesome DE - not all my apps are KDE, or even QT based.
For example, while I'm running KWin as the window manager, the effects don't seem to want to stay on, even if all I want is the compositing. And of course, even if I can get that to work, the moment I start to use Portage, it disables them again because the compiling uses too much resources.
Compare this to Metacity with it's own built in compositor. It only disables itself if you tell it to, and doesn't get in the way at all. On the other hand, there's no standalone application to set the window border without pulling in a lot of Gnome.
Now, while KDE offers the option to use another Window Manager instead of KWin, besides having to remember how to set themes for that Window Manager, it also isn't going to integrate well.
The solution? I'm running KWin, with effects disabled and using 'xcompmgr' to give me Metacity-like compositing that doesn't turn itself off, though I have a handy plasmoid that looks like a little switch. Turning it on starts up xcompmgr, and turning it off kills it. There's a similar plasmoid available on kde-look.org that does this for KWin's own, but this one can be customized to do anything really.
Problem solved.

The programs I use also tend to be similar. Chromium is a GTK+ based application, as is GEdit, but both of them have a few things about them that I like and want to keep.
Konqueror has, rather impressively, managed to overcome both Chromium and Firefox as the default web browser (and file manager too, an invaluable feature for me) but I keep Chromium around because sometimes it does have it's little issues.
Similarly, while Kate and KWrite are decent applications too and also have their good points, GEdit is a long time friend of mine - it's familiar, I know it, and I know how to make it do what I want.

Some people say this is wrong, and one should stick to apps from one single toolkit, but with GTK+, QT, and ETK (Enlightenment, in case you're wondering) not to mention any other toolkits I've not noticed and of course anything running through Wine, you're never going to be able to get one single unified toolkit. There'll always be people who like applications for one toolkit, while running a desktop for another.
So in short, don't feel that because you're running one desktop, you can't choose applications from another toolkit. They may not look right, and sometimes they may need a little work to make them play nice. My workaround to compositing proves that.
But never be put off doing it - mix things up, go with what you want regardless of what others suggest.

In slightly unrelated news, has anyone ever managed to get KDE 4.7.x to emerge successfully on Gentoo? It doesn't seem to want to play nice with me. Not that I have any problems with the 4.6.5 I've got now, except a periodically segfaulting Konqueror, but I feel like giving it a try.

Right, that's all. Keep rocking, people.

When giving it a Bash just doesn't cut it

2011-07-22T20:19:00.001+01:00

Or what's in a Shell?
Bash is pretty much the de facto standard shell everyone sees whenever they open up a terminal. I can't say for BSD, Solaris or Mac systems, but on every Linux based system I've ever used, and even on Cygwin/MinGW on Windows, the Bash shell is the default.

Bash has and still does serve many people well. It's extendible with the bash-completion options, adding lines to the right files it sources can be quite powerful. Even the prompt itself can be customised a great deal.
But there comes a time for nearly every app on any system where the user will inevitably ask that question: 'Is there anything better out there?'

Of course 'better' is a matter of perspective. Some say KDE is better than Gnome. Some say the spartan desktops provided by just a simple tiling window manager are better than a fully fledge desktop session.
But the only real way to tell if something is better in your own opinion is of course to try it yourself.

Now, the Bash shell is something that like many people I rarely actually think about. I think in terms of the terminal itself - right on the console with no X session, within Terminator or a Gnome Terminal, maybe even xterm when all else fails for whatever reason. But essentially all they are is a way to give you your selected Shell - Bash.
Over time though, and through periodic trawls through package listings when bored, I keep noticing other shells. ksh, dash and zsh to name but a few.

Zsh is the only alternative I've tried yet, and after a little experimenting with it, its quickly become the default shell for me. I find it's even more powerful than Bash, without losing any functionality at all. The completion in Zsh can be autoloaded and is much better than in Bash.
Small annoyances such as forgetting to type 'cd' when moving around directories are easily resolved with a simple command. Type a directory, and it can be told to act as if you'd prepended it with 'cd'.
Often find yourself mistakenly typing suod instead of sudo, or other such similar mistakes? There's a little command that'll make zsh prompt and ask if you want it to auto-correct it for you.

There are two caveats though.
Firstly, if zsh can't find and .zshrc in your home folder, it'll assume you've never run it and go through a sometimes bemusing first-run wizard. Which is useful in it's way, but you're better of creating the file yourself and running around the Internet looking at the great many guides and pages on it - or of course, read the man pages on it. I'm not going to list all the pages here, but two that you should definitely look at are the Arch Linux wiki page, and the Gentoo Wiki page (Note that the latter is not linked to from gentoo.org - go to en.gentoo-wiki.org instead)
And Secondly, it doesn't always act the same way as Bash. For example, Home and End do not move to the start or end of the line you're entering. I've yet to find a fix for this, but it's only a minor annoyance for now.

These are just my initial impressions of it. I've barely been using it for an hour, but it's impressed me, and I'm sticking with it for now. As for you, as said earlier - the only way you'll be able to tell if it's better for you is to try it yourself.

That's all from me. Keep on rocking, people.

Office Suites

2011-07-20T12:17:00.001+01:00

One of the main reasons I like Linux distros over Windows is because of how much software they come with out of the box - or at least, easily available. No hunting around for things, just ask the package manager.

But even the package managers have to admit defeat sometimes, and it seems that alternative Office Suites are one of those areas.
As far as I can tell, there are four main options: OpenOffice, LibreOffice, GOffice and KOffice.
The first two are well known enough. Both have pretty good track records, though OO.o may soon be heading away from that thanks to Apache.
GOffice isn't so much a suite as it is a collection of apps that give you most of it, but the down-side is that Abiword and Gnumeric can't always open documents not saved in their own formats - and the OpenDocument formats Libre/OpenOffice uses are the biggest casualty here, as I've yet to make them open one without getting a stream of garbage data.
KOffice on the other hand is a fair competitor to Open and Libre, and as its name suggests is designed to work with KDE. Which kind of makes it not so helpful for those of us who don't run KDE, or want to pull in half the dependencies just to work on our documents.

However, since my Gentoo install has begun to throw up unusual errors when trying to run LibreOffice, errors that refuse to be solved by rebuilding, removing all trace from the home directory and even starting on a fresh user, I'm at a bit of a loss. KOffice seems like overkill for a Gnome-based and mostly lightweight desktop, and as OpenOffice is doing the same as LibreOffice, it too is counted out.
GOffice as mentioned has trouble with the OpenDocument formats, which most of my work is, rather inconveniently, saved in.
This leaves me with a bit of a dilemma, since no one seems to be able to give even the slightest hint on the LIbreOffice errors (if you're curious, look here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/gentoo-87/libreoffice-exits-immediately-after-starting-890419/) I can't work on my work.
For now I've got a temporary stop-gap measure by using the Windows LibreOffice through Wine, but it's far from perfect.
So does anyone happen to know of any LibreOffice-compatibile word processing apps out there?

USE flags and Updates

2011-07-01T20:56:00.001+01:00

For once, something that at first seems like a regular annoyance has turned out to be an interesting habit.

I had originally decided not to customise the USE flags on my Gentoo install too much, preferring instead to modify them only where I felt necessary. After a bit of a delve into the details though, I've decided the reverse is true.

It's quite an interesting ability, being able to disable or enable support for something so easily, rather than having to dig into the configure-time details to see if things can be changed thus.

What's more, where I used to think I'd chafe at the time spent compiling periodic updates, I've found that properly set up, Gentoo is quite happy to update, or rebuild a large number of packages with new use flags or even both, without getting in the way too much. Maybe updates do take a little longer, but with the massive flexibility given, it's well worth it.

The only complaint I have is that there's no easy way to figure out what packages aren't needed any longer - you know the kind, they were pulled in as a dependency, but aren't needed any more? I used to regularly tidy up the system of such packages, but I can't seem to find any easy way to do that on Gentoo. At least not yet.

But overall... I don't think I'm going to be leaving the comfort of Gentoo anytime soon.

Gentoo: AKA Time Well Spent

2011-06-04T22:37:00.001+01:00

Eight days ago, I started installing Gentoo Linux on my laptop.
Three days later, I had a working Gnome Desktop.

And now, after much patience, it's finished. Who'd have thought I'd finally get around to doing this?
Not me, if you'd asked me when I first understood what Gentoo was about.

There's still the odd little thing now and then, but they're now restricted to my making spelling error when trying to use Portage. The graphic frontends aren't entirely perfect, but they're good at what they do, and I'm getting to grips with how the whole thing works.
I've even managed to get some apps working that never worked for me before.

The biggest bother for me though is lib* updates - more often than not, this results in a lot of packages that depended on the old version needing to be rebuilt - but with the handy command of 'revdep-rebuild', even this is no problem.

I like Gentoo. It's a bit of a hassle to get up and running, especially if you're a stranger to configuring your own kernel (Which I cheat on and use genkernel with a few tweaks), but in the end I think it's worth it.

Not one for those without much patience though, that's for sure - especially if you decide to compile Firefox, Xulrunner, Wine or LibreOffice from source. These do take time. LibreOffice's ebuild helpfully says that it could take 'up to a day' depending on system speed. I found this to be a little inaccurate, taking this laptop a little over six hours - but even so, this is a bit of a wait.

Right, I'm done for now. Expect Gentoo-related posts whenever I remember I have a blog again unless something manages to push me off it. Which isn't likely.
Rock on.

From Gentoo

2011-06-01T17:33:00.000+01:00

That's right, Gentoo. After only a few issues with getting the graphics card and wireless to play nicely, I have a functional Gnome desktop running on Gentoo.
I've been after something like this for a long time.

The problem now remains that since I chose to emerge gnome-light instead of the full Gnome suite, I have to fetch all the other bits and pieces I want, copy all kinds of things from my Sabayon home folder, and generally finish setting it up the way I want.

But the point is, it works.
And now I'm going to see how long it takes for me to break something.

This will probably be until I change USE flags, or add any more testing packages. Firefox 4 is one of them, but emerged after only a few minor issues.

Oh. And I have to get used to Portage. This could take me a bit longer. So I'm going to see what graphic Portage frontends there are and use one to give me a hand in this area.

That's all for now.

A change or two

2011-05-27T14:52:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since I last updated this, with good reason - too much has been changing.

So far, I've ditched Arch Linux because of issues with KDE and power management, ditched KDE in general (again) because as usual, I just can't seem to get on with it, and picked up both Sabayon and Gnome (again).

And now I'm headed from Sabayon to Gentoo.
Normally when I've tried Gentoo, I end up giving up before I even see a usable X session or desktop.
Over time, the reasons for this have been anything from a failed kernel config (I don't care what they say, it most definitely is NOT easy) to missing drivers or a lack of patience.
However, I'm putting all that aside and giving it another go.
And I'm using genkernel because I'm not going to muck about trying to build my own kernel.

Gentoo is often reported as having the most flexibility of all, quite probably because everything gets compiled (unless you opt for the -bin packages) with your choice of compiler and USE flags.

In deciding to use genkernel instead of tinkering, I've already taken one part of that flexibility and high-optimisation out of my soon-to-be (hopefully) install. In deciding not to alter any USE flags, I've removed another.
Why? Because my desktop, window manager and default apps change so much, that there isn't much point in tailoring everything for a GNOME session, then deciding I want to try KDE again and having to recompile many packages to give them KDE/QT support again. So I'm opting for wide-scale compatibility and as few rebuilds as I need.

So far, I have my typically vague plan of what I intend to end up with out of it.
In this case, it'll be a GNOME session, with GDM to login, Chromium as the browser, LibreOffice and Dropbox around, and WICD for the network management. And that's all. The rest will come as and when I get to it.
In theory, this shouldn't give me any trouble.
However, such theories generally don't translate to practice very well when dealing with me and Gentoo.
So with any luck, the next post here will come from a working Gentoo system, or be complaining about whatever put me off it this time.

Incidentally, has anyone ever managed to get the blogtk application to work with Blogger? It'd be nice to have a desktop app for posting these things - one that works, for a change.

Rock on, people.

HAL - I can't let you do that

2010-10-29T23:59:00.000+01:00

Linux users know what HAL is, or should.
It's what lets you plug something in and have it ready to go without breaking everything, or needing you to reboot a la Windows.
X.org recently had support added for Input Hotplugging by Udev, which makes HAL rather redundant.

Unfortunately, a great many things still rely on HAL, and for someone trying to make a HAL-less system like me, this is inconvenient.
Now, since re-writing the source code of every HAL-dependent package I wanted to use would take a long time, not to mention requiring experience on my part that I don't have, I opted for a different approach to it.
Arch Linux's system for creating packages makes this simple, so with a copy of the PKGBUILD for HAL, and a few alterations to it, fakehal was born.
It's an empty package, which is designed to replace the HAL package, but provide and depend on nothing.
This has probably produced a highly unstable result, and I wouldn't be surprised to find a great many HAL-dependent packages don't work without it - but finding them and finding out if things can work with a fake HAL installed is part of the experiment.

I've uploaded the package to the Arch User Repository by now, which I'm guessing is most likely how you ended up here. If you want to give it a shot, go ahead and install it. Comments, suggestions, etc, just leave them in the comments or drop me a mail. I think I left my email around here somewhere.

Open, Free - what's the difference?

2010-10-21T03:01:00.000+01:00

Apparently a great deal, in the eyes of Oracle and the OpenOffice team.
It seems the OpenOffice team - now the LibreOffice team - have had some kind of falling out, and the resulting schism means that if you'd like to best of OpenOffice, you'll want to move to LibreOffice.

Most users can find a download for it at their download page:
http://www.documentfoundation.org/download/

Linux users won't always have their distro catered to, but this is a common occurance. In due time, it should be as widely available as the older OpenOffice was.
So we won't talk about that.

What we'll talk about is the differences, specifically in the naming.
Naturally, OpenOffice is now LibreOffice. This brings other side-effects though. The binary name is no longer soffice, but libreoffice - make note, those of you who use custom menus. You'll need to update them.
This also means that users of Cairo-Dock (and potentially other docks) will need to alter their launcher.
Now, for other docks you may have to do a little figuring out, but for Cairo-Dock, here's how to alter an OpenOffice Writer launcher to serve the same purpose with the new suite.

Grab your launcher settings, and set the command to launch to this:
libreoffice -writer
If you'd prefer it to launch without starting Writer, Calc or any other, simply remove '-writer', or change it to the part of your choice.

Now, while your Launcher will work in this state, if you open a document, you'll find that it won't use the launcher as it's Icon (if you have that option turned on). To fix this, open the 'Extra parameters' part of the launcher properties, and look for the part labelled 'Class of the program'. Change this to 'libreoffice' and watch as your documents all move to the launcher.

While this change may be small, it's an interesting one. I'm interested to see what's coming next for the newly rebranded LibreOffice.

Firefox Collections

2010-10-08T22:14:00.000+01:00

Following on from my previous post, Yet Another Computer Blog now has it's own official collection, which you can find here.

This collection is so far made from my own list of addons, but in time will be influenced by readers and comments made about it.
I've made some more discoveries since the last post as well, in particular ones giving me a rather Chrome-like experience.

Now, for the hardcore, there's the Chromifox themes and extensions which bring the entire Chrome look to Firefox, but what if you like your Firefox theme or persona? Fear not, we have the answer.

Firstly, you'll need only two addons.
Tabs On Top - Does exactly what it says, moves the tab bar to the top of the window.
Hide Caption Titlebar Plus (Smart) - This lets you remove the window manager decorations, cutting it down to just Firefox, and adding it's own controls for minimize, maximise and close.

Optional extras:
Tab Wheel Scroll - This lets you change tabs with the mouse wheel just like Chrome.
App Tabs - More from ChromeOS than Chrome itself. Have a tab set aside for web-apps, like GMail.
Download Statusbar - Chrome pretty much has this built into it.
Locationbar^2 - Chrome highlights the domain name, and this replicates it.
Smart Stop/Reload - Combines the two into one intelligent button that shows the most appropriate one.

And that's pretty much it. Experiment with the configuration a bit, and you can get quite close to Chrome.
There are probably other addons that can make Firefox even more Chrome-like without sacrificing your theme/Persona, so if you find a working combo, please go ahead and suggest it!

Hybrid - a horror or not?

2010-10-04T14:50:00.000+01:00

It was remarked recently that I'm a bad Linuxer because I use a hybrid desktop - hybrid in this case meaning a mix of GTK (AKA Gnome/XFCE), QT (KDE3.5 and 4.x) and Windows (via Wine) applications.
To this I say: What's wrong with that?

Now, I understand that if you keep all things native to your current session, eg Gnome apps in a Gnome session, KDE ones in a KDE one and so on, then you'll likely have better overall performance and a uniform look.
But the downside of this is that some of the session specific options I don't like, and want what I want instead.
Even though this means having my GTK apps look different to my QT ones, I don't mind that. I could use the QT or Oxygen engines for GTK, I could use the GTK engine for QT, but I don't want to.

What this boils down to is that I like things my way, and I couldn't care less what widget set or session it was made for - if it runs with the ones I'm using, then I'll use it.

This is especially useful right now, since I've changed my desktop again. To what? Well, not Gnome, as I've fallen out with it again.
No, this time it's KDE, but not the monster of the KDE4.x series - Thanks to the Chakra project, based on Arch Linux - which conveniently, I use - I've dug out the kdemod-legacy repository, giving me the older KDE 3.5 desktop - and it beats even the 4.x series. Yes it's unsupported. Yes, 4.x has all those flashy bells and things. Yes, I still use some Gnome apps. But overall, KDE 3.5 is one of the better sessions I've had.

It's customized, naturally. The default panel was shrunk down to the K Menu and a CPU monitor, and is auto-hidden in a corner, appearing only when I need it. Everything else is taken over by the Avant Window Navigator at the bottom.
Compiz and Emerald replace Kwin as the window manager of choice. While this takes up a little extra resources, it provides a few things Kwin can't.
And that's actually where KDE stops, because most of the applications I use are actually GTK-based.
OpenOffice, while not strictly speaking a GTK app, pulls it's theming from the current GTK settings. Since KDE has a handy module for choosing the GTK theming while in a KDE session, this isn't a problem, even if I use a KDE colour scheme that normally upsets OpenOffice - which is often.
Pidgin has taken over from Emesene (MSN) and XChat (IRC), also taking support for Google Chat and Twitter, bundling them all neatly together into one GTK application. Pidgin's plugin framework makes it unparralelled for those who use lots of IM networks, let alone those who use IRC and more on it.
Transmission Bittorrent... well, actually I'm trialling the QT interface for it, which I previously hadn't known about. So far so good, except for one mysterious crash I can't seem to replicate, but if I find any real problems, it's back to the good old GTK one.
Lastly, Firefox.

Regulars will know that Iron and Firefox regularly clash over my favour. However, through now fault of it's own, Iron has finally lost out for good.
The main reason is XMarks. If you don't know what it is (or possibly was) it's a cross-browser and platform bookmark sync tool. It's kept my Firefox and Iron bookmarks up to date and synchronized so that no matter which one I added a bookmark in, both had it.
However, they're discontinuing their service, and there doesn't seem to be any alternative that works for both Chrome and Mozilla based browsers.
So once more, I've tweaked out Firefox with a ton of extensions, with Firefox Sync supplanting Xmarks.

One further note on Firefox though, specifically the TACO extension.
There's a little controversy going on over TACO since TACO 3.0.
TACO 2.0 (Which lives on as Beef TACO) was an invaluable tool for blocking and opting-out of a lot of unwanted things. I'll let you read up in more detail on the Beef TACO page here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/180650/
TACO 3.0 'with Abine' sees a massive increase in the size of the extension, and adds this Abine thing. This appears to be some kind of iTunes store like extra where you can purchase extra functionality, at the cost of some massive reduction in performance, with it nagging you pretty much constantly.
The same results TACO 3.0 offers, without this and without the massive footprint, can be achievevd through several smaller extensions. Beef TACO, of course, replaces this. Add in the BetterPrivacy and NoScript extensions, and you're set to go. Adblock is an optional extra. Alternatively, if you don't like the way NoScript handles it, set up Adblock and Flashblock instead. Flashblock conveniently handles Silverlight as well, making it more useful.
Stop Autoplay is another optional addition, removing yet another web annoyance.
OptimizeGoogle is useful for removing a lot of junk from Google's search and other tools.
Greasemonkey, and by extension Greasefire, is also useful. Pull in user scripts that work on pages and you can enhance things yet further - not to mention some scripts are also capable of handling some parts of what TACO 3.0 tries to do.

Basically, there are better ways to handle it than TACO 3.0 - and all of them, regardless of what these Abine people think, are better than TACO 3.0

In similar Firefox news, since I tweaked it out, I found some interesting new extensions. I won't go on about them here, instead I'll just list them. You can look them up yourselves.
If there's interest though, I might turn it into a collection if people want to see just what I use and why.
So here's the official YACB interesting new extensions list:
All-in-One Sidebar
App Tabs
Hide Caption Titlebar Plus
Liquid Tabs
RightToClock
Tab Progress Bar
Tab Wheel Scroll
Unread Gmail Favicon

That's all for now.
Until next time, keep rocking.

Long time, No post

2010-08-28T19:31:00.000+01:00

It's been some time since I last remembered I have a blog. I guess I'm not the kind to do these things often.

A lot's happened though. I got a new laptop, which came with Windows Vista. And like many a good Linux user, I removed it, right?
No.

I've been trying to put up with it, and I found that but for a few small issues, and that I keep getting lost in the control panel, it doesn't live up to the bad press - you just have to stick with it.
However, since it developed a mysterious and unfixable issue connecting to networks by wireless, I told it to budge up and make room for Arch Linux, which is now the dominant system. I keep Vista around only for the things that Wine can't handle.

Now, I've remarked on my liking for Arch Linux before, and if I haven't, I should have. It's nice, simple, and I like it's way of installing the essentials, then waiting for whatever you want next.

I chose to give KDE4 a try again.
KDE and I have a bad relationship. I've tried it time after time, and sometimes it's managed to keep me interested for a while, but inevitably loses out. On this laptop, more powerful than the last, it went through yet another stage like that. I just cannot get along with it. It's far too heavy for me.
Next was XFCE. XFCE, with it's similarity to Gnome, lasted a lot longer. Unfortunately for it, I found a few issues which got in the way of my normal use, and once again, I come back to Gnome.

I like Gnome. With Metacity's compositing enabled in place of the somewhat heavy Compiz, I can do everything I want with relative ease.
Though the most recent Xorg says you no longer need HAL, Gnome didn't listen and still needs it. However, this means that mounting and unmounting of partitions and removable disks is a breeze.
The default Gnome menus aren't so nice, however. I've replaced them with MintMenu from the AUR, and find it quite adept at handling it.
Docks, now docks are a sticking point with me. I like to arrange all my applets on one panel at the top (a la Mac OSX, but without the Global Menu) and have a dock at the bottom.
There are five ways I choose to handle this.
1: DockbarX. This is the most simple. Create a panel that expands and add DockbarX to it. I like DockbarX. Try it yourself if you're a Gnome user.
2: AWN (AKA Avant Window Navigator). With DockbarX installed, it can take it as an applet, but it can hold it's own without it. It's collection of addons and plugins are unparalleled, but it's the heaviest of the options.
3: Cairo Dock. This, and it's similar counterpart GLX-Dock (Built in) is a nice one for those who don't want to activate Compiz. It doesn't have such a selection of additions, and doesn't take up as much as AWN. It also offers to activate Metacity's compositing feature if it's not active, which is useful since I've yet to track it down without it.
4: Gnome Do. In ordinary circimstances, I wouldn't even consider this and the next option because of it's dependency on Mono. Mono is a reimplementation of Microsoft's .Net framework, and if you examine something that runs on Mono, you'll see, yes, a .exe program and lots of .dll files. However, that said, running in Docky mode it's not bad at it's job.
5: Docky. This is, essentially, Gnome Do in Docky mode, without the Do part. Like Gnome Do, it's a Mono application but it too is good at it's job. It's also the lightest with the exception of the first option, provided you don't activate the window preview function of DockbarX.

Now, many people dislike Mono. I too don't really like it. However, I've granted it a chance to do the same as Vista - prove itself better than the bad press. So far, Docky is managing to do just that.
So far.

Other things of note are certain choices in other applications.
Tweetdeck, for example. Despite it's dependency on Adobe Air, which being an Adobe product and like Mono I would never let on my system, Tweetdeck manages to redeem it insofar as there appear to be no decent GTK based Twitter clients.
Liferea has proved itself to be better than my Windows based FeedDemon. It's a neat and tidy application that does exactly what it's meant to do, without any extras.
GNote for notes. It's the C++ (AKA Mono independant) version of Tomboy notes. Unlike Docky, Tomboy has given me nothing but trouble. GNote, despite what I've heard about it being unstable, is actually very stable. True, I only use it for a ToDo list on the desktop, but it's better than Tomboy's refusal to stay where I want it, when I want it to, or to load the correct note.
Finally, the Iron web browser has managed to completely supplant Firefox but for one site.

Iron, for those who don't know, is Chrome (And by extension Chromium) but without any tracking extras. It's perfect for the paranoid like me. And I don't care what Google's Eric Schmidt (Sorry if that's not spelled right. It serves him right for having a strange name) says about 'If you've got something to hide, you shouldn't be doing it' talk. If people want to know my browsing habits, they can bloody well ask me for them.

That's all for now.
Rock on people.

Web 2.0 madness

2010-05-12T11:43:00.000+01:00

Web 2.0, the all singing, all dancing, way to throw your personal life around the internet.
Oh gods.

Now call me weird, but I don't like this. I don't like, or want to be convinced to like it. It's impersonal, among other things.
I admit to having used Facebook once. Just once. And now I'm gone from there, after digging around for a permanently and completely delete my account option. I found it, by the way, thanks to a blog around the interwebs. If only I could find it again...
Anyway.

I'm going to pick on Facebook because it annoys me the most, was the single biggest source of blatent spam ever to (dis)grace my inboxes, and gets the most attention.

Here's a short list of why I detest it:
-No, I do not want to know about every thing every one who I ever knew is doing right down to every single stupid little badly made and worse looking web app game. Farmville, I'm looking at you, ever since my own mother signed up to the website. That was the final straw for me.
-No, I do NOT want you to tell every website that even has a single bit linking to Facebook everything my 'friends' think of it. I'm web savvy. I know what a blatent threat is when most people think it's legit. I don't care to have people tell me what to think about it. I get to decide that, no one else.
-No, I DO NOT want you to plaster every single bit of information over the web for me. Google Buzz, I'm looking at you as well here - both the implementation of Buzz and the so called 'privacy' reform that showed everyone's everything to the entire world were badly thought out, stupid, brainless and full of sheer wrongheaded idiocy.
-And finally no, I DO NOT WANT to have to put up with potential employers stalking through my profile, and picking out some message I put there years ago, citing it as a reason not to employ me. I have enough trouble as it is without people stalking me.

That's just a few reasons. My main reason for refusing to use FB or sites like it, making an exception in the case of Twitter, to which I tweet very rarely, and use it more like I do RSS feeds (More on that in a bit) just to keep up with things, my main reason is the impersonality of it. If you want to get to know me, don't get to know who I am online. Come and find me, ask me if I can spare a few minutes, and do it in person, damn you. And not over the phone. If people try that, they'll be in for a surprise, because as far as I'm concerned, a phone call is just like saying, 'I don't want to meet you, just talk to you'

/end rant.

In COMPLETELY unrelated computer news now...

Farewell Ubuntu. Goodbye to your arbitrary decisions without consulting your users, to your dreadful Ubuntu One that Dropbox beats hands down, to your iTunes like plugin for Rhythmbox, and many others things. I grant that it's not a bad distro for those new. But what I get out of my Arch Linux install is unparraled except by Gentoo, and as said before I don't have the patience for that.
Arch doesn't modify applications or set them up with what was somehow decided as 'the best defaults that are better than the package maintainer's ones' like Ubuntu does. I can choose everything. True, it's a bit more work, and I still have the odd problem like getting Samba to work, but I like that. I can see everything, I can learn a lot more.

Have you gathered that I now dislike Ubuntu and like Arch? I thought you might have.

RSS feeds aren't something new, but they're something I've never really bothered with until recently. I used to have a long list of websites I visited regularly, and most of them didn't have updates.
A lot of them had the orange RSS subscribe icon though, so I gave in, installed Lifera (The unstable version, naturally) and subscribed to all the regulars that had them, found a few more interesting feeds, stuck it on an hourly update, and lo and behold, updates. So much easier.
It's cut a huge chunk out of how long it takes to run through regular stuff. If you haven't tried RSS feeds yet, and like me you keep watch on a lot of things, see how many of them have an feed you can subscribe to, and find out just how much time you can save. Believe me, it's one thing you'll wonder how you did without afterwards if you're anything like me.

Well, that's all from now. There's other news, but it's not computer related, and it's more personal stuff, which as I said, you want to know, become real life friends.
So rock on people.
/me out.

Here goes again

2010-04-30T16:32:00.000+01:00

Distributions always seem to be something I can't settle on. While I always seem to gravitate back to Ubuntu from time to time, I still try to find a better one for me. And in that seemingly never-ending quest, I've gone through a lot of distributions. I have a folder of CDs and DVDs that now encompasses five BSDs, an OpenSolaris snapshot, four development releases, and currently twenty different Linux distributions.
So, once in a while, when Ubuntu's obsessive user-coddling gets to me, I run through once more, and give another one a try.
Slackware, one of my favourites, has actually fallen from graces for a change. While I admit I've learned more about Linux with it than I have on any other distribution, I found myself doing a lot of './configure, make, make install' just to get some software up to date, so it could open documents I've been working on in the Ubuntu environment. I'm not always patient enough to handle this, which is the main reason Gentoo always slips right past me, so after a lot of issues, complaints and annoyances, I chose to give it up, and go on to another.
In this case, Arch. I don't recall if I've ever mentioned it before, and I'm feeling too lazy to go look because I've been unwell recently, so bear with me.
Arch and Gentoo are very similar, they both ask you to use the online handbook to install the system, they both only install the core, and they both then reboot and say 'OK boss, what now?'

This is a useful thing, for me. Ubuntu always suffers immense amounts of tinkering in places normal users don't go before I can call it adequate, and it never works as well as it should.
Arch, on the other hand, doesn't have anything to tinker with, beyond what it's built-in installer gets you to do. I can install what I want, pick and choose, and just get what I want, without the fluff. I don't have to install a complete Gnome desktop just to have to remove it and put Openbox on, I can just have Openbox out of the proverbial box. It's perfect for those people who want specifics, and don't want to be coddled with unnecessary extras that they don't want (A big culprit of that being Adobe - if you don't agree, see the website http://dearadobe.com).
The installer's also well made as it is - it's not quite as simple and self-explanatory as Slackware's, and it doesn't offer quite so much choice as Gentoo when following the handbook, but if you know what your partitions are, and what you're going to do, you don't even need the guide on the ArchWiki, you can just power through and have a working system within two hours on a good internet connection, or less than an hour if you install packages from the CD.

The only caveat I've discovered is audio - the ArchWiki guide says to install ALSA. You'd think that would work, right? Nuh-uh. Look at any full-featured distribution, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian and such. Look in the listings, and while you'll find ALSA installed, you'll also find PulseAudio installed.
As I understand it, without PulseAudio, only one process can hold the audio channel at any one time. Install it, and you get the same level of audio capabilities as the mainstream distributions do. People new to, or considering going to Arch, take note of that, and when it tells you to install ALSA, also call up the ArchWiki page on PulseAudio, and install that too.
(Note: If you want to be safe though, leave it until after you've finished going through the guide.)

What else do I like about Arch? Pacman. No, not the little yellow ghost-eater, the package manager. I admit to being fond of Apt, with Yum coming a close second, and I can use either with a fair degree of proficiency, skill and speed. Pacman I can't do the same with still, but it's simple, no-nonsense approach to it is well thought out, and doesn't leave much to worry about. Like most advanced package managing tools, it resolves dependencies, and provides a very apt-like output telling you what it's going to do, and asking for confirmation. Even during the package install step of installing Arch, it gives you an idea of what you'll see and get, and even allows you to scroll through the output once it's done to check up on it.

All in all? Arch is one of the better distributions I've come across. For someone who has patience enough to tweak and install what they want, install of what the distributor decides, but not enough patience to sit and watch Gentoo compile everything on the go, this is perfect. For those who want more than is available in the Arch repository and it's testing repository, there's AUR - the Arch User Repository. Unlike other equivalents, such as Ubuntu's PPAs, it's not a repository you pass to Pacman - it's just a collection of scripts that you can download. You execute them, and they create a Pacman-usable package, thus giving you the flexibility to examne, refine and edit the script, with all the benefits of the package manager. It's like being able to 'make, make install' then have your manager install it alongside all the other packages.

If you want more customisability, give Arch a go. I guarantee that if you've enough patience and time enough to do a little work, you won't be disappointed.

Reaching Enlightenment

2010-04-18T19:47:00.000+01:00

It's been a long time since I first started using Linux, and even longer since Gnome caught me in it's clutches. In that time, I've used Gnome, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, BlackBox, FluxBox, OpenBox, FVWM, JWM, IceWM and even WindowMaker. All of them had their good and bad points, but for the first time since Gnome, I've found something I like more.

E. AKA E17, or Enlightenment.
Enlightenment isn't included in Ubuntu Karmic by default, or if it is, I never noticed it before.
The useful tools of Ubuntu-Tweak and the sources generator at repogen.simplylinux.ch also don't have it listed (Although between them they cover sources for an immense amount of repositories for nearly everything).
Ubuntu Tweak's website, however, does include it. Why it doesn't show up in the app's sources centre, I don't know.

Now, Enlightenment's website does give a list of repositories for it's packages, but it's conspicuously missing Karmic. So I'll give you the instructions here to make it simple.
First you'll need the repository key, of course. Open your favourite terminal (Guake, in my case) and enter the following command:
sudo wget -O - http://packages.enlightenment.org/repo.key | sudo apt-key add -
(Note that the space on the end appears to be necessary)
Next, open /etc/apt/sources.list in your favourite text editor, and add the following line:
deb http://packages.enlightenment.org/ubuntu karmic main extras
Run a complete update, and as a good practice, I always apply any upgrades before continuing, but that's just me.

Now, to install the core of Enlightenment, just install the package 'E17'
If you're used to the flashy effects of Compiz Fusion, you can get the Enlightenment port of it by installing the package 'ecomorph-core' - note that if you do, when you choose your session at GDM, KDM or whatever you choose as your login manager, you'll need to choose the Ecomorph option, not the one for Enlightenment. Also, there aren't many Compiz plugins available, and some aren't quite the same. Try Wobbly Windows for an example.
If you want to add more functionality, have a look at the emodule pacakges. There is a dummy packages 'emodules-all' that pulls in them all, but be warned, it also pulls in the Enlightenment Network Manager, which may insist on removing your current one. If you like the network manager you already have, or aren't sure, pick and choose your emodules by hand.

There's a few other packages of note with it. Empower is like gksu, though I've never actually got it to work. emprint, and it's corresponding emodule is the screenshot tool. There's more to, of course.

It's fairly easy to customize too, with an entire section of the OpenDesktop site to itself, namely, e17-stuff.org - though there isn't much there in comparison to Gnome-Look and the like, it's enough to get started.
With that, I've found that Enlightenment without EcoMorph is a very good desktop for older computers, while including it provides a nice balance between usability and special effects.
Overall? E17 is an impressive desktop environment, and if you're not certain what Window Manager or Desktop Environment to use, give it a shot, and give it a fair trial. It takes a little getting used to, and it also takes some customising to get it how you'll like it, but it's definitely worth a good trial.

Identifying a 64-bit CPU - the one step easy guide

2010-03-28T21:29:00.000+01:00

This old computer I've had for a while, I've always run 32-bit systems on. A couple days ago, I happened across something that I wish I'd known before - it's 64-bit capability.
So, here's the simple way to identify whether your CPU is 64-bit capable. Note this only works on Linux, but then, why would you want to run anything else? (BSD might also work, but I don't know for sure. Can anyone confirm?)

You'll need a terminal. Enter the following command:
cat /proc/cpuinfo

Read the output, and look for the section on Flags. For my CPU, it looks like this. The bolded part is the one to look for.

processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 44
model name : AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 3000+
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 1000.000
cache size : 128 KB
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt lm 3dnowext 3dnow up rep_good pni lahf_lm
bogomips : 1999.70
TLB size : 1024 4K pages
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc

Notice in that the list of flags, there's 'lm'?
If you see that in your CPU's list of flags, you have a 64-bit capable CPU.

Simple, innit?
And all this time I've been running a 32-bit system on it. To think I never knew.
To be fair, switching from 32-bit Ubuntu Karmic to 64-bit Ubuntu Karmic hasn't been entirely smooth. I've yet to manage to get Skype to work, and a few of my other applications don't seem to have amd64 packages, only i386 ones. This is inconvenient, but on the other hand, gets me experimenting with alternatives I don't normally consider, thus allowing me to learn more.

So next time you're sat wondering if you can run a 64-bit system... fire up a terminal (Or if you're not on Linux, grab a Linux LiveCD and use that instead) and run that command, and lo and behold, definite proof.
Rock on.

Desktop Environments and Window Managers

2010-03-26T16:05:00.000Z

It seems like I revisit this all too often. But for those of you interested in Gnome Topaz aka Gnome Shell, you might find parts of this interesting. And if you like Gnome Shell, be ready for some unpleasentness.

Go back a few days. I'd finally decided to see what all the fuss was about, and use Ubuntu Tweak's Gnome Shell testing repository, and install it.
No problems there.
Everything advised me to shut down Compiz, and revert to basic Gnome/Metacity, before opening a terminal to enter the command 'gnome-shell --replace'
This is the first big glaring mistake.
When you run any window manager with the --replace operative, the current one is remembered and shut down. Remembered, because if the new window manager is killed, it'll be reloaded.
So you don't, it seems, need to shut down Compiz - it'll do it for you.
Now, that aside, I let it spend a few minutes starting up. I admit my computer isn't recent, but it's fairly robust, and can handle KDE with only a few problems, but more on that later.
Gnome Shell, however, brought it to slower than a snail's pace. As I'd lost the CPU applet on my Gnome panel,I couldn't tell how much of that it was hogging, but evidently the hard drive wasn't doing anything.
Then finally, things started to appear. The new bar (It's not a panel until it can support Gnome panel applets) my normal Gnome desktop, and the Avant Window Navigator that I keep running.
Then after a few more minutes, the terminal reappeared. Slowly.
I figured it was now ready to use. Boy was I wrong.
The mouse is perfectly fine, but to actually interact with anything, you have to mouse over, and wait. And wait. And wait. And wait.
I tried to launch Firefox from AWN. I tried to write this post. I gave up after 30 minutes, summoned back the terminal (Eventually) and killed Gnome Shell with Ctrl-C.
I will not be using Gnome Shell again until it runs far better than this. If this is what the so called future of Gnome is going to be, then expect to lose your users, Gnome. Gnome Shell is worse than Windows. Any incarnation of Windows. Even Vista.
Fix it. Oh, and while you're at it, since we can't use Compiz with the Gnome Shell, at the very least, offer your own implementation of it, so you're not cutting out chunks of things that people actually want.

With that bitter taste left, I decided I didn't want to run Gnome any longer, and went off to look at other things.
Of course, for a start, there's the other two Desktop Environments, KDE and XFCE, both familiar to me.
KDE came first, and though as said my system isn't exactly good, it performed respectably. I couldn't have many desktop plasmoids, but I don't really mind that.
What's a big let down in KDE, however, is the high resource requirements. I can't run Firefox in KDE at all. Everything slows right down, though it's far faster than Gnome Shell.
So KDE disqualified itself, after trying to run other Window Managers with it caused it to crash and reset my session.
XFCE lasted a little longer, it's XFApplet (The one that allows you to import Gnome panel applets) making up for a lot of missing things that I have in Gnome, and it performed relatively well.
What was wrong with XFCE? Several things.
There's no way to edit the menu. Gnome has Alacarte, KDE has it's own too, but nothing for XFCE.
Compiz doesn't play nice with it. It's usable, but not ideal. This isn't a necessity, but I prefer it.
No GlobalMenu. The Gnome GlobalMenu mimic's Mac OSX's universal menu bar for all apps, though some (Firefox, Openoffice, aMSN) don't work with this, and continue to use their own.
There is an XFCE applet for it, but it didn't work, and using the XFApplet to import it didn't work any better. Again, it's not a necessity - but it'd be nice.
Long login time. Now, I have several apps I like to start with login, Qwit for monitoring Twitter, my journal app, AWN, and the Guake terminal. But even KDE handled these small requests fine. XFCE, even with the options to launch Gnome and KDE services disabled, slowed right down and took a long while to get to usable.

This leaves me looking for alternatives.
Openbox has long been a friend of mine, and I did, for a time, have an Openbox session on this currently Karmic box - however, Dropbox refused to launch, and as I make use of it a lot, this is a major downside.
Blackbox and Fluxbox are in the same boat as Openbox here, though each acts differently. Still neither could launch Dropbox.
IceWM is nice, but doesn't have the right feel or touch to me. Same goes for JWM.
There are others, of course, some of them I've even tried, but none of them measure up.
So, I'm back with Gnome again. I don't want the Gnome Shell, and if they don't give users the choice between current Gnome and the Shell... well, it looks like I'll be moving to a distro that doesn't have it - and I'll keep having to do that until there isn't a distro left without it.
Then, I'll probably save up and buy a Mac. Despite everything bad about them, in my books, they still beat Windows, and it'll be a better option than running a Desktop I don't want, just to keep Gnome around.

In summary? Gnome Shell needs tons of work.

A Statement

2010-03-16T16:07:00.000Z

It's very rare that anyone will ever hear me so much as comment on political or even legal matters. Some might say it's because I don't care, don't know, or don't have an interest. I simply choose not to comment.

This, however, is different.
I honestly admit I have used BitTorrent. Who hasn't these days? There are some Linux distros you can only get through it these days, and it's generally more reliable.
But now, if I understand things correctly, the RIAA, MPAA, and others, or whatever their names are, are trying to change copyright laws through courtroom judgements, and make it illegal to share anything.

What the fuck?

Not sharing didn't get us this far. Who knows how much less advanced the world would be if people never shared?

Here's an related observation I made recently.
Look at Windows. Any Windows. Compare it to a Linux distribution at the time. Assume you know how to use both equally, and have no bias (Impossible, I know, but it's a hypothetical situation).
To my point of view, I have Windows, closed source, with a great deal of applications being developed for it, but an unstable and difficult system.
On the other side, Linux, open source, also with a great deal of applications being developed - a good number because there's a need for them where there otherwise only exists an alternative in Windows. Linux is far more stable.
Which would you choose, sensibly? Linux, I have little doubt.
Now think about this. Why does Linux excel? It does so because anyone can look at the source, examine it, and submit ideas, patches, or even a re-written source file to improve it. Linux lets people do this to all parts of it.
Windows doesn't. People complain. Nothing happens.
But wait! Here come the RIAA! You're not allowed to share things like this. Linux is illegal. It looks like Windows, therefore it's not legal. I'm sure many of you have heard of the case where a misinformed teacher thought it was illegal for a student to be handing out CDs of Linux.

What is the world coming to?
At this rate, one where we pay to do as we are told.
If you're writing code for anything at all, regardless of who it's for, where it'll be used... put it under a creative commons or GNU license, and make the world a better place for us all.
Down with the recording industries misinformed and pointless fight to make everything theirs and to make us pay to make the rich richer, and the poor poorer.
Down with them. Out with them. The Pirate Bay has the right idea. Fight them. Bring common sense back to them, and make them see why they are wrong.

/end statement. And now a disclaimer. The views expressed above are mine and mine alone. They do not represent the views of anyone or anything else. Somewhere out in the deepest depths of space there might be a many-tentacled green slime oozing bloblike life form that shares these views, but he/she/it will have to make it's own statement. This one's mine.
And if any of you people from the RIAA and Co read this - go find yourselves a brain. You clearly don't have one.

Distros and End Of Life

2010-03-09T16:33:00.000Z

Now, call me weird, but last time I checked, when a distribution reached End of (supported) Life, the repositories and such for it didn't just vanish, right?

Unfortunately, that's what's gotten into some people's heads locally. For example, on my home network, there's three PC's running Ubuntu Jaunty, and everyone's telling me they MUST be upgraded come April (Which might be when Lucid is released, but I've never really paid attention to that) or they'll cease to work, or you'll never get updates, and other such doomsday prophecies.

The truth is, I couldn't care less.
Let's examine my network as it stands:
There are four laptops. One for each of us. The parents are running Vista and 7, because they came with the laptops. I've given up trying to suggest Linux might be worth trying on either laptop.
My own laptop and my brothers, both ancient Dell Latitude C400s, are both running Ubuntu Jaunty alone. While mine is ailing and dying (Though *still* hasn't died yet - it's persistant), his is still happily plugging away.
Then there's the two desktop PCs.
One dual boots Jaunty with Windows XP, because unfortunately we still find need for it from time to time. It seldom gets much use.
The other, this one, has Fedora 12 on it alone. This has the interesting effect that no one else will use it. At all.

Now, Fedora 12, despite some time ago cursing it off as the worst thing I ever saw, I've learned a bit more about, and it's not quite the big bad ogre I once thought it was, and truth be told, I'm considering upgrading to Fedora 13 as soon as the stable is out.
Ubuntu Jaunty, is, in my opinion, the last good Ubuntu there ever was. Some say Intrepid, some (mistakenly to my mind) say Karmic, but I say Jaunty. Karmic it far too buggy and unstable to be considered, and Lucid... I won't even go there.
So what am I to do, with three Ubuntu Jaunty installs that everyone thinks I'm going to have mayhem with come April?
There's all kinds of possibilities.

I like Jaunty. I might decide to stick with it. Given that the truth is that it'll still be perfectly fine, with only security updates and anything 3rd party repositories provide, I don't really see much wrong with it. But if I have to change it, there's only a few options.
I've gone off Debian and Ubuntu based systems. the DEB package format isn't bad, but Debian and Ubuntu, along with most of their derivatives, seem to make things too easy.

There's the possibility of going into Gentoo, Source Mage, Sourcer or Lunar, all of which are source-based distros. That's nice, but I'd like to have a graphic desktop now, rather than compile it myself, which is where Sabayon comes to the rescue.
Sabayon is based on, and maintains compatibility with, Gentoo, which as you may know, is an ongoing fascination of mine. (Incidentally, I remember seeing someplace that you can add Portage to other distros. I've no idea of the consequences, but for the adventurous among you, see what a search turns up.)
Sabayon provides binary packages, which is perfect for those in a hurry, but who also don't mind going back to good 'ol Gentoo's compiling. It gives you a KDE environment, and like most distros, a small suite of applications, then leaves it all up to you.

Alright, so what's the more flexible possibility?
Arch.
Arch I've never got along with before. 'The Arch Way' is something that used to give me no end of trouble.
But then, that was before I realised that like Gentoo suggests reading the handbook as you install, so does Arch suggest reading the wiki, and I learned more.
Arch is nice in that it gives you the core system, and a command line, then essentially says 'Ok boss, what now?'
I can choose literally everything. No more installing and finding applications that I'll never know the purpose of or never use, because 99% of them will be ones I selected.

What other options are there, you ask?
Without going into much detail, Fedora, as mentioned, has my attention (The Yum package manager beats the pants of APT, and I really wish someone would port it to DEB)
Also in favour at the moment are Wolvix and Slackware. While I have had a few issues with Slack and Slack based systems, I'll grant I mananged to milk a great deal more out of my systems than on most other distros - something I hope to rival with Arch someday.
There's a pair of BSDs that have garnered my interest as well, GNOBSD, the only one I know of that provides Gnome on BSD out of the box, and PC-BSD, one of the few with a graphic installer - something useful for those who don't get the BSD naming schema.

As usual, there's a lot of choice. But since everyone's complaining I shouldn't be keeping Jaunty around, and I refuse to let Karmic on my network, it's looking likely that I'll just branch out my knowledge a bit.

The adventures of Slackware

2010-02-22T09:49:00.000Z

As previously mentioned Slackware's finally grasped my undivided attention. Which makes a change, since prior to that, Debian or Ubuntu always seemed to be the one I kept coming back to.

It's provided me with no end of interesting challenges, and more than a few headaches, but on the other hand, I can also say I have a system that works my way - more so than I did for the very brief time I had a GNOME Gentoo desktop.

Slackware 13, installed from a DVD is what I have.
Now, I'm known (probably) for being a bit of a GNOME junkie - I prefer it, if at all possible. Slackware, on the other hand, has eschewed it entirely, which is a bit of an inconvenience for me.
So one of the first things added was the GSB (Gnome Slack Build) which provided me with... well, a mostly working Gnome environment, GDM, etc.
On the other hand, it also has the slight problem that possibly because of the missing GNOME dependencies in certain Slackware packages, some things don't quite work. USB devices won't mount, it admits DVDs are there, but pretends they're not, and all kinds of apps complain loudly if you run them via a terminal.

But, it works, and it gave me the parts of GNOME I still like. I've since worked around most of the issues I had with it simply by returning to the default KDE desktop, and starting to bring GNOME to it.
The KDE panel had it's notification area and task switcher removed, windows were allowed to cover it, and it now resides in the top left corner. On login, two additional commands are executed - 'gnome-settings-daemon' imports, as it's name suggests, my GNOME settings, and saves them on logout. 'gnome-panel' again does exactly what it says it does; launch my gnome-panel.
Which is laid out along the bottom, with a number of handy applets that I can't seem to find any KDE equivalent of.
First is Gnomenu. The KDE Kicker menu is nice, but I often get lost in it. True, I often do in Gnomenu as well, but I know it better.
Second is cpufire-applet, which displays the cpu usage as a neat little fire. The higher the flames lick, the more it's being used.
Third is the default network monitor. I like to keep tabs on what's doing what on my network. Call me possessive, but when it really is MY network, I don't like the idea of having something go wrong with it, and I try not to let it happen.
Fourth is Topshelf. My god, I have not found anything more useful than this. It happily sits there, one small little icon, which I can click on to bring up a window with any document I've added to it. It's one-click access to all my current works, which since I like to write a lot, is my list of stories.
The rest, of course, is simple - the task manager, notification area and clock.

Between this gnome-panel setup and KDE's working perfectly - a rarity for me - I actually have a system I can use.
I would prefer Nautilus to work slightly better, since it seems to have more functionality than both Dolphin and Konqueror combined, but yakuake (since guake doesn't work) has started to make up for that. If only I could remember which options do what which when using tar.

Slacking off

2010-02-15T14:45:00.000Z

No, not literally.
Slackware has finally garnered my attention for long enough that it's beeen installed on one of my PCs already.

Now, those of you who read this blog will know by now that I've tried this before, using the Install CD (CD1, in case you were wondering) which invariably gave a Kernel Panic.
It turns out, that while the image I used was perfectly fine, the disk burner did something to it that caused that.
So I spent last night downloading a Slackware 13.0 DVD image. From a mirror, via LinuxQuestions.org because the main Slackware site is down. Again.

This time, it's booted perfectly fine, leaving me ready to try to install. At the moment it's formatting what is due to be the / partition.

I'll grant, I prefer graphic over text installers, but that's a preference. Slackware's installer is a text mode, but it isn't bad at all - it explains nicely. However, I don't think it's friendly for those newbies who might be better off using Ubuntu for a bit longer.

You might be asking what finally got me to give Slackware a second chance. The answer is Wolvix.
Wolvix is based on Slackware 12.2, and is intended to be a LiveCD only distro. It does have a HD install available though, and since that's what I use most, I gave it a shot. It does warn it may not be bug free, but it worked fine for me - a nice, clean interface, a button to launch GParted if needed, it's all there, nice and simple.
Wolvix also shows off the best of XFCE, a desktop environment I normally avoid in favour of GNOME. After learning that Slackware seems to have dropped GNOME entirely, however, I was willing to give it a go.
The LiveCD boots slowly, but it has a wide array of hardware compatibility. Nothing was left undetected at all.
As with many LiveCDs, you log into a root-user session. Manually, though that's little trouble through it's SLiM login, which tells you to use 'root' 'toor' to log in.
It's responsiveness while in LiveCD mode was sluggish, but that's to be expected. It's not running from the HD, which was the next. At first glance, there doesn't seem to be an option, but the Wolvix Control Panel is where its hiding, along with options for a Frugal and USB install.
Post-Install, Wolvix was much more responsive, and felt more like a desktop distro. The first thing to do, as with any system, was to check for and add updates.
This presented a minor problem, as the slapt-get package manager, and it's graphic fronted gslapt required an update before practically anything else could be updated. Trying to update GSlapt from the command line with slapt-get tried to pull in libpng, which gave the same problem of 'incomplete download'
A breif search on their documentation however revealed that to solve this, you first use slapt-get to update slapt-get, and then upgrade GSlapt, finally allowing you to upgrade the rest of the system. It's all due to some change in slapt-get that handles authentication, I believe.
That hurdle aside, I set about finding regular packages I use.
As slapt-get is based, obviously, on apt-get, so GSlapt would appear to be on Synaptic. Having used Synaptic a gread deal, this made for an easier time.
GSlapt also marks dependencies without telling you - unless there's an error handling them. I don't mind this, but I like to know all the same. The dependencies, although it does make the disclaimer that it's only as good as the person making the package, were handled near perfectly.
One thing I did note is that several packages are marked on an 'exclude' rule, preventing modification. Packages such as udev and the kernel. This may or may not be overly important, so I left them be. Probably safest.
I did note at this point there was very little to do with GNOME at all - it seemed like it had just been lifted out. Slackware came to the rescue there explaining that for some reason in the past they'd been removed.
So I added a few 3rd party repositories to GSlapt. This isn't recommended by any means, but since Wolvix is slightly outdated on some software, it was going to be a necessity in order to bring it up to date.
However, again, I ran into issues. Dependency problems plagued me from there. Which is what finally prompted me to Slackware 13.

Which so far has done a grand job of winning me over. True, I'm still getting to grips with it, but it definately lives up to the adage that 'If you use Slackware, you'll learn Linux' and no doubt about it.
I'm still working on it though, so you'll have news of my Slackware Adventures later.

Distributions (yet) again

2010-01-26T23:05:00.000Z

I know some people who use Linux, who have a massive collection of Live and Install media which goes back a long ways. If I keep up at this rate, I'll be one of those people before long.

See, this started a few days ago when Mum decided she didn't like OpenSUSE, and wanted something new. Her computer isn't exactly robust, however, so we always try out potential candidates before they touch her computer.

We went through, and settled on Mandriva. I've heard a lot of good things about it, and I'm sure in other circumstances, I might even have seen a few of them.
Mandriva, to me, is a pest. I used the GNOME Live CD, because her computer doesn't have a DVD drive, nor does it support booting via USB. A bit of a pain.
It booted on another computer perfectly, and apparently it 'looks perfect' according to her.
It working, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter.
On first boot after install, it started downloading files without any explanation of what they were. After examining what scant details were available, I concluded it was adding repositories and checking for updates.
So, when I finally got to a useable desktop environment - two hours after starting the install because of it's immense slowness - nothing seemed to be different, so I told it to check for updates. It said there weren't any.
So I went hunting for packages that she wants. To my surprise, there are no packages uninstalled!
It hadn't added repositories at all, and it took me the better part of half an hour to finally track down why, and get it to add some. Even then, a good half of them told me it couldn't download some file, and therefore couldn't be enabled.
But, it provided updates and some of the missing software, so I accepted what it let me have, and turned to RPMDrake.
And turned away from RPMDrake.
While RPMDrake is good in the sense that it allows you to mark actions easily, it is, in comparison to urpmi - the backend, like apt-get - dreadful.
DistroWatch's page on package management came to the rescue, allowing me to finally upgrade from the command line.
With that finally done, I decided not to trust RPMDrake, and merely made lists of the package names I'd need to install, passing them directly to urpmi. Most of them worked. Some of them, like K3B, downloaded a dependency and then complained loudly that it didn't exist.
But it just downloaded the package it's telling me doesn't exist? (And yes, I did check. Several times, in fact.)
While sorting this out, I thought I'd go and start up rhythmbox, and put on some of my music to ease my mood - joy for being able to keep /home separate.
However, even this complained about half my media, forcing me to retreat back to RPMDrake to find missing gstreamer plugins, which, you guessed it, downloaded dependencies and then told me they didn't exist again.
Mandrake may have it's good points, but I saw almost none of them before I gave up at that point.

I've since gone through my growing collection of media, and tried some others.
Slackware invariably gives a Kernel panic, regardless of the computer I try to install it on, or what's in that computer.
OpenSuSE has a window manager that doesn't work.
Debian Lenny is old.
Ubuntu Karmic... well, speaks for itself. I've yet to hear one good thing about Karmic that Jaunty can't do with an extra repository, or a compile-it-yourself source archive.
BSD had another small look in, and a look out again after I remembered that I understand absolutely nothing about it.
Linux Mint had a Nautilus that segfaulted almost immediately.
Fedora has SELinux. 'nough said. See my earlier rants about Fedora.

All in all, not very useful.
So now I'm trying to try (yes, you read that right) Ark Linux.
The problem now is that the computer being used to test this on, when using the graphic installer (I prefer them over text based, but if the text based explains what it's doing, why, and what I'm meant to do clearly, I don't mind them either. An example is Gentoo with the Handbook) the mouse isn't detected. Meaning I can't set up partitions correctly.
I'm seriously considering breaking out an old Windows XP install here. And coming from me, who tries to avoid Windows at all costs, that's saying something.
Buck up, Linux. You need to do better than this.

/rant.
Rock on, people.

Linux and 'the best'

2010-01-21T10:26:00.000Z

Some of you may well agree with what I'll say next. Many won't.
There is no such thing, especially within Linux, as 'the best'.
That doesn't seem to stop people from trying to identify it.

Take the Linux Questions forum - now, I have no objection to their polls for the best this or that of the year. I've even voted there myself, and made a few posts. But as far as I'm concerned, it's just a measure of how many people share the same opinion.

See, for me, my 'best' setup is like this:
Openbox/Gnome session, with Guake terminal and aMSN on autostart, the topshelf applet on the top Gnome panel for quick access alongside a CPU and network monitor. Using Firefox as the web browser of choice, and OpenOffice.org as the Office suit of choice.

Openbox because it lightens up almost anything. For a time, even KDE managed to run near flawlessly using it on my old laptop.
Gnome because in my opinion, there is no desktop environment more customisable.
Guake - I've been told it's dated, obsolete and old. I've been told to use Terminator. That doesn't change the fact that Terminator doesn't do what I want. Guake is a one button drop down terminal. I use the terminal that often, having Guake there on F12 whenever I want it is perfect.
aMSN. Personal choice. Emesene is good in a pinch, but aMSN is my preference. XChat handles IRC, and that's all the rest I've ever needed.
TopShelf. A damned useful Gnome Panel applet if I ever saw one. You feed it your files, and it sits around pretty much as an instant link to them. For example, I'm writing two stories at the moment - they're both in there, and it's invaluable when I suddenly have an idea (Usually at 3 am...) and have to write it down before I forget. (Also thanks to the quick start up time. You'd never think a laptop this old could start up so damn quick)
For the CPU monitor, I use CPUFire. I like watching the fire. The normal system monitor applet handles network traffic, with the colours changed so blue is local, red is up and yellow is down. Instantly able to tell what the traffic is like.

Firefox.
Now then.
Much as I keep trying to find other browsers, Firefox has a firm hold on me. Chromium/Google Chrome are useful short term or speed browsing alternatives, but Firefox, despite it's being slighty overweight in memory and CPU usage, simply cannot be replaced. I've even got to the point where I refuse to use Debian's rebranded Iceweasel because I wanted true Firefox, and installed it to /opt/Firefox though that was mostly to figure out what /opt was actually for.
As to OpenOffice.org... well, there's plenty of solutions out of there, but I find it's perfect. Even more so with the Gnome package enabled, providing Gnome integration.

So, some of you have probably read that and thought, Hey, that's not the best one, why don't you use this instead? (You are of course welcome to say such things in the comments! I welcome new ideas.)
As I said before though - this is what I currently find is my 'the best'
Before though, I've had a 'best' that was pure Openbox. And another that was KDE/Konqueror/KOffice. My Gnome setup on desktop PC's is totally different from this setup for my laptop.

So as you can see... it's difficult to tell where the 'best' really is. Statistics and polls can only tell you what popular opinion says.

And now, for a shameless self plug. You might have noticed I mentioned something about writing stories. Yes, I write. Not much, and currently I'm unpublished (And unpublishable, until I rewrite a lot of words) but there are some stories online you can see.
They're fanfictions, and they're sparked off ideas I've had while watching my little brother. Don't ask. He's more crazy than I am.
But if you want to see my stories as I upload them, point your web browser to http://www.fanfiction.net/u/2198404/ to find me, and at the bottom of the page you'll find my stories.

Now I'm off to go write some more to one of them before I forget what I was going to write. Where's that topshelf applet...

Giving a Squeeze

2010-01-14T13:31:00.000Z

Guess what? Yup, it's that time again, when I bore you with one of my infrequent and random update posts.
Remember how I said I was using Debian Lenny?

I went off it. Lenny is missing too much, and is too far outdated to be usable - at least, that's my opinion, now I've upgraded to Squeeze.
Debian Squeeze, for those who don't know, is the testing branch - not the unstable one, sid.
Squeeze is happily plugging away perfectly, and curing so many of the problems I had with Debian.
I experimented a bit with KDE again. Now, knowing my ancient laptop, you might think that would be suicide for it, but did you know, you can remove a lot of the heavyness of KDE by using an Openbox/KDE session? At least, it worked for me.
I also take back negative things I've said about it. Once you get the hang of it, it's not actually as bad as I thought.
That was, however, the current KDE backported to Lenny - on Squeeze, it mysteriously slowed down.
So I've gone back to good old GNOME.
My only issue so far, has been with Frostwire. It needed something that wasn't in the repository, but after a helpful chappy on the Debian IRC channel referred me to the Debian Multimedia repository, all was solved.

In short? If you're thinking of using Debian, I'd say go for Squeeze. Lenny is uber-stable, but also full of old material. Squeeze is also stable - at least, I've had no stability issues - if anything, it's fewer.
Also, a useful point for people. If you change your Debian sources.list file (Note: not all 3rd party repositories support doing this, if you get 404 errors, change it back to lenny/squeeze) so that wherever lenny appears, it's replaced with stable, and for Squeeze, testing, then when Squeeze becomes stable, you'll automatically get the updates for it - and the same for when Sid becomes testing, and something else takes the place of Sid as unstable.

Another interest of mine lately is Longene, the Unified Kernel project. While I've not tried it, it's remained something of an intrigue to me.
It aims to be Wine and a bit more. Firstly you add a package that adds a kernel entry. This kernel supports both Windows and Linux calls, as I understand it, which improves handling of Windows programs.
Secondly, you add a second package, which patches Wine, so it understands what to do.
Apparently, this increases compatibility considerably.
Some people may find this useful, but be warned, as the first package is actually a kernel module, you may find that it's incompatible with other kernel modules, such as the proprietary NVIDIA graphics drivers for one.
If you do decide to use it, be aware of that, and of course - BACKUP.
(Which you should do anyway)

That's all from me for now. Keep on enjoying the new year.
Rock on.

Another small update

2009-12-29T17:53:00.000Z

Not much has really changed.
My old laptop is still plugging away on Debian, and is actually doing fairly well, using an Openbox session with fbpanel to provide a taskbar.

I've gone off pretty much all Ubuntu derivatives for now, because they're not really very good for solving problems - problems like the desktop with Karmic on, failing to boot, and then after sticking Jaunty on, failing to update properly.

Slackware's being a pain as well, as the ISO downloads take forever, and the torrent ones have no peers or seeds connected to me. Add to that, that the Slackware 13 install CD fails to boot with a kernel panic, and it's enough to annoy anyone.

I have, on the other hand, been looking into making a server on the home network, since if I use CentOS, I can learn a bit about it for business environs. However... given that CentOS and Fedora are fairly similar, I'm wary about using it - past experiences with those kind of distros has not turned out well.

BSD was a recent and fleeting interest of mine, having a look into MidnightBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and MirOS. However, no matter how much I know about Linux, BSD is a whole different can of worms, and not one I'm willing to open right now.

and now, a parting word.
FISH!
That's all for now.

A return to Debian

2009-12-17T22:32:00.000Z

As some of you may well know, some time ago before I started this blog, I once tried Debian. At the time, it was Debian 4.

Now, with Ubuntu seeming too simple, and my laptop temporarily unusable, I've gone looking for a new Linux distro to use on the desktop PCs, and thus I turned once again, back to Debian.
This time, it's Debian 5, Lenny.

Not much, visually, has changed since Debian 4. Since I prefer graphic installers over text ones if available, that's what I used to install it with.

The destination is a not too old custom desktop, the specs of which I won't bore you with here.
For some time now, it's second hard drive, though small, has always had a Linux distro on it, primarily for emergency rescue for the Windows XP install still on there, despite it's little use lately, but also because whenever one of the family want to try out a distro, that's where it all starts.

Since no one's after that though, the previous Arch install there is being replaced with Lenny.
The graphic installer, while somewhat bland, nevertheless is clean, clear, and concise, leaving very little doubt about what is happening, and what choices you're being asked to make. I like this; it makes sense, and at only one point did I have any trouble, and that was the partitioning. Until I remembered to do it manually.

Once done, I had a working Debian Lenny install within 15 minutes, which for this old computer is a fair feat.
One old niggle I have with Debian is Firefox. For some reason unknown to me (Because I'm too lazy to find out) they don't like Firefox, and so instead rebrand an older version as Iceweasel.
Now, call mea fanboy, but I prefer to have Firefox say it's Firefox, so I went and downloaded it direct from them, to extract into /opt so I could enjoy my favourite browser just as it is. However, something appears to have gone wrong. I haven't figured out what yet. But, Iceweasel is an adequte replacement until then.
Setting up the NVidia proprietary driver was a bit of a pest at first, until I got Iceweasel to search Debian's help, and then a clean simple explanation solved it. With Compiz installed after, I have the full range of effects I'm used to.

The next little problem is Sudo. By default, Sudo isn't set to work for me.
A little change using Visudo, and that's solved. Almost too easy.
It's nice to know that they warn you about the dangers involved when you first use Sudo though.

A few key - at least to me - apps were missing, however, from the default Debian install. K3B is understandable, but is a standard for me as it's best burning program there is for Linux.
The Compiz Fusion Icon is the next essential, since it allows on the spot management and changing of the window manager. I use this a lot, especially when darting in and out of Openbox when I need a little extra resources that metacity and Compiz hog.
Finally, Wine. I don't really run that much Windows software, but I keep it around because there are times I do need to.

But based on the initial impressions it's made on me so far, I like it a lot better this time. I've actually managed to stick with it long enough to start fiddling around like I always do at post-install and after.
Gnome-look, as always, is the first port of call to get the look and feel I want. Dark themes are the current fad here, so long as the main controls are clear still.

On other distros though...
I thought I'd look into Slackware 13, and (after arguing with a Linux Mint install that was segfaulting) finally got it burnt to a disc. However, trying to install from it gives an inexplicable Kernel Panic. For some reason, I can't help but laugh when I see that, despite that it means something's gone wrong.
Arch was given a try, through the unofficial LiveCD Arch, and it's installer, larchin. However, since it couldn't recognise the wired network interfaces, and I don't have wireless on this computer, it was short lived.
Gentoo once again got a look in from me. I keep coming back and trying to learn more with a kind of morbid curiosity. I always come to it, thinking I'll try it this time, and then go looking to find out more, but always find something that puts it off again.
BSD, for the first time here, also got a look in. I've not tried it yet, but it's possible next time I get bored, I'll have a look.

And finally, in other news, I've decided I prefer deb-based systems, but want RPM's yum package manager. Where this will lead, no one knows.

Have a happy christmas everyone.
Rock on.

Window Managers again, GRUB, and so long and thanks for all the help

2009-12-09T17:31:00.000Z

It's not really often that I lump so much into a post, but it seems to be becoming a habit. Sorry to anyone that bothers.

Anyway, it's that time again, when I ramble about my ancient laptop.

Some time ago, I made a post talking about various Window Managers. This was under Ubuntu, however, not Fedora.
Under Fedora, GNOME/Metacity works relatively well, and I enjoy the customizability I get from it, but as time has gone past, it's started to cause trouble. Firefox, for example, has begun to inexplicably lock up randomly. This is distressing, because Chromium doesn't work, much to my annoyance, and the only other web browser I have available that I can put up with is Galeon, which is no substitute in my books.
So, I turned once again to an old curiosity of mine, and launched Openbox once more.
Well, that's not entirely accurate - Blackbox and Fluxbox also got a look in, but since I've yet to figure out how to the NetworkManager to work correctly in either, and WICD isn't available to Fedora 12 users, I left them behind.
Openbox, in comparison, is incredibly spartan. There's no panel, unlike Flux and Black. Instead, it's all done through the right-click menu on the desktop.
Unfortunatly, I'm in the habit of using a panel, so I'm trying fbpanel, which despite it's lack of customizability to it's GNOME and XFCE counterparts, is quite impressive, and I'm starting to like. If I could get it to launch itself when I launch an Openbox session, that'd be perfect.
This has got me thinking about Crunchbang Linux, as it uses Openbox, but more on that later.

Now, for GRUB.
The Grand unified Bootloader, and it's younger cousin, GRUB2, are from my point of view, quite impressive little things. It leaves a lot to be understood, however, as dad wants to put Linux Mint on his laptop. Now, Mint Gloria is based on Ubuntu Jaunty, which has no GRUB2 - and I may be wrong, but GRUB doesn't support Windows 7 correctly. GRUB2 I also have no understanding of.
So I'm left being forced to get him to put off using it until I can understand how exactly to manage it.
In ordinary circumstances, I'd simply go to the LQ website, but recently, I've been having a few negative responses there, so I'm letting things cool off before I go back.

Lastly, Fedora. Oh, Fedora.
It made such a good impression, but I'm afraid I have to say goodbye already.
Ubuntu Karmic, as you'll know, has left a very bitter taste for me, which is why I left it. Fedora 12 replaced it, in an attempt to get a little more usability out of my laptop, but with some of the issues I've had, not to mention the somewhat... snobbish community, I'm forced to leave it.
For Slackware.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, Crunchbang has recently appealed to me because it too is based on Ubuntu, which is like an old friend to me, and it uses Openbox, which is my new favourite session. I'm wary about using it though, because I don't like Karmic, and I don't want to use something based on it, at least not until the so called Service Pack for Karmic comes out next year. Also, I'm already uneasy about going back to Ubuntu and it's derivatives because inevitably, I'd have to upgrade, and that once again means Karmic. Karmic, Karmic, Karmic. I don't like it, and I'm sorry to say that unless it picks up, I never will, and that will be the end of Ubuntu in my house, but for anyone else who might use it.
Slackware has been suggested to me before, but until recently, I didn't quite understand the lettering system that explains the software packs. Now, I have a better understanding, and know - I think - what I need.
The problem remains however that I need to understand how to make GRUB - Fedora's GRUB, that is - boot the installer, which is from the LiveCD, but running on a HD partition. Essentially the same way I installed Fedora, except from the LiveCD, and on a HD partition... unlike Fedora, which was actually installed direct from the internet (A novel idea, and quite an interesting one, too).

For now, Openbox/Fedora 12 is managing, despite problems still finding there way in to bother me. But as soon as I've decided on either Crunchbang or Slackware, and I know how to do it, I'm changing once more.

SELinux and more

2009-12-02T17:51:00.000Z

My little laptop is pretty much back to normal, or rather the new normal, now I've had a chance to sort it out. I still have some small problems with it, but apparently they're either there to help the community, and be a pest to me, or they're there because there's no other reason except to be a pest.

For example, SELinux.
Now, my understanding is that it's meant to aid in system security. I have never had a single problem on my network. I run exactly zero antivirus guard with a resident shield. Periodic scans for both viruses and malware return nothing. If there is a network problem, it either originates with a mistake I made, or a mistake on the computer having the problem.
I have no need for SELinux.

However, it seems to be built into Fedora 12, and it seems to fall into the category of "There to help the community, but be a pest to the user" as in it's Enforcing mode, it allows me to do nothing beyond log in, and log out.
In Permissive mode, it allows me to do some more, then waits until I have something I don't want to lose, crashes everything, and then forces me to hard-reset.
So I've disabled it, and now everyone's busy telling me it's a bad idea.
Why? It's done nothing useful for me. It's sat there and been a pest. Since I'm told it's not removable, it can stay disabled. Someone suggested tweaking it, however I distrust this on the grounds that it just seems to be a varient of Permissive settings.

My main nag with it is that with it enabled, I cannot run anything through Wine - not even Winecfg, the configuration tool. And I do use Wine a lot, because some of the programs I used have not been ported to Linux in one form or another yet.

Yet I'm told that's a 'feature' of Wine/SELinux.

You're kidding me. Stopping people from using Wine is a feature?
I could understand if there were ports for all Windows programs. But this is just sheer wrongheaded stupidity.

Finally, it was suggested I change distribution.
Now, unless someone wants to tell me which Slackware ISO I need to download to get the Slackware equivalent of your standard Ubuntu LiveCD using Gnome, there is no alternative except Gentoo or Arch, neither of which are useful candidates because of the amount of work needed for them, and the amount of bandwidth I'd need - more than can be afforded.

So in response to those on various forums but mostly on the Fedora IRC channel - where they could be a little more polite to newbies, rather than being as abusive as they were to me - No, I'm not changing distribution. Slackware I might consider if someone explained, as above. But other than that? I'm on Fedora, and I'm here to stay, so live with it.

And while you're at it, it wouldn't hurt to actually listen to your users once in a while.
SELinux could be made OPTIONAL. But it's mandatory.
They could have used the right branch of GDM, one that had the gdmsetup graphic tool for configuring the GDM login screen, but no, they went and used a different branch, losing gdmsetup, and since forcing them to listen to the 'whining' (Read complaints) of their users demanding it back.
For gods sakes, if your users are doing that, don't just ignore them and call it whining, clearly you made a mistake, so fix it by putting things back again! Or at least wait until the branch you're using has gdmsetup again.
Or as one annoying person on the Fedora so-called-support IRC channel told me, program your own.
Now, that'd be a good idea. If I knew how to program in a language useful to Linux. I know VB. I have some very limited extremely basic C++ knowledge, useful for fixing conflicts in patches applied to OpenTTD, and little more.
But nope, I'm somehow expected to have a sudden burst of inspiration, know how to program in whatever language I need, know exactly what to write, compile it, and become some kind of saviour of the community, because they're too lazy to A: Fix their mistake by using the correct branch of GDM ro B: Write a tool for the users, so they don't have to put up with their ~~whining~~ complaints.

Fedora seems to have as many issues and people being jerks, as it does good points, at the moment.

On a side note, can anyone actually explain how LVM (Logical Volume Management) is meant to be useful?

That's all from me.
Rock on.

Friend of Fedora

2009-11-28T11:13:00.001Z

A few weeks ago, I would have called you insane for suggesting I'd be using RPM packages, let alone saying that Ubuntu had fallen from graces entirely.

I never thought I'd say it, but damn, RPM is a lot simpler to use than DEB.
I do miss apt-get for terminal commands, and on my laptop's newly installed Fedora, I tried apt-rpm. It's painfully slow in comparison to it's DEB counterpart, and after investigating the DistroWatch website's page on package management, yum has neatly taken over from it.
I like yum. While it's still not familiar to me, it's working on it quite well. I like the layout it uses, and how it does things.
Synaptic isn't used, mainly because it requires apt-rpm, and is therefore considerably slow. I haven't found graphical package manager I like for RPM yet.

Since using Fedora, I've discovered only a few small niggles.
First up Ndiswrapper. Irritatingly, I have a wireless PCMCIA card that has no native alternative. More irritating is that I'm going to have to compile ndiswrapper myself in order to make it work. This isn't exactly something I like the idea of.
Second. The touchpad no longer detects taps for clicking. True, I used the buttons underneath it for left clicking instead, but I did still use it.
Third. On boot up (which is a little longer than Karmic) the screen flashes repeatedly, in a way that people shouldn't look at, until it reaches GDM.
I'd rather it didn't do that, but I think it's just because it's an old laptop.

All that said... first impressions, and using it alongside Ubuntu Karmic on the desktop PC still running it... I'm impressed.
The menus are cleaner and tidier, the games menu I installed an RPM that divides them all into neat categories, installing and uninstalling (yum erase (package), a recently learned command for me) has become relatively easy, and a lot quicker. Adding a new repository seems to be the simple act of installing an RPM that automatically gets the GPG signing key for it.
Beyond the problems, there is little negative to be said about it.
For now, the ex-swap space that Karmic used to use is still an ext3 data partition, because I'm not entirely sure if this is the right distro yet. If I can finally sort out Ndiswrapper, then it'll most likely be put back to swap as normal, which should give a significant boost to the performance.

So the summary? Fedora is neatly winning me over, and Karmic is slowly slipping out of favor. Ubuntu and it's derivative, Linux Mint, may well be good for people new to Linux, but I'm not so new to it anymore. Maybe it's about time I moved on from it to a new distro instead.
And Fedora looks set to be that new one, once the last major issues I have are solved.

Slacking off? Not here

2009-11-26T23:29:00.000Z

I've been a little busy lately.
I've been looking at replacing Ubuntu Karmic on my ailing laptop.
I've been looking at Slax, Slackware and Fedora.

And I'm looking, to the left of this very screen I'm typing this on, at Fedora 12 installing on my laptop.

Now, considering my laptop has no CD/DVD/Floppy drive, has no working USB, and Karmic taking up all of the Hard drive except for the Swap, this is no mean feat.

The Swap space was taken from Karmic permanently, and changed to an ext3 partition. It was first fed the contents of a custom Slax LiveCD, and (Eventually, with help) booted from.
Slax is not for me.
So I decided to look at the base of Slax, Slackware.
Oh god.
How many different versions? Debian first confused me, until I understood about architectures, but Slackware takes it to another level.

So I gave up, and went looking for Fedora.
Now, my (ex-)Swap partition isn't spacey. It's only just a shade above that required for a LiveCD alone.
So I followed the instructions for a media-less install, and told it where to go to retrieve a file called 'install.img'
And now, thanks to the wonders of a single ethernet cable, my router, and the internet, I have Anaconda, the Fedora installer, sat looking at me as I customize the repositories, and the starting packages - something that Ubuntu doesn't do, and by gods, it needs to do.

Fedora, congratulations. Once you've finished being installed on my laptop, you have a convert in me.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to use yum, RPM packages, and see if I can get good old Synaptic back...

Cloud Storage: Ubuntu One VS Dropbox

2009-11-20T18:23:00.000Z

Until recently, the only thing I'd ever used cloud-based storage for was the Xmarks extension for Firefox (And other browsers, but I do wish they'd support Opera already), which handily backs up all my bookmarks, and then no matter where I go, I can access them. Lost bookmarks are a thing of the past.
On a side topic, I also recently signed up for, and got into the Xmarks for Chrome (And Chromium) beta. So far, it's good. Chalk up one more in favor of my using Opera.

But to the point, that was all I'd used it for. With some issues still plaguing my old laptop, and moving around computers meaning I'm often away from where I've put this file, or those documents, I decided to finally look into them.

Ubuntu One was my first target. It's free, it's integrated into Ubuntu, and it looks pretty good.
What was the downside for me? I couldn't get it to synchronize on demand. If I added something to my local folder, I had to log out and back in again to get it to happen.
Also, there's no way of telling who's logged into it - my laptop logged me right in, without asking me for a user name or a password, and provided me with a Ubuntu One folder - but my laptop's and my home's main desktop PC seem to be using two different accounts.

After a little frustration, I moved to Dropbox.
Dropbox is what every app should be - clean, simple and to the point. I enabled the software repository for Karmic via Ubuntu Tweak, but that wasn't essential as they tell you how to do it on-site as well.
I installed it, logged out and back in, because it has to integrate with Nautilus, and since the GNOME desktop is basically an embedded Nautilus, that's the safest option.
Run it from the menu, and it lets you know you have to use their proprietary daemon. After verifying this wasn't going to cost me anything, I let it go ahead and download it.
Now, this download took a while, so I can only assume it's a fairly large one. But the clean and simple dialog allowed me to keep watch, a definate plus, though I would have liked to know where it was downloading to.

Finally, I registered on the site, went through the tour (Because it nabs you +25MB of storage space) and all was done.
Added my laptop as well, and now it syncs whenever there's a change - even when both computers are running Dropbox and both logged in at the same time.
It's also impressively quick at it too.

Ubuntu One needs work, but to my knowledge, it is a beta, so that's understandable. Dropbox, which is also in a testing state really, is still superior to it for now, and thankfully, it works on all three major OS. Or so it claims, I've yet to actually use it on Windows, and I don't even know anyone who owns a Mac.

Ubuntu One vs Dropbox? Dropbox wins me over, no contest.
But, if you're thinking of trying either - take my advice and try it yourself - you may find Ubuntu One does better for you.

Calling all Linux users

2009-11-20T14:37:00.000Z

Please note that this does not apply to every Linux user.
But it seems to be applicable to an increasing number. So here it is.

Stop being jerks. Stop being arrogant, and stop being so blind.

I asked you simple questions, and both times you provided useless answers.
I asked you to help me understand cross-compiling Windows builds of OpenTTD on Linux, and you told me to download the Windows binaries, instead of answering the question.
I asked you if you could help me identify what I needed to help get a little extra life out of my old laptop, and you ignored me and just told me to get a new laptop, something I cannot do right now.

Read this, and learn the next bit.

If someone asks you a question, answer it. Don't give them a solution that doesn't answer the question, like telling them to download a Windows binary that can't be patched because it's not in source form.
If someone is asking a hardware question, answer it. Don't just tell them to get something else, UNLESS it also answers their question.

So stop being arrogant, self-centered, blinded, hateful jerks, and either help, or shut up.

I'm fed up of you being useless. I'm fed up of being given non-solutions. And I'm in one of my rare incurably bad moods because of it. So learn, damn you.

Anyone who's read my threads on the Linux Questions site regarding the two examples above won't find it hard to see the source of my irritation.

I'm not going to twitter about this post, because I'm not proud of it, and I'm just as annoyed about it as they should be at being such jerks. It's a relief outlet for me, and I'll probably remove it later when I realize that I'm not being any better than them by doing this, but I don't really care right now.

Either help, or leave me alone.
Rock out.

Broadband for all

2009-11-19T22:58:00.000Z

Have a read of this page, then come back here and carry on reading.

Neat, huh?
What's taken them so long? And why doesn't the rest of the world have this right yet?
We should. Any child of the net-generation would agree with that.

And speaking of net-children, it's interesting to notice that while about a year ago, I ignored and eschewed twitter altogether... now it's become useful, and a part of my daily life.
True, I rarely tweet, and have only re-tweeted once, but it's a handy tool for following people and sites you want to keep up with.
So, with that, if you follow me on Twitter (Look for TheStarLion, that's me) you'll get a tweet from me whenever I make a new blog entry.
And that's about all I'll tweet, really. Except the odd one like about that page.
Twitter is good. I'll give it that.
But I think it's more useful to find out what sites are doing, and when your favorite blogger/webcomic artist/whatever updates their site, than to tell everyone your every move.

Alternatives

2009-11-16T11:21:00.000Z

As usual, my updates aren't exactly regular. I'm working on that, but as long as people don't mind that if there's nothing to mention, I don't have much reason to post, then that's alright.

Anyway.

As some people may be aware, Ubuntu Karmic has recently left a bit of a bad taste for me. While I'll grant that it's slowly improving - and if what I've read through StumbleUpon (An annoyingly addictive addon for Firefox... and other browsers too, of course) is any indication, then they're doing a first, and putting together SP1 - though, most won't notice it as it'll come with their regularly scheduled updates, and so on.
I'll be looking forward to that, since so far, I still have some issued with Karmic, such as that GNOME no longer works at all on my now revived laptop (Interestinly, XFCE works perfectly... but isn't it also technically GNOME?), or the odd issue that sound randomly mutes itself.

But that's become practically normal for now. I'm looking into changing though.
So far, I've had all kinds of suggestions, but with the assistence of the DistroWatch and Polish Linux websites, along with numerous other sources, I've narrowed it down to 4 or 5. I say or 5 because there may well be one more.
That one is Gentoo. The prospect of compiling everything and tinkering with the code along the way is intriguing, but I suspect my meagre knowledge of Linux isn't quite ready for that just yet. So it's only a possible.
The other four are Fedora, Arch, Slackware and Slax. I understand Slax is a varient of Slackware, like Ubuntu is to Debian perhaps.
With the exception of Arch/Gentoo, all of these use my previously detested enemy, RPM.
However... it appears my fears were ungrounded on that (I really should read up more about these things *before* I decide I don't like them...)
Firstly, it appears that apt-rpm and Synaptic are indeed available in some form even to RPM users, they're not just a couple of DEB packages.
Secondly, it seems like yum, the RPM version of DEB's apt-get, does indeed resolve dependencies, from what I see, fairly well too.
And thirdly, like apt, there's no end of options for how to handle it.

So, I've resolved not to slam it until I know more.
The problem comes with what computer to put it on.
See, my ancient laptop, as regulars will know, is clearly on the way to visit Death in person. The only way left for things to get in and out of it, like this blog post, is via the wireless card - which in turn, has to run through NDisWrapper, but that's another story.
So, given that it's only available drive is the hard drive, which when I first foolishly formatted the entire thing into two partitions - swap, and the root filesystem - I have a little problem when it comes to changing distribution.
I'm not naive enough to try what I once did on a different computer, adding the Ubuntu repositories to a Debian install and try to do dist-upgrade, leaving me with a dreadfully broken system.
What I am going to do, is thank the generous people at the Linux Questions website, for helping me find a solution. Two, actually.
(Original thread here)To quote member AuroraZero's post with the solution:
"hmmm do not fret this can still be done I believe. Two ways off the top of my head are one go to e-bay and see if you can pick up a pcmcia ext cdrom. Second choice go get an adapter that changes the 2.5" PATA to 3.5" PATA and then put the hard drive into a desktop to load what you need. The second choice is the cheaper way to go. I have this before and works quite well actually. Both ways cost some cash but not as much as sending it in to be fixed or having it fixed at a comp shop. I would suggest the second way as it will probably be the cheaper way and save the laptop for a few more years. Also when you are done with it you can take the drive and install it into a desktop which is kinda cool."

The former is an interesting choice, restoring - at the cost of losing wireless, as the wireless card also uses that slot - CD Rom drive to my laptop, a considerable boon.
The second is just as interesting though, as it means that if my laptop does give up finally, as it probably should have done long ago (And probably wishes it had sometimes) I can still use it to nab all my stuff off it.

So I've got a lot of alternatives to think about for now.

In related news, my previously Linux-phobic father has actually done what I never thought I'd see him do - he's not only ordered himself a new laptop without Windows on at all, but one which he intends to install, by himself, Linux Mint on, which means he intends to give up Windows entirely. Personally, I'm proud of him - he's been trying to use Ubuntu once in a while, sometimes asking me how to do something, but mostly by himself, but that's on a PC that dual boots with XP. Now he's going for full Linux, no Windows but for that Wine gives, which is bound to be challenging for him at first, but at least unlike me, he's got someone to help him. Me.
So there you have it - Linux is now beating Windows so badly, that even Dad wants to use it.
(So does mum, her Distro of choice being OpenSuSE, but as it takes some time to help her learn these things, we haven't got around to sorting that out just yet. Plus it means I'd have to Quad-boot one of the desktop PC's between Ubuntu for my brother, Whichever of the four above for me, Mint for Dad and OpenSuSE for mum. What a nightmare that'll be to maintain...)

Thanks given

2009-11-05T19:18:00.000Z

A rare case for me, but nevertheless... a big thank you to Sylphid, who on the Ubuntu support channel helped me revive my ancient laptop.
As regular readers will know, it's died many times before. Now, I know the cause, the diagnosis, and the cure.

To all of you running Ubuntu, you may want to take note:

Disable Ubuntu X and Ubuntu X (Testing) from Ubuntu Tweak.
Go to a TTY (CLI only, no G/KDM) and completly remove xorg-xserver
sudo apt-get update
then install x/k/ubuntu-desktop, or anything that depends on xorg-xserver, et voila! It works again.
Sylphid, I thank you again.

Linux, Linux on the web...

2009-11-03T22:17:00.000Z

As I mentioned earlier, I decided to look for alternative Linux Distributions to think of trying using the Chooser I linked to.

The results are quite interesting. Where before it listed only Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and the derivatives of each, it now only lists Debian and Ubuntu, along with others. The exact results are as follows:

Debian still holds top spot. I did once, on a previous occasion that I lost patience with Ubuntu (Intrepid, at the time) try Debian. My main issues were that sudo did not automatically have the first user added to it, and the menus were different. Also, their somewhat insistant habit of rejecting software such as Firefox for unbranded versions like their IceWeasel is a pain.

Foresight Linux is a newcomer to my scene. According to the chooser, it boasts the latest and greatest of GNOME - which is appealing, as I like GNOME a lot. People can complain about it's lack of customisability, I say they're wrong. Although I know little about this one as yet, it appears to be a promising candidate for a new Linux to try.

Mandriva isn't new to me, but also isn't tried by me. I've heard much about this distro, and I'm not certain what to make of it. I'd need to know what kind of hardware support for NVidia graphics cards is in there, how it handles packages, and how easy/hard it is to customize.
(Note: I'm no longer opposed to RPM - provided I can install apt-rpm, and manage my RPM packages via Synaptic through the apt-rpm stuff - if not, I'll have to find another way, but apt-rpm and Synaptic are preferred.)

Fedora is an old friend and enemy. It's the very first Linux I used, with Fedora 10 KDE. However, I spent very little time there, as I had trouble with it. This was, I realize now, mostly because of KDE, so it's gained another chance. What brings it down however, is that I've also heard that Fedora isn't very good for normal home use, and that Wine, an essential for me, doesn't work at all. Again, more information on this would be useful.

Ubuntu finds it's way into the results here between Fedora and Gentoo. It used to dominate the top of the boards, but as my knowledge of Linux has grown and changed, and my hatred of RPM has now vanished, it's slipped a lot.
However, I do like Ubuntu. It does have it's many good points, and I will keep it around, even if it means a dual-boot system. It's something I can fall back on.

Gentoo Linux. Ah, much have I heard about this one.
Now, as I understand it, Gentoo doesn't do packages. It does source code. Apparently it compiles the kernel itself on install, which is a daunting prospect - anything I've compiled previously has taken a while to do so, the thought of the massive Linux kernel being compiled is somewhat unnerving - will this take a few minutes, hours or days?
However, the idea of compiling applications rather than using pre-compiled applications is intriguing, and offers me the chance to investigate the source code to help my incessant habit of looking into it just to see how it works.
On the down-side, not all applications I use have source code available, such as once again, Firefox - the more recent ones just aren't available to my knowledge. So, assuming it exists the same on a Gentoo system, I'd have to download it from Mozilla, precompiled, and install it to /opt instead. I've never had to do this before, so like the kernel, I'm a little daunted by this.

Arch Linux is another one I've heard about, and it seems to me to be a lot like Gentoo.
I've looked into it before, but always been put off by the fact that as I understand it, you install and have little more than a command line.
Now, I'm no stranger to the terminal, but it's a Ubuntu- or Debian-like terminal I'm used to, with sudo, apt-get, aptitude and so on, which isn't on Arch. I'd need to know exactly what I'd have to enter into it to get a GDM login screen, and a GNOME session, where I could continue in a graphic environment. I don't have anything against the command line; it's very useful for getting more information on what's happening behind the scenes, so to speak. But I don't like being stuck at one, like my laptop is, and not knowing what to do.

Slackware I know little of, beyond wanting to be stable and easy to use. Ubuntu manages both - despite my opinion of Karmic leaving a bad taste.
Like Foresight Linux, I really need to know more before I can say for sure whether this garners a place on the list of distributions I'll be trying.

Finally, Zenwalk, previously unknown to me. It says it's Slackware based however, which means to me, I'll be considering the two as the same for now.

Now, I'll be posting, as I always do, a tweet about this post on Twitter (it's about all I really actually use Twitter for...)
If you've just come from there, and you use any of these versions of Linux, or for that matter, ANY Linux - have a read through, and see if you can help out on some of the information I'm missing, or - in a rare case of me being unusually nice to people - if you think you can sway me to your favored distro, go right ahead.

If you don't use Linux, pass it on to someone who does, and thinks they can help out - resident Linux fanatics, for example (Be warned though, said fanatics will watch what they say on my blog).

Help a guy out here - Ubuntu Karmic's not doing too well here, so this is your chance to make your favored Linux shine, and maybe net another user for it too - me.
Not that it means much, but I'm sure some people would get a nice feeling from knowing they converted someone.

Karmic Chaos

2009-11-03T16:52:00.000Z

My initial impressions of Ubuntu Karmic aren't holding up.
I've reluctantly kept it around on the now upgraded desktop that uses it, and I'm not impressed anymore.

Conky now randomly crashes without apparant reason, and I had to rewrite my config file for it.
Audio levels now appear to be completely random and independant for all programs, requiring constant micromanagement in order to not have sounds too loud or quiet.
The option to change from PulseAudio to ALSA and others has been removed from it's easy-accessible spot in Preferences -> Sounds, and moved to Preferences -> Multimedia Systems Selector - which is hidden by default.
Wine, though it works, the metapackage for it not only depends on the package wine1.2, it tries to remove it at the same time. Wait, what? Is that even possible?
Running in a terminal "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade" no longer works - it will fail when trying to run the upgrade half.

And overall, a lot of things run very slow. I put this down to being my ancient laptop (Which has since re-died, by the way) before, but now it seems to be affecting all of Ubuntu Karmic.

Oh, and if you do anything with apt-get, aptitude, Synaptic, Adept, GDebi or the new Software Center - something I'm actually still slightly impressed with - you almost always need to restart because the system slows down even more.

I'm sticking with it though, and hoping that at least most of these issues will solve themselves with updates. But if it gets too much, I'm going to do one of three things.
Go back to Jaunty, and stay there until Lucid.
Go back to trying to put up with Debian (Something I gave up on due to numerous differences, which I had trouble with)
Using the Linux Distribution Chooser I found to help find a different Linux distro - even going so far as to possibly use one that uses my previously hated enemy, RPM, if I have to.

Karmic's first impressions on me were good. Since putting it on the desktop though, they've steadily declined.
Definitely more polish needed for it, I think.

Birthday et more

2009-10-31T11:06:00.000Z

'tis my birthday today, it is.
22, and 14 years on from when I actually was 8, I don't feel a day over 8 years of age.
I get to pull off my favourite Halloween trick too.
See, they come a-calling, every year, the trick or treaters.
And I answer the door.
They say that inevitable phrase.
And I tell them, Sorry, I'm busy celebrating my birthday - come back next year.

Now, you'd think after 6 years of this, they'd finally catch on, but some of them still do it anyway. So I get my yearly fun.

AAAAnyway.

I upgraded my ailing ancient laptop to Ubuntu Karmic.
GNOME has ceased to work on it. KDE is it's salvation. Or it was.
After upgrading, I decided to tidy up, and remove some un-needed packages.
And now, once again, it's stuck at the command line, as KDM - like GDM, previously - fails to start.
What I would like, is a new laptop. One with a working USB, with inbuilt Wireless that linux can use without needing NDISWrapper, one that has it's own built in CD or even DVD drive.
What I have, is this laptop, which is almost dead, and is hiding some of my stuff that I *really* want back.
Except until someone tells me how to access a windows share via Samba on the command line, I'll never get them.
Oh, joy of joys.

In the breif time I had Karmic running though, I had some good first impressions on it. I'm a bit miffed that they've dropped support for GCC - the GNU Compiler Collection - since I use that a lot. A few other packages have conspicuously gone missing or changed, including one that now makes OpenTTD cease to function. However, a helpful person on the TT-Forums, with my aid, found the solution - simply install it from the Jaunty Repo.

In the breif time I was able to use KDE on there, I also had mixed impressions.
The bad ones are that it's slow, clunky, and I got lost in the KDE version of the Start Menu. However, the first two are most likely my laptop being ancient, and the last just being not used to it.
The good ones are that there's some pretty cool stuff in KDE, some nice KDM themes available for it on GNOME-look's cousin KDE-look, and a few things are actually easier.
I also like the plasmoid display. True, it took me a little while to figure it out, and I haven't had the chance to investigate much because my laptop complained if I had more than one plasmoid on screen, but it's got my interest.
I did note, that while my favourite terminal program Guake (Drop down Quake-like terminal for Gnome) has a KDE cousin, Yakuake, that Guake works just as well in KDE. So Yakuake (Or however it's spelled) can stay away for now.
However, I miss Gnomenu. I like Gnomenu. But I don't get Gnomenu. The KDE menu just isn't the same.

So overall - Karmic has a good rating from me, if you like Ubuntu or Jaunty, definatly upgrade - in a few days time though, so you don't get caught by the massive server overloads of people downloading it.
KDE also has a better rating in my books too now.

On a related note, I've been looking into BlackBox, and FluxBox. BlackBox for Windows (bb4win, and bblean) has managed to save me from a lot of getting annoyed at Windows when I'm forced to use it, but on Linux, I can't seem to get used to them. It has something to do with the fact I'm suspiciously missing anything resembling a notification area, that and gksu and kdesudo don't seem to work anymore.

Anyway, that's all from me. Rock on, and wish me a happy birthday, lest I visit curses up on you.

A long needed update

2009-10-19T20:09:00.000+01:00

My, it's been a while since I posted here.
Hope no one missed me.

Real life, as always, has intruded itself once more, and time is more limited than usual, but I digress - before I've even started, too.

I recently tried to help maintain the Community Integrated Version patchpack for OpenTTD. Due to the sheer amount of patches in there, it grew overweight, and I had to kill it.
Thus GPP (Gremnon's Patch Pack) was born by me, and was slightly slimmed down.
I still try to maintain it, though various updates to trunk, lack of updates to patches, and the fact that there's still a good number of patches causes it to take time to sort out.
A friend also tried porting it to work on the CargoDist branch, and gave up. Which isn't promising.
I've taken time away from it because I don't have enough at the moment, nor do I have the patience, but I'm not out of the OpenTTD scene yet.

I have, however, grown short-tempered over one small issue on the Transport Tycoon forums, though.
It seems that anyone using Windows immediately gets the 'I can't' syndrome for compiling, and when told it's easy, and that it you read one page (Compiling on MinGW, specifically) on the OpenTTD Wiki, they seem to lose the ability to read, and whine loudly that no one's being helpful.
So now I've lost patience, and any of them I see I'll be reminding that it IS simple - since my 3 year old niece, while supervised, regularly compiles OpenTTD without any help at all.
She apparently doesn't trust precompiled builds, so regularly updates her local subversion checkout, runs ./configure just in case, and then happily sits and watches it compile.
OK, so she's not actually very good at playing yet - but she can compile, and no one helped her learn, I just showed her the page, and explained some of the words she didn't understand.

So there you have it. Compiling OpenTTD is so simple, even a 3 year old can do it.
Now stop whinging, and go compile it yourselves you lazy people who complain 'I can't because of XXXXX'

Docks

2009-09-19T16:00:00.000+01:00

Not ducks, though if you're using the same font I do on my laptop, you'd be forgiven for thinking it said that.
Anyway.

Docks. Mac's great gift to all systems, and something that lately, I'm happy they did.
There are lots of docks out there. Mac users need not look, I believe they get theirs pre-installed. Windows users, I know of only the Rocket Dock.
Linux has many, the ones I know of are the (Recently discovered to me) Avant Window Navigator and Cairo-Dock. I know there's more out there though.

Cairo-Dock was good, but somewhat limited, and put me off docks. AWN has won me irrevocably back to them, however, with a simple combination of being able to replace 90% of all things on my GNOME panels, a theme that means it takes up little space, and a whole hoard of applets. When i used the ever-useful Ubuntu Tweak to enable the testing version, it had me.

My AWN Dock is as follows:
MiiMenu - Replaces the standard Ubuntu "Applications/Places/System" menus found normally on the top panel.
Volume Control - Speaks for itself
File Browser Launcher - useful for going directly to where I need
Notification Area - this used to take up a nice chunk of the GNOME panel, now it's nice and neat and far less space.
Cairo-Clock - Well, it helps to know the time. Especially when you have no sense of it.
Show Desktop - Another self-explanatory one. I don't actually use it often.
Trash Applet - Ditto.
And of course, the AWN settings launcher, followed by running programs.

I did consider adding the launchers for some programs I use often, but even using my new theme for it, awn-shiki-brave, found on Gnome-Look (Under other Gnome stuff, they really need an AWN section) this all takes up just under half the lower part of the screen.
So, the ex-main panel at the top now holds my launchers, the desktop switcher, and the menu for logout, shutdown, etc. And a handy little tweak found in the panel properties means it takes up only a small amount of space, rather than the whole of the top, and is on auto hide.

This setup only loses me a small amount of screen real-estate, but provides far more in other ways. AWN's got me hooked.

So thanks to AWN's developers, the maker of each of the applets I use, the creator of the awn-shiki-brave theme for it, but mostly, and most unusually for me, to the Mac - for putting the Dock into the computer.

How does your desktop look?

2009-09-17T15:22:00.000+01:00

Pre-Linux time, I never used to worry much about how my desktop looked. Mostly, this was because XP was, and still is, very limited, without 3rd party programs.
Linux, on the other hand, has unparalleled choice.
Originally, I used XFCE, which of course uses practically the same things as GNOME, which I later used.
Both of these, in comparison to XP, held that much choice, and I changed how it looked often.
At the time, I used one tool - Art Manager. It's a Ubuntu (And probably Debian too) package which you can get GTK, Metacity and more themes.
KDE I experimented with, but as I've said before, I don't like it as much as I do GNOME.
Since discovering the useful site gnome-look, I've found even more choice, and I've since moved from the Metacity window decorater to using Emerald, or Beryl Emerald, to be exact, because it has many interesting styles that I like.
However.
Some people seem to have trouble getting Emerald to work, so, thanks to many people online, and many hours of searching and investigating, here is how to do it.
Firstly, you need to install the Emerald Theme Manager and it's dependencies. Also, Compiz-Fusion should be installed too. Finally, look for the package compiz-fusion-icon (or something similar).
The Fusion Icon is invaluable, as it sits in your notification area, and you can launch both Emerald and Compiz settings managers, change your window manager and window decorator... very useful.
(A Caveat - While running the dev version of compiz fusion, changing the window manager while logged in causes the X session to become unresponsive. I'm not sure if this is my computer, the dev version of compiz, or just me fouling up, so be aware it may happen to you too)
Second thing to do. Launch the Compiz Icon. You'll find it (In GNOME) under Applications -> System Tools -> Compiz Fusion Icon.

Right click on the icon that appears in the notification area, and select Emerald Theme manager. Choose your theme, set any option. Note that at this point you will NOT see any change. This is normal.
Close the Emerald Theme Manager

Right click on the Compiz Fusion Icon again, this time go down to Select Window Decorator, and in the submenu that appears, select Emerald.
Et voila! Give your computer a few moments (or nano-moments if you've got a blindingly fast box) and Emerald should be working normally.

If, for some reason, it isn't, then you need to do a little more.
Go into System -> Preferances -> Startup Applications (Or Sessions, on older Ubuntu versions)
Add an entry, give it the name 'theme' and make the command 'emerald --replace' both without quotes (Copy and paste from here if you want to be sure)
Reboot, or log out and back in, and that should have fixed it.

Now enjoy your Emerald themes. Hope this helps!

Oh, and as a last note, completely unrelated... I now strongly reccommend you miss a bus than run for it - tripping and sliding along the pavement, or sidewalk, or whatever you call it, is not only painful, it leaves you with a lovely arrangement of grazes, bruises, and in my case, also a split lip. Not fun.
Rock on people.

Repositories

2009-09-13T16:28:00.000+01:00

Gah.
Ever wondered why there are so many empty PPAs on Launchpad?
It's because it's bloody difficult to figure out.
I finally decided to try maintaining a repository where people could get the latest nightly build of OpenTTD, as I said I would.

Oh, boy did I make a mistake.
It quite happily walks you through setting up a GPG key, the signing of the Ubuntu Code of Conduct and setting up a PPA. Then it gets useless.
See, the page which tells you (supposedly) how to upload a packages makes very little sense.
By trying to follow it's instructions to try to upload my package, I get errors every time. And my package, at this rate, will never get there.
It has a 'helpful' list of common errors. Which doesn't explain anything for my issue.
It sits there and tells you how you're *meant* to upload, and my computer sits there and says, it's wrong.

So now, I have an empty PPA on Launchpad for OpenTTD nightly builds that will never be there, doing nothing, because Launchpad's package upload help is... crap.

Gah.

(If you think you can help, I invite you to do so before I lose any more of my sanity.)

M&M Update

2009-09-11T22:45:00.000+01:00

A little update from the previous post - aMSN has found it's voice again.
One little line change in Preferences->other, and it's solved.
For anyone else having the same issue, simply look for the thread '[Solved] Sound Issues' in the Linux part of the aMSN forums.

Messages and Messengers

2009-09-11T21:29:00.000+01:00

My gods. Another of my infrequent posts? Believe it.
Of course, if I knew that I had any readers, I might actually post more often. Possibly. Habits are hard to break.

For anyone interested (probably no one) I signed up on Twitter. I followed one... channel? is that what they are if they're not for a person? Anyway, I followed the Forumwarz.com thing, 'cause they had an update recently and I was bored, so I decided to follow them to find out when it came back up again.
Typically, it was right after I started following them.
As yet, my Twitter account has been looked at once, and isn't linked to anything... although there's a distinct possibility that I might have linked this blog to it. I'm not sure yet. To be honest, I'll probably almost never use it, I prefer the MSN messenger for talking to people.

Which is, incidentally my next topic.
Now, I can understand Microsoft's reasoning behind not providing a Mac/Linux messenger - it'd give more people another reason to leave their gift-from-god (at least in their eyes) OS, Windows.
However, times have changed and all kinds of people have made workarounds. Of course, their messenger service doesn't 'officially' support them, but I have no doubt a few people up there play around with these messengers too.
Anyway.
MSN was the first program I set about replacing when I started using Ubuntu. And I quickly found several replacements, my favourite at the time was Emesene.
Emesene's good, lightweight, but was hard to get used to, and didn't have the same look and feel as the MSN, or the WL (Windows Live, and also hated) messengers. This was a downside, as even now, I still prefer the look from them. Some things I prefer the Windows way, so I'll admit they do periodically have a flash of good sense.
I moved on from Emesene to aMSN. And I still use it. I've had a few issues, such as recently, as I understand it a misplaced Ubuntu Karmic dependency on the Ubuntu Jaunty aMSN daily build, since resolved, and my current issue of no sound. I'm hoping the aMSN forums will shortly be able to help with this one. Seeing a general lack of activity on there however, I might be in for a wait.
So while I'm waiting, I'm writing this.

I've experimented with other messengers that support MSN from time to time, I've heard good things about Pidgin, and indeed, it's ability to link all IM accounts to one simple clean interface is nice, but like Emesene, it lacks a few things from MSN that I like. I'm a stickler for things like that.
I've tried Galaxium, and the testing version (Thanks to Ubuntu-Tweak for giving me access to that - the 3rd party repositories they turn up are VERY useful). Galaxium is actually quite good, to me, if a little unstable, but it was the testing version. I'm periodically trying it again to check on it. It may be possible I'll change to it sometime, but only if it can manage to fully supplant aMSN for me.
There are others, but I won't list them here. Gods know there's too many if I started on that.

I did, however, at one point experiment with getting ye aulde Windows MSN and WL messengers working through Wine.
Here's my advice for you: Don't bother for WL, not without a lot of patience and experimenting, and MSN... well, I guess if you're really desperate and don't like the alternatives...

In other news... I once again attempted to like KDE. KDE once again failed. There are some interesting features... but GNOME still wins out.
I've fixed an issue with Firefox - must remember to be more careful when using Nightly Tester Tools to enable incompatible addons - and it's managed to win me back from Chromium... however, Chromium still has it's place when I need really quick browsing.
I also joined Forumwarz.com, as mentioned earlier. Actually, I joined some time ago, but I didn't bother to tell anyone. If you're not easilly offended, maybe have a look. WARNING: Mature content alert on that site. I take no responsibility. You look at your own peril.

Finally, I've started (again) to play OpenTTD, one of my old favourites that I keep coming back to.
As usual, it's a patched build, with my own selection of them. One more, the newGRF GUI window replacement, I'm waiting on an update for, then it'll join the others.
Where I've been installing these using checkinstall to create a .deb package, two thoughts occured to me.
Firstly, was that maybe I should start a patchpack. However, since my choice in patches varies widely, and I'm expected to keep it up to date - not something I like the idea of - this isn't exactly appealing.
Secondly, was that maybe I should figure out how to maintain a PPA (Personal Package Archive, if you don't know) on Launchpad, and make nightly builds available via that. This option's more interesting, as it means people can simply add my PPA Repository and get an upgrade to a new nightly relatively quickly, and since I recently figured out dependencies for checkinstall, it'll ensure they have all the requirements they need.
The only downside is the same as the Patchpack, however, since all I'd need to do is keep a separate folder for a clean trunk from SVN, and once a day, update, compile, run checkinstall to generate the .deb, then upload, it shouldn't be more than a couple of days out from the current nightly at any time really.

Comment with your thoughts on any matter here... not that I'm expecting any, but it'd be a nice surprise.
Rock on people.

Jaunty and Wireless

2009-09-02T16:38:00.000+01:00

So, after a fairly long time, this ancient, ailing, and still slowly dieing laptop has finally been upgraded from Ubuntu Intrepid to Ubuntu Jaunty.
My huge list of 3rd party sources gave a few worries, but since the upgrade helpfully disables them and replaces all instances of 'intrepid' to 'jaunty' so it's looking for the right version's packages, there was only one major issue.
My aMSN messenger package ended up with broken dependancies, and a little investigatory work on their forums revealed that they're linking to a package for Karmic, not Jaunty. I have no problem with this - not any more, at least - but it'd be nice of they checked these things.
So instead, I downloaded and compiled the source tarball, and new have a spanking new version that's even further ahead than the old one, and works better.

That aside, my long overdue impressions of Jaunty are this: It's better. The sound works better, but for a few sounds that still play the default instead of my custom ones, performance is greatly increased - something my desktop conky system monitor reminds me of - the boot time is impressive, since it used to take about a minute to get to the gdm login, let alone have a useable desktop.

I still have a few issues though. Firstly, something odd's happened to my NetworkManager. I don't like WicD, some people might like it, but I don't. There's such a thing as too much choice. Anyway, NM has decided not to enable on login, I have to open a terminal, start it manually, and leave the terminal open. This has actually carried over from Intrepid, not only before I upgraded, but before I added the PPA on Launchpad with more recent builds of NM. I partially solved it with the Guake Terminal, which takes it's name from Quake's drop down command line interface. It's a godsend for a terminal in a pinch. I used to just open a new terminal in that, and leave it alone.
I've gone one better - sort of - and solved it further by adding a line in the startup applications which starts it. Unfortunatly it requires root or sudo, so I prefixed it with gksu, and all I do is enter my password again after the normal login. It's a minor inconvenience for having my wireless work normally.

The second issue is a long-known one - wireless.
Now, I've been tracking the bug thread for it on Launchpad, and it claims to be fixed in Karmic, by using a new NetworkManager. The same one, incidentally, I happen to be using right now on Jaunty. Guess what? It still can't connect to any secure network. Karmic may have fixed it, but NetworkManager didn't.

The final issue isn't exactly Ubuntu at all, it's the laptop. When I first decided to put Ubuntu on it, everyone told me it was impossible, I'd be left with an expensive paperweight, and I was an idiot. Even Jay, who knows almost as much as I do, said it wouldn't work.
It was difficult, but not impossible. The first issue is that this laptop has no CD drive, I had to use a USB one. Even then, the laptop wouldn't boot from it. Windows XP, which was on here when I got it, could read it normally, of course. I had to make the Windows autoplay that comes up from a LiveCD create a boot option.
When I finally got it to go to the LiveCD boot, I had to tell it to install using ACPI workarounds - whatever that means - because it couldn't boot the LiveCD Ubuntu, and the normal install gave a kernel panic and stopped. I have absolutely no idea why that happened to this day.

At any rate, I finally installed Xubuntu 8.04 on it, and the issue I had right from then, was graphics. Not bad ones. The lack of memery periodically caused odd errors, text artifacts appearing over pictures and toolbars, text going blocky and unreadable.
I moved from Xubuntu to normal Ubuntu - XFce to GNOME, if you prefer - and it fixed most of that, with a slight downturn in performance, but I expected that. I toyed with KDE, but since my experiment with it on here led to waiting ten minutes before it was useable ruled it out.
The upgrade from Hardy, 8.04, to Intrepid, 8.10 didn't seem to change much on that.
However, on going to Jaunty, the text problems returned, worse. I fixed *most* of that by using Ubuntu Tweak's 3rd party repository for Ubuntu X - the experimental upgrades for the X.org drivers and such. After applying that, it worked, and still does work, mostly normally again.

Okay, so you didn't really need to know all that. But it helps. I still have periodic issues with odd text artifacts, and text on image's but it's far reduced, even from Intrepid and Hardy. If anyone knows how to fix it entirely - without buying upgrades - do let me know.

And on a completely unrelated note, post a comment if you actually read this - I'm interested to see if anyone ever does.

Mistakes

2009-08-25T02:02:00.000+01:00

Oh, yes, mistakes.

And so soon after the last post.

Because it's related.

You see, once I had my pure Ubuntu system, I made a mistake. I wanted the two new partitions, one that was previously C:\ and the other D:\ (D:\ being a separate partition on the same drive as Ubuntu and it's swap space) to automagically mount on boot.

However... be wary of messing in something you don't know about, because as a result of trying using tools, and some help in the Ubuntu IRC community support channel - a very helpful place, I might add - Ubuntu now refuses to boot.

So, I'm forced to dig out the Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope LiveCD which has been gathering dust, use it to make a quick emergency backup of the data on Ubuntu to my laptop, and now it's happily churning away.

At what? Firstly, it's changing the ex-C:\ drive into the /home partition. All home folders are on this drive, separately now. Secondly, it's changing the ex-D:\ drive's windows partition, and the now dead Jaunty that was already on there, into one large partition, mounted as / (Root filesystem, for those who don't have a clue).

And then finally, it's going to install Jaunty, and I get the thankless (at least here, anyway) task of reinstalling all sorts of things.

Hey, at least it's quicker than installing Windows, that sometimes feels like it takes years.

The Switch

2009-08-25T00:50:00.000+01:00

I've been a Ubuntu user for some time now, but I still periodically needed to reboot into Windows, and the rest of the family here also preferred Windows too.

Now that's changed. Windows XP, which had been failing slowly for a while, finally made everyone lose patience with it when all sound production ceased, with no apparent cause or remedy short of a format, and thus a plan was born.

Now, I've just finished setting up that same computer, with only Ubuntu on it. Windows XP still exists, but only on a mere technicality. For Windows programs, Wine takes over, but even Wine has problems sometimes, so the VirtualBox OSE (Open Source Edition) has been installed from the Ubuntu-tweak's 3rd party repositories, and if the need arises, the Virtual XP can take over from Wine.

There's still one computer in the house that proper dual-boots XP over Ubuntu, but more than just the family use it, so it makes more sense to leave it - for now.

But for the main computer, the days of XP have ended, and the Virtual one's days are numbered, as Wine because more and more apt at running the programs.

(Oh, and yes, I did kind of write this like a story. It wasn't actually intentional.)

Chromium/Google Chrome

2009-08-20T09:53:00.000+01:00

Okay, I'm now almost completely switched to Chromium (Or Google Chrome, since a lot of what I say about Chromium applies to Google Chrome too)

As previously mentioned, I've enabled Flash support.

Now, I have an adblocker too.

I'm converted.

I'm still missing something to check hotmail/yahoo emails, I know there's one for the gmail, but I'm keeping things lightweight, and it really isn't too much trouble to log in periodically. Like once a day.

NoScript WOULD be nice, but for sites I'm used to, it's not essential.

Anyway, the goodies you've been waiting for. I'm too lazy to tell you how to do it yourself, so here's a link to your Chromium or Google Chrome adblocker: CLICKY

Enjoy.

Random Silliness

2009-08-14T01:46:00.000+01:00

I've been on Gaia Online too much lately. It's a far better place to be addicted to than Facebook.

And yes, I AM an addict of Gaia Online. I even joined the guild for it.

I've finished the event, Camp Chaos, in record time for any event I've taken part in (not many, actually).

Now I've been spontaneously pranking random people, except most of them are in a battle already, which gives a General Error.

And I couldn't help but think of a military General, named Error.

Then I remembered something from Zelda II, where in one place, you meet someone named Error. He's Error. General Error.

Okay, silliness over. For now.

Browsers again

2009-08-10T14:23:00.000+01:00

Yeah, I know. I need to post more regularly. I've never been one for regular routines though.

Anyway, browsers again. One new one, one old face, SwiftFox, and Chromium.

SwiftFox is similar to SwiftWeasel mentioned before, except it seems to be more up to date, and do a better job. However, like any mozilla-based browser, it suffers from excessive memory and processor use.

Chromium I said before due to it's lack of Flash support, I didn't use much. I've since solved that, and also found a way to get one of my favourite FireFox extensions work too - StumbleUpon.

Firstly, StumbleUpon. I'm not going to hide where I found out, so here's the page it's on.

Useful, neh?

Now for Flash. It turns out, there's a really simple way to do this.

If you'd rather get it from the same place I did, click here.

If not, and you're running a debian, ubuntu, or a box based on either of them, then read on.

1: Download the .tar.gz flash 10 from Adobe

2: Extract the file inside, and make sure you know how to reach where it is in a terminal.

3: Enter this command:

sudo cp ~/Downloads/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins

(Replace ~/Downloads/ with the path to the extracted file.

4: run Chromium with the command:

chromium-browser --enable-plugins

If you use a menu item or desktop launcher or any kind of launcher, just edit the command that uses.

Simples.

A caveat, however. Since enabling Flash in Chromium, it's become slightly less stable, and there's the added inconvenience of flash Ads, but that's all.

Owner, Beware

2009-07-23T01:33:00.000+01:00

It's a common occurrence that a computer breaks down, and you need it fixed. Leaving you three alternatives.
Call one of your local geeks, or if you have another working computer, talk to them online about it. Quick, if they're around, that is. And they don't always know the problem, but usually have a guess that might work.
Call out a professional. True, this costs, but generally is safest of these three choices.
Take it to be repaired. Oh my.

You'd think the last would be safe too, no?
Read this story. Read all of it.

Still sure it's safe?
Those of you who read my post on FireFox addons know I'm a very paranoid person about tracking and privacy as it is. This, however, bothers me more. The only way around this is practically to format your computer, or at the very least, uninstall everything, remove all browsing history, cookies, saved passwords, everything, and get it into as close a state to 'as new' as you can.

Browsers again

2009-07-17T15:41:00.000+01:00

What do all these have in common: A Web Browser, FireFox, IceWeasel, SwiftWeasel.
The answer? They're all based on FireFox, in turn on Mozilla.

Here's the breakdown. FireFox is of course, the main web browser.
A Web Browser is the unbranded FireFox, basically FireFox without the FireFox specific parts.
IceWeasel is the Debian branch, used because Debian doesn't agree with Mozilla's licenses.
SwiftWeasel is a Linux-optimised version of FireFox, and one I'm currently trying.

SwiftWeasel's optimization makes it a lot easier to use on this old laptop, which with normal FireFox 3 has a few issues because FireFox is fat. It uses a considerable amount of system resources, and slows down a fair bit after three tabs, regardless of what's on them, and if there's one tab with many images on will practically kill the browser.

SwiftWeasel manages these issues more gracefully, and so far has managed everything far better.
The only issue I had is importing settings. When installing FF 3.5, it ransacks FF3's settings and profiles, and imports it all. SwiftWeasel however, doesn't. Where I use a lot of computers, I'm used to re-installing a ton of addons (I use a lot, and find it hard to stop using some), but importing settings is tedious. Which is where the FEBE extension comes in. I made a backup from FF3 (and some from 3.5 before it stopped working again) using it, then install FEBE into SwiftWeasel, and import. Solved.
I did attempt to import a complete profile import using it, however with only one profile, it refused, and also crashed. Ah well.

That aside, anyone who uses Linux should, I believe, at least try SwiftWeasel. Google it yourself, too many people rely on people giving links.

As to extensions, for anyone interested, here's my complete list, with a few notes.
walnut2
Classic Compact - with Classic Compact Options
Ad Hacker - Used to block all ad tracking sites via either NoScript or an Adblock Plus rule
AdBlock Plus - Using filter lists EastList+EasyPrivacy and Malware Domains from the Adblock Plus site
AmIOnMySpace.com - I tolerate Facebook, I hate MySpace. And Twitter.
British English Dictionary - not that I use it, it's usually ignored.
CustomizeGoogle - Damn, where would I be without it, Google search is no longer lame with this
Download StatusBar - Though, I'd prefer something more like Chromium/Google Chrome's instead.
Facebook Beacon Blocker - like I said, I tolerate it. I don't like it spying on what I do. Paranoia online is useful.
Faviconize Tab - useful for hiding incriminating tab descriptions, or saving on space.
FEBE - see above, I've only just started using it, but it's good for saving settings between browsers and computers.
Fission - saves a little space at the bottom with this
Gaia Online Toolbar - Gaia Online is a site I'm sometimes on, I don't do much on there. Look for (currently) Adept Alex on there, that's me.
Gmail Notifier - speaks for itself, I don't actually use Gmail often
Greasemonkey and Greasefire - Greasefire makes finding scripts easy, Greasemonkey's scripts are very useful. No, I'm not telling you which ones I use.
Long URL Please - STOP POSTING SHORT URLS! I like to know exactly WHERE I'm going to be taken.
Nightly Tester Tools - See also my post on how to get incompatible addons working. Bloody useful addon this, plus you can change the titlebar's part which normally says FireFox, SwiftWeasel, etc to whatever you like. I like confusing people by making it read "Windows Internet Explorer", or sometimes Exploder instead of Explorer. Never fails.
NoScript - by itself, any FireFox based browser is an improvement over IE, but this makes it even more secure. If it could be made part of the normal FireFox trunk code, then I think it should be. It's that good.
Stop Autoplay - oh, yes. No more embedded music playing in the background, no more YouTube or Google Video playing when I don't want it to, or even loading, for that matter, which since this old laptop has a few minor issues with either, is perfect.
StumbleUpon - never be bored again. Or get any sleep.
Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (TACO) - I don't actually know if this helps much, but apparantly, it sets an Opt-Out for cookies. I'd personally prefer if all cookies were Opt In instead.
TrackMeNot - in conjunction with NoScript and the other anti-tracking addons, this also does exactly what it says on the can. As you may have gathered, I don't like being tracked.
TryAgain - Page load errors are a thing of the past. Sort of. This just keeps trying until something different happens. Wait, isn't that the definition of insanity?
Update Notifier - a lot easier for checking for and installing updates for everything, not to mention offering an instant browser restart on demand.
User Agent Switcher - This was an attempt to get Hotmail working in FireFox 3.5, since any emails I sent in that were blanks. With this, most sites will identify your browser as whichever you specifiy. I use the importable massive list of agents, as it provides tons of choices. I use about three - Firefox 2, for hotmail, iPhone for when FF2 fails, or I want to do it really quick, and Opera 9.64 Linux sometimes.
WebbMail Notifier - like Gmail, but this checks my two Hotmail and one Yahoo emails. It used to do Gmail, but that stopped working, hence the Gmail notifier.
WoT - with community ratings for sites, this will tell you if the site is dangerous or not. Useful for avoiding dangerous ones, though NoScript also disables some of the dangerous parts.
Xmarks - a must have for anyone who uses more than one browser, computer, or both. Keeps bookmarks (or favourites for Opera/IE/Safari users)
YouTube to MP3 - It's been a long time since I used this actually, but it does exactly what it says - converts the soundtrack of a YouTube video to an mp3 file and starts a download for it.

I use a lot of Addons, like I said. Some of them I could get rid of. A lot of them are really only there because I'm paranoid online.

Google, Google, Everywhere

2009-07-16T17:56:00.000+01:00

Welcome to any of you who followed me here from my infrequently-updated Facebook page. And yes, against what I've said before, I am still using it. Sometimes.

Anyway.
Google is well known to pop up just about everywhere online these days. Most websites have a custom search for their site, some (like this site) are powered by Google and use your Google login. Other sites use code from the Google APIs and the Google code repository (Note: I have no idea what it's actually called, but it seems suspiciously sourceforge-like to me).
And of course, Adsense and Doubleclick, the controversial ads and cookie system that tracks what you look at through the ads, and gives them a profile about you. Which is one reason why my NoScript has forbidden anything from Adsense and Doubleclick, because I'm mildly paranoid about things like that.
It's got it's own web browser, Google Chrome (Based on the Chromium Project, not something everyone knows, and if you want a Linux Google Chrome, get Chromium's development version from them - it's not fully stable, or finished, but it works, and looks like Chrome.)

Google Desktop was one of the more recently discovered (by me) items... and as far as I knew, only recently released on Linux.
Now I have Chromium and Google Desktop on this old laptop. Chromium... I'll come back to. Be patient.
Google Desktop, installed just five minutes ago as I type this, is still indexing what I asked it to. Fair enough, it'll make it a little more efficiant, I can spare 2 hours for it to troll my 10gb hd.
Beyond that, I'm still experimenting. It seems to be just a Google Search for your computer, so far, along with a search-on-command tool, where you hit a hotkey command and a little box pops up which you can search from, and it'll pass it to the default browser for a standard Google online search. I think. Like I said, still experimenting/learning.

Now, browser. s.
I experiment even more here. I currently have 4 browsers on here.
Firefox 3, Firefox 3.5, Chromium and lastly, Epiphany

I switch between them all regularly. FF 3.5 is used when it's stable enough to last more than a few minutes without dieing, as it's slightly faster. FF 3 takes over when 3.5 fails somehow, and is the most used, and most useful, overall.
Chromium is useful, it's fast, it's lightweight, but it doesn't have any addon support at all yet, so even flash won't work. I use this when I need to look for something really quick.
Epiphany takes over from Chromium when I want quick browsing, but also want Flash or Java. This is useful when I'm running other programs too, since both Firefoxes are somewhat fat on the system resources, so Flash and Java slow down considerably on this old laptop.

Opera sometimes makes a breif appearance. I've used it on Windows before, and had few problems, but Firefox beats it for me. (note - anyone who thinks of flaming browserwars in the comments, think again.)
Konqueror, the KDE browser, also sometimes jumps in, but it doesn't have all the features I like from the other browsers, or if it does, it's in such a different way that I prefer not to.
Lastly, sometimes the ies4linux is used, showing up when I either want to check something in IE6, or when the other browsers have issues.
I meant to try and get IE7 working, but it failed to install, and IE8 is out of the question for now until someone discovers how to make it work.

Alright, that's all from me. For now. Rock on, and come back later whenever you're bored stiff, or want to be bored stuff by my rambling.

How to get your extentions, themes and addons working in Firefox 3.5 - the quick and dirty way

2009-07-11T20:30:00.000+01:00

You can find any number of posts which say 'Go to about:config...'
This isn't one of them. Seriously. There are loads of posts of them that say this and not one that says the bleeding obvious.

Go to the addons search for Firefox, and install Nightly Tester Tools (Not the lite version).
Restart Firefox.
Go to the addons window. Look in the bottom right and you'll see a new button saying 'Override all compatibility'. Click it, and restart Firefox once more.
Done. Your addons now work. If you have incompatible themes, go to the themes selector and repeat.

When you install an incompatible addon, it'll tell you, but now you can tell it to override and install anyway.

HOW DAMN SIMPLE IS THAT?
Ahem. Sorry for the amount of caps there.

Enjoy your quick and dirty way to get all addons working in Firefox 3.5, and remember - this trick will always be the same, in any version you can add the Nightly Tester Tools to.

Scripting

2009-07-09T10:33:00.000+01:00

So yesterday I told a little lie in that I have 5 commands I use on login.
I've since experimented just a little more with scripting, and now I have one command:
'sudo sh update.sh'
where update.sh contains all five commands from the previous entry.
I could have left the sudo on the two apt-get commands, but it seems to work this way just as well.

Scripting is useful. You can condense a lot of lines of nonsense into one file, where you never need to remember the command again.
Now if only I could write one for blogging.. er, logging, into the blog to write a new post.

Terminal

2009-07-08T13:25:00.000+01:00

The terminal, the console the command line. Whatever you call it, it's damn useful on any system.
Sometimes it's a pain to find though, and it's also hard to remember commands for it.

On the first issue, I've started using Guake Terminal - based off, if I remember correctly, the console in Quake, one key shows a drop-down terminal ready for use, and the same key hides it again with a second touch. It's become so useful it now starts up when I log in.
On the second, there are countless cheat sheets, but I've found it's easier to just experiment with commands you use often, and remember them. Never mind others you won't use, at least not until you do need them.

So now, I've disabled the update manager from doing anything, except once a week interrupting me to tell me I missed an update or two, and now when I log in I run five commands in Guake Terminal:
"sudo apt-get update" to update the package listings
"sudo apt-get upgrade" to handle all upgrades to all packages
"cd svn/openttd" which changes to my source code folder for the OpenTTD game
"svn update" updating the source code to latest nightly, then finally:
"make" which lands me the compiled version.

These five commands mean that after they're all completed, practically everything on my system is up-to-date, and it takes about 5 minutes, including the compiling of OpenTTD.

Handy little package Guake. I recommend any Debian or Ubuntu user to try it, and I do believe somewhere out there is a KDE version too. Knowing their naming habits, probably Kuake. Hmm. Maybe not.

Rock on all.

Package Problems

2009-07-06T22:26:00.000+01:00

Say what you like about linux, but it's package managers are a stroke of genius, allowing you to update practically everything on your box at the touch of a few buttons.

For Debian, Ubuntu and other derivatives of either, a .deb package is practically the same as all those 'setup.exe' files you're collecting on your windows system, except that they install, and add themselves to the package manager too.

However, there are some times I have issues with even this.
Firstly, subversion (svn) repositories, which once compiled, are meant to be easily installed with the 'make install', but for me never seems to work.
Secondly, I have yet to find a means of using RPM without a lot of issues. RPM may be good, but it has a lot of problems, as far as I can tell, it doesn't do any dependencies, etc, etc.
Third, and last... non-standard installers, such as the aMSN generic installer, which don't add themselves to the package manager's listings.

I like my package manager - synaptic, for preference. But I still have a few issues with it.

Sod's Law

2009-07-04T19:47:00.000+01:00

One of the games I used to play often was OpenTTD, which is an open sourced reimplementation of TTD - Transport Tycoon Deluxe - and TTDPatch, a 3rd party patch adding more new features.

Not long after the OpenTTD 0.6.3 release, I stopped playing. Yesterday, I decided to have a look at it again and see what had changed since then, using a nightly build - which despite their name, are actually relatively stable.

I tried it a little, then deleted it, since I had little interest in rekindling my playing it, and no one else here plays it.
Today, Dad decided he wanted to play it again - he and mum do now and then. Except, the last time they played it, was on a custom build, a nightly with a lot of patches I hand applied because it gave features they used.
Unfortunatly, it didn't work. Patching it had broken something, and I didn't have the source code I used to fix it.

So I downloaded today's nightly, put in some newGRFs for Dad to use, and after several small complaints ("It doesn't do this" "I'm missing that") he had it working again.
Which in turn means I now have to keep a copy around on my computer to keep an eye on things, and so I know how to fix anything he breaks. Or finds broken. Making me put it back on again.

Sod's Law in action at it's finest.

Sat-Nav Silliness

2009-07-03T18:30:00.001+01:00

This probably is silly, but so what.
With Sat-Nat in your car, on your phone, on your laptop/notebook/netbook and so on, we're going to eventually end up with a lot of people who are good with technology - but without technology, haven't the faintest clue where anything is, or how to get there.

Think on it.

On the Pirate Bay

2009-07-02T21:14:00.000+01:00

Many of you will have already read this many times, and it's old news, but I don't care. You're reading this, therefore you are the victim of my choice to write about it.

The Pirate Bay sold out.
The founders believe nothing will change.
The buyers say everything will.

TorrentFreak reports in a recent article (Go find it yourself, I'm lazy today) that the new owners are going to pay content providers for putting their content on there, which they'll only do if there's no illegal file sharing - e.g. what's currently there.
And they're going to pay file sharers for sharing it, and that will only work if the users have free DRM-free music. And of course, if they don't jump ship, which by the majority of comments on the posts about it at the Pirate Bay, a considerable portion of them are.

Where are they getting the money? TorrentFreak's article says from a massive ads campaign. So now you have to view hoards of ads before you even see a shred of torrent. Or use FireFox and Adblock Plus extension, and give them nothing while taking anything.
And if everyone did that, they'd get no revenue, they'd get fewer downloads by now (by an immense difference) and they'd owe A LOT.

My friends, the Pirate Bay has turned into the Legal Bay, and is sinking fast.
Which is a shame, because they used to be a highly reputable website, and one of the better places to go for a torrent.

In related news, anyone who can tell me a replacement for TPB and Mininova (Who has also begun filtering copyrighted torrents, I'm told) leave a comment, or an email - I think I left my email around here someplace.

Rock on, and don't drown with TPB's sinking ship.

Update

2009-07-01T16:27:00.000+01:00

They say no news is good news.
They're right.

My ageing and ancient laptop, about a month ago, stopped working on me. I didn't bother to find out how, I assumed it was going to happen sooner or later.
Just two days ago, I gave it a little troubleshooting, and found it turned out to be the mains power adaptor. Now it works. Problem solved.
The downside is of course that the battery is still shot, and doesn't work at all anymore, but has to be plugged in for anything to work at all.

More good news. I finally solved a little issue I was having with Ubuntu, on the wireless. Ubuntu Jaunty doesn't normally connect to my router by wireless (Intrepid, which powers my laptop, works fine, and always has). I can't change the security type on the router, no matter how many times people tell me to. The solution? The madwifi site has native Linux drivers.
The bad news? I have no idea how to use these ones. I don't pretend to know everything about Ubuntu or Linux, and previously, all wireless drivers I used worked through NDISWrapper, which is basically a translation layer - the router thinks it's talking to a windows computer - NDISWrapper - and NDISWrapper translates the communications to Linux-readable forms.
(You're welcome to give me a hand with sorting this out, by the way)

Last good news. Firefox has an update, 3.5 version being released. Lots of good features, and through the Nightly Tester Tools, I can keep a few of my older addons working until a proper update happens.
The bad news? Windows Live Hotmail sends blank emails. I found a temporary solution, the User Agent Switcher addon, since the prime reason according the the FireFox community is that FireFox 3.5 is blacklisted by hotmail, as are a few other browsers.
I haven't tested this idea yet, since Ubuntu doesn't yet have a 3.5 update for FireFox, I expect that in due course.

So, in this case, my recent silence turned out to prove that no news was indeed good news.

A bit of Bashing

2009-06-26T17:57:00.000+01:00

Despite their best efforts, there's a few software developers I have some issues with. Windows, naturally, is a prime candidate. However... they're excluded from this post because I haven't gotten around to playing with Win7, and never will. For a while, at least.
For Mac bashing, see my previous post.

Linux. Yes, even my favourite system has it's bad points.
Ubuntu Jaunty - presently has a few issues still, such as an ongoing problem of not getting it to work with my wireless.
Debian. Hmm. I thought with Ubuntu based on it, it wouldn't be too different, right? Oh how wrong I was. There's a lot of differences I hadn't expected, and I ended up doing more damage to it in just trying to get working what I had on Ubuntu.
Package Management, specifically RPM. DEB is a nice clean system, it tells you dependancies, it works fairly well. RPM I have issues with. It's quite possible it works just the same, but it's not, and I have trouble with that.
GNOME/XFCE/KDE - not technically a Linux bash, but a Windows one. It's more about the desktop environments, I can choose to have GNOME or use KDE or even both. Windows doesn't have this, with the exception of alternative shells. I've tried a few, but to Microsoft's credit, their own native shell so far has bested them all. Not through any great brilliance, but through the fact that the ones I've tried all had issues.
Also, multiple desktops - on my Linux box, I can have several desktops, and arrange windows on them, send them to other desktops, etc. I have found only one program which does this on windows, and it fails to start on XP (Vista is not even thought of for these computers.)

Don't get me wrong, I like Linux, but it does have it's problems too.

Other bashing now though.... Adobe.
How about 'A Deskload of Bloated Elephants'?
Okay, so I couldn't think up anything better for the 'e'.
But it's a fair point... Bloatware described a lot of the Adobe software. The updater needs teaching manners, I'm opening a PDF, don't go and decide to restart just because there's an upgrade. Don't go looking for upgrades without telling me. And stop re-setting yourself as the default viewer, and placing unwanted shortcuts.
I don't use much Adobe software. In part because I don't have it, in part because of the bloat, but mostly because their pricing is dreadful - €99 does not equal £99 or even $99.
Finally, the Flash Player, one of the most used things on the 'net. And one of the most broken.
Well, not broken, it still works, but on Linux it doesn't fully work correctly, on any system, it's a gaping security hole and leaves behind non-deletable flash cookies, and most of all, the source is not available.
If they'd just provide the source, not only could other developers contribute to improving it (Not to mention the distinct possibility of better developers than theirs), it would help make it more stable, secure, etc, etc... and overall more useful.
It's a similar issue to Apple's only allowing OS X on Apple hardware. If Apply unlocked it to work on all computers, if Adobe showed the code to all people, a lot of good things could happen to each.

Alright, bashing over. And sorry for no post yesterday, there was nothing interesting to mention, except that I got a conquest victory on Civ4 (On Monarch difficulty, hardest I've played on yet)
Rock on people.

On Macintoshes, Hackintoshes, and other systems

2009-06-24T20:15:00.000+01:00

The Hackintosh, for those who don't know, is a Mac OS X operating system, hacked to work on your Windows and Linux capable computer. Normally, this isn't possible because the OS X code looks for a little chip on the motherboard (at least, I think it's a chip, any passing experts can leave a note in the comments correcting me) that says, I'm a Mac. Try to install an unhacked OS X, and it'll fail because it can't find that chip.

If you're one of the few people who reads EULAs and has read the OS X one, you'll know that in there is a little snippet which says you may only run OS X on a Mac.
This seems backwards to me. Windows can be run on their in a varaity of ways, as will Linux which runs on just about everything up to your toaster probably. (Hm, open source toast.)
Apple in their infinite wisdom, chose not to do the same. Well, okay, I guess if you want to lock it to your hardware, that solves a huge amount of hardware problems, but I think if they either allowed Hackintoshes, or better yet, did it themselves (though seeing their pricing, still overpriced) they could win over a significant amount of users to use their system. It's not perfect - not even Linux is - but both Linux and OS X are an improvement of the security-hole ridden Windows.
Though, I'll admit they're trying to fix that, Vista seems to have left such a bad taste that no one wants to leave XP - myself included, however, I've chosen to use Linux instead (Ubuntu, and if you think you're using a better distro which doesn't use RPM for packages, also comment and I'll consider it)
Wine covers a lot of ground, and I can do a considerable amount in Ubuntu instead of Windows, but it's not perfect, and some programs and games still don't fully work. PlayOnLinux attempts to solve the latter, I haven't gotten around to trying it yet. In any case, until Wine can manage a lot more, I'll still be using XP mostly, while patiently awaiting the day where everything is made primarly for Linux, and there are wine-like things to make windows able to run Linux apps.

Yes, I'm a Linux boy. I've had trouble trying to use Macs, but I don't hate them. Windows... isn't bad, but also isn't good. It has a lot of issues, but if you're willing to sacrifice a little hard drive space and a few resources, it's not as much of a problem. But nevertheless, I await the day Linux takes Prime Spot.

That's all from me for now. Rock on people. (To whatever music you like, I'm currently listening to Metallica, Linkin Park - their new song New Divide is awesome.)

When in the summer

2009-06-24T16:41:00.000+01:00

Do as summer does? I think not...
I don't do well in heat, and I overheat easily, and get somewhat testy.
I don't mind going out in it, so long as I get the chance to stop in a patch of shade somewhere. I also don't mind walking a friend's dogs for her when she can't, I've been doing that a lot lately.
What I do mind is the people up on the trail nearby on the bikes, not all are bad, but a lot of them aren't all that nice, and couldn't care less who else is on the trail, it's theirs.

Anyway, completely away from the computer bit done.
I've been playing Civ4 a lot lately. I thought I'd have the bright idea of learning to mod it. XML isn't too hard, Python only slightly more so. Modding the SDK though, is not taken so lightly, I've had experiences in C++ before, (With OpenTTD, a game I've stopped playing recently) but the SDK for Civ4 is a bit above that. Especially when what you want to do is take the sources for several mods that use SDK changes, and merge them.
A bit beyond me. Something I'm going to leave for now. C++ might be useful, but it's a devil to understand sometimes.

Opening

2009-06-23T11:35:00.001+01:00

So I guess in a time where everyone seems to have their own blog, it's probably about time I started one too.
Some people will likely disagree with that, but at least this way I have one knocking around I can use later on.

Blogs are useful little things. The used to be a way to bore people with your life, now they're more, and you can find a blog for just about anything if you have patience to search for them, for which Google is naturally good. I have an issue with them on that though - grab your copy of IE (if you dare!) Firefox, Konqueror, Opera - any browser will do. Turn off ad blocking, and any addons that affect the Google search. Search for something. Anything.
Look at the results carefully, and there's two glaring problems: Ads which are just wrong, and Spam Results.
Ads which are wrong - look on the right, if you searched for something like a piece of software, it'll likely show "Download ___ Free, no cost" and other such. Shouldn't Google be doing something about this? Hmm... it's one small area though. Look through the results, even the 'sponsored' ones sometimes, and there's more. The Spam Results.
Also included in which are the results which aren't really results, they're just another search engine muscling in trying to pretend to be a result, leading you to another search. Now, I can understand that search engines want your business over a different one getting it, but that almost seems like stealing people's business.

So far, I've found one solution for this, CustomizeGoogle extenstion for Firefox. A lot of other browsers offer ad-blocking, and frame or text blocking to hide things like this, but that extension is the only one I will use, because it does the job without even reminding you it's there.
It doesn't just affect Google search results either, but you can read more details about it and try it here at it's addon page.

That isn't, by far, the only extension I use, or the only reason I use Firefox over other browsers, but I've talked long enough. If people want more on this, I'll do another post on it.