Semidigerati

Nothing to fear...

2009-02-16T07:50:00.003-05:00

Lately I've been having a bit of an itch to try out a tilling WM. I see screenshots of people having a grand old time with awesome or dwm or any of the other (I'm sure many) tiling windows managers. Also the small footprint, noted many times and recently by k.mandla, is pretty appealing, as well.

However I can't convince myself to really install, configure, and then get used to not using my mouse. I realize you can still use the mouse, obviously, but there's something about floating WMs that makes me feel more comfortable when using my computer.

The same goes with Vi/Vim, I suppose. I understand that it's a much more powerful text editor than, say, nano or pico. When being used, though, I feel a bit wary that I might hit the wrong key combo and wipe my entire document. And, if given the opportunity, I'd probably use leafpad over nano any day.

Obviously this is just me being a worry wart; Linux used to make me feel the same way. I felt like at a moments notice I could destroy the entire system.

The feeling of not having full control over where one's data resides is, I'm sure, a common fear. I'm starting to understand how new computer users or inexperienced computer users feel when they first fire up their brand-new machine and don't quite know what exactly is going on at any moment. Heck, some don't even know where their files are logically located on their hard drives.

I'm starting to understand more and more about how computer users (or anyone with information, for that matter) operate. It's all about comfort zones.

slock, looking into mythbox

2009-01-21T20:31:00.002-05:00

For a while I've been looking for an easy/no-hassle way to lock my computer. I realize I could just as easily log out, but I didn't feel like exiting X and all that jazz. Enter slock. This program is wonderful, as is expected from suckless. Type in `slock` and bam, monitor flicks off and your session is locked. Type in your password and bam, monitor flicks back on. Really nice. This one's added to my ever increasing note pile.

Uh oh... speaking of notes...

Google Notebook will no longer be updating its services. Son of a gun. Time to move all of my freakin' notes. I suppose it's time I get them organized... perhaps this is a good thing. I'll probably just end up storing them in a document in Google docs. Perhaps I'll invest in a small wiki of some sort. Who knows.

My next adventure looks more and more like it will be with MythBox. I'm not too big into watching television, aside from a very few choice shows. However, my future roommates may be interested, as well as any visitors. I figure this'll be the opportune moment to check out MythBox for the good of my friends. Besides, would I be a geek if I didn't try to weave Linux into every facet of my life as possible?

A bit off topic, but I've been doing CrossFit workouts as part of my exercise regiment. If you were interested in the HIIT stuff I did a while ago, give the CrossFit website a look-see.

Repost: Handbrake. Also, ext4?

2009-01-13T08:43:00.003-05:00

Bah. I deleted my post from yesterday in regards to Handbrake. The long and short of it is that Handbrake is an extremely useful tool if you're planning on ripping/backing up your DVD collection. I was successfully able to rip one of my DVDs, but then deleted the rip once I tested it was successful. The LAST thing I need is someone from the MPAA or whatever knocking down my door for backing up my own DVD collection. Yes, it's still a "legal gray area," but I'm not taking chances here.

Any who, I mentioned that the handbrake package is extremely outdated in the official Arch repos. If you don't believe me, check it for yourself. According to the Handbrake guys in IRC, 0.9.1 is more than a year old. In fact, they've made some major improvements since then, including a fully functional gtk gui (not a frontend to their CLI tool) and presets (also very useful). I emailed James Rayner about the outdated package, so hopefully we'll see an update in due time.

Also, I just read an article about ext4. If the diagram pictured is factual, then WOW. Ext4 more than doubles ext3's write times in the benchmark pictured. Be warned, though: some of the commenters seem a bit skeptical as to the legitimacy of the test, commenting on the fact that they were performed on Solid-State drives. However if all tests were run on the same drive, then what's the big deal? I guess it's one of those things that you'll have to time for yourself. Literally. With like, a stopwatch and stuff.

Things I haven't and should have done, Things I did instead, etc.

2009-01-03T15:33:00.004-05:00

Remember when I promised I'd work on my Ubuntu newbie meta-guide and possibly create an Arch newbie meta-guide? That didn't happen all break. Instead a good deal of time was spent working to pay college debt. My free time was spent mostly on playing Mother 3 (thanks to this translation team), researching stuff about handbrake, and getting printing to work nicely through VirtualBox. Right now I'm battling with ogm to see if I can play the rip I made of one of my DVDs. I really hope I didn't just waste 4 hours ripping/encoding...

I'm very pleased with the performance of Arch on my mother's desktop. I set her up with slim as a login manager, Openbox as a window manager, and fbpanel as a, well, panel. And, to tell the truth, that's pretty much the bulk of her system. Things run very smoothly except for when you run VirtualBox; I set VirtualBox so that it would consume around half of the system's RAM, so running Firefox while the virtual machine is running is pretty much an impossibility. Other than that, everything is running nicely. We'll see in a few months if everything is running just as smoothly.

I also gifted her my old 17 inch LCD monitor. She had bought it for me in the first place, so I felt it appropriate that she ended up using it.

Another accomplishment was fixing my broken AUR packages. I also added a new one to the family for webcamstudio. Happy day! I can't wait to see how that program progresses.

The next project I have will be to upload my screenshots that I've been neglecting to share with everyone. Some are pretty cool, while others are a bit obnoxious(ly bright). The one I'm using now for my laptop is pretty much directly gleaned from the boxlook screenshot that I found for the Openbox theme "Alone Again". I thought it was fitting for the season.

VirtualBox and Seamless Integration and Other Stuff

2008-12-30T11:40:00.004-05:00

Right now I'm going to take a moment to applaud Sun. Their program VirtualBox is extremely cool in a nerdy-me way. With it, I was able to get my mother's printer working without having to jump through partitioning hoops. The only downside is that the machine itself can be sluggish when running apps in both the virtual machine and the Linux machine itself. Basically one shouldn't get their hopes up for running Firefox in the original Linux machine while the virtual machine is running.

Admittedly, I had to do a little song-and-dance to get the finalized setup. First I had to get the printer working. I had to follow the steps found in this post to get the usb device to actually work within the virtual machine. Basically this remounts the usb filesystem with specific permissions so that VirtualBox can access it. The details are a little foggy to me, but those are the basics. Then, as usual, the wiki came in handy with sharing a folder between the two machines.

I've also make a new PKGBUILD for webcamstudio. This nifty little program will create a fake webcam and allow you to use images, video, or even you desktop as the feed. This comes in handy if you wish to show your desktop over skype or some other webcam sharing software or website.

Before I messed with the PKGBUILD for webcamstudio, I made one for vloopback, but it had already been created. Always be sure to check that something hasn't already been done before you dump too much time into doing it. However, I must admit I learned quite a bit, in particular about depmod. Interested reading material.

Mid Finals Frenzy Update

2008-12-05T11:51:00.004-05:00

I'm in the middle of finals right now. It almost makes me feel guilty to update this while I SHOULD be studying, but... well, I just can't be bothered to study more than I already am.

I decided to just give my mother's computer fbpanel instead of the stalonetray + gtim combination I usually roll with. I might switch her off to lxpanel, though, since fbpanel seems a bit behind in its update status. For what it's worth, though, fbpanel does the trick. Since my mother and sister aren't quite as computer literate as myself, I figure they'd appreciate having an all-in-one tasktray, clock, tasklist, and app menu. The decision came about after trying to find a task list that would dock nicely in the openbox dock for WAY too long. In the end, it was a good decision, I believe. It brought life back to their old computer which had slowed to a crawl under an XP install. That wasn't meant to be a knock on XP... on a more powerful system, XP would have been acceptable. However, that baby's only cooking with 192 MB of RAM, so it is extremely sluggish.

Hmm... Christmas is coming... I think I know what to get for my mother now. Well, not JUST that, but you get the idea. Now I just need to find a sneaky way to find out what type of RAM to buy.

I need to work on a few of my packages in the AUR. I messed 'em up pretty nicely with my last edit and, being the responsible guy I am, never tested them out or fixed them. That'll be a nice little Christmas break project.

I'm home for one day and already--

2008-11-26T23:17:00.002-05:00

I've already been put to work putting Arch on my mother's computer. Windows was slowing down her computer to a stand-still and, frankly, she was sick of it. I'm going to dual boot just because her beloved printer won't work under Linux. Friggin' Lexmark.

I set her slow computer up with Openbox, stalonetray, and wbar (thus far). I'm going to find another program for her task bar so she can see what she has open. Unfortunately I wasn't too pleased with how wbar operates. Perhaps I just need to toy around with the settings a bit but, as it stands, there's little to no indication that one has clicked and successfully started opening a program. This can be a bit annoying when the computer is a bit sluggish with delayed gratification of clicking something.

I didn't bother to put on Windows yet. I'd been working on it for the better part of the day today when I realized I'm suppose to be on break. Any sane person would be relaxing now, so I think I'm going to do the popular thing and do nothing today and tomorrow (Thanksgiving).

Learning as I go

2008-11-18T12:20:00.002-05:00

I found out something interesting when reading the AUR newletter:

> One thing that we do with our kernel modules, to make this easier, is
> we set the version to "2.6.27" instead of "2.6.27.8" so that when .9
> is released, we don't need to rebuild all modules (they still need to
> be tested, however)

Basically, the Arch devs (gods) make all minor updates to the kernel named similar to the last version so that modules don't complain. This way, the process of recompiling modules is completely avoided. I personally think that's pretty darned clever. Would that also mean that one could change the version number to 2.6 and never bother with recompilation of modules at all (well, that is, until 2.8)? Seems highly unlikely, but if so, I can possibly understand where this could come in handy as far as being a time saver.

I tried out wbar myself for the first time a few nights ago. Man oh man does it look slick. I was also surprised by its speed, for whatever reason. That, I believe, goes back to my past experiences with the Mac launchers being slightly laggy. Not to mention Rocket dock in Windows and some of the other launchers that I've used in Linux in the past. To be honest, I'm mostly impressed by the minimal dependencies required by wbar. That gets an A+ in my book.

In other news, my friends here at the University have had network ports shut off in their rooms several times now. The University's grade A (here I go with grading scales again) tech support team claims that they were DNS spamming, and, in one instance, insisted on COMPLETELY reinstalling Windows on one of their computers. The fact that they consider a complete wipe and re-install a solution is ridiculous.

The culprit, at least we assume, is their Xbox 360. I suggested using OpenDNS instead of the University's server, so we'll see how that goes. If their ports are turned off again, I believe I'll be able to hear them screaming from my dorm which resides one flight below theirs.

I really don't have much time to experiment with computer things here at the University. For one, I don't wish to lose any valuable data, although I'm pretty sure I'm past that phase of being careless about backups. Also, the University's technology policy is pretty strict, so I'm usually too wimpy to do anything ultra network heavy. Also also, I'm still waiting on my official Intrepid CD to arrive in the mail before I give that an install on one of my machines.

Yes, you read right: I'm probably going to make some space on my LVM on either my laptop or desktop to install the new Ubuntu release. I've waited a while so that I didn't have to deal with bleeding edge Ubuntu for a few reasons:
1) Having to troubleshoot a system that is as reliant on the GUI as Ubuntu is can be very frustrating. It's much better when I can just download a few updates that "fix" the system straight up without me having to go through extra programs and features and whatnot.
2) During release week, I could almost guarantee that more than half of the Ubuntu community has already been messing around with the RCs. By the time I go to install/configure, there will already be experts on the quirks of the new release.

Does this mean I'm getting lazy? I don't think so. Personally, I think of it as being a more experienced Linux user. I'd update Arch Linux in a heartbeat to be on the bleeding/cutting edge, but that's only because I know what it's going to update. I know my systems, I know their quirks, and I know them well. However, Ubuntu has become foreign to me. It only makes sense to ease myself back in again and have the benefit of a whole community's knowledge ready to bathe me in helpful hints and tricks and whatnot.

Samba Solutions

2008-10-26T23:54:00.005-04:00

I've been noticing that pyNeighborhood has its shortcomings. However, it is, unfortunately, one of the better clients out there. This didn't stop me from taking a peek at the AUR today to see what was offered.

First off was autoscan which just seemed far too bulky for my likings. If I was looking for an all-around network tool, then I'd definitely give it a fair run. I did not end up even trying it as the package in AUR was terribly outdated. Hopefully my email to the aur mailing list is heard shortly.

Then I came across g2sc. This program, still under development, seemed like it could be my answer as a successor to pyNeighborhood. Alas, it appears to be outdated, as well.

I noticed that someone began the creation of a thunar samba extension. That's pretty nice, I suppose. I'll be happier once I can get it to work appropriately. I also noticed the package pcmanfm-experimental which has support for samba, ftp, etc. That'll be a deal breaker for me, I think, as far as what file manager I end up using full time,

All in all, I must say I'm slightly disappointed in the array of gui samba clients out there. Either they're old, too bloated, or too lacking in features. I suppose I'll stick to pyNeighborhood, for now. But still...

Perhaps I should start learning a language instead of complaining all the time. :D

I say it's Midterm season, and I say FIRE!

2008-10-17T17:32:00.002-04:00

Posting in the middle of Midterm month, it seems. I haven't had much time to fool around with Linux as much as I'd like, but I do consider myself quite a bit more comfortable with it than I did before. Aside from the occasional Guild Wars, I'm running in Arch full time.

I had an urge to re-arrange my standard desktop interface recently. I think what I'm going to do is create a sort-of MMORPG User Interface, using health/mana bars for harddrive/cpu meters, spell icons for launcher icons, running program icons in the upper left or so to indicate what "buffs" your computer has on it, etc. Needless to say, when I told my roommate, he sighed and shook his head. I blame the urge on the fact that I started to hop on Guild Wars again.

The server's still running strong. I'm not surprised at this or anything, but I am pleased that it's run without hang-ups for 57 days now. "Linux lol 2.6.25-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Jul 14 15:25:51 UTC 2008 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3400+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux". Good times, man.

On another note, I would really really like an HTC Dream. Currently I'm signed with T-Mobile, and I could get the phone asap, but I'd rather wait until my contract runs out in a few months and pick it up then. Oh how the waiting will kill me.

Speaking of Google, I'm still waiting on my freakin' Linux Chrome. Let's pick up the pace here, Google.

Follow-up to the New Candidate

2008-10-08T01:23:00.002-04:00

Turns out my friend is enjoying his Ubuntu experience so far. This makes me quite happy, as his conversion will up my ratio to about 1 success in every 2 attempts. Not too shabby :).

What really amazed me is that he said his wired internet connection worked straight up at my University. If you've been reading my posts at all, you'll remember me messing around with wpa_supplicant scripts and such to get myself connected via a wire. In fact, I still do this on both my desktop and laptop under Arch. Apparently, though, Ubuntu 8.04 makes it possible to just enter in a username and password and BAM, you're on the net. I'm assuming this has something to do with an updated Network Manager, but still, really really cool. This feature will definitely turn some heads... having to explain the difficulties of connecting to the net here at my Uni was almost unbearable.

Also, my midterm essay due on Thursday is almost completed. Seems this puppy's going to weigh in at around 10 pages when it's completed. After that I have about 3 weeks where I'll have an exam on at least one of the days of the week. Hopefully that will bring an end to the onslaught and I'll be able to head home for Turkey Day break. DOUBLE hopefully I'll manage to schedule in some time to work on those write-ups!

A new candidate: "Yeah, I want to try Ubuntu on my Laptop"

2008-10-05T00:03:00.002-04:00

My friend recently expressed a desire to have Ubuntu on his laptop. Now, if you're thinking "Oh, why not arch, huh? WHY NOT ARCH?", then I shall tell you. I mentioned in another post this very fact: Newbies get Ubuntu, the experienced move on to Arch on their own. It's as simple as that. I will not force arch upon anyone... I'd much rather the person enjoy their experience rather than regret the decision.

Anywho, the friend is using a gateway something-or-other. I'll have to give it a second look later tonight while I'm installing. It's a nice machine... 2GB of ram with a dual core processor. I figure I would set him up with a dual boot system just in case he doesn't enjoy Ubuntu. If not, I'll just resize the ntfs partition and fix the MBR. Boom.

This'll be my first re-install in quite some time. I'm actually pretty excited about it, mostly because with 8.10, everything seemed to work perfectly. From his wireless mouse to his wireless network card, everything seemed hunky dory. This SHOULD be a really smooth process. We shall see.

wbar: Nice little eye candy

2008-09-23T14:11:00.004-04:00

Thanks to forum poster msdark, I've run into a little project called wbar. It's a nice looking quicklaunch bar that could potentially find its way onto my desktop or laptop. I'll try it out in the near future as there seems to be a PKGBUILD in aur for both the program itself and a gui configuration tool written in python for some of its options. Definitely marking this one down as "to-do."

As far as those quickstart guides go, I'm probably going to take a little bit longer than expected. Possibly sometime this weekend they'll get some of the attention they deserve.

Adding to the to-do list: Arch Linux starter Guide and Ubuntu starter Guide

2008-09-17T13:29:00.002-04:00

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

I created a Ubuntu guide mostly for self-reference back when I was using Stumble Upon. I haven't updated it recently at all mostly because I've been using Arch, so my Ubuntu-foo is quite weak. However, after seeing the latest update date of the article itself, I decided I should re-saddle and try my hand at installing/configuring Ubuntu for the sake of keeping my article updated. Then it got me thinking: Why not do the same for an Arch guide?

The guides were mostly written to help transition a windows user to Ubuntu, so the arch guide will be to help transition Ubuntu -> Arch.

We'll see how quickly I get to those things... aka it might take a while.

I also need to update my color scheme for my terminals and such since I recently changed my OB/gtk themes. Oi... not to mention school work. There's not enough time in a day.

Looking into Physically Small, Environment Friendly PCs. Also new Wicd

2008-09-16T13:18:00.004-04:00

My roommate really has caught my interest with his Aleutia computer. I have a strong feeling that "green PCs" are going to become all the rage in a very short amount of time (see energy crisis), at least here in the States. Now that the Aleutia E2 has come out (their next generation in computers), I'm even more interested than I was before. The bill for one of those babies is around $386.25.

However I'm not sure that I could justify putting out that kind of money at this point. I'm really satisfied with my current desktop dual-booting Windows and Arch and I'd really like to save my extra dollars so that I can pick up the T-Mobile android phone due out in October. But I digress.

My roommate certainly does sacrifice the power of a more expensive desktop PC, but he's found a few programs that aid in the process of every-day computer usage. Not to mention he's found Micropolis. If I were using that low powered of a machine, though, I think there are some changes that I'd make to his normal lineup of programs.

For starters, he uses Opera. How he manages to do this and not loose his mind is beyond me. I would personally be running dillo or dillo2 (when it becomes stable, of course... late this month or next according to their website). He also uses Sonata to connect to our Music server in the room (which is running amazingly, by the way). Once again, I'd be using something more lightweight, such as ncmpcpp. He uses XFE which I would highly recommend for his build. Other than that I'm not entirely sure what else he's running (I think he's using feh for his wallpaper).

And as if this post wasn't unstructured enough, here's another little blurb: I recently saw that Wicd was updated in the arch repos. The new setup is nice, but they moved some files around. For example, their wpa_supplicant encryption files are now located in /etc/wicd/encryption. Not too big of a deal, I suppose. It just required me moving my University's wireless config from point A (/usr/lib/wicd/encryption/templates) to point B (/etc/wicd/encryption/templates) and then adding the name of the file in the "active" file. They had also changed the naming scheme around for the tray icon program (wicd-client) which I had to fix in my .xinitrc file. No biggy.

I do like wicd's new GUI interface. More options plus the choice to choose dhclient or dhcpcd. It figures they add this only a few days after I find out how to make both dhclient AND dhcpcd not mess with /etc/resolv.conf file. Oh well. The new version also adds the option to share a username/password across SSIDs of the same name which is a major time saver here at the University where I'd otherwise have to key in my passphrase in public places. Eeek.

The Universal "Gaining in Momentum" News

2008-09-09T12:35:00.003-04:00

I subscribe to quite a few tech blogs, mostly those pointing to open source and the development of the Linux kernel. Some, like kmandla's blog, provide really interesting real-life application and battle stories that are actually pretty fun to read.

For the rest of them, I must go through 75% without reading the actual article. Why? When I see the header "This Distribution is Gaining Momentum!" or "A windows killer? We think so!" or anything like that I automatically scroll past it in my RSS reader. I simply don't have the time or patience to read about how Linux is "lol omg taking off." News flash, kids: Linux isn't "taking off" in these mysterious spurts. People are trying it every day. Some like it, some don't. Saying that a certain percentage of computer users are running a Linux box is not news. News is that some new feature has been added to the kernel or some popular program got a Linux port. That's news, and that's what I want to read about.

Perhaps the articles do, in fact, contain useful information but are titled something like "Year of Linux on the Desktop has finally arrived because this many people use it now!" Stop saying it's arrived. Stop speculating. Do I have to rub your nose in it, too? Stop it.

For the sake of keeping my RSS reader chock-full of useful info and crap-free, stop posting these doo-doo filler articles.

Edit: And suddenly, my RSS feed was happy again.

To use or not to use?

2008-09-04T21:53:00.003-04:00

So I gave chrome a whirl the other day while I was booted into Windows. I thought it was... ehh... It's was ok. The memory usage far surpassed that of firefox, which made me really disappointed. It's still a Google product though, so I will probably end up using it anyway. The only thing that I'm kind-of turned off by right now is the tricky Eula that everyone was complaining about and it now supposedly "fixed". We'll see.

Speaking of being booted into Windows, I had managed to grab a beta account for Ryzom. Holy cow is that game fun! I don't know what my friend was talking about... that game is as much fun now, if not more fun, than it was last year.

Also, college is happening, hence the lack of posting. This year's going pretty well so far. The mpd/nfs/samba/ssh server is up and running beautifully. My roommate and I pop open sonata and just share an equal sound system. No problems with that as of yet.

ALSO ALSO, I finally took the time out to find out how to keep my /etc/resolv.conf static from the hands of dhclient. All that had to be done was create a file /etc/dhclient-enter-hooks with
make_resolv_conf() {
echo "doing nothing to resolv.conf"
}
in it. Bam. No more wicd messing with my openDNS servers.

I've also been waking up early to run with my roommate. He's taking the Somethingawful Nike+ challenge. He's in the top 7 as of now, so that's pretty exciting. Not really Linux related, but I thought that'd be note worthy, as well.

NFS server up and runnig... Google... Chrome... oh god

2008-09-02T00:15:00.001-04:00

I set up the NFS server the other day without a hitch. Everything mounts the way it should. Very nice.

Now I've got my eyes glued to the monitor for a new reason: A Google browser. Sweet fish sticks. Once more reason Google will rule the universe.

NFS: Coming soon to a server near me

2008-08-27T09:05:00.002-04:00

Over the weekend I plan on installing NFS on the server in our Dorm room. My friend expressed a desire to mount the raid on his computer for whatever reason. I personally don't have a problem with using ssh/sftp/scp, but setting up an NFS server should be fun, anyhow.

I'll be following the steps as listed on the ArchWiki since the wiki has given me the best results when learning to set up anything Arch related. I'll probably end up setting the server up to only allow nfs mounting from the 192.168.2.*/24 range since this is the hard wired connection inside of our room, rather than the wireless connection we have set up.

Which reminds me: I need to find out how to set up samba so that it sees shares on multiple networks. As of right now, it's only seeing shares on eth0. Similarly, on my laptop (which I connect to our internal LAN) can only see the samba server in our room. Ah well... all in due time, I suppose.

PS., I'm still addicted to Quarantine 2019. I decided to start up the medical profession line so that I can both self-heal and heal other citizens. As of right now, the humans are most definitely winning. I sense a strong zombie uprising in the future, though.

My new AUR Package: somatic-icon-theme

2008-08-21T12:13:00.004-04:00

Finally someone made a nice looking theme out of David Lanham's work. I'd been using this guy's wallpaper for a good year until I finally figured out who had done them. David Lanham is a talented artist who creates nonsensical cartoon-ish characters as well as some nice interface design themes. Check out some of the art on his website. Some really funky stuff.

I decided to give gnome-look a cruise today and found that someone by the name of pokemonjojo2 had taken his work and created an icon theme. Since I've gone mad with doing Arch packages for icon themes that pique my interest, this had to be my next project. Check out the package here. You can find Pokemon JOJO's blog here. A very... interesting choice of username.

My new AUR Package: ultimate-gnome-icon-theme

2008-08-16T01:35:00.004-04:00

I'm going to try to make a habit out of adding packages to the AUR. They're very simple PKGBUILDs, but they are of themes that I like or found interesting. Why shouldn't everyone have easy access to a nice looking theme?

Also, I want to be able to contribute! This is one of the only ways I can see fit to do so.

Ultimate Gnome is a nice looking icon theme created by Newmooon, a.k.a. Marco Tessarotto. He describes his theme: "I was tired of half-good themes with some icon from the Mac OS, other from some Crystal theme. So I decided to create my own theme based on what I like. The Ultimate Gnome it's a distro indipendent [sic] theme tested on Gnome 2.20.1 . It does not include any copyright violating icon cause every icon has been drawn from the author himself with Inkscape." Kudos, Marco!

Midori in Testing repo

2008-08-15T12:33:00.002-04:00

The latest installment of aur-general informed me that Midori is in the testing repo. I installed it and will give it a few run-throughs to see how it functions.

I haven't been keeping my eye on the Midori project as closely as I had been in the past. To tell the truth, I haven't really seen a reason to. Perhaps I'll find something I really like about it in my adventures.

A few things I DID notice, though. Midori did not want to load gmail or google reader, two must have services. Looks like this baby's going to the backburner for a bit longer.

The Server is Up! Also, Internet Forwarding!

2008-08-10T22:52:00.004-04:00

Two very exciting pieces of news today. Well, tonight.

My friend, and future roommate, and I have successfully set up our file server for the up coming semester. We're using his old computer and two 750GB drives in a software Raid (RAID1). Everything works very nicely. It was extremely easy to set up under Arch Linux. All hail the mighty Arch! Here's how I did it:

1.) Format the two drives. Make sure they have the filesystem "Linux raid autodetect"

2.) Create the array. This will create a new node in /dev/ named 'md0'. This will be the mountable drive.
# mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sd* /dev/sd*

3.) Then we simply add this array to the mdadm.conf file so that it may be assembled on boot.
# mdadm -D --scan >>/etc/mdadm.conf

4.) Don't forget to add your raid to fstab so that it can be mounted on boot!

Freakin' DONE. Now onto the second bit of news:

I managed to get my laptop onto the 'net through my desktop PC. This was also very very easy to do on two Arch machines. It takes a tad bit longer, but only in the number of steps to complete. No thinking really required. Here's how I did it:

1.) Set up the above scenario. Wait to configure the laptop part; we'll do this last.

2.) "Computer" should have iptables installed. If it doesn't, install it.

3.) # iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
- The above will set a rule for device eth0 to Masquerade any packet leaving as its own address. I'm really not sure about the nitty gritty of this, but just stay with me.

4.) # echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
-This tells the running kernel that you DO want to forward packets.

4.5) Edit /etc/sysctl.conf so that net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
-This will be set on every boot

5.) # /etc/rc.d/iptables save; /etc/rc.d/iptables start
-Saves the running configuration and starts iptables

...On to the laptop...

6.) # ifconfig eth0 192.168.2.100; route add default gw 192.168.2.1
-Sets the ip address and default gateway for the ethernet device on the laptop.

7.) Check to see if you can ping:
1. 192.168.2.1
2. www.google.com

...Back to Computer...

8.) # iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
-Sets to allow any existing connections and anything "Related" such as FTP servers connecting back to you (?)

9.) # iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -i ! eth0 -j ACCEPT
-Allows any new connections coming from anywhere EXCEPT eth0

10.) # iptables -P INPUT DROP
-Drops everything else.

For any additional info, go to where I found all of this info:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Masquerading-Simple-HOWTO/

My new AUR Package: xcursor-gruppled

2008-08-01T12:14:00.003-04:00

Thanks to a post made by Toor from Phorolinux, I've got a new favorite xcursor theme! Gruppled is an xcursor theme made by gruppler, or Craig Laparo. The white version of this theme goes very nicely with my latest theme setup (see the screenshot section to the right).

I decided to make this into an AUR package for the good of the community. Enjoy, archers!

Plone: To use or not to use

2008-07-30T09:35:00.002-04:00

Since Plone was mentioned as being one of the top 5 Open Source applications, I figured the least I could do would be to visit their homepage and snoop around a little. Plone is a python-based CMS (content management system) which is sort-of structured like a wiki. Plone itself sits on top of Zope, a "widely-used Open Source web application server and development system." Whatever that means.

The first thing that popped into my mind was "Hey, I could use this to take notes for next year!" It's true: using Plone could (and most likely would) be beneficial to me for taking notes out at college this year. However I'm still a little uneasy when it comes to going completely electronic with notes. What if something happens to my Plone server? What happens when there's a catastrophic crash, resulting in me never being able to read my sweet, sweet notes ever again? I don't know if my heart could take it.

I suppose there's always the possibility of just making backups. This is usually the best choice when dealing with really important data, and is the reason that my friend and I will be running a mirror raid for our server next semester.

Another aspect I'm worried about is whether or not I'll be able to even access a server over my Uni's network. Last year they had things pretty tightly bundled up, accepting almost no traffic from the outside world (or even across their own networks). The university does allow all students their own unix account, making it possible for me to setup my own webpage. However, they only ration off 5MB of space per student. C'mon, 5? Really? A little detective work will show that this would only house between 1/6 and 1/7 the space required for Plone.

I may end up just scrapping the idea, since last year's method of just taking notes in a text editor seemed to work just fine. However it sure would be nice to be able to link in-between notes instead of switching between two different files at once. Oh well.

Waitin' on the Processor

2008-07-29T11:46:00.004-04:00

Most of the parts for the new computer have come in. All but the Processor remain. I got a little anxious last night and opened the boxes, mounted the drives as well as the PSU. Now it's all a matter of waiting. I think I'm a bit too excited to finally put this computer together.

In the mean time, I'll read up on... well... I don't really know. Various aspects of Linux, I suppose. I mostly want to figure out where I went wrong with my freenx installation. Perhaps it was that I was a bit tired when I made the attempt and was impatient (see my first trial with awesome). Hey, maybe things will be different this next time around.

In fact, while I'm waiting for this part, I'll install the freenx server on my lappy and see if I can get at it with the family desktop. Fun fun!

Edit: Everything arrived, and I just finished putting everything together and getting everything installed in about 5 hours. I was really freaked out when the monitor wouldn't flicker on. However, after a few reboots, the system seems to be running flawlessly. Now the real test is to see if my Step Mother notices a HUGE speed increase. I'm pretty sure she will.

Settling In

2008-07-28T23:18:00.001-04:00

Ahhh... Ok. Now over the next few days, you may notice a few small changes here and there. Otherwise, I feel like I have a pretty good little theme going. I made the theme with the PsycHo: Free Template Generator. I didn't have to lift a finger.

Well... I BARELY had to lift a finger.

Patience please

2008-07-28T08:52:00.000-04:00

I'm in the middle of switching to a new theme. Patience please.

OpenSSH Tools: I am in love

2008-07-27T23:48:00.002-04:00

For a while, I've known about ssh. I've logged into my toy-around servers and my school server a couple of times, never doing too much in the way of being productive. I've only recently learned about sftp as well as scp. How awesome are these utilities? I ask this rhetorically. Through the use of one program, sshd, one can copy files remotely to and from a server, access it with an ftp server, and execute commands. All of this through one port. I just think that that is amazing. What I would really like to do, though, is read up on how to restrict access to folders on the server (create a jail, basically). There's no need for this in my life, though, so I probably won't bother to even look it up. Yet.

Anywho, just thought I'd express my nerdy love. No one else thought it to be quite as cool as me...

A fresh install: Ubuntu 8.04

2008-07-26T12:22:00.002-04:00

No, I didn't install Ubuntu on one of my own computers. Rather, I wiped clean the hard drive of my father's/family's computer and am now installing the latest edition of Ubuntu. Just from the live CD I can already tell that this is going to be a worthwhile endeavor; the printer is automatically recognized, as is the wireless card, two pieces of hardware that had caused me so much pain and heartache in the past. Sweet.

Not only this, but the GUI itself seems more responsive, even off the Live CD. I can't wait to have this bad boy completely installed and running.

This installation has made me realize why people still choose to install Ubuntu on a client's computer rather than Arch (if they know how to install Arch, that is). First off, Ubuntu will, more than likely, "Just work". If the tech doesn't feel like learning every inch of a customer's computer and doesn't feel like running into any snags, he or she could more than likely install Ubuntu without a hitch.

Also, there's very little these days that has to go into customization for a Ubuntu computer (at least from what I can tell). Arch is really something that someone who is feeling bold should undertake on their own time, rather than have someone do all of the work for them.

I understand now. I am enlightened.

New parts ordered

2008-07-25T00:06:00.002-04:00

I ended up just ordering new parts for my Stepmom. I'll be building her a fresh computer, and it's only costing $234USD after shipping is factored in. It'll be a pretty nice system, toting an AMD dual-core 2.3GHz processor, 1GB of ram, and an 80GB harddrive (it's plenty of space, trust me). I'm actually pretty excited to put it together and have her give it a test run, just to see how she likes her new-found speed.

I can only look back on my most recent upgrade which ended up costing me around $800USD. Since it was a few year ago, quality:cost ratio has gone way up, meaning the consumer gets a ton more bang for their buck. I can only imagine when quad-core will be the new standard for building a machine.

Oh man... I really hope that I don't become one of those crotchety old guys that shakes their fist at technological advances. "Those darned kids and their atomic processors! Why back in my day..."

Reinstall On the Laptop

2008-07-22T01:20:00.002-04:00

I had a great weekend of relaxation at the beach. Tons of sun, and, unfortunately, a nice amount of sunburn. Ah well... that's what I get for being super pale.

Over the weekend break, I actually ended up wiping my entire laptop and installing Windows on a 25 GB partition, using the rest for Arch Linux in an LVM. Much like the desktop, I'll need that Windows partition for next year while in the dormatories. Also, since I take the laptop with me to my friends' houses, I'd like to be able to install any game without struggling with Wine. It's really all in the name of convenience.

In other news, my Step Mom now wants to watch movies with the Netflix streaming application. I'm starting to get a mark on my face from the amount of facepalming Netflix has caused me to do. Apparently, the Netflix Watch Now or whatever stupid program they use is Windows only. Stupid. Why companies don't go cross platform these days is beyond me.

FINALLY! Google Gears starts becoming useful

2008-07-17T13:24:00.002-04:00

Thanks to Lifehacker, I've learned that Google most likely plans on implementing Google Gears for Gmail and GCalendar. How awesome is that? Perhaps the Google gods will see fit as to do the same for Google Notebook. Please?

Hello?

Quarantine, Bash Colors, Torrenting, and a Blogger Theme (?)

2008-07-16T22:45:00.002-04:00

First thing's first: Sorry for the long title of this post. Now, on to the content!

I was perusing a certain forum recently and came across this little gem: Quarantine 2019. Being the sucker I am for browser-based games, I signed up and have been playing throughout the day. The game is modeled after Urban Dead, a Humans vs. Zombies type of game. Back in my heyday of trying every single free game out there, I threw a few weeks into UD, but never got hooked. Q2019 is still in beta stages, but seems to have caught my attention this time around. We'll see how long I stick with it.

I got an answer about more terminal colors thanks to goldfish in #bash. He pointed me in the direction of the Gentoo Wiki which has a great article in regards to using many more colors for your terminal than the standard 9-ish provided by bash.

While attempting to come up with another way to help the community, I decided to do something as simple as seed the Arch iso torrent. Although minor, the thought that I'd donating some of my idle bandwidth to my current favorite OS makes me happy.

I'm also on the lookout for a new blogger template. My current one as of writing this post is nice, but I'd like to stand out in the crowd just a little bit more. Perhaps I'll crack my knuckles tomorrow and dive into some simple web design.

Dead as a Doornail. And some Diablo, too.

2008-07-13T09:26:00.005-04:00

Turns out my step mother's computer is dead. At least the hard drive is. Bios doesn't even recognize it anymore. My step mother wanted me to compare prices between a pre-built system (from Dell or one from Newegg) versus building one from scratch, so I'll be doing that right after publishing this post.

In other news, I'm almost through Diablo (the original), and let me tell you I'm sorry that I waited this long to play the game. You wouldn't think it, but running around a randomly generated dungeon wildly clicking enemies and watching them explode is a TON of fun. The game's fairly short, though. There are only 16 floors or "levels" which you must go through. Although it has taken me this long since I bought the game to beat it, I haven't necessarily been playing it all too often. For example, I've been playing Earthbound for a bit longer and I think I'm just barely approaching the halfway point.

As far as getting the Blizzard downloader to work in wine, though... that doesn't seem to be coming along as smoothly as I'd like. I'm still getting the same error when attempting to download. I submitted the picture of the error and a bug report describing what's going wrong.

Just for good measure, here's the same error when trying to use the Starcraft installer:

Kicking the Bucket

2008-07-08T12:06:00.002-04:00

I just received another email from my step mother concerning her old computer. This time around, it sounds like something finally snapped in that old box, and it may be time to build a new box. I feel bad for her, but I had explained before to her that a hard drive will eventually die out. Hopefully she won't be too disappointed if it really is fubar'd.

Let me explain that I know a hard drive would be pretty darn easy to swap out. However, I'd like to get her updated to at least a 64 bit processor system. Her old computer was running fine (aside from the occasional kernel panic), but it gets to a point sometimes when one just has to let go of older hardware and embrace change.

I'll be dropping by my father's house on Sunday to visit. During that time I'll give her computer a once over and assess the damage.

FreeNX and the Fileserver

2008-07-06T11:42:00.004-04:00

I'm really interested in FreeNX. This could be the answer to my friend wanting to use a kvm switch on the server (which I disapprove of for my own silly reasons, the most being the fact that it costs money). From the main page:

NX is an exciting new technology for remote display. It provides near local speed application responsiveness over high latency, low bandwidth links.

What's even cooler is that this thing runs over SSH. From the Archwiki:

Once installed the server is effectively running and ready to go, you do not have to do anything manually. The only thing that must be running in order to connect is the sshd daemon.

In actual fact, if you check the process list (ps aux) you may not see the nxserver running even though it says it is. This is because the nxserver is actually started by logging into sshd as the special user 'nx'. This user has been set up to use the nxserver as its shell, much like a normal user has bash as the default shell.

Read that and tell me that's not awesome. You can't. You just can't.

As far as the server goes, my friend and I have hit a stumbling block in that the case we wanted to use isn't going to make the cut, mostly due to its lack of... anything. Sure there are standoffs to screw the motherboard into, but there's nowhere to mount the cd drive, harddrives, or powersupply. We may end up just using one of the cases from my spare computers, which I'm fairly sure are from the PIII era.

Gettin' Things Done, Baby

2008-07-03T19:08:00.003-04:00

Today and yesterday have been (semi)productive days. I switched back over to using the stock ARCH kernel after not noticing much of a difference when using my own custom compiled Kernel. The switch back was mostly fueled by the ability to update everything with a simple pacman -Syu, rather than having to go out of my way to compile modules, update, etc. I guess this sets me apart from most other Linux users in that I don't go through torturous lengths to make my computer run a fraction of a second faster. Wanting to make your computer faster, if even by the smallest amount, is never a bad thing. All I'm saying is that I don't go the extra mile to make that happen.

I also got around to uploading The Brady Brunsh music to lastfm. I've wanted to do this for quite some time, and since I fooled around with LMMS this morning and created a new TBB song, I decided today was the day. First I tagged my music with Picard, and then created a new lastfm account specifically for the group. Give the music a listen here. Yes, it is supposed to be silly/bad music.

I sold a few more of my old games in order to get a few bucks. I'm hoping to buy the Diablo Battle Chest in the near future, mostly so I can have a bit of a background with the game, instead of just going right into D3 cold.

On top of this, I've made a bit more progress into Earthbound. I'm just at the part where the story forks. I won't reveal too much, since I'm not sure blogger does spoiler tags.

See, to me, this is getting stuff done. At least in the summer time. I did a few other things that actually matter, such as paying bills/taxes, but I'd rather keep this blog to technology related matters.

Psyched for D3

2008-07-02T12:45:00.002-04:00

I've never gotten into the older Diablo games. What with D3 being announced, though, I may have to change that this time around. A few of my friends back at college were really into the game, so I'd at least have someone to play with.

Now I just need to solve the whole "bored with current resources" problem that I seem to be having. Perhaps I'll install Crux on a vbox. Otherwise I'll just be cruising various fora for some quick, cheap fun.

On the Rainslick: AUR package. You're Welcome.

2008-06-29T00:40:00.002-04:00

I made another submission to the AUR today. This time it was my newly found game "On the Rainslick: The Precipice of Darkness". I'm quite proud of it, personally. You can go check it out, if you want. I mean, I'm not pushing you to, or anything. You don't have to.

But you should.

My (adopted) AUR packages

2008-06-27T08:19:00.003-04:00

I decided after reading this Arch Linux thread to adopt a package or two from the AUR. I decided to do this because I wanted so badly to be able to give back to the Linux community. What better way to do this than to maintain packages?

After perusing the AUR for a little bit, I noticed that gtim and config (which is a python module required by gtim) were orphaned. This was great news for me. Two packages that I use/need in my work environment just sitting out in the open, begging to be maintained. I quickly snatched these up. Right away I remembered that the config PKGBUILD was a bit unfinished. After upgrading the version to the latest and adding the arch= flag, I re-uploaded the .tar.gz file. Bam. The package was automatically upgraded.

gtim didn't need anything done to it, really. I just selected that I'd like to maintain the file. I'll be ready if a new version ever comes around. Edit: Correction. There were a few things that needed to be corrected in the PKGBUILD. Thanks to pkgman, this took less than one minute.

I thought, "Wow... that was a bit... easy." I was really hoping for more of a challenge. What better way to test my skills than to submit my OWN PKGBUILD not already existing in AUR? I noticed that gbatt, a nice python tool for checking battery status was not yet submitted. I personally didn't use the program before, but now I will. This nifty little guy is perfect for my Openbox tray on my laptop. After a bit of reading up and learning, I was ready to submit my PKGBUILD. Stythys in the #archlinux IRC channel pointed me to pkgman and suggested its use for automation of the creation and submission of AUR packages. Thanks again, Stythys.

You can check out packages maintained by Factory (me) here. Feel free to yell at/degrade me for sloppy PKGBUILD techniques. I'm still new and love to learn about this stuff.

HIIT Followup, LXDE, idesk

2008-06-26T00:31:00.005-04:00

Remember when I said I'd created an mp3 to play while doing HIIT exercises? Turns out that was a DEFINITE good idea. It's much much easier than looking at your watch frantically while trying to run full speed. I created my mp3 in audacity, a free, open source audio editor/recorder. I "mixed" two songs by Aponaut together (I say mixed with quotes because I am by no standards a DJ), and then just imported an easy-to-listen-to beep sound that I found on FindSounds. You can get the file here for free, since Aponaut made their music freely available on the net a long time ago.

I also installed LXDE just to give it a try. I was inspired by gcarrier's post in relation to lxnm. I really like how the whole DE is modular, in that you can mix-and-match programs to your liking. It's also pretty cool that these guys created a good amount of their own software to better suit the needs of the DE. I'm not the biggest fan of pcmanfm, though. I'm much more interested in Thunar. However, this takes away the ability to have a desktop background + icons. I would use nitrogen (or feh) + idesk for this solution.

And this thought led me to try out idesk for the first time. Let me tell you first and foremost that I LOVE aur. I found a nice easy gui tool that creates the icon for you (idesk-extras). Nifty difty. I'm thinking about installing idesk on my step mother's computer just to see if this eases her annoyances.

My Friend's Aleutia + Arch article

2008-06-25T16:51:00.004-04:00

While I wait for this mp3 player to charge, I'll post a link to my friend's wiki article about setting up Arch on the Aleutia. He put a decent amount of time into it, so give it a read-through. It might convince you to pick up one of these dinky lil' guys.
Installing Archlinux on Aleutia E2

Spring, Precipice, HIIT, and mpd stuffs

2008-06-25T15:39:00.006-04:00

Before I go out for my run this evening, I'll tell you what I blew away a good couple of hours on my day off with: Attempting to get Spring and SpringLobby to work correctly in Arch. Everything would have gone smoothly had the aur pkgbuild made the appropriate directories in my home directory, but nooooo. I also had to copy over files from the official website as described in steps here. Big thanks to everyone in IRC who helped me figure stuff out (mostly a guy by the name of BrainDamage... Go figure).

Anywho, this game looks potentially fun. I plan on bringing it up in future LANs or next year in the dormitory.

Also, no I haven't bought the key for PoD yet. I will, though. Maybe tonight, even. We shall see. Right now, though, I just finished putting together a 17+ minute long mp3 for HIIT stuff, so it's now time to go test that baby out.

Also also, my future roommate is warming up to the idea of using mpd on the file server to play music and control it remotely. This is mostly because I sent him a HUGE list of clients that are available for mpd. I must admit, I was fairly surprised myself, as I mostly stick to ncmpc and Sonata.

On the Rainslick: PoD. Yes, my children, there is a Linux version.

2008-06-22T08:49:00.004-04:00

If you haven't already, give the game from the Penny Arcade guys a try. I just played through their demo and it's pretty fun. I'm considering buying the key needed for the full version for 20 dollars. There is, after all, a Linux version, and I'd like to support the idea of cross-platform gaming.

The only thing stopping me from buying is I'm wondering if the key can be used multiple times. I do have a few computers and I wouldn't mind installing it more than once.

Sweet Neptune's Ghost!

2008-06-18T12:49:00.002-04:00

I got wireless setup at a family friend's house. FINALLY. I come here (to their house) every once in a while to watch after their kid while they have work, and I usually bring my laptop. I would normally leech off the neighbor's 10% signal, and that was getting old fast. They were originally using just a straight connection from Modem to Desktop. I noticed, though, that they had a Netgear router lying next to the computer, completely untouched and packaged in original store packaging. "Hmm..." I thought, "A wonderful opportunity to help both them and myself out at the same time. Excellent!"

So it's done. I'm getting about a 60% signal one floor up from the router which really isn't that bad when you consider I'm running my wireless with ndiswrapper. Now I'll just have to help them out with setting up their computer on the third floor. They plan on running a wire all the way up through their house. Whatever the case, I'll be helping them out with that, too.

Google's Services or Why I <3 Google

2008-06-14T10:59:00.006-04:00

There are an unbelievable amount of Google services out there, ranging from note-taking, to word processing, to email, to photo collecting, to instant messaging and even social networking. It seems that Google is becoming (or is) a very viable Web-Based Operating System.

Alright, you Technical Tommys. Google isn't really an OS, but it has most of the programs available online (for free) that most people use on a day-to-day basis. Heck, even Walmart was selling (still is?) the super cheap computers running gOS based mostly on web apps.

Ugh... I just went to that site after the longest time... an operating system aimed at MySpace users? Ugh... ugh...

This post isn't about gOS or the fact that it got really cheesed up since I've last seen it and now looks a LOT like Mac OS X. So let's get back on track.

I personally used Google Docs like a mad man during my first two college semesters. I probably will use it again when the next semester kicks off. After I started to use Docs, I had virtually no use for my USB drives. They became backup slaves just in case Google dropped off the face of the earth. All of the computers on campus that I used had internet access, so I had to spend minimal time using Microsoft Word. I did, however, still need to make use of a word processor in order to format the page to my liking. Perhaps I was too lazy or just overlooked some great feature used by Docs for formatting. I'll look into that.

Google Calendar also came in handy more than once during the semester. I could schedule classes, appointments, and anything else I needed to remember. The day of, I could have a text message sent to me 15 minutes (or any amount of time, depending on how much time I needed) before the even happened. I, of course, would always check Google Calendar in the morning to see if anything needed to be done that day, but the reminder via text message was crucial sometimes and saved my skin more than once.

I never got into taking notes with Google Notebook mostly because I wasn't always fortunate enough to be able to get onto my Uni's wireless signal in class (or at all, for that matter... damn you, Broadcom). They've said this will change next year, as they're adding many more hotspots around campus, so fingers crossed. The interface for Google Notebook is very intuitive for in-class notes.

I'm not sure what's scaring me away from using it as my primary source for storing notes, though. It would be almost useless to me for Math notes as I require plenty of space to let my mind organize itself (or explode) on paper rather than line-by-line word processing. However, for classes that deal with historical facts, famous research information, or for anything else that can be easily dictated, this service would be ultra useful. We shall see, though. I'm still waiting on Google to allow for colored section headers and linking between notes.

I'll cut it short here. This is already a long enough post.

gtim: The result of way too much searching

2008-06-13T13:16:00.007-04:00

I've finally found an app to display the time and date in the dock of Openbox. I know, it seems silly that I haven't been able to find one after all this time. However, if you know me at all, you know that I'm very fussy about my apps. If they don't behave just so, I won't use them.

gtim does exactly what I want it to do: display the time in plain text in my Openbox dock. Nothing more, nothing less. I edited the .py file a tad so that it'd show the date in a nice fasion, too.

Right clicking produces this little menu. Nifty difty.

And for the sake of showing off that I managed to match colors, here's a full screenshot of gtim in action:

Mmmmm... Smooth, Easy Guild Wars

2008-06-12T17:05:00.003-04:00

Planning on selling ALL of my old gameboy games (original, color) to Game Stop, I packed my 2 old gameboy colors, screen magnifier, and cartridges into a plastic bag. After a quick drive to Game Stop, I found myself prepared to sell the toys of my childhood for cold, hard cash. Whoops... I meant store credit.

To my dismay, Game Stop no longer buys GB cartridges. They stopped back in April, so I missed the boat by a little more than a month. Damn.

I did end up selling a single GBA game I wasn't playing, though. I don't remember the exact title, but it was some Kirby game. I got 10 bucks of in-store Game Stop credit. "Oh great," I thought, "Like I'm ever going to use th--." And there it was: Guild Wars: Eye of the North on sale for 15 bucks. FIFTEEN DOLLARS. Just so you're with me, I'm looking at a purchase of one of my favorite games of all time for a lump sum of five dollars out of my pocket. Sweet.

This would be the perfect opportunity for me to 1.)reformat, 2.) reinstall Windows on a small partition, and 3.) reinstall Arch with LVM. I bought the game, went home, and began the fun. After a few annoying stumbling blocks, I was happily downloading the updates for Guild Wars. In Windows.

Now I'm torn. I feel a sense of guilt for advocating Linux while keeping Windows installed on my system. Oh well... at least Guild Wars is running at a smooth 60 fps with all of the settings turned up. Delicious.

As a side note, Saga doesn't even work in Windows. It crashes directly after the patcher. Now I don't feel so bad... Afterall, I got further with Wine + Linux.

Update on the Koala Mini

2008-06-11T02:43:00.003-04:00

Hey guys, just an update about the Koala. Remember when I said I'd email the System76 dudes? Well... uh... I did. Here's their answer:

Thank you for your interest in System76.

Power consumption estimates for the Koala are as follows:

active 46.1 W
idle 23.4 W
shut down 2.9 W

Best Regards,
Tom Aaron
System 76 Technical Support
support@system76.com
720-226-9269 x603

Sweet. This might be doable in the near future.

PS., if you haven't noticed, I say things like that all the time in order to procrastinate.

Kernel Compilation: My first step into Linux manhood?

2008-06-11T02:15:00.003-04:00

I guess I could have entitled this post "Am I cool yet?"

Just a few nights ago, I compiled my own kernel. Apart from screwing with the way fstab is setup, I had zero problems. The problem, which isn't really a problem, per se, was my newly compiled kernel wasn't picking up on my harddrives like the default kernel compile was. In other words, the hard drives weren't arranged in the same sda1, sda2 order. I don't know what order they were in, because I didn't bother to check. I just reformatted my fstab by setting it up to mount the drives via their UUID (now done by default with the 2008 Arch discs).

I must say, the whole process was very straight forward. I don't think I did too much in the way of "customization," but I turned some stuff off and some other stuff on. In the end, I really just wanted to be able to compile my own kernel for the first time. Feels good.

Now that I know I can do that, it's time to learn what happens during boot times. I know the basics; I know something is done with the initramfs image and the kernel image, then the modules are loaded, then the network is started, then the daemons, blah blah blah. However, I'd like to know more about the first bit: What the heck is the role of the init image? This can be learned easily, I know, by a simple wiki search. This will be done in the very near future.

First thing's first, though: repartitioning and reinstalling. I need, no, WANT, to have my Linux partitions arranged in an LVM. After messing around with an LVM system (a few, actually) in virtual box and on a test machine, their benefits far outweigh the trouble it takes to set them up (which is almost non existent). I'd also like to have a spare 20GB or less set aside for a Windows environment. Hold onto your pants. I'll explain: Next year, my friend (the aleutia kid) and I plan on rooming together. Since he's only going to have a low powered pc (which will only run Linux, I assume), I need to have an environment setup so we can play through a single player game every once in a while. If you say you don't sit down and cooperatively play through a single player game with a friend once in a while, I'll know you're lying.

That's all for now, I think. This post kind-of went off the Topic sentence. Oh well. My college professor of Writing Comp. would say I just took you, the reader(s), on a journey through my thought process. I hope you kept your hands and feet inside the car at all times.

Lil' dinky guys

2008-06-08T00:08:00.002-04:00

My friend recently purchased an E2 from Aleutia. He's on a whole environmentalist kick (not that he wasn't before), so the fact that this baby weighs in at only 8 watts meant that this was right up his alley. The price is affordable, too. If you don't feel like doing the math, Google says the price of £199 comes out to be (roughly) $392.01. Not too shabby if you're concerned about your waste output.

He installed Arch on it (of course) and, with very little fiddling, got things working nicely. He even has Gnome running on it nicely. Obviously there was some noticeable slow-down when messing with themes or heavily graphical tasks due to the underpowered hardware, but still.

This machine reminded me of something I saw from System76: The Koala Mini. It may not be as low wattage as the Aleutia E2, but it's still rockin' the miniature look. I emailed their staff about how much power would be consumed, so hopefully I get a response soon. Supposedly their tech support is REALLY nice, so I'm sure I'll be answered promptly.

If I didn't love Arch, I'd buy all of my laptops from the System76 guys.

Actually, I probably still could. However, I already have a laptop. I'll just point my friends in their direction in the future.

Vidya Gamin' (or at least trying to)

2008-06-07T00:03:00.004-04:00

As the summer slowly begins, I find myself in the position of having some amount of free time on my hands. Granted I work WAY more than I used to, but even so, spare times comes about once in a while. During this time, I'd usually entertain myself with some crappy Korean Grind game for a few hours and then go to bed. However, now that I've switched to Linux, a fair amount of these games have been closed off from my reach, mostly because of the GameGuard utility that so many MMOs make use of these days. Therefor, I must now fill this void with searches for games that run in Wine.

I tried for a very long time the other day to get Saga of Ryzom working. However, the installer utility didn't seem to connect to its intended server. I tried this in a vbox instance of XP and it still didn't go through. I didn't try natively, though. It would be nice to poke my head into Ryzom's world after so much time has passed since my first play with it. Wow... I think Ryzom was actually the first MMORPG I'd ever tried. Ever. That's quite a few years ago.

I then tried Saga (hur hur, yes, the two names are similar). I still haven't gotten to actually play this one yet, either, as the patcher doesn't seem to work correctly, even after acquiring the correct dll (MSVBVM60.DLL). It, like the Ryzom installer, just appears to hang after being started, never connecting to a server. I will attempt to manually patch that right after this post.

If I DID get Saga working, though... oh man... I think I would be playing that one for a while. I need to work on my RTS gaming ability.

Speaking of Wine, the program is at rc4 for it's first "stable" release. I wonder how far they are from the full release and what this will mean for the project. The program is far from perfect, but it has made great progress in time I've been watching it. Perhaps some day we will see certain programs running 100 percent as well as they do on Windows under Linux.

Goodbye pypanel, Hello stalonetray

2008-06-04T00:21:00.005-04:00

I've been messing around with my interface lately after being ridiculed for having two clocks on my computer; For a while I had a nice large time display in conky and also in pypanel. One of them had to leave. Simply put, the app that lost out was pypanel. pypanel was a convenience for a while, but it was an eyesore as well as a waste of space.

A waste of space... it was only 16 pixels... something is wrong with me.

Anyhow, stalonetray is now my new friend, sitting comfortably in the Openbox dock at the bottom of my screen. I can middle click the mouse on the desktop to switch to minimized windows. This really allows for a much cleaner/nicer looking environment, if you ask me. Here's what my laptop looks like now:

And the Desktop:

Yes, I have problems with colors sometimes, so forgive me if you think the Openbox Theme doesn't mesh well with the background; I'm working on my decorative skills :).

And yes, that is Pokemon you see.

Let it be known that my step mother is still dealing with Linux. I haven't had the time to reinstall Windows, so she's been sitting on the same setup for some time now. I'm hoping that it grows on her after some time, but if it doesn't, I will do my duty and install whatever she wants.

Lastly, am I the only one not using /home/username as their blog name? How did I not think of this before getting Semidigerati?

Age of Mythology: Wine?

2008-05-29T14:53:00.003-04:00

Confirmed. Age of Mythology, a game from Microsoft Game Studios, works (with a no-cd patch, of course) in wine-0.9.61. Wow. I'm actually pretty surprised, although I probably shouldn't be, given that it's an RTS. The opening movie was a tad chunky, which made me a little nervous. However gameplay is amazingly smooth. If you've got this game, give it an install.

One side note: There doesn't appear to be wide screen capabilities, at least not under Wine. There's the flaw, you nitpickers.

Slowly Educating Myself (Learning Bash, part 1)

2008-05-28T10:26:00.004-04:00

Last night I decided that I would finally "teach" myself bash. That may sound kind-of odd, as most know that by default, most Linux distros use bash at the command line, and more than likely, I understood a decent bit about it already. This may be true, but I need to learn syntax for things like for loops, if loops, basic commands, etc.

A few helpful sites that I'm using right now:

The Linux Document Project's tutorial for Bash Scripting. TLDP taught me about Logical Volume Management, so this was the first place I looked for a basic introduction to Bash. It's not quite as in-depth as I was hoping, but that's OK; I still learned some valuable info related to syntax and HOW to write code in bash. Good stuff.

hypexr's documentation is also very informative. I learned about two different "modes" for bash: emacs and vi. This info will DEFINITELY come in handy. I feel a inclined to install emacs so I can have a useful text editor for editing scripts. Sorry vi guys, I'm not up to your standards yet. EDIT: On second thought, maybe I will use vim afterall.

Now what I really need is to think up some reasons to write scripts. I already have some basic ideas, one of which is for backing up my home directory:

Weekly (or so) backups of my home directory in /var/. I'll need to exclude the .wine folder, as this hosts a fair amount of space that really doesn't need to be taken up in a backup. I can also exclude .Virtualbox for the same reason. If there are more than 2 backups in my /var/backups folder after a backup, I'll remove the oldest one.

We'll see how it all goes.

Another failure and a first run with awesome

2008-05-25T23:05:00.003-04:00

My step mother has decided that Linux isn't right for her. She has her reasons, I'm sure, so I'm not going to fight her (especially since it's her computer). I'm fairly sure the kernel panics have something to do with it. Allow me to explain:

Every once in a while, her computer would freeze while in X. This means nothing could be entered via the keyboard, mouse, etc. Nothing would respond, including switching terminals. At first I thought it was the leaky Firefox. I told her to make sure she closed out after every session, just to be on the safe side. A few days later, though, she informed me that the problem still persisted.

I'm going to copy her logs tonight and just see if I can make any sense of obvious failures/errors. Hopefully something will point me in the right direction. Tomorrow, though, I will sadly install Windows XP on her old old old computer. One can only breathe a heavy sigh and accept defeat. I will take a page out of K.Mandla's book and not install antivirus on her computer. I will just do a vanilla install, wash my hands of the situation, and she'll figure out the rest.

On the brighter side, I tried awesome for the first time two nights ago. It was an interesting experience, and I think I'd vastly enjoy the window manager if I had a keyboard that had a super key ("windows" key). I use a model m, so I had to re-map Mod4 to Caps Lock. I don't consider this elegant, but it still did the trick.

I dropped learning kind-of quickly as I was extremely tired when I tried it and didn't want to have a majorly bad impression of the program. In the future I hope to be able to pull away from floating WMs and use tiling full time.

LEEEXXXMMMAARRRRKKKKK! and other fist shaking

2008-05-23T09:40:00.004-04:00

Here's another story about a guy who would really like to install Linux on a computer but is limited by non-working peripherals that the client considers essential.

I've been talking up how I'm going to install Arch on my mother's computer in almost every other post it seems. It seems like these plans have fallen through; her printer, a Lexmark Z1300, currently is garbage under a Linux OS. Their drivers page was one of the things that made me say "oh sweet lord no". Notice how they (Lexmark) completely disregard the fact that anyone uses something other than a MAC or, heaven forbid, Windows. I dislike this company right now to a degree unthinkable by any living being.

Anywho, my mother was, to say the least, displeased that she would not be able to print things with her computer, an action considered a given by present day computer users (and it should be). Ah well. I'll just let them stick with what they have for now (XP) until the printer kicks the bucket OR until I find a sub $50 printer that works flawlessly in Linux. First and foremost, though, I need money.

And now, more adventures with the VirtualBox. Oh MAN do I love this program.

Let the official record state that I do not like Slackware. It's package management (can we even call it that?) is not to my liking at all. Packages are downloaded from their website (or cd) rather than a program such as pacman or apt/aptitude. YOU must do all dependency checking for the program. This does not please me. I understand that this may be that I'm spoiled by my nice programs that check and automatically download dependencies for me, but seriously, that one little thing, to me, makes or breaks whether or not I ENJOY building a system. I don't want to spend more time tracking down dependencies and having sub-par package management than I do using my system.

So many distros, so little time...

2008-05-21T11:02:00.002-04:00

If you want a basic idea of just how many Linux Distributions are out there, take a look at DistroWatch. Holy CRAP that's a ton of 'em. How does one choose? To tell you the truth, I really couldn't tell you how. One must experiment. Find out what your skill level is and go from there.

I'm still holding strong with Arch.

Cursor Themes: Wowwee!

2008-05-20T16:09:00.005-04:00

I just learned how to set cursor theme for X. Xcursor themes can be found in /usr/share/icons/ or (per user) in ~/.icons. A strange place to put them, but whatever. One can set their cursor theme of choice by adding the line Xcursor.theme: Theme-Name to their .Xdefaults file, where Theme-Name is the name of the folder containing the theme.

Themes can be downloaded from the official repos or from other sites. Do a pacman search for xcursor and a few themes will pop up. If you want the mouse theme to apply to all existing windows, you'll have to restart the programs. For me, this means I have to exit out of X (which kinda sucks, but whatever). If you want the XCursor theme to apply to newly created windows, just run xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults.

Right now I'm just rockin' a white mouse theme called Vanilla-DMZ from the repos. Suh-weet.

Goodbyes and Hellos

2008-05-20T15:38:00.003-04:00

Today I say goodbye to VLC. It's been a nice run, old friend, but since you broke in the last update, I decided to try out mplayer. You're good, but mplayer is better, especially since it can be run in screen (usually only useful when using it as a music player). Fare thee well.

I also gave spookyet's compilation of firefox3 a run through (firefox-spookyet). Infact, I'm still using it. I haven't noticed a definitely speed boost yet, but there's nothing wrong with it. I think after I run it on some older computers I'll start noticing a larger difference in performance.

The time to install Arch on the family computers is nearing. At my father's more space is needed for everyday tasks (he uses the computer as a personal dvd copier. Nothing illegal, just home videos). Not only this, but they've got Ubuntu installed on it, and if you hadn't noticed, I'm through with Ubuntu and am currently on the Arch love train. At my mother's, the computer is SLOWWWWWWW. It shouldn't be so darned slow, though. Sure it has 192 Megs of ram, but that's no excuse. It's currently running under Windows XP along with antivirus I installed for it which heavily weighs it down. It's like attaching a friggin' cement block to one's feet and telling them to run a marathon.

Now that that's out of the way, I'm once again perusing the internet looking for some fun little time wasters. To be specific, I'm looking for some nice browser based mmos to sooth the savage beast. The usual meet the guidelines: Civilization/Management based, Pokemon-esque (c'mon, who doesn't like pokemanz), or... well, actually, everything else is close to utter crap. I ran across Urban Rivals, but I didn't end up enjoying it very much. I also found Pokemon World Online, which will DEFINITELY be worth (to me) doing once their Java client is released.

Virtualbox Playtime

2008-05-18T23:32:00.000-04:00

Being a tad bored, I decided to install Virtual Box. It was extremely easy to set up a virtual machine. Soon enough, I was trying to installed every OS I could think of. Windows XP installed extremely easily, as did Ubuntu 8.04. I also tried almost all of the flavors of BSD, but eventually crapped out; I couldn't get many of them to work. It was quite frustrating. I found this, which could explain why I was having so much trouble.

I tried to go over a few possible reasons in my mind as to why someone would want to install an OS on a virtual machine rather than an actual real-life machine. I came up with a few reasons:

Lack of a Machine - This goes without saying, but I'll write it anyway: a person might not have a spare machine collecting dust or even a spare drive.
Needed at the Workplace - If your manager or supervisor or whatever would spontaneously combust if you didn't use Microsoft Word or Outlook Express or whatever silly program that a company may rely on, you don't have to install a crappy OS to run that crappy software.
Testing Purposes - If you wanted to try out that new release of Fedora but didn't want to mess around with your partitions or risk data loss.
Troubleshooting a Family Member's Problems - If your Great Aunt Tia just can't seem to open up Internet Explorer or your little cousin has just installed Ubuntu, you don't have to say "Sorry, I don't run your operating system."

These are the main ones that I could come up with. If you haven't tried out a virtual machine yet, give it a go.

Followup: Oh Garage Games, what have you done?

2008-05-17T11:17:00.002-04:00

http://www.darkhorizons-lore.com/download.php?view.79
Here it is. The answer to the Dark Horizon woes. As I mentioned previously, I was having troubles getting DH: Lore running. This simple work around does the trick.

Rockbox on my Newly Used H10

2008-05-17T08:51:00.003-04:00

Someone in the arch IRC channel pointed me in the direction of Rockbox back when I was toying around with a borrowed iPod. It's a cool concept, especially if you're like me and are into customizing everything you get your grubby little hands on. Unfortunately I didn't have a compatible mp3 player at the time, so Rockbox sat in my bookmarks bin collecting dust. Luck was in my favor though, as my friend recently offered me his slightly used iRiver H10 at a heavily discounted price. I immediately bought it and installed Rockbox on it.

The install was super simple, especially since the Rockbox devs have created a nice looking GUI for the install process. I went with a full install; if I'm going to use a 20GB music player with a color screen, I'm going to go all out.

What I thought was really cool was that the install didn't disturb the music my friend had on it. Every song was left untouched after the installation. This would probably be a selling point for most mp3 player owners.

The only real problem with the h10 (20GB model) is that when connected via a USB cable, it's placed into MTP mode by default instead of UMS. Basically UMS mode means the player will connect as a USB Mass Storage Device while MTP will not. Click this link for a full explanation. Luckily one can force the player to enter UMS mode just by holding down the select button and then turning on the player. This is annoying, but it's a small price to pay, IMO. With that said, there's probably an option in Rockbox to enable UMS by default. Then again, perhaps Rockbox isn't able to do this. Looks like I have a new mission.

Issues with the spare computer

2008-05-13T09:25:00.004-04:00

I don't quite remember if I mentioned it, but my step mother recently wanted me to set her up with a spare computer for the dining room. It seems in this day and age when we as humans have come to rely on technology and computers so much an additional computer is required in a home (right now there are 4 here at my father's). The spare computer is fairly old, clocking in at 700MHz and 256MB ram. For this reason, I decided the best route to take would be to install an Arch + Openbox system rather than a full featured DE.

Everything seemed to run OK., aside from flash chunking like mad when watching movies on sites like youtube. The other thing that didn't seem to work would be the DVD drive, which only seemed to be picked up as a CDRW. Not too sure what the cause of that is just yet. Edit: Problem is non-existent. DVDs pickup now. I'm fairly sure it was a problem with the DVD I was trying before.

Anywho, the computer seemed to run just dandy for a day or two. Soon, though, it began to lock up when viewing youtube videos every once in a while. I was a tad lost, and my step mother wasn't too happy, to say the least. I didn't blame her; if I were watching a video and suddenly my entire computer would lock up, I would not be a happy camper.

I ssh'd into the computer and monitored the ram usage while she surfed the net. I noticed that even with Firefox3b5, the ram footprint while surfing her normal workload of websites would eat up around 20-40% of the ram. Note that this is not a big surprise, as my stepmother had open three instances of Firefox each with multiple tabs. This wasn't necessarily the problem.

I kept the ssh session open and noticed Firefox was slowly eating up more and more ram. A quick Google search told me that even with firefox3, there are still unresolved memory leaks that may NEVER be resolved. It all began to make sense. My step mother confirmed that she was in fact leaving her browsers open overnight and then coming back to them the next day, only to find that when she tried to do anything that'd hog up the memory, her computer would lock up. I simply told her that the best course of action would be to close out of her browsers when she was done, or to simply logout of the system and just log back in in the morning.

I'm curious, though... how is Firefox so well loved even with (a) memory leak(s)? It seems that Mozilla is on the warpath as far as memory usage goes, but one must still wonder how they got so high on the pedestal in the first place.

As a side, the website I listed earlier, Jesse Ruderman's blog, seems to focus on the development of Firefox quite closely.

Gnome - Wait, I'm running Gnome?

2008-05-09T15:48:00.003-04:00

I decided to give Gnome a run through on my desktop. The version in the Arch repos is 2.22 as of writing this. I hadn't used gnome since my Ubuntu days, and I must say I am pleasantly surprised by Gnome. While it's not Openbox, it's still fairly responsive on my hardware (which is, admittedly, fairly up to date). I also installed firefox3 from the Arch repos, and let me tell you the hype about a smaller memory footprint is true.

I may see if this runs OK on my mother's computer which only has 192 Megs of memory. I mostly don't want to bother torturing them with the whole right click + no desktop icons only because I know it'll become annoying to explain over and over again.

I'll probably end up doing something similar to my father's computer; He's still running under Ubuntu and it'd just make the transition WAY easier.

LVM2

2008-05-07T13:51:00.002-04:00

Today I'm taking my first steps into the world of LVM2 (read up about it here). Basically it provides a TON of flexibility when managing hard drive partitions, specifically the ability to resize then very easily. At this moment I'm installing arch from the 2008.04RC cd that I burned last night. The Arch Wiki was extremely helpful (as usual) in helping me out with the necessary steps to get my setup working correctly. Now all I need to do is actually boot into a working environment (fingers crossed).

To be honest, the primary objective was to see the difference between installing on my old disk (which I think is a 2007 disk... I didn't check at the time of burning it). So far what I've noticed is that rc.conf looks different on install (expected) and that fstab uses UUIDs instead of /dev/sda1 etc. In my opinion, this gives an even better reason to configure LVM. This way, one does not have to deal with UUIDs, and can just use /dev/mapper/blahblahblah. Decent.

The wiki also said I needed to add lvm2 to the hooks section in mkinitcpio.conf as well as make sure the menu.list file in /boot/grub has all the correct lines in it. That's understandable.

Now time to cross the fingers and reboot.

Organizing and Updating

2008-05-02T11:07:00.004-04:00

While I wait for arch to update, I figure I'll write a post about my recent computer adventures.

I managed to get ssh working on that older computer from last post. I can now help my family out if they have any kind of problems with their computer and I happen to be at college (6 hours away). This plan will be, of course, complicated if they loose power and their IP address changes. Oh well... that's not too hard for them to get for me.

My latest task is to get their digital camera to play nicely with udev. In Arch, udev is kinda... temperamental. I'm not sure why as the whole concept is kind of over my head. All I know is that udev can act similar to hal in that it'll automatically do something when something else in the system happens. Anyway, when I tried to follow the Arch wiki, the computer was able to automatically detect the correct Camera as well as the correct model, but it was unable to scan the camera's memory unless I was root. In other words, there was some odd permissions error that was preventing the regular user from uploading/access pictures on the camera. I had to add a custom rule in /etc/udev/rules.d/ in order to have the permissions issue sorted out (and of course I had to run /etc/start_udev).

It MAY be the the camera is already recognized by the kernel... as libgphoto2's manual says:

Unfortunately, for some devices there are drivers both in the kernel and in libgphoto2, creating a conflict situation. If that happens with your device and you want to use libgphoto2 instead of the kernel driver, you may have a problem. In later kernels and current libusb versions , libgphoto2 will try to unload the kernel driver for the interface as soon as libgphoto2 wants to claim the device.

Perhaps the camera was already picked up by the kernel and, for whatever reason, its drivers are "better" than libgphoto2's. See, I didn't try the camera to see if it worked out of the box (which I should have done first, in retrospect). Oh well... you live and learn. I'll try this out the next time I'm at my family's house in person.

Also, their dvd drive doesn't seem to want to read dvds. It could be that the drive itself is bad. I'll try a few other dvds before deciding this, though.

Persistence

2008-04-29T09:32:00.008-04:00

After a full day of wrestling, I finally got an old family computer (A PIII 700mhz with 256 ram and a 20GB harddrive) to the point where I'd call it "finished". I installed Arch (of course) along with Openbox and Thunar. The family will have to learn to survive without Desktop icons.

Since this machine was going to be going in the living room, having it connect to the router via a wire was out of the question. Instead we purchased a Linksys wmp54g wireless PCI card. At first I thought I was going to have a rough time, as the card wouldn't scan with "iwlist scanning". After about an hour or two of trying different stuff (but not ndiswrapper), I finally decided to just install wicd and see if it worked. For some reason, it decided to work. I'm not complaining.

The second thing that messed me up was the xserver. The machine itself is a very old machine, so it can't handle AIGLX. Every time I would try to startx, the mouse would appear, but after 5 or so seconds, the whole screen would freeze and I'd be greeted with a barrage of fantastic colors and lights. While some might consider this trippy, I wasn't pleased; There was no way for me to use my keyboard to escape or kill the process. I eventually had to shutdown and start from runtime 3.

How did I finally figure out that I needed to disable AIGLX? I Google'd my vga controller according to lspci along with the error that /var/log/errors.log spit out. After some reading, I had to do this:

Section "ServerLayout"
....
Option  "AIGLX"  "false"
EndSection

After much wrestling, the family computer is humming along quite nicely. I've even set up an ssh server on it so I should be able to access it from far away if they need help with it.

Just goes to show that it may not be a good idea to trash computers at the first sign of sluggishness. Get the right kind of computer geek that's willing to blow away an entire day and you may have yourself a happy new addition to the family.

First few days home

2008-04-27T15:25:00.004-04:00

I just arrived home and am now starting relaxation times. When I came to my dad's, first thing I checked was if anyone was mooching off our wireless (unencrypted). Sure enough, I had to set up my first MAC ban. Man that's empowering. You should try it sometime. Leave your network unencrypted, then watch your DHCP table. Swat down anyone's MAC that you don't like.

I've a mission to do while I'm home: Fix up the family computers. I think I'm going to rewipe them eventually and put Arch on them. Hopefully they'll be able to get over the fact that they don't have desktop Icons.

Also this is good to know: xvidcap. I've been looking for a toy like this.

Post First Year Thoughts / Brain Dump

2008-04-25T16:52:00.007-04:00

I just finished out my first year at college here in the US. Whew... what a year it was. In that time I've met new people, experienced new cultures, and learned many new things. I'm looking forward to my second year in the next 4 months. In the mean time, though, it's time for summer, and I won't be doing much in the way of school work for quite some time. But I digress.

In my first year at college, I committed myself to running Linux full-time. I started out with Ubuntu, worked my way up to using Openbox, then decided to go for broke and install Arch Linux. I'm extremely happy with that switch. Using Arch has enabled me to learn much much more about Linux than I could have with Ubuntu.

Next year I'm considering migrating to a no Pencil/Paper system of note-taking. While some will argue that this isn't the best decision, let me reassure you that I'm not totally sure this is the direction I want to take yet. Aside from math classes in which I'd more than likely have to write equations rather than dictate a lecture, I'd use Google Notebook as my note taking device, Google Docs as my Office Suite, and Google Calendar as my schedule manager. In the mean time, I'm hanging on until Google moves more, if not all, of its applications to Google Gears. Also, I'm waiting for Google Notebook to become a bit more flexible, resembling an actual notebook (with margins, diagram making (yikes), quick comment -> content linking, etc.). Until these things happen, I'm not sure I can confidently use my computer for EVERYTHING just yet.

All good things in time, I suppose.

I also introduced a few of my floormates to the Linux world while I was out at college. My roommate, who had already adventured into Linux a tiny bit, is really loving Arch Linux. He still runs a dual boot so that he can play his favorite video games to their full potential (it is possible with Wine, but the quality difference is extremely noticeable). Another friend was sick of Vista, so he tried Ubuntu, and then Arch. I'm not sure if he likes it as much as a Window environment, though. I also offered to install Arch on a third friend's older laptop (an Inspiron 510m, I believe). He said the speed difference is incredible. He seemed extremely interested in learning the Linux environment, so I introduced him to the Unix for the Beginning Mage ebook which I find a pleasant and informative read. My friend said he enjoys it, as well.

Also, I found out it's really a bother to mess around with wireless in Linux. However, the wicd program makes it extremely easy. If you're trying to connect to your University's wireless and you have a wpa_supplicant.conf file all set up, you're halfway there (well, more than halfway). You need to plop that script into /usr/lib/wicd/encryption/templates/ (some people report this folder is actually in /opt/wicd/encryption/templates, so this fact may vary across systems). After this, just add the name of that file into /usr/lib/wicd/encryption/templates/active and you should be able to select your template as an encryption type when connecting to a network. You'll need to modify the beginning of your new template a tiny bit, so just look at one of the other templates in that directory and see what you're missing.

Finally, I should mention that I changed some of the items in about:config in Bon Echo. I modified general.useragent.extra.firefox to have the value Firefox/ so that I wouldn't run into websites telling me that I don't have a compatible browser (ie Google Gears). I also changed middlemouse.contentLoadURL to false, because that error message is really annoying sometimes.

This post is more-or-less a brain dump, so please forgive its large size and lack of cohesion.

Fixed Stuffs

2008-04-22T23:36:00.005-04:00

Recently I fixed my annoying line glitch I was getting when trying to run UT2k3. Turns out it was a well known problem with the nvidia drivers. A simple upgrade to the beta nvidia drivers fixed the problem right up.

Also, I've been sucked back into Guild Wars. Oh god how much time I've plunked into that video game over the past few days... Let's just say it's over 36 hours. Yeah. I have a problem.

Not much else to report on right now... I finally got some of the media buttons on my laptop working. Now I can turn the volume down/up without popping up alsamixer. Convenience.

Finals are almost over. I'm not sweating them too much, but I'll still study quite a bit tomorrow for my Java test.

PS: OH GOD I NEED TO TURN OFF THE TAP TO CLICK FOR MY LAPTOP'S TOUCH PAD.

2 installs in 2 days

2008-04-07T10:34:00.006-04:00

Two of my friends both decided that they wanted Arch Linux on their desktops this past weekend. I've gotten pretty friendly with the install/setup process of Arch in that time, as both of them are fairly new to the Linux environment. I hooked them both up with an Openbox environment similar to mine. I included Thunar, pypanel, feh, Firefox, and Pidgin in their default install. One of the friends wished to have gnome installed, as well, so I went ahead and did that, too.

After that weekend I appreciate my Google Notebook WAY more. I can search through all of my config files or any trials/tribulations I may have gone through to get my setup working. My next task is to merge a ton of commands into one, as I've got a lot of unsorted pacman commands floating around.

Issues on the friend's computers:

There's something wrong with one of the friend's hard drives. He said he had them setup in a raid, but the more I think about it, the less I'm staring to think that's the case. In any case, his boot times are severely gimped because of a bad hard drive or a bad sata cable.
The same friend's mouse (Microsoft Wireless 6000) has a major sensitivity issue. Both the wheel and the general movement is WAY too touchy. It's at the point where one is unable to choose a different workspace when scrolling on the openbox desktop: The dialog box pops up, but it goes fast enough so that it just ends up back on workspace 1 every time.
The second friend's net connection seems kinda iffy. I don't know if the arch mirrors were just down yesterday (a ton of them seemed to be not functioning), but we were getting a lot of "cannot connect to mirror" errors.

Right now, if I have to solve another computer issue today, my head is going to explode.

Consonance: A small music manager? Yes please.

2008-04-04T10:21:00.003-04:00

If you have a hankering for a music manager and don't wish to be tied down to bloated dependencies (and you've a fetish for gtk apps), check out Consonance. Built for Arch (so you know it's nice and snappy), this music player is built to be a replacement for larger applications like Amarok and Banshee. The only thing that would hold people back (that I could see right now) would possibly be that ipods might not be supported as well as Amarok (or at all) yet. I haven't tried out the program yet myself, but I will be very soon. Also, I don't have an ipod, so I can't tell you how well it would work with it. I'll adventure with it today... or tomorrow, depending on when I get around to it.

Explorinatin'

2008-04-01T11:53:00.004-04:00

Yes, I am now "exploring" the Linux graphical world. Ever since my friend opted to install Xfce4 on his eee instead of *box, I got to wondering: What is the appeal of larger Desktop Environment suites? I decided to try on a few bigguns, starting with KDEmod (because if you know me, I couldn't bring myself to install KDE... too much crud).

KDEmod seems pretty nifty. A ton of eye candy even for the minimal install is included in the package (or at least what I consider to be eye candy). Auto-mounting would be a plus for a casual computer user, and was easily setup in Archlinux after adding my account to the "storage" and "optical" groups.

Not only this, but it would appear that setting up Samba shares as well as NFS shares would be amazingly easy, as there's a nice little gui setup for it.

KDEmod comes with its own theme which seems pretty cool. However, at the time of writing this, the current KDEmod in the repos is currently based off the 3.5.2 version of KDE, so a few of the themes also located in the repos will _not_ work. I never got around to installing a "minimal" theme, but I figured as long as I'm using a real Desktop Environment, gosh darnit, I'm going to USE it.

Let me just say this: multiple programs open do NOT play well with my computer for whatever reason under KDEmod (and any other bloat DE, I'm guessing). Perhaps it's the processor, but I just know the draw time for windows was pretty laggy after I had 5+ different programs open. I guess this isn't too big of a surprise, but for someone who likes to multitask, this was a big problem for me.

I never really thought about how much is truly "hidden" to the user when they run a Desktop Environment such as GNOME or KDE. A ton of the basic functionality that I hand-coded was done with a GUI interface in these heavy weights, which I could see as appealing to those migrating from windows. It's just... blergh... I didn't like it very much.

I didn't feel like I knew what was going on with my computer. I didn't know where the setting files were, nor where icons or backgrounds or anything else for that matter were located. I switched back over to my openbox session, but left KDEmod on just in case someone needed some kind of help with it later on.

I'm still convinced that, if you have help, running something like Openbox or Fluxbox or any other *box program is PLENTY for usability. When I install on a friend's or family's PC, I'll be sure to put on two things: openbox and thunar+thunar-volman. The rest of the programs will fall under the usual array, being Firefox, urxvt, and possibly wine. Right now I'm keeping all of my gained knowledge in a google notebook. I'll compile all of these notes into one super `pacman -S` statement in the future.

That's enough for now.

It's alive... IT'S ALIVEEEEEE

2008-03-28T09:57:00.003-04:00

Hooray hoorah! Yesterday was a glorious day for victory and triumph. I got wireless working on my laptop (finally (seriously this time (I'm not kidding))). Turns out WICD was identifying my university's wireless network as WPA2 when it's really WPA. This was messing something up, as I could not get a dhcp IP address. It also turns out that the little -w flag I was using to call wpa_supplicant was messing things up, as well, as I was easily connected after I removed that. I'm now cruisin' with wpa_supplicant + dhclient. Life is good.

I also managed to get Arch on a friend's EEE. There's still some work that needs to be done, though. I have X running on it and XFCE (at my friend's request). I personally would have gone with *box, but it is, after all, his choice. I was a bit tired at that point so I didn't do anything past getting the X server actually on the little thing as well as the necessary wireless/wired/webcam/etc. modules. I felt I should let my friend have a hand at customizing his little laptop, as well. After all, what's the fun in owning a linux machine if you didn't actually participate in putting it together?

Oh, as a side note: We were unable to enter anything into the terminal in xfce. I have no idea why this could be, but it is really annoying. I'm about to start a google search for that bit of information.

I also should write on the WICD forums or google around for similar problems to what I had.

Stinkin' Wireless

2008-03-25T08:46:00.005-04:00

I'm still having unlucky trials with wireless with wicd. I'm fairly sure it's because they don't include the security type of wireless network at my uni (which is PEAP with MSCHAPv2). wpa_supplicant will have to work for now if I want wireless. However I haven't really been needing wireless much, lately.

The WoW is time consuming. That's all I'll say about that. It's just.... it's just time consuming.

Oh, and this is just an open statement to Nvidia: Fix the darned bugs in your drivers. For the love of Pete. The laziness of professional companies astounds me, sometimes.

PS., completely linux un-related, by my GOD.... Super Smash Brothers: Brawl. Incredible. Just.... Just.... I think I'm growing weepy.

Laptop Stuffs

2008-03-18T12:08:00.003-04:00

I learn something new every day. For instance, that first sentence is a simple sentence.

Everyday I use my laptop, I gain more knowledge. I've got Archlinux installed on it and it's humming along nicely, pulling in around 4 hours of battery life. I've started to find some nifty programs to monitor wifi connection and battery life, as well as getting the ability to perform a suspend and hibernate. Here's what I've learned in my own words:

Battery Stuffs
As far as I know, with an Arch base install (which is what I did), everything you need for your battery to perform is given to you right off the bat, minus monitoring tools. Right now I'm using conky to monitor my battery life.

Battery: ${alignr 24}${battery}
B. time: ${alignr 24}${color #FFFF00}${battery_time}

This shows me the status of my power consumption (charging, charged, etc.), as well as the amount of time left to either charge or to de-charge.
Screen dimming is handled via bios, so there's really not too much to look at, in this respect.

Wifi Stuffs
If you're like me, you're a snob and you don't like to use gnome libs when you don't actually USE gnome. I use an Openbox environment, so if I can use as little other DE environment libs as possible, I will go out of my way to do so. If you're looking at a program similar to network-manager, look at wicd. This little baby runs as a daemon in the background, and it also uses python frontends to display some nice information about your connection. It has a nice little tray icon frontend-- I don't particularly bother with it, but a friend of mine would die without a notification that he's still connected-- that'll sit in your program tray (if you use one). Alternatively, you can use some more conky variables (look for 'wireless' in the page).

Suspend/Hibernate Stuffs
Although I haven't toyed around with hibernate things, I have successfully gotten suspend to work with pm-suspend. At first, I had NO clue this command even existed on my computer. I tried doing a `locate pm-` on my computer and managed to find what that program was a part of pm-utils. The short version: pm-utils provides programs to perform well known actions (such as suspend/hibernate) usually found on laptops. On my machine, suspend resumes when I open the lid of my laptop. This could be different if I changed some config files or something, but I really don't want to mess around with something like that just yet.
I also noticed something called pm-powersave. I'm not quite sure what that does yet, as I haven't tested it out. However, when I issue this command, I'll be sure to keep my eyes glued to my battery monitor to see if my charge times goes up or down. Or neither. Hopefully it goes up. Hopefully.

Oh, and if you're wondering HOW pm-utils even got on my laptop: pm-utils installs along side of hal, now. Certain things that hal does requires pm-utils to do them. Just as something like gnome-power-manager requires hal to do stuff, hal requires other programs to do stuff.

Currently Watching

2008-03-14T15:51:00.001-04:00

Some good news: I have both Morrowind and WoW running at tolerable FPS on my desktop and laptop, both running Archlinux. When I say tolerable, I mean somewhere around 30 FPS, which really isn't bad since it's absolutely playable. While it does take away from some of ability to enjoy really high FPS (60+) that I probably could get with my hardware under a windows environment, it certainly is, to me, better to be in a Linux environment and sacrifice some of the really flashy stuff.

In my Morrowind game, I actually feel like I'm doing something. I never felt that way before through any of my previous runs (which were, admittedly, short lived). Perhaps I just didn't put the time necessary to get completely immersed in the world. Perhaps I'm just a person that learns from trial and error techniques. I'm starting to think it's the latter of the two.

Some bad news: Some things _don't_ work. Things I'm currently keeping my eye on:

1.) As of a few weeks ago, I had no sound coming from my front right speaker on my desktop running Archlinux. Very strange. I ran a speaker test and found both the front left AND front right sounds were being played from the front left speaker. I submitted a bug to Alsa's bug tracker but so far no response.

2.) I installed Unreal Tournament 2003 with the loki installer located on the third disk. I had to delete my libsdl file in the ut2003/System/ directory to even get the game to start. Now I get these really odd graphic bugs (which someone on the Arch forums has told me is probably the fault of the nvidia drivers). Screenshot 1 Screenshot 2
As of now, this is (kind of) ignorable, but really, if this is an nvidia driver problem, shame on them.

3.) I'm still not having any luck on DHLore. I'll try this fix when I get home. My problem is pretty much described word-for-word by the op.

The DHLore problem will probably never be fixed officially since it's not going to be updated anymore. Beautiful. I love having to use workarounds to get things to work.

Wait... No I don't.

WoW Battle Chest Install

2008-03-13T13:57:00.001-04:00

I broke down and finally purchased the WoW Battle Chest today. Let me say this before I actually get into the technical details: The box is HUGE! It contains two large Battle Chest game guides, two smaller game manuals, two (10 day) guest passes, and a Blizzard Product Catalog (euh). And, of course, the dvd for WoW and it's expansion, Burning Crusade. All this for forty bucks seemed like a pretty good deal to me.

Now, on to the install on linux.

Everything seems to be going smoothly so far. I'm installing the original dvd right now (25%). I was a bit put off at first because it seems Blizzard made some kind of weird multi-session hoojamawhutsit (hoo jah mah wuts it) for the Mac install. I wanted to install under wine with an install exe, so after a bit of googling, I had to use the unhide option when I mounted the dvd:

mount -t iso9660 -o ro,unhide /path/to/device /mount/point

After that it was all a matter of running wine Installer.

A bit of woe to report on, though. I tried installing UT2003 with the loki installer. I had some problems, and now the stinkin' game doesn't even start. It's upgraded to the latest patched version 2225, so I'm not sure what else there is I can do. I have one idea that I just thought of that MIGHT work. I'll of course update with what's going on as far as that goes.

Oh Garage Games, what have you done?

2008-03-12T12:03:00.001-04:00

I decided to give the game Dark Horizons: Lore a little play through. My computer would have none of it.

I got this nice little bit of text spit back out at me:

[rpj8@archdesktop DHLore]$ ./DHLore.bin
./DHLore.bin: symbol lookup error: ./DHLore.bin: undefined symbol: X11_KeyToUnicode

I let my head slowly sink down and touch my desk. I, of course, had no idea what this meant. After googling for a little bit, this is basically what I found:

This function is used by game build on SDL library in order to transform input of the keyboard into Unicode characters.
There is a risk that a lot of game build on SDL does not work with [Ubuntu] Edgy.
For instance all the games based on Torque will not work with edgy : http://www.garagegames.com/

Well, ok then. What in the world does this mean? From some forum post somewhere:

according to this mail X11_KeyToUnicode is an internal symbol that should not be used by applications.

And onto "this mail"!:

It is an internal symbol that should not be used. It is nowhere to be
seen in the SDL exported headers. Which applications are using it? They obviously need fixing.

While this isn't good news still (the fix won't be right in front of my face), it's still cause for me to jump in the air for not having caused the problem myself! Apparently, libsdl never meant to have whatever the "X11_KeyToUnicode" command/symbol/whatever made public. Unfortunately, it WAS made public, and people built applications around the assumption that it would remain public. Who is at fault? I don't really know, but from an outsider looking in, I'd say it's not really anyone's fault, since it's a mistake on SDL's end for making it public, and also a mistake on the app builder's end for not releasing some sort of patch for their application to correct this problem.

So after some more googling trying to find a fix, I came across this (yes, it is google cache'd). This doesn't necessarily help me, as it's only a fix for "TGB", Torque Game Builder.

As for now, I'm coming up empty handed. I shot the guys at Torque an email, so hopefully they can get back to me on that issue. I also left a forum post on the http://darkhorizons-lore.com forums, so hopefully a fix comes to fruition.

Euh EDIT: EUH!

2008-03-11T22:57:00.001-04:00

So I'm not sure what I'm going to end up doing with my laptop. Since wireless doesn't work with ndiswrapper under arch OR with b43 (also under arch), and I don't really want to downgrade the kernal and blah blah blah, I may end up just doing a fresh 'bunt install and rip out all the non-essential daemons. Not too sure though, since I like the customization of arch. I suppose I could always install a gnome desktop over arch...

I'm a bit frustrated with whoever works on the b43 modules. I don't know the official name for em, but here's an excerpt from that one link I posted earlier in relation to why the b43 module doesn't work with the latest kernel.

EDIT: STOP THE PRESSES! In my search for that link I posted earlier, I FOUND A SOLUTION! REJOICE!

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=341133

The actual answer is this post: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=341133#p341133

The only reason it wasn't working before: ORDER. ORDER MEANS EVERYTHING.

Failure. I am a failure.

2008-03-06T09:27:00.001-05:00

It turns out my Laptop doesn't... *sigh*.... doesn't actually HAVE a pcmcia slot. Instead, it has an "ExpressCard" slot, which look a helluva lot similar to pcmcia, but I assure you, it is not. Imagine my dismay when I opened up my D-Link network adapter only to find I'd ordered the wrong thing. The darned thing even slides all the way in the way it should, minus the satisfying "Ok, I'm fully plugged in" clicking sound.

Bottom Line: Do your research on hardware! If you don't know your computer specs (to the MINUTEST DETAIL), you will experience trouble on your Linux tour, let alone your general computer tour.

On the upside, I've gotten WoW, Guild Wars, and Steam to all run under Wine. Granted these programs do not run without flaw, but it certainly is a feather for the cap of the fine people over at WineHQ.

Fingers Crossed

2008-02-29T09:59:00.002-05:00

Since the bcm43xx drivers are being replaced by the b43 drivers that still blow ( :( ), I ordered a pcmcia card for my laptop. A D-Link dwl-g630 is coming my way. I've read quite a few success stories with it. Plus it was under 20 bucks, so I couldn't pass it up. Hopefully it'll come in today, if not Monday. I really want to toy around with it.

Contrast... and contrast

2008-02-25T10:18:00.002-05:00

As I have been mentioning for a while, I've been toying with Archlinux a bit over the past weekend. It's been an interesting experience, and would have gone MUCH smoother if I didn't have to jump through hoops for networking. This post isn't about that experience, though.

My purpose for writing this post is just to state the sharp contrast between the IRC Ubuntu channel and the Archlinux channel.

Ubuntu:
Let's put it this way: Ubuntu has several branches for their channels, including #ubuntu, #ubuntu-offtopic, and #ubuntu-server. Those are three different channels. THREE.

Most of those new to the OS fall under the first channel. The people who are into the whole "gui thing" and the "why isn't this easy" mostly fall into #ubuntu. If you've ever sat back and watched the rate at which text FLIES on #ubuntu, your head may explode into one million tiny pieces.

Archlinux:
In the Arch channel, it seems a lot of the tech support confusion is non-existent. This should be a no-brainer, as most who use Archlinux "know what they're doing." Discussion is on a much higher level than the Ubuntu rooms, dealing with a lot less problems, but much more in depth ones.

That said, there's nothing wrong with the #ubuntu channel in any way. I pop my head in once in a while to see if I can help with a few easy questions. It's kind-of rewarding, in a way, to feel like you've helped someone. However it's not so rewarding when all you did to help someone was do a Google search.

WPA-Enterprise: Makin' things difficult

2008-02-24T12:03:00.001-05:00

You've got to hand it to my university. They're very good at making things difficult for Linux fledglings at every step of the road.

My Uni uses WPA-Enterprise, which you can read about here (because I'm not going into the details myself (because I don't understand them all)). It took me some guessing/testing until I got a wpa_supplicant.conf file close enough to get me associated with the access point. Eventually, I got a working connection, although I haven't tested it in the long run. I'd bet I would have to make a few more tweeks to get everything working exactly the way it should without any flakyness. For now, though, it works.

I didn't know you had to pass a hostname manually when you sent a request with dhcpcd, but you do. I probably took a little bit too long figuring that one out, but whatever. I now have internet access on my Arch laptop.

The next step? Find a cool power management utility, preferably a cli utility, and NOT a gnome application.

EIGHT HOURS

2008-02-23T01:32:00.002-05:00

Eight Hours. That is the amount of time I spent attempting to set up wireless on my laptop.

Why? Oh, I'll tell you why. Actually, read this.

The kernel breaks the module. 2.6.24 BREAKS bcm43xx wireless stuff. Do not upgrade to this kernel, if you are reading this.

I installed arch's 2.6.22 kernel, did a simple ifconfig eth1 up, hit the fn + f2 button, iwlist eth1 scanning. Boom. Done. Done done done. Done.

There are TONS of guides to extracting (cutting) the firmware out of the windows driver. Here's the Archwiki one.

What was I doing for eight hours? Uninstalling/Reinstalling ndiswrapper SO many times. Extracting firmware, Blah blah blah blah. What COULD I have done (in probably 10 minutes tops)?
1.) Installed the old Arch kernel from an ftp server (read up here)
2.) Installed bcm43xx-fwcutter
3.) Downloaded the Dell Drivers here
4.) Unzip
5.) Cut the firmware from bcmwl5.inf (or was it .sys?)
6.) moved the firmware to /lib/firmware
7.) rmmod/modprobe bcm43xx
8.) ifconfig eth1 up
9.) FN(function)+F2
10.) iwlist scanning

Flawless Victory

2008-02-21T23:39:00.001-05:00

It's done. Archlinux is on the laptop. Things I still need to implement:

Wireless
Battery Settings (and power testings)
Automounting (ivman)
My official "Cool kid" shirt

Archlinux Guide for the Completely Weak at Heart (me)

2008-02-21T08:58:00.001-05:00

I still haven't gotten around to giving arch a try. I really do plan on giving it a go, though. CD in hand, setting my laptop to boot via optical drive, I was ready. Turns out my Arch disk was corrupted. I ended up spending the last bit of the night downloading/burning the disk which I, of course, verified to work before I hit the hay.

There really is no reason to not give Archlinux a try as long as this newbie guide is in existence. C'mon. How much simpler could it get? There's even a section entitled "About Daemons." One of the only reasons I was hesitant to install up until this point was because of my lack of knowledge related to daemons. Now, with the newbie guide at my side, maybe tonight's the lucky night.

German, Deutschland, etc.

2008-02-20T10:08:00.002-05:00

So as usual, I was reading Kmandla's blog. I see that he mentions the Cube engine that I've come across a few times in my many voyages upon the S.S. Internet.

I had no idea anyone made an RPG-style game based on this engine. I HAVE to try this out when I get a spare moment.

In my poking around, I found Wouter van Oortmerssen's Webpage. He seems like the lead (only(??)) developer for the cube2 project. I am probably wrong, but if I'm not, give at least a warm round of applause to this man. His games look incredible, as well as everything else he seems to play a role in.

Ever the student

2008-02-19T23:48:00.001-05:00

I was looking up linux e-books the other day and found one for bash scripting. Now the only thing I have to do is actually take the time to read it.

I also learned that automounting devices is a tricky task that only gnome-volume-manager can pull off right now. If you hadn't noticed, I'm not the biggest fan of gnome-everything, so I'm still on the lookout for something that 1.) Isn't gnome centric, and 2.) Doesn't require so many dependencies (though I'm fairly sure no matter where I turn to there will be dependencies to deal with).

I guess I could sum up this post with the following: I'm learning the harsh realities of linux in that most developement is weighted by Ubuntu+Gnome/KDE.

Edit: I'm also planning on installing Archlinux on my laptop in the near future. You know, for testing purposes.

Networking Justice

2008-02-15T10:37:00.001-05:00

If you like to configure systems from the cli up, these links will tell you about setting up networking on Ubuntu + Archlinux.

Archlinux Networking
Ubuntu Networking (Skip that gui crap and cut straight to "Configure Network Interface Using Command-Line")
Debian Networking (Similar if not the same as the Ubuntu Networking procedure above)

I'm a bit struck that Arch and Ubuntu are completely different procedures. I know I shouldn't be, but it just goes to show why some people tend to stick with one flavor of Linux.

Cue Cards, Smoo Smards

2008-02-08T10:18:00.002-05:00

This'll be the first non-Linux oriented post! Woo!

The greatest Christmas present (or at least one of the better ones) that I've ever received is a Hipster PDA. This little guy seems like a step backwards at first. However, if you're a cheap-o (like I am) and you have a hard time remembering things, a small stack of index cards, a paper clip, and a pencil or pen are the perfect tools. I use a mechanical pencil, so that 1.) I never have a problem with stabbing myself when reaching into my pocket, and 2.) it never goes dull. People who are less eco-friendly can use a pen, but I don't like throwing away things that can still be used.

The HPDA has taught me the beauty in using cue cards in general. I thought to myself "Hey, instead of pulling out a manual every time I want to accomplish something, why not make a quick guide for myself?"

Right now I've got two quick guides going on 3.5 x 5" cards. One has basic math functions for my stat class and the other has the basic outlines for writing a Java program/tester. These are both done in pen to prevent smudging.

I'm thinking about doing something similar for computer automations, specifically for my parents. While it pays to learn the software that you use, sometimes one can forget the simplest steps.

If you want to create your own cue cards, just get out a 3.5 x 5", get a pen, write REALLY small (so long as it's readable), and then keep it among your other stack of cards in your HPDA.

More links:
HPDA on 43Folders

OpenArena

2008-02-04T10:39:00.001-05:00

I think I've come across this game quite a few times in my quest for open source games, but I've never really been interested in it as I am now.

http://openarena.ws/?abou t

Hopefully I'll be able to rope a few friends into playing it. That is, if I am able to tear them away from WoW for twenty minutes.

PS., still waiting on a (complete) native MMO, people.

Ubuntu on my Laptop

2008-01-31T11:14:00.002-05:00

I've been using Ubuntu on my Dell Inspiron 6400 for quite some time. While I much prefer it to Windows, I can't help but notice the battery consumption is much higher under the penguin than under... uh... the window.

I've decided that WHILE I mess around with Arch (maybe), I'll reinstall Ubuntu on this guy from the ground up like I did on my desktop. Maybe Ubuntu's default install uses more daemons than I really need, causing more power consumption.

I'll do some reading on it for now. Hopefully I come up with something good and/or useful.

Edit: "Laptop Mode is NOT allowed to run: /var/run/laptop-mode-enabled does not exist."
When I saw this, my head cocked slightly, and I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. Had laptop mode not been at work this entire time? Have I been degrading my battery life this entire time without realizing? My god... what have I done?

I'm DEFINITELY re-installing on this little guy over the weekend via cli and then building on top of it, just like I did with my desktop. After that I'll follow this guide: http://klamstwo.org/evad/archives/34 and I'll be sure to check laptop_mode status, as well. Now I'm crossing my fingers that it'll be easy to find non-gnome related power management tools for a *box environment.

I'm scared

2008-01-30T23:55:00.001-05:00

Ah, I do love my Ubuntu. It has been ever so nice to me over the past few years of my baby steps into Linux. After learning a bit about common Linux lingo, I'm beginning to think there's more out there to this kernel than I'm using. Sure it's nice trying to get as many apps usable in the command line as in X, but after a while, what's that really accomplishing?

I've read and heard people profess Archlinux, a distro based on the KISS principles. I don't know why I've been shying away from it so much. Perhaps I'm experiencing a bit of brand loyalty. Perhaps it's just a scary thing to jump from one extreme to the next. Perhaps I don't want to screw around with my University's 802.1x networking setup (again).

I suppose my want for a more difficult setup procedure stems from installing a Ubuntu cli system. Maybe I shouldn't have, but I felt powerful building my system from the blinking white line and up.

I've printed out an install guide, along with some useful tips that I found via Google. Hopefully I've managed to pick up enough Linux know-how and gather up the courage this weekend to plunge head-first into the unknown.

Websites of Interest: Artichoke Edition

2008-01-30T13:20:00.001-05:00

I believe that it's best to learn from those who have some amount of Linux experience under their belts. Sure, a man page is nice (and I suggest--nay, COMMAND--you to read man pages), being a very thorough explanation for a new piece of software. Sometimes, though, nothing beats the words of a well spoken Linux guru.

Tips for Linux - This is an extremely useful site for the beginner - intermediate Linux Jedi-in-training. Contains tons of tutorials on Linux as well as "PHP, MySQL, Perl, Apache, and various Linux softwares." As of writing this post, there are 32 tutorials in the Linux-specific section and 13 tutorials in the miscellaneous section. I'd definitely suggest reading through some of the articles, as everything is in human-readable format.

f0rked - This is pretty much where I learned how beautiful the program "screen" can really be. This guy knows his stuff, posting about many things useful for the Linux user to know. "This is more or less an archive of my projects, articles, and interests. I have written a few guides and authored several scripts and programs. "

All about Linux - Yet another Linux blog. This author has quite a following, and for good reason. I'd say this blog contains more Slashdot-like information than simply Linux, though.

Motho ke motho ka botho - This is the wordpress blog of Kmandla, UbuntuForums administrator. His blog is one of the reasons I wanted to start up Semidigerati. The posts are centered around adventures into the Linux world, and he definitely knows plenty more information than myself. Although he is currently obsessed with Crux, his is "primarily a blog about the Ubuntu Linux operating system, and by necessity, computer hardware."

Brainz Busterz

2008-01-27T14:08:00.001-05:00

As I'm going through my music today, I notice I have a TON of mislabeled/unlabeled songs. This, my friends, is unacceptable. Now, under Linux there are various ways to tag your music by hand. But who has time to look up id3 tag stuff all day? I certainly don't.

Enter MusicBrainz. This cross-platform program automatically looks up your songs based on their partial id3 tags in their HUGE database of music.

If you've got a huge huge HUGE music library, check out this program. It can save you a ton of time.

Ps., read the docs on this one. It's really not that hard to use.

Instant Gratification

2008-01-27T10:18:00.001-05:00

I was in the mood to play some games on Zsnes. While playing them on the keyboard is one possible way to go about controlling the games, nothing beats playing with a gamepad. The authenticity of holding the controller in your hand... nothin' beats it.

Plugged in the pad and boom, I could just configure the buttons in Zsnes without doing anything extra. That's it. No questions asked. I think I'm in love with my computer and Ubuntu. If you know a good therapist, please send me their number.

The same thing went for my webcamera. Plugged it in and I was ready to talk on Skype. All you need to do is find a program that'll make use of your device and you're set.

The reason behind this is because the Linux kernel has many drivers for most things built right in. I'm sure there's some book out there that goes into deep detail, but for what the regular person needs to know, a TON of stuff "just works" under Linux.

Poking around

2008-01-26T10:09:00.000-05:00

I decided to give PCManFM a whirl after twiddling around with XFE for a while. I'd give both managers a thumbs up, XFE for speed, and PCManFM for (slightly less) speed, being built on gtk2 (yay for matching my others apps), and having more features.

One of PCManFM's features is the ability to display icons on the desktop from the ~/Desktop directory. This is all well and good, but it seems that PCManFM insists on also managing the wallpaper display. Once again, all well and good, but if you're like me and use something like feh to display your background image, this is a tad of a turnoff. It's also a turnoff if you use a WM such as Fluxbox which relies on having the ability to right click the desktop to display a menu for programs.

On the other hand it is extremely responsive. Very fast at loading up, cruising files, etc. Besides, who could argue with tabbed browsing?

Features (that I like):

Tabbed browsing
Drag & Drop support
File association support
GTK+ 2
Bookmarks support

If you don't use a WM like Fluxbox (if you use gnome, kde, or something that doesn't heavily rely on right clicking the desktop) and you can stand the fact that you can't re-arrange how the icons are displayed, it's not that big of a deal. In fact, I'd recommend using this over nautilus any day.