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?

Labels: arch linux, screenshot, why do I bother with these

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.

Labels: apt/aptitude, arch linux, lexmark, linux, pacman, printers, slackware

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.

Labels: arch linux, linux, mmos, mplayer, vlc

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.

Labels: arch linux, firefox, legacy, trouble shooting

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.

Labels: arch linux, legacy, victory