MALsPa's Space

a year with saline

2012-01-26T18:21:00.000-08:00

Well, it's been a full year since I first installed SalineOS here. I like to spend some time with a distro and not jump to any conclusion about it after a few days or weeks; Saline has not disappointed.

For the most part, Saline is just Debian Squeeze with Xfce. A few things that set SalineOS 1.x apart from Squeeze:

- Quick, easy installation from a single live DVD
- A User Manual, located conveniently on the desktop (I later moved mine into my home directory) that includes installation instructions and other information
- Lines in /etc/apt/sources.list for Squeeze Backports, WINE, and Remastersys
- Chromium is the default web browser, instead of Iceweasel
- While Synaptic is available for adding software, there's an AutoUpdate script that uses aptitude for updates; they include an icon on the panel to start this script, and one kinda odd thing about it is that it opens up two terminal windows

From the SalineOS "About" page:

The primary goal of the SalineOS project is to deliver a fast, lightweight, clean, easy to use and well doccumented operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux. In keeping with these goals SalineOS includes many things added on top of Debian to make it easier to use and more complete out of the box. This includes a choice of sgfxi and magix-driver-installer for installing proprietary graphics drivers, Debian repositories that include software that does not conform to Debian's strict free software guidelines, WINE repositories, Remastersys backup utility, binary firmware for common wireless network cards, the Debian backports repository and a script to install potentially patent encumbered multimedia codecs with one command.

Saline's developer, Anthony Nordquist, released SalineOS 1.0 right after Debian Squeeze was "frozen" -- before Squeeze actually became Debian Stable. Looks like he plans to do the same kind of thing with 2.0, planning to release the early development builds with the Wheezy freeze (probably at least 6 months away, yet).

Among other things, he plans to go with the Midori web browser, and will not include the Synaptic package manager. Chromium in the Stable repos kinda lags behind (which is why I ended up installing Google Chrome in Saline, as well as in Debian Stable). And Synaptic is easy enough to install, if you want it (I do).

Nordquist also plans to set up his own repository -- as he posted in the forum, "...this is likely to include packages for the user manual, salineos_utils, game packages built from upstream's pre-compiled binaries and packages pulled from Debian backports (When they start for Wheezy)."

About the only thing about SalineOS that I can think of that might be considered a drawback is that it's a "one-man distro." I don't necessarily consider that to be a drawback; part of the beauty of Linux is that lone developers can do some things that really can't be done with distros run by large organizations. Also, Saline uses Debian repos, so in that sense it isn't completely a one-man distro.

Considering that a lot of people complain about Debian being kinda difficult to install, and that a lot of people are unhappy with the direction GNOME has taken, and prefer something like Xfce, it surprises me a bit that SalineOS hasn't caught on more than it has. But it's still in its infancy, really. I'll be interested to see how much more popular it becomes over the next few years. I certainly plan to keep it installed here!

Here's a link to the home web page: http://www.salineos.com/

And, one more screen shot of my SalineOS desktop:

man pages in your browser

2012-01-22T15:48:00.000-08:00

This worked for me in Ubuntu 10.04 and Debian Squeeze. Don't know yet if it will work in other distros. A "thank you" for this tip to Linux Mint forum member "Habitual."

For this to work, you will need to have groff installed. In Ubuntu 10.04, installing groff brought in these packages:

groff (1.20.1-7)
libnetpbm10 (2:10.0-12.1ubuntu1)
netpbm (2:10.0-12.1ubuntu1)
psutils (1.17-27)

In Squeeze, it brought in these:

groff (1.20.1-10)
psutils (1.17-27)

Next, add the following to ~/.bashrc:

export BROWSER=chromium-browser
alias manb="man -H"

If you don't use Chromium, replace "chromium-browser" with "firefox" or "google-chrome" or whatever.

Then ran the following command:

source ~/.bashrc

(As Mint forum member "Jesse654" explains: "The file .bashrc is being changed. The source command reloads .bashrc. If you logged out, then logged in again, .bashrc would be reloaded automatically.")

Then, the following command will open "man page" in your browser:

$ manb [man page]

For example:

$ manb date

When I tried this without having groff installed, I got something like this:

$ manb date
man: command exited with status 3: /usr/bin/zsoelim | /usr/lib/man-db/manconv -f UTF-8:ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8//IGNORE | preconv -e UTF-8 | tbl | groff -mandoc -Thtml

So, you need groff.

I couldn't get this to work in PCLinuxOS. Here's what I saw:

$ source ~/.bashrc
bash: TMOUT: readonly variable
$ manb date
What manual page do you want?

change

2012-01-08T09:00:00.000-08:00

Seems that one of the main reasons I had little problem adapting to KDE4 and GNOME 3 had to do with something I read in a book some years ago -- one of Octavia Bulter's science fiction novels. One of her characters was saying something along the lines of how "Change" is gonna happen no matter what, and the thing is to prepare yourself and position yourself to take advantage of that.

A simple idea, but it struck me as profound at the time, and I kinda decided to try to have that sort of outlook in my life.

It was an idea that was in the back of my mind when I decided to learn to use Linux. And while using Linux, it's had a lot do with my deciding to spend time with different distros, DEs, and WMs, and to try to become comfortable with .rpm distros as well as the Debian distros that I started out with.

So I wasn't all that tied down to KDE 3 or GNOME 2, and I've adapted to KDE 4 and GNOME 3 quite easily.

I really feel that my being open to Change -- preparing for its eventuality, positioning myself for it, embracing it -- has really allowed me to be more accepting than a lot of other people of the directions that KDE and GNOME have taken. So many of the comments I saw about KDE 4, and that I'm seeing about GNOME 3, are along the lines of, "It isn't KDE 3," or "It isn't GNOME 2." "It isn't what I'm used to," "It isn't like what we've been using all along."

And folks feel that the changes were forced on them. But that's usually how Change happens. Change doesn't usually stop and ask, "You gonna be okay with this?" It just comes, and if you haven't prepared yourself for it, you're gonna get blindsided by it, and you're gonna find yourself longing for the way things used to be.

Trying GS Extensions

2011-12-21T18:59:00.000-08:00

So far, I'm not much of a fan of GNOME Shell extensions. For the most part, I prefer the default set-up, and I have no problem getting around the desktop and getting work done.

Up until today, I had the following extensions installed in Fedora 16:

Alternative Status Menu: I like this one because it gives a Power Off option, which is something that should have been included in GNOME Shell from the beginning. I installed it from the Fedora repos, but it conflicted with GNOME Shell at first, until some subsequent updates apparently fixed it.

Icon-Manager: Don't use it, have it turned off.

Workspace Indicator: This is a pretty good extension for showing which workspace you're currently on, and provides an alternative way to quickly switch between workspaces. I have it running, but I rarely use it for switching workspaces.

Dock Extension: Don't use it, have it turned off.

User Themes: I have it turned on, but I've played with it only a couple of times.

Applications Menu: It's turned on, but I rarely use it.

Today, I added a couple more extensions: Panel-Docklet and Area Screenshot. Until now, I've only used extensions installed from the Fedora repos, but I pulled these two from the GNOME Shell Extensions site.

I use Google Chrome (or Chromium, depending on the distro I'm using at the moment). But the GNOME Shell Extensions site doesn't work with Chrome or Chromium; if you go there with one of those browsers, you'll see a mesage saying, "You do not appear to have an up to date version of GNOME3. You won't be able to install extensions from here."

You'll see this message even if your GNOME 3 version actually IS up-to-date.

So, I went to the site using Firefox.

Once you find an extension you want to install, you click on it's name and you're taken to that extension's page. There you'll find an on-off switch next to the name of the extension. Turn it on, and after a few seconds you're given the option to install the extension. I did this for Panel-Docklet, it installed, and I was taken through a settings manager. I was notified that I could later access the settings by right-clicking on Panel-Docklet.

While Panel-Docklet can be turn on/off via Advanced Settings, I see no way uninstall it other than going back to the extension site with Firefox and uninstalling it there.

One problem I'm noticing is that the icons sit too high on the panel, cutting off the top part of the icon. This screen shot gives you an idea:

With the mouse hovering over Panel-Docklet, you get a drop down list showing all open windows on each workspace, separated nicely by workspace.

If you right-click on one of the icons, you get a menu with the following items: Close Window, Minimize, New Window, Application, and the name of the active window. Under Application, there are options to Quit Application and Remove from Favorites.

If you right-click on one of the workspace numbers, you get a menu with the following items: Settings; and a menu of the same Favorites that you have in Dash (the dock) -- only, in reverse order! Hopefully this will be fixed.

It seems a bit buggy yet. I've lost control of the mouse at various times, particularly after trying to take a screen shot with GNOME's default screen shot app. Also I've noticed some times when the wrong workspace number was being displayed. Further, I'm not sure that I like having it up there in the panel any better than simply using the hot spot in the upper left corner to get a view of apps running on various workspaces, although it does seem useful for going directly to a particular running app quickly.

Next, I added the Area Screenshot Extension. As noted in the extension's homepage:

By default, this extension does nothing; you have to assign a keyboard shortcut to it. To do this, you can run the following command[s]:

key='/apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_10'
gconftool-2 -s --type string "$key" 'Print'

After running those commands, I tried it out. The extension's homepage notes:

When you hit + Print now, you can select an area on your screen with your mouse. After releasing your mouse, a new screenshot will be saved in your local "Pictures" directory with the current timestamp. You can also take a screenshot of a single window by simply clicking on it.

When taking an area screenshot, you can set a timer to be able to open context menus and such, which can't usually be captured. To set the timer, simply press the numbers 1 to 9 on your keyboard to define the countdown. The timer will appear in the bottom left of your screen. After making your selection, it will count down to zero. Pressing 0 on your keyboard will deactivate the timer.

Well, things worked okay, except the timer didn't work at all here. I pressed numbers on the keyboard to define the countdown, but no timer ever appeared on my screen. I was able to select areas of the screen with the mouse, but the extension didn't work at all, for example, when I right-clicked on an icon in the Panel-Docklet extension to open up the menu.

So, I'm not sold on most of the GNOME Shell extensions I've tried so far. For now, I think I'm better off staying close to the default GNOME Shell, as designed by the GNOME developers. That set-up works fine for me; we'll see how things turn out in the future.

A few additional notes regarding the extensions from the GNOME Shell Extensions site (as opposed to the ones available in the Fedora repos):

- Right now, if you want to update extensions, you have to uninstall them manually and reinstall them. Gnome 3.4 is supposed to include features for automatic updates of these extensions.

- You can either go to the site to uninstall extensions, or you can remove the extension's directory which is stored in ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions, then restart the session.

I think I'll wait few weeks, then try uninstalling and re-installing some of the extensions from that site, and see how things have progressed.

f16 wallpaper fun

2011-12-21T03:50:00.000-08:00

I managed to get an automatic wallpaper changer working in Fedora 16 in GNOME Shell, thanks to Ubuntu forum member "mareser." It's a script run by a cron job. mareser provides the script and a command to set up the cron job in this thread; anyone interested can pick them up from there.

Since I was trying this in Fedora 16 (not in Ubuntu), I did a few things differently. I dropped some wallpapers into a directory called ~/wallpapers, extracted the script to my home directory, and within the script edited the following line to read:

wallpaper_dir="/home/steve/wallpapers/"

I edited his command for setting up the cron job, changing the time interval from "30" to "10," and replacing "$USER" with "steve" and "$HOME/edit/this/path/change_wallpaper_gnome3.sh" with "/home/steve/change_wallpaper_gnome3.sh." I used su - to get root access instead of sudo, so here's the command I used to set up the crontab:

# sh -c "echo \*/2 \* \* \* \* steve bash /home/steve/change_wallpaper_gnome3.sh >> /etc/crontab"

Well, it works, and it'll do for now until I find a really nice GUI automatic wallpaper changer for GNOME Shell that works in Fedora.

BCS :(

2011-12-06T08:42:00.000-08:00

Boise State coach Chris Peterson made the point that when he's voting (in the USAToday coaches poll), "I'm trying to make the best case for Boise State to get in there ... I probably shouldn't be voting."

Which, of course, is what every coach would be doing.

And, how many coaches really know all that much about teams outside of their own conferences? These guys don't have time to watch many other teams play, other than their own upcoming opponents, or the teams they've played against, so what do they really know?

Why should the coaches poll carry so much weight, then?

As Peterson also said, the polls lack credibility when teams ranked in the top ten can't even get into a BCS bowl game. This year: Boise, Arkansas, Kansas State, and South Carolina, all ranked in the top ten in the AP poll, the USAToday, and the BCS standings, all left out of BCS bowl games. Instead: Michigan, Clemson, Virginia Tech, West Virgina -- none of them ranked in the top ten by anybody, all of them playing in BCS bowl games.

Maybe Peterson is gonna come across as a "whiner," but he makes some points that are pretty hard to argue with:

I think everybody is tired of the BCS ... Everybody's frustrated. Nobody really knows what to do anymore. It doesn't make sense to anybody. … I don't think anybody's happy anywhere.

...The whole thing needs to be changed, no question about it...

...Why are we voting at all if it doesn't really mean anything?...

...I haven't heard anyone saying, 'Hey, this is really good.' Nobody likes it. Nobody understands it. Everyone says it needs to be tweaked. Hopefully it will be.

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/football/story/2011-12-06/bcs-boise-state-petersen/51666700/1

dumbed down?

2011-11-26T22:04:00.000-08:00

They say GNOME Shell is lacking for configuration options, but check out what Ubuntu forum member VinDSL has done with it, apparently in the Ubuntu 12.04 pre-alpha:

Ubuntu forum member Harry33 comments:

Today the newest gnome-themes-standard package update (3.2.2+git20111125) brought a change to the default background.

It is now Adwaita-timed, which will change by time:
bright-day => good-night => morning => bright-day ...

This is available from the Ricotz Gnome-shell Testing PPA.
Really a great PPA.

Sweet!

debian and ubuntu

2011-11-21T03:56:00.000-08:00

From an interview with Mark Shuttleworth ("People Behind Debian: Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu's founder"):

So Ubuntu is the second half of a complete Debian-Ubuntu ecosystem. Debian’s strengths complement Ubuntu’s, Ubuntu can achieve things that Debian cannot (not because its members are not capable, but because the institution has chosen other priorities) and conversely, Debian delivers things which Ubuntu cannot, not because its members are not capable, but because it chooses other priorities as an institution.

Many people are starting to understand this: Ubuntu is Debian’s arrow, Debian is Ubuntu’s bow. Neither instrument is particularly useful on its own, except in a museum of anthropology.

So the worst and most frustrating attitude comes from those who think Debian and Ubuntu compete. If you care about Debian, and want it to compete on every level with Ubuntu, you are going to be rather miserable; you will want Debian to lose some of its best qualities and change some of its most important practices. However, if you see the Ubuntu-Debian ecosystem as a coherent whole, you will celebrate the strengths and accomplishments of both, and more importantly, work to make Debian a better Debian and Ubuntu a better Ubuntu, as opposed to wishing Ubuntu was more like Debian and vice versa.

GNOME Shell Cheat Sheet

2011-11-20T17:11:00.000-08:00

If you're new to GNOME Shell and you feel that it's a less productive environment than so-called "traditional" desktop environments, you might find that learning the ins and outs of the shell will change your point of view.

Or, maybe not. :)

Anyway, here's a link to a very helpful cheat sheet page for folks using GNOME Shell, from live.gnome.org.

Below, I'll list some of what I thought were key tips from the page -- in case the web page is not available (happened here a couple of times) (Note: I've left some things out, so see the page linked above for more info):

On the desktop

Alt+Tab switches between applications. Window previews of the applications with multiple windows are available as you cycle through. The previews show up after a short delay, but you can get them immediately by pressing the Down arrow key. You can move between the preview windows with the Right and Left arrow keys or with the mouse pointer. Previews of applications with a single window are only available when the Down arrow is explicitly hit. It is possible to switch to any window by moving to it with the mouse and clicking.

Alt+Shift+Tab cycles through applications in reverse direction.

Alt+[key above Tab] (eg, Alt+` on a US keyboard) switches between windows within an application. This can be used from within the Alt+Tab switcher, or from outside it (to open the switcher with the window previews for the current application already selected).

Window maximizing and tiling: You can maximize a window by dragging it to the top edge of the screen. Alternatively, you can double-click the window title. To unmaximize, pull it down again. By dragging windows to the left and right edges of the screen you can tile them side by side.

The panel

The Power Off... menu entry is hidden by default. You can make it visible by pressing the Alt key in the user menu.

Switching to and from the overview

System (Windows) key or Alt+F1 - these key combinations will take you to the overview or back to the desktop.

In the overview

Clicking on the application icon will launch it if it is not running, and will open the last used window of that application if it is already running.

Middle clicking on the application icon will launch it on a new workspace.

Right clicking on the application icon for a running application will display a menu with window titles for selecting one of the windows. This menu also provides options to open a new window for that application and to remove or add that application to favorites depending on its current status.

Ctrl+Clicking on the application icon for a running application will open a new window of that application in the current workspace.

Dragging an application icon to a particular workspace will open a new window for that application on that workspace. Unlike launching by clicking which results in leaving the overview mode and switching to the application immediately, launching by dragging does not leave the overview mode.

Using a vertical scroll over a particular window zooms in on it by bringing it forward.

Escaping

Hitting Esc key escapes Alt+F2.

Also:

Typing 'r' or 'restart' in the Alt+F2 prompt will restart GNOME Shell. This is useful when you are make changes to the GNOME Shell code while working within the GNOME Shell. You don't need to compile anything if you only changed JavaScript code, but you need to run compilation as you would normally do for C code before restarting.

Typing 'rt' in the Alt+F2 prompt will reload the GNOME Shell theme. This is useful when you are a theme designer and want to test changes in your theme without restarting the whole shell. The theme file isshare/gnome-shell/theme/gnome-shell.css.

Keybindings

Most keybindings can be viewed under the User Menu -> System Settings -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts

f16 nautilus location bar

2011-11-20T11:41:00.000-08:00

In Fedora 16, I wanted to set Nautilus to always set the location bar to use text input, instead of the default behavior, which looks like this:

To do it temporarily, you can click Go > Location, or press ctrl+L. To make the change permanent, the following command works:

$ gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences always-use-location-entry true

This can also be accomplished via dconf-editor, but that app seems kinda buggy in Fedora 16. When I open dconf-editor from the menu, then go to org>gnome>nautilus>preferences, the keys aren't visible:

I had to click on the windows's min/max button to get the keys to show up:

Then I'm able to select "always-use-location-entry." Here's the resulting view in Nautilus:

GNOME Shell in F16

2011-11-11T22:15:00.000-08:00

Very pleased with what I'm seeing so far in Fedora 16's GNOME Shell. I've really only just gotten started with it, but I like the looks and feel and the things that I've found that I can do with it.

The Activities area can be opened up by clicking on "Activities" on the panel, by moving the cursor to the "hot spot" at the upper left corner, or by pressing the Super (aka Windows) key.

The icons on the Dash launcher are easy to work with. They become smaller (and less obnoxious) if you have more of them there. To add an icon to the launcher, all you have to do is right-click on an icon in the Applications area and click on "Add to Favorites." You can remove an icon from the launcher by simply right-clicking on it and clicking "Remove from Favorites." You can drag the icons to different positions on the launcher.

The Workspace list is the vertical bar over on the right side of the Activities area. In GNOME 3, you get only as many workspaces as you need, instead of a set number of workspaces. If you open an application into an empty workspace, another empty workspace will be available. To switch between workspaces, simply click on one in the Workspace list.

I added the Workspace Indicator Extension for an alternative way to switch between workspaces.

Many people don't like the menu set-up in the Activities area, but I have no problem with it. It's very easy to find an application using the search area at the upper right, and the categories along the right side are also very helpful.

But I added the Applications Menu Extension for a more traditional drop-down menu.

In Fedora 16, to take advantage of available extensions, you'll want to first add gnome-tweak-tool and gnome-shell-extension-common. The gnome-tweak-tool GUI shows up under the name "Advanced Settings," and there you'll find your installed extensions.

One common complaint is that there's no "shut down" button in GNOME 3, but I found that if you click on the the username button on the left side of the panel, then press the Alt key, the "Suspend" option changes to a "Power Off..." option.

And, Windows-style, the Alt+Tab combination works for switching between open applications.

Desktop configuration seems a bit limited, from what I've seen so far. For example, as with the old GNOME 2, there's no nice automatic wallpaper changer included by default. But why pick nits? The available tools make it very easy to get work done in GNOME 3. Folks complain that it's a departure from "traditional" desktops, and that users are being "forced" to learn a new way of doing things, but I can already see that I won't be missing GNOME 2 at all. I'm looking forward to Ubuntu 12.04, which will have both Unity (which I also like) and GNOME Shell. I'm sold.

fedora 16

2011-11-10T08:24:00.000-08:00

Fedora 16 was released a couple of days ago, so I replaced Fedora 14 in my line-up with the main (GNOME) version of Fedora 16. That's somewhat of a departure for me, because my F14 and F15 installations were the KDE spins. This will also be my first real hands-on experience with GNOME Shell.

Here's a look at the default desktop that I was presented with, post-install:

Firefox 7.0.1 was included by default. The desktop itself, although I'm not at all used to GNOME Shell, seems easy enough to navigate. Fedora 16 ships with grub2 instead of grub-legacy, unlike earlier releases. Not much else to say other than that, since I'm barely getting started with this release; more later.

saguaro vs. chaparral

2011-10-29T06:57:00.000-07:00

Last night in Scottsdale, Arizona, two #1 high school teams faced off.

Scottsdale Chaparral, the #1 team in Division II, came in with a 9-1 record. Cross-town rival Scottsdale Saguaro, the #1 team in Division III, came in at 8-1. It was a nationally televised game, and the first time since 2008 that the teams had met.

It was being touted as the game of the year.

So, what happened? Saguaro rested their starters -- for the playoffs. Chaparral won in a blow-out, 65-0.

A complete embarrassment for Arizona high school football. And, to make matters worse, Chaparral coach Charlie Ragle even had the nerve to go for two-point conversions with his team up by almost 50 points.

Nobody won in this one. Poor sportsmanship on each side. Nobody comes out of this with bragging rights. Just a pitiful example of how stupid decisions by adults can ruin a good thing for kids and fans.

A couple of articles about this fiasco, here and here. Be sure to check out the comments following the articles.

the whining

2011-10-29T06:43:00.000-07:00

Linux users have hundreds of distributions to choose from, distros that, somewhere out there, some talented people have put together. The operating systems are free for us to download and use.

When I download a distro and get it installed on my computer, I'm not expecting it to be set up exactly like I want it to be set up "out-of-the-box." But it's Linux; I expect to be able to tweak and configure it and turn it into something that I'll be happy using for maybe the next couple of years. And that's generally how it goes, no matter what distro I choose.

So, why all the constant whining about Ubuntu, Unity, GNOME 3, KDE 4, and so forth? Have Linux users become soft? Why should I care what desktop a distro comes with by default? I'm gonna change it, anyway. I'm probably gonna go straight to the repos and add some other desktop environment or window manager, so that I can use that one whenever I feel like it. All that's required of me is that I learn how to take whatever is put out there and turn it into something that I can use. All I hope for from the devs is that they keep putting something out there that I can work with.

And, they keep doing exactly that. Whether it's Debian, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, whatever, I feel like I can choose just about any distro, download it, install it, spend a little time tweakig and configuring it, and I'm set.

You don't like Unity? Use something else. GNOME 3 isn't your cup of tea? So what? You can install Xfce or Openbox. You want to drop this distro for that one? Go right ahead, nobody cares.

But quit your whining, folks. You're sounding like nothing more than a bunch of spoiled brats. It's Linux, it's free, you can do what you want with it. Be happy that it's out there.

using ubuntu

2011-10-26T13:29:00.000-07:00

I've been running Ubuntu here since 2006, along with, at times, Kubuntu and the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint. I see Ubuntu as a great distro, but it helps to pay attention to what the distro is all about.

Ubuntu is gonna push the envelope; they're gonna try different things, and the user might not like many of those things.

Although I have an Ubuntu 11.04 installation running here on one of my machines, I generally avoid the non-LTS versions. I see no point in keeping up with the 6-month release cycle. I have the most recent LTS version, 10.04, installed on my main pc, and I'll stick with that until the next LTS version comes out next year.

Even with the 6-month release cycle, one thing to keep in mind is that those releases are actually supported for 18 months -- not 6 months, as many people assume. If you have a non-LTS version running, and if everything's fine, there's really no reason to jump to the next version right away, unless you simply want to try it out for whatever reason.

If I was running only Ubuntu here, what I'd do is go with the latest LTS version as my primary system, and dual-boot with the latest non-LTS version, just to keep an eye on where things are going, and to play around with whatever new things they've come up with. But it seems to me that most people who have problems with Ubuntu are folks who are constantly trying to keep up with the 6-month release cycle, and who almost blindly move on to the next release without either keeping a back-up of the old release or keeping the old release running on (a) separate partition(s).

Dual- or mulit-booting Linux distros isn't all that difficult, and comes with many advantages; one of the biggest advantages is when it comes to distros like Ubuntu, where the stability and quality of the next release isn't guaranteed. Keep the old version running while you thoroughly check out the new one; save yourself from some headaches.

fedora fan

2011-10-26T13:12:00.000-07:00

I first installed Fedora 14 late last year, and I've been really impressed with the distro. I added Fedora 15 back in June.

I decided to take an approach similar to what I do with Mepis -- install the latest version, but keep a previous version on another set of partitions. This way, I can check out the new version while still having the old one to fall back on.

Fedora 16 will be released soon, and I think I'll stick with the same approach; I'll install F16 over F14, but keep F15.

I went with the KDE spins with both F14 and F15, and I think I'll do the same with F16. I figure I can always add another DE or WM later, but I think that the KDE spins are the best ones for me to start out with.

Even though Fedora is considered the "testing grounds" for Red Hat, and it's considered a "cutting-edge" distro, with some inconsistency between releases, I'm finding it to be a quality distro, dependable, and quite nice to use. Looks like I'll be running Fedora here for years to come.

Sos 1.5

2011-10-26T13:01:00.000-07:00

SalineOS 1.5 is out. Here's a link to the distro's main page. For more info on 1.5, see this forum post.

I've been running Saline here since January 2011. This distro's still running under the radar, but it's a nice Xfce distro, based on Debian Squeeze. To me, it looks just as good as my Squeeze installation (I have GNOME and AwesomeWM installed there), but it was a lot quicker and easier to install and set up. Looks like a good alternative to Mepis and other Debian-based distros, especially for folks who like Xfce.

customized searching

2011-10-26T12:52:00.000-07:00

Some customized Google search engines, found in a Linux Mint forums post:

Linux Beginner Search

Ubuntu Search

googlubuntu

precise

2011-10-06T00:26:00.000-07:00

How does the name for Ubuntu 12.04, the next LTS version, grab you? "Precise Pangolin."

These names get worse and worse, don't they?

I never cared for the names for Debian 6 ("Squeeze") or the current Debian Testing ("Wheezy"), either. I'm okay with the Linux Mint names, which are always female names ending with the letter "a" ("Helena," "Isadora," "Julia," "Katya," etc.), I guess. With Fedora, we have "Goddard," "Laughlin," "Lovelock," and so on.

I don't know. I prefer version numbers, but I guess in the end, it's all in fun, and maybe it adds some color to the Linux world. It would probably be too boring if everybody stuck with only version numbers.

But, ugh, Precise Pangolin? Dang.

locked out

2011-10-04T23:22:00.000-07:00

Does anyone care if the the entire NBA seasons gets cancelled? I don't.

No sympathy here for either side. The regular season's too long, ticket prices are too high, there are only a few players (like Kevin Durant) who I was looking forward to watching, and too many cities have teams that probably won't realistically compete for a championship over the next decaade.

I mean, really: New York, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Toronto, Indiana, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Atlanta, Charlotte, Washington, New Orleans, Memphis, Houston, Denver, Portland, Utah, Minnesota, Phoenix, Golden State, the Clippers, and Sacramento. Count 'em: That's 22 of the NBA's 30 teams, and none of them are considered to have a serious shot at even making their respective conference finals next year. Come the year 2020, almost none of them will have made it to as far as the conference finals. Maybe the Knicks, but they're still a long way off.

As far as I'm concerned, most NBA fans around the country are already locked out!

Why should I care who gets the bigger slice of the pie between the billionaire owners and the multi-millionaire players?

If the the season gets shortened and they end up working out a deal, that's fine with me. It's not like I can afford to go to any of the games anyway, and the season's boring until the last few months as it is.

Let the players lose some paychecks. Let the owners take some losses. And let the fans find other things to do with their time and money. What a joke.

leonard-hagler

2011-09-24T00:10:00.000-07:00

My good friend Rick hipped me to a great article on the 1987 Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Marvelous Marvin Hagler fight.

Classic bout between two of the greatest fighters of all time! I thought Hagler won; Rick saw it for Leonard. I've got to respect Rick's take, as he's a former boxer and knows a lot more about "the sweet science" than I'll ever know.

After reading that article, I'm even more convinced that Floyd Mayweather, Jr. would beat Manny Pacquiao if they ever get it on. It's a little different because Mayweather isn't the glory boy like Leonard was, but Mayweather is smart and fast like Leonard. Leonard got in Hagler's head, and he played the fight just right, he played the judges just right. 15 or 30 seconds of going all out at the most crucial times, leaving that impression on the judges. Mayweather can do that, too.

Dang, Hagler went 11 years without a loss! Very impressive. And you have to wonder what would have happened if Leonard and Hagler had fought a few years earlier, like before the Mugabi fight.

I also watched some of the video from this page, including the last round of the Leonard-Hagler fight, the whole fight between Leonard and Mayweather, Sr., and the Hagler-Hearns fight.

I thought the last round of the Leonard-Hagler fight was a draw, and that Leonard wouldn't have had anything left after that round. Amazing flurries by Leonard.

Leonard-Mayweather was interesting. Leonard dominated the fight and had him in trouble numerous times, but Mayweather was game, and very crafty. Good defensive fighter, but not as good as his son. Still, he hung in there well and seemed to frustrate Leonard a bit. Leonard finally got to him in the last round, though. Looked like Mayweather never hurt Leonard at all.

Hagler-Hearns: Probably the greatest few rounds of boxing I've ever seen. I had forgotten how good Hearns was, kinda, but that fight reminded me. Maybe Hearns wins that fight if he stands back and boxes a little more instead of mixing it up and going all out. Hearns landed some big shots on Hagler but Hagler shook it off and kept coming.

d'backs clinch!

2011-09-24T00:01:00.000-07:00

Alright! Time to get it on! Been a long time coming, but Arizona is finally back in it. Don't know if they can get to the Series (Philly is very tough) but at least they've got a chance. Anything can happen. As always, hoping to see D'Backs-Tigers in the Series, as improbable as that seems.

A year ago, the D'Backs went 65-97. They'd also lost 90-something games the year before. Kudos to Kirk Gibson and to the players! Worst to first!

The Diamondbacks might not go far in the playoffs, but what a great year anyway! This is the cool thing about MLB, every now and then a team can completely turn it around.

Rooting hard for the Tigers as well. Can't wait for the playoffs to start!

And there's them dang Yankees, still standing in the way! That team is always up there! Everybody's gotta be expecting Phillies vs. Yankees in the World Series. And Philly might have the pitching to take 'em. But I wouldn't count anybody out. It's a whole new ballgame once the playoffs start; anybody can get hot. Who knows, the Brewers might even come through!

By the way, I think the Tigers' Verlander deserves the AL MVP as well as the Cy Young that he's certain to get.

enjoying unity

2011-09-23T23:56:00.000-07:00

Well, almost three months since I installed Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty), with Unity, on my notebook.

I don't know if Unity will work on my main pc. It doesn't work when I run the live CD on it, and I haven't looked into it because I won't be installing the next LTS until next year sometime.

That release will also come with GNOME Shell. So I figure I'll try to get both Unity and GNOME Shell working, and go from there. In the end, I'll probably add Openbox anyway, though.

Anyway, I'm completely comfortable using Unity in Ubuntu 11.04. I don't feel like it hinders my workflow at all. It looks great, it feels great. I think it's a wonderful environment, and I don't quite understand all the "Unity is crap!" stuff.

Okay, so here's what I'd like to see: More configurability.

Having the Unity launcher over on the left side is fine; it seems like the best place for it. But you should still be able to move it somewhere else, if you want.

And I feel like I can't make enough changes to the panel along the top. I feel like if I really wanted to do more things, I'd have to add gnome-panel, or maybe something like AWN (Avant Window Navigator).

But Unity in 11.04 is a fairly early version. By the time 12.04 comes out, I'm sure that Unity will look a little better. Regardless, if it works with my hardware, I don't see myself having any problem using Unity, or even GNOME Shell. To me, neither of those are more trouble than using E17 or AwesomeWM or whatever. Once I see how things are done, it's all just Linux.

But whether I'm using Unity or GNOME Shell or anything, I'll still add Dolphin from KDE! :) It's still my favorite file manager, by far.

tough stretch

2011-09-23T23:50:00.000-07:00

Tough loss for the Michigan State Spartans against Notre Dame last week, and a tough stretch coming up.

After hosting Central Michigan today, they play at Ohio State. They get a bye week before hosting Michigan, then they host Wisconsin, then at Nebraska.

Nebraska might have a slightly tougher Big Ten schedule than MSU since the Huskers also face Penn State; but Nebraska doesn't face Illinois, and the Illini might turn out to be better than Penn State this year.

But I don't think anybody has a tougher four-game stretch in the conference than what the Spartans will face. Ohio State was ranked, and probably will be again once they get all their players back, and the other three are all ranked teams. Those four games will make or break the Spartans' season.

Heck, the UofM and Ohio State games will make or break the Spartans' season! Losing to Notre Dame was bad enough, but lose to UofM and it's back to being little sister; lose to Ohio State, and it's back to being irrelevant. MSU needs to win those two games in the worst way.

best?

2011-09-17T04:51:00.000-07:00

"The best Linux distro of 2011!"

OK, that's an interesting article, and the comments that follow are interesting as well, but...

The title misleads since they're only comparing six distros: Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, and OpenSUSE.

And, "best" is so... subjective. Who can say which is "best" for a given individual? Except for "Performance," where they showed a chart of boot times at startup, folks will argue about every comparison they made in the article; and even the boot times at startup depend on different things, like which desktop you've installed and so forth. They found openSUSE (with KDE) to be the fastest, but I wondered if it would really boot faster than Debian with Xfce, for example. And boot times would certainly vary depending on the amount of RAM you have, right?

Some of the things they said in the article were inaccurate, incomplete, or simply wrong. But the article is sure to spark a lot of debate in the Linux community, where the "best" Linux distro is usually "the one I'm using right now."

With six distros running here, and a couple of different releases of three of those distros, and with some long-term experience with a few others, my opinion is that there is no "best" Linux distro. Each one has its pros and cons; sometimes I feel like I could list a bunch of distros on a wall, blindly throw a dart at it to pick a distro, do a little tweaking, and walk away happy.

Besides, they didn't even mention Mepis or PCLinuxOS. :)

water on mars

2011-08-05T10:42:00.000-07:00

planetarium

2011-08-03T08:22:00.000-07:00

Something cool from mozillademos.org -- The Planetarium: http://mozillademos.org/demos/planetarium/demo.html

I guess this is supposed to be for Firefox, but here I've got it running in Google Chrome. A screen shot from AwesomeWM in Debian Squeeze:

No Pluto, though. :(

You click on a planet to get some info:

more awesome stuff

2011-08-03T00:57:00.000-07:00

Of the DEs/WMs I use, AwesomeWM is easily the most difficult to configure -- I still don't understand everything that's going on in the config file, ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua -- but once it's set up it might be the best for doing a lot of work with several application windows open.

I really haven't been using Awesome enough to have acquired a good understanding of all of the things I can do with it. I log into an Awesome session perhaps once every two weeks or so.

It's the only "tiling window manager" I've had much experience with. There are like 9 different layouts to choose from, but I've edited my config file to use only 5 of them -- max, floating, tile, spiral, and magnifier -- and I use the first one, max, almost all the time. Maybe that defeats the purpose of using a tiling window manager, but I'm a rookie, so that's my excuse.

The max layout simply maximizes each application window. The floating layout is more like what folks are used to from other DEs/WMs in that you can move the windows around. I like the tile and spiral layouts because I can get a good look at each open window, and it's nice how the magnifier layout brings the active window (okay, "client" in Awesome talk) to the forefront.

The icon at the top right shows which layout you're using, if you know which layout each icon image represents.

A nice thing about is AwesomeWM is that, like Fluxbox, you can tab application windows. Another feature is that an application window (client) can have more than one tag (sorta like virtual desktops), kinda like having the same window open on desktop #3 as well as on desktop #1. Useful sometimes.

Further, different tags can have different layouts, so I can be using the max layout on tag (desktop) 1, and the magnifier layout on tag 3, for example.

I'm sure that in my comments here I'm getting some of the terminology messed up, but that's okay, I'll get better at it. For now, here's the order of my layouts, from the ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua file (left-clicking on the layout button at the upper right changes the layout in Awesome; right-clicking on it takes you backwards through the layouts):

layouts =
{
awful.layout.suit.max,
awful.layout.suit.floating,
awful.layout.suit.tile,
awful.layout.suit.spiral,
awful.layout.suit.magnifier
}

And here are some screen shots showing some of the different layouts I've been using, in the same order as above (note the layout icon in the upper right corner):

"max" -- my default layout:

"floating," with the gedit window dragged over to the side a bit:

"tile," with a view of all open windows:

"spiral" -- kinda messy:

"magnifier" -- here, the active window (client) is brought to the forefront:

And, finally, another view of the open desktop, for your viewing pleasure:

Not bad for a neophyte, right? :)

when fsck runs at boot

2011-08-02T18:21:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when you boot into Linux, fsck runs and checks this or that filesystem (partition). This is a good thing, even though sometimes you wish it wouldn't because you're in a hurry! You can see which filesystems will be checked at boot time by looking at the file /etc/fstab.

Partition info is shown in /etc/fstab under these columns: file system, mount point, type, options, dump, pass. According to man fstab, the numbers under the last column (pass) determine the order in which filesystem checks are done at boot time.

The entry for the root filesystem should have a "1" under the "pass" column. Other filesystems will have a "2" under this column; man fstab says, "Filesystems within a drive will be checked sequentially, but filesystems on different drives will be checked at the same time to utilize parallelism available in the hardware."

If there's a "0" under the "pass" column, or if there's nothing present there, then fsck assumes that the filesystem does not need to be checked.

fsck will run at boot time after the filesystem has been mounted a set number of times, or if that number hasn't been reached, after a set time interval. For ext2, ext3, and ext4 partitions, you can find a bunch of info about a filesystem, including last mount time, mount count, maximum mount count (before fsck runs), last time checked, check interval, and next scheduled check (according to the check interval) by using the tune2fs and/or dumpe2fs commands.

The following two commands output mostly the same info (see man tune2fs and man dumpe2fs) -- I can use either of them for getting info about the partition at sda7 in Debian Squeeze (run as root):

# tune2fs -l /dev/sda7

# dumpe2fs -h /dev/sda7

Piping either of these commands into grep, with the -i flag (to ignore case), gives me the output relating only to the info I'm looking for in this situation:

# tune2fs -l /dev/sda7 | grep -i 'mount count'
Mount count: 5
Maximum mount count: 24

# tune2fs -l /dev/sda7 | grep -i 'check'
Last checked: Fri Jul 29 21:52:37 2011
Check interval: 15552000 (6 months)
Next check after: Wed Jan 25 20:52:37 2012

Or I can use egrep to get the above info all from one command:

# tune2fs -l /dev/sda7 | egrep -i 'mount count|check'
Mount count: 5
Maximum mount count: 24
Last checked: Fri Jul 29 21:52:37 2011
Check interval: 15552000 (6 months)
Next check after: Wed Jan 25 20:52:37 2012

Or:

# dumpe2fs -h /dev/sda7 | egrep -i 'mount count|check'
dumpe2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
Mount count: 5
Maximum mount count: 24
Last checked: Fri Jul 29 21:52:37 2011
Check interval: 15552000 (6 months)
Next check after: Wed Jan 25 20:52:37 2012

pipe menus

2011-08-01T07:50:00.000-07:00

Thanks to this article, I recently found out about Openbox pipe menus.

For more info, see these Openbox wiki articles:

http://openbox.org/wiki/Openbox:Pipemenus

http://openbox.org/wiki/Help:Menus

I like the SysInfo pipe menu:

To add the “SysInfo” pipe menu in Openbox in Ubuntu Lucid, I downloaded sysinfo.sh from http://openbox.org/wiki/Openbox:Pipemenus (see the System Information section). I created the directory ~/.config/openbox/scripts and moved sysinfo.sh into it. Going by the notes in the scritpt, I edited ~/.config/openbox/menu.xml, adding the following line:

<menu execute="~/.config/openbox/scripts/sysinfo.sh" id="sysinfo-menu" label="SysInfo"/>

I placed that line in the menu between the obmenu and wallpaper.sh entries. Then I edited the script as follows to reflect Lucid's partitions:

MountPoint1=$(echo /dev/sdb5)
MountPoint2=$(echo /dev/sdb6)

Made the script executable, then did a restart from the Openbox menu, and the pipe menu worked.

I haven't yet found any other pipe menus that I'd like to add, but there are many of them that other people have created, and of course you can create your own. Here's a post about them at the PCLinuxOS forums, by forum member "menotu."

choices!

2011-08-01T07:31:00.000-07:00

It's funny, no matter how much I enjoy KDE4 or Unity, it doesn't take anything away from how I feel when I log into an Openbox or Xfce session. I can go either way; I enjoy using Openbox as much as anything else. Even if I successfully install Ubuntu 12.04 next year and I'm able to run Unity on my main pc, I'm sure I'll be adding Openbox; and I'll certainly be running Xfce in other distros. There simply isn't any one Linux DE or WM that I like better than all others, so I'm glad that I don't have to stick with just one.

Openbox in Ubuntu Lucid (using xfce4-panel):

readers

2011-07-28T15:18:00.000-07:00

This one's been posted already at a lot of different blog sites, but it's worth repeating:

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one."

-- George R. R. Martin, spoken by one of his characters in A Dance With Dragons.

For a short review on A Dance With Dragons, see: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20509545,00.html

present windows - all desktops

2011-07-28T14:51:00.000-07:00

In Mepis 11, I have KDE4's screen edges set so that I can move the cursor to the bottom right corner to bring up the desktop grid. This is quite useful for taking a look at what's on each virtual desktop and moving quick to a different desktop.

But I have the top left corner set to "Present Windows - All Desktops." This one gives me a look at all open application windows, and of course I can click on any one of them to go to that window.

That's just a tool to use in addition to the desktop grid and the panel's Task Manager. Here's the Screen Edges GUI used to set it up (System Settings > Window Behavior > Screen Edges):

USB flash drive synonyms

2011-07-28T14:21:00.000-07:00

Some terms that folks use to refer to a USB flash drive:

- jump drive
- memory stick
- USB memory key
- thumb drive
- pen drive
- USB stick
- pocket drive
- disk on key
- USB key
- data stick
- finger stick
- keychain drive
- key drive
- memory key

f15 (gnome3) from flash drive

2011-07-28T08:12:00.000-07:00

After spending some time using Unity in Ubuntu Natty, I wanted to take a look at GNOME 3 in Fedora 15. I downloaded the Fedora-15-i686-Live-Desktop.iso and verified the sha256sum, and then used a couple of different methods to create bootable flash drives.

First, I used MultiSystem, which I already have installed in Ubuntu Lucid. Very easy to use, and the live session booted up fine.

Next, I installed unetbootin in Mepis 11, and used that to create the flash drive. unetbootin was also surprisingly easy. Fedora 15 is not listed as one of the Fedora versions supported by unetbootin, but everything worked fine.

I think that in either case, the flash drive needs to be formatted to FAT32. The Linux dd command is also mentioned as an easy way to create bootable flash drives, but I haven't tried that one yet.

Now, for some screen shots of Fedora 15's GNOME 3 version (which is the main version), from the unetbootin live session.

Here's the desktop with a wallpaper that's very close to the default wallpaper, except with some decoration in the lower right:

Clicking on "Activities" in the upper left corner brings up the menu. Here's the System Tools menu:

Looks like you can't do much desktop configuration without installing some things like gnome-tweak-tool, but you can do some basic things from the live session.

Here's a shot of some kind of bug that I've seen a few times in the live sessions:

I haven't bothered to research that yet.

I'm not crazy about the way GNOME 3 does workspaces; it's different, but it works for getting around. You have to go to "Activities" for the workspaces to show up along the right side of the screen, or to even change workspaces using the mouse. They call them "dynamic workspaces." The desktop starts out with one workspace; if you start an application, you get the workspace that the application starts in plus one empty workspace. Each time you start an application in an empty workspace, you end up with another emply workspace. The dock along the left side starts out with big, juicy icons, but they become smaller when you have more applications running.

I felt that the workspace grid in Unity and desktop grid in KDE4 are better ways to deal with workspaces than how things are done in GNOME 3, but maybe "dynamic workspaces" just takes some getting used to.

Here's a shot of the desktop with a wallpaper chosen from Fedora 15's default collection:

The crash in the gvfs-1.8.1-1.fc15 package occurred again and again during my live sessions, so that's a concern. Another problem was that I was unable to change the time on the clock at the top and make it stick. Those and the fact that configuration options were limited might not be issues in a hard drive installation.

The system felt fast and responsive; the menu was fairly easy to get around, but I didn't like the fact that you had to go to "Activities" to do just about anything with the mouse, including opening up applications. The search tool that shows up in the upper right in "Activities" is nice, but using it to find and open up apps requires using the keyboard.

Fedora 15 came with Firefox 4.0.1, which is already old (!). There was no office suite with the live CD .iso.

The lack of minimize/maximize buttons for applications struck me as odd, but double-clicking at the top of an application window toggles between the two modes, and right-clicking in the same place brings up more options. You can drag windows from one workspace to another using the workspaces thing along the right side when in "Activities."

My initial impression is that GNOME 3 is not as easy for getting things done as Unity, but other folks feel differently, and perhaps my opinion will change over time. Also, I think that Unity looks better -- less childish, more attractive. But that's a matter of opinion, too.

I'm in no hurry to use GNOME 3, and what I've seen from these live sessions doesn't inspire me to do a hard drive installation of Fedora 15's main version (I already have the KDE spin installed), but I figure that GNOME 3 will improve and that a lot of people will be happy with it and that I'll be fine using it whenever I get around to installing it.

u3 -- gone!

2011-07-28T06:24:00.000-07:00

In Ubuntu Lucid, I installed u3-tool and used it to remove the U3 stuff from a Memorex TravelDrive flash drive. Check man u3-tool for more info. u3-tool is also available from the Debian repos.

I inserted the flash drive. Then, I checked System > Administration > Disk Utility. The drive was shown at /dev/sdc and the volume at /dev/sdc1.

I ran the following commands, which basically just gave me a look at things:

steve[~]$ sudo u3-tool -i /dev/sdc1
Total device size: 1.88 GB (2017984512 bytes)
CD size: 4.09 MB (4292608 bytes)
Data partition size: 1.88 GB (2013691904 bytes)
steve[~]$ sudo u3-tool -h

u3-tool 0.3 - U3 USB stick manager

Usage: u3-tool [options]

Options:
-c Change password
-d Disable device security
-D Dump all raw info(for debug)
-e Enable device security
-h Print this help message
-i Display device info
-l Load CD image into device
-p Repartition device
-R Reset device security, destroying private data
-u Unlock device
-v Use verbose output
-V Print version information

For the device name use:
'/dev/sda0', '/dev/sg3'

According to some tips I found in an Ubuntu forums thread, the output at the end of that second command shows the devices names that should be used.

So, I ran the following command:

steve[~]$ sudo u3-tool -p 0 /dev/sg3

WARNING: Loading a new cd image causes the whole device to be whiped. This INCLUDES
the data partition.
I repeat: ANY EXCISTING DATA WILL BE LOST!

Are you sure you want to continue? [yn] y
steve[~]$

So, I opened GParted and saw that all that was left was a FAT16 partition (1.88 GB) and about 4 MB unallocated. I unmounted the FAT16 partition and then resized it to take up the rest of the drive.

Next, I took a look at things again with this command:

steve[~]$ sudo u3-tool -i /dev/sdc1
Total device size: 1.88 GB (2017984512 bytes)
CD size: 0.00B (0 bytes)
Data partition size: 1.88 GB (2017984512 bytes)

So, u3-tool worked and the U3 part is gone -- yay!

changing workspaces in unity

2011-07-27T12:48:00.000-07:00

One of the big complaints about Ubuntu's Unity is that there's no workspace pager on the panel to quickly switch workspaces. There's the Workspace Switcher on the Unity launcher, but a common complaint about it is that using it to change workspaces requires too many clicks -- for example, a click on the Workspace Switcher item to bring up the workspace grid, and then a double-click on the workspace you want to move to.

However, in Unity there are a few different ways of moving to different workspaces:

- Using the Workspace Switcher alone, I've found that once the grid is showing, a right-click instead of a double-click is an easier way to move to the workspace you want to go to.

- I installed the Workspace Indicator applet (found out about it at http://www.techdrivein.com/2011/05/10-useful-application-indicators-for.html). With this applet, two clicks takes you to the workspace you want to go to; or, you can use the mouse wheel to change workspaces.

- The ctrl+alt+arrowkeys combo works nicely for moving to different workspaces.

- You can set up the mouse wheel to take you to different workspaces (if the desktop is visible and the application window is not maximized). I did this by going to CompizConfig Settings Manager > Desktop section > Viewport Switcher > Desktop-based Viewport Switching and setting "Move Next" to Button5 and "Move Previous" to Button4.

- The Super+s keystroke also brings up the Workspace Switcher. Convenient in certain situations.

- Finally, I set up a desktop edge to bring up the Workspace Switcher by going to CompizConfig Settings Manager > Desktop section > Expo > Bindings tab. "Expo edge" is disabled by default, but if you click on the "Engage wall expo mode edge binding" button (the button will be marked "Disabled" but you can see what it's called when the cursor is hovering over it) you can set the binding to whatever edge you choose. With this set, changing workspaces requires only moving the cursor to your set edge and right-clicking on the desktop you want to move to.

Even all these options won't make some people happy. Some folks simply want a workspace pager. In Ubuntu Natty, those folks could always go to Control Center > Startup Applications, create an entry for gnome-panel to start at the beginning of a session, and simply add the Workspace Switcher to the panel. Installing something like xfce4-panel or AWN (Avant Window Navigator) should also work fine -- once installed, just add a workspace pager to one of those, if one isn't present by default.

unity quicklists

2011-07-24T04:31:00.000-07:00

You can create quicklists for Unity's launcher buttons to make it easier to get to certain tasks and applications. To get an idea of the kinds of things that can be done, visit this web page at askubuntu.com or do a web search using the search terms unity quicklist.

In Ubuntu Natty, I created a couple of launcher buttons that when I right-click on them show some of my favorite applications. The first thing I had to do was create the directory ~/.local/share/applications.

I'll show how I created a Graphics button containing a couple of applications, KSnapshot and Geeqie. To begin, I created the graphics.desktop file using the following command:

$ gedit ~/.local/share/applications/graphics.desktop

The contents of that file:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Exec=
Name=Graphics
Icon=/usr/share/icons/Humanity/categories/48/applications-graphics.svg
X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=KSnapShot;Geeqie;

[KSnapShot Shortcut Group]
Name=ksnapshot
Exec=ksnapshot
TargetEnvironment=Unity

[Geeqie Shortcut Group]
Name=geeqie
Exec=geeqie
TargetEnvironment=Unity

The order of the list of shortcuts on the "X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=" line determines the order that they'll appear when you right-click on the button. If you have other "shortcut groups" defined below that line, only the ones in the "X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=" line will appear when you right-click on the button.

Once I created the file, I simply drag-and-dropped the file from Dolphin onto the launcher.

If you make changes to the .desktop file, you'll have to log out and log back into your Unity session.

A couple of shots to show how it turned out:

Here's the entire desktop, showing my "Utilities" button with its quicklist opened up:

great, if it works

2011-07-21T15:09:00.000-07:00

"The mammoth 800-plus meter (2625 ft) tall tower will instantly become one of the world's tallest buildings [...] The Arizona tower will be a staggering 800 metres or so tall - just 30 meters shorter than the colossal Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest man-made structure. To put that in context - it will stand more than double the height of the Empire State building in New York City, and it'll be as much as 130 meters in diameter at the top."

Sounds good! Let's hope it works out.

EnviroMission plans massive solar tower for Arizona

"The sun beats down on a large covered greenhouse area at the bottom, warming the air underneath it. Hot air wants to rise, so there's a central point for it to rush towards and escape; the tower in the middle. And there's a bunch of turbines at the base of the tower that generate electricity from that natural updraft."

More from the article:

Because it works on temperature differential, not absolute temperature, it works in any weather;
Because the heat of the day warms the ground up so much, it continues working at night;
Because you want large tracts of hot, dry land for best results, you can build it on more or less useless land in the desert;
It requires virtually no maintenance - apart from a bit of turbine servicing now and then, the tower "just works" once it's going, and lasts as long as its structure stays standing;
It uses no 'feed stock' - no coal, no uranium, nothing but air and sunlight;
It emits absolutely no pollution - the only emission is warm air at the top of the tower. In fact, because you're creating a greenhouse underneath, it actually turns out to be remarkably good for growing vegetation under there.

more unity screen shots

2011-07-20T02:14:00.000-07:00

Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty), after a little bit of tweaking:

long live mepis

2011-07-20T00:17:00.000-07:00

Warren Woodford came out with the Debian Stable-based Mepis before Ubuntu existed. It wasn't the first Linux live CD, but Woodford's creation gave us a live/installation CD -- a complete, easy-to-use system that could be run from the CD or used to install Linux to the hard drive.

I've been using Mepis since early 2006. During that time, I've also used several other distros, but Mepis continues to be the one distro that I fall back on. The live CD (and now, the live DVD) has been convenient to have around, and I know I can count on Woodford to turn out quality releases.

So, why hasn't Mepis become more popular than it is now?

Being based on Debian Stable means that Mepis doesn't come with the latest and greatest packages. (By the way, for a short time, Mepis was based on Ubuntu; the experiment didn't last, and Mepis moved back to a Debian Stable base.) Mepis users can acquire more up-to-date packages the Debian way -- by creating a "mixed system" and pulling things in from the Testing or Unstable repos, or by compiling packages on their own. They can also get newer stuff from Mepis' Community Repos. But those aren't always good solutions for people who want things a bit more "cutting edge" out of the box.

The Debian Stable base, along with the fact that Mepis is a one-man distro, produced, primarily, by a guy who has limited time and resources, means that you don't see Mepis in the news as often as other distros like PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Fedora. Woodford puts out one version of Mepis -- it's always just a KDE distro. Other distros have several different versions and release more frequently; Mepis releases come out once a year, at best -- Woodford releases it when it's ready, and usually it takes longer than one year for the next version to come out. So we don't see as many announcements about Mepis at sites like DistroWatch, for example, as we see about other distros.

Most people in the Mepis community don't hear from Woodford much. He doesn't participate at the Mepis forums. He tweets, but not often. He's great at putting out a solid distro, but not so great at selling it to the Linux public. His eccentricities may put off a lot of people, and many people would rather not use a one-man distro as their primary operating system. I mean, what happens if Woodford croaks?

Also, folks have questioned Woodford's commitment to the project. The guy has to work for a living; he's got other things going on in his life, and doesn't say much, if anything, about the long-term direction of the project. Several times, Ive wondered if the current release would be the last. There are no guarantees that Woodford won't bail on the project at any given time. Many people aren't comfortable with things being up in the air like that.

My take on that is that a Debian Stable-based Mepis release is good for a few years -- for the life of the current Stable (a couple of years), and a bit longer if you don't mind not receiving updates for awhile. It should be fine to use for quite some time. After that, it's anybody's guess.

The uncertainty and the lack of popularity don't keep me from sticking with Mepis, though. I decided awhile back to just enjoy the ride. Woodford's release always seem to be a little bit less than perfect; you'll see a few bugs here and there. But Mepis is always solid, stable, and quick and easy to install. No major surprises slap you in the face; from one version to the next, you pretty much know what to expect.

The Mepis community is one of the most knowledgeable, friendly communities out there. They'll bend over backwards to help someone out at the Mepis forums. You're free to discuss other distros at the forums, but distro-bashing is held to a minimum -- forum moderators don't have to step in very often, because, to a large extent, the forum membership polices itself. They know what a good thing they have going there, and they aren't about to let some troll step in and ruin it. Politics, religion, and personal insults are not tolerated.

The documentation is very good, and you can also fall back on the larger body of Debian documentation because so much of it applies to Mepis as well.

As Woodford has found himself more stretched for time, the community has stepped up to the plate, helping out quite a bit with documentation and with testing alpha and beta releases on different hardware and providing Woodford with important feedback. Increasingly, they've contributed artwork, helping to smooth out the rough edges in an area that hasn't been one of Woodford's strengths.

Mepis remains one of the best-kept secrets in the Linux world. I recently joked that it should be named "secretMepis" instead of the official "simplyMepis." Its users swear by it. Even with the relative lack of popularity, Mepis generally seems to have a good reputation among folks who've been around Linux for awhile -- a reputation for quality, consistency, stability, and ease-of-use out of the box.

Anytime another computer falls into my hands, whether it's new or simply "new to me," the first thing I do is try a Mepis live CD (recently, a live DVD) on it. If that works (and it almost always does), the next thing I do is install Mepis. It's got a great track record here, which is why I've contined to use it, and why I'll stay on board and enjoy the ride for as long as Woodford continues to do his thing.

should be interesting

2011-07-19T07:43:00.000-07:00

Saturday, Juan Manuel Márquez KO'd Likar Ramos in the 1st round, setting up Márquez' November 12th rematch with Manny Pacquiao.

Back in 2004, Márquez and Pacquiao fought to a draw after Márquez came back from being knocked down three times in the 1st round.

In 2008, Pacquiao beat Márquez on a split decision. Márquez went down in the 3rd round in that fight.

The first fight was at featherweight, the second at super-featherweight. I think the fight in November will be at welterweight.

Both of those two fights were controversial and the decisions could have gone either way. I don't think anyone in recent years has fought Pacquiao as well as Márquez did.

Everybody wants to see Pacquiao vs. Mayweather, but I seriously doubt that would be as good a fight as Pacquiao vs. Márquez.

Márquez fought Mayweather in 2009 at 144 lbs. Márquez was moving up in weight and didn't look so hot; he came in at 142. Mayweather came in over the limit at 146, which cost him a financial penalty, and Mayweather won the unanimous decision.

Márquez is 53-5-1 with 39 KOs. It'll be interesting to see if older Márquez vs. older Pacquiao at welterweight will be anything like young Márquez vs. young Pacquiao at featherweight and super-featherweight. It's also interesting because if Pacquiao loses the fight, there goes any chance for Pacquiao vs. Mayweather. Another interesting point is that Márquez couldn't handle Mayweather, so how can Pacquiao handle him? Is Pacquiao that much better than he was before? The "experts" say so, but we'll have to see.

One thing's for certain: Márquez is a tough Mexican fighter with a great record who has never been stopped. Should be interesting to see if Pacquiao can finally stop him in November.

wally in unity

2011-07-13T19:29:00.000-07:00

For automatic, timed wallpaper changes in Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty), I found that Wally Wallpaper Changer works, with a few tweaks.

First, I installed wally via Synaptic. Then, I followed the instructions regarding Unity from this web page: http://ubuntuincident.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/wallpaper-changer/

Update (20110509) [Unity patch]

Wally exists in the system tray. However, Ubuntu 11.04 introduced Unity that comes with a new top panel and applications are not allowed to be there by default. You need to enable explications explicitly. If you want to continue using wally, here is what to do:

First, get your current settings for systray-whitelist:

gsettings get com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist

Then, add your application to the above list with this command:

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "[ your_previous_list_here, 'wally']"

Next, I set up Wally to start at log-in by going to System Settings > Startup Applications and adding an entry for Wally there. Then I logged out and back in to make sure Wally started up and showed up on the panel at the top of the screen.

I set up a directory in my home directory and filled it with wallpapers. To make Wally pull from this list of Wallpapers, I right-clicked on the Wally icon on the panel and selected the "Folders" module. Then I added my wallpapers directory:

From the "Settings" module, I set Wally to change every 10 minutes, set the position to "Centered Maxpect," and put check marks in the boxes next to "Choose in random order," "Switch background on play," and "Play automatically on application start." At the bottom of the window, I made sure that the only active modules are "Folders" and "Files."

I raided interfacelift.com for a bunch of cool wallpapers to add to my collection, then kicked back to enjoy!

rekonq

2011-07-08T06:12:00.000-07:00

I'm testing out the Rekonq web browser in KDE 4.6.3, in Fedora 15. The version is Rekonq 0.6.1.

Looks like a nice little browser. The tabs are placed below the bookmark bar instead of up at the top like in Chromium. Rekonq has a nice feature where, when the cursor hovers over a tab, a thumnail pops up showing the web page that's open in that tab.

Rekonq is supposed to be getting support for Chrome extensions, but it looks like that hasn't happened yet, so that's a minus. It does come with an ad-blocker, but the ad-blocker doesn't block the texts ads here in Gmail. Seems to work fine otherwise, though.

One extension that I really miss having is Xmarks, but I was able to import my bookmarks from Firefox into Rekonq, and that worked out well.

Rekonq seems to be a bit halting at first when opening up web pages, but then fairly speedy when it finally opens them up. Scrolling up and down in web pages with the mouse's scroll wheel seems a lot smoother than in Chromium.

You can set the new tab page to open up to "Bookmarks," which I find useful.

Then, when you open a new tab, you'll see something like this:

Overall, Rekonq is a nice web browser, but it still needs some work.

desktop stuff

2011-07-08T05:49:00.000-07:00

Good 'ol Dedoimedo. He wasn't exactly complimentary in his Xubuntu 11.04 review, but he calls 'em like he sees 'em. He admits that he's no Xfce fan, and he clearly doesn't like Thunar (well, I'm not crazy about Thunar, either), but I found it interesting to read about the issues he had with Xubuntu.

I've used Xfce in Mint, from the Ubuntu repos, and that was fine. But everything I've read makes me think that Xubuntu is not such a good Xfce distro, and the things Dedoimedo says about it don't make it sound any better.

Mint's Xfce version, by the way, is now based on Debian Testing, and I'm getting the impression that it's looking nice and would be a better choice than Xubuntu. Myself, I like Xfce in SalineOS, just seems like a very nice implementation.

A weird thing about Xfce in Fedora 15, the other day I was using it and then logged out of the session and into a KDE session, and the KDE menu was replaced by the Xfce menu! Okay, that wasn't cool. But when I rebooted and went back into KDE, everything was back to normal. I'm thinking that it has something to do with menu Xfce uses now, but maybe it's just a Fedora bug.

Speaking of bugs, there was one in KDE4 around version 4.6.1 where the application launcher in the desktop right-click menu wasn't working. I first saw that in PCLOS, then in Fedora. That got fixed, but then another one popped up that I'm seeing in 4.6.3 in Fedora 14 and 15, the same application launcher starts up two instances of any application you open up. It only happens from the desktop right-click menu. I found the bug report and saw that Aaron Seigo has pushed the patch through, so that bug shouldn't be there when Fedora brings in the next KDE4 version (which should be soon; PCLOS has version 4.6.5 now, and Fedora seems bring them in not too far behind PCLOS).

So, even a KDE4 fanboy like me has to admit to still seeing a few bugs creeping up here and there in KDE4! Fortunately, both of these were in the same area, and didn't bother me much because the application launcher in the panel's main menu wasn't affected. But it adds fuel to the fire for those of you who don't like hearing that "the next version of KDE4 is the best!" :)

I'm enjoying playing around with Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 ("Natty"); it's a lot nicer than I though it would be. Quite a bit more configurable than I expected, too, but I found that I had to add a couple of tools to enhance the configurability, and my feeling is that those tools should be included by default. But isn't that the GNOME way of doing things (although, I guess techinically Unity is a separate thing from GNOME proper)?

Unity is good to work with. It has good tools for getting around the desktop, and generally it has a good flow to it, especially after you get used to it. I've found a few things that I don't like about it, and each of those are things that folks are complaining about, so perhaps they'll be addressed fairly soon. But I also found some web pages that have some really nice tips for using Unity, and those were some great finds (for example, see http://www.techdrivein.com/search/label/Ubuntu%2011.04). I tweaked the launcher (the panel along the left side) to make it a lot less, um, annoying and gaudy, but I'm thinking that it would be a lot nicer if it could be placed elsewhere on the desktop -- like at the bottom of the screen, maybe.

I think Unity is going to be great for a lot of people, and I can see where a couple of tweaks here and there will make it a lot nicer, so I'm looking forward to installing Ubuntu 12.04 next year. I think I'll have fun with it. Still, the next time I logged into a KDE4 session, I was happy to be back to a more "traditional" desktop! ("Traditional" in the sense of having a panel and normal menus.)

I've only seen a couple of very minor bugs in Natty so far, but a friend of mine has been talking about a "white screen of death" issue that he's seeing. I'm thinking that it's some kind of graphics driver problem, perhaps, because I haven't encountered it. Natty also comes with an option to log into a traditional GNOME session; I've taken a quick look at it to make sure that it works, but quickly switched back to Unity because it's just more interesting to me right now.

notebook

2011-07-07T09:15:00.000-07:00

I prefer using my big, old, clunky pc instead of a laptop, notebook, netbook, or whatever. But I needed a working, spare computer. I was going to just look for a used pc, or even a cheap new pc, but the convenience of a laptop eventually won the day.

The one I found? The HP Compaq Presario CQ56-219WM Notebook from Walmart. $278 bucks. 250 GB drive, 2 GB RAM, CD/DVD drive, 3 USB ports, 15 inch display, Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz.

I tried my Ubuntu Natty live CD on it. Then I tried Natty from a MultiSystem live flash drive (for info, see http://www.pendrivelinux.com/multiboot-create-a-multiboot-usb-from-linux/). Then I tried my Mepis 11 live DVD on it.

Then I used KDE Partition Manager from the Mepis 11 DVD and wiped out Windows from the hard drive. Deleted every partition that was there. Re-partitioned, then installed Mepis 11.

Looks beautiful, runs great.

Because the drives on my main pc are all filled up with other distros, I'm considering adding a Ubuntu Natty installation to the notebook, just to test things out, see how things go. Haven't decided yet; I'm just glad to have something else to get online with when I can use my main pc.

In the past, I was using an old Balance notebook as a spare. It originally came with Linspire, but I have Kubuntu Dapper sitting on it now. But I've been unable to get a broadband connection with it, and installing other distros on it has been, at times, problematic. It was time to retire it, quite simply. It served me well.

M.A.L. has a new MacBook Pro. I joke that I could have gotten 3 or 4 new computers for the price of that MacBook Pro. Actually, it's no joke, and I'm sure I'm as happy running Linux on my Presario as he is running OS-X on his MacBook Pro.

Hopefully, I won't end up regretting this purchase, but $278 wasn't much. Everything looks great so far.

unity ain't so bad

2011-07-06T07:27:00.000-07:00

I finally got a chance to take a look at Unity, from the Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) live CD.

I'm having no trouble getting around in there, and my feeling right now is that some people are getting all worked up over nothing. It's different from what people are used to, but it's just another look for Linux. It's still just Linux. Folks can choose to use it, or not.

With Ubuntu, I normally only install the LTS (Long-Term Support) versions, so I don't think I'll be installing Natty. I'll wait until Ubuntu 12.04 comes out next year. But I don't think I'll have any problem using Unity. I'll probably do what I always do, though, and add something like Xfce or Openbox.

Here are some screen shots of from the live CD, starting with a view of the workspace switcher:

My first thought about the workspace switcher was that it takes an extra click or two to do things, but I do like the design. It's easier to access than KDE4's desktop grid (see http://monksblog-malspa.blogspot.com/2011/06/kde4-desktop-grid.html) but otherwise it works about the same way.

A couple of Nautilus windows opened up:

The launcher along the left side kinda annoys me; too gaudy, too cartoon-ish. But it's easy enough to use. I installed CompizConfig Settings Manger and set the launcher to "auto-hide," but it also disappears when you maximize a window. Here's the terminal, maximized:

And the terminal, re-sized, with the launcher hidden:

The application menus show up in Unity's top panel instead of at the top of the application window:

A couple of different ways of accessing things in the menu:

Overall, I don't think I'll have any trouble getting used to Unity, but I don't think it'll become my favorite.

free throws from the heart

2011-07-06T06:27:00.000-07:00

Allan Guei, formerly a star basketball player at Compton High School in Los Angeles, won $40,000 dollars in a free throw shooting contest.

Guei, who is heading to Cal-State Northridge on a full scholarship, gave the money to the contest's seven other finalists.

"I've already been blessed so much and I know we're living with a bad economy, so I know this money can really help my classmates," he said in a release from the school. "It was the right decision."

One of the greatest "sports stories" I've ever read. In sports, people talk about players having "heart," but this kid took that to a whole 'nuther level. Beautiful.

Here's a link to the story, from Rivals: http://highschool.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=1237085

fireworks

2011-07-01T07:55:00.000-07:00

Considering all of the wildfires this year in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas, it doesn't seem like such a good idea for folks to be setting off fireworks, does it?

The kids aren't gonna be happy about it, but I'm kinda glad that I have a good excuse not to spend a bunch of money on that stuff this year!

awesome in squeeze

2011-06-23T22:32:00.000-07:00

A couple of (kinda boring) shots of AwesomeWM in Debian Squeeze.

The empty desktop, browser minimized (no desktop icons, of course):

And, showing the main menu, accessed here by right-clicking on the desktop, with the Debian menu opened up:

I'm not very good at using tiling window managers, probably because I really don't use them all that much. When I log into AwesomeWM, I actually have to open up man awesome because I always forget the key bindings and mouse bindings.

man awesome gives you the default mouse and key bindings, and other information, so I guess there's no reason to list those things here. man awesomerc and man awesome-client are a couple of other important manual pages.

The "official" site for AwesomeWM: http://awesome.naquadah.org/

A tutorial for folks new to AwesomeWM and tiling window managers: https://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/My_first_awesome

Wiki: https://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Main_Page

And, some good info at Urukrama's Weblog: http://urukrama.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/first-steps-with-awesome-window-manager/

openbox in lucid

2011-06-23T08:04:00.000-07:00

In Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid), I've kinda created a hybrid desktop with Openbox. I still have the default GNOME to log into if I want, and I also have LXDE installed (LXDE actually brought in Openbox), but most of the time I prefer to use an Openbox session.

I say "hybrid desktop" because in Openbox I have apps available from four desktop environments: GNOME, KDE4, Xfce, and LXDE. For example, Dolphin (KDE4) is the file manager I use most of the time; for screen shots, it's KSnapshot (KDE4). gnome-terminal and gedit, from GNOME, are my favored terminal and text editor, respectively. And my panel is xfce4-panel.

Right-clicking on the desktop brings up my customized Openbox menu. The Openbox menu also contains the Debian menu for a more complete listing of applications (added by installing the menu package from Synaptic).

However, for the menu on the panel, I'm using Ubuntu's applications menu (found at /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu).

I pulled in xfce4-panel from Synaptic, then added xfdesktop4, which allowed me to add a menu button to the panel. I've used pypanel and fbpanel in Openbox in the past, but xfce4-panel feels like a better fit.

The overall result: A nice, clean, simple, fast desktop -- easy to configure, easy to use.

Edit Xfce 4.6 right-click menu in SalineOS

2011-06-21T14:45:00.000-07:00

I finally figured out how to customize the right-click menu in Xfce 4.6 in SalineOS. It's a simple task in Xfce 4.4 and earlier versions because those versions have a handy menu editor (so does Xfce 4.8), but the menu in Xfce 4.6 has to be edited manually. Not for the faint of heart.

Here's how it looked when I right-clicked on the desktop in SalineOS:

I wanted to get rid of all that Thunar stuff ("Open in New Window," "Create Launcher," "Create URL Link," etc.) and show only the items that appeared under the Applications sub-menu, which looked like what appeared in the main menu from the panel:

Then I wanted to customize that menu.

Here are the steps:

Created ~/.config/menus directory.
Copied /etc/xdg/menus/xfce-applications.menu to ~/.config/menus/xfce-applications.menu.

At this point, the right-click menu still looks like the default. It has all of the Thunar stuff, and the “Applications” sub-menu contains everything you see if you click on the panel's main menu icon. To get rid of the Thunar stuff, I ran:

$ xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -v --create -p /desktop-icons/style -t int -s 0

See man xfconf-query. The above command creates a new property named “/desktop-icons/style” for the xfce4-desktop “channel” and gives it type “integer” and sets the type to 0 (=OFF).

To toggle back and forth between the two properties:

$ xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -v -p /desktop-icons/style -s 0

or

$ xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -v -p /desktop-icons/style -s 2

The following command gives a list of properties for the xfce4-desktop “channel”:

$ xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -l

And this command shows the same as above, but shows the settings:

$ xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -lv

To edit the menu, I edited ~/.config/menus/xfce-applications.menu. As an example, here are the steps for adding a menu entry for Google Chrome:

First, I looked in /usr/share/applications for the name of the .desktop file, then added the following line to both the “Include” and “Layout” sections:

<filename>google-chrome.desktop</filename>

To edit the actual application name that showed up in the menu:

# gedit /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop

There, I edited the following line:

Name=google-chrome-stable

Changes to those .desktop entries apparently don't take effect without starting a new session.

For Dolphin, I had to first copy the .desktop file from /usr/share/applications/kde4:

# cp /usr/share/applications/kde4/dolphin.desktop /usr/share/applications/dolphin.desktop

Then, followed the same steps as above.

Here's how it looks now when I right-click on the desktop in SalineOS:

bash history

2011-06-14T19:18:00.000-07:00

I use the history command in Linux quite a bit, but I don't really use it to its full potential. Most of the time, I'm simply typing the following to get a list of the commands in my BASH history:

$ history

That produces a numbered list of commands. Here are the last three lines of my output:

203 man man
204 exit
205 history

Then I can use "!(n)" to run the nth command, like this:

$ !203

Or else I'm using the "up" or "down" arrows to scroll through the commands in history, then pressing "Enter" to run a command.

Sometimes it's useful to see the actual text file where the history is stored. In PCLinuxOS, that file is ~/.bash_history.

When you're at a root prompt, typing history will show a list of commands that you've run as root, but not the list of commands you've run as a normal user, because the normal user's history and root's history are stored in different files. In PCLinuxOS, root's bash history is stored at /root/.bash_history. You'll need to have root access to even view the file.

There's tons of info out there on this topic, but here are a few good links:

http://maketecheasier.com/mastering-the-bash-history/2009/05/20

http://www.basicconfig.com/linux/linux_bash_history

http://www.ducea.com/2006/05/15/linux-tips-take-control-of-your-bash_history/

http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/gnu/bash/html_chapter/bashref_7.html

More information can be found hidden deep inside man bash, including the "Event Designators" section under the "History Expansion" heading:

Event Designators
An event designator is a reference to a command line entry in the history list.

! Start a history substitution, except when followed by a blank, newline, carriage
return, = or ( (when the extglob shell option is enabled using the shopt
builtin).
!n Refer to command line n.
!-n Refer to the current command line minus n.
!! Refer to the previous command. This is a synonym for `!-1'.
!string
Refer to the most recent command starting with string.
!?string[?]
Refer to the most recent command containing string. The trailing ? may be omit‐
ted if string is followed immediately by a newline.
^string1^string2^
Quick substitution. Repeat the last command, replacing string1 with string2.
Equivalent to ``!!:s/string1/string2/'' (see Modifiers below).
!# The entire command line typed so far.

wrong

2011-06-14T17:44:00.000-07:00

Found somewhere on the web:

kde4 desktop grid

2011-06-08T08:51:00.000-07:00

Found out about KDE4's desktop grid feature when I was looking at the KDE 4.0 Visual Guide: Desktop.

You activate it with ctrl+F8, and you can use the same key stroke to toggle back to desktop view. From the desktop grid, you can move applications from one virtual desktop to another, or click on a desktop to go there. Kind of like a fancy desktop pager, but I find it to be more useful. Here's how mine looks in Fedora 15:

fedora 15 kde

2011-06-08T08:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I downloaded the CD .iso of Fedora 15 (KDE spin) and installed it.

The installation itself went quickly -- a matter of minutes -- but it took me a couple of hours to finish setting things up. Most of that time was spent downloading stuff.

Post-installation, the first thing I did was log into Mepis 11, which is the distro that boots all my other distros, and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst so that the menu list showed "Fedora 15" in the title. Then I booted into Fedora 15 and disabled SELinux.

I had to run the following command to be able to access any files not on the Fedora partitions:

#usermod -u 1000 -g 100 steve

Then I ran KPackageKit to update the system. There were 145 updates available.

Next, I added mount points for all of my other partitions, and edited /etc/fstab accordingly. Then I installed Yumex, LibreOffice Calc, and LibreOffice Writer.

Fedora 15 came with only Konqueror for web browsing, so I installed Chromium. First I installed wget, then I ran the following commands to install Chromium:

$ su
# cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
# wget http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/spot/chromium/fedora-chromium.repo
# cd
# yum install chromium

I set up Chromium; then I added a color user prompt for the terminal by adding the following to ~/.bashrc:

PS1='\[\e[1;32m\]\u[\w]\\$ \[\e[0m\]'

As in Fedora 14, in Fedora 15 I didn't like the appearance of the analog clock widget. I went to Workspace Appearance > Desktop Theme and clicked on “Get New Themes...” Then I searched for “Glassified” and installed it. Then, in Workspace Appearance > Desktop Theme > Details tab, I changed the analog clock to the Glassified Analog Clock theme.

I installed the Smooth Tasks widget, which I prefer to use instead of the Task Manager widget. Installed my favorite image viewer, Geeqie. Finished personalizing the desktop, including turning on desktop effects and getting those set up, then used the following procedure for Flash for Chromium (using the instructions from http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flash):

First, I selected "YUM for Linux" from the Adobe page. This downloaded adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm . Then I ran the following commands:

steve[~/Downloads]$ su -c 'rpm -ivh adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm'

steve[~/Downloads]$ su -c 'rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux'

steve[~/Downloads]$ su -c 'yum install nspluginwrapper alsa-plugins-pulseaudio flash-plugin'

steve[~/Downloads]$ su

[root@steve Downloads]# ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/libflashplayer.so

My desktop:

trying to be enlightened

2011-06-02T06:09:00.000-07:00

I've spent a good amount of time playing around with the Enlightenment window manager. I used E16 quite a bit in the past, and I have E17 installed in PCLinuxOS. I know that lots of people rave about Bodhi Linux, which features E17, but I haven't tried it, because, while I enjoy using Enlightenment sometimes, I've never been completely won over by it.

The desktop looks pretty nice. Here's a shot of it, using the A-Black-S1 theme:

I've got two panels (called "shelves" in E17 talk) -- my main shelf at the bottom center, and another one at the bottom right. The reason I put one at the bottom right is because of the first little annoyance that I want to mention here: The show desktop button, called Deskshow, looks too much like a desktop pager, so I don't like having it on my main shelf.

Here's a close-up of that shelf, with the Deskshow icon on the left:

Why did they make it look like a desktop pager?

The icon on the right is for the Slideshow gadget. I'm glad that E17 has it, but I want E17's Slideshow to work like the one in KDE4. Check out its settings window:

You can't set the timer for more than 300 seconds; I happen to like my wallpapers to change every 6 minutes, or sometimes every 10 minutes.

The sub-directory to use for backgrounds is ~/.e/e/backgrounds. It looks like you can change it, but you can't. You can't simply select a directory for your backgrounds, you have to add them one by one by going to Settings > Wallpaper:

Also, I'd like to have wallpapers changing on Desktop #1 while having set wallpapers on the other three desktops, but Slideshow gives you the following choices: 1) set wallpaper on all desktops; 2) set wallpaper on current desktop; 3) set wallpaper on current screen. When I choose #2, the wallpapers change on whatever desktop I happen to be using. Nice, but not what I'm trying for.

When I hover the cursor over an icon on the shelf, the application name that pops up looks kinda cool, but at the same time, kinda annoying. Here, I'm hovering over the Synaptic icon:

It would be better, I think, if the name showed up just above the icon, instead of right on top of it.

Here's an annoying "feature" (and I think they do call it a feature -- it isn't considered to be a bug): When you open up a menu too close to the right edge of the screen, you can't see the submenus to the right. Here, I've right-clicked on Deskshow; the submenus are off the edge of the screen:

You have to move the cursor way over to the right before the whole thing shifts left so that you can see the submenus:

Why not just open the submenus to the left when the menu opens up so close to the right edge of the screen?

E17's Settings menu is really nice. There are tons of configuration options, some of which might even address some of the issues I've mentioned above:

It's really a beautiful window manager, and I certainly could be doing a lot more with it than I am. I have fun using E17, but after about a day (and sometimes after only a few hours), I get to a point where I just want to go back to a nice, normal, quiet desktop - KDE4, or GNOME, or Openbox or whatever.

Different strokes for different folks. I guess I still haven't been enlightened.

GNOME desktop right-click menu

2011-05-25T23:13:00.000-07:00

Contrary to popular belief, it isn't impossible to edit the desktop's right-click menu in GNOME. Here, I've added some frequently used apps to mine in Ubuntu Lucid:

To do this, I went to Synaptic and added nautilus-actions. The Nautilus Actions Configuration Tool shows up in the main menu under System > Preferences. Here's the main window:

To add an entry to the desktop's right-click menu, first click on the "Define a new action" button, or use File > New action. On the Action tab, put check marks in the "Display item in selection context menu" and "Display item in location context menu" boxes. Next, type something in for the Context label. You can also browse for an icon for the action on this tab.

On the Command tab, you can add a Profile label, and indicate the command to be used.

On the Advanced conditions tab, add a scheme called "x-nautilus-desktop." I think it needs to be the only scheme selected.

Go to Edit > Preferences > Runtime preferences tab to configure the ordering of the items:

At this point, you can save your changes. You may or may not have to restart GNOME. Use the same procedure to add more entries to the right-click menu.

I haven't found a way to add GNOME's main menu to the desktop's right-click menu, but I found something very close. I went to Synaptic and added gnome-main-menu, then used the command /usr/lib/gnome-main-menu/application-browser in the Nautilus Actions Configuration tool to add an entry for the Application Browser, which looks like this:

That's a pretty good tool, although not quite as good as GNOME's main menu, in my opinion.

mepis 11

2011-05-07T06:21:00.000-07:00

Screen shot from Mepis 11 live DVD, demo session.

scientific

2011-04-22T09:44:00.000-07:00

Screen shot from the Scientific Linux 6.0 live DVD:

This is GNOME 2.28.6, but it comes with KDE 4.3.4 and IceWM 1.2.37. The default web browser is Firefox 3.6.14. Hoping to add the system to my multi-boot set-up soon!

gulag

2011-04-20T18:13:00.000-07:00

I recently finished the book Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum, about the system of concentration camps in the Soviet Union. The camps were spread all over the Soviet Union, and held political and criminal prisoners -- often under appalling conditions. The story made me think hard about Nazi Germany, slavery in the Americas, and other terrible things that humans have done to each other over the years. The book, published in 2003, was a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

the future, the present

2011-04-19T21:03:00.000-07:00

Little boys, watching the high school varsity baseball game at Del Norte H.S. in Albuquerque. These kids were taking a break from their work-out on the track -- note the baton in the hands of the boy in the middle.

The Del Norte Knights' dugout:

Our flag, flying high on a windy Albuquerque afternoon:

#!

2011-04-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

Landor's review of Debian-based CrunchBang 10 r20110207, which features the Openbox window manager:

http://landorsplace.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/it-doesnt-go-snap-crackle-pop-it-goes-crunchbang/

Sounds like a distro I might be trying out soon!

waiting for mepis

2011-04-18T09:18:00.000-07:00

It's been about two months since Debian Squeeze was moved to "stable," but Mepis-lovers are still waiting for the final release of the Stable-based Mepis 11.

Mepis 11 is now in its RC2 phase, after slowly going through three "betas." I figure that there might be an RC3, but folks over at the Mepis forums seem quite happy with the current release candidate, so hopefully it won't be long now.

I never did install Mepis 8.5; I decided to skip it entirely and wait for Mepis 11, so I've still got Mepis 8 running here, using KDE 3.5 and sometimes Xfce 4.4 there. A Mepis fan since the 3.4 days, I can always count on developer Warren Woodford's solid, polished releases, and I'm really looking forward to this one; it'll be my first look at Woodford's work with KDE4.

clapton

2011-04-18T09:08:00.000-07:00

Taking a trip through Clapton-land, reading Clapton: The Autobiography, and listening to some CDs that I dug out of a box -- a lot of stuff recorded from stuff borrowed from my friend and co-worker, the late John Besse (a fine guitar-player himself).

I'm barely halfway through Eric Clapton's autobiography, but it's giving me a new-found appreciation for his music. Not that I wasn't already a fan -- I've always thought of him as one of the greatest musicians ever, and I was enjoying hearing his stuff on the radio long before I even knew his name.

This book, with Clapton dropping names left and right, is almost like a mini-history of rock-and-roll; he was influenced by, and played with, so many greatest blues players, so many ground-breaking artists from the 60s. I find it striking that the blues formed such a major part of his development, even though I sorta knew that the roots of rock-and-roll really are the blues.

Clapton chronicles his heavy drug use, which is a sad, but necessary aspect of the book. But, more interesting to me are the parts about his meeting and playing with Hendrix, Muddy Waters, members of the Beatles, the Who, the Stones, Buddy Guy, and many, many others.

When he writes about the women in his life, I feel him, as anyone else would who has known, for example, what it feels like to have known a woman who no other woman could ever replace, or who has ever found himself writing songs and poems about her, and thinking of her endlessly. Or, anyone who has really felt the blues, I guess!

And, listening to the music... actually, so far I haven't actually gotten past my CD recorded from the collection The Cream of Clapton. I keep playing it over and over again. I've got a stack of CDs to listen to, but this one, with tunes from when he was with Cream, like "I Feel Free" and "Sunshine of Your Love," and many others like "Bell Bottom Blues" and "Layla" (Derek and the Dominos), and other music, is so good to listen to that I haven't listened to anything else for a few days now. After reading so much about how he developed as a guitarist, and stuff about his techniques (which, I have to admit, I really don't understand much about), all of a sudden I'm listening to these songs and paying close attention to the guitars, and to the music, when in the past I'd probably have been more caught up in the singing, the lyrics.

On another bright, beautiful Albuquerque morning, enjoying this book and this wonderful music!

anybody's game

2011-04-13T22:05:00.000-07:00

Well, now that the San Antonio Spurs have choked away the best record in the NBA, losing at Phoenix, 106-103, a few words about the "favorites" in this year's NBA Playoffs.

In the East:

Chicago Bulls: Can't say enough about the job these cats have done under first-year coach Tom Thibodeau. Derrick Rose is a solid contender for the MVP award; Joakim Noah and Carlos Boozer are solid inside; the bench is decent; and this team plays defense. But, are they still a year away?

Boston Celtics: Just like last year, the Celtics struggled badly late in the regular season. Can they turn it on again? Or will they simply be the latest team to suffer from the Shaq Curse?

Miami Heat: Watch out, folks. For all their shortcomings (for one, a lack of any stand-out players besides their Big Three of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh), this is still a very dangerous team.

Orlando Magic: Hard to know what to expect from this team, but they do have arguably the best player in the league in center Dwight Howard. The Magic aren't to be taken lightly.

In the West:

San Antonio Spurs: What to make of this team? They dominated most of the regular season, but they're looking very beatable right now. Is this Tim Duncan's last hurrah?

Los Angeles Lakers: The title still goes through L.A. The defending champs are still the team to beat, unless and until somebody knocks 'em off.

Oklahoma City Thunder: I thought Kevin Durant had an off year because his rebounding average dipped so much. Still, the young fellah led the NBA in scoring for the 2nd straight year. The Thunder have a lot of nice pieces, and the acquisition of Kendrick Perkins from Boston certainly didn't hurt. Could this be the year they break through?

Dallas Mavericks: Dirk Nowitzki and the Mavs have to actually do something in the playoffs before I'm gonna start paying much attention, but it sure would be nice to see my boy Shawn Marion make some noise.

I think these playoffs are wide open. Each of the above teams has a realistic shot at making it into the Finals. I'm not gonna try to predict the outcome, but here's how I hope it'll turn out:

Chicago vs. Oklahoma City for the title. If those two teams make it... flip a coin, because I'd be ecstatic to see either team win it all.

bayless?

2011-04-13T21:03:00.000-07:00

Yeah, Jerryd Bayless, the 6'2" guard from Phoenix, who starred at St. Mary's H.S. and the University of Arizona, deserves that question mark following his name.

The record will show that the Toronto Raptor finished this season averaging a little over 9 points per game in a little over 20 minutes per game.

But he saw some good minutes in the month of April (almost 38 minutes per game), started in 7 of 8 games, and produced to the tune of 22.5 points per game. It should be noted, however, that the Raptors lost 6 of those 8 games.

Bayless just finished his third year in the NBA. He came out of school early, and he turns 21 in August. He's already suited up for three different teams.

He's shown that he can score, and he seems to do fairly well when he gets the minutes. But, right now, he doesn't seem to really light it up off the bench. He's no "Microwave," at least not yet.

What will the future hold for him? They say there's always a roster spot in the NBA for a guy who can score, right? But, where does he fit in? He isn't your prototypical point guard, but he doesn't have shooting guard size. He seems inconsistent.

I keep waiting for the guy to break out.

He's still young, but... I'm afraid the jury is still out.

bonds gets off

2011-04-13T17:17:00.000-07:00

Barry Bonds was found "guilty" of only the obstruction of justice charge. Mistrial on three counts of perjury after the jury failed to reach a verdict.

That's cool, I guess.

The main points here:

- Yes, Bonds used steroids.
- Yes, he lied about it.
- Yes, there should be an asterisk next to his name for the home run records.

But, I'm glad he got off, because I didn't really want to see him do time over this. We have too many people, too many men of color, and too many black men locked up as it is.

Besides, Barry Bonds has created a prison, and a hell, for himself.

file managers

2011-04-13T16:32:00.000-07:00

Some screenshots of various Linux file managers.

Krusader, in Mepis 8's KDE 3.5:

Konqueror, in Mepis 8's KDE 3.5:

D3lphin, in Mepis 8's KDE 3.5:

Nautilus, in Ubuntu Lucid's GNOME:

PCManFM, in Ubuntu Lucid's GNOME (from LXDE):

Dolphin, in SalineOS's Xfce (from KDE4):

Thunar, in SalineOS's Xfce:

And, finally, the old-fashioned command line -- xfce4-terminal in SalineOS:

gnome 3

2011-04-12T09:37:00.000-07:00

I read Prashanth's review of the new GNOME 3, which gave me a good idea of what GNOME 3 is all about, I think. I was almost tempted to take a look at it myself, by trying the Fedora-based live CD available for download at http://www.gnome3.org/tryit.html.

But, I figured it would be a waste of time. I'd probably only play around with the live CD once or twice. Also, there will probably be quite a few changes to GNOME Shell by the time I actually get around to installing a distro that comes with GNOME 3.

From what I've seen so far, nothing about GNOME 3 excites me. It bugs me that it seems to be aimed more at folks who use portable devices with touchscreens, and perhaps netbook users, than at PC users. Prashanth's comments about not being able to click on the desktop and not being able to configure the panels don't make GNOME 3 seem very appealing.

While KDE4 evolved into something that I really enjoy using, I'm not confident that the same thing will happen with GNOME 3. Perhaps I won't mind the "fallback mode" so much. We'll see how things go; most likely, I won't have to make a decision about it until Ubuntu Lucid and/or Debian Squeeze (I'm running GNOME in both) come to the end of their respective lives. At that point, if I find that I don't like GNOME 3, there's always KDE4 and Xfce; I can install and use one of those instead.

Dedoimedo on LMDE

2011-04-08T10:33:00.000-07:00

Hm. Dedoimedo gives Linux Mint Debian Edition a great review; compare that to his less-than-glowing review of Debian Squeeze.

I noticed that in the LMDE review, he made no mention of the tons of updates necessary to bring LMDE up to speed. LMDE needs regular "snapshot" .iso's (sort of like PCLinuxOS does with their quarterly releases), in my opinion.

I do agree with some of his points about Squeeze, though. Debian isn't up there with other distros when it comes to the out-of-the-box experience, or when it comes to the installation experience. SalineOS, for example nailed it here where Squeeze didn't.

But, as with most reviews, his focuses on initial impressions, not how things go over the long-term. I'm still not sold on either LMDE (based on Debian Testing) or SalineOS (based on Debian Squeeze) over Debian Stable when it comes to long-term usage. I don't mind struggling with a Debian Stable installation once every few years, knowing that it will end up being trouble-free and solid for the duration. LMDE and SalineOS are still too new for me to feel confident about how things will look down the road; and, in the end, LMDE and SalineOS are still essentially one-man-distro spin-offs of "the real thing." Not that I have anything against one-man-distros...

Since I prefer to use Stable instead of Testing anyway, I have yet to install LMDE; quite happy so far with Saline, though.

Not trying to knock either of those two distros -- I'm actually really glad to see both of them out there (along with Mepis). Both of them do something that Debian doesn't: They give users an easy Debian installation (or, and easier one than they can get from "straight" Debian), and a great out-of-the-box experience.

But, neither LMDE nor SalineOS can replace Debian Stable for me here. Yet. We'll see how things go in the future.

KRename in Dolphin

2011-04-07T10:46:00.000-07:00

There are several different ways to perform a bulk rename of files in Linux, but I've been using KRename in Dolphin to do the trick.

Here, I'm using Dolphin in Debian Squeeze, even though I'm using GNOME in that distro.

First, I open up Dolphin to the correct directory and select the group of files that I want to rename. Then I right-click on the files and, from the box that pops up, click on "Rename with KRename."

KRename opens up to the Filename tab, and within that, the Simple Filename tab. The default setting under "Filename" is to use the original filename. The window at the bottom shows the original name, and what it would be renamed to.

I use the "Custom Name" option. Adding a pound sign (#) at the end instructs KRename to number the files. You can see how the filenames will look in the window at the bottom.

Click on the "Finish" button, and the operation proceeds. When it's done, click on the "Close" button.

And, there you have it! Here's how the files end up looking in Dolphin:

spring = baseball

2011-04-07T09:37:00.000-07:00

Nothing like April and high school baseball!

From Albuquerque, NM:

Del Norte Knights at St. Pius X Sartans, April 5, 2011.

birthers

2011-03-29T10:16:00.000-07:00

Donald Trump:

"It took me one hour to get my birth certificate. It's inconceivable that after four years of questioning, the president still hasn't produced his birth certificate."
(http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20048318-503544.html)

Please. These "birthers" are beyond ridiculous. This is no conspiracy conceived years ago by Mr. Obama's parents, hoping for the kid to become president someday. And Mr. Trump needs to get his facts straight.

Seriously, in Hawaii, birth certificates are not public record, and only family members can get copies of them. But Obama put his out there a few years ago in response to all this nonsense. Check out the following web pages:

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/jun/27/obamas-birth-certificate-part-ii/

Happy now, birthers? I thought not.

We all know what this is really about.

fedora and pclos

2011-03-26T03:03:00.000-07:00

Okay, slow package management aside, and even though I don't care much for the PCLinuxOS forums, I'm more and more impressed by both Fedora and PCLOS as time passes. Seems that there's the possibility of breakage, perhaps more so than in some other distros, but I haven't had that problem come up (yet). Both distros just continue to impress me.

PCLOS recently updated to KDE 4.6.1 with no real issues other than that I had to set up the desktop all over again. I really liked how, when Firefox 4 came out, I was able to easily update Firefox via Synaptic within a day or two of FF4's release.

Fedora seems to have the best implementation of KDE4 among the distros I've tried (I'm using the KDE version of Fedora 14). Also, while Fedora might not be as nice "out-of-the-box" as PCLOS, it seems to be one of the most "solid" distros that I've got installed here.

Kudos to both.

new chrome/chromium logos - ugh!

2011-03-16T22:41:00.000-07:00

No, I don't like the new logos for Google Chrome and Chromium better than the old ones. Check out the article "New Chrome Logo."

The idea is that the new logos look better "as desktop icons." I don't use desktop icons, but I do use panel icons; and, fortunately, I can choose my own icons for my Linux panels.

For example, I'm using GNOME in Debian Squeeze. Right-clicking on my panel's Chromium icon and clicking on Properties brings up this window:

Clicking on the Chromium icon image there opens Nautilus up, showing the path to the .png image that's being used for the icon: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/chromium-browser.png.

Just to make sure that I'll still have the old icon available to use, I copied chromium-browser.png to another directory...

final four

2011-03-15T22:55:00.000-07:00

Talk about going out on a limb! Obama's picks to make the Final Four: Duke, Kansas, Ohio State, and PIttsburgh. On the women's side, he picks Baylor, UConn, Stanford, and Tennessee.

In other words, he went with the #1 seed every time!

How boring.

How about going with the approach mentioned in this article:

March Madness Advice: 3 Tips for How to Actually Enjoy the NCAA Tournament

#1: Pick your team to win it all.
#2: Pick some REAL upsets.
#3: Cheer for the games, not your brackets.

Yeah, that's kinda how I feel! It ain't March Madness without the upsets! I personally enjoy the tournament a lot more when I don't fill out a bracket, but that's just me -- I almost feel un-American in saying that! But, hey, here's hoping that NONE of the #1 seeds make the Final Four!

cold heat

2011-03-09T03:54:00.000-08:00

Last night, the Miami Heat dropped their 5th in a row, losing to Portland, 105-96, despite 38 points, 6 rebounds, and 5 assists from Dwyane Wade, and 31 points, 11 rebounds, and 8 assists from LeBron James.

Chris Bosh, the third man of Miami's "Big Three," managed only 7 points and 4 rebounds in 40 minutes of play.

What's kind of shocking is that the Heat now have as many losses as the Cleveland Cavaliers (LeBron's team last year) had all of last season! The Cavs went 61-21; Miami is now 43-21.

What a disappointment. Heat fans can only hope that this team can turn things around a make a run in the playoffs.

Even more disappointing for me is that, although I'm not a Heat fan, Wade is one of my favorite players; and another player who I like -- Mike Bibby, who was one of the best high school guards I've ever seen when he played at Phoenix's Shadow Mountain H.S. -- has joined the team. I'd like to see both of those guys do well, but it doesn't look like they're gonna make a difference for the Heat this year.

bodhi hit hard

2011-03-09T03:37:00.000-08:00

Ouch!

Dedoimedo reviewed Bodhi Linux after, as he say Bodhi's main dev contacted him and asked him to take it "for a spin."

Be careful what you ask for. The title: "Bodhi Linux -- Minimalistic and pointless."

Bodhi comes with E17, and I have to agree with some of Dedoimedo's comments about that environment. I have it installed in PCLOS, but I'm finding that I don't log into it very much. My experiences with both Enlightenment (both E16 and E17) have been kinda fun, but... the word "unprofessional" comes to mind, I guess.

Bodhi is another Ubuntu spin-off. As Dedoimedo says, "Seriously, do we really need another Ubuntu pimpage...?" Hm.

And, he sure did run into a lot of issues with the distro, even though he did state that it was an early release.

From his concluding comments:

   Bodhi Linux is pointless. There's no other word to describe it.
   The distribution lacks pretty much everything to be functional, starting with a text editor and continuing everywhere. There are many bugs and problems, both visual and functional. The desktop theme is designed to be stylish, but it manages to be cramped and archaic, with the old-looking font decorations that pale against the typical modern Gnome or KDE stuff.
   But even if you ignore the aesthetics, Bodhi Linux gives you no reason to use it. Absolutely everything you might expect from a typical desktop is missing, save the Web browser, which too lacks the bling-bling demanded by today's users [...]
   Dedoimedo says no to Bodhi. Perhaps one day.

grooveshark

2011-02-25T07:59:00.000-08:00

Over the past few days, I've been having a lot of fun with with an online music service called Grooveshark. Found out about it from Dedoimedo; check out his article: http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/grooveshark.html

I haven't created an account there (yet), but each morning I've been going there, searching for songs, and dragging and dropping them onto the playlist at the bottom of the window. The service works from inside a tab in Chromium, as shown in the screen shot below (running it in Fedora 14). The interface is friendly, and I can usually find whatever song that comes to mind.

There are ads along the right side, but almost all of them are blocked in Chromium by Adblock. Flashblock has to be disabled for the site, though. The settings include modes like "shuffle" and "loop," stuff you'd expect in any good music player.

face

2011-02-20T04:14:00.000-08:00

Artist: Clifford Lee

ssdd

2011-01-29T04:48:00.000-08:00

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

In the Linux world, it seems there's always been a very vocal segment expressing dislike or even hatred of particular desktop environments or distros. GNOME folks hated KDE. KDE folks hated GNOME. Debian folks hated Ubuntu. Criticism and insults constantly flew back and forth, aimed at users, developers, and the DEs or distros themselves.

Kind of sad, really. And, sadly, it continues with the emergence of KDE4. A good number of users can't stand it. KDE4 and its users and developers are barraged with criticism and insults.

It's the Linux way.

Often, upon closer inspection, things are not as good as they once seemed, and not as bad as they once seemed. Formerly quite KDE-centric, I eventually found that I actually liked GNOME; it wasn't the awful DE that so many people were describing it as. I began to see why many people preferred GNOME over KDE, even though at one time it seemed obvious to me that KDE was vastly superior to GNOME.

While some former KDE 3.5 users can't stand KDE4, I've come to enjoy using it more than any other DE; the venom being hurled at KDE4 looks, to me, like a twist on an old theme. Instead of hating everything GNOME, many former KDE 3.5 users now hate everything KDE4.

In the end, as always, you have to go by what you see in front of you. I have KDE 3.5, KDE4, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, and more installed on various distros on my system; I regularly go back and forth, from one DE or WM to the next. When I log into KDE4, I see a DE that looks great, works great, and is very enjoyable to use.

In the end, just as it didn't matter what GNOME-haters said, it doesn't matter what KDE4-haters say. What matters is what happens when I sit down to my computer -- how I feel, what I experience, what I see. Just because someone else doesn't like something doesn't mean that I won't, either.

Some say Linux is all about choice; but with all that choice comes a lot of rabid infighting. Perhaps the bickering spurs eventual improvement in the development of desktop environments and distros, but it continues to be, in my mind as well as in the minds of others, an ugly and unfortunate aspect of Linux -- but one that never goes away.

SSDD.

ubuntu ppa for xfce 4.8

2011-01-20T12:13:00.000-08:00

If you use Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) or Mint 9 (Isadora) and are interested in trying the new Xfce 4.8, there's a PPA for it:

https://launchpad.net/~alexx2000/+archive/xfce

more on screen edges

2011-01-20T06:09:00.000-08:00

A follow-up to my "screen edges" entry from 1-14-11:

The "screen edges" feature is one of those things in KDE4 that I use quite often. I understand that it's also a feature in Compiz, but I don't know anything about Compiz. I've also read about a window manager called pekwm that supposed to have customizable screen edges actions. I understand GNOME 3 also has "screen edges."

I found an article that mentions Brightside. That might be something good for me to try in GNOME, in Squeeze and/or Ubuntu. I've read that Brightside also works in Xfce and possibly in Openbox. Brightside actually looks better than what KDE4 has because in KDE4 you have to choose from a list of actions for your screen edges. Looks like Brightside allows you to make custom actions.

There's another screen edge action in KDE4 that I haven't seen elsewhere but that comes in very handy here, where you "grab" a maximized window at the top edge, which changes it to a smaller, re-sizable window that you can drag around the screen or over to an adjacent desktop. You can maximize a window by dragging it back up to the top edge.

Edit: I tried Brightside in Debian Squeeze, in GNOME, installed via Synaptic. It works fine; my only complaint is that there's no Linux manual page for it. To set it up, run brightside-properties from the command line; that opens up a settings GUI.

king

2011-01-18T13:31:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. A couple of nice finds from out there in internet land:

- An NPR piece about Clarence Jones, who helped draft the "I Have a Dream" speech. The piece includes excerpts from Jones' book, Behind the Dream. I want that book!

- Alex Haley's 1965 Playboy interview with King.

Xmarks acquired by LastPass

2011-01-18T12:37:00.000-08:00

Some notes under "Support" at the XmarksForChrome page:

Xmarks 1.0.3 [released 1/16/2011]
- Some users saw an error in Compare in their bookmark syncing with 1.0.1, we believe this to be resolved in 1.0.3.
Xmarks 1.0.1 [released 1/16/2011]
- Xmarks is under new management -- LastPass acquires Xmarks
- LastPass' password sync is now preferred LastPass Password Manager
- If download of profile fails, revert to previous profile.
- A number of missing labels on radio dialogs fixed.
- Invalid username/password error is now properly shown instead of a generic error message.

Looks like Xmarks itself will still be free to use in Linux. I have no use for a web-based password manager, so LastPass Password Manager is out of the question.

From the announcement about the acquisition:

Xmarks is transitioning to a "freemium" business model, the same model that allowed us to grow into a thriving, profitable business. The browser add-on and the vast majority of what users have enjoyed will remain free. Users can then opt to purchase Xmarks Premium for $12 per year, which includes new enhanced features like Android and iPhone mobile phone apps, priority support, and more. The Xmarks and LastPass Premium offerings are also available bundled together at a reduced subscription rate of $20 per year. For current LastPass Premium users, this means you can upgrade today for only $8 more per year.

cleaning up my gmail

2011-01-18T11:57:00.000-08:00

I got kinda tired of my messy Gmail. I had tons of messages in my inbox, tons of labels, just seemed like I had stuff all over the place.

I went to Settings > Labs and installed a few tools. Here's how Gmail describes them:

Hide read labels - The visible labels in the navigation bar will be hidden under the 'more' menu when they don't contain any unread conversations.

Nested Labels - Manage your email by sorting it into a hierarchy of labels. Add slashes (/) to label names to express inheritance. For example, if you want a Home label with two child labels named Kids and Shopping, create the three following labels: Home, Home/Kids and Home/Shopping.

Then, I spent some time cleaning out my inbox, creating some nested labels and switching things around. I adjusted some things on the main page, like collapsing the "Invite a Friend" section and the Chat section.

This looks better (too bad I didn't take a "before" shot!):

Here's a list of the other Gmail Labs stuff that I have enabled; again, the descriptions are provided by Gmail:

Create a Document - Allows you to create a Google Document from an email conversation or a new blank document if your keyboard shortcuts are enabled by hitting 'g' then 'w'.

Default Text Styling - Would you prefer Times New Roman to Arial, or perhaps large text to small text, in the e-mails you send out? Enable this lab, head over to the 'General' tab on the 'Settings' page, and change the default text styling to better suit your preferences.

Sender Time Zone - Should I reply to this mail or just call the guy? Ooops… it's 1 am. Sorry, I didn't mean to disturb…

Undo Send - Oops, hit "Send" too soon? Stop messages from being sent for a few seconds after hitting the send button.

more facebook concerns

2011-01-17T09:53:00.000-08:00

If you put stuff like your address and phone number in Facebook, you might want to take a look at New privacy concerns for Facebook over phone numbers, addresses.

Or just delete your Facebook account.

broadway jets

2011-01-17T02:47:00.000-08:00

Of the teams left in the NFL playoffs, I'm more of a Steelers fan than any other, but I like how the Jets are adding to the fun of the playoffs. They aren't trying to be politically correct, that's for sure. You either want someone to shut their mouths or you're enjoying watching to see if anyone can shut their mouths!

I don't really like trash-talking in sports, but in this case it does takes gall (and some balls) to get up there talk smack when you're about to face Tom Brady and the Patriots, and then go out and actually beat 'em. Joe Namath would be proud.

QuietWrite

2011-01-17T01:29:00.000-08:00

This one seems a bit odd to me: QuietWrite.com, a minimalist "online writing workspace," as they call it.

The idea is that the navigation bar at the top of most editors is distracting for writers; QuietWrite gets rid of the navigation bar and gives you what they call a "peaceful online editor." Here are some links to some recent reviews:

http://gigaom.com/collaboration/quietwrite-a-minimalist-web-app/
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/01/04/quietwrite-kill-the-noise-of-buttons-write-in-visual-peace/
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2010/12/quietwrite-is-a-mostly-blank-aqua-blue-space-to-think-in/

The interface lets you "publish" your writings, like a blog, or upload your writing to blogger.com, or you can just keep your writing stored but unpublished. But you can also use the interface without even logging in -- just click on the "Start Writing" button.

If you're interested, be sure to check out the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy to make sure you're comfortable with the app.

I've never felt that any editor's interface was particularly distracting, and I have a hard time understanding the need or usefulness of this application. Normally, when I need to do some writing and have it available online, I just put it in a Gmail draft or use Google Docs (when I'm not writing directly to this blog).

In either case, I'm not comfortable with putting any real personal stuff out there in "the cloud," and I don't feel any differently about using QuietWrite.

But I can see where some people might like it; I can see where it could come handy for some folks. And the interface does seem soothing and calming. Maybe there's something to it!

Yet, isn't all that stuff at the top of the browser window also distracting?

¡dos años!

2011-01-17T00:52:00.000-08:00

In a couple of weeks, it will have been two years since I started my blog!

298 posts. An average of about 12 posts per month.

I'll never be up there with my pal ComputerBob. He makes sure to post something at his site every day!

And I don't know how many people read the stuff I write, but I know that links to my pages show up in Google searches, so people who are searching on topics that I've written about might stumble upon my blog.

I basically started it as an outlet, so that I wouldn't bore my friends so much with emails about Linux, sports, etc. I still bore them with that stuff just as much as ever, I'm afraid.

But it's been a relaxing venture, and a fun one. It doesn't matter to me how many people read it, even though I do hope that a few people enjoy it or find something helpful or useful in it.

nfl playoffs

2011-01-16T23:25:00.000-08:00

The NFL, where they play the games on the field, not on paper.

Check out this BCS-style NFL scenario: Since New England finished 14-2 and Atlanta finished 13-3 in the regular season, easily the best in their respective conferences, they would play each other for the mythical NFL championship.

Oops... both of them got put out? You mean #1 and #2 in the regular season don't get a free ticket to the Super Bowl? Novel concept, this playoff thing.

chromium in fedora 14

2011-01-15T00:11:00.000-08:00

Commands I used to install Chromium web browser in Fedora 14:

$ su
# cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
# wget http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/spot/chromium/fedora-chromium.repo
# cd
# yum install chromium

I found those instructions at: http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2010/install-chromium-on-fedora-using-yum/.

You can also accomplish the same thing by going to http://repos.fedorapeople.org/, clicking on "fedora-14," and pasting the contents of the next page into a new text file at /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-chromium.repo. Then install Chromium with yum or Yumex.

screen edges

2011-01-14T23:58:00.000-08:00

I like to take advantage of KDE4's screen edges settings. In PCLinuxOS, I access the configuration tools from the main menu:

System Settings > Workspace Appearance and Behavior > Window Behavior > Screen Edges

Or:

Configure Your Desktop > Workspace Appearance and Behavior > Window Behavior > Screen Edges

In the Screen Edges module, in the Active Screen Edges section, I set the behavior of the screen when the cursor hits the corners of the screen.

Upper left and Lower left (as shown above): Present Windows - All Desktops

With this setting, moving the cursor to either of the corners on the left side gives me a spiral tile view of each of the apps I have open:

Upper right: Show Dashboard

This brings up my widget dashboard:

Lower right: Show Desktop

That one, of course, toggles between minimizing/maximizing all windows.

I left the Window Management section at the defaults. In the Other Settings section, I use the "Only When Moving Windows" setting for "Switch desktop on edge." That's nice for dragging windows to other destkops.

fedora 14

2011-01-03T10:12:00.000-08:00

Prior to last week, the only .rpm distro I'd installed and used was PCLinuxOS, but I've had my eye on Fedora, Mandriva, and openSUSE for a long time.

I finally downloaded the Fedora 14 KDE live CD. It ran fine on my hardware, so I decided to install it, adding it to my multi-boot set-up.

Fedora 14 looks great! Most of my experience with package managers has come with apt-get (and Synaptic), so I'm still learning my way around yum and its front-ends, KPackageKit and Yumex. And I had to do a fair amount of tweaking to get everything in my multi-boot set-up working smoothly.

But the system was just about ready to go out of the box. They didn't include OpenOffice on the live CD, so I installed OOo Writer and OOo Calc. I wasn't crazy about the default appearance, but I tweaked KDE4 to make things look more comfortable.

I enabled the rpmfusion free and non-free repos and then installed codecs so I could play .mp3 files.

KDE4 desktop effects didn't work out of the box on my hardware. I checked the name of my graphics drive:

$ lspci | grep -i vga
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV41.1 [GeForce 6800] (rev a2)

Then, I made sure I had the latest kernel:

# yum update kernel*

Then I ran this:
# yum install kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs

Then I rebooted, and after that I was able to enable desktop effects.

I don't know how important SELinux is, but I found the pop-up messages to be annoying, so I disabled SELinux by editing /etc/selinux/config:

SELINUX=disabled

The default web browser was Konqueror. Uncool. Google Chrome and Chromium were not in the repos. Also not cool. So I went to the Google site and downloaded Chrome.

On the panel, I replaced the Task Manager widget with the Smooth Task widget, which I prefer. Another little tweak was to install the Glassified theme (Workspace Appearance > Desktop Theme > “Get New Themes...”) so I could use the Glassified Analog Clock (Workspace Appearance > Desktop Theme > Details tab > change the analog clock to the Glassified Analog Clock theme). The Glassified analog clock looks better than some of the other themes' clocks that I've tried.

My main concerns have to do with how things will look over the long term. I want to see how well yum handles things and how well I come to like yum, KPackageKet, and Yumex in comparison to Synaptic. And, since Fedora releases a new version about every six months, and the current version is supported only a month after the second version down the line is released (F14 will receive support until a month after F16 is released), I'm interested in seeing how I like Fedora after one or two new versions.

But they've put together a nice release. I haven't been seeing any flaws or bugginess.

My Fedora 14 desktop:

My widget desktop:

the little guy

2010-12-22T13:47:00.000-08:00

Sports is all about the underdog, the little guy.

Earl Boykins, 5 feet 5 inches, out of Eastern Michigan University, born in Cleveland. How do you measure heart? Boykins is in his 12th season! OK, so he's never been a superstar, and he's had to come off the bench a lot. But he's had some good years. And how many so-called basketball players never make it the NBA, let alone hang in there for 12 seasons? Gotta love it.

Oh, yeah, and he dropped 22 points on the Lakers last night as the Bucks won at the Staples Center!

widget dashboard

2010-12-22T09:17:00.000-08:00

My widget dashboard in KDE4 in Linux Mint Isadora. Nothing fancy, just a few tools.

MultiSystem

2010-12-22T09:02:00.000-08:00

For the first time, I created a bootable Linux USB flash drive. I used the MultiSystem application (http://www.pendrivelinux.com/multiboot-create-a-multiboot-usb-from-linux/) with Ubuntu Lucid to add a couple of distro's live CD sessions to a 4 GB flash drive.

I had to go into my BIOS and change the boot order, and I after doing that I was able to boot into live sessions of Linux Mint Debian and Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick).

Works good; the systems run much faster than from a live CD, and being able to put more than one on a flash drive is convenient.

I would use a larger flash drive (maybe 16 GB) for an actual installation, or to run a persistent mode; and, ultimately, it's cheaper to use CDs for live CD sessions than it is to use flash drives, although the prices of the latter continue to drop.

the scale of the universe

2010-12-01T15:42:00.000-08:00

An incredible presentation at this web page:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/525347

Makes ya feel a bit insignificant, doesn't it?

mice, mouses, meeces

2010-11-17T15:16:00.000-08:00

In computing, what is the correct plural for "mouse?" I prefer to say "mouses." The following from The Free Dictionary explains things:

http://encyclopedia.tfd.com/Computer+mouse

The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (third edition) and the fourth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language endorse both computer mice and computer mouses as correct plural forms for computer mouse. The form mice, however, appears most commonly, while some authors of technical documents may prefer either mouse devices or the more generic pointing devices. The plural mouses treatsmouse as a "headless noun."
Two manuals of style in the computer industry – Sun Technical Publication's Read Me First: A Style Guide for the Computer Industry and Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications from Microsoft Press – recommend that technical writers use the term mouse devices instead of the alternatives.