Here's a Joe Pass solo performance from late in his life. He's playing a custom ES-175 guitar that Gibson made for him and delivered to him in 1992, according to longtime friend and fellow guitarist John Pisano.
The guitar differs from stock ES-175 models in a few ways. It has a slightly thinner body, a single pickup in the neck position (which is like ES-175s with a single pickup, though "modern" ES175s usually are equipped with two pickups), an ebony fingerboard (instead of rosewood) and gold hardware instead of nickel (or chrome).
I create a text file. Then I push it to the server with FTP.
Without the Indexette addin, that would be it. But since I do use Indexette (which time/date-stamps entries indepenently of the file's own timestamp), I re-index the site via the browser, and the post appears.
This is the video I use when I'm testing systems to see how they deal with YouTube. The video is HTML5-ready, so it'll display in browsers on systems that don't have Flash installed or enabled.
It's a performance from late in Joe Pass' life, and it shows his way with a standard.
I had the vinyl of this record, and I probably listened to this track a thousand times. I never knew it was available on video.
I've spent just about a month with this new HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop that shipped with Windows 8. That means UEFI and Secure Boot.
And new hardware. We all know how difficult Linux can be with new hardware.
During the aforementioned month, I did a lot of work in Windows 8. I sent up my whole environment. Even installed Perl. And Python. (It's not like I'm a big-time hacker or anything, but I aspire.)
But it's time for me to get back to Linux. Except that I'm having issues.
Video: International Space Station Commander Chris Hadfield sings David Bowie's 'Space Oddity' ... in space
Not so much irony as planned coincidence, Commander Chris Hadfield -- who is very musical if this is him singing -- does David Bowie's "Space Oddity," aboard the International Space Station.
Hadfield has a YouTube channel, and it appears he really can sing.
Via Steve Kemp's list of static-site generators, I've just learned about the node.js-based Yeoman and Ruby- and Sinatra-based Middleman.
Kemp -- also the developer of the Chronicle Blog Compiler -- is using his own Templer system.
Keep track of all Steve's development on his GitHub page, which I'm putting here more for me than for you.
Unfortunately the Xubuntu 13.04 live DVD ate it.
I was trying to run Thunar with gvfs to open a file over FTP in the Mousepad text editor. The thing crashed and wiped out the data in the file.
So my Windows 8 post is gone.
No big loss, I suppose.
I'm rebuilding it (as a Xubuntu post).
To see if Mousepad is the problem, I installed gEdit in the live environment. You can do things like that with Linux: Try whole systems out with live media and even add software until your memory runs out.
It's fucking awesome.
If you see these words, it worked.
Linux on new computers is always dicey. Or it has been for me.
Right now I have a Windows 8-running (aka Secure Boot-equipped) HP Pavilion g6-2210us, and its AMD video chip is not playing nicely with 3D-accelerated video in Linux.
So GNOME 3 is unusable, Ubuntu's Unity is marginal.
But Xfce, in all it's 2D glory, looks perfect.
I've used OpenBSD as my primary desktop OS before, but it's been a long time. Since then my main laptop has run Linux -- a bit of Fedora and Ubuntu and a whole lot of Debian.
I still dabble in OpenBSD, and I've done a few installs of version 5.2 recently on older test hardware.
I love the whole vibe of the project: the care that is taken with the base system and even the ports and packages that you add later, the like-clockwork development schedule that puts incremental improvement and not breaking things ahead of whiz-bangery, the best documentation anywhere (they care about the man pages and offer a by-your-own-bootstraps FAQ).
It feels solid. I've run every BSD I could at one time or other (FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD, PC-BSD, GhostBSD, DesktopBSD) and have had more success with OpenBSD than any other. That's me. And my hardware.
I've had the Lenovo G555 for about 2 3/4 years at this point, and I've had another part fail -- the battery.
A laptop battery losing its ability to hold a charge after two years is by no means unusual.
Laptop batteries can be pricey. I've seen them go for $90 -- and that's for a computer that's worth maybe $30.
When my LCD power inverter went when I had the Lenovo for about two years -- a bit early -- and I was able to replace what is usually a $50 part by spending $9 and change on eBay, I decided to look around before committing to a new battery.
I saw aftermarket batteries going for anywhere from $25 to $65. That's quite a range. Some claimed to be better. Those offered a two-year warranty. Most of the time, it would take another $5 to $8 in shipping to complete the transaction.
I'm experimenting with a feed out of this Ode site whose sole purpose is to originate and archive my posts to social-media services such as Twitter.
Ideally I will be pointing the RSS of a specific subset of posts either at Twitter directly, or at http://dlvr.it, and the only things I will be posting to social networks will both originate and live here.
This is a "push" system that doesn't gather any responses to these social-media postings, but I could always gather and repeat that history here, provide a link to same, or just forget about it and be happy having my "original" posts contained within this portion of my Ode blog.
Later: The super long URL in the header ran right out of the box, so I used bit.ly to shorten it.
The link referenced in the title is the URL to this very entry: http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog/social/posts/2013_0220_twitter_out_of_ode
Even later: problems with this method include: The link doesn't track from the blog to Twitter. Instead the Twitter post goes back to this blog entry. That might not be so bad -- Any link I want can be at the top of the blog post, and the reader can go from Twitter, back here, then to the outbound link.
But it would be better to at least have the flexibility of originating a Twitter post with a unique link and pushing that to the social-networking service rather than a link to a blog post. There is probably some way to do this with the Twitter API (and maybe even the Twitter-related Perl modules). Something to think about.
I have no way of knowing how good or bad InceptionHosting is in terms of service, but the UK-headquartered company has somewhat of a presence in the U.S. and is offering VPSes -- virtual private servers -- running Linux for prices beginning at 4 euros per month. The latest exchange rate puts that at $5.38.
If you have a few extra bucks a month and want to mess around with a VPS, I sure haven't seen anything cheaper.
I don't have time to look too deeply into this, but if you love the idea of analog synthesizers with gobs of patch cords going from one module to another, you may love vModSynth. Just look at the screenshot above (click it for a full-size view).
As developer Rafał Cieślak says:
vModSynth allows you to play with a modular synth on your computer. You are free to choose any modules you wish, you can connect them however you want, and you will hear the result immediately. The synthesizer intentionally resembles the look of a modular synthesizer (I was inspired by modules manufactured by synthesizers.com), and it imitates behavior of one.
I see via Planet Ubuntu that Ubuntu developer Mike Rooney, who had been blogging with geek-favored Octopress, has now moved to WordPress.
He acknowledges that most people seem to be moving it the other way (from WordPress to Octopress), but he cites a few things that he couldn't get past in the Ruby-on-one-side, static-HTML-on-the-other world of Octopress:
- Hard to set up on OS X
- Doesn't like Markdown
- Hates lack of copy flow
- Wants portability in composing entries (from machines without his private key)
WordPress has all of this, of course. It's not geeky sexy like Octopress, or the Jekyll project on which it's based.
Acknowledging that something isn't working for you and seeking something that does? Nothing wrong with that. And a whole lot right.
By the way, I love Markdown. And you can get it in WordPress
I decided to pull out a test machine -- the old Gateway Solo 1450, circa 2002 -- and try to install GNOME 3 in OpenBSD 5.2.
As you can see from the screenshot above, I was successful. Tips from Call for Testing helped.
This is an old laptop, so there is no 3D acceleration. That means it's Fallback Mode only for GNOME 3 on this machine.
But it's a working GNOME 3.4.2. Here is what I have in /etc/rc.conf.local:
ntpd_flags= # enabled during install
multicast_host=YES
pkg_scripts="{$pkg_scripts} dbus_daemon avahi_daemon"</code>
Here is my ~/.xinitrc:
exec /usr/local/bin/ck-launch-session /usr/local/bin/gnome-session
Though developers for OpenBSD have a reputation -- deserved or not -- as less than warm and fuzzy, the project is nothing if not transparent in terms of letting the world know what they're working on.
I'm sure other projects are as good at detailing what has changed from one release to the next. But this is one area where OpenBSD excels.
Look at http://www.openbsd.org/plus.html for the changes between OpenBSD 5.2 and -current (the current development version). Every change is in there.
Most of what's new in the 5.2 release can be seen at http://openbsd.org/52.html, and the full changelog is at http://openbsd.org/plus52.html
The source is always available and up to date on the web -- http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ and via the CVS version control system.
You can follow the latest in ports -- software you can compile and run -- at http://openports.se/.
It's not like other open-source projects don't make their source available because they do. But I find it very, very easy to figure out what's happening in OpenBSD because of the systematic way the project's developers go about their work, which includes detailing what they've done in these changelogs as well as in the man pages for the operating system.
If the graphical stars align, it looks like it's possible to run GNOME Shell -- and not just Fallback Mode -- in GNOME 3.x when running OpenBSD 5.2.
A lot of the progress in getting GNOME running on OpenBSD goes to the developers at m:tier (more here, who are also offering binary updates to the OpenBSD base system.
So what other BSDs offer GNOME 3 packages without a whole lot of trouble? I'm not sure any at this point.
I have run GNOME 2 and Xfce 4 in the past on both OpenBSD and FreeBSD (and Xfce 4 on DragonFlyBSD), and a familiar environment goes a long way toward making you productive in an less-familiar OS.
Thanks go to Rob Reed, creator of Ode, for coming up with the ShyPosts addin, which allows you to "hide" posts from your blog indexes yet have them available via their permalinks.
You can read about ShyPosts here and in the same place download the addin for your Ode site. The addin itself is small, and the instructions are short. For the most part they work, but I needed to refer to this forum post to figure out how to write a "rule" that lets ShyPosts know what to hide. If anything, the shyness_rules file is a great place to get a little practice in writing regular expressions.
A look at and how-to on installing GNOME 3 on OpenBSD 5.2 from Michael Dexter of http://callfortesting.org.
Read Dedoimedo's Linux-distro reviews, like these on Bodhi, Fedora, Netrunner and Crunchbang, this roundup of desktop environments and his top distros of 2012. And he loves CentOS.
No feelings are spared. If he likes it, you know he likes it. Also the other thing.
I'm testing Fedora 18 again. Yes, the live image. I didn't do an install, though I'm certainly thinking about it.
In this release's GNOME 3.6 desktop, at least a few applications -- all from GNOME proper -- like Nautilus are putting more functionality into the "global" menu that pops down from the app's icon in the upper panel.
While not catastrophic, it is problematic.
From where I sit, as long as most of an application's menu choices remain in its own window, putting anything in that app's panel-icon dropdown menu other than a superfluous "quit" does nothing to enhance the user experience.
More directly, having to go from the menu in the application's window to the additional menu in the upper panel to look for the functions you want just seems wrong.
For one thing, it kills discoverability, something that both GNOME 3 and Ubuntu's Unity seem overly fond of doing.
I've been changing my Ode body type settings over the past few days. I've switched fonts, sizes and line height.
I did take some inspiration from Rob Reed's Ode blog, especially on the line-height property in the css.
While I liked the Carme font I pulled from Google, it looked better on some devices (newer iPod Touch, systems running Linux) than others (older iPad, systems running Windows), and I wasn't crazy about the noticeable delay in text showing up on the screen while the client device pulled the font from Google.
So I went with Helvetica Neue, though I also like Arial and Verdana. Even plain sans-serif looks good. I might keep switching things up.
I still haven't yanked the Droid Sans Mono font I pulled from Google for code blocks. Since the rest of the type shows up on the page without delay, I don't think a late-blooming code font is much of a distraction. And I really like Droid Sans Mono.
The body type font size has been changing day to day. I went from 14px to 12px and now 13px.
I bumped the post headline font up six pixels to 22px. I could go bigger. I could go bold. Not just yet.
Fedora 18 has finally appeared in its final form after many delays. Largely responsible: a new Anaconda installer that has seen much criticism, mostly from users who like complicated manual partitioning. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I've always liked Ananconda. As far as I know, it's the only installer that can create any number of encrypted partitions -- in or out of LVM (logical volume management) -- and allow me to unlock them with a single passphrase typed once during boot. It also appears to be the only installer that can create a fully encrypted LVM installation while allowing another operating system -- like Windows -- to remain on the same disk.
What I'm trying to say is if the Debian installer would do these two things, I'd be a happy, happy camper.
Back to Fedora 18, aka "Spherical Cow." (I do like funny distro names more than serious Fedora names or stupid Ubuntu animal ones.) F18 offers a whole bunch of desktop environments in relatively (to very) new versions: GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, KDE and now MATE and Cinnamon. No Unity. A pity, perhaps. Or not.
I downloaded the network-install ISO, from which I could theoretically install any one of these environments.
I also downloaded a live image of Fedora 18 with Xfce 4.10. For the past many months, I've been using Xfce 4.8 rather heavily in Debian Wheezy. Debian Wheezy is never, ever going to get Xfce 4.10, even via Backports, as far as I know. Not that there's all that much difference between 4.8 and 4.10.
I've been playing with the load function in jquery. It works quite well. I'm going to be using it in a project very soon.
I spent much of yesterday fighting with WordPress to make it do what I want. Not having unfettered (or any) FTP access to the server didn't help.
Today I had a problem (caused by a previous experimental change) with my Ode site's RSS and fixed it in about two minutes. Before I started, I forked the theme by copying and re-dating its directory so I had a full backup. Then I removed the problematic line of code, and everything was as it should be.
Understanding how it works makes it easier to fix, modify, experiment and not lose your data in the process.
I'm not saying WordPress isn't a great system, but the simplicity of Ode is one of its strongest assets. Anything you know about HTML, CSS and Linux/Unix will help you. And Ode can help you learn about those things. Then you can apply that newfound knowledge directly to the rest of your work.
Is your screen blanking in Xfce despite your xscreensaver settings? I have the fix -- and this time it's for real
Some readers might have seen this post appear and disappear, appear and disappear again. That's because my first "fix" for this annonying Xfce problem didn't really work.
Neither did my second attempt. Nor my third.
Screw proverbs. The third fourth time now seems to be "the charm." That finally fortunate circumstance allows me to resurrect this entry yet again with my now-new onetwo-line script to keep the screen from blanking on its own -- without xscreensaver's help -- with a fix that has worked for me over the past couple of days. And this time I'm sure of it:
Here's a quick fix for Xfce users whose screens are blanking even though they have a much-longer screen-saving interval set in xscreensaver. This includes me.
Big-time free-software personality and developer Benjamin Mako Hill has moved his blog from PyBlosxom, the Python-coded Blosxom-style blogging system, to WordPress. He details his reasons in this post.
The title says it all: I just added the Axe Menu GNOME Shell Extension to my Debian Wheezy system.
After complaining a bit about the lack of a menu in GNOME 3/Shell and not liking the last GNOME Shell Extension I tried to get a menu back, I decided to go to the GNOME Shell Extensions web site again. There I found the Axe Menu. Liking it so far.
It's been awhile since the last "My Xfce desktop" post, and it's time for an update.
I've been tweaking things slowly since that previous post appeared. If I could definitively solve my screen-blanking problem, that would be nice. I keep thinking I've got it nailed, and then it returns.
One thing you might notice in the above image (click it, or here for a full-sized version) is that I'm back to Debian Squeeze's SpaceFun wallpaper. It's the best Debian theme design ever and is definitely not outclassed by what got picked for Debian Wheezy (in a process that, to me, appeared very, very broken).
While I continue to use Gmail for my work e-mail -- a decision enforced by my employer's move to Google Apps for Business, I've been seeking solutions for my personal e-mail that include less back-end effort and more flexibility on my part -- plus no spying/marketing in exchange for the service.
My chief concerns:
- I don't want to manage a full mail-server system
- I don't want Google/Yahoo/other spying on me and marketing to me on the basis of my e-mail's content
- I do want webmail -- I'm tired of client applications on the desktop
The third point in this list means that while I maintain a Mozilla Thunderbird (or in my case the Debian-rebranded Icedove) mail client on my Linux desktop, I'd much rather use webmail day to day and only use a desktop client application for occasional archiving.
Blog posts by programmers don't often get me feeling sentimental. This one did:
When our daughter was in kindergarten, her class put on a show at the end of the year. It was during the school day, so I couldn’t go, but my wife videotaped it.
The highlight was the final song. As a slide show ran photos of the kids on the first day of school and doing activities during the year, they sang:
Kindergarten’s the best kind of garden,
The best kind of garden for me.
In the background of the video’s soundtrack, you can hear the muffled sobs of all the moms in the audience. The last day of kindergarten, like the first day, is a big deal—one of those milestones that children typically can’t remember and parents can never forget.
It reminds me to cherish our daughter, to remember the good times and to make many more of them.
(Thanks, Dr. Drang, for sharing this.)
I was looking over old threads in the Ode forum and this one introduced me to Carme from Google Web Fonts.
I went to Google Web Fonts, searched for Carme and followed the instructions, calling an additional stylesheet (from Google) into my Ode theme and then calling the Carme in the Logic theme's own CSS.
I like it. It looks better on my Linux (Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3) desktop than it does on Windows 8 right now, so I'm not sure I'll stick with it. But for now I will.
I keep an eye on Planet GNOME and World of GNOME to follow the project, and via the Planet site I noticed GNOME developer Bastien Nocera's post on new features in GNOME 3.7 that will be polished through the 3.8 release. Those features include a search panel (to control search output; I really don't know what this means), a notifications panel to manage and filter notifications on the desktop and, best of all, a privacy panel that, as Bastien says:
... would be the go-to place to ensure your identity isn't leaked on the network, or visible on your system. You can see how some of the features in the two aforementioned panels will also affect your privacy.
On this last topic, GNOME executive director and (FaiF podcaster) Karen Sandler writes more about the increasing emphasis on privacy in the GNOME desktop.
More GNOME: From the As Far As I Know blog, Give a detail this Christmas follows GNOME's Every Detail Matters project and shows some of the new features that developers are bringing to GNOME 3. And there are pictures. Personally I like the little headphone icon that appears in the upper panel when you plug in headphones. (!!) If you want to know more, go to the GNOME Every Detail Matters wiki page.
I'm a big fan of Steve Kemp's Chronicle Blog Compiler, available direct from Steve's site and in package form from Debian and Ubuntu.
I noticed recently that two Debian Developers, Gregor Herrmann and Nathan Handler, have moved their blogs to the Perl-based, static-rendering system.
As with many static-blog compilers out there, I don't really have Chronicle figured out from a user perspective -- I run Ode, which isn't at all static but is coded in Perl and is fairly easy to get running on most shared hosts.
One of Chronicle's notable features is native comments. I don't know of many other flat-file (static or dynamic) blogging systems that don't rely on Disqus for commenting.
Aside from eliminating a task for developers, a big reason to use Disqus and not to code a native commenting system could be the spam problem. For that reason, Disqus might very well be the best solution out there. But I've seen many users of blogging software who are uncomfortable (or not comfortable) outsourcing their comments to a third-party site.
Steve Kemp has a whole site/service/program at BlogSpam.net that deals with the spam problem in blog comments. It's definitely worth a look, as is the whole of Chronicle.
However you look at it, the option to host your own comments is a good and viable one, as is the option to outsource them to Disqus or even Facebook, as Anil Dash does.
Note: While I remain interested in the landscape, if you will, of blogging software, I remain committed to Ode as my personal-blogging platform of choice, even as my "professional" life is all about WordPress. More on this in an Ode-focused post in the near future.
Since Amazon has an open API for its s3 Simple Storage Service, other cloud vendors (and even YOU) can spin up a similar service.http://blog.stone-head.org/s3tools-simple-storage-service-for-non-amazon-providers/
Rudy Godoy shows how you can use s3tools in Linux to tap into s3-like services both at Amazon and elsewhere.
I picked this up entirely by accident:
A few years ago, if you were running a graphical desktop under the X Window System in Linux and wanted or needed to kill the X server, you typed ctrl-alt-backspace.
When that "went away," I thought that was it.
But that's not it. You can do the same thing that ctrl-alt-backspace did with:
alt-PrintScreen-k
The "PrintScreen" is your print-screen key. Mine is labeled PrtSc.
So if you want to kill your X session from the keyboard, go right ahead.
I'm interested in learning about version control. To pursue that interest, I am teaching myself git.
I installed git on my Debian Wheezy laptop and have started accounts on both Github and Gitorious
Among the things I've learned are how to "pull" from a remote git repo (in my case one on Github), how to commit my changes locally and push those changes to Github and how to delete a file in a git repository and subsequently push that commit back to the repo.
While all is not clear, the fact that I could get going in such a short time must mean something. Things like branching and evaluating patches are beyond me at the moment, but hopefully I'll be able to learn more as I go.
The git website is a great place to start. Everything is explained very well, and the site offers the free Pro Git book in a number of formats.
Among the available references, there's an O'Reilly book (always the symbol of good taste in tech literature).
A peek at the Planet Python blog aggregator (I'm a big Planet blog fan, in case you didn't know) clued me in to a project I'd never heard of before: Nikola, a static website/blog generator.
I get on any other computer, any other OS (even Windows and Mac OS), or any other desktop environment, and I find myself mousing into the top-left (or "hot") corner to get my application panel and search/launching dialog.
That works in GNOME 3. I do it all the time.
You can also hit the "super" (aka "Windows") key to make the same thing happen. And I do that, too.
But I'm so comfortable mousing into the hot corner that I continue to do it in environments that aren't GNOME 3.
You know what happens when you mouse into the corner in these other OSes/DEs (excepting Ubuntu's Unity, which shares more technology with GNOME 3 than you might care to admit)?
Nothing.
Thanks to readers who have helped me, and to the Fedora Project for offering a very solid GNOME 3.x environment in what is now the Fedora 18 beta, I'm getting the hang of working in GNOME 3.6 (as opposed to the GNOME 3.4 version of the desktop environment in Debian Wheezy).
My previous complaints centered on what I thought were the absence of the "Connect to Server" and "Create Empty File" functions in the Nautilus file manager, now pretty much called Files in the world of GNOME.
Debian is boring. Releases happen every two years, give or take. Developers spend months and months chasing bugs while other Linux distributions crank out release after release.
But Debian gets better as it inches toward release. And if you're running the Stable distribution (Squeeze instead of Wheezy, still in Testing) you can enjoy the goodness for the next two years -- or three if you wish, as Stable gets an extra year of security patches as Old Stable after a new Stable version is released.
Debian isn't quite as boring as it is conservative. Even though Debian's Testing is more stable than many other distributions' actual releases, you can expect some bugs. And if you follow Testing, as I am at the moment, you get to see some of those bugs get fixed.
Before:
After:
Using the Clock app in the upper panel of the Xfce 4.8 desktop in Debian Wheezy, I didn't like the stock way date and time was displayed as just time only in the default:
08:23 AM
Luckily when you right-click on Xfce's Clock in the panel, left-click on Properties and choose "Custom Format" under Xfce's Clock options, you can use anything that the Unix/Linux date command switches offer. Go to man date and study up for every single option.
At first, I used the easy %c, which is one of a few options in date that bring a whole lot of information into your clock:
%c
Fri 02 Nov 2012 08:23:27 AM PDT
That's good but not exactly what I wanted. I spent considerable time looking at man date. This is more complicated but gives me output more like I want:
%A, %B %-d, %Y - %-I:%M %p %Z
Friday, November 2, 2012 - 8:23 AM PDT
I now have the full day of the week, full month, 12-hour time and time zone -- all with no "leading zeroes."
Lately I've wanted to save a little space, so I use %b instead of %B:
%A, %b %-d, %Y - %-I:%M %p %Z
Friday, Nov 2, 2012 - 8:23 AM PDT
Explanation: All of these parameters are explained in man date. You use a minus sign to remove the leading zeroes in dates and times when they are in single digits: %-d and %-I instead of %d and %I
Spending some time with man date is the best way to get exactly the output you want in your Xfce (or any other Unix-based) clock application.
Also: If you want to go from 08:23 AM to 8:23 AM -- removing the leading zero, use this:
%-I:%M %p
8:23 AM
I pretty much included this last one so I'll remember it. But if I didn't, man date is my friend.
I'm still trying to get to the bottom of the erratic cursor movement when the Alps touchpad in my Lenovo G555 laptop is in tap-to-click mode.
Having found that this happens only rarely in GNOME, I've tried to find the differences between touchpad configuration in GNOME 3 and Xfce (version 4.8 is what I'm running in Debian Wheezy).
Running a diff on the files has produced a few differences, but nothing that affects sensitivity.
So I've been delving into the many settings of Synaptics and Alps touchpads -- all accessible through interfaces meant for Synaptics touchpads, by the way.
In most modern Linux distributions, you can control the touchpad through the synclient utility. While man synclient helps in figuring this out, you need to look at man synaptics much more closely. That's where the keys to the touchpad-controlling kindgdom really lie. They tell the truth, but that's where they are.
One thing I did was write a couple of scripts that turn tap-to-click on and off. I don't think these needed to be in /usr/local/bin, but I put them there anyway. They did need to be executable. In Xfce I made program launchers on the desktop that call both of these scripts so I could turn them off and on, using the touchpad's tap-to-click when I want and turning it off when it's annoying me.
There are usually system utilities that can help you do this, but they're usually a few menu clicks away, and Xfce in Debian Wheezy -- at least the way I have it set up -- doesn't offer to toggle this behavior for me. And the scripts with launchers are faster anyway.
I'll go into detail about all of this in the near future when I have all of the settings more set.
For now I'm experimenting with touchpad sensitivity. There are a few parameters that seem to control this, and I began by focusing on FingerHigh.
I raised the number to reduce the sensitivity of taps on the touchpad, meaning it takes a harder tap to actually register a tap.
Here is how I set it in the terminal:
$ synclient FingerHigh=35
I think the default value was something like 12. When I got to 40, tapping pretty much stopped working. So I'm working with FingerHigh=35 for now.
Another parameter I've been experimenting with is PalmDetect, which is supposed to ... detect your palm.
Once I get the scripts in better shape, I will both publish them on this site and in a publically available repository.
This kind of command-line tinkering and extremely simple scripting is not at all complicated. It's the kind of hacking anybody can do.
Touchpad sensitivity is a problem I've seen not just in the Lenovo G555 but in Windows 7 as well as in Linux, and the lack of control that users in Windows have over behavior of the hardware is a terrible situation.
I've been sampling Fedora 18 -- now in alpha -- via the live images mostly as a way to test and come to terms with GNOME 3.6.
I'm currently running GNOME 3.4.2 in Debian Wheezy, but I've wanted to know what was going to be so different in newer versions of the desktop environment.
I'm grappling with those differences, as you can read in posts right around this one. While it seems like this is time for GNOME 3 to settle in a bit, it looks like that will happen maybe a year from now.
Coming at this as a user of GNOME 3 (and I find myself actually liking the environment that many have avowed to leave behind), Fedora 18 is looking like a very good release for desktop users.
I've been comparing it to the Ubuntu 12.10 GNOME Remix, which is sticking with a less-hobbled Nautilus 3.4 along with a GNOME 3.6 base. So far, Fedora 18 appears to be superior. It handles my hardware (and touchy Alps touchpad) better and seems more solid, even in its current alpha form.
Even though the first Ubuntu GNOME remix is a final release, it seems pretty unfinished, and I expect things to be a lot better if and when the Ubuntu 13.04 GNOME Remix is released.
But for now Fedora 18 looks like a very promising way to run a solid GNOME 3 system. Or as solid as it gets, anyway.
Note: Look at this page from the GNOME Project. It offers an ISO that includes GNOME 3.6. I've heard that it's Fedora with a newer GNOME. GNOME is also hosting ISOs for the Ubuntu 21.10 GNOME Remix.
And on the Getting GNOME page, GNOME recommends not only its own ISO but Fedora proper, OpenSUSE, Arch and Debian.
GNOME 3 update: 'Connect to Server' lives in GNOME 3.5/3.6, I rant about features being moved and removed, and I fix my GNOME 3.4 problem in Debian Wheezy
In my test of the Fedora 18 Alpha release, I was left thinking the "connect to server" feature in the Nautilus file manager disappeared in versions 3.5.x and 3.6.x of the GNOME desktop environment.
Thanks to readers, I learned that "connect to server" has moved to a separate application that you call from the shell with the not-so-friendly name Nautilus-connect-server, as seen in the image above.
You can still get to ftp, sftp, secure and unsecure webDAV and Windows shares via this application. Again, it's a separate application from Nautilus proper. And when you do call it and go to a server, Nautilus is the application that opens. It's like using Gigolo with Thunar in Xfce, though Thunar has recently added the ability to go to remote servers without Gigolo's help.
Yes, GNOME is separating a feature from its file manager while Xfce is adding that same feature to its own file manager.
What do you think of that?
I am happy that "connect to server" remains in GNOME 3, but I do have something to complain about:
One thing that seems to be missing from Nautilus in Fedora 18 is the ability to create an empty file from within the file manager with the "Create New Document" feature. I do this all the time: I create an empty file, open it in Gedit and then write the file and name it. It's already in the exact directory where I want it. Without this feature, I have to open Gedit, start the file, name it, then navigate to where I want it to be and finally save the file.
It's not a huge deal to create the file in Gedit, then save it where I want it. But this is another case of a feature ("Create New Document") disappearing in Nautilus because the developers feel it's no longer needed. It's absence adds an extra step to my workflow.
I use "Create New Document." I will miss it. It's absence is not a huge inconvenience. But this removal of functionality doesn't help me, or anybody else, in any way.
In this same vein, I'm glad you can still "connect to server" in GNOME 3, but why take the functionality out of Nautilus proper and put it in a hard-to-find, poorly named Nautilus-connect-server? The feature didn't die, but it's harder to access. How does that help?
Heading back to GNOME 3.4.2 in Debian Wheezy, I did fix my problem with not having a desktop at all when I logged into the system. After countless reinstalls of gnome-session and gnome-panel, which sometimes worked for a brief time but usually didn't at all, I followed some advice:
- I created a new user account in my system.
Surprisingly (or not), that account had a working desktop. And a much faster desktop. When my original user account worked, logging in used to take a full minute or more. Now I could log in and have a working desktop in a few seconds. And the shell responded faster to commands. Or so it seemed.
With this knowledge in hand, I went into my original, non-working account in a virtual console using ctrl-alt-F2, logged in and got rid of the entire .config directory in my home directory:
$ rm -r .config
OK, that wasn't the first thing I did. First I tried to get rid of everything in ~.config that might have had something to do with GNOME. That didn't bring back my ability to log in and use GNOME Shell.
Only killing out the entire .config brought back my GNOME 3/Shell desktop -- and with all the speed that my "new" account had.
Sure, I lost more than a few settings. But I now have a working, seemingly faster user account in GNOME 3 in Debian Wheezy.
Yeah, I thought GNOME 3.6 had a lot of speed improvements over GNOME 3.4, but I think cobwebs in my ~.config ~/.config
And despite all the amputations in Nautilus, GNOME 3.6 is looking pretty good -- but not good enough to dump Debian Wheezy for it.
Note: My Chromium browser settings were also in ~.config ~/.config
Now that I've had time to think about it, the way to go about this is to change the name of .config -- maybe to config (with no dot). Then log out and log in. Then you haven't lost anything. GNOME will generate a new .config, and you can then move back in things like your Chromium, gPodder, Gigolo and other configurations that I lost in my haste to fix this GNOME Shell problem.
Another note for command-line newbies: In case you're not on board with all of the bash shell conventions, The "~" in ~.config ~/.config means that what follows it is in my home directory, e.g. /home/steven/.config, since my user name is steven. The ~ is a shortcut for "my home directory" that you can use in the shell to get there:
$ cd ~
is the same for me as:
$ cd /home/steven
Correction note: Thanks to reader Thor in the comments for fixing my syntax with "~" -- you always need a "/", which I have done above, striking through the original type and underlining the new. I should have tested this out before posting it. Like some or many of you, I'm still learning all this.
I'll get the disclaimer out of the way early: I'm very aware that Fedora 18 is currently in alpha, that we're more than a week away from the beta, and that Fedora 18 won't see a release until 2013.
Those are all things I'm aware of.
But the state of Nautilus in the Fedora 18 alpha's "main" GNOME 3 edition sent me scurrying to the Xfce build, where -- in contrast to the fail of Nautilus -- I'm already using Xfce's Thunar file manager to work directly over FTP and write onto a web site with the Leafpad text editor.
Except that Leafpad isn't cooperating and saving the file back to FTP.
I'm also looking for distributions that handle my Lenovo G555's squirrely touchpad without random cursor leaps, text highlighting and subsequent accidental deletion.
Is that so much to ask?
Add to that a new cupful of fail in Debian Wheezy's GNOME 3 desktop -- that fail being that I'm not getting a desktop at all half the time in the 3D version of GNOME 3. I just get wallpaper. And I can log out with alt-F4.
That's it. GNOME Classic works just fine. But regular GNOME Shell? It's gone half the time. I can reinstall gnome-panel and gnome-session and everything returns, but am I going to be happy doing that every day or so?
So I'm testing everything I can get my hands on in hopes of finding a Linux-distro port in what has become a very turbulent storm. (Or I could just reinstall Debian and hope my problem disappears.)
My first impressions of the Fedora 18 Xfce Alpha -- knowing, again, full well that this is only an alpha -- are that the desktop is slow to redraw, the FTP in Thunar only half works (this is a problem I've experienced before), and Gigolo is not in the default.
I'll hope that these problems will be fixed before the final release next year. Otherwise Fedora 18 with Xfce is looking pretty solid.
Update: "Connect to Server" isn't gone, it just moved. Thanks go to readers who led me out of a non-networked Nautilus desert.
Here is the original post before I was brought to my senses:
If this is what awaits users of GNOME 3.6, I don't blame Ubuntu for sticking with Nautilus 3.4 and Linux Mint for forking the file manager and creating Nemo.
The GNOME developers have got to be kidding.
They take a file manager and REMOVE perfectly good features? They could have HIDDEN the features but left them intact.
Right now I can't figure out how to get the Nautilus in the Fedora 18 Alpha to open an FTP site. This is basic Nautilus functionality that this particular file manager has included for years and years.
And now it's gone?
I know this is a Fedora Alpha, but will the ability to browse FTP/SFTP and WebDAV be gone in future versions of Nautilus?
You can go to other machines on your network (which I never do, by the way) but not to FTP/SFTP and WebDAV (which I do all the time)?
Words fail me.
Even if the feature is really, really hidden, the fact that as a longtime GNOME and Nautilus user I can't find it -- and I do believe it's completely gone -- is so very, very wrong.
Will Gigolo allow me to browse networked files in the "new" Nautilus? Even the Thunar file manager doesn't need Gigolo anymore in Xfce 4.10 -- you can go directly to an FTP site and work directly in the file manager.
Unless I'm missing something, GNOME is screwing the pooch pretty good here.
Again, I know this is the Fedora Alpha, and right now it looks like it's running the development version of GNOME -- i.e. 3.5 instead of 3.6. But this is my first exposure to what Nautilus is supposed to become in 3.6 and thereafter, and I'm stunned. Not in a good way, either.
Going by what I read, Linux and BSD users are abandoning GNOME and Unity for ... Xfce.
They hate GNOME 3/Shell, they don't like what Ubuntu's done with Unity, and they're not crazy about KDE, either.
Enter Xfce. Back in the GNOME 2 days, I found that on a fast machine you really didn't gain much in desktop speed by picking Xfce over GNOME. But on slow, old hardware, Xfce sure could make a difference.
That means on new computers it all boils down to what you like. If Xfce does the job for you, use it.
With GNOME and Unity throwing out the "old" desktop paradigm for a new one that ostensibly helps the tablets and touchscreens none of us are using work better, anybody who wants to keep working in the same way they've been doing for decades is probably looking at Xfce and LXDE as the way going forward.
Some don't want any change, but most want evolution instead of revolution, and they don't want nonexistant tablets to dicate how they use their mouse-and-keyboard computers.
I get that.
Even Windows users are in this. Windows 8 probably won't throw out so much baby with bathwater, but the changes in the Microsoft desktop would ordinarily send geekier users scurrying toward Linux. Unity and GNOME 3 might be too much of a shock.
Enter Xfce.
It has more than enough features. It's fast. It's not undergoing a cataclysmic transformation. It doesn't care about tablets, touchscreens, smartphones or TVs. It's not trying to sell you services or get you to buy shit. It works like a desktop you know. (Like GNOME 2.)
Personally I haven't soured on GNOME 3. I still like it. But I also like having something I know will be there when my hardware isn't so new. A workhorse desktop.
It's here.
Already I like what I see in Xubuntu 12.10.
The new Xfce 4.10 desktop environment with a network-friendly Thunar file manager
Nice defaults and design (which you usually get in a distribution's "native" desktop environment but not so often without it)
What I don't like:
- The Alps touchpad in the Lenovo G555 is jumpy
Onto the next ...
Increasingly my litmus test on whether or not I can live with (and maybe embrace) a given Linux distribution on my Lenovo G555 comes down to one thing:
- Does it keep the cursor from jumping around the window and randomly deleting things when tap-to-click is invoked for the touchpad?
It's a sad commentary on the lousy Alps touchpad in this laptop, the state of operating system software and drivers (Windows 7 is among the OSes that can't deal) and my obsession with a machine that doesn't eat my work.
If I could only figure out how Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3 (but not with Xfce 4.8, or Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity does it, I could take that information with me to make the touchpad work well in any damn Linux distro. I used the output of synclient -l in Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3 and Xfce 4.8, doing a diff and using a synclient script to compensate for those differences in Xfce. I still get a jumpy Alps touchpad on the Lenovo G555. So GNOME is doing something else that doesn't show up in synclient. But what?
I can tell you that the Ubuntu 12.10 GNOME Remix does not possess this secret touchpad sauce. I have to check Xubuntu 12.04 and 12.10, Fedora 18 (GNOME and Xfce).
Just this moment Ubuntu 12.04 suddenly highlighted this whole post and deleted all the text in a single keystroke. I used ctrl-z to bring it back, but Ubuntu 12.04 exhibiting this same disturbing behavior would mean that Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3 stands alone in the "didn't eat my homework" department. More testing is in order.
Things in Ubuntu 12.04's favor are its LTS status -- it'll be around through 2017. I can't see myself using any release that long, but it could come to that, and the ecosystem around an Ubuntu LTS is formidable.
Sure I could turn off tap-to-click and make this whole problem go away. Since I use an external (generally wireless) mouse most of the time, this isn't as much of a deal-breaking problem as I'm making it out to be.
I'm in the Ubuntu 12.04/Unity live environment right now, and it looks pretty nice.
The menus appearing in the upper panel instead of in the application window is a "feature" of Unity that continues to disturb me. It doesn't help my productivity one little bit. I don't use Macs all that often, but Apple does this better.
The other design elements are less offensive. There's a refreshing attention to detail that for the most part helps more than it hurts.
The Dash is very responsive. In 12.04 it doesn't drill into application menus like it's supposed to do in 12.10 (I haven't tried it, hence the supposed reference) and basically re-implements what GNOME 3 does with it's desktop search for applications and files.
While the best outcome would be my figuring out the secret touchpad sauce and using it on any distribution in any desktop environment, I'd like the option of using GNOME, Xfce and even Unity without suffering from the cursor-jumping problem.
Right now I'm liking Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity. Given all the controversy over shopping lenses in 12.10, I expect that it'll have more users than it might have had otherwise.
A stable system with GNOME 3.6.x and/or Xfce 4.10 is also something I'd like to park on this laptop.
So I'm testing the Ubuntu 12.10 GNOME Remix and notice that the Shell is more responsive in GNOME 3.6.0 than in the 3.4.2 build in Debian Wheezy, the system I'm using day-to-day.
I write about it and wonder if the performance boost is worth making an entire distro switch.
Later the same day I'm looking at my GNOME Shell Extensions via the extensions.gnome.org website (where you can find, install, configure and manage your GNOME Shell Extensions from either Firefox/Iceweasel or Epiphany/Web) and I come across Impatience.
Here is the description of Impatience:
Speed up the gnome-shell animation speed. By default it's sped up by a factor of 0.75 (i.e 25% faster), but this is configurable if you have gnome-shell 3.4 or later.
I install it, and boom -- hitting the "super" key and typing in the first few letters of an application brings up the icon as quickly as it does in the Ubuntu/GNOME 3.6.0 live environment.
Another problem solved in Debian Wheezy's GNOME 3.4.2. And a GNOME Shell Extension you must try right now.
Note: The fix outlined below DOES NOT WORK for more than a day.
This fix is a bit brutal but DOES WORK:
To restore the desktop in my GNOME 3 user account, I ended up deleting the entire .config directory in my home directory.
That enabled me to log into GNOME Shell and have a working desktop. I lost a whole lot of settings in the process, so I recommend renaming .config as, say, config with no "dot," then logging in and eventually restoring the parts of the .config that you need.
Things I lost by killing out .config include my Chromium browser settings, all GNOME settings, gPodder settings, Gigolo settings ... and maybe more that I haven't yet discovered. Sure, I got my main account working with GNOME, but I should've backed up .config instead of killing it entirely.
For reference and disclosure's sake, here is the original post:
I'm having an issue with GNOME 3 in Debian Wheezy that have only cropped up in the past few days. It may be due to one of the upgrades to Wheezy that have flowed earlier this week.
What happens is I log into GNOME 3 Shell, I get wallpaper and that's it. No panels, no nothing.
I can click alt-F4 to log out, and that's about it.
GNOME fallback mode (i.e. 2D) still works fine, as does Xfce. I wasn't locked out of GNOME at all, just the 3D/Shell version.
This Debian Forums post helped, though I don't think it describes my exact problem. I did take its advice and reinstall gnome-session and gnome-panel. It worked for awhile, then stopped working. I did it again, and GNOME 3 is working again. I'll update this post when I'm sure of the long-term viability of this fix.
Here is the command I used in the console:
$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall gnome-session gnome-panel
For now this fix is working. I haven't seen anything on the Debian mailing lists or forums that describes my exact problem, so this could just be something that affects me alone
I decided to go in a different direction in my previously intended Linux testing regimen and sample the Ubuntu 12.10 GNOME Remix.
I've been fairly happy with GNOME 3.4.2 in Debian Wheezy but eager to see what GNOME 3.6 has to offer.
I could've gone Fedora, but I'm looking for a smoother transition from Debian Wheezy to whatever I run next.
The new Ubuntu 12.10 GNOME Remix seems perfect in that regard. I keep the Debian base and might even be able to install Ubuntu over Debian and keep the same partition layout.
In my Debian Wheezy GNOME 3.4 desktop, I used the Transmission bittorrent client to download the 64-bit ISO. After a few unsuccessful attempts to create a bootable USB flash drive with the image using dd and cat, I surmised that this wasn't a hybrid ISO image. So I installed unetbootin and used it to create a bootable USB drive with the Ubuntu GNOME remix. I was also able to create persistent storage on the flash drive.
Even though this is the live environment and not a proper installation. There are a few things I can say based on my brief experience with Ubuntu 12.10 GNOME Remix:
- The "jumping tap-to-click touchpad" problem that I have in Debian Wheezy with Xfce but NOT in Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3 is present in Ubuntu 12.10 GNOME Remix.
That is a problem. And a reason to stick with Debian (or try Fedora). I haven't been able to figure out why Debian with GNOME handles this so well but everything else I've tried does not. This is a quirk peculiar to my hardware, the Lenovo G555 laptop and can be solved by turning off tap-to-click. I'd like to solve it while keeping tap-to-click, but a thorough analysis of the synclient output in Debian's GNOME 3 offers no clues.
- GNOME 3 Shell seems faster in Ubuntu 12.10's 3.6.0 than it does in Debian Wheezy's 3.4.2.
Everything is just a little bit more responsive. Hitting the "super" key and typing in the first letters of an application are a bit smoother on the screen in Ubuntu 12.10 vs. Debian Wheezy. I don't think it's all that much faster, but it looks better. And it's a little faster. Update: I'm not sure if this is responsible for the "speed-up" in GNOME 3.6, but the GNOME Shell extension called Impatience makes things much faster and smoother on my Debian Wheezy GNOME 3 desktop. It's a great extension and works well in Wheezy's version of GNOME 3.
Though everything in the Ubuntu 12.10 GNOME Remix is pretty much GNOME 3.6, the Nautilus file manager remains at version 3.4.2, just like in the stock Unity edition of Ubuntu.
A big difference in GNOME 3.6 vs. 3.4 is the presence of an application-grid icon in the application panel on the left side of the screen.
It simplifies the look of the Activities screen that appears when you click the "super" key or mouse into the upper-left corner. This is one of the "big" changes in GNOME 3.6. I like it, but it's more evolutionary than revolutionary.
Webmail isn't just a Gmail/Yahoo Mail/Hotmail thing. Anybody with a mail server can offer webmail to their users. There are a number of different client applications out there, but my favorite is Roundcube, which I use with my shared-hosting account from Hostgator.
Just today I noticed that Roundcube got a nice new look that coincides with a new release of the platform.
It's nice, to be sure. I love the look and functionality of Roundcube. But what I'd really like in Roundcube is the ability to create and deploy filters. It's on the roadmap. With filters, I really could leave Gmail behind.
I know that Horde offers a filtering option, and I probably should give it a try. But I really like Roundcube ...
I periodically check up on my Compaq Armada 7770dmt, the 1999 machine running a Pentium II MMX processor at 233 MHz with 144 MB of RAM and a 3 GB hard drive.
While I'm still partial to Puppy 2.13 -- a very, very, very old release, I wanted to see how this old Compaq performed on a new Puppy. I do have a 20 GB laptop drive floating around, and if I find it, I could either use it entirely for storage with Puppy, or install something like Debian without the constraints of a mere 3 GB of hard drive space.
Today I did an update/upgrade of the Debian Squeeze installation on the Compaq. Then I burned a Wary Puppy 5.3 CD on another machine and proceeded to try it out on the 233 MHz laptop.
In the unlikely event that you have this exact same ancient laptop and want to run a modern Puppy live system, know that when configuring video, Xorg doesn't work. Choose Xvesa instead.
Anyhow, I don't know if it was the nature of modern Linux, a growing "heaviness" for the Seamonkey web browser, or something else. But Wary Puppy 5.3 was slower than Debian Squeeze with Xfce. Using the web browser at all made the rest of the 144 MB system pretty much unusable.
About a half-hour into my Wary Puppy session, no apps at all would start. I could've rebooted and tried again, but I didn't. I know that using a Mozilla-made browser on hardware this old is painful.
In Debian I use Chromium, which is a quite a bit lighter than Firefox/Seamonkey, and that makes this old machine much more pleasant to use.
And Xfce is a very usable desktop on hardware this ancient. It's all about which applications you use. If you avoid heavy browsers like Firefox/Iceweasel, stick to text editors like Mousepad and Geany (OpenOffice/LibreOffice is not something I'd recommend at all) and keep things simple, even a 13-year-old computer can have some utility. This is a great machine for writing (as I'm doing now with Mousepad).
You can't go wrong with Xfce staples like the Thunar file manager, Mousepad text editor, Ristretto image viewer and Xfce Terminal. To that I add selected extras like the gFTP client, mtPaint image editor (thanks to Puppy for introducing me to it), Geany IDE/editor (thanks again to Puppy) and Ted word processor (introduced to me in Damn Small Linux and no longer in Debian but available as a .deb from the developer).
There's a lot you can't do with a 13-year-old computer, but there's a lot you can do, too.
I don't download nearly as many Linux and BSD ISO images as I used to. Recently I purged my "collection" of ISOs on CD and DVD. I probably dumped 200 discs going all the way back to when I started with free operating systems in 2007.
And these days I don't distro-hop. I pretty much just run Debian, either Stable or Testing, and currently the latter.
I keep my hand in. My recent tests have included a trio of Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones: Scientific Linux, CentOS and CentOS spin Stella.
Two distributions I keep an eye on are Crunchbang and Bodhi. I recently grabbed torrents of both systems -- in Crunchbang's case the Testing image (based on Debian Testing, currently Wheezy) and Bodhi 2.1.0, based on Ubuntu 12.04.
Chances of me installing one of these distributions on my main laptop aren't great but aren't nil either.
What I'd like to do is get a few USB flash drives and install to those instead of burning optical discs. It is the 2010s after all. Once I get some time in the live environments, I very well might go a different direction and install something new.
Other systems that interest me include Fedora (GNOME, Xfce and LXDE) and Ubuntu (the stock Unity, plus GNOME, Xfce and LXDE). I do have a Lubuntu (Ubuntu with LXDE) installation running on another laptop, and it's running quite well.
Key is how I feel about GNOME 3 vs. other desktop environments. If I weren't having touchpad tap-to-click issues in Debian Wheezy with Xfce that disappear in GNOME 3 that I can't seem to clear up in Xfce, I'd be a happy Wheezy Xfce user. I have everything else in Xfce pretty much the way I want it. Except for this touchpad issue. Most of it is lousy hardware. Lenovo really f'd up on this one, I can tell you that.
But if GNOME 3 can take care of it, certainly Xfce can, too. Or another distribution entirely.
So I will be looking around, but there's always GNOME 3. Or turning off tap-to-click.
At this point, taming the touchpad in Debian Wheezy with Xfce is more about not letting the software and hardware get the best of me than anything else. It's also "insurance" against future Linux systems not configuring this touchpad as well as Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3.
Note: The touchpad is an absolute nightmare in Windows 7. About the only thing you can do is turn it completely off. Tap-to-click is the default, and it's a text-deleting nightmare. So in this case Linux is winning big time. But it can always do better. If only Lenovo and Alps didn't release such crappy hardware.
You can use Amazon Web services free for a year, and I'm pretty darned interested in doing I did just that.
I wouldn't say signing up for Amazon Web Services was easy, or that you don't need to possess a certain level of geeky experience, because you do. But if you know a minimum about how a Linux server goes together, you can do it.
One thing to note: Ubuntu is HUGE in the world of AWS. This is an area where it looks like they are either dominating, or well on their way to dominating.
I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 as the distribution for my Amazon EC2 server.
I wanted to find a particularly galling story I heard on American Public Media's Marketplace business radio program and was pleased to find a very good-looking and functional web site that just happens to be built on Drupal.
I still like the simplicity of the stories page better than the home page. Marketplace is all about the stories that appear on the air, and quick, simple, "here they are" access is what I want to see (and do).
The beginning of the stories page is on top of this entry. Here's more of the stories page so you can see how each item appears in the rundown. I really like the simplicity and uniformity (click on either image for a full-sized view):
So what was the particularly galling story about? Well, this small-business owner couldn't decide whether to vote for Mitt Romney or Barack Obama, and on her second appearance on Marketplace she wouldn't reveal her vote. What she did want from President Obama in a second term was "compromise" on his pledge to keep taxes the same for those making $250,000 and below. She thought he should bend a little and pledge not to raise taxes for those making $500,000 and below. Her strong implication was that a family dragging in HALF A MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR is still "middle class."
Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal replied, "But that makes you part of the 1 percent ..." He didn't pursue it further. I can't blame him.
But I will spell it out. I don't think $250,000/year makes you part of the middle class. If anything, you're "upper middle class." However, if you make $500,000 a year, YOU ARE RICH. You are fucking rich, so shut the fuck up.
Due to my slower home connection, I didn't update my Debian Wheezy laptop over the weekend, and today I have 103 packages about to flow onto this system.
Aside from a new kernel, new Chromium web browser, new LibreOffice and new Java/OpenJDK/IcedTea, there are plenty of other packages coming along for the ride from GNOME, new ffmpeg and libav, cups and more.
Why so many packages at once? Could it mean the release of Wheezy as Debian's Stable distribution is closer than not? I have no answers yet.
All I do know is if you're running Debian Wheezy right now, be prepared for a whole lot of updates.
steven@lenovo:~$ sudo aptitude upgrade
Resolving dependencies...
The following NEW packages will be installed:
linux-headers-3.2.0-4-amd64{a} linux-headers-3.2.0-4-common{a}
linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64{a}
The following packages will be REMOVED:
linux-headers-3.2.0-3-amd64{u} linux-headers-3.2.0-3-common{u}
The following packages will be upgraded:
chromium chromium-browser-inspector chromium-inspector cups cups-bsd
cups-client cups-common cups-ppdc evolution-data-server
evolution-data-server-common ffmpeg fonts-opensymbol gdm3
gir1.2-panelapplet-4.0 gnome-terminal gnome-terminal-data
google-talkplugin icedtea-6-jre-cacao icedtea-6-jre-jamvm kdelibs-bin
kdelibs5-data kdelibs5-plugins kdoctools libav-tools libavcodec53
libavdevice-extra-53 libavdevice53 libavfilter-extra-2 libavfilter2
libavformat-extra-53 libavformat53 libavutil51 libcamel-1.2-33 libcups2
libcupscgi1 libcupsdriver1 libcupsimage2 libcupsmime1 libcupsppdc1
libebackend-1.2-2 libebook-1.2-13 libecal-1.2-11 libedata-book-1.2-13
libedata-cal-1.2-15 libedataserver-1.2-16 libedataserverui-3.0-1
libglib2.0-data libgtkhtml-4.0-0 libgtkhtml-4.0-common
libgtkhtml-editor-4.0-0 libkcmutils4 libkde3support4 libkdeclarative5
libkdecore5 libkdesu5 libkdeui5 libkdewebkit5 libkdnssd4 libkemoticons4
libkfile4 libkhtml5 libkidletime4 libkio5 libkjsapi4 libkjsembed4
libkmediaplayer4 libknewstuff2-4 libknewstuff3-4 libknotifyconfig4
libkntlm4 libkparts4 libkprintutils4 libkpty4 libkrosscore4 libkrossui4
libktexteditor4 libkutils4 libmozjs185-1.0 libnepomuk4 libnepomukquery4a
libnepomukutils4 libpanel-applet-4-0 libplasma3 libpostproc52
libraptor2-0 libreoffice-common libreoffice-filter-mobiledev
libreoffice-help-en-us libreoffice-java-common libreoffice-pdfimport
libreoffice-report-builder-bin libreoffice-style-galaxy
libreoffice-style-tango libsolid4 libswscale2 libthreadweaver4
libxenstore3.0 linux-headers-amd64 linux-image-amd64 linux-libc-dev
openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jre-headless openjdk-6-jre-lib
103 packages upgraded, 3 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 177 MB of archives. After unpacking 112 MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]
Click, the blog I write under the auspices of my employer, has moved from Movable Type to WordPress.
The move was prompted by the company's decision to phase out Movable Type, which they've been using since the MT 3 days.
I can't say I'm surprised. While there's a certain flexibility in what you can do in Movable Type (like setting up any number of feeds and kinds of HTML output without regard to themes), the multiblog capability is integrated in a way that WordPress isn't anywhere near, and every damn thing is a static HTML file (if you want it that way), the platform is getting creaky, there's not much of a community, especially compared to WordPress, and the whole WP ecosystem of plugins and themes is pretty much nonexistent.
That said, I got to know Movable Type pretty well, I will miss it, I have to figure out how to build a whole lot of stuff that is easy (and already built in MT).
But there are so many things that WordPress brings to the proverbial table, things I'm learning about as I go, that it's going to be an equally proverbial adventure.
GNU MediaGoblin -- a free, open alternative to YouTube, Flickr where you can share media with whoever the hell you want to share it with
I've heard rumblings about GNU MediaGoblin, software that enables anybody to set up a media-sharing system that can substitute for things like YouTube and Flickr -- you know, those proprietary services that take our content, make money off of it and justify that moneymaking by giving us "free" access to our own stuff.
Yeah.
I don't have time to go into MediaGoblin right now, but I'm very excited by the prospect and hope I can give it a try soon.
I've got no beef with GNOME 3. But I still have two desktop environments installed on this Debian Wheezy system. Today I used the other one, Xfce 4.8.
Nothing to complain about. Xfce in Debian is always a little rough around the edges, most of which I've smoothed out at this point. I'm looking at Xubuntu and Fedora's Xfce spin as potential candidates for my next install.
About the only thing that's not working great in Debian Wheezy with Xfce is the touchpad on this Lenovo G555. In Wheezy with GNOME 3, the touchpad is preconfigured in such a way that it doesn't randomly delete text like it does when running Windows 7 (or previous Linux systems, for that matter). Something in this GNOME setup is taking care of the terrible Alps touchpad on this laptop, and I wish I knew exactly what.
That's because in Xfce, the touchpad defaults to not working at all. That's not much of a problem because I rarely use it. But sometimes -- pretty much when I'm watching video -- I like to use the touchpad.
I've seen xorg hacks (thanks Linux Mint Debian users!) to turn on the touchpad for Xfce, but once I do this, I get the same poor touchpad performance in Xfce AND GNOME.
So right now I'm settling for great touchpad performance in GNOME, none in Xfce. Until I figure it out.
I lucked into a couple of these Staedtler Mars Lumograph 100 pencils. They're "artists' pencils," I presume. No eraser on the end.
One is an HB, which is equivalent to the standard No. 2 pencil lead. The other is a 2B.
They are made in Germany.
Construction is flawless. The wood is of high quality.
The leads are smooth and long-lasting. I can't complain.
Read much more about the Staedtler Mars Lumograph at Pencil Revolution, Pencil Talk and PenciLog
Apologies for the photograph. Again, it's a cell-phone image. I worked on it a bit in the GIMP to bump up brightness and contrast, and I used unsharp mask to sharpen it.
I haven't used OwnCloud much over the past few months. And I let my installation get old.
I just did an upgrade from 3.0.2 to 4.5.0 in a single operation. OwnCloud is complicated: The update consists of 4,562 files.
Once the files transferred, the system didn't work. But the fix was easy: OwnCloud 4.5.0 requires PHP 5.3. My shared hosting account defaults to PHP 5.2. PHP 5.3 must be called in the .htaccess file. I was doing that in version 3.0.2, but part of my upgrade included a new .htaccess file from OwnCloud.
I went into .htaccess, added my hosting provider's recommended code to invoke PHP 5.3, and OwnCloud 4.5.0 began working immediately.
One of the things about 4.5.0 that I'm most excited about is the ability to upgrade OwnCloud from within the application itself. Sure beats transferring 4,562 files over FTP.
The "fast" pace of Iceweasel/Firefox and Icedove/Thunderbird releases over the past couple of years has really thrown longer-term Linux distributions for a loop.
The Mozilla-coded apps quickly get very old, and it's harder and harder for Debian developers to patch those older versions with the latest security fixes when the upstream code leaves the distro's original version further and further behind.
And enterprises, educational institutions and people who like things to stay the same aren't terribly excited by applications that change versions from month to month, regardless of what actual changes are happening in the code. Never mind that those changes are often significant enough to break things built for a platform that is moving too quickly for many tastes.
Enter the Extended Support Release version of Firefox and Thunderbird. After seeing its Mozilla applications get really old really fast in Squeeze, Debian picked up on the ESR releases of Iceweasel and Icedove for Wheezy. That's what I see in CentOS, Scientific Linux and Stella as well, so it appears that even Red Hat Enterprise Linux has opted for ESR.
Sure there are features in the "consumer" version of Firefox (which Ubuntu follows even for its LTS release) that users of ESR will miss, but between stability in terms of functionality and knowing that these web-connected applications are fully patched, the peace of mind is well worth it.
Iceweasel 10.0.09esr just rolled onto my Debian Wheezy box. I'm glad to see it.
Pencils are a thing. I started using pencils -- mechanical and wooden -- more and more over the past year.
I have lost most of my mechanical pencils. They seem to walk away. While I just bought a load of cheap Bics, I've been increasingly drawn to the traditional wooden pencil (ring the bell, take a drink, do what you would do whenever a bad pencil pun appears in an article about same).
Pens have lost their usefulness for me in my so-called work (writing, making and modifying lists, taking notes, etc). The ink bleeds, I make too many mistakes that need to be crossed out. With a well-sharpened pencil, my writing is clear. It's clean. I can erase. On paper, pencil marks don't smudge in the same way as those made with ballpoint (or gel) ink.
Overall, writing with a pencil is an enjoyable experience. That's the main thing.
The all-the-rage Raspberry Pi $35 single-board, ARM-based computer is a great device for embedded uses -- I'm eager to turn one into a print server -- but isn't well-appointed as a desktop substitute.
News that its memory is doubling to 512 MB (H-Online, RaspberryPi.org) and that all boards are being assembled in the U.K. instead of China while the price is sticking at $35 is welcome.
Paul Tagliamonte writes a short post I found via Planet Debian titled Stuff that's bothering me about Ubuntu right now.
Many have complained about the Amazon results that pop up when you search even your local drive, but I haven't seen much reaction to Ubuntu's solicitation of donations in the boot screen for the live disc.
Paul is not in favor, and he frames it in an interesting way:
... begging for a handout when people Download Ubuntu — without an option to donate to Debian, which composes over 70% of the Desktop, I get upset.
I feel cheated, and I’m not even involved on a day-to-day anymore.
I’m ashamed of what’s going on now, and I hope we find a better way to serve our users.
Even though I guess I'm a "power user," I'm starting to agree with Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols' idea that Google's Chromebooks are a compelling choice.
If you're comfortable with Google services and doing everything in its cloud, or if you're doing it anyway, these devices are cheap enough, starting at $350, and due to their light Ubuntu-derived OS boot right away and run acceptably fast. They have a six-hour battery life. From an updates and security perspective, they're virtually maintenance-free.
If you lose one or it breaks, you just move on to a new one. All your stuff is in the cloud.
I'm pitching them to my company. Very soon now, we'll be able to do just about everything we do with a Chromebook. It's cheaper than an iPad, way more usable for things like writing, and the tight integration with Google is a win for those already committed to the search giant's services.
The more I think about it, GNOME's renaming of applications with a clear word as to what they do is a good thing to do.
The file manager Nautilus is now called Files.
The web browser Epiphany is now called Web.
I believe that Totem will eventually be Movies (or something like that).
Sure it makes it hard to manage these applications when you don't have them installed.
But when you install a Linux distribution (or eventually a BSD system that runs GNOME 3) with a complete GNOME environment, users won't be confused and need to scale a steep learning curve to figure out what they need to click to find ... Files. And the Web. And what they need to click to watch video (like "Movies").
I will ignore the fact that Epiphany (now Web) as a browser is not quite ready for prime time, and almost all users will need and want Firefox or Chromium/Chrome (or Opera for those who love Opera). Maybe Epiphany will get up to speed. By that I mean it will get Flash support.
But overall, simple declarative names for core applications is a good idea. Maybe they'll retain their descriptive package names (Epiphany, Nautilus, Totem, Gedit, etc.). Or maybe they'll have a GNOME-appended package name (gnome-web, gnome-files, gnome-movies, gnome-text-editor). That would make package management more sane.
But for users coming to the GNOME desktop for the first time, clear and simple application names gets them going that much faster.
Not all of these sites are the work of self-proclaimed minimalists. Most are. All are worth a look:
The PyBlosxom blogging software isn't dead, but it's not terribly alive either, plus why I use Ode as my flat-file blogging system of choice
PyBlosxom, a very worthy project that took the Perl-based Blosxom and re-did it in Python, has been slow, development-wise, for a long time now.
In recent months the project was near death, but a new maintainer is at least watching over what's left.
Not that Blosxom is an active, living project, because it isn't.
I spent a brief time years ago pumping the mail from my terrible workplace e-mail server to Gmail, which obliterated many sins (low capacity, terrible software and hardware) while giving rise to others (Google is data-mining us like crazy).
Well, after years of IMAP in Thunderbird, I'm changing course. I'm letting Google's Gmail handle my work mail again.
I'm aware that Google is using my e-mail to craft marketing messages it will aim at me. I don't like it, but I don't hate it enough to suffer through my current mail routine, with the inbox maxing out more days than not. That leads to all sorts of lost productivity on my part.
And my coworkers are making increasing use of Google Drive/Docs, Calendar and Google Plus (with plenty of Google Chat/Talk and Hangouts).
My thinking: If I'm doing all of that, Gmail doesn't add much to the spy vector. And this is for work only. I've been trying to do most of my personal e-mail off of Gmail -- and every other ad-supported e-mail service.
But faced with a poor e-mail system that I must use daily, Gmail makes it much more usable. Google has won me over. Again.
I get offered products for review here and there. Usually those products are hard for me to get excited about.
But a computer built for Linux, assembled in Berkeley, California, by the well-respected ZaReason?
That was exciting.
Cathy Malmrose of ZaReason contacted me through Larry Cafiero, Linux advocate and my Digital First Media / MediaNews Group colleague. Soon enough, the ZaReason Limbo 6000A was on its way to the L.A. Daily News office.
The lowest-priced Limbo 6000A runs a very reasonable $500. The box sent to me included a few key improvements that brought the price up to $605.
I know what you're thinking. I could put together my own box from Newegg/TigerDirect parts, or buy a cheaper computer from Dell, HP, Acer, etc. ...
But if you buy from ZaReason (or System 76, or the other Linux- and BSD-loading builder-dealers out there), you are getting systems on which all the hardware is guaranteed to work with free, open-source operating systems. You get actual support. And you don't run the risk of putting together a box from scratch that might not even POST when you turn the power on, not to mention fail to work with the Linux distribution of your choice.
(Rear of the ZaReason Limbo 6000A)
The $99 supercomputer: Adapteva turns to Kickstarter for funding to get its massively parallel, fully open Raspberry Pi killer off the ground
Above: Adapteva's video of the prototype Parallella board running Ubuntu.
First netbooks died, killing off their Linux origins before that. Then big OEMs flirting with desktop Linux went from bang to whimper with nary a marketing push.
But the bright, shining light in open source hardware -- software-wise anyway, as the hardware ain't all that open -- has been the $35 Raspberry Pi single-board computer that runs Linux, sips power and has a great deal of the world busy crafting enclosures, fine-tuning OS images and basically geeking out.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
But there will be competitors. Others that want to take the throne.
Chief among complaints about Raspberry Pi is the presence of closed-source chips on the board.
Well along comes Adapteva with an idea for a massively parallel collection of CPUs on a chip (either 16 or 64), also (electrical) power sipping but this time funded by Kickstarter and promising way more processing power, plus a fully open hardware design, all for $99 (for 16 cores) or $199 (for 64 cores).
That's if they get that Kickstarter money and get the project off the ground.
People are thirsting big time for these "supercomputing" ARM platforms, something cheap enough to play a niche role yet powerful enough to actually do some things.
The Parallella Project is looking for $750,000 out of Kickstarter to produce the 16-core chip. If things blow up and they get $3 million, they'll produce the 64-core version.
According to the Ubuntu Vibes write-up linked to above, the 16-core version will deliver 13 GHz of CPU performance, and the 64-core version will push 45 GHz. All that in 5 watts of power.
And they're pledging to open-source the hardware if this Kickstarter thing works out.
Lots of updates today in Debian Wheezy, plus when I think it will go Stable and why I stick with Debian as my distro of choice
Quite a few updates moved for Debian's Wheezy testing branch today. I got a lot of GNOME bits and, for some reason, qemu-kvm.
The Debian Project is pushing Wheezy ever closer to release. The way things are going, counting the number of release-critical bugs and comparing it to roughly the same period before the release of Squeeze (the current Stable release), there are now 243 release-critical bugs remaining to be solved before Wheezy's release can happen. In September 2010, there were 126 RC bugs remaining to be solved.
Squeeze was released in February 2011, and if the RC-bug count is any indication, we won't see Wheezy go Stable this year, even though that was an early goal of the project.
I get why they called it Gigolo. It's the Xfce utility that "mounts anything without complaining."
The things it mounts include ftp and sftp over the network, WebDAV and Windows shares. I'd rather not use it at all, but in Xfce's Thunar file manager, you still need Gigolo to access these remote filesystems.
But since I'm using GNOME and the Nautilus file manager, which is advertised as having baked-in ability to access sftp/ftp and various other networked filesystems, you'd think I'd have no need for Gigolo.
Unfortunately this isn't true.
As often as I create bookmarks in Nautilus to my often-used sftp/ftp sites, they disappear. I don't know why. I've blogged about it recently but find no bug reports.
And though it may be due to the ftp sites I'm using, after a certain period of neglect, during which I don't access a given ftp site after doing so earlier in the session, Nautilus either disconnects or is disconnected from a given ftp server and won't reconnect. Thunar seems to do a better job or reinitiating the connection, but Gigolo is a quick way to "respawn" said ftp connection and get it working again with my file manager, be it Thunar or Nautilus.
But what's really annoying is continually losing my ftp bookmarks in Nautilus. This never happens in Gigolo. It may be awkward, poorly designed and cringe-inducingly named, but it does what it says.
I bit the bullet and did some repartitioning of my Debian Wheezy-running laptop to give myself more space on the Linux side by taking it from the seldom-used Windows side of my dual-boot system.
I had wanted to make my existing Debian partitions bigger, but due to the fact that modifying LVM -- especially with some partitions encrypted -- is a bit too mysterious and difficult, I decided to work with the Windows 7 partitions on the drive instead. Once I shrunk Windows, I planned to use the freed-up space for a new Linux partition. After that I would configure my Debian system to use it.
When I set up this laptop back in 2010, I did a fresh, crapware-free Windows 7 Home Premium installation at the very end of the drive. Windows dumped its main partition and small boot partition right there. At the time I gave something like 100 GB (out of the 320 GB drive) to Windows.
That's where I got my "extra" space for Linux.
I write a lot about encryption. I'm not trying so much to keep the government out of my business but to give myself peace of mind in the event my machine is lost or stolen.
I want to know that it would be way too much trouble for anybody to try to get any data out of the machine so I can confidently carry around a laptop and know that nobody else can get to that data if it leaves my possession.
But there's one problem with the kind of encryption provided by the installers for Debian and Fedora: The global (or individual) passphrase(s).
An interesting post from Evgeni Golov: Why I hope Twitter will die with the new API.
Twitter built its following on a great deal more openness and flexibility than it wants to provide now. And thus Twitter is closing things up in such a way as to make sure more users access the service through Twitter-controlled sources and see more Twitter-controlled marketing.
Evgeni hopes it'll backfire. I'm with him.
We're in the middle of the git-isation of all things digital. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm somewhat on board. I have a Gitorius account. That's about as far as I've gotten.
Here's an interesting article: Manage your website through git by Debian Developer and GNOME contributor Andrea Veri.
It's been in the works for a while, promised but not yet delivered, now promised again for Oct. 30, 2012: The Lightworks video-editing software is coming to Linux, specifically to Ubuntu 12.04 (and perhaps others after that).
Having really never heard of Lightworks, which the OMG!Ubuntu post above says was used to edit such professional films as "The King's Speech" and "Hugo." The project was open-sourced in 2010, and there is already a Windows build available. I'm somewhat excited by that prospect in itself, as I haven't yet come up with a Windows video-editing workflow/application that I can both use myself and recommend to others.
You can bet I'll be trying this out asap and waiting for the Linux version. If it only runs on Ubuntu, a video-editing app that can really get the job done is enough for me to choose my OS accordingly. That's a big "if." I'll have to get some actual time in front of Lightworks before I can make any judgments.
Remember my recent problem with doubled icons in the Applications view in GNOME 3 on my Debian Wheezy system?
Running the command update-menus every time you boot takes care of the problem, but that's no solution.
It turns out that getting rid of the menus package fixes the problem permanently:
$ sudo apt-get remove --purge menu
This will most likely accomplish the same thing (though I didn't try it):
$ sudo aptitude purge menu
I know that on my system the menu package came along with the fluxbox window manager. Since I was losing the menu package, I opted to get rid of fluxbox at the same time.
Note on Xfce: Removal of the menu package did not affect Xfce, which I also have installed on this Debian Wheezy system.
Note on menu and Debian: I suppose this should be classfied as a bug, because menu and GNOME Shell should be able to co-exist, but I don't see a bug that addresses this issue filed against menu. Maybe the bug should be filed against GNOME Shell. This is one of those (many) situations where I'm at a loss.
Note on menu: If you reinstall menu, will the problem with GNOME 3 return? Yes, it will.
While there's always a pack of geeks telling me how they've been running the same Debian system since Potato, I've found that most desktop systems under any kind of heavy use by those of us who do a lot of experimenting and install a lot of software don't last forever.
Or they won't last a long time without a great deal of maintenance and fixing mistakes made along the way.
My current, main Debian desktop system -- running on the Lenovo G555 laptop I bought in early 2010 -- has been in place since late 2010, after Fedora 13/14 died a quick yet painful death and I had a brief flirtation with Ubuntu 10.04. I started with Debian Squeeze while it was still the Testing distribution but well after the freeze that would lead it to becoming Stable the following February.
I upgraded to Wheezy -- the current Testing release that is now frozen -- with very little pain at all and am pretty happy with GNOME 3/Shell. I've installed Xfce for comparison's sake. I'm not using it much, preferring GNOME Shell even though it seems like I'm in some kind of silent minority and in threat of using my geek credibility because I not only don't hate the Shell but actually like it and find that it boosts my productivity on the desktop.
So here's the old and crusty part: You (really I) never know how much disk space you'll need when you set up a system. And since I chose to use Logical Volume Management with a couple of encrypted volumes, I really can't mess with them. Go ahead and send me links about how you shrink and expand LVM partitions. With encryption. It's just too hard. There's not enough real information out there. And for the non-super-geeks out there, attempts to modify encrypted LVM partitions are likely to go pear-shaped damn quickly.
When I try to arrange bookmarks in the Chromium or Google Chrome browsers in Debian Wheezy, the app crashes
Update: I only have this problem with the Chrome/Chromium menu while running the GNOME 3 desktop environment. In Xfce, everything is fine.
The original entry starts here:
I guess I should file a bug report against Chromium in Debian Wheezy about the following:
When I go into the menu in either Chromium or Google Chrome (yes, I have both) and try to edit the bookmarks, the browser crashes. So I can't re-arrange my bookmarks in these two browsers.
FYI, re-arranging bookmarks in Firefox/Iceweasel not only works but is extremely intuitive: You can drag/move bookmarks right in the bookmarks menu -- no need to go to a special bookmarks-editing screen to change the order of a bunch of bookmarks. Thanks, Mozilla!
All is not peaches, cream, furry kittens and puppies in GNOME 3. Why are the bookmarks I've created to FTP sites in Nautilus disappearing?
To write today's flurry of blog posts, I opted to use a bookmark in Xfce's Gigolo (yes, the app's name is extremely unfortunate) to access the server where these files live via sftp. At least Gigolo remembers where I've been. I'll try again with Nautilus.
Once you start mousing into the "hot corner" in Xfce, GNOME Classic, or plain old GNOME 2 -- all systems where there is no "hot corner," you pretty much know you've committed to GNOME 3 and GNOME Shell.
I'm not trying to be a GNOME Shell fanboy. It doesn't gain me any credibility not to hate on GNOME 3.
But I gave GNOME Shell a try (GNOME 3.4.2 in Debian Wheezy, to be exact), and despite having GNOME Classic, Xfce 4.8, even Fvwm and Fluxbox, on this machine, I'm using the Shell 98 percent of the time.
Once my muscle memory drags me over to the hot corner, it's nice for it to actually be there.
It's easy to get native Linux apps in the menu bar on the left side of the screen in GNOME 3 / GNOME Shell. They appear there when you run them from the Applications tab, and you can right-click on them in the bar and cause them to persist.
Not so with Wine apps. The only Wine app I'm really using right now is the photo editor/viewer IrfanView (p.s. I didn't need to add mfc42.dll to make it work!!), and when I run it from the Applications tab, I don't get an IrfanView icon in the GNOME menu bar. Instead I get a "windows loader" icon. And besides not persisting, that icon won't run IrfanView.
But this will work:
Go to the Applications tab (hot-corner or Super key), then click Applications, or just type the first few letters of your Wine application into the box.
At this point, don't start the app. Instead, drag the icon into the menu bar on the left side of the screen.
Now that icon will persist in the menu bar (is that what they call that thing on the left side of the screen, or is it the "application bar"? If you really know what's it's called, please let me know).
And the icon will launch the Wine app to which it's tied.
Problem solved -- for me, anyway (and hopefully for you).
How I got rid of multiple icons in the Applications tab of GNOME 3 ... temporarily anyway (but full solution is forthcoming)
Note: I figured it out!!! I will write up the solution to the multiple-application-icon problem tomorrow sometime in the near future.
Meanwhile, here's the entry I wrote earlier today:
I'm running GNOME Shell (aka GNOME 3) in Debian Wheezy, and when I go to the applications tab (mouse into the "hot corner," or hit the "super" key, then either click on Applications or just start typing the first letters of your desired app), I had been getting multiples of the same application, one version with a detailed icon, another with a fuzzy, bitmapped icon.
There are quite a few "recipes" on the Web for solving this problem, but most are from 2011, and with GNOME and the distribution in general undergoing a lot of changes, I wasn't optimistic that anything would work.
This easy fix did work for me, albeit temporarily; only in the current session. If you feel like trying it, it's easy enough. Basically open up a terminal and use your rootly powers (I use sudo for that purpose, but you can su to root if you wish) to do the following:
$ sudo update-menus
My multiple-icon problem was cleared up ... until I logged out. When I logged in again, I had multiple icons. I could run update-menus in a startup script, but that's not terribly elegant.
Firefox in CentOS (and by extension Stella) right now is version 10.0.x. I wondered why.
Well, it's because those very-long-term support distros are using the Extended Support Release of Firefox. Read more about ESR here, here and here, and if you want to try the ESR version of Firefox, start here.
My current Debian Wheezy installation is an upgrade from Squeeze, so I was unprepared for what just happened: I'm doing a bunch of installs in between my other work, and I just got around to a traditional Wheezy desktop installation with the GNOME desktop using netinstall image.
I was unprepared for the only GUI package manager to be GNOME Package Kit. No Synaptic Package Manager. Not even the "Sofware Center" ported from Ubuntu that shipped in Squeeze.
Debian Developers, you think GNOME Package Kit is anywhere near as good as Synaptic? It's certainly RHEL-like, as Package Kit is the GUI package manager in RHEL/CentOS.
At least Debian is still shipping Aptitude, unlike Ubuntu.
But no Synaptic? In Debian? Are they kidding? Not counting these five paragraphs, I'm speechless.
Later: The Xfce install of Debian Wheezy DOES include Synaptic. So does the KDE install. I did another GNOME install and confirmed that Synaptic is NOT included. This is quite an omission. The LXDE install of Debian also does not include Synaptic, but that is very much expected.
At the risk of repeating myself yet again, Debian's default installs of Xfce and KDE include the Synaptic Package Manager, but the GNOME install does not. That is crazy.
Given the rumor that Debian is looking at Xfce as the default desktop environment for the Wheezy release, that Xfce seems more "complete" in regard to package management is, in a way, encouraging.
More Debian GNOME install weirdness: Debian has always included the full office suite in just about every default desktop installation. GNOME, Xfce and even LXDE installs have included OpenOffice and now LibreOffice.
What's strange about the current GNOME installation of Debian Wheezy is that it includes not only LibreOffice but also the Abiword word processor and Gnumeric spreadsheet. That's like a double office suite. It's strange to have both.
Debian with KDE: I've done quite a few installs in the last week, and while I'm not sure I could get used to KDE, the desktop in its default installation in Debian Wheezy is very nice. It works great, doesn't require 3D acceleration (like GNOME 3 does), and generally has a lot (a whole lot) of polish.
As much as hating GNOME 3/Shell would put me in good company, I find myself liking it just fine.
I installed Xfce 4.8 on this Wheezy laptop, and while I like that environment well enough, I've pretty much moved back to GNOME in the weeks since.
I'm OK with the hot corner, the virtual desktops that pop up (and go away) on demand and hitting the Windows/Super key to enter command/hot-corner mode.
I have the GNOME Tweak Tool, and I've installed a few GNOME 3 Extensions from the web site. But just a few. Most of the Extensions I've seen are fairly frivolous/unhelpful.
After I installed Wine (not as easy as it should be in 64-bit Debian) and then IrfanView, it took a little doing to get the photo viewing/editing application to show up in the GNOME 3 applications menu, and I still can't get it to show in the applications bar on the left (where it presents as a generic Wine launcher). No problems with that in Xfce, of course, but I can still "hot corner" my way to IrfanView whenever I want. I'm using Fotoxx half the time anyway, so that is less of a problem.
I still love Nautilus and Gedit, and while I continued using the GNOME text editor all of the time and Nautilus some of the time in Xfce, once I determined that the 3D effects in GNOME Shell take CPU when they're under way but give it back soon thereafter, I felt that the productivity boost was (and is) well worth it. Compared to what a Web browser sucks from CPU and memory (and often doesn't give back), GNOME Shell is thrifty.
I am in the process of looking into CentOS-derived Stella, which provides nearly all of the desktop packages and codecs I need day to day. But for my main production machine, I will be sticking with newer systems (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, or "other").
FOSS Force's Chris Hall has a nice post on how he returned to the open-source, not-for-profit (as far as I know) Diaspora social network to find it more populated than the last time he signed in. He's now actively using Diaspora and inviting his Facebook friends to the non-explotative alternative.
It wasn't all that long ago that the KDE desktop environment made a major leap from version 3 to 4, leaving a lot of the old functionality behind without having the new polished enough to keep users happy.
And now GNOME has thrown out its own version 2 bathwater for a new GNOME 3/Shell desktop paradigm in which the window manager is radically different but the critical "furniture" of the environment in the form of applications such as Gedit, NetworkManager, GDM, etc., remain largely the same.
It's going to get worse before it gets better. GNOME is about to pour extra fuel on this particular fire as a very important piece of that furniture -- the Nautilus file manager -- is about to undergo a "dumbing down" to make it more touchscreen/mobile friendly, even though GNOME doesn't appear to run on any mobile or touchscreen devices at this particular point in time.
So do you think GNOME is taking an especially hard pounding for the changes in version 3? Do you think KDE was criticized as much, or more? Did KDE finally acquit itself with later versions in the 4.x series? (I know they never managed to get their office suite back on track.)
And will this all blow over for GNOME, or will the Linux community (and what's left of the BSD-running GNOME community) leave it for dead?
(There's irony; I'm writing this post directly to the web server over sftp entirely in GNOME 3 using Nautilus and Gedit. I've been running Xfce 4.8 quite a bit, but I'm getting more comfortable with GNOME Shell all the time.)
Stella takes CentOS (which takes Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and adds many (many!!) of the desktop packages you're missing; along with RPMForge/RepoForgethe EPEL repository, you're pretty much all the way there
It's nice to say that the very-very-very-long-term-support releases in the Linux world that won't cost you arms and legs -- the RHEL-source-fed CentOS and Scientific Linux -- are there if you want to run the same distribution for years and years.
But that's only true if you can stick with the relatively anemic selection of desktop packages available in the CentOS, Scientific Linux and, by extension, Red Hat repositories.
You soon hit a wall. Applications you use every day in Debian, Ubuntu and even Fedora are just not there.
For me those include the Audacity and Ardour audio editors and the OpenShot video editor (or ANY video editor, for that matter). For others -- and maybe for you -- it could mean Skype (if that's your thing, and it very well might be) or the VLC media player.
And then there's a buttload of codecs and other various (and) naughty multimedia bits that are available but often hard to find.
Hate GNOME 3 or just love GNOME 2 and wish the goodness would continue on and on? Well, that's happening. It's called MATE, and this fork of GNOME 2 is under active development.
So you want to run MATE in Debian Wheezy or Sid (or Linux Mint Debian Edition or Linux Mint Lisa or Ubuntu Oneric)? The Debian/Ubuntu MATE Repository is here for you. And here are the installation instructions.
That page also offers links to the MATE Homepage, MATE Wiki, MATE Forum and MATE/debian blog, the latter of which points to the Ubuntu Precise Pangolin MATE repository.
As I've written in my last half-dozen or so entries, even though the GNOME community is in a state of heavy questioning about it's present and future, I'm still evaluating GNOME 3/Shell. And while I was a GNOME 2 user, my love of GNOME was and is more about Nautilus, Gedit, GNOME Terminal, Rhythmbox, NetworkManager, GDM, etc. than the window manager portion of the overall desktop environment and application mix.
Just as GNOME 3 deserves a full evaluation, so does MATE -- especially if development continues and picks up steam going forward.
Since the GIMP edits JPEG images superbly but obliterates their IPTC metadata captions, and gThumb, my main image editor of the past three years, outputs horrible resized images in version 3.0.1 in Debian Wheezy, I need a new image editing application.
And did I say that I need it now?
I go through many dozen images a day. Shrinking. Cropping. Recaptioning.
The software needs to work.
Yesterday I set up Wine the non-emulator, whatever-it-is Windows-compatible environment in Linux that enabled me to install and run the IrfanView image editor/viewer.
Not that other choices don't exist. There is the KDE app DigiKam.
And a little searching brought me to an app I always meant to try: Fotoxx.
It's in Debian, so I installed it. After a lengthy indexing of my appointed directories, I dug in and started working on photos.
Quality of resized images is great. It will be even better when I tweak the sharpen settings just right.
I can edit IPTC caption data, and though it's a bit awkward, also the byline field.
I wouldn't call it a speedy app, but so far it is getting the job done. With a little practice, I just might have a new photo-editing app.
I'm here trying to get work done, and the Windows XP box I barely used today is totally locked up. The disk light isn't on at all, but nothing is moving on the desktop.
I'm rebooting, but I'd rather just do some f&^%ing work.
Here are two blog posts to read about the current uneasy feeling(s) over the GNOME Project:
Staring Into the Abyss by Benjamin Otte (the post that led to hundreds of comments and dozens of blogged responses)
Staring Into The Abyss: Some Thoughts by Jono Bacon (He's the community manager of Ubuntu, employee of Canonical)
And there's my previously linked-to An opinion on the future of GNOME by Andrew Wyatt
More from me when I get some time ...
It's no secret that full reimagining of desktop environments in Linux/Unix can make people unhappy. It happened with KDE 4, and it's happening with GNOME 3, too. I wasn't around, but I've been told that the transition from GNOME 1 to 2 wasn't without its bumps and lumps.
Read 'An opinion on the future of GNOME' at Fewt.com, and don't skip the comments. It'll give you a bit of an idea about what users think.
As for what I'm doing about GNOME 3, I'm still in the evaluating it, not committed yet stage. I recently upgrade my Debian Squeeze laptop (with GNOME 2.3x as the only desktop environment) to Wheezy, the current (yet frozen) Testing branch. It upgraded to GNOME 3.4.x, and I added Xfce 4.8.
I'm switching between the two environments -- GNOME and Xfce -- and I haven't decided to stick with one or the other. I've run both for years on various systems, and it's been nice to seen the improvements in Xfce over that time.
I don't know if it's because the new GIMP 2.8.0 is in Debian Wheezy, or because I'm working on more multi-layered images, or because I'm less happy with my go-to image-editing application gThumb, but I'm using the GIMP -- the GNU Image Manipulation Program more and more.
I'm working in the GIMP's native .xcf format and exporting as .jpg or .png when my image is ready. To get better at using the GIMP, I really should get No Starch Press' The Artist's Guide to GIMP, Second Edition: Creative Techniques for Photographers, Artists, and Designers by Michael J. Hammel. No Starch has another GIMP book coming out in October: The Book of GIMP.
Rob Reed, who created the Ode blogging system in Perl, writes about how he's looking into Python but still finds a whole lot to like about Perl in his entry titled I Like Perl:
Like many other people who work or play at web design and development, I've spent a considerable amount of time learning new (to me) languages in recent years. Now I'm starting to take a good look at Python. Why? First, because there seems to be a lot of promising activity around Python. But more importantly, I suppose it's because Python, like Perl, is readily usable beyond the web.
Keep in mind that I'm an IT guy more than I am a developer. That tends to be the way I look at things. Perl is a fantastic language for accomplishing all sorts of programming tasks (virtually anything you're likely to want to do that doesn't require a dedicated team of developers). Python is the same sort of language. By comparison PHP, Ruby, and others are not so much (which is not to suggest that they aren't perfectly fine languages for what they're used for).
The interesting thing is, the more I learn about these languages, the more I appreciate just how sensible Perl is. It makes me appreciate Perl all the more.
There's a lot more to this thoughtful entry, and I highly suggest you read the whole thing.
For quite some time now, the newest version of the gPodder podcast-catching client has not included the ability to sync podcasts with devices such as an iPod or non-Apple audio/video player.
Kind of a stopper in upgrading from the 2.x to 3.x version of gPodder, which I've been using throughout my tenure with Debian Squeeze and Wheezy, the latter of which is still shipping gPodder 2.20.1.
In a bit of very positive news for fans of the application (of which I am most definitely one), gPodder 3.2.0 has been released, and device sync has returned to the application.
Hopefully this means that Linux distributions will begin pushing the new version of gPodder into their repositories. Debian has 3.2.0 in Sid, but due to the Wheezy freeze I don't know if the update will make its way into the current Testing (and future Stable) distribution.
If you're running LibreOffice in Debian Wheezy, you've probably already seen the approximately 30 updates associated with the office suite present themselves on your system.
It's not a major version update, just a newer version of 3.5.4.2 (3.5.4-6 in Debian's package-numbering scheme).
Just moving from Squeeze to Wheezy (and from the squeeze-backports version of LibreOffice to the Wheezy version) fixed my problem with the libreoffice-pdfimport not working. Prior to Wheezy I needed to uninstall that package and manually download the pdfimport extension from an OpenOffice site.
Now Debian's libreoffice-pdfimport package works perfectly and allows me to open and edit PDFs in LibreOffice Draw application.
Not that I understand it, but here is the changelog for this particular update of LibreOffice:
debian/patches/CVE-2012-2334-clip-max-entries.diff: add additional fix for CVE-2012-2334 from Florian Weimer which we missed to apply so far..
debian/templates/soffice-template.desktop.in: fix Icon= (remove obsolete 3), thanks Miros◈aw Zalewski (closes: #678313)
- debian/control.in: make -filter-mobiledev Break libreoffice-core (<< 1:3.5~) (closes: #633929)
- debian/control.mediawiki.in: add missing epoch to -core dependency
- debian/rules: re-enable -gcj
I'd like to report that I fired up the 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt with its 233 MHz Pentium II MMX processor, 144 MB of RAM and 3 GB original hard drive. The laptop is running Debian Squeeze, to which I upgraded from a Lenny installation some time after Squeeze went stable.
It's been 240 days since the machine last booted. I updated the installation, and here I am in Xfce writing this quick and painless blog post (using Mousepad and gFTP).
P.S. The SpaceFun theme of Debian Squeeze is so much better than Wheezy's Joy theme, it's hard to overstate.
P.P.S. You can run Xfce on a 13-year-old laptop.
I was prepared to embrace SpiderOak as a more secure, better-suited-to-me backup/syncing service than Dropbox. I thought I'd like the ability to sync any directory/folder, and not just items under /dropbox.
I've been using Dropbox for a few years now, and I recently installed and ran SpiderOak on my Debian Squeeze desktop.
While the SpiderOak software seems to be undergoing fairly consistent improvement, I found it hard to configure and use, and when I unknowingly exceeded my 2 GB file limit, the service basically broke and I couldn't seem to either pay for more space or get access to bring the amount of data I had on the service under the 2 GB limit. And yes, I did contact SpiderOak for help.
Dropbox is extremely enthusiastic about supporting Linux, the /dropbox "limitation" makes it easy for me to regulate what I do and don't store with the service (though I'd like the option of selective syncing across the filesystem like SpiderOak).
In the end, it was a combination of service, reliability and software -- I really like the way it works -- that keeps me using Dropbox. I suppose you can throw in familiarity.
Had my SpiderOak experience gone better, I'd probably feel differently (or indifferently).
And now that Dropbox has doubled the amount of data you can store (or halved its prices, depending on how you look at it), the service is more attractive than ever.
It certainly makes my work across multiple computers a lot smoother and trouble-free.
(Click the image above for a full-sized screenshot of my Debian Wheezy Xfce 4.8 desktop)
After a few weeks in GNOME 3, which I actually like, I decided to give Xfce 4.8 a try as the desktop environment on my recently upgraded Debian Wheezy laptop.
Above is a screenshot of the bare desktop. I've made a number of tweaks to the default Xfce configuration. Xfce in Debian generally requires a bit more configuration than distributions for which Xfce is the primary desktop environment such as Xubuntu, Linux Mint Debian, etc.
The changes I've made so far include:
Changed desktop wallpaper to the blue, traditional Aquarius.svg image (I'm not terribly fond of the new Debian Wheezy desktop theme; the Squeeze SpaceFun theme was my favorite of all time, and the new Wheezy theme just doesn't measure up)
Added two extra desktops to the Workplace Switcher for a total of six
I'm not saying that GNOME 3 is driving me to it, because there's a lot I like about the GNOME Shell environment and still a lot I like about GNOME applications like the Nautilus file manager, Gedit text editor and others.
And while the system on this laptop, which began life as a post-freeze, then-Testing Debian Squeeze in late November 2010, has never run Xfce but instead stock GNOME (then version 2) and Fvwm, the latter of which I never used much.
Due to its reliance on 3D acceleration, the stock GNOME 3 environment is necessarily heavier on resources than GNOME 2 or Xfce (version 4.8 is what's in Wheezy; 4.10 is in Experimental at this point). And yes, I'm aware of the GNOME Classic mode in GNOME 3, which I've used (and may in fact go back to if I stick with Wheezy). That GNOME is doing away with GNOME Classic is something I'm not happy about. Absent GNOME Classic, I don't know the status of GNOME 3 without 3D.
I just installed the xfce4 package, and right now I'm rolling in xfce4-goodies to get all the extra bits.
Hello, world — this is my website
No databases were harmed in the making of this blog
You're seeing this blog, powered by Ode, through the magic of the Perl programming language and the Common Gateway Interface. The Apache web server and Linux operating system have more than a little to do with it.
Ode does not use a database to store content. Instead, every entry exists on the web server as a "flat" text file.
Comments are managed via Disqus, integrated through the work of Ode project leader Rob Reed.
E-mail: steven (at) stevenrosenberg dot net.
Who am I
and why am I here?
My name is Steven Rosenberg. Most of what I write these days has something to do with technology. I'm not an "early adopter." I think before I leap. I've got a lot of old hardware, and I like making it work.
Most of my computers run the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. I also run OpenBSD and Ubuntu -- and even Windows when necessary.
I promise to write about guerrilla large-appliance repair in the near future. Aside from saving money, I've gotten a lot of satisfaction from repairing my own appliances and working on my home's electrical and plumbing systems. Knowing that a dryer is spinning (and actually drying things) due to my own effort is a beautiful thing.
I'd like to write less about technology and more about other aspects of life and work. We'll see how that plays out.
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