A fork in the road

I fell sick the other day and had to spend most of my time recuperating, so I don’t have much to report in the way of progress … progress of any sort, really. The new hard drive is working great, even in a 13-year-old laptop, although half the time X won’t start on that machine because of memory errors. Yes, it’s true, most of the systems I build for that machine don’t really work, and the ones I show here are sometimes the best of three, or maybe four, attempts.

The memory chip still doesn’t appear in the BIOS or in the system, and that is also disheartening. It’s in the only easily accessible memory mount — I say “only” because I don’t know if there’s another one deep inside this machine, in a place more difficult to reach. My fear is that the standing 16Mb in this machine is fused to the motherboard, which would make it impossible to improve upon, if the “external” brace is not happy.

And if that’s the case, then I need to reassess the situation, and plan for the long term with this machine running at 16Mb, no more, no less. In other words, the plan is this:

First, figure out how to bring the sound to life, which is really the only remaining issue with the laptop’s physical performance. I never configured the sound mostly because there wasn’t a need, but it’s starting to grate on me that there’s that one little point I omitted for such a long time. Technically it should be a SoundBlaster Pro compatible card of some sort, if this page is to be believed. There are BIOS options for the audio interrupt and DMA and so forth, but to be honest, I wish there weren’t: It compounds the possible variations when I’m troubleshooting.

After the sound works, or after I get tired of trying to make it work, then it will be time to tear it apart and find out where the memory is. If it’s possible, I want to playtest the thing with the 32Mb stick I have now, and see if it’s possible to get a little more overhead.

If it is, then I can do things like, try Ubuntu on it. As it is now, the Ubuntu kernel won’t even boot because there’s not enough memory. But with just a smidgin more space, I can get quite a bit more out of it. And it would also, probably, alleviate some of the swapping issues I have now with the desktop, and that would improve life considerably. From there the options are much broader.

But if 16Mb is all there is, then it’s time to go console-only. X works, and I’m fine with that, but it has always been my contention that there’s a lot more speed available by omitting X altogether. It’s fun to watch Awesome at work, but the fact is, dropping the graphical context makes it a brand new machine.

At this point you might be wondering why I bother at all, and the reason is the keyboard. I like the feel of the keyboard. It’s a little plasticky, but it’s enjoyable to type on, and I have a tendency to tolerate machines that have a nice “feel” when I type. Both my Inspiron and Thinkpad fall into that category, and it’s one of the reasons I keep them.

But all that aside, I’m not done with this laptop by a long shot. The day will come when I can do all my routine tasks — music, writing, e-mail, etc. — from 100Mhz, and that will be something to show.

Unbelievable luck

I have spent enough time working with an 810Mb hard drive to satisfy both my curiosity and my need for self-deprecation. So I deviated from my day-to-day routine yesterday and after browsing for about 20 minutes in an electronics store, I picked up the box for a 40Gb 5400rpm laptop hard drive.

It’s similar to the one I bought almost a year ago, the same one that’s in this Celeron I’m using right now. Samsung-built but IO Data branded, it’s a solid performer and hasn’t given me any errors.

I was tempted to grab a little bigger drive, or perhaps even a monstrous 120Gb drive — with price differences of about US$20 for a drive three times as big, I’m almost a fool not to.

But if the drive is destined for a machine with BIOS limitations on hard drives that date back to 1996, I don’t want to overwhelm it too badly. I know the Samsung drive, I trust it in another machine, the size is more than I will ever use (particularly in a Pentium), so I was content to save US$20 and take the smaller drive. I know, it’s stupid on the surface, but I’m okay with stupid sometimes.

When I got home, I dropped it into the modular bay without looking too hard at it, except to notice that it was a Western Digital drive, and not a Samsung. I shrugged and went on, because to be honest, drive resellers like this don’t usually pin down one model and slap their label on it, from my experience.

But things got weirder. I booted the Crux 2.4 ISO and checked fdisk, and the drive was present. I started cfdisk to partition it (knowing I needed to leave a separate partition for /boot, so the BIOS doesn’t freak out), but the size of the drive is reported at a bizarre number far too big for a 40Gb dimension. I’ve done enough installs and reinstalls on 40Gb drives to know where those numbers ought to be.

So I exited cfdisk and used a few other tools to be sure I hadn’t made a mistake, then went ahead and partitioned it, leaving a ginormous partition at the end. But then mkfs.ext2 was showing giant block arrays that were also way out of the range for a 40Gb drive.

Well this must be wrong, I thought. So I halted the machine, pulled out the drive and checked the label again. And then I realized there is a God, and she loves me.

It’s not a Samsung MP0402H, a 40Gb 5400rpm laptop drive. It’s a Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD1200BEVE, a 5400rpm 120Gb EIDE drive.

What incredible luck!

To make the rest of the story short, I checked the box and the receipt and the label, and everything shows it as a 40Gb drive, but the one in the box, sealed from the company, was a 120Gb drive. So I scored on an astronomical scale, with the kind of luck I haven’t had since secondary school when I got a second floppy disk packaged in a C64 game (I’ve forgotten the title), and sold it to a friend for ~$5.

It’s possible it might not be happy in the Pentium (I mean, it has half as much cache as the system has memory!), but even so I can swap it out for another drive if it puts up a fuss. Take it back? I think not. I’ve worked counter retail and there’s no point being honest.

Nope, this one I’m going to chalk up as a point for me, take it as a blessing from above, and bask in a rare moment.

Awesome 2.3.4 on 450Mhz K6-2, 256Mb

I took a break yesterday from my 100Mhz laptop in order to try Awesome on a slightly faster computer — the dreaded Sotec e-Note.

The reason was fairly simple: At 100Mhz and with a clunker of a hard drive, trying new settings and getting used to the way Awesome works was a bit tedious. I don’t require a speedy computer to use it (thus far, everything with Awesome is speedy), but the time it takes to edit a configuration file or change a program setting and test and retry are compounded by the hardware delays on a classic Pentium.

So I started up my K6-2 and put Awesome and a few console programs on there, with the explicit intention of playtesting them for future use on the Pentium.

So far, so good. I ditched Raggle in favor of Snownews, which isn’t as visually intuitive as Raggle, but seems to be running with a lot less pain. I also liked that the configuration files for Snownews were all in one place, and required minimal effort to integrate with, for example, elinks. Edit the browser file for the command you use, and move on with life.

I mentioned a desire to ditch rxvt-unicode in favor of xterm, but that idea was abandoned when xterm refused to display the Terminus font for me. Ordinarily that shouldn’t be a dealbreaker, but for whatever reason I found it annoying that something as simple as a font would require an extraordinary amount of effort to use.

I suppose I could just use Fixed, but all the cool people use Terminus, and I want to be cool too. It must be possible; I’ve seen screenshots with both in action together, but it wouldn’t happen for me. Perhaps, like so many times before, I made a mistake.

One of the nice things about using this laptop over the older one (aside from the fact that it’s four times faster) is that the sound system is a little less perplexing. So I have cplay on hand to offer some (terrible quality) music through the console. Not exactly lovely, but working too. I may have to knuckle under and figure out how to configure the ISA sound card in the older machine, but that’s going to be very time-consuming and very taxing.

I should also note that I threw feh into the mix as a matter of habit, but this time I decided to also forgo the background wallpaper. Not because feh is too slow (which was the case at 100Mhz), but because the terminals cover the wallpaper anyway, and transparency wasn’t really what I wanted. It’s also the reason I didn’t include a screenshot this time, because, well, it looks like the last one.

But I’m impressed with the speed, which I guess I should be, and it’s convenient to be able to test some of these things without the delays I suffer with that awful hard drive. Tinkering with .awesomerc and the companion files is much easier now. And I can learn the ins and outs of Awesome much more quickly.

In fact, I’d use this machine on a regular basis were it not for the fact that the keyboard is absolutely hideous. The “feel” is crappy, and that’s on top of the fact that the g, k and right arrow keys usually don’t work. Really the only reason to keep it around is because it’s a true i586, and a comparatively fast one at that.

No, this is all experimentation, with an eye toward bringing the older machine into a more regular role. This is strictly a guinea pig, and it always has been.

The height of arrogance

Invention is the mother of necessity, as I have said in the past, and one of the problems that I have occasionally is that I can’t find things on this site as easily as I’d like. I put together a few shortcuts in the form of the Howtos page, and I’ve collated a lot of the information into the Ubuntu setup page, but it’s still a bit taxing to pin down one particular bit of information in a hurry.

The obvious solution to that, of course, is to rely on an outside search engine to skim these pages and find the post I need. The obvious tool for that, of course, is to use Google. The obvious caveat for that, of course, is that I don’t care to pump much more into Google’s coffers by feeding them trivial searches, or put up with the ads that accompany the results, or have my IP associated with certain search terms when all I need is an option or a setting I jotted down two years ago.

So I have a tendency to rely on Scroogle, particularly the SSL search page, and the quickest way to do that is with the search engine bar in Firefox. (As a side note, if you want an image search, I feel obligated to mention that Ixquick uses SSL connections too, and doesn’t record IPs at all.)

The only problem is (are you bored yet?) that I have to keep typing “site:kmandla.wordpress.com” every time I use it. A customized search plugin is what I really need.

So here it is, the height of arrogance and yet another example of my overweening vanity: a Firefox search plugin for Motho ke motho ka botho. Of course I can’t offer a direct link to install it because, even in this day and age, WordPress.com still only allows about eight different file extensions to be uploaded to their site. I have an egregious amount of space, but unless it’s one of about six proprietary file types or two free ones, it doesn’t work.

So unfortunately this will be another cut-and-paste-and-save adventure for you. Scoop up the XML below and save it in a file in your ~/.mozilla/firefox/????????.default/searchplugins/ folder with an .xml extension. When you restart Firefox, it should show up as a search option, and when you use it, the results should only come from this site.

<searchplugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/" xmlns:os="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
<os:shortname>Scroogle SSL Motho ke motho ka botho</os:shortname>
<os:description>Anonymous Google searches with Scroogle.org, SSL-encrypted</os:description>
<os:inputencoding>UTF-8</os:inputencoding>
<os:image width="16" height="16">data:image/x-icon;base64,AAABAAEAEBAQAAAAAAAoAQAAFgAAACgAAAAQAAAAIAAAAAEABAAAAAAAwAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACAAACAAAAAgIAAgAAAAIAAgACAgAAAwMDAAICAgAAAAP8AAP8AAAD//wD/AAAA/wD/AP//AAD///8AAACZmZmZAAAAmZmZmZmZAAmZqqqqqpmQCZmQAAAAqZCZqQAAAAAKmZmgAAAAAAqZmaAACaoACpmZoACZAAAKmZmgAKkAAAqZmaAACpmaqpmZoAAAAAAKmZmqAAAAAAqZCZqgAAAJmZAJmaqqqqqZkACZmZmZmZkAAACZmZmZAADwDzgFwAPgA4ABAHyAAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA4AMAAOADAAAAfAAAAHyAAeADgAHgA8ADAADwDwAA</os:image><br /><searchform>https://ssl.scroogle.org/index.html</searchform>
<os:url type="text/html" method="POST" template="https://ssl.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbwssl.cgi">
<os:param name="Gw" value="{searchTerms} site:kmandla.wordpress.com">
</os:param>
</os:url>

If you want to make one of your own, it’s terribly easy. There are tutorials available elsewhere but if you just edit the “site” string and short name in this code, you can cut and paste and save again, and it will work fine.

I should note that I trimmed out the update terms from the plugin, since it will never be updated. Wow, from alpha to 1.0 in a matter of seconds, and no bug reports! Now I can retire into the post-development Nirvana reached by only a handful of other open-source projects. …

Wanted: Barrack-room lawyers

My education is so far removed from the legal arena that even TV dramas are sometimes bewildering. Aside from my unforgivable nonchalance regarding most conventional legal systems, my only brush-in with judges and courts involved a traffic ticket, about 20 years ago.

But I do have a question regarding contracts, so if you can offer a tip or a clarification, you’ll be helping me understand things just a little better than I did.

Basically, my question is this: If a contract presents a statement or sets forth a condition that is technically incorrect, but requires the other party to concede to it before the agreement is complete, does that in any way invalidate the contract?

That sounds just as complicated as I imagine it. Let me give you an example instead.

That is the dreaded Microsoft end-user license agreement, presented as part of a Vista installation on an HP laptop. (I’ll pause while the booing and hissing subsides.) The lower checkbox, as you can read, suggests that you will be unable to use your computer if you do not acquiesce to the terms of the agreement.

I’m sure I’m splitting hairs here and I apologize beforehand, but to me that’s patently false. The use of the machine is completely discrete from the presence of a Microsoft product, as any free software advocate would tell you. Suggesting that the computer is somehow incapable of functioning by omitting the software is … well, a lie.

So doesn’t that statement, and the requirement that you acknowledge it, establish the agreement on false terms? Again, my legal know-how doesn’t extend much beyond a once-a-year viewing of Miracle on 34th Street, but if someone misrepresents the usability of a product as a condition of an agreement, it seems like that would invalidate the contract. Or is it just caveat emptor?

If I tell you that your car won’t work unless you use my brand of petrol, you’d laugh and refuse to buy the car. If I told you that your cake wouldn’t bake unless you bought my brand of flour, you’d call me a fool and bake the cake anyway. And in either case, you’d probably hire somebody else to sue me for lying, or just for being stupid. Which is sometimes the same thing.

I don’t know. I don’t have to worry about it because I’ll never buy or install or even use Vista, so personally the question is moot. And it comes as no surprise to me that Microsoft would use what appears to be a scare tactic to coerce someone into agreeing to use their shoddy software. But it does seem that anyone who did click on that box would have some sort of argument that the original premises were false, and that the cake is a lie.

A horse of a different color

Living outside your native country occasionally triggers double-takes over the simplest things. I’m used to that; I’ve been living outside my native country, off and on, for decades. But sometimes you have to look twice at something new before you realize that it’s not just where you’re at, but the fact that it is actually something new you’ve never seen before.

I stood and stared at a laptop in my local recycling shop for about two or three minutes today before realizing there must actually be something called a Crusoe processor, and that it isn’t just a labeling issue or a leftover sticker put there by some kid with a weird sense of humor. I’ve never seen or heard of a Crusoe processor, but a quick Scroogle search this evening puts me back in the “educated” category.

Apparently those machines will run Linux, so I wonder if it’s adequately obscure to warrant a price tag of just under US$200. I can’t offer any more information than that; I was sufficiently bowled over by seeing it that I didn’t even bother to notice who made the darned thing. Talk about losing your cool.

Regardless, if you have any experience with them or can offer advice, I’d be willing to listen. I don’t actually need another laptop right now, but the strange and unusual are always given priority in my household.

Correcting a long-running error

I started this blog because I wanted to keep track of notes and configuration settings in a way that was more persistent and trustworthy than a piece of paper or a file somewhere on a local drive. A good example is the settings for a Japanese keyboard under X.

Unfortunately, I was always about 10 percent wrong on those settings, and I finally, this morning, came up with the options that get all the keys working properly. It might sound odd that I’ve been using Japanese key configurations for a year and a half and sometimes they’re not quite right, but the odd keys that don’t come into play … never really come into play.

But this is 100 percent correct, as far as I can tell, and so I put it here to preserve it into the future.

Under Section "Keyboard",

Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "jp106"
Option "XkbLayout" "jp"
Option "XkbVariant" ""

I think that’s correct. Or at least now those one or two odd keys (like the right curly bracket) that weren’t quite right … are.

P.S.: Sorry if this is boring. I’ll try to have something more spicy to tell in a day or so.

Tripartite, and only 750Mhz too

The only other worthy mention at this point in time is that my rtorrent slave has burgeoned into a full-time download client, using both that and Blice’s fttps continually.

And now it takes over the task of in-house ports server, which I relegated from the 100Mhz machine when I realized I wanted more from that computer than just a once-a-day download client.

And since the Thinkpad is on all the time, and since setting it up is terribly easy, and since nfs is already running on it, and since there’s no stress involved in syncing with the Crux ports once a day, the laptop with the busted screen now has three roles:

1. Download anything and everything torrent based;
2. Download anything sizeable that I would rather not tie up my wireless network with; and
3. Serve up fresh ports once a day, for the rest of the household.

Which just goes to show you that just because a computer is deficient in one point, it doesn’t have to be thrown out altogether.

Settling in at 100Mhz

I ran into a busy spot at work over the past few days, so there’s little to tell or share. My last advance in usability for the 100Mhz laptop — awesome with console applications — seems to have set in for the long run. I haven’t traced the root of the memory issue, or for that matter come up with faster hard drive yet. But both of those things are in the future.

Right now though, I’m finding I can do more and more with this old machine, which is either a testament to lightweight console applications, or an offhanded slur against how little I actually do that’s worthwhile.

But what’s clear is that elinks, irssi, Charm and a few other programs are keeping me occupied and enthused, moreso than I usually am. System performance is still substandard, since any program switching or movement between programs triggers disk access, and the drive that’s in here is just too darn slow to be tolerated. In the short run it’s the only one I’m willing to use, but by the end of the week I should have a new one in place. My hope is that even if the memory stick proves utterly useless, a faster drive will mean tolerable swapping, at least.

Here’s the short list of applications that are on this machine.

I’m still using nano to draft these posts (as you might have guessed from the whacked-out post formatting from time to time ), and that’s probably not going to change for a while. WordGrinder, as much as I would like to use it, has a rather gnarled list of dependencies that will need solved before I can transplant it to Crux. It’s on my to-do list though. If I can find a nice, solid block of about four hours of free time, all of these things could be checked off. …

Charm works great on this machine, although I do have to manually edit the 1.9.1 version, in the manner reacocard explained here. But the actual function of Charm is sufficiently light that it doesn’t require extra effort to use. One hundred megahertz is plenty.

Chatting is like random noise to me, but it’s fun sometimes to watch the conversations scroll past. irssi does the job without complaint, and so I usually let it run without actually participating. So if you see me online in #crux or #archlinux or somewhere, don’t take it personally if I seem to be ignoring you.

It sounds funny to say it, but elinks is the heavyweight in this configuration. It can regularly eat up as much as 40 percent of my meager processor power, and a large 12 percent of my 13Mb of memory left (according to htop, that is). When it’s idling it drops to more acceptable levels, but the action of accessing the Web and converting all its junk into an acceptable shape is rather taxing, for 100Mhz. Just the same, it’s doing the job well, and there’s little Firefox can do that it can’t. Yes, except for display images, and that extension that you’re about to mention, that you can’t live without.

I’ve had two disappointments in recent days; the first was Raggle, which didn’t want to cooperate and bogged down the system so badly that it went from pityable to unusable. As far as I can tell Raggle was the only program on the system to use Ruby, so I have a feeling between that and ncurses-ruby and Raggle itself, there was just a little too much being asked.

I was also just a little set back by mutt, which seemed like more effort than it was worth to install. I realize that mutt is what separates the true geeks from the wannabes, but in this case, I didn’t really want all that work just to check an e-mail address.

Instead, I grabbed alpine, and found it sufficiently useful to keep it on hand. I would like to configure it to use multiple accounts, if that’s possible. I’ve just barely scraped the surface, and so while I don’t see a visible option for checking more than one account, it might be in there somewhere. And if you want a great, two-second howto for setting up alpine and GMail, go here.

After that, I should mention that I have htop and mc installed as the obligatory system monitor and file manager (there is none higher), and while I could install cplay, I never did sort out the sound issues on this machine, and so anything audio is … moot point. It’s okay, it’s not critical. On the other hand, cmatrix is critical, and so it’s installed.

But I think that’s about everything. I use scrot and feh as a matter of course, but I set the background with xsetroot because feh is too sluggish for that task. I have rxvt-unicode installed, but I might switch to xterm since it’s probably lighter, I don’t use complex fonts and I don’t need pseudotransparency.

In case you haven’t figured out where I’m going with all this, I’m wondering how much of my day-to-day use can be relegated to this 100Mhz machine. Naturally there are some cracks in its armor — for one thing, I don’t know of any console replacement for Zim, but I heard of one or two that might take the place of Osmo.

If it turns out I can actually live for a day — or two, or longer — I might adopt it for daily use. It’s a long road though, and time always seems to be my limiting factor.