K.Mandla’s blog of Linux experiences
No surprises really, but VICE 2.1 will compile nicely in Ubuntu 9.04. And since I have the full Gnome suite installed, I decided to check it this time against the Gnome UI.
I don’t like Gnome, but the Gnome UI for VICE does have quite a few more options than the old xaw-based interface. 
I’ll update the howto next, to show it works. That thread just gets older and older, all the time. …
I spent an hour or so this morning looking into Web-based Java desktop sharing services, and had the best luck with one called Elluminate. I believe the original purpose is educational, for online classes and so forth. It allows remote desktop control under certain circumstances, which is what I was originally after, and doesn’t require port forwarding or other technical points.
It also has some file sharing, whiteboard displays, audio and multimedia options. In that sense it’s a bit overkill for what I need, but one never knows when those frills might come in handy.
It’s also free for up to three connections at a time, which means I could conceivably host more than one person in a “session.” Why would I want to do that? Beats me. But it sounds cool. 
One thing that I need to remember for the future, is that my fastest machine is still a great deal slower than the machine I was connecting to. I was getting some serious lag while waiting for the desktop to refresh, and didn’t figure out why until I realized that the distant machine had a lot of desktop effects enabled.
So the moral of the story is, turn off Compiz when connecting a Pentium III to a dual core machine. 
I don’t intend to sound jaded or know-it-all, but it’s unusual that anything in the Linux world should surprise me. By that I mean that I have expectations for certain software and certain distros, and thus far in my relatively short experience with Linux, everything can be comfortably cubbyholed.
Ubuntu is full-featured but kind of slow. Fedora is the same, as are most of the other well-rounded distributions. Arch is fast, and lets you control your system down to the minute detail. Crux is brutally honest, as other source-based distros probably are. Ultralightweights like Slitaz, Puppy and Tiny Core are so bewilderingly fast as to defy logic.
That’s just what I’ve learned as life has gone on, and what I’ve come to expect. No harm in that. No danger in having expectations.
Except that occasionally somebody in that list above steps out of their box, and I’m left struggling to understand how it’s possible. This time, it’s Ubuntu that has me scratching my head, and questioning my personal belief system.
For some reason, through some sort of arcane technological magic, my Ubuntu 9.04 system boots in under a minute.
The hardware is this machine, the same one I have been using since early 2006 when I realized Linux was going to save me thousands of dollars in hardware upgrades demanded by Redmond. One gigahertz, a 7200rpm 60Gb system drive, 512Mb of PC133, a ground-level Nvidia card and a decent wireless card.
Up until now, I had a hard time getting Ubuntu to boot in under three minutes. In fact, about a year ago when I still had a 2Ghz machine, three minutes was still the best I could do. And the only way to get Gnome to finish loading any faster was to put together a custom kernel, and inject that into it’s electronic heart, like epinephrin.
So I have no explanation. I built a system with the desktop ISO, I installed the full Ubuntu Gnome suite, and I used ext4, just for a change.
Aha, maybe that’s it.
I had heard ext4 was yielding some speed increases, but I’d also heard the opposite — that it was dragging down older systems and making them unresponsive. The obvious corollary was that, like many things, ext4 was probably best on newer, higher-end hardware.
But this sub-one-minute-booting machine is nothing short of a shocker. I measured it three or four times, and every time it’s ducking in under the 1 minute mark.
And that’s when the drive light stops, not when the cursor appears. I dislike that the startup sound plays and the system appears ready before it actually can do anything — that’s an old Windows trick that doesn’t fool me — but I can’t find fault since it’s only another eight or nine seconds before the entire system is ready.
So there it is. Finally, an Ubuntu system that can put Gnome in my face in less than a minute from the Grub bootloader. Somebody out there deserves a gold smilie:
I am late to the party again — this time it’s a blanket party — in honor of Windows Vista. That, of course, is because I wouldn’t put it on my computers if I was paid to. I use it on a daily basis in my office, or at least I have for the last month, since the abused Duron spun out of control and crashed into the sidewall. In its place a gleaming new eMachines J4482 was installed, with Vista on its back like the proverbial monkey.
I don’t have much that’s positive to say about it, mostly because it hasn’t really impressed me yet, and because I only use it superficially — browsing with a portable version of Firefox, typing documents in Word, and so forth. Beyond that, I haven’t really had a chance to delve deep.
Of the little that I see, and of the few things I have made it do, I am not terribly impressed. The funky program-switching feature that flips through applications like pages in a folder? It’s okay, but it doesn’t hold a candle to spinning your desktop like a cube. Desktop widgets? Meh. It looks to me like a KDE knockoff, although I can imagine that the counter-argument is that KDE is a Vista knockoff. Chicken or egg, if you ask me.
I guess it gets the job done. I haven’t run into that “confirm or deny” behavior that everyone mentions, but again, I only use two programs, and neither of them is really running a risk of bringing the entire system down. It does disappoint me that, for all the power and technology that the system has, Vista feels a little sluggish. As an example, if the machine enters power-saving mode while at the login screen, it takes two seconds for the mouse to come back to life.
Little things like that seem to hinder its day-to-day functions. Every login brings out a system profile screen, although that might be a feature and not a bug, and I just don’t know how to turn it off. 
And so forth, and so on.
In any case, my lackluster beratement of “one of the worst products in history” isn’t serving anyone. I will only say that it does the job, albeit rather begrudgingly, and seems heavy on glitz while light on performance.
Of course, coming from someone who uses Linux on a 100Mhz laptop as the primary machine in the house, that might be the worst thing I could say.
I have a tendency to slap things together the first time I try them, and not really take the time to work out how they’re supposed to be done, in the correct, classical *nix sense of things.
That’s the case too for this extremely old Pentium which has some of the worst clock lag I have ever seen on a computer. Over the course of a day (in other words, for every 24-hour span), the machine’s clock usually falls behind by at least a minute. The more I use it, the worse it gets, too. At one point, this machine lagged behind the others by as much as a day and a half. How embarrassing. 
Personally I solved the problem in a way that’s probably less than ideal, but seems to be working. ntp from the contrib repo for Crux can sync the time with a remote server across a network, and without any configuration file editing or fancy footwork.
I inserted the ntp command into /etc/rc.local, and set it to sync against a distant server, and that way the clock is corrected each time the machine boots. ntp seems smart enough to wait for the network to be brought up (via /etc/rc.d/net) before doing its thing.
I read elsewhere that it’s possible to use ntp as a daemon and have it sync repeatedly while the machine is in use. To be honest, this machine has so little resources to work with that I’m not inclined to add something else to the mix. Once at startup gets me within striking distance of “correct,” and that’s good enough for now.
I suppose there is a better, or more orthodox way of setting up ntp, but for my purposes, this is satisfactory. Anyway, it keeps the clock from falling behind by days.
Silly me. How could I have forgotten — and not just recently, but months after I spent a full week at 100Mhz, and more than a month after relinquishing X on another machine — that there’s a site practically devoted to console applications, in various states of development: cli-apps.org.
Ordinarily, when scraping for unusual console apps, I cruise a few screenshot threads, or dredge up another text-based distro and check out their list of included applications. INX, for example.
cli-apps.org, as you might expect, has a good collection of nifty things you hadn’t ever thought of, and they’re arranged in convenient ways (popularity, etc.). So I don’t necessarily have to sift through armloads of Crux ports, compile for an hour, only to find that a program sucks.
Which does happen occasionally. Not everything on the terminal smells like roses.
And if you want something a little more in the way of direct analogues, make sure you check out the lengthy list jared mentioned in a comment a few days ago. Where cli-apps.org is arranged in terms of name, popularity and frequency of download, jared’s list is helpful when moving from one application — like OpenOffice.org Presentation — to its counterpart at the terminal — like tpp.
Between those two sites I have a near-infinite array of software to test and hours of compilation ahead of me. Hmm … joy. …
It’s rather strange, but I’m starting to see “noise floor calibration” errors with my Corega wireless card on my Thinkpad. I was running rtorrent and seeding the Jaunty ISO, in an effort to overload my wireless router. And as a result, I seem to have overloaded my wireless card.
I’m not sure where exactly the “noise” is coming from. I had a mess of errors this morning — all resulting in a full network stop — and had to reboot once or twice to get back online. It’s possible I was picking up noise from elsewhere in the building, or perhaps the wireless card is too close to the radio while Revolution Void is playing at high volume.
Or wait, you mean that’s not the noise we’re talking about here?
Right now it seems to be behaving, but it’s a full 12 hours later, most of the building is out enjoying a Saturday evening, the sun is down (I have enough experience with encrypted network transmissions to blame just about anything on sunspots) and the music is off. And that’s just the beginning of my list of “noise”-producing possibilities.
Anyway, it’s something else to add to the list of Not Very Important Things That I Should Probably Solve, But Probably Never Will. That darned list gets longer every day. …
I hope you’ll forgive another post extolling the magic of console-based software. I have two that I think worth mentioning mostly because they fall outside the bracket of your standard terminal-based fare.
It’s easy to find utilities that run at the command line, but not so easy to find full-fledged applications. Just so you understand the distinction, I consider a utility to be something like iftop, which shows you the traffic through your network interface. It’s a tool, and outside of supplying you with information, it doesn’t have much other function.
On the other hand, these two are — in my humble opinion — more like applications.
At top left is hnb, and at top right is tpp. And why is it important to mention these things, aside from the fact that they both have three-letter names?
Because they actually do something, instead of just supplying you with information. These two run counter to the traditional stigma of a console-based program: That while a command line is useful for picking the lint out of your kernel, it’s not so great for actually doing things.
hnb is a heirarchical notebook — in other words, a program that builds a text outline, with the intent of organizing information. While it’s (at best) a distant cousin to something like Outline mode in Word, it’s a fantastic way to arrange notes and text in a structured and organized way. The learning curve for hnb is incredibly shallow, meaning it will only take you a few minutes to learn how it works. About five minutes after you install it, you can transfer all your lists, notes, reminders, to-do lists and even calendars to it.
It imports files, it exports its information, it’s colorized and menu-driven. It has spellchecker support, a statistical overview, copy, paste and search functions, undo, redo, sorting and shuffling. Anything that would require a practical arrangement of information is perfectly suited for this application.
tpp on the other hand, is more for show — quite literally. tpp is a text presentation program, and if that conjures up an image of PowerPoint running in a terminal, you have the right idea. If you just snickered at the thought, you need not feel guilty … except that a lot of the core functions of PowerPoint are mimicked in tpp.
Color text, oversized (banner) text (via figlet), transition effects like typewriter “mode” and text sliding, slide counters and headers, boxes, lists … and more. The next time you have to give a presentation, you can wow your geek coworkers by dragging in your Pentium and throwing tpp up on the overhead projector.
Creating a tpp presentation is no more difficult than editing a text file, mostly because that’s all they are. Easy-to-organize text codes trigger the effects, and you can adjust them for the occasion with minimal effort. Best of all, the tarball comes with a folder full of examples, which will get you started.
About the only downside to tpp is that it’s ruby-based, which is neither here nor there, except that I have found ruby-based programs to be rather sluggish at extremely low speeds. That’s not a criticism of tpp so much as it’s a note for people (like me) who are still using particuarly old hardware on a daily basis.
There are other programs which would qualify as applications more than utilities (I did tell you about oleo once, a long time ago), and are bound to the console, but these two are standouts for me mostly because they are exceptionally useful. That, and they prove that the terminal isn’t just a place to monitor your network speed. 
I’m not a full-time Ubuntu user any more, but that doesn’t stop me from seeding the Jaunty ISO. And since I just got done showing off a few console network monitors, there’s an obvious collision there.
rtorrent is running on a virtual terminal (so as not to tie it to X) while these monitors show the network frenzy taking place. This is on the Inspiron running Crux, everything connecting through my wireless router. That image doesn’t show it, but the peak speeds for my Intel PRO/2200BG are around 1Mbps down and 880Kbps up. Not bad. Not fantastic, but not bad.
Hmm. I’ve never really put my wireless router through the wringer like this. I hope it doesn’t suddenly have a nervous breakdown. …
I keep turning over rocks and finding new console applications that are worth mentioning. I thought I had scraped the bottom of the barrel, but the list of gizmos, gadgets and whirligigs available for the terminal seems to be growing instead of shrinking. They’re like coat hangers, or bunnies. They’re constantly reproducing when you’re not looking.
I found two network traffic monitors I hadn’t heard of, and I’ve added both to my system even if I hardly need them. I already mentioned slurm a few weeks ago, which still stands as one of my favorites. Nothing better than a sideways-scrolling multicolor network graph to keep the kids busy for days.
On the other hand, slurm doesn’t feed you much in the way of details, even if it is a dandy visual metaphor for your network activity. If you want details, you can always install tcpdump, but watching tcpdump spit out information is a bit like skimming a phone book, with lots of numbers and words spinning past without much in the way of coherent presentation.
Here are two more, that are more organized: iptraf and iftop.
At the top is iptraf, and on the bottom right is iftop. slurm is on the left, just for comparison’s sake.
All three are fairly straightforward, showing traffic and usage in their own particular ways. The white bars in iftop will scale to the left and right depending on rates and activity, inverting the text so its readable. iptraf has a detailed version if you want to focus on just one interface, and it will give you far more information that just what you see there. And I suppose it’s worth mentioning that slurm has three graphs you can switch between, by pressing the ‘c,’ ‘l,’ and ‘s’ keys while it’s running.
I don’t have a clear favorite, although personally I see more of a use for slurm and iftop than iptraf. I think on a complex, busy machine like a server or a network host iptraf would be the winner, just because it seems to have more details particular to each address and interface. For me, it’s a little less appealing than the other two.
slurm is good stuff, but slurm doesn’t give me as much information as iftop does. It’s actually kind of nice to be able to connect the numbers to the destinations — to put names to the faces, so to speak. And it’s important to say that iftop has a brief help screen — press ‘h’ — and you can adjust the display to something of your liking. And I like that I can cram iftop into a tiny windowbox and not lose any information … for the most part.
But it’s not colorificationized, like slurm, and doesn’t have cool peaks and valleys and up-and-down-rates in two configurable colors, like slurm. And it doesn’t show as much detail as iptraf can, for the most part. So for me there’s no clear winner, even if I’m more inclined to use iftop and slurm, than iptraf.
You try them and see what you like. They’re all free, and the only investment is the time you spend to install them. Linux is cool that way, isn’t it?
Recent Comments