It works! Sort of …

On a whim, I installed the latest pre-release release of ReactOS today. I tried it a long time ago and had no luck whatsoever — black screens, nonbooting or just generalized irregular behavior — and so I rarely give it a thought.

But I was surprised to find that the live CD version — which weighs in at a size comparable to Slitaz — works great, and the installation version does its job too.

For the most part. I get a weird split-screen effect, with the lower half of the screen rolling up from the bottom, like a TV with a busted vertical hold. And the resolution doesn’t scale to the Inspiron‘s LCD, which means the right third of the screen is lost somewhere in the ether.

Add to that the fact that nothing aside from the touchpad, the video and the hard drives seem to work — no wireless network, no PCMCIA, no audio, no USB, etc., etc. — and it’s not exactly functional for me. I’d show a screenshot, but I’m at a loss for a way to get the image off the machine.

However, every computer is different, and every installation is different, so it might be that your hardware is the lucky combination that works as an entire system. No harm in trying.

And even if it’s not 100 percent functional, it’s nice to see progress made on something as lofty as a cycle-perfect imitation of Windows. Regardless of your philosophy on the subject, some people are working very hard on this, and it seems their labors are bearing some fruit.

You want this: Vertical split patch for screen

Wrap your eyeballs around this one, why dontcha.

Ay caramba. The vertical split patch for screen is now my favoritest thing ever! That’s one vertical split in screen, with a horizontal split on the right. Then the lower right area is further subdivided by dvtm, which means five applications are squished into one 800×600 area.

I understand it, the next version of screen will supposedly have integrated the patch, but in the mean time, it’s well worth the effort to compile it. Crux users need only add a patching line to the standard port; Archers can tinker with the PKGBUILD and come up with the same thing. Ubuntunuts have this as a guide, although I have only built it in Crux so far.

I wonder how many smaller windows I can reasonably create and manage before. …

No time for the jibba-jabba

Boil it all down, and really it’s just about words. You change some words into electronic pulses, and they’re transmitted around the world to someone else, who converts them back into a meaningful thought. Sometimes a picture is more useful than words, but I don’t think I would be going too far out on the proverbial limb if I said ultimately, it’s all about words.

To that end, I’ve been surprised to find so many chat and text relay clients for the terminal. But I shouldn’t be, because again, working at the terminal is focusing your efforts and your energy primarily on words. Images have their place and their applications, but text is paramount.

Here’s a six-in-one image for you, to illustrate what I mean.

At top left is centerim, and beneath that mcabber. At top right, naim and beneath it finch. That’s four console-based applications all devoted to the exchange of words, and the transmission of those words between you and someone else. And those aren’t the only ones available.

I can only vouch for one of these applications — centerim — because of course, to use all of them I’d need either an account that they all can access, or a bunch of other accounts specific to the services they may or may not use. And so I’m sorry, but I’m not signing up for four different chat services, just to take a screenshot.

Anyway, depending on your service of choice, there are probably one or two options here for you, and others that might not be listed. naim is mostly AIM, if I understand it right. mcabber is for Jabber. centerim and finch, I believe, will handle a variety of protocols, and possibly duplicate some others. So if you have two or three accounts you might consider saving a little time and effort, and using the one that accesses all of them.

Each program handles its own configuration and controls separately, so again, pick the one that applies to your service, then hunker down for an hour and figure out how it works. Speaking only for centerim, it’s all menu-driven and quite easy to manage, and I can give it a personal blessing. For the others … well, sound off if you can.

I didn’t mention the two applications in the center yet — on top, weechat and below, elmo. Elmo is an e-mail suite that seems to have fallen out of development, which is unfortunate since I rather like it. alpine works for me and I’m not ready to abandon it yet, but elmo’s interface is likeable and configuration seems simple, so I might give it a full test run in the coming week. Too bad there’s no PKGBUILD or Pkgfile for it. …

weechat is, I guess, the alternative to the omnipresent irssi, and like elmo, it seems to have some admirable elements. Starting it up in Ubuntu shot me straight into irc.freenode.net, which is where I always end up anyway when I need chat-based assistance. So in that sense, it’s one less step to get online than irssi is. (Of course, there are ways around that too. It’s just worth mentioning.)

So why use any one of these over another? Well, it’s personal preference — the beauty of Linux, that is. You know what you need, you know what you like, and you know what your system can afford. Try them out, see which one fits, and then get back to those words.

fim completes me

I got a pleasant surprise today when I updated the ports on my Thinkpad: an update for fim.

Until now every attempt to build fim proved fruitless, but the “beta” version that is dated April 29 compiles and installs without issue.

And why is this important? Because the only “thing” I lacked, since I abandoned X on that machine, was a way to view images. I know fbi is part of the fbida package, but for some strange reason building it requires a large part of the X structure … which to me, defeats the purpose.

I can admit that I tried to split out fbi and build it without X, but I lack the experience and proper know-how to isolate it and eliminate the parts that want X.

On the other hand, fim doesn’t call for anything X-ish, and is working wonderfully for me now.

I will have to tinker with it to get a grip on how all the inner workings are configured, but that’s always the case with new software. And regardless of all the little points, it’s doing what I need it for: viewing images. It works, I’m happy. End of post.

P.S.: I suppose it’s worth mentioning that if you intend to use this in Crux, you’l need to build a kernel with framebuffer support. Or maybe that’s too obvious to mention. …