Another Ubuntu success story

For good or for bad, another family member has jumped into Ubuntu with both feet, and with any luck it might stick.

This time it’s the owner of the previously mentioned dv7, who had done a test-run of Ubuntu in the 8.10 flavor a little less than a year ago, but didn’t stay with it. Wireless issues were the stumbling block that time.

But like all good Vista fairy tales, Microsoft’s product finally became so much of an obstruction that learning Ubuntu was more appealing than continuing to use Vista. This time wireless didn’t get in the way, and I’m getting gleeful e-mails that things suddenly work again — things I take for granted sometimes, like watching DVDs and so forth.

Now comes the dangerous part though: Navigating through things like DVD ripping, or iTunes, or playing favorite games. I can coach a little, but I wouldn’t buy an iPod to save my life, and this person happens to be one of those people who buys Apple products consistently. There may be some lessons yet to learn. …

An X for every application

I picked up an odd tip the other day, by way of questions about window managers. falconindy pointed out that, rather than looking for a lightweight option, perhaps better route is to open another instance of X.

It’s something that I knew I could do, but didn’t really want — or need — to. After all, I’m normally I’m opposed to X in general, on account of the weight it has put on in recent months (years?). But something as quick and easy as this actually might prove … well, quicker and easier.

#!/bin/bash
DISPLAY=:1
X :1 -ac -terminate &
sleep 2
$*

Copy, paste, mark as executable. Call it from the terminal and suffix it with the name of the application you want to run. Switch between them by way of the CTRL+ALT+F# keys, with successive servers getting successive numbers.

Memorywise, I don’t know if it is a wise idea, or at least a wise idea for something as slow as this. On the other hand, it’s a dwindling population that uses machines with those specifications, so it might be perfectly acceptable for anyone using something built after 1999.

I gave it a try on a machine running Arch and had no real issues; whether or not you use it may depend on how practical it works out for you. After all, most window managers support multiple “desktops,” and so adding a whole different instance of X may be overcomplicating things to an unwieldy degree. You’re the best judge of that though.

The value in a mailing list

In June of 2008 there was a small stink on the Crux mailing list, because a little program called pinentry was refusing to build. It was dragging in dependencies from the xorg group, and people using programs that depended on gnupg were suddenly drawing in a mess of X-related packages.

For most people that wouldn’t matter, but for the original author it seemed ridiculous. In that case, it was a server running ketchup, and I think I can sympathize. Or at least, for a desktop machine running only console programs, it seems equally ridiculous.

And that’s the bracket I found myself in this evening when I wanted to install gnupg, and suddenly I lacked requisite dependences because of the trickle-down through pinentry. It bounced around in my brain for a little bit, before I said, “Wasn’t there a ruckus about this on the mailing list once … ?”

And sure enough, I rifled through my old mailing list updates, and there it was, along with a link to a divergent Pkgfile that didn’t rely on X software. And so that’s what I’m building now.

The moral of the story: Subscribe to the mailing list of your choice. Even if you never contribute to it, and even if you don’t read it in detail, it’s another valuable resource.

Looking for broken screenshots

I’ve been fighting a running battle with xs.to these days, trying to scout out all the images that expired and are being replaced with a giant postcard-sized advertisement for their site. Some of those pages are almost three years old, and if it’s possible, I’d like to either make new screenshots or take out the image tags.

And besides, I’ve been running an ad-free blog for years (unless you count the four or five shameless product endorsements), and I’m not going to start advertising now. (Although the crafty ad feeders keep telling me I could make as much in traffic here as I do in my real-life job. )

If you see a page of interest that is showing a filler and not a screenshot, please send me a note. I’m in the mood to redecorate, and the first things that need to go are the dead images. Thanks.

Changing alpine’s default mail folder

Another little note to myself that I’ve been hoarding for a while is how to switch the default mail folder in alpine. The problems that I seem to have in configuring alpine usually are matters of translation — I want to call it “the default mail folder,” but owing to the fact that alpine is a lot more than just an e-mail client, it’s actually something altogether different.

The solution to the first problem is that it’s called “Folder Collections” in alpine-ese. The second problem is that the setting for that folder is usually hidden, which means you have to show hidden configurations first, then look for it.

Changing it can be a bit tricky, although that trickyness might come from the fact that I use four different rules to access Web-based e-mail accounts, and I might have complicated things more than was necessary. I can tell you that to change it from the default “Mail” in my home directory to “~/.mail” (which is what I wanted), I changed that variable to show

Folder Collections  = ".mail/[]"

I believe that might depend on you starting alpine in your home directory. And take note: Those brackets at the end are important. For a while I was beating my head against the LCD (how many times has that happened?) and the source of my aggravation was those brackets.

But mess around with that and see what works for you. In my case I just didn’t want that “Mail” folder to stick out quite so much in my home directory, so a small dot at the beginning was the answer.

Suddenly having doubts

As in, doubts that I will be able to practically upgrade the memory in my Pentium. I thought I was being clever and got a batch of about six or seven 32Mb PC66 SDRAM chips, thinking that the law of averages would allow that most, if not all, of them would prove working and I’d be able to finally start using that machine without paging as a constant impediment.

But I am starting to scratch my head again, and that’s a bad sign. The machine refuses to acknowledge anything inserted into the memory expansion slot, and I can’t help but wonder what I’m doing wrong. I see no dip switches, no BIOS settings enabling the slot. I see no way of cueing the machine to notice that, hey, you’ve got a whole giant stick of memory in there.

After four or five sticks, and no signs of change, I think maybe I am beating a dead horse.

Which is not to suggest that the machine is unusable — far from it. But a day after I pass on a Pentium with 80Mb of memory in it, I wonder if perhaps that 560E was a suggestion from above. I don’t plan on ousting this Fujitsu any time soon (it’s in far too good a condition to surrender wantonly), but it does suggest that, to get a feel for the real speed of about 120Mhz, perhaps I should be thinking about another test subject.

Stay tuned. …

User-agent swap boosts elinks speed

For most of this year I’ve been using elinks as my browser of choice, so long as I wasn’t surfing for something that needed image access specifically — like online shopping, since that makes it difficult to see thumbnails and so forth.

One thing that has always annoyed me has been the seemingly slow rate that elinks brings in some pages, with a long drag that tends to hang the program near the end of loading. It was exceptionally slow on the Pentium, but was only an issue on certain sites — the Ubuntu Forums were rather draggy, but the front page of Wikipedia was terrible. Some of the pages there could take a full minute to complete, which is unthinkable with a text-only browser.

I was willing to suffer through it usually, just because there was no indication elsewhere on the web that anything was wrong. And given that I usually am working on a customized machine in the sub-600Mhz range, I was willing to mentally attribute it to my bad luck or my bad configuration.

Fast-forward to this morning, when I finally got tired of other, unrelated sites blocking page access because elinks has its own user-agent string that it reports. That too is rather rare, but in a case where it keeps me from getting technical information, it’s quite frustrating.

These two issues are related because when I swapped out the user-agent string in Elinks (it’s hiding at Protocols / HTTP / User-agent identification) from its own native

ELinks/%v (textmode; %s; %t-%b)

to the user-agent string for a Linux version of Firefox 3.5.5

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5

I got a huge speed burst. Wikipedia pages load in a matter of seconds now, and the Ubuntu Forums are also much faster. There is a slight difference in how some information is shown — CSS rollover menus, for example, seem to be spilled off to the left, rather than arranged in a table form as before. That’s going to depend on the site and the code, of course.

But the difference in loading times is remarkable. It also doesn’t hang the application like before, where paging up or down was delayed while elinks waited for the site to supply more information. Bonus.

I’m not sure why the user agent string should make a difference, but tell me if it does the same for you. It’s always possible that I am conveniently imagining things. It wouldn’t be the first time.

MPlayer for the framebuffer only

As you might have seen in some of the screenshots, I run mplayer against the framebuffer on my Thinkpad, scrunched into a slot that takes up half the available 800 pixels, and usually from within a screen-vs session.

If it’s vaguely interesting to you, or if you also want to smush DVD rips against the framebuffer of an 8-year-old laptop, you might be interested in the flags I use to build mplayer. Most of these come from the mplayer-no-gui PKGBUILD in AUR (which has since been purged out, I should mention), although I have adjusted it even further to carve out even less dependencies, and reduce the time it takes to build.

And even if you’re not interested at all and you think I’m a hopeless lunatic … well, I get tired of keeping the flags in hnb, so I’m dumping them here.

./configure --prefix=/usr \
--mandir=/usr/man \
--win32codecsdir=/usr/lib/win32 \
--disable-mencoder \
--disable-x11 \
--disable-gl \
--disable-tv-v4l1 \
--disable-tv-v4l2 \
--disable-runtime-cpudetection \
--enable-largefiles \
--disable-gui \
--disable-nas \
--disable-mga \
--disable-smb \
--disable-arts \
--disable-openal \
--disable-sdl \
--disable-aa \
--disable-esd \
--disable-jack \
--enable-fbdev \
--disable-lirc \
--disable-lircc \
--disable-liblzo \
--disable-fribidi \
--disable-libdv \
--disable-musepack \
--disable-speex \
--disable-cdparanoia \
--disable-dvdnav \
--disable-libamr_nb \
--disable-live \
--disable-mad

Insert that into your Pkgfile (for Crux) or your PKGBUILD (for Arch) or just your ./configure command, and it should spit back out a leaner, meaner mplayer. (Please note that this is written for Crux, so it might need a little smacking around to make it work with your distribution. Be prepared to fight for your freedom.)

And so, once again, this blog does the thing it was originally intended for: keeping a record of all the little weird things I do.

A cheap hobby is sometimes cheaper

I wandered into my local recycling shop today, which is a bad thing for me to do. My real reason — I swear — was to see if there were any high(er)-end Thinkpads on the shelves (which there weren’t), but there were two interesting machines in the “antiques” aisle, if I can call it that.

One was a Thinkpad 560E, with the maximum 80Mb of memory and a 2.1Gb hard drive. Knowing my affection for Thinkpads, it was difficult to walk past that one at the ridiculous price of roughly US$20. It looked mostly complete, with AC adapter, intact keyboard, no major damage to the frame, and a CDROM.

I don’t know if I need another Pentium though. The one I have is head-and-shoulders above this, in terms of physical condition. And even if it has its share of eccentricities — like no proper framebuffer extensions, and lack of an internal CDROM — I think it is still challenging enough for me to side with it, over the possibility of picking up a 150Mhz Pentium MMX.

I’m still thinking about it though. At a price like that, I can afford to stack up another one in the closet.

The other was a little more unusual, and probably not in as good a condition (none of these machines are plugged in while on display, I have to ask the attendant to turn them on if I want to make sure they’re working). This was a Fujitsu FMV5200, which was written up as a 200Mhz Pentium (which would make it somewhat rare, if I remember my chip sequences right) with 96Mb of memory.

This one came with a docking station, which is why I considered it at all, since that meant the laptop itself could be pulled away from the external drive mounts, and used solo if the CD wasn’t a consideration. It also had USB ports on the docking station, as well as a few other now-pointless connections at the back. Provided it was working, it probably would have been useful to a degree.

But I say that about everything. In the end I bought nothing, partly because today is a holiday in Japan and I didn’t have enough cash on me to buy much more than a box of Pocky, and I didn’t feel like running down the road to an ATM just to buy another leftover computer. I may be lazy, but at least I don’t impulse buy.

Walking out of the store I considered that I’m rather lucky, to have a hobby that takes up so little money. Short of electricity and an occasional hardware upgrade, there’s little that I require to keep myself entertained than an occasional 1000-yen note and a 10-year-old piece of electronic junk.

Installing Crux 2.6 via ssh

I’ve been quiet for the past day or so because I’ve been trying to commandeer the aforementioned quirky Inspiron 600m, and use it as a compiling machine for the other Crux systems in my house.

After an uptime of 17 days I decided I wasn’t really proving anything by running the beast as a server trapped in the closet, aside from proving that you can abandon a Gnome Ubuntu machine in the closet with a few extraneous console-based packages on it — like openssh, rtorrent, mc, htop and elinks — and not see any real slowdown.

And a day or two ago I got to wondering about the Crux installation CD, because for some reason — it might have been a random thought that sprang into my head, or perhaps a bit of indigestion, to borrow from Dickens — but I got to wondering if ssh was available by default in that “live-ish” environment.

It is. The tricky parts are the network interfaces on that machine, since one doesn’t seem to really work, and the other requires a bit of work to get going. But so long as I’m just piggybacking to tinker with an installation, I see no harm in borrowing the network for that as well. And running a decade-old network card under those circumstances is nothing new.

And once the network is up, I only need to give the root account a password, start the daemon, and jump in remotely. No more difficult than the Ubuntu system, if I don’t count the need to work through the GUI to get all that done.

And everything seems to working from a remote machine. I can chroot into the mounted system, compile a kernel, install grub, and update all the software on the system. The only thing really left to test is to boot the actual system, which is to say, the old Pentium. It might have worked, it might not, but that’s no better than it ever is.