Change Metacity button location in Ubuntu

I’m not a Gnome user. But personally, I’ve had just enough whining about the location of the minimize, maximize and close buttons in Lucid. Ordinarily I wouldn’t bother trying to help out Gnome users because Gnome itself is deliberately hamstrung and at the same time grotesquely overweight, but this is something so simple and so straightforward as to make all the whining rather painful.

Open your terminal. Type gconf-editor and press return. Result:

Skim down to apps > metacity > general. On the right you should see a key entitled, “button_layout”. Right-click and pick “Edit Key…”

Change the contents of the Value box to :maximize,minimize,close. In essence, you’re moving one single character, a colon from the end to the beginning.

Press OK and your buttons should immediately bounce back to the right.

The settings are stored in the .gconf folder in your home directory, so you can hand-edit them too if you want.

Now can we stop the whining and go back to the important stuff, like saving the world from evil software monopolies and rampant materialism?

Reset a password in Ubuntu

It’s hard to believe, but even in the short time since my friend picked up a new computer, there’s already been a password problem. Apparently it was a new password, misspelled slightly for added “security,” and then promptly forgotten. After several failed login attempts as the primary user, I got a text message pleading for help.

In Ubuntu, if you can believe this, it’s quite easy to change or “reset” the password for an account, so long as you have physical access to the machine. In total this should take you about 10 seconds to finish, give or take for the actual speed of the machine.

First restart, and then watch closely as the computer starts up again. After the BIOS screen disappears (the screen that usually shows the manufacturer’s logo, or information about the hardware), hold down the Shift key (if you’re using a version earlier than Karmic, you will probably have to press Esc repeatedly).

If all goes well, you should be at a Grub boot menu. From the list you see, pick any option that ends with the “recovery mode” option, and press return.

In Karmic and perhaps in some earlier versions, you may get a gray, blue and red menu that describes several different options; the final option — “Drop to the root shell prompt” — is good enough. Some of the earlier versions of Ubuntu went straight to the prompt.

Then you should see the command-line cursor, with root as your user name. Next type

passwd enter_username_here

and press return. You’ll need to enter the new password twice for confirmation, and then you can restart the machine.

reboot

You can logout of the root account if you like, and go back to the gray-blue-red menu, but it’s just as easy and useful to reboot from that point.

And the new password should work fine. From within Gnome there are ways for a person to adjust their password by themselves, so I gave my friend “password” as the reset one, and at some point it can be changed to something else. Crisis averted.

Shopping with a friend

A quick apology first, for a lapse over the past few days. I ran into a particularly busy spell at work, and added to some other extra-curricular responsibilities, it made it impossible to update this site. On the other hand it also made it impossible to make any progress in these “Linux adventures,” so nothing was particularly lost.

I did accompany a friend to a computer retailer on a computer shopping trip. The winning prize was a rather nice machine by my standards — possibly one I would have bought myself a few months ago, if I had seen it first. It’s an NEC VersaPro model VY22X/RX-M, housing a 2.2Ghz Celeron, 256Mb of memory, a 20Gb hard drive, USB2.0, an ATI Radeon 330-series graphics card on a 1024×768 LCD, a CDROM, Windows XP (in Japanese) and a floppy drive.

Considering that the focus of this machine will be common desktop tasks, like surfing and watching Flash videos, it’s fine. It was a little sluggish at start — actually very sluggish — but I added a leftover 256Mb stick of DDR333 and it hums along quite well. It’s a sizable machine — easily bigger than any of the computers I keep on hand — but I think that was actually a selling point for the buyer.

The price was good too — under US$200 with a 30-day lemon guarantee, and the seller threw in an off-the-shelf DVD reader-writer identical to the one I bought two weeks ago. Considering that my friend was expecting to pay twice that amount, it was an easy choice.

Overall the computer is in solid condition, no physical defects, flexible enough to handle everyday chores, and should have a few more years of action left in it. We’ll see how it goes from here. …

Your way is the right way

It’s nice to see, on occasion, proof that my ramblings and rantings are having some effect on the collective Linux psyche, however minimal. I don’t expect to see everyone dropping Xorg, the sluggard, just because I point out its rotundity, but if you find yourself leaning more and more toward a console-only system, if the dark side of the Force is beckoning you, well. …

Well, you’re not alone. Don’t be embarrassed or shy or feel somehow diminished if you prefer a text-based system against a graphical one. There is at least one more of you out there, beyond the screen.

But at the same time, the rule of thumb is to use what suits you best. I can ramble and rant for hours on end, for days and weeks on end, but that doesn’t mean my way is the best way. It only means my way is the best for me.

So there is no implication of superiority, no surreptitious allegations of inferiority, or any other -ation of -ority. Use what you like, how you like, on the machine you like. That, in its core, is what is best about Linux: We can all do whatever we want, however we want, with whichever works best. Your way is the right way.

But of course, if you’re another console-only weenie, and you want to give a shout out, feel free. We have a kind of club, you know, and anyone can join. Dress is casual, there will be punch and pie, and your only obligation is a screenshot. For example …

That’s this machine, of course, with a Grub-to-console boot time of 23 seconds (including the time it takes to snap the framebuffer into place), a full-workload memory footprint of less than 18Mb and taking up around 1Gb of hard drive space. Jump in any time. …

A fork is not a bad thing

It has happened again, so I have to wonder again: What’s the reason for a sudden, vitriolic knee-jerk reaction to the idea of someone forking a distro?

After all, you have a slightly different idea of where a distribution should go. You have a plan, a goal, a mission statement and your own favorite wallpaper. What more do you need than that, plus a little ambition, to set yourself up as supreme dictator for life?

I understand brand loyalty, if that’s the reason for the reaction. After all, some people would have every Ubuntu variant ever concocted permanently erased, or at least merged into one megadistro available on a series of six DVDs. But just about every brand out there comes with a clause that says if you want, you can adjust and redistribute it, free of hassle, free of charge and free of obligation. So it’s not like it’s some big surprise that someone actually follows through on that.

Or maybe it’s an inability to see a distro’s shortcomings. I can understand that, if you think your preferred version is all that and a bag of chips. It’s an unfortunate situation, but not a difficult one to understand: Brand X does everything you ever wanted, so it must be perfect for everyone else too, right?

If I had the guts, I would threaten to rerelease just about every distro out there, and effectively double the number of available options, just to annoy the people who are already annoyed by the software buffet before them. And all I would do is tweak the default wallpaper. Oh, if only I had the guts. And the time.

But I won’t dwell on this any longer. I’ve discussed it in the past; splitting off someone’s work and dedicating your time to it does no more harm than take your time away from you. It’s educational, it’s free (short of bandwidth and hosting, I guess) and you’re allowed to, for goodness sake.

So don’t be shocked or rude when it happens. Everybody has to start somewhere, and nobody benefits from that kind of negativity. Be kind to one another. …

The style is light, the software is …

While the Ubuntu rebranding is still at the forefront of everyone’s mind, I think I’ll throw in my meager opinion: It’s great. I love it. It’s clean, it’s fresh, it’s a new direction. It’s classy, it’s simple, it’s sharp and it’s light —

Waitaminute. Are we talking about the logo, or are we talking about the software? I understand that the theme is light; after all, the new typeface and the simplified icon are “lighter” than the past ones, in a visual-effect sense. I have worked in print media, and I can more or less see through the marketing jargon.

And the desktop is interesting, even if we seem to be transitioning between orange and brown and purple (my primary school art teacher is having a heart attack right now). We all know the default desktop is a completely pointless exercise anyway.

No, it’s lines like this that throw me into a painful 10-minute giggle fit.

Good software is “light” in the sense that it uses your resources efficiently, runs quickly, and can easily be reshaped as needed. Ubuntu represents a break with the bloatware of proprietary operating systems and an opportunity to delight to those who use computers for work and play.

The first sentence I have no qualms with; I can agree in principle. But the second is a slight derailment, in that it doesn’t really follow the idea of the first. Is this one of those clever marketing psychology gimmicks? Am I reading one of those advertising school ploys to keep me buying at a frenzy? or downloading at a frenzy, I should say? Is this a trick question?

I’ll cut to the chase. If the intent is to somehow assert that Ubuntu is light … well, I am bemused, to say the least. A default Ubuntu desktop — even with a K or an X at the front — wouldn’t know “light” if the idea jumped up and bit it on the ankle. You say “light” and the last thing I even consider beginning to get the urge to want to start debating thinking about … is Ubuntu.

And suggesting the idea is valid because Ubuntu is somehow lighter than Windows or Mac OSwhatever won’t work either. That’s like saying, “I’m not as fat as that girl,” and expecting people to applaud your waifishness. Please.

I have no problem with a facelift, especially since a new captain is in the chair, and there is always a trickle-down suggesting a change in command should be accompanied by a change in appearance. That much I almost expect.

But let’s not make suggestions, allusions or triple entendres. You want to tell me Ubuntu is solid, it’s dependable, it’s reliable or trustworthy, and I will accept that with the standard-issue “case-by-case” caveat. All of those things it may be, but light … no, no. Don’t make me laugh again, please. …

Random page links for WordPress.com

One quick note today, and not necessarily aimed at Linux users: You may have noticed a small link on the right that says “Surprise me!” If you click on that you get taken to a random page on this blog, which is either interesting or not.

I had been looking for a way to do this but didn’t find any guidance on it in WordPress.com’s help pages (I will confess to not looking very hard though ). I spotted a random page link on another, “professional”-grade site (in other words, one that has ads and gets to seriously customize the layout) and it’s nothing incredibly fancy.

http://kmandla.wordpress.com/?random

Throw that into the link box, or in the href field in your <a> anchor tag. Make sure you change the first part of the URL though, or you’ll get sent back to my site. Which would be either interesting or not.

wicd is good stuff

The other thing I wanted to mention about my brief interlude with Arch a day ago, was my surprise at using wicd. Ordinarily I wouldn’t bother messing with utilities or daemons that manage network connections. I rarely see the need when I can hand-edit the rc.conf file more quickly and easily than working my way through a GUI.

On the other hand, I have family members whose frustrations with Windows 7 and its precursors occasionally warrants teasing , and something like this is just the ticket.

Knowing that at some point they might ask for a system built to look like Windows XP Classic means I have to prepare for the least common denominator, and that means the things I take for granted — like reconnecting to a different network interface, or automounting USB stuff, or point-and-click wallpaper management — need to be a little easier to handle.

Enter wicd. To put it simply, this program completely usurps the need for Arch’s default net daemon in your system. I have !net set in my rc.conf, wicd added, and the wicd-gtk interface set to run with the .xinitrc file. And without prompting and without coaxing, it quite easily finds the open interface, connects, and sits back and relaxes.

It’s clean, it’s fast, it’s magical. I was amazed, to be honest. I have come to imagine most of these utilities as requiring more work than they save, but wicd is almost too easy. It can jump between connections at the drop of a hat, will spit up a very simple transmission/receive meter, has a dead simple configuration panel, and after that, it doesn’t do anything but what it’s supposed to.

I’ve tried to confuse it by swapping hardware, and it doesn’t skip a beat. It doesn’t care if you’re using wireless or wired connections. About the only complaint I could make is, I would like to be able to customize the tray icon. I know: How shallow is that?

But really, when you start up a program for the first time, and it does exactly what it’s supposed to, and it’s frighteningly easy to manage, and you can’t seem to confuse it … well, what else is there to say? A gold smilie for the wicd people: Nice work.

Ach, Arch!

I used the word “fitful” to describe installing Arch Linux on this machine the other day, and I should probably explain why.

The 2009.08 ISO has a couple of interrelated idiosyncrasies on this hardware, which I don’t think I have described in the past, but are worth mentioning. (It’s possible that I have mentioned them in the past, but perfect recall on a 4 1/2-year-old post-a-day blog is getting difficult. Please bear with me if this sounds familiar. )

That ISO, and some of the ones before it, have two boot options — one for SATA-style drive labeling, and one for old IDE-style naming. In other words, /dev/sdaX or /dev/hdaX. It’s not a huge difference, or at least it hadn’t been up until now.

I don’t usually pick the first option, but this time I did and got some of the strangest, most bizarre behavior from an Arch environment I ever saw. Network access was fruity to say the least, with the setup program downloading little more than the names of the files from the server, touching them in the temporary directory, and then complaining because it couldn’t install them. The one or two programs that did manage to survive the blast seemed somehow scrambled if I tried to tamper with them from another window.

It wasn’t just network access either — the drive (if you can believe this) seemed to sometimes be there, and sometimes not. I don’t know how else to say that, except that I could change into the temporary installation directory and find the wreckage of the installation, but seconds later the terminal would hang and tell me it was unable to find files or programs I asked for. Very strange.

I tried this twice, thinking the first was just a fluke, but a reboot using the same SATA-style selection yielded similar results. I know I should be concerned and I know I should be looking for some sort of bug to report … but where do I start? So many things were scrambled I don’t know what to say is wrong. And what does it have to do with that boot option?

Anyway, the second boot option is usually the one I rely on, and at least this time I knew what I could expect. Behavior was normal, network access was normal, the system installed fine … except for one small thing: On the first boot, the system froze, complaining that the root drive was unavailable.

If you ever run into this problem, I can tell you that message is both true and false. It is available, and it isn’t. The issue is that the installer wrote out your /etc/fstab file with /dev/hdaX drive assignments — as you expect it might.

However, the kernel boots and recognizes everything with /dev/sdaX drive letters, and so asks for your help. The solution is somewhat straightforward: Remount the drive so you can write to it (the instructions are right there at the login prompt), then edit the /etc/fstab file to change the drive lettering to sda-style. Reboot, and it should work fine.

I’ll look around for a bug report on that particular issue, since it’s a rather easy one to pin down. I don’t know how much I can do about that first situation though, and it’s always possible this was something unique to this machine. I have one more thing to note in this short Arch experience, but I’ll save that for the next post. …

What was I thinking?

Actually I know exactly what I was thinking. I was thinking, “Gee, it’s been a year since I had a graphical desktop on this computer. I should check and see if things are working again.”

And you know what? They’re not. It was issues with the siliconmotion driver that initially drove me away from X, and in all that time, things are still gunked up. Maybe I was expecting too much. Or maybe the hardware is just too darned old, and everyone else with a Silicon Motion card has a machine a good deal newer than this one.

Regardless, after a rather fitful installation of Arch Linux, I discovered that the 1.7.3 version of the driver and the 1.7.5 version of xorg-server still spatter garbage across my desktop. A year later, and moving windows creates wakes of multicolored pixels. A year has passed, and typing causes splattered rainbows inside text boxes. Twelve long months, and the cursor leaves white smears everywhere.

Oh well. It was worth a shot.

I am not without options of course, since there is always the vesa driver to consider, as well as the fbdev driver. In my case only fbdev actually gave me a working desktop, since vesa only sent me to a dead black screen. fbdev isn’t much of an option either, since there’s a heavy flickering effect when I move windows, and screen redraws are painfully obvious. Better than nothing, I suppose.

But perhaps even more frustrating was the fact that I could only have one driver installed at a time, since any xorg.conf file I built was promptly ignored by X. If I didn’t want it to pluck the siliconmotion driver from the throng, I had to yank it out completely.

That I blame on hal, since I also couldn’t get the Japanese keyboard configured in a standard (the old standard, maybe?) xorg.conf file. I tried to manhandle hal’s fdi files, buried deep in the inconvenient /etc/hal/fdi/* directory. But adding almost anything to hal’s little world (XML … yuck) either had no effect, or caused a complete loss of keyboard input. Somebody throw me a bone here. It can’t be so frustrating to get an international keyboard set up under hal with Arch.

I am sure 100 percent of these complaints are attributable to my inexperience using Xorg with hal in the driver’s seat. Perhaps if I had spent a little time with it, I would be able find exactly the file that needs editing, or the tweak that needs setting, that would allow me to type properly in X, or set one driver over another as my preferred form of output.

But I must confess I don’t have the patience. It’s not that spectacular to me, to be able to use a Windows XP-ish IceWM on a 550Mhz Celeron. Because even in the best case scenario, with that same setup running with fbdev as the video driver, the system requires more than twice as much memory, plus as much swap, just to stream music over a network connection. And add to that the CPU is usually hovering around 40 percent workload, according to htop.

Video playback is workable, but was better when I had the entire machine at my disposal. And it goes against my grain somehow to think that I now have X as an interpreter between me and mplayer, and it’s (sort of) using the same method of output as my home-grown framebuffer-only custom-built mplayer.

I know most folks count me amongst the stranger eggs in the basket for running a console-only system against the framebuffer 24-7, but really, what do I gain from a graphical setup? A groggy system, sloppy window redraws and not even the scant 3D acceleration that I should have with this graphics card?

No thanks. I’ll stick with what I know. I cloned the drive before installing Arch, and it’ll only take me an hour and a half to put the old system back in place over USB1.1. Always have a Plan B. (Or was it C … ?)