Nonbelievers need not apply: Surfraw

I kid about using the command line, but the beauty in it — as any proponent will tell you — is in its simplicity, its speed and its precision. Things get done faster, with less overhead, when they’re done without all the glossy buttons and shiny sliders and whirling doo-dads that encrust most graphical applications these days (Potamus excluded ).

I have been accused of taking it a little too far, by roping two computers through a third, and running the entire show without any graphical element whatsoever. But I am not at the forefront of the revolution. I am not the prophet, just the harbinger for the true believers, the ones who preach reclaiming heathen lands, bearing witness to the truth. That the command line’s love will set you free.

Before you change channels, this time it’s the devs over at surfraw who have this fun sense of humor. Their perspective alone would be worth mentioning, mostly because it lampoons the overzealous Unix fiend who thinks all life should be done at the command line (wait, that could be me … ).

But the fact is that surfraw is a great application too. As I said, console programs are fast and speedy and simple, and surfraw in principle looks rather too simple. This is the first and the last you’ll see of surfraw.

I say first and last, because the next thing you’ll get from surfraw is this:

So where’s the joy in that, you ask? What’s the point in a command line tool that jams a search term into Google? Well it’s not just Google. It’s Google and Amazon. Google, Amazon and Wikipedia. Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, Altavista, the Debian wikis, the Arch Linux package database, currency converters, DMOZ, eBay, gentoo-portage.com, the Pirate Bay, Scientific Commons, w3css, YouTube and about 100 others that are all hard-cued to pop up in your favorite text-based (okay, okay … or graphical) browser.

Oh, but my fingers are tired, you whine. Oh, it’s too much effort to type out the whole word, “surfraw” just to get a quicker jump to a search page. I have a Firefox search bar for that, and it only takes two mouse clicks of my muscularly hypertrophied index finger. (Did you ever notice that? GUI junkies have disproportionately large index fingers. Just kidding, just kidding. … )

Okay, you can trim down the word “surfraw” to just “sr” and surfraw will still do its thing. Or even better, you can add the location of the surfraw libraries to your PATH variable, and then you only need to type the name of the search engine you want to use. Convenience, at your fingertips (notice the plural ).

I know everybody says this, but after a few minutes with surfraw, I was hooked. I usually keep the Scroogle SSL search page as my home page, which keeps me a few keystrokes away from searching whatever for whatever I like. But now I can funnel my search in the direction I know it is going anyway — for example, straight to Wikipedia — and save a step or two.

I hold no grudge against applications that are at a developmental standstill, but surfraw is not one of those. The latest update was a week ago, and the surfraw mailing list is alive with chatter. Check it out and see if the Shell Users Revolutionary Front Against the WWW doesn’t draw you in. Jaunty black beret not included.

You secretly love the command line, don’t you?

It’s as plain as day. I profess no special powers or magical ability to read thoughts. I am not a circus performer or a side-alley psychic. It’s just blatantly obvious.

Gnome-Do	Kupfer
gmrun	Gnome’s Alt+F2

The funny part is, if I get up close to the screen and squint really, really hard, those all look remarkably like. …

Yep, I’m sure of it. You secretly love the command line, don’t you?

P.S.: Tell your mother you love her. Buy her the Humble Indie Bundle.

Distro-hopping notes

I had a lot of time available to myself over the past week, as you might have guessed by my relative proliferation of posts. Some of that time was spent distro-hopping, although I had plenty more things to write about than just the flavor of the day. For future reference, here are a few of the distros and tools I had the chance to experiment with, in the past week.

• Out of curiosity, I downloaded the Debian-Hurd ISO and threw that into my system. Results were mixed; it would start but couldn’t find the external DVD drive, and I had my doubts about a lot of the other hardware on this machine. I may try it out on another, older and more “established” machine, but I have a feeling I would be sacrificing in other directions (no PCMCIA support, I think) so I might not get much farther than that.
• The latest version of FreeNAS, on the other hand, works beautifully on the X60s, which is actually a bad thing. I would like to run a machine with FreeNAS constantly (and probably ought to), but that’s the fastest machine I have and the one I need for other purposes, like compiling or distro-hopping. It works great and is probably a fantastic computer for that situation … but it is otherwise engaged.
• This one is not really a distro; boot managers are always helpful to have around, and PLoP Boot Manager is a very good one, for what I have seen of it. I used it to trick the NEC Celeron into booting to a USB stick a few days ago, which it otherwise can’t do. It was ignored by the Thinkpad, interestingly enough. But that machine has always been a little finicky about its startup, and so I wasn’t surprised that it hung with a blinking cursor there. No demerits for PLoP.
• ttylinux is the distro I would be using, if I was really fanatical about trimming away everything. Starts up lightning fast, takes up no space, and works like a standard, regular, modern Linux distro with no cut corners. The available prepackaged software is so slim that I can guarantee you’ll be building your own. But on the other hand, if that style appeals to you (and in many ways it appeals to me too) you probably won’t mind building a few applications for your own use.
• Xubuntu deserves more attention than I am giving it here, and to be honest I will probably be coming back to it in the near future. My neighbor’s 2.2Ghz Celeron is now running it, and the word is that performance is night-and-day between that and Gnome Ubuntu. Perhaps Xubuntu has unwittingly dodged the memory-hog bullet that hit its pure-Gnome cousin. I’ll have to investigate more later; my experiences with it this week were exceptionally short-lived and too superficial to make an assessment.
• Last but definitely not least, Slackware. Ah, Slackware. Slackware is the distro I really want to like, but every time I use it I am frustrated and befuddled and left feeling like a newb again. My run-in with Slax the other day was both the cause and the effect of trying out Slackware 13: I started with the Slax ISO, decided I wanted to build it from scratch with Slackware, became frustrated and then went back to Slax again. I know I need to try harder on this one; I shall have to look for some sort of howto that illustrates how to start at the command line and build up to a graphical environment, because that’s what I ultimately would like to do with Slack.

That’s about it for now. I have more on my list to try, but I might have to wait for another week-long national holiday to get enough time to put them into motion.

Here we go again …

Well, I waited a polite week or so grace period, but it doesn’t appear that omploader.org will be back any time soon, which means my photos that were on there are probably permanently gone.

This will be the second image host I’ve outlived, which means it’s time for me to learn to suffer with WordPress.com’s in-house hosting service. It adds two or three extra steps to posting for me, but I suppose there’s a measure of peace of mind to be had: With the image and the text all on the same site, there’s less chance one is available and the other not.

In any case, I’m going to start sifting through the last six months of posts (about 180 pages, maybe?) and see where stuff is missing. I’ll repost what I can, but there will always be one or two that were irreplaceable. You know the drill: If you find one, tell me where it is so I can clean up this place. Sigh.

Manual fan control with /proc/acpi

Thus far, I have run into only two small problems with the 300Mhz Celeron I brought home a few weeks ago. The fan in the machine is rather noisy, and seems to spin a little more than is really necessary. Personally I doubt the machine would run so hot that the fan would be absolutely critical, and even if it did overheat the system would shut itself down. A noisy fan isn’t going to save it.

Shutting down the fan is fairly easy; in Arch Linux, this one-liner from a root prompt will do the trick.

echo -n 3 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN/state

After that you can check the status of the fan by rereading that same location.

cat /proc/acpi/fan/FAN/state

echoing a 0 to the same file will cause the fan to turn on again. Rebooting reverts that setting too; in my case this is an always-on machine so I can comfortably enter that line once every two or three weeks, as luck will have it.

The only other problem I’ve had is trying to figure out why Arch Linux sometimes can’t recognize an external hard drive connected over a 1.1 port. If I restart the machine the drive appears in fdisk -l, but if I unplug it and plug it back in, it’s unable to sense it. That I will chase some more, in the future.

Slax: Clean, cute and quick to customize

I am a tinkerer. It is my nature. I like to see how things work, and how changing one small point can have repercussions on the larger experience. When I was younger I would take things apart if they had broken, not so much to fix them, but to see what the insides were like, and why things worked the way they did.

This is no doubt what accounts for my interest in Linux and computers. But I also have a neat streak, and computers are usually cleaner than engines or machines. And no one goes crazy if one of the computers is in pieces. Unlike the toaster.

For tinkerers, one of the coolest and slickest distros out there is probably Slax. I don’t mention Slax much, because it’s one of those things I have to actively veer away from — it’s too entertaining to modify and adjust and tweak and realign and … and that takes up a godawful amount of my time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of fun — but I become focused and lose track of events while adding this or subtracting that. One must know one’s limitations.

But if you’re perhaps an intermediate-level Linux user, or you enjoy tinkering with software packages to see what you can arrive at, Slax will probably be equally obsessive for you. The standard Slax desktop is KDE-driven, and looks very, very good — much like everything you will see when it comes to this distro.

But the real fun part is that you can customize your ISO from the web site. You can start with the four or five standard “modules” that come with a bland (but attractive) regular Slax arrangement, then take out or add the stuff you like or dislike. So for example, this is likewise Slax, but with my own blend of XFCE in there.

The web page arranged the ISO according to my likes, which means the KDE suite is gone, and mtpaint and Firefox are really the only applications on board. I could have added or subtracted almost anything I wanted, and gotten it prepackaged in the ISO I downloaded.

But that doesn’t mean you have to rearrange everything again, if you decide you want to change the menu. All the important guts of Slax are in one folder, and adding or subtracting from that folder is the only real change that is needed. So instead of an ISO, download the tar version, unpack it to a USB key, download modules from the website and drop them in that folder, and on the next boot (or sometimes even while the system is running) you can try that new software.

It’s almost too easy, and that makes it all the more dangerous for me. Don’t like this desktop? Dump that out. Disappointed in that driver package? Delete, delete, delete. Prefer to try a different desktop? Drop it in the /slax/base folder on your USB drive, and installation is finished. And if dragging and dropping requires too much effort, double-click on the file and the hard work is done for you.

And as if all that wasn’t good enough, the system comes with prezipped persistent save files that Slax is preprogrammed to hunt down and put into use. So there’s no freaky partitioning needed, no unusual kernel boot lines or special setup routines. If it’s there, it uses it. If not, it doesn’t.

And if you’re a “cloud” fan, there are free online Slax Drives, for storage. If you’re just a fan of clean, sharp desktops and artistic working spaces, just about everything in Slax will appeal to you.

And if you like to run strictly from RAM, Slax will dump itself into memory at boot, and then you can use all of its razor-sharp cuteness at ludicrous speed. And since the default ISO takes up only around 200Mb, you can probably do this on all but the smallest of hardware.

There’s a lot to look at here, and just about all of it is extremely well thought out. The people designing this obviously arrange it in ways that make it easy to adjust and use, without relying on constantly rebooting or rewriting CDs. I would definitely recommend this for people who know their way around easier, more complete distros and want to customize their environment, but don’t care to install from the command line or build software from scratch.

At the same time it’s great if you need a self-contained boot environment independent of anything on a particular computer, or a system you can carry around in your pocket that has the software you like. Or if you just like to experiment with different programs without the hassle of installing and uninstalling, syncing repos and downloading dependencies (although there is some of that involved). Or if you prefer a particular desktop environment in it’s vanilla form. Or if you happen to like working with Slackware-leaning distros. Or if you need a particular series of events triggered from the kernel boot line, like going straight to power down after an X session. Or if you want a console-based system that only takes a few seconds to arrange and rearrange. Or if. …

I’d better stop. A distro that is push-button configurable even before you download it, and needs no more effort to customize than dropping a package in a folder is a dangerous thing for me. It just makes tinkering too easy.

If it’s not there yet, where exactly is there?

The last thing I’ll mention today is oddly framed, yet again, against the backdrop of Apple for some reason. This time it’s a mad-dash article left by Rich Jaroslovsky for BusinessWeek on the day after the 10.04 release, that closes by saying Ubuntu “just isn’t there yet,” and implying that Ubuntu needs some sort of figurehead to focus the attention of the masses upon.

I’ve heard some strange reasons not to use Linux (there is a hilarious list of them somewhere on the Ubuntu forums), but lacking a figurehead was not one of them. If we must condense the experience of hero worship and distill its essence into our computer software, then it may be a while before we get “there” with Linux.

At the same time I have to ponder the sense of suggesting Ubuntu “isn’t there yet” because people get confused and make mistakes. Everyone gets confused and makes mistakes, but expecting the rest of the world to bend over backwards to make sure the least-capable of users doesn’t become unhappy with a program … well, I have my doubts.

There are plenty of non-technical people who use Ubuntu on a daily basis, and some of them have been doing it for a long, long time. I suppose there will always be someone who isn’t satisfied with an Ubuntu release. I have a track record of critiquing it rather harshly, and even some of its strongest devotees can be put off by a less-than-stellar experience.

I only have to wonder, if Ubuntu “isn’t there yet,” what’s left to be done to get us “there” … and where in the heck is “there” in the first place?

No VICE yet for Ubuntu 10.04

The almost-four-year-old howto I wrote about the VICE Commodore emulator and Ubuntu seems to be hitting a snag these days. Trying to compile the emulator in Lucid is throwing out error messages and stopping just short of finishing.

I won’t pretend to know what the error messages mean, but I would expect something changed in one of libraries for X, which has happened in the past and caused errors in the past. My plan at this point is to wait until one or the other is updated; often the jury-rigging hand-editing fixes are helpful, but sometimes they’re confusing to explain.

In the mean time I think I shall stick with the precompiled version in Arch, running in a virtual machine in Ubuntu. Of course, the idea of running a virtual installation to run an emulator to play games on a 30-year-old computer is a little mind-bending. …

P.S.: If you need something to spend time with while you wait for the VICE code to be magically fixed, try this site.

More stories of stuff

It’s teeny-weeny post day here at K.Mandla’s house, where I clean up all the little dashes of information that seem to cling to my list of things to write about. A long time ago I told you about Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff, and it’s worth mentioning again. At the same time if you want something a little more powerful and a little more artistic and a little more focused, see if you can find a copy of Manufactured Landscapes in your local video store.

For a full-length motion picture that hopes to avoid outright condemnation of materialism, it’s a surprisingly powerful film. It’s not new, and it’s fairly low-key, so you might have to special order it. It will take a different tack from Leonard’s online work, but the ideas and general motive are the same.

P.S.: Thanks to pkm for reminding me of it.

Your leak was weak

I spent a lot of years in the media, but left when I realized it was transmogrifying into something weaker and less credible than it was a generation ago. Occasionally it still amuses me to see what passes for journalism these days, and perhaps more humorously, who count themselves as journalists any more. (Yes, bloggers, I am looking at you.)

At the same time I can’t help being a technophile and a geek, and so the drama around the iPhone leak is doubly entertaining. I don’t have anything pithy to add to the swirl of self-righteous chest-pounding indignation, and the image of Apple’s jackbooted (but stylishly clad) thugs knocking down a door to get back their precious prototype. But I can tell you that if I was going to write anything at all, it would look a lot like — but probably not be as good as — Michael Malone’s chastisement of journalism, public apathy and corporate manhandling.

And with that, I consider the issue to be closed.