Notes from all over

I have a few notes that were forwarded to me from … well, from around the world, I guess. Since they all bear repeating on a wider front, I’ll go ahead and paraphrase them here.

• Raymond sent a note mentioning the XFCE release of Linux Mint, which I can confirm is based on Debian testing now.

  I’m still in the process of downloading it but I’m excited to see how it looks — and compares — to other full-figured XFCE-based distros.

  My own disappointment with Xubuntu aside, things done right in XFCE can be quite effective … as I have learned first-hand.

• Ben Winston jotted a note just today to underscore his satisfaction surfraw, when used in conjunction with the Duck Duck Go search engine, and to be honest I have to second that emotion.

  It’s exceptionally fast when juxtaposed with elinks, which can render a text-only page at 150Mhz at a rate that rivals my core duo with Firefox.

  Add to that the convenience of using surfraw, and it’s literally information at your fingertips. Looks like I’ll be changing my home page. …

• One more, and this one comes with a plea for help. Allex has gotten hold of another Datamini laptop; you might remember Remy’s astounding refurb job from a year or so ago, and Allex’s sounds similar.

  As it is though, Allex needs a little help pinning down information about The New Toy:

  There is a green box with “Datamini” and 2 small black words “AT Laptop”. There is also a white sticker at the back which states the model no “LA-20″ and serial no “C10604″.

  It is pretty heavy, bout 6kg and has dimensions of bout 36cm x 30cm x 6cm. It comes with two drives for floppy disks on the right hand side. 4 ports at the back, “Power”, “Serial”, “Parallel”, “Display” along with a carrier handle and 1 more port on the left side, marked “KBD”.

  If you have any experience with those models or if you have a suggestion on how to glean information from those machines, Allex could use the help.

And there you have it. If anyone can offer a little help to Allex, I’m sure it would be appreciated. In the mean time, I’m going to take XFCE Mint Debian for a spin. …

Too many variables

I’ve more or less completed my transition from a framebuffer-based Debian 6 installation on the 120Mhz Pentium to a framebuffer-based ConnochaetOS system on the 150Mhz Mebius.

It took a considerable amount of time, mostly because a lot of the software I was using in Debian isn’t really available in ConnochaetOS, at this point in time.

Which means I have to build it on a surrogate system, and then transplant it into the Mebius. Much like this, to start with at least.

It probably sounds worse than it is: yaourt in Arch can grab PKGBUILDs, which I can build in a chrooted system on the core duo. After that, I just sync a package directory over my home network.

I suppose if I really wanted to measure the improvement in speed between Debian and something Arch-aligned, I would have done this in two or three steps.

I should have built one system again and compared it speed-wise, then changed machines and built the same system twice, and so forth.

Because the net result of moving to a slightly faster machine and more memory and a different distro and a framebuffer driver specific to the video card … has been a giant burst of speed.

“Giant” being relative of course, since we’re talking about 15-year-old computers here.

But yes, boot times are considerably faster. The framebuffer refresh rate is vastly improved. Applications snap between “windows” in screen. I get no artifacts.

And so on. It doesn’t really match my Crux systems for overall snappiness, but in terms of ease of setup and minimal maintenance, this is very pleasing.

But too many things changed at once, and I don’t dare suggest one distro or another has improved things for me.

In the mean time I’m fishing around for a new home for the 120Mhz machine, and the 133Mhz machine. I’m overstocked on outdated computers and I am anticipating newcomers. Time to make space.

Azulejo: Quick window tiles

It’s an odd coincidence, but I got an e-mail a day ago asking about making the leap from Gnome to a tiling window manager.

Late last week there was a thread on the Ubuntu Forums mentioning Azulejo, a little utility that allows you to tile windows in Gnome or other desktop environments.

It works much better than the old tile package, which isn’t really around any more, it seems.

Basically there are four or five main window arrangements, and you can bounce between them at the press of a key … or two, if you’re willing to count the Super_* key.

You also have the option to stretch and expand windows, and rotate them through the arrangement. In a small way it sort of reminds me of dvtm, or maybe Awesome.

It’s not a true-blue tiling window manager by any stretch of the imagination, but it does give you a taste. And it comes at a very light cost, in terms of dependencies.

Of course, if you’re running this up against Gnome, the dependencies probably won’t bother you.

jnettop: Another network monitor?! Why not?

I only have a few minutes today, and so I’ll just tack down one more network monitor I scrounged up the other day. This is jnettop.

It would be unfair of me to make light of jnettop for being one in a long list of network monitors for the console.

After all, I don’t know who was first and who followed who, and it may be that jnettop can trace its history back into the early days of network monitoring.

Be that as it may, there are a lot of options out there for network monitors, and jnettop is just one of them.

When I finally break down and acknowledge the overwhelming obviousness (and need, although I dread saying that) of a CLI-app-a-day blog, one whole month will be devoted just to network monitors.

All the same, I won’t make a recommendation for, or slur against jnettop, since it does much the same job as its brethren, but displays the information in a slightly different arrangement.

Like many things in life, you’ll have to examine this one and weigh it on its merits, and then decide if you’ll use it over the others. Beware, the list is long. …

A bash loop, for pacman

So long as I am mentioning rather esoteric bash solutions to even more esoteric file management problems, here’s one just for Arch Linux.

I’ve been transforming my Debian-based system into a ConnochaetOS-based one, and wanted to strip out a lot — a lot — of packages in one fell swoop.

pacman didn’t like my primitive attempts with wildcards though, and so as a means to yank anything that contained a particular string — like xf86, for example — I did this:

for i in `pacman -Q | grep xf86 | cut -d' ' -f-1` ; do pacman -Rcsn ${i} ; done

grep strains through pacman’s list of installed packages, and gives the list that includes anything in xf86.

Of course, pacman’s output includes version numbers, so those are trimmed off with cut, setting the delimiter to a single space.

Not great, not fancy, but for the most part, a solution.

Create large files of random information

I wanted to test that mischevious hard drive, to avoid problems when I move stuff on to it.

The plan was to fill it with dummy files and if there was an issue at the 40Gb point, I would know up front. Which would have been better than finding out a week later.

To that end, the weak-sauce tip for the day becomes this one: Creating a series of 2Gb files made of random gibberish, just to take up space.

for i in {1..20} ; do time dd if=/dev/urandom of=test-{$i}.file bs=268435456 count=8 ; done

The results, after a considerable amount of time (/dev/zero is faster), will be twenty files all 2Gb in size, filled with gunk. Good gunk, that is.

A little tip there: The block size multiplied by the count gives you the size of the file. So what?

So simply setting the block size to one gigabyte (or gibibyte, since I seem to be drawing flak on the issue these days ) might cause memory errors on a machine with only 512Mb or less. It did for me.

The size of the file in my case wasn’t really important I guess, but I did get that quick primer for performing this stunt on low-memory machines. Reduce the block size, magnify the count, get the same results.

Oh, and the hard drive? It’s fine. I filled it all the way to the brim, and Arch didn’t complain. Good to know.

APM, and the value in Linux

I have to offer a public thank-you to Alex, who pointed out the APM discussion on the kernel mailing list. I’ve been through the majority of the replies and find it very interesting.

It’s certainly not a life-changing debate, but there are a couple of points that stand out for me.

To start, as mentioned early on in the string, there isn’t much activity around APM support, which suggests two possibilities: Either the code has reached pristine condition, or no one is using it.

If the latter is true, then there does seem to be a rationale for dumping it.

But there does seem to be support for a lot of hardware that is far older than the APM bracket, and it’s still in the kernel. Which makes cutting it seem a bit arbitrary.

Losing it wouldn’t make a machine unusable, it would just make it difficult to use with newer kernels. And when that happens, then we have reached the definition of obsolescence.

I have to admit up front that I rarely, if ever, rely on software-driven power management of any kind, when I build my own kernels. So whether it’s there or not is immaterial … to me.

But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be useful to someone else, using something similar or even older. And I think Ingo summed it up well by saying, “Our general compatibility with old hardware is an asset that we should value.”

I think that’s the real value in Linux. People watch their perfectly functional, favorite computers slowly become “unusable,” as big-name operating systems gleefully abandon them.

Where’s the first place they go? Linux, because it has the reputation of supporting outdated machines … often better than the original manufacturer intended.

Keep it, I say. Dropping it only means alienating a smaller bracket of potential users, or committing a small pocket of hardware to final unusability.

And who knows? Maybe APM really has reached code Nirvana. It’s not impossible.

A little more information

I did a bit of a disservice the other day, when I dropped that bland note about the drive size issue between different versions of Linux.

Invariably if I make a note like that and don’t give a little more information, months from now I’ll be scrounging around trying to remember why that happened and what I did to get around it.

So as a service to myself, and to anyone else who might run into the same problem, here’s a little more information.

First, yes, the Debian 5 installation routine (specifically off the business card installer) can properly report and partition the drive to its correct dimensions.

And yes, both Debian 6 and Arch Linux can’t, at least not in their current renditions. I don’t think this is a bug, I think it’s a combination of lesser issues, and the fact that the drive was probably supposed to be 40Gb.

However, both ‘Six and Arch can manage the drive after it has been partitioned, and access areas beyond that imaginary 40Gb limit.

Their internal partitioning routines still try to cut it off at 40Gb, but so long as those stay out of the way, there doesn’t seem to be a problem.

Which means the obvious shortcut is to prepartition the drive using the Debian 5 installer, break away and go back to one of the other miscreants.

The only problem I’ve had with this, after two or three attempts apiece, is a single Grub 18 error in Arch. If you don’t know, that’s when the Grub configuration files are located beyond what the BIOS can access normally.

And that’s an error I’m used to, after working with very old machines for years. It’s easy enough to get around, with a small 64-96Mb partition at the front of the drive, just for /boot.

So that’s as much information as I have now, and unless I stumble over something that’s related or relevant, as much as I’m likely to ever have.

If there’s a fix or a bug report out there that seems to match it, let me know. But I probably won’t be filing a bug anywhere entitled, “Drive size misreported on a magical hard drive that was mispackaged as three times the advertised size but only in some distros and not in others.”

And then there was one

I’m going to close out this little three-day foray into the maelstrom of console-based software with one I really like, and have been using quite a bit since I installed it: sc.

Now it’s true that I am a teapot fan — I like teapot for being unconventional and at the same time easy to figure out. sc, however, is like a comfortable old jacket … it just feels nice as soon as you put it on.

It’s about the size of a pin, as easy to run as a pencil and paper and has a history way, way back in days of *nix past. It does exactly what you expect, when you expect it, how you expect it.

And yes, vi fans, it has some similar keystrokes.

That shallow learning curve, coupled with the onboard help, will probably have you up and calculating in no time. Which is good. If that’s not enough, check out this recent rundown from Linux Journal.

Downsides are that it’s not Excel or Gnumeric or whatever spreadsheet Apple users get, which means about 99 percent of the planet is going to be hesitant.

And it is a little naive when it comes to file formats, although you can export to asc or something like tab-delimited too. I am sure a savvy computer user like you can get your data converted somehow.

And that’s really all I’m going to say about it. I know there is a successor, slsc, but I don’t see it in the Debian repos and so I might need to build it myself. I am not afraid.

But for now, sc does almost everything I need in a spreadsheet. Life is good.

A mix of six

WordPress.com was suffering from some technical glitches over the past few days, so some of the posts I had planned out over three days got glommed together.

That’s a good thing really; I realize there is more than enough material out there to do a “cli-app-a-day” blog for at least a year or two without having to duplicate posts.

So if you’re in the mood to take on such a project, let the world know. People seem to dig it. In the mean time, here’s another mixed half-dozen that might give you reason to pause.

First, here’s yapet.

Password “wallets,” as I am tempted to call them, are not something I usually pursue. I rely on traditional cellulose-based methods … which is to say, a pencil and a piece of paper.

But this might enthuse you as something that can encrypt and retrieve passwords, as well as generate them and protect them from casual view.

I have to mention though, that at very low speeds — like 120Mhz — the screen refresh for yapet was horrific. I am afraid I can’t use this one because just jumping between text boxes caused the screen to flash three or four times over the course of two or three seconds, with each key press.

I don’t know why that is, if it’s a side effect of the way the program was written or if it’s something oddball about Debian’s version, but I’ve never seen that in other text-based applications.

Next is pdmenu, which also falls in the useful cyan gadget category:

This I like very much, because in conjunction with Debian’s menu utility, you have arrow-key access to the bulk of the software that’s installed on your machine.

Not that I need help with that; I don’t have many more than about seven or eight discrete programs that I use on a daily basis. I’m not likely to be surprised by anything pdmenu happens to find.

But for anyone else who might be, say, chained to my desk chair and forced to use a Pentium with only text-based software on it … well pdmenu might be what saves them from a short screaming fit.

Next up are two file managers, lfm on the left, and vfu on the right.

 

lfm is strikingly similar to mc and the traditional two-pane file manager genre, being distinct in its relative freshness (last update was May 2010 for the Debian Squeeze version, I believe) and its python underpinnings.

lfm also includes a little something called pyview, which stands as a text or hex file viewer, independent of lfm or cued by it. Two for one, in a manner of speaking.

vfu is strikingly different from lfm or its mc heritage, by being almost completely text, without any sort of graphic adornment save color bands.

In a way I like this one, and you might too. It shows almost all the pertinent information for a file, up front and immediate, and you don’t have to manage panes or trigger info displays.

If you ever wish you could pan through the results of an ls -lha --color=auto command, this might be the application you’re looking for.

And now, sports fans, it’s time for a little action. First is asciijump.

I giggled as I tried it, and while I haven’t figured out all the commands, I can tell you it runs relatively quick on a 120Mhz machine that’s simultaneously accessing and controlling a second computer, and running about eight different applications at the same time.

Which isn’t too shabby. Invariably I crash as I land, but the judges don’t seem to mind, so I’ll stick with this one for a little while.

Last is a aajm, which is half sports, half science.

I didn’t know juggling was such a detailed and mathematical event, but I have now been schooled. I’ll give you a hint — start with aajm -s 453 to get the results you see there, but after that you’ll have to research siteswaps.

That’s good for today. I shall finish this “series” off tomorrow and get back to proper blog materiel.