If you’ve been following my blog for a long time, you know that back in 2014 I was working on a Python program to create hourly btrfs snapshots and cull them according to a certain algorithm. (See all the related posts here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) The furthest I ever got was weekly culling. Frankly, life and school contributed a good excuse not to keep going because I had created a huge headache for myself by attempting to figure out the date and cover all the possible corner cases with unit tests. This is what my code looked like in 2014.
I was having an issue with Kdenlive while rending my most recent tutorials for my Extra Life Donation Tracker and so I grabbed the latest Appimage version since it’s more up to date than the version in the Fedora 29 repos. Boy has it changed in the last year or so. Here’s the version in the Fedora 29 repos:
Kdenlive 18.12
And here’s the latest release with the exact same file open:
After someone told me that a PDF I’d created in Calligra Office was illegible and having issues with spreadsheets loading slowly, I decided to install LibreOffice. However, rather than go with the version in the repos, I decided to go with Flatpak - which allows for a more advanced version via the usage of runtimes. First, I had to install Flatpak:
sudo dnf install flatpak
Then I needed to install the runtimes. The LibreOffice page uses the –user tag, but I think that is just for installing it just to yourself rather than for the whole system. So I am omitting that.
So I found out today that there is no way to re-enable different backgrounds and plasmoids per virtual desktop. It appears to be a mix of forcing people to finally use activities and a complication that was causing all kinds of bugs (according to their bugzilla). I was bummed for about an hour. The different backgrounds can make it very easy to know what virtual desktop you’re at without having to glance at the pager. And if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time longer than a couple months you have seen my Desktop Screenshots and know how much I customize it in KDE.
Looks like I was right about the non-commit and possibly also about the df -h.
Last night at the time I wrote the post:
# btrfs fi show /home
Label: 'Home1' uuid: 89cfd56a-06c7-4805-9526-7be4d24a2872
Total devices 1 FS bytes used 1.91TiB
devid 1 size 2.73TiB used 1.99TiB path /dev/sdb1
Because of grad school, my work on Snap in Time has been quite halting - my last commit was 8 months ago. So I haven’t finished the quarterly and yearly culling part of my script. Since I’ve been making semi-hourly snapshots since March 2014, I had accumulated something like 1052 snapshots. While performance did improve a bit after I turned on the autodefrag option, it’s still a bit suboptimal, especially when dealing with database-heavy programs like Firefox, Chrome, and Amarok. At least that is my experience - it’s entirely possible that this is correlation and not causation, but I have read online that when btrfs needs to figure out snapshots and what to keep, delete, etc it can be a performance drag to have lots of snapshots. I’m not sure, but I feel like 1052 is a lot of snapshots. It’s certainly way more than I would have if my program were complete and working correctly.
When I first installed my new hard drive with btrfs I was happy with how fast things were running because the hard drive was a SATA3 and the old one was SATA2. But recently two things were bugging the heck out of me - using either Chrome or Firefox was painfully slow. It wasn’t worth browsing the web on my Linux computer. Also, Amarok was running horribly - taking forever to go from song to song.
I originally got interested in checking out the Chakra project because it was based on Arch Linux. As I mentioned before, the super customizability doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t have time for that - perhaps if Arch had existed when I was in high school or college I might have enjoyed it. What I do like is that they tend to have the latest packages and they tend to keep the distro as simple as possible - with very few customizations. When I went to do my pre-review research, I found out that while Chakra WAS based on Arch, they’ve now split off into their own proper distro. (Kinda like Fuduntu and Fedora) While they still use Pacman and other Arch-y things, they’re slowly changing to their own products.
Two years ago I reviewed Arch Linux. My conclusion at the time - great if you have to control every aspect of your system, but it’s not for me. I later used it on my Pogo Plug to set up a file and print server and it definitely has its merits. I know, generally speaking, that one of the best parts of using Arch is getting access to the latest software before anyone else. So I decided to take a look at a few Arch derivatives that take the work out of getting Arch installed while still having the benefits of Arch’s early access.
Fuduntu started off as a customized Fedora install, but recently forked Fedora to create their own special distro that borrowed a bit from Ubuntu and a bit from Fedora. It has a very nice look when it first starts up and I almost forget that it’s Gnome 2.x:
I decide to jump right into the install before doing any messing around. I like their logo, “Punny Name, Serious Distro”. Not surprisingly for a distro that started off as a modified Fedora, it uses anaconda for installation. The first question I get is the hostname. Then comes timezone and root password. After that is partitioning and the install finally begins. Overall, not too many options. It’s neither the easiest installation ever nor the hardest. I’d say it leans towards very, very easy, but I think Linux Mint actually wins for the easiest, nicest installer. (And Ubuntu - which I haven’t installed for a few months now might edge it out of second place) Overall, the installation is extremely quick, but I’m cheating in that it’s in a VM so, of course, I don’t need to worry about CD or DVD drive speeds.
So I took a look at Blogilo a few days ago. So, taking a look at my Blogilo post I have to say that it is pretty much ALMOST there for the perfect offline blogging tool for someone using Wordpress. Sure, it doesn’t allow your to create categories, but a blog like mine that’s been around for ~7 years probably has all the categories it needs. The extra fidelity can come from tags which Blogilo hands just fine.
For the most part, I haven’t seen the point of using blog editors like Blogilo. While there might have been a purpose to them back in the dialup days, it seems pointless in the days of always on broadband connections. Also, back before blog software like Wordpress had their great visual editors, I could see the need. However, I guess I could see some use for it on my laptop. I often compose blog posts on there in a text editor when I’m traveling. It would be nice to have it all formatted correctly and ready to go when I got an internet connection rather than have to load up Wordpress then spend time formatting it when I could have done that on my laptop while I didn’t have a connection.
[caption id=“attachment_4833” align=“aligncenter” width=“253” caption=“The Amarok Dynamic Playlist DJ Monster is responsible for building your dynamic playlist”] [/caption]
I’ve spoken about Amarok’s Dynamic Playlists before. Despite my best attempts, I couldn’t quite get it to work correctly. However, Amarok 2.4.3 has revamped the dynamic playlists engine and interface, so I wanted to check it out and see if it worked better as well as testing out some of the new features. For one thing, they changed the interface to more closely match the interface for static playlists. See:
Sure, it’s a tired and cliche phrase, but hurray for the wisdom of the crowd. I’ve received comments on identi.ca, twitter, and in the comments here with answers to nearly all my problems with KDE. Let’s see if I can get them all to work. First off, I was told that my problem with Konversation not getting my password in time to keep me from being signed into the fedora-unregistered could be solved by setting the password as a server password. Alright! That worked! woohoo! Before I’d had it set to just run the /msg identify command.
This is the first time in nearly 10 years that I’m moving to a new version of WIndows. I pop the CD in and boot up. I see a text screen as Windows “loads files”.
Nothing here different from a Linux distro. Then the Windows logo pops up.
I’ve been wanting to try Arch Linux for quite some time now. They seem to have a similar aesthetic to Gentoo in that the main mission of Arch is to build your operating system from the ground up. You only add the things you need. So you don’t have any cruft on your system based on what some other people think you should have. So let’s pop this CD in and see what happens! (I’m also following the directions on http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Official_Arch_Linux_Install_Guide) The disc is the 2009.08 snapshot. I booted into the LiveCD.
So I was unable to preupgrade to Fedora 12, even after the latest update. So I did a yum upgrade since I’ve known that to work in the past. As always, I followed the instructions here. It was very fast this time around compared to past upgrades. It only took 2 hours 40 minutes. I ended up needing to tell yum to ignore problems because of a weird package that it wanted to install, but couldn’t. But then installed anyway. I’m not sure what’s up with that. The specific package was abrt. And then when I went to install it afterwards, it said it was already installed. Go figure! So far there’s only one thing that annoys me since upgrading. All my taskbar icons are much more spread out. I tried to push them together, but I think this is as close as they get. See the images below for a comparison.
All good things come to an end. In this specific case I’ve decided to end my tenure reviewing Linux distros. Being a home owner consumes a lot more of my time than being a renter. Doing a quality distro review takes a lot of time - usually at least 2 - 4 hours. And so it was that I came to decide I’d rather spend my time on the hobby I enjoy most - photography. Also, I’ve grown bored with Linux. Not that I’m giving up on running Linux on my computers. But it just doesn’t excite me as it once did. I’m strongly considering letting my Linux Format Magazine subscription lapse. It was a tough decision because 90% of my blog’s traffic comes from Linux reviews. But, with only so much time in the day, I’d rather just work on my photography. So, very likely, this will be my last Linux review unless I get into it again. I will still probably be blogging about Linux and technology, I just won’t be doing any full-blown reviews. The big exception would be if I installed a new distro on one of my machines.
This month’s LXF came with SimplyMepis 8, Zenwalk 6, and PCLinuxOS 2009. As soon as I get moved and the world stops turning upside down I’ll get those posted.
My wife said since she isn’t using the Linux computer I built for her, that I could use it. It has a Intel Core 2 Duo Dual Core chip, so I was pretty excited to try out 64-bit computing to see if there would be any problems. I installed Fedora 10 since I’m used to that platform. Installation process was pretty much the same as with 32-bit. It took 20 minutes to install. Blender was found in the repositories along with Inkscape - so far so good!
Debian…the father and grandfather of many a Linux distro. I think indirectly Debian is probably running on more computers than any other Linux distro. It’s the basis of Ubuntu, Mepis, Xandros, and many others. And many people use Debian where they need a nice, stable distro. The fact that Debian’s stable releases come out every one to two years and remain supported for a year after a new stable version means that it’s the darling distro where stability is needed. As great as Ubuntu is, you just can’t keep updating every 6 months on a production machine. Now, the flipside is that Debian tends to have older software all-around. So it tends to be used more as a server distro than a desktop distro. But more people than you would expect do run it on their desktops. Afterall, what does the latest version of Gnome have that you REALLY, REALLY need?
I first wrote about Knoppix in my original blog in Oct of 2004. I mentioned how awesome it was to be able to test out a live version of a Linux distro. It’s been a really long time since I last checked out Knoppix. Since it was bloated with KDE 3.x and slow to boot I used Damn Small Linux whenever I needed a LiveCD environment. Now that Knoppix 6 is the distro in this month’s Linux Format Magazine, I’m checking it out. It boots into Adriane. This is some strange speech synthesis program that launches different command line programs. (It also reads out loud what all the options are) Turns out if you want to go to a graphical desktop you ened to type “Knoppix” at the boot menu. So I scroll down to “graphical programs” then “start lxde”. Wow! LXDE is truly a lightweight desktop environment. It loads up a LOT faster than Knoppix and KDE used to. The menu loads up very quickly and the programs also load up quickly despite running off of the DVD. The default browser is Iceweasel (Debian’s rebranding of Firefox). The internet works perfectly fine.
(ed note: I actually ended up reviewing Crunch Bang Linux 8.10.02 due to a problem with my 8.10 disc)
I discovered Crunch Bang Linux (#!) through Linux Outlaws. Fab kept talking about how awesome it was. Then more and more podcasts and people on the tubes started talking about it. So I wrote to Linux Format Magazine about having it on their cover disc. They said there was a lot of clamor for it to be on a cover disc, but they couldn’t because it comes with multimedia codecs potentially covered by patents. So why am I breaking my self-imposed rule to only review distros on LXF cover discs? Because one of the most attractive features to me for #! is that it is supposed to load up a lot faster and run faster than Ubuntu. Right now I have Ubuntu 8.10 installed on my laptop. I pretty much only use my laptop for travel (although I do use it in the apartment ever once in a while). So if it boots up and runs faster than Ubuntu, it will leave me with more battery power for when I travel. I already ran the #! liveCD, so I know the wifi card will work. So first off, I boot up Ubuntu to time it and see how much of a savings I’ll be getting. From power on to GDM login screen is 1 minute 1 second. And it’s 40 seconds from login to a useful desktop. (Gnome) So then I install Crunch Bang Linux.
I had done a second review of Gentoo 2008.0. People suggested I do a completely commandline install and I did. But my blog post got corrupted and I’m not typing that up again. My Gentoo install was unsuccessful anyway. So I fared no better with the commandline than with the GUI install. I’ll give it another shot sometime in the future.
About a month ago my wife asked me to get rid of the extra POS Linux and BSD computers I was using for my renderfarm. They quite a bit of an eyesore and so I agreed. Unfortunately, in the the group of computers I got rid of was my first ever Linux computer. It ran Fedora Core 1 and ran the server that ran this website until I upgraded computers and moved to FreeBSD. So it will be missed - I don’t usually attach too much emotion to objects – especially computers. I didn’t care too much when I got rid of my old Dell. But since that computer was what allowed me to get into Linux and learn all about libre software – which I had no idea about before. All I have left now from that era is the computer now known as luigi and functioning as my print and file server.
For a long while there I didn’t want to check out the Avant Window Navigator (AWN) because I was shunning Compiz. But now that I’m back on the Compiz (and since Metacity should have compositing “soon” anyway) I decided to give a shot when it was featured in Linux Format Magazine Issue 112. I found the AWN packages in Fedora although for AWN only AWN-extras comes up. You need to search avant-window-manager to get the main package. It doesn’t matter since AWN-extras brings in AWN in the dependencies. Here’s how my desktop looks before that:
Ok, I noticed that most complaints on the Fedora mailing list seemed to have been solved and it has bene a few months since Fedora 9 came out. So I figure that it’s time to finally upgrade. Also, my biggest problems appear to have been resolved. Although X.org is still in beta, nvidia has released drivers that will work in the interim. And today KDE 4.1 was released! I expect it’ll be in Fedora any day now. I was going to wait until it was there so I wouldn’t have to download all the KDE packages twice, but I figure it’s not that big a deal.
Foresight Linux was supplied on the most recent Linux Format Magazine disc. Unfortunately, the distro doesn’t run in LiveCD mode (or at least such an ISO was not provided) so I decided to try it out in Virtualbox, which I have heard so much about. It appears to be equivalent to VMWare while also being mostly open source, so that was a bit of a draw.
The Open Source Advocate has an article discussing the merits of all the distros releasing on the same schedule. His main argument, bolstered by quotes from Shuttleworth is that by having them all release at the same time, they will end up with the same software and cause a massive synchronization across all major open source projects. The 2 main quotes I’d like to focus on are:
“Simply set a hard date and modify your goals to make that release date.” - Article Author
Well, the entire upgrade process is not yet over, so I don’t want to get too excited, but I think this may solve my problem. I started a yum upgrade on my living room computer - which will one day be my MythTv PVR (once I get the necessary hardware). It went through the dependency check in roughly 4 minutes or less. It’s now downloading 951 MB of updates, so it may be a while before it’s ready for the next phase. Still, if this works, I know what I’m going to do with my main computer. I really hope this can eventually become a supported method of upgrading. It seems to be a lot faster and doesn’t require me to uninstall all of my third party programs.
As you know, life tends to consist of cycles. You feel up and then you feel down then up again. You get hungry and eat to get full and then get hungry again. And so on….
Apparently the same is true in the computing realm as well. I was searching through my blog today to find a post to see what my Wordpress theme is called. (It’s called ramart) Wordpress 2.3 is out and they had a list of themes that were compatible, so I wanted to see if mine was, but I needed to know what it was called. (It isn’t compatible) I knew that I had changed to this theme early on so I was searching through my earliest articles.
Read the latest Linux Format Magazine and I was delighted to find out that the two IRC clients I use were each awarded a 9/10 in their IRC client roundup. When I’m in KDE I use Konversation and in Gnome I use gnome-xchat (although it was vanilla xchat that got the 9/10). Both were praised for being approachable by tyros while at the same time having features for the experienced.
WTF is this world coming to? From the digg “horny nerd” files, comes this website: http://www.moanmyip.com/.
Interesting things I learned on this site are how web servers and websites see me. Here’s what it says it thinks it knows about me:
YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM AND BROWSER
Linux / Safari
YOUR USER AGENT INFORMATION
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.5; Linux) KHTML/3.5.7 (like Gecko)
YOU CAME HERE FROM
http://digg.com/security
I think it’s interesting that it reports as Linux Safari when it clearly knows, from the next line down that ti’s Konqueror. I know that Konqueror and Safari share KHTML/Webkit for the backend, but I think ti’s strange that it shows up as Safari in one field and Konqueror in the next.
They finally got Epiphany-extensions up to the right level! So now the only thing I need to have everything working perfectly again is to finish up editing xorg.conf so that I can get compiz running again. I also submitted my hardware profile to the team via Smolt. Hopefully that means more support for my hardware. YAY!
It turned out to be pretty easy. I used the nVidia tool to generate my xorg.conf and then just had to do a couple of tweaks. First off, since it was running as a non-privileged user, it wasn’t able to save to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. So I had to save it to my desktop. Then I had to edit it because the nVidia tool didn’t want my second monitor to be an awesome resolution, so I had to edit that manually. Then I just copied it to the right spot. Now it’s perfect. Here’s my xorg.conf:
I thought I’d have to wait for Fedora 7 to experience Pidgin (what gaim got renamed to due to their legal battles with AOL - as I previously blogged), but they provided it for Fedora Core 6.
The interface has changed a little. Here are some screenshots showing my first impressions on the differences:
The main difference I noticed is that everyone is represented by a green dot if they are available instead of an icon representing their chat service. In other words, AOL contacts are no longer displayed as the AOL running man and MSN is no longer the chubby green guy.
I booted into this disc to see what games it had. It is a decent disc and I discovered that there’s a Penguin-based Mario Kart Clone. It mostly has FPS shooters.
Anyway, when I booted back into Windows my network card was no longer working. After fretting for about an hour and rebooting and shutting down, I went on IRC and found the answer. Sometimes (although it’s never happened to me before with a livecd) the drivers get into a weird state. To fix it, just completely cut the power. That means shut down your computer and then pull the power cord and wait for about 1 minute. After that it will work again.
I’ve done a few updates in the past week or so and I’ve been in fvwm-crystal, so I don’t know which update fixed things, but Gnome finally handles Dual Screen Compiz correctly. Previously, if I maximized a window, it would maximize across both monitors! I NEVER want that kind of behaviour because my screens are not only a few inches apart, but they also have a 2-3 inch frame between viewable areas. I really didn’t like that discontinuity in my viewing area, so I would always have to manually size up the windows. This behaviour was only occuring in Gnome; KDE, fluxbox, fvwm-crystal and other WMs were correctly handling the maximize command. So I’m glad that Gnome will no longer be a source of frustration for me.
Date Sun, 4 Feb 2007 11:10:36 -0800 (PST)
From Linus Torvalds <>
Subject Super Kernel Sunday!
In a widely anticipated move, Linux “headcase” Torvalds today announced
the immediate availability of the most advanced Linux kernel to date,
version 2.6.20.
Before downloading the actual new kernel, most avid kernel hackers have
been involved in a 2-hour pre-kernel-compilation count-down, with some
even spending the preceding week doing typing exercises and reciting PI
to a thousand decimal places.
I read a blog post a few days ago where someone who purported to be a Linux user (so as to not be accussed of trolling) claimed that although Linux and its freedoms were great and all - at the end of the day - the user had to return to Windows to get any serious stuff done. Well, I’m here to say, that I think that’s completely bogus. I haven’t had my Windows computer on since last Monday and I’m only turning it on today to work on my photography. All week long I’ve used Linux for everything, even helping to correct my younger brother’s paper by using Open Office.org Writer.
As I read this article about how this guy’s kids love Linux and hate Windows, I had a couple of questions come to my mind. First of all, is this a testament to how easily kids learn things? Second, what does this mean for newbies to Linux who complain that it’s not as easy as Windows?
According to the article:
Here was a five year old, traversing the directories, finding applications and opening them without any hesitation. He had no issue figuring out how to open and close screens, move them around, or change their size. The tool bars, menus and icons were all intuitive to these kids.
So why do we need YALD? Well this isn’t just any new Linux distro! This Linux distro is created by Gael Duval, the recently-booted creator of Mandrake Linux. Mandrake Linux was in the position Ubuntu now is - the easy distro to introduce new people to Linux with. It had the easiest installer around and generally worked on the greatest amount of hardware. It was originally based off of Red Hat Linux 5.0. (This is back when they used to sell boxed PC software in the niche that Fedora now occupies)
As I was reading the latest Linux Format Magazine, they had a great tip for a low tech way to remind yourself of different time-sensitive events. The best part is that it works under any window manager! (ie it doesn’t matter if you’re in Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Fluxbox, or any other) The trick is to use xmessage and at. at is cron’s little brother, for scheduling things that will happen in the future, but not be a recurring event. xmessage presents a little dialogue box with whatever message you give it. Here’s a screenshot with an example!
I'm a day late, but happy birthday Linux! Here's the email that started it all!
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Message-ID: <1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things).
I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.
This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and
I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.
Wall is a great command if you’re intent on getting notoriety/kicked off the box you’re on. It broadcasts a message to every terminal open for every logged on user. For this reason, it may be turned off on the computer you’re on. This means every xterm, gnome-terminal, etc and every one of the 6 VTs will get the message. Usage is:
As I was browsing around /usr/share/emacs/21.4/etc/ looking for the emacs manual in order to look for the command to launch the doctor and I found the following. It’ll be funniest if you’re used to Unix man pages. Here it is, the man page for condom.
CONDOM(1) EUNUCH Programmer’s Manual CONDOM(1)
NAME
condom - Protection against viruses and prevention of child
processes
SYNOPSIS
condom [options] [processid]
DESCRIPTION
_condom_ provides protection against System Transmitted
Viruses (STVs) that may invade your system. Although the spread of
such viruses across a network can only be abated by aware and cautious
users, _condom_ is the only highly-effective means of preventing
viruses from entering your system (see celibacy(1)). Any data passed
to _condom_ by the protected process will be blocked, as specified by
the value of the -s option (see OPTIONS below). _condom_ is known to
defend against the following viruses and other malicious
afflictions…
After reading about the BSDs in Linux Format Magazine a few months ago, I started to wonder about these Linux cousins. The original Berkely Software Devision port of Unix was developed a long time ago, but the free ones developed almost simultaneously with the Linux kernel had remained hidden from me up til now. Even though I used a BSD machine at Cornell (at least I assume it was since it had a daemon on the login screen), I was just told it was a Unix machine capable of running our software on the Unix cluster.
I first read about Xen while still at Cornell. I think it may have been my Junior year. I don’t have the magazines with me at the moment, so I can’t verify. When I finished reading about the new technology in Linux Format Magazine, I racked my brain, but couldn’t find a reason to run it. I mean, I could see a reason to run it if you were running servers, but not at home. So why put it on Fedora, Debian, and all the other distros? The paradigm wasn’t there, so I couldn’t figure it out.
What GIMP needs to implement for me to stop using Adobe. (Thus saving myself and others $600+)
RAW Support (preferably the new standard of DNG)
16bit File Editing
XMP Tag support
Panorama Tool
Adjustment layers
Number 1 is important for those of us who wish to capture the camera’s RAW data and then losslessly manipulate it before getting it into the image editing program. There are some plugins which do bits here and there of RAW support, but I need it to be much closer to at least Adobe CS 1. For those who, like me, do editing on nearly every photo, 16 bit files are important because each pixel holds more data and, therefore, less is lost overall with each edit. XMP tag support is important as it is the standard for applying tags, titles, and copyright notices to photos. Many agencies expect this and it also allows for pretagging of photos so that they upload to flickr with tags already in place. I was so happy when flickr finally adapted that ability. The panorama tool is alone amongst these five as just me being spoiled. There are many ways to create your own panoramas by meticulously lining up the photos and messing with the layer masks. But I don’t want that! Why? Because Photoshop almost always gets things perfectly, allowing me to do what a photographer is supposed to be able to do - be creative! I don’t want to fiddle endlessly to get a panorama to work or it’s not fun for me. Endless tweaking is ok when I’m programming, but it frustrates me to no end with photography. Finally, #5 is almost the most important feature. In Photoshop adjustment layers are layers for some of the adjustments one normally makes TO a layer. In other words, instead of tweaking the luminosity on a layer, you create a luminosity layer tweak. This does many important things. First of all, it is non-destructive to the photo. If, twenty steps down the line, you don’t like the effect anymore, just remove the layer. You don’t have to undo through 20 steps and lose all that you’ve done along the way. Ever since I discovered adjustment layers they completely changed the way I worked. Second, you can make adjustments to your adjustment later without having to go back through the undo stack. If you know what I’m talking about, you know how useful this is.
While I was fiddling with grub as part of my experiment to get rid of the graphical boot, I noticed the picture grub uses when I boot in. For Fedora Core 4 users, I’m talking about the blue screen with the words Fedora Core where grub gives you a few seconds to choose a different kernel or OS before booting in. I decided to make my own, to truly customize my computer! Afterall, that’s one of the things that REALLY attracts me to open source.
Linux Format Magazine Issue #72 had, appropriately enough, 72 speedups for a Linux computer. I really don’t need it for my desktop computer as it has a modern processor and 512 MB of RAM, but my laptop is a 600 Mhz 128 MB RAM geezer. The most important thing for me with the laptop is the startup time. I use it for pretty simple tasks since it is so slow and so I don’t mind perhaps giving up some ameneties to make it startup faster. After all, on a laptop, the longer it takes to start up, the less battery time I have to use when it’s up!
I chose the following speedups:
As happens every once in a while, this article tries to spread the FUD that the FOSS movement is a communist movement. That is completely untrue as the developer is free to charge for value-added services. For example, Novell makes a boxed product that sells for $100. You could download it for free, but if you pay the money you get a manual and support. Likewise, Madriva is free to download, but you can pay for the priveledges to get the downloads first by being part of the Mandriva Club. FOSS requires a paradigm shift and some are scared and can’t see how to make money this way so they call it communism. It’s ok, most people are afraid of new things.
Yumex, the graphical frontend for yum has been upgraded to version 0.44. This version fixes all that was annoying about the previous version. It now automatically takes the user to the output page during updates to see what is going on. The interface is also a lot cleaner and there are a lot less popup windows which had a tendency to get “lost” if heavily using multiple desktops.
I believe that the more choice in Linux distros, the better! It’s good to have one for each purpose and the following website shows why:
the best linux distro
In this post, wget had created a directory structure, foiling my plans to do the md5sum check automatically. The correct way to do what I wanted to do was use the option -nd for no directories. If I had typed
wget -nd address
it would have just saved to my current directory and the code would have worked perfectly. It would have also worked the roundabout way that I showed.
If you like Neal Stephenson’s style of writing then you MUST read Catch-22! Catch-22 is the literary father of his style of writing so be sure to check it out! I just finished the book a couple of days ago and I loved it! It was a little confusing at first, but then I couldn’t put it down.
You may wonder what use the command line has? Afterall, why use it when you have a GUI? Well, they are so useful, that Microsoft will be reimplementing it in Windows Vista to allow people to run shell scripts. I’ve blogged about the usefulness of the command line before, but I wanted to demonstrate with some examples.
As I was reading about DSL, I wanted to download the ISO so that I could try it out. But how to do this quickly and without my intervention? Enter the program wget. wget allows you to download from the internet in the commandline. You can download one thing, such as an iso, or you can download an entire website for offline browsing. What makes it better than using your browser to download is that you can set it to retry a number of times so that if the download gets disconnected for some reason, it will continue to try. Also, a good thing to always do when downloading an ISO is to check the md5sum, allowing you to know that your file was not corrupted during a download. No biggie if you are just downloading one thing, but if you are downloading a couple of ISOs, it can get a little tedious. Using the commandline should help you out. So here’s how I started off:
Here are some of the latest screenshots I’ve taken of my main Linux desktop and how to do the same for yourself. Click on the screenshot to be taken to the fullsize picture. I finally listened and provided a low-res picture here instead of resizing the large one, thus a faster download time for those of you on dial-up.
These add-ons on my desktop as known as eye candy. They are on my desktop to look cool and provide some functionality. It’s nothing I can’t already do by going into a web browser, but it looks neater doing it like this - to some anyway. First off, you’ll notice that my menu bar and icons are in Spanish. That isn’t part of the eye candy, but I figured I’d let you in on how to do that in case you also wished to practice your technology vocab. When you are starting up your computer, if you are using Fedora you will have GDM as your greeter - the place where you type in your username and password. Other distros may also use GDM or you may select it on your own. There is a button called “languages” and if you click there, it will set all of the menus to be in Spanish. And when you load Firefox up and go to Google, it will be Google in Spanish! (or whatever language you selected, if it’s supported)
What does DSL mean to you? If you’re a technological person, it might mean Digital Subscriber Line, a way to access the internet. If you’re not a technological person….well, just ask my sister-in-law what it means to her. But to Linux users, DSL has even a third meaning, Damn Small Linux. What is Damn Small Linux? It is an entire Linux distrobution that fits on a 50 MB “business card” CD-ROM. It’s based on the Live CD technology devised by Klaus Knopper of Knoppix fame. He has created a phenomenon by perfecting the idea of having an operating system running entirely in the user’s RAM. This allows you to use Linux wherever you go, no matter what computers are available, and you won’t be touching the underlying system!
I finally had an awesome enough computer to run Gnome and KDE! I was so excited and downloaded Super Karamber, gdesklets, and all the other eye candy I could never enjoy on my old Linux box. (which is now serving as a debian print server) However, having used Fluxbox so long on the old computer caused me to long for fluxbox. There was something I just liked about it. Perhaps it was the inobtrusivness which comes from a lack a large program menu or maybe it was right-clicking for programs or the way I did almost everything in a term window. So I was getting a little tired of having Gnome in Spanish, as I had switched it to about a month ago for fun so I decided it was time to end my session and start a new one. I always wanted to take advantage of having a GUI with a low memory profile since I wanted to begin working on Cinelerra (see my tutorial tomorrow), which takes up quite a bit of RAM.
Here’s a really great article that I found about customizing one’s desktop. This is the most important thing a geek can do with his or her computer. When you first get your computer it looks just like everyone else’s computer. By customizing it and taking a little bit from what you see on this person’s computer and that person’s computer you end up with something that is uniquely your own and slightly different from everything else you’ve seen. Be sure to visit the link provided below to see the screenshots.
Recently I had ocassion to require wireless access on my Linux box. This is notoriously difficult in Linux as of now, although most other hardware devices are found and work right out of the box. I’d gotten it working on my laptop before, but this time it was necessary to get it working on my desktop. At first I tried a USB wireless device, but those are almost no support in Linux so I ditched that effort and bought a D-Link DWL-G510 Wifi G pci card. I hoped it would work out of the box, but it didn’t.
As we saw in yesterday’s post, one of the things the author of the article suggested was that Linux needed to get simpler in order to gain a wider audience. But I say, hell no! Do not dumb down Linux! One of the most powerful things about Linux is that we still have access to the raw commands and configurations that allow each person’s computer to be infinitely different from the next. Already part of this process has taken place with a right-click in KDE (at least in FC3) not even having an option for opening a terminal. Look at Microsoft, it’s such a pain to use DOS now and, although some don’t like it, text commands hold a much greater amount of power and complexity than an icon can.
I have recently had yet another paradigm shift involving my use of the GNU/Linux operation system. Up until now I was treating it like a better, more stable version of Windows. At first I even tried to do everything graphically, shunning away from anyone who told me to use the command line. I figured they were just some diehards who felt that mouse users were below them and considered their advice to be one-sided.
Usually with a magazine, I feel a little sad reading it. In middle and high school I was subscribed to Electronic Gaming Monthly. Each month they would detail all of the new games coming out; their features and how to do certain tricks here and there. Since I was too young to purchase them and my parents believed in being frugal when it came to video games, all the magazine could do was make me lust over games I could never have. The same goes with most PC magazines. They talk about this or that software for Windows and it is often too expensive to get it.
Kdenlive 18.12
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