In The Jungle: Running Linux for September

Alternative Desktops

So after getting a bit bored of the existing layout, I thought I would try a dock. After installing Cairo Dock and futzing with it for a bit, I decided to return to my old setup. Something about it just didn't seem to mesh with how I wanted to approach my desktop.

For those readers out there that are still using Windows, it is not entirely uncommon for Linux users to have multiple styles of desktop. There are several arrangements available and while they all approach desktop functionality in different ways, they still consistently run and handle programs with ease. So if you ever feel confused about Gnome vs. KDE vs. WindowMaker vs. XFCE vs. insert-some-other-name here, don't feel too lost. Each of those is a distinct desktop environment. And yes, you can run programs that come from one environment in another.

In fact...

You can run the actual program on one machine, have the windowing system managed on a 2nd machine, and see the displayed results on a 3rd machine. Dizzy yet? How about multiple machines running different programs all showing on the same display? Let's not even start on how you can have all of those machines share the same set of fonts, or the multiple input devices (a fancy way of saying you can have 3 or 4 keyboards, 2 mice, a trackball, a tablet, and who knows what else all actively controlling the programs you're working with). I'm sure that this induces some vertigo in most folks, so let's just keep it simple:

It's flexible, customizable, and you have a variety of choices.

Closet Gamer

Ok, I admit it. I have to drag this skeleton out of the closet. It's time to hold it up to the light of day.

I've tried playing my Windows games on Linux. And I like it.

(from the back row of the peanut gallery, I can hear someone wretching, violently choking up what was left of their last meal...)

Ok, now that we've got that out of the way...no, wait, seriously, I've tried it and for a few exceptions, it's suited me fine. In fact, I'm finding that the older the game, the more likely it will run. Contrast this to Windows 7 and its valiant "I'm all-new and don't share my underpinnings with older versions" attempt to jettison not only baby and bathwater but the tub, kitchen sink, a trousseau, the house cat and some monogrammed towels. Older programs (read: games I've owned for years) just don't run. Even the so-called compatibility mode is a painful exercise in hurry-up-and-wait, as it meanders and plods along, trying desperately to get enough wherewithal to just finish loading, a 30 minute wait in futility as the program crashes without a peep, leaving you to figure out if anything worked at all. The half-hour wait isn't an exaggeration, it's actually pretty close to the encountered time of 22 minutes. Yes, that's right, Windows 7 fixes all of the nastiness of Vista but still leaves you "computationally impotent". And as much as I grudgingly need to get a copy for my wife in the near future, I suspect there will still be some unwritten sorrows to come for people running "legacy" programs that are 5 years old.

Valve Software's Steam runs fine on it, although the graphics translation portion of Wine kicks into overdrive as it renders the output of the Source engine, which is used in the Half-Life 2 series of games. An old copy of Tribes: Starseige runs just dandy with only two screen settings changed (select OpenGL, then select the native resolution). Homeworld 2 isn't quite there yet - under very specific circumstances, I was able to lock up the display when zoomed in, but otherwise it ran as well. I chalk that one up to an older version of Wine.

It's still not 100% for Mom and Pop, but for the seasoned computer user, a little futzing with the various options under Wine usually yields results.

A Resting Server

The family server hasn't had much activity. It spends most of its time sitting in a corner, looking mournful and taking up my precious desk space. I do know that I'm going to run Debian on my server, and not just because I'm cheap and I have old-skool madskillz. Debian's big attraction for me consists of:

• a community of people who share a common goal - making free software reachable for everyone, everywhere, on the planet.
• a complete software ecosystem, of the community, by the community, for the community.
• a community based on sound principals, namely, it has a constitution and elected members.
• elections for important matters in the community. That's right, the people in Debian actually vote on how they handle their issues, publish the results of the vote, and then follow through. When's the last time workers at Microsoft got a vote on how to resolve issues?
• a reputation for stability that has become legendary in the industry. Debian stable doesn't just mean "ready for release", it often means "ready to run for years". That stability is only marred by the release of updates for software vulnerabilities. Even those software patches are not updated to the "latest and greatest" - instead, the security fixes are brought into the existing release (a process called backpatching for the non-techies out there), so that the fundamental behavior of the program never changes over its lifespan. "Stable" means stable, not somewhat-stable, not half-baked, not bleeding-edge, just....stable.

And finally:

• I can bend it to my diabolical will, allowing me to fulfill my plan to conqu....er, um, our family photo albums.

It Just Works

I keep hearing how "linux is too hard" and "it doesn't do what I want it to do" and yada yada...

Well, I thought I'd try to see just how hard it is to hook up an HP OfficeJet 5610 into my system. This is a multifunction printer that Helen uses for her work, and while the computer is booted into Windows, functions as a printer, copier, fax, and scanner. So it should be a challenge, right?

First, the printing. I decided to add the printer via USB, and was fully expecting it to be a painful process. Except...it was done in a few mouse clicks. Ok, let's make it a bit more challenging...we'll see if we can get more options than just "black-and-white vs. color" printing. How about double-sided printing? Bet it can't do that...wait...yeah, it can. Ok, I bet the driver won't work correctly and I'll get a jumbled mess of print instead of a printout...here, I'll print a 4-page PDF double-sided, that should...huh...what's it doing? The paper's moving back in and...oh. It worked too, I now have a double-sided printout. Huh, the print portion works fine, I need a bigger challenge. I know! The scanner! I bet it doesn't work. Yeah, I don't see any options to scan in here! Hah! Well, to be fair, I supose I should look around for scanning software that might need to be installed. Let's open up the package installer and search for "scan"...what's this? XSane? And some other programs? I'll give them a try. (Moments later) Ok, I see a new program in my menu, XSane Image Scanning Program. Bet it doesn't work when I start it...huh..."Looking for scanners"...now I have a program running with a bunch of buttons...there's this "scan" button in the bottom right corner...I'll click that and (whirrrrr click whirrr). Oh.

It just works.

Short Story: The Command of Babes

"Tell Bob that those budget increases were not for textbooks. Kids need play time, and they need teachers that aren't stressed out. Go. Now!" Suzie growled.

"But... Mrs. President, we..."

"I said NOW!" she screamed.

"Yes, Mrs. President." Dick turned and left the room.

"That's better." She kneeded her temples at the desk. Getting the Department of Education to go along with the increases for teacher's salaries and playground equipment was always like pulling teeth.

Suzie hurriedly stood up from her desk and started for the exit of the Oval Office. Without even a look, she continued straight to the side door that lead to the bedroom quarters, while growling again at her assistant. "Get us ready to greet Thomas. And are we still having lunch with Ivan later?"

"Mrs. President, your schedule says Thomas will be here in 30 minutes. Ivan will be able to attend for lunch, but at 12:30. Will that be all?"

She stopped at the door and turned to look at her assistant, her voice softening a bit, although it was still matter-of-fact. "I don't like this dress, it makes me look bad. What happened to the blue one?"

Travis suppressed a smirk. "It's in dry cleaning, we're trying to get the ice cream stains removed."

She sighed. "Well... Ok. Is there a different one? I want to look presentable."

Travis couldn't supress the smirk anymore. "I think you have the pink-and-white available. Would that work?"

Seeing the smirk, she smiled a bit, knowing what he was implying. "Yeah. Gimme me a few minutes."

Suzie left the Oval Office and headed for her bedroom. When she got there, she noticed that once again security had re-arranged the wall decorum. She was miffed that they kept doing that, but they insisted it was for security. Quickly she made her way to the closet and picked the pink/white dress off of the rack, and hurriedly changed. She always liked a visit with Thomas and wanted to look nice for him.

After a few minutes, she stepped out, only to be greeted by her mother.

"Well...how do I look?" The combination blazer-and-dress was a bit conservative for her tastes - the surrounding blazer over the top of it hid much of the print that started at the straps, a mix of black-and-white artwork that gradually tapered off as it descended past the bust line - but she knew it was important to keep her appearance understated for diplomatic functions. The blazer's length was just long enough to allow her to move freely, without it being caught when sitting. It also covered all of the artwork while giving her a formal appearance. She didn't hate the blazer, just the fact that that it covered the best parts of the dress.

"Mrs. President, you look wonderful." She smiled sincerely and her eyes were happy. It always bugged her when her mother was glowing like that.

"Is it really necessary to have the blazer?" She always liked the backside of the dress, where the print took on a controversial tone. Once, during a domestic function, attending the Department of the Something-or-Other, she took the jacket off, only to be greeted by the clicking cameras of the press. And while she had hell to pay the next day, she was giggling for a week after that fiasco. It made her happy to let people know she was not always wanting to be President, and the dress was her way of giving the public the bird.

Her mother's slow, nervous answer told her what she already knew. "While I know you like that dress, there are visiting diplomats that don't take kindly to some of our culture." A smile with a hint of nervousness followed. "The blazer is a prudent idea, the press will be there for a time, and we don't want bad diplomatic relations due to bad press, right?"

"Ok..." she said, a bit sulkily. In the back of her head, she was still conspiring to show Thomas the print, after the press had left.

"Hey Mom?"

"Yes?"

"What did they do to the posters? And the new one, the one with the band..."

"Security dear. I'm afraid they had to reduce the poster count on the walls. Something about being able to obscure listening devices."

"But I liked that new one I got yesterday! They didn't throw it away, did they?"

"No, it's in storage, along with all the others." Her mom smiled. "Dear, I know it bothers you, but we're just concerned."

"Yeah, whatever..." Suzie rolled her eyes. Then she remembered what was next and perked up. "Hey, what time is it?"

"About 10:24, so Thomas should be here in a few minutes". That made Suzie's eyes light up a bit.

"Good! Is the reception room ready?"

"Yes, Mrs. President."

Suzie Goodchild, 36th electoral President of the United Regions of the Americas, ran to the reception room. At just 11, she was the oldest elected President of the URA, and into the 1st year of her two-year term. She was elected for her fierce stance on violence, and her ability to woo visiting boy diplomats. Thomas Beckenridge, Vice Roy of the United Welsh Kingdom, was already waiting for her. While she took a hard stance with other boys, there was something about Thomas that had a soft place in her heart. Her cabinet, including her mother (who was Secretary of State) were often looking nervous, wondering if this could become a potential political issue. Ivan Torvich, diplomat from the Russian Confederacy, was also a favorite of hers. She found his accented English to be an irresistible lure, although not as much as that of Thomas.

And so it was, and had always been for a long while. The use of select children in diplomatic and domestic political roles was one of the defining events of the 20th Century. They often lacked a hidden agenda, or the biases of older adults, which gave them the ability resolve international disputes in often creative and arbitrary ways. Their unique view, based on being a child, also created a surge in child care, rights advocacy, education, health, and behavioral research. It was hard to have adults argue to cut education when the person approving the rubber-stamp on the budget was a kid themselves. It was even harder to allow personal bias and hubris in adults to foster when children were constantly reminding them that they too, at one time, had a childhood as well. There were diplomatic uses for this - sorting out the trilateral disarmament of the URA, UWK, and RC nuclear weapon stockpiles based on exchanges of PB&J sandwiches was a difficult task to complete, yet time and time again the results were demonstrated to be far superior to whatever adults would muster.

In The Jungle: Running Linux for August

So what's happened since this little experiment started? Not much. Still plugging along. Well...kinda. There's lots going on in Linux-land, so let's take a peek at what's happened for the month:

The Desktop Experience
Replaced the sucky FX5200 AGP with a Radeon 9600SE, and things got faster...until the Radeon suffered a stroke and started to "snow" during heavy drawing. Swapped for an older (and much more stable) Radeon 9100, but as this machine dual-boots to accomodate the wife, Windows 7 has trouble with it. Specifically, during shutdown it bluescreens. Wouldn't have anything to do with those Windows XP drivers I fed it, right? ;-)

So the FX5200 is back in. The proprietary Nvidia driver is reloaded. And life is back to the way it was for both boot partitions.

Recycled Server
Under consideration is the family server. The initial build was made with recycled discards from work (with approval from the boss, of course) along with many spares I had already. So here's what we're looking at:

• Antec Sonata III "Quiet" Case, 380W PS
• Tyan 230T Mobo (w/thermal and fan sensors)
  
• Twin Pentium III "Tualatin Cores" @ 1.266 Ghz (512Mb L2 Cache)
• 512Mb PC133 ECC RAM
  
• mirrored 80Gb PATA drives
• Debian 5 (sans desktop)
  

The initial build has been completed (many thanks to Jason for the 2nd drive!), but there are some outstanding problems. The twin fans are whiny-loud, there is a faint smell of burnt something on warm days, and finding someplace to put it in the house where you don't hear whiny-loud and smell burnt something while connecting to Internet access is also an issue. And then there's cramming everything into 80Gb, which for us isn't too bad (we don't do digital video) but it's still a concern because there's no backup...

The first concern is the burnt smell. The case has a 120mm back fan, and the smell seems stronger there than at the power supply. I've eyeballed just about all of the large caps on the mobo but none look swollen to my untrained eye, nor are there any signs of a leak.

The whiny fans I can't do too much about without sinking more $$ into it. And right now, given I've popped $50 or so into this old beast, I'm not sure if it's worth it. Some $10 fans would silence this but that's $20 outlay, and this beast is probably worth that in parts.

I haven't come up with a coherent storage strategy that doesn't require a 3rd mass storage device. I have considered, and decided for, the use of LVM, as I'll probably upgrade the drives at some point in the future, and LVM will make that a snap.

Guess lighting this up will have to wait another month. Stay tuned while I try to breathe some life into this Frankenstein of mine...


Palm Pre & Friends
I've downloaded the Palm Pre software development kit for Linux, and have completed the install. No, I don't own a Pre, I just wanted to mess around with it. So far, it's pretty straightforward, although the novacom debacle is hardly what I call friendly. Novacom is needed to transfer data into the device, and it uses some kind of weird protocol to handle this. They should have just looked at a pre-existing protocol, something like SSH maybe, but I digress.

Pros:

• If you can do some basic HTML, you can probably write something.
• If you can do more than HTML, you'll make stuff that's just F@#%ing brilliant.
• You can root it in no time flat. Hell, if you connect with novaterm, you get a root session.

Cons:

• It's not the real thing.
• Questions of how developers will commercialize any programs for it

Of course, the Pre is dying a slow death because the iPhone has more or less sucked all the oxygen out of its vicinity. Too bad - I like devices that I can perform feats of pwnage on and bend them to my (diabolical?) will. The iPhone doesn't have that factor - what you see is what you get, and sometimes, that's just not enough for me. To each, their own...

Time Is (Someone Else's) Money

Time is money!

This refrain I've heard for years. No, decades. And it continues.

But is time really money?

Time is money - if you're paid for it. Generally speaking, I don't have hordes of people lined up outside my doorway, breathlessly waiting to pay me money for breathing air. So let's set aside that you're always getting paid something, which seems to be a really poor assumption on the part of the "Time is Money!" crowd.

Let's either point out the elephant in the room or burn the house down trying.

Time is someone else's money. Because you're only getting paid for your time when someone else is paying. You can't just pay yourself - that's silly. Or, at least, counterfeiting. But back to the point - someone else is involved in trading your time for money.

Why bring this up? Because a few years back, all kinds of people in the computer industry were trying to say that Linux wasn't worth their time because of Jamie Zawinski's "Linux is free only if your time is". Well, duh. What are you going to do Jamie, run up and shower me with dollars for using software?

People took this as "stay away from this because you'll spend money". Obviously the same people who are clamoring at me with "Time is Money!"

And so we come full circle.

Why my good man, I just stepped off that Zepplin

Personally, I really want to get into doing some handiwork, you know. What's that old-timey word again...craftsmanship?

I have read some of Gibson's work and cyberpunk was interesting, but it wasn't something I could get into. Here's the stuff of the future, and it's all...inaccessable. It's not something that I can point to and say, "wow, that's neat stuff", because that "neat stuff" is just a bunch of ideas in an author's head. When I first heard of steampunk, I heard of it as a form of fiction. Who would know that it would take off in popularity, and the retro-techno-fitting of just about everything with that...craftsmanship. Suddenly, a light goes off in my head - this is accessible. It's more than just accessible, it's doable, it's something that will challenge what skills I have, and it can be made to be beautiful, even if that "beautiful" is pseudo-Art-Deco mixed with Victorian Brass.

I think the real appeal of Steampunk lies in its pre-industrial-revolution charm; a kind of accelerated technology that is still accessable to the common person in the street. You can't just open a chip fab and start churning out your own microprocessors. You can get your hands on some brass and do some milling, and come up with something both beautiful and functional.

The downside is that I don't have the skills, or the time, or the money to get started. (sigh)

Little Billy in a Dark Place

I have a secret theory. I think that Bill Gates was traumatized by a teletype machine.

Don't believe me?

Why did powershell take off after he left the company? Especially since it was in development during his tenure there? Why make it the tool of choice for administration of Exchange 2007, after years of pointy-clicky?

A co-worker has confirmed this suspicion (and was actually the first to point out the sudden command line culture appearing in Redmond after his departure).

Ok, so there was DOS to contend with. But maybe that was also part of the issue. The entire "letters on a grid on the screen" subculture pretty much lived there in PC-land for 10 years. When people think of command-line, they usually think of minicomputers, but those inside the industry usually think of Unix. And we all know how he just looooves Unix.

Odd, how everything in the last 15 years with software development is marketed as "Visual Crapulence version Ten-Zillion", yet dotNET shows up as a compiler that works on a command line.

There's a time and place for GUI interfaces. When the metaphor is right, they reduce effort and make it easy for millions to use their computers in a (relatively) sane manner.

But programming usually isn't one of them.

Living on the Edge...of Computing

So, I've decided to embark on a little journey in computing.

With the exception of the few games I own, I plan to live "outside" of Windows.

For a year.

(A muffled gasp from the back row, followed by quiet mutters of "He won't survive! He'll starve to death! He's gone mad! We'll find him reduced to picking berries and digging up tuber roots in a month's time!")

Now, I've already been running a non-Windows desktop for about 4 months now, and it's been pretty painless. But I've noticed more and more that I get less and less done while I'm in Windows. And frankly, I only use Windows because my games were written to run in Windows.

(Yes, I am aware of Wine and other ways to get games to run inside of my non-Windows sessions. But this is about "getting things done", not "screwing around".)

So what's it been like after 4 months?

Strange as it may sound, relaxing. I don't worry about things. I just worry about doing what I want to do. Isn't that what everyone claims to want - I want to just get things done? But isn't it funny that I get more done "outside of the box"?

We'll see how long this can last. I plan to go the additional 8 months. Can he do it? Can he hold out? Only time will tell...