Why I’m still an amateur

I usually don’t bother with installing a printer. I have one, but I rarely use it. Jen however needed to print something, her Windows Dell is broken (another story), so I installed cups and the HP drivers, and connected the printer. I tried to add it via the webinterface, but it wasn’t found.

I modprobed the right module. Nothing. I rebooted, although I knew it wasn’t necessary. Nothing. I reinstalled the drivers, but of course, nothing happened. I muttered a bit, when Jen passed and asked if I had checked the cables.

“Well, of course I did, I just plugged it in, and at the back of the printer it’s…oh. Thanks. And I’m an idiot.”

Printer was up and running a minute later…

San

The slow route to Linux

I blogged before about putting Linux on Jen’s laptop. After wring that post, I found that the new KDE (4.1 at the time, I think), didn’t really work out, so I simply slapped Ubuntu on there and asked her not to ignore the updates. That’s pretty much all I did, because she’s sick and tired of hearing me claim that Linux is far superior to any other OS

In any case, she didn’t use it much, and kept booting into Windows by default. Fine by me, but every time she had a problem (wireless simply doesn’t work, SN connection problems, weird Firefox scrolling behaviour), I asked “well, does it work in Linux?”, because if it did, that would be my solution.

Then a couple of things happened. First, she wanted to edit some photographs, didn’t find a good application on her Windows partition for that, booted into Linux, found the Gimp, and liked it. Secondly, she bought a camera and didn’t liike the software that came with it. I installed Kino for her, and although converting movies into MPEG doesn’t always work the first time, it does get the job done eventually. With Emesene being an acceptable replacement for Messenger (apart from the games) she doesn’t have much reason anymore to boot into Windows.

However, her using a video editor meant that the 5GB partition I had put Ubuntu on wasn’t big enough anymore. I borrowed her laptop for a couple of hours, made the partition 10 GB, and installed Arch on it. I chose Arch instead of Ubuntu mainly because I wanted more recent software on it, like Firefox 3.5.

I wanted to keep the system lightweight, so I tried LXDE first, but that turned out to be a bit too sparse. XFCE turned out to be the better choice. I installed the Buuf icons because she liked them on my netbook, chose a purple theme she liked (which I think clashes horribly with the icons, but who am I ), made the Volume up, Volume down and Sleep buttons work, and gave it back.

She’s been booting into Linux by default now, because at the moment it’s that or a crippled Windows. The best thing about it is that I haven’t forced her to pick Arch. She made the choice herself.

The best thing for me is that I have to do the support of her laptop anyway, and I’m much better at it in Linux. Everybody happy.

San

Arch and Asus EEE 900

My collegue bought an Asus EEE 900 about a year ago, and confessed he was a bit disappointed with the power and HD space, so he sold it to me at a good price.  It had Win XP installed, but I quickly wiped that and installed Arch on it. Mind you, at that point I wasn’t at all confident. I assumed I wouldn’t get things like wireless, webcam, suspend and resume and the function keys to work, and I expected to have to use specialist distributions like EEEbuntu or Moblin.

Well, wireless even worked during the install, so no problems there. The install itself went flawless, which meant that all I had to do was the usual configuration. There were some differences with my normal PC, since I wanted to save as much space as possible. A panel was out, the system tray is on auto-hide, I cropped the window decorations from applications like Firefox and Thunar, and that was pretty much it. Everything else was my normal install of Openbox.

The function keys I got working by adding an extra module from AUR, and although I’m not a regular user of Skype, I installed it to see if the webcam worked. It did, without any tweaking from my part. Same thing for going to sleep when I close the lid. Opening pops it back to live, without a hitch.

Battery life is surprisingly good on this little thing. I’ve been working on it for what must be over two hours now, and I’m still at 30%. CPU load is something like 10% on average, and memory usage has yet to rise over 200 MB, and that’s with Firefox open. About the only thing I don’t really know how to do is slightly adjust the keyboard layout. It’s close to be-latin, but not quite. Some of the more exotic keys aren’t really where they’re supposed to be…

All in all, I love this little thing which I named Tinkerbell, so here’s some showing off:

Tinkerbell: Pseudo clean

Thunar and audacious. Stalonetray bottom right

San

Arch + PekWM screenshots: August

Yes, no Openbox this month. I was aching to try something new, and PekWM looked inviting because it’s themes are pixmap based, which in plain English means they simply look better. As a WM it’s just a tad less good: it’s not entirely standard compliant, and configuring it was more difficult for me than when I first started using OpenBox. Most of all, PekWM’s default mouse and key configuration is just insane. In any case, I got it the way I want it. This is the result.

Arch August 2009: Clean

Arch August 2009 - Busy

San

Install Linux using a USB stick

Because something happened to my main Arch install (I don’t know exactly what I screwed up, but half the time X wouldn’t boot and I was stuck at a blank screen), I decided to download the latest release and re-install it. However, I accidentally ended up with a file with an *.img extension, which is not an image for a CD-ROM but for a USB stick. I must have clicked the wrong link somewhere…

In any case, I knew my PC is able to boot from a USB stick, and I didn’t want to wait for the “right” download to finish, so I gave it a try. “Burning” it to the stick was the most difficult part, but as always, the Arch wiki came to the rescue. The CLI command “dd” doesn’t offer much visual feedback, so I just waited until the light on the stick stopped blinking, checked if the job had indeed finished, rebooted, and installed.

The package install was quite a bit faster than usual, so I’ll keep installing distributions this way (if possible). It’ll save me a lot of CD-ROMs that’s for sure, and the USB stick can contain 4GB instead of 700 MB…should open another range of possibilities.

San

Oh noes! I haz virusses!

It’s been a while since I encountered one of these, but browsing the Arch forums I clicked a link that should have led to a ScummVM but actually gave me this:

Oh Noes!

It’s well done really, and quite clever too, since I clicked a link a second time, and the layout was different, as was the file they wanted me to download. In any case, the message was the same: Your computer is infected! Look at all the authentic looking Windows popups and security messages!

Yeah. Nice try.

San

I got suckered into Windows support

Well, suckered in…It’s my job these days. But I like to leave my job when I’m at home. Unfortunately, I couldn’t yesterday. I’ve been playing Heroes of Newerth lately, and one of the people I sent a beta key to is my sister in law, who couldn’t connect to the game server. Neither could The Sims. Or Everest Poker. I grumbled a bit about Windows, asked her if she had a firewall installed (she hadn’t, because she had removed ZoneAlarm…too many annoying popups). She also claimed that she had to use a special tool to remove it and that there were processes running she couldn’t stop, and that she knew where the .exe files were but she couldn’t delete those directories either. She didn’t have the rights or there were in use or whatever.

Sigh.

“Boot into safe mode…no, just google it, I can’t be bothered, and then delete them. Yes, it’ll work.”

It did, and so I was forced into something I vowed not to do anymore. On the upside, she’ll be able to play HoN tonight. I’ll kill her a few times to make me feel better.

San

Linux Gaming: Heroes of Newerth

It’s no secret that one of the areas that Windows has the advantage of Linux, is gaming. It’s not that Linux as an OS isn’t capable of running quality games, it’s just that game manufacterers don’t think the Linux gamers can make them any money. For that reason, it’s always nice when a game is released with a native Linux version, like World of Goo a couple of months ago, and Savage 2. Now, the same people who are responsible for the latter are working on a game called Heroes of Newerth. It’s being beta tested at the moment, and yes, the good people of S2 Games provide Windows, Mac and Linux version (both 32-bit and 64!).

Even better, one of the communities it’s reaching out to for the beta test is the Linux community, by providing Phoronix 400 beta keys they could hand out. And as could be expected, 400 won’t be nearly enough. The interest in this was huge. When I asked for a beta key yesterday, the reply forum was on its third page, which means I was one of the first. I then left for a walk, and when I came back the page count had reached 12. A few hours later when I went to sleap it was 31, now it’s 38 and the 400 invites are pretty much gone. And that’s not even counting the people who misunderstood and requested their key by mail or in the wrong thread. Phoronix has already asked for, and received, new keys, and they guarantee that if you’re using Linux and you’re interested in testing this, there will be a key for you.

Now, because the beta is closed, I can’t tell you that much about the game and I certainly can’t show you any screenshots or videos, but if you have a Facebook account you can become a fan. There’s some content there that give you a pretty good idea of what the game is about. In any case, if you ever played DotA, which is a Warcraft 3 mod, you’ll know exactly how the game plays. If you haven’t, but you have played Warcraft 3, just imagine a bunch of Heroes who decided to drop all the building and raising armoes and just kick the crap out of eachother instead. It’s a little more complicated than that, but the gameplay is definitely faster than in Warcraft 3, and strategy is still present but very different.

I can also reveal that I suck at this game I played one and a half game and managed to kill absolutely no one. Getting killed, on the other hand, was incredibly easy. I set all kinds of records, but not the good ones. I had a lot of fun though, and my teammates were understood the sheer noobness of my endeavors, though some did go “What in the name of all that’s good and holy are you doing?”

But the best part of this game? Fast, because I didn’t have to run it in wine. Beautiful, because I didn’t have to run it in wine. At the correct screen resolution, because I didn’t have to run it in wine. And it worked as good as the Windows version, because I didn’t have to run it in wine.

If you manage to get your hands on a beta key, go and try it out. It’s well worth it.

San

Pardus 2009

A year ago I reviewed Pardus 2008 and I was pleasantly surprised. Safe for some details here and there, it was a very well made ready-for-everyone kind of Linux distribution. Now, a year later, the new version is out, and switches from KDE3 to KDE 4.2. It’s been gathering some positive reviews, and I was eager to try it out.

Well, the install is still very easy. It looks even better than it did before, especially because of the custom-made icon theme which is one of the best I’ve ever seen. The first-boot KAPTAN configuration tool is still a very good idea, and helps to personalise your desktop right from the start. Configuration in general is still very easy, especially network configuration.

But something must have gone horribly wrong during the install, because the stability is simply atrocious. Applications keep crashing. One time, I could move the mouse but I couldn’t open a single program because I couldn’t click anything. I booted into 5 minutes ago and Firefox wouldn’t start. I don’t know what happened, but I don’t feel like installing it again.

It’s a shame, because as I said, it looks incredible.

San

Chromium in Linux is advancing nicely

I’ve installed “chromium-snapshot” from Arch’s AUR yesterday (means user contributed, unofficial packages), and I must say it’s come a long way. In the very beginning, this was described by the devs as a 500MB binary that displayed a window. I’m paraphrasing here, but you get the idea. Then it developed into something browserlike, but without tabs, or flash, or stability. Now it has all those things, plus it actually follows your GTK theme. Flash works, albeit a bit buggy. It’s the only thing that has been able to crash a page at this point. The browser itself hasn’t died on me yet.
In fact, the only thing I’ve noticed is that it’s a memory hog of biblical proportions. I have an openbox script that tells me how much memory my applications are using, and if it’s correct, with three tabs open Chromium needs ten processes, consuming 774 MB of RAM. That’s so much it’s hard to believe, and so far my 2GB RAM equipped PC doesn’t have trouble yet, but that rate, it will grind to a halt when I have the usual 5 to 10 tabs open.

In any case, this is of course still alpha software, but it’s advancing fast. Here’s a screenshot:

Chromium in Arch

San