Adventures in Linux

updates

2010-06-11T11:35:00.000-07:00

Just thought I'd post my updated conky and fbpanel configs. fbpanel now has the ability to exit, shut down and reboot. my conky config now shows my storage drive, as well as swap... swap somehow ended up with the wrong uuid in fstab, but it's fixed now.

fbpanel

# fbpanel <profile> config file
# see http://fbpanel.sf.net/docs.html for complete configuration guide


Global {
    edge = bottom
    allign = left
    margin = 0
    widthtype = percent
    width = 100
    height = 24
    transparent = true
    tintcolor = #ffffff
    alpha = 35
    setdocktype = true
    setpartialstrut = true
    autohide = false
    heightWhenHidden = 2
}

Plugin {
    type = space
    config {
        size = 2
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = menu
    config {
        image = /home/lleu/Downloads/orb-big-white.png
        systemmenu {
        }
        separator {
        }
        item {
            icon = gnome-settings
            name = configure
            command = configure
        }
        item {
            icon = gnome-session-halt
            name = shut down
            action = gksu poweroff
        }
        item {
            icon = gnome-session-restart
            name = reboot
            action = gksu reboot
        }
        item {
            icon = gnome-session-logout
            name = exit
            action = openbox --exit
        }        
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = space
    config {
        size = 5
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = launchbar
    config {
        button {
            icon = gnome-fs-home
            tooltip = PcManfm file manager
            action = pcmanfm
        }
        button {
            icon = gnome-terminal
            tooltip = Terminal
            action = sakura
        }
        button {
            icon = mozilla-firefox
            tooltip = Firefox web browser
            action = firefox
        }
        button {
            icon = accessories-text-editor
            tooltip = Texteditor
            action = geany
        }
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = space
    config {
        size = 8
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = wincmd
    config {
        icon = gnome-fs-desktop
        tooltip = Left click to iconify all windows. Middle click to shade them.
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = space
    config {
        size = 7
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = pager
    config {
        showwallpaper = true
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = icons
    config {
        DefaultIcon = /usr/share/fbpanel/images/default.xpm
        application {
            icon = gnome-terminal
            ClassName = XTerm
        }
        application {
            icon = gnome-terminal
            ClassName = mlterm
        }
        application {
            icon = gnome-terminal
            ClassName = URxvt
        }
        application {
            icon = gnome-emacs
            ClassName = Emacs
        }
        application {
            icon = mozilla-firefox
            ClassName = Firefox-bin
        }
        application {
            icon = mozilla-firefox
            ClassName = Firefox
        }
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = space
    config {
        size = 5
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = taskbar
    expand = true
    config {
        ShowIconified = true
        ShowMapped = true
        ShowAllDesks = false
        tooltips = true
        IconsOnly = false
        MaxTaskWidth = 150
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = tray
}


Plugin {
    type = dclock
    config {
        ClockFmt = %R
    }
}

.conkyrc

alignment top_right
background yes
border_width 1
cpu_avg_samples 2
default_color cornflowerblue
default_outline_color white
default_shade_color white
double_buffer yes
draw_borders no
draw_graph_borders yes
draw_outline no
draw_shades no
gap_x 25
gap_y 15
maximum_width 225
max_port_monitor_connections 64
max_specials 512
max_user_text 16384
minimum_size 330 10
net_avg_samples 2
no_buffers yes
out_to_console no
#wm_class_name Conky
own_window_colour black
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_type normal
own_window yes
stippled_borders 2
update_interval 2
uppercase no
use_spacer yes
use_xft yes
xftalpha 0.8
xftfont arial:size=9

TEXT
${color #9DCAFF}${font impact:size=12}$sysname $kernel ${alignr}
${color #9DCAFF}$nodename
${font arial:size=5}
${color #0077ff}${font arial:bold:size=12}System:
${color #0077ff}${font arial:size=9}Uptime:$color $uptime ${color #0077ff} Load:$color $loadavg
${color #0077ff}CPU 0(${freq}mhz):${alignr}$color ${cpu cpu1}%
${color #0077ff}${cpubar cpu1}
${color #0077ff}CPU 1(${freq}mhz):${alignr}$color ${cpu cpu2}%
${color #0077ff}${cpubar cpu2}
${color lightgrey}Core0:$color ${platform coretemp.0 temp 1} °C${color grey} @$color ${cpu cpu1}%
${color lightgrey}Core1:$color ${platform coretemp.1 temp 1} °C${color grey} @$color ${cpu cpu2}% 
${color #0077ff}RAM Usage:${alignr}$color $mem${color #0077ff}/${color}$memmax - $memperc%
${color #0077ff}$membar
${color #0077ff}Swap Usage:${alignr}$color $swap${color #0077ff}/${color}$swapmax - $swapperc%
${color #0077ff}${swapbar}

${color #0077ff}${font arial:bold:size=12}File Systems:
${color #0077ff}${font arial:size=9}/ ${alignr}$color${fs_used /}/${fs_size /}
${color #0077ff}${fs_bar /}
${color #0077ff}/home ${alignr}$color${fs_used /home}/${fs_size /home}
${color #0077ff}${fs_bar /home}
${color #0077ff}/storage ${alignr}$color${fs_used /storage}/${fs_size /storage}
${color #0077ff}${fs_bar /storage}

${color #0077ff}${font arial:bold:size=12}Processes:
${color #0077ff}${font arial:size=9}Top CPU ${alignr}CPU% MEM%
$color ${top name 1} ${alignr}${top cpu 1} ${top mem 1}
$color ${top name 2} ${alignr}${top cpu 2} ${top mem 2}
$color ${top name 3} ${alignr}${top cpu 3} ${top mem 3}
${color #0077ff}Total Processes:$color ${processes}

${color #0077ff}${font arial:bold:size=12}Network:
${font arial:size=9}${color #0077ff}
${color #0077ff}Net Down:$color ${downspeed eth0} k/s
${color #0077ff}${downspeedgraph eth0 104E8B 0077ff}
${color #0077ff}Net Up:$color ${upspeed eth0} k/s
${color #0077ff}${upspeedgraph eth0 104E8B 0077ff}

conkyclock

alignment top_left
background no
gap_x 10
gap_y 15
minimum_size 200 5
maximum_width 250

update_interval 1
total_run_times 0
double_buffer yes
no_buffers yes
text_buffer_size 1248
     
cpu_avg_samples 2
net_avg_samples 2

use_xft yes

xftfont HanelGotD:size=9
xftalpha 0.5
override_utf8_locale yes
own_window yes
own_window_type desktop
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints below,undecorated,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
#below,  normal  override
       
draw_shades no
draw_outline no
draw_borders no
draw_graph_borders no
       
#default_color 454e57
default_color light blue
#default_shade_color 7a999c
default_outline_color green
       
#MD0: ${alignr}${fs_used /mnt/disks} / ${fs_size /mnt/disks}
#${color slate gray}/var/log/everything.log:
#${color}${exec tail -n33 /var/log/everything.log}
#${font Sans:normal:size=7}${color1}${exec dmesg | uniq | tail -n 5}

TEXT
${offset 4}${voffset -3}${color light blue}${font URW Gothic L:size=60}${time %I}
${offset 100}${voffset -125}${color light blue}${font URW Gothic L:size=32}${time :%M}
${offset 165}${voffset -73}${color light blue}${font URW Gothic L:size=13}${time %S}${color}
${offset 165}${voffset -7}${color light blue}${font URW Gothic L:size=13}${time :%P}${color}

#${color #1793d1}${hr 1}${font}${color}
${color #9DCAFF}${hr 1}${font}${color}
       
${font DejaVu Sans Mono :size=10}${execpi 60 DJS=`date +%_d`; cal | sed s/"$DJS"'\b'/'${color #8a6a3e}'"$DJS"'$color'/ | sed s/^/'${offset 20}'/}

${color Cyan}Crystal Lake Weather ${hr 2}$color${execi 600 sh /home/lleu/conky_weather/weather_script.sh}
${font conkyweather:size=35}${execi 600  sed -n '4p' /home/lleu/conky_weather/weather1}${font} ${voffset -20}${execi 600 sed -n '1p' /home/lleu/conky_weather/weather1}


${rss http://rss.accuweather.com/rss/liveweather_rss.asp?metric=0&locCode=60014 10 item_title 1}
${font conkyweather:size=35}${execi 600  sed -n '5p' /home/lleu/conky_weather/weather1}${font} ${voffset -20}${execi 600 sed -n '2p' /home/lleu/conky_weather/weather1}


${rss http://rss.accuweather.com/rss/liveweather_rss.asp?metric=0&locCode=60014 10 item_title 2}
${font conkyweather:size=35}${execi 600  sed -n '6p' /home/lleu/conky_weather/weather1}${font} ${voffset -20}${execi 600 sed -n '3p' /home/lleu/conky_weather/weather1}

Fun with conky

2010-06-05T17:52:00.000-07:00

Conky is a great little app that can display on your desktop pertinent information about your computer. I currently have two instances of conky running on my openbox window manager... the first one on the right shows CPU usage and temperature, RAM usage, file system space, processes running, and network information. The one on the left shows a clock, a calendar (with the current date highlighted), and detailed weather information for my city.

Here is a copy of my autostart.sh startup script for reference

pcmanfm &
conky -c conkyclock &
conky &
fbpanel &
volwheel &
eval `cat $HOME/.fehbg` &
xscreensaver -no-splash &
export OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP=gnome &

Here are the conky scripts
.conkyrc

alignment top_right
background yes
border_width 1
cpu_avg_samples 2
default_color cornflowerblue
default_outline_color white
default_shade_color white
double_buffer yes
draw_borders no
draw_graph_borders yes
draw_outline no
draw_shades no
gap_x 25
gap_y 15
maximum_width 225
max_port_monitor_connections 64
max_specials 512
max_user_text 16384
minimum_size 330 10
net_avg_samples 2
no_buffers yes
out_to_console no
#wm_class_name Conky
own_window_colour black
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_type normal
own_window yes
stippled_borders 2
update_interval 2
uppercase no
use_spacer yes
use_xft yes
xftalpha 0.8
xftfont arial:size=9

TEXT
${color #9DCAFF}${font impact:size=12}$sysname $kernel ${alignr}
${color #9DCAFF}$nodename
${font arial:size=5}
${color #0077ff}${font arial:bold:size=12}System:
${color #0077ff}${font arial:size=9}Uptime:$color $uptime ${color #0077ff} Load:$color $loadavg
${color #0077ff}CPU 0(${freq}mhz):${alignr}$color ${cpu cpu1}%
${color #0077ff}${cpubar cpu1}
${color #0077ff}CPU 1(${freq}mhz):${alignr}$color ${cpu cpu2}%
${color #0077ff}${cpubar cpu2}
${color lightgrey}Core0:$color ${platform coretemp.0 temp 1} °C${color grey} @$color ${cpu cpu1}%
${color lightgrey}Core1:$color ${platform coretemp.1 temp 1} °C${color grey} @$color ${cpu cpu2}% 
${color #0077ff}RAM Usage:${alignr}$color $mem${color #0077ff}/${color}$memmax - $memperc%
${color #0077ff}$membar
${color #0077ff}Swap Usage:${alignr}$color $swap${color #0077ff}/${color}$swapmax - $swapperc%
${color #0077ff}${swapbar}

${color #0077ff}${font arial:bold:size=12}File Systems:
${color #0077ff}${font arial:size=9}/ ${alignr}$color${fs_used /}/${fs_size /}
${color #0077ff}${fs_bar /}
${color #0077ff}/home ${alignr}$color${fs_used /home}/${fs_size /home}
${color #0077ff}${fs_bar /home}

${color #0077ff}${font arial:bold:size=12}Processes:
${color #0077ff}${font arial:size=9}Top CPU ${alignr}CPU% MEM%
$color ${top name 1} ${alignr}${top cpu 1} ${top mem 1}
$color ${top name 2} ${alignr}${top cpu 2} ${top mem 2}
$color ${top name 3} ${alignr}${top cpu 3} ${top mem 3}
${color #0077ff}Total Processes:$color ${processes}

${color #0077ff}${font arial:bold:size=12}Network:
${font arial:size=9}${color #0077ff}
${color #0077ff}Net Down:$color ${downspeed eth0} k/s
${color #0077ff}${downspeedgraph eth0 104E8B 0077ff}
${color #0077ff}Net Up:$color ${upspeed eth0} k/s
${color #0077ff}${upspeedgraph eth0 104E8B 0077ff}

conkyclock

alignment top_left
background no
gap_x 10
gap_y 15
minimum_size 200 5
maximum_width 250

update_interval 1
total_run_times 0
double_buffer yes
no_buffers yes
text_buffer_size 1248
     
cpu_avg_samples 2
net_avg_samples 2

use_xft yes

xftfont HanelGotD:size=9
xftalpha 0.5
override_utf8_locale yes
own_window yes
own_window_type desktop
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints below,undecorated,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
#below,  normal  override
       
draw_shades no
draw_outline no
draw_borders no
draw_graph_borders no
       
#default_color 454e57
default_color light blue
#default_shade_color 7a999c
default_outline_color green
       
#MD0: ${alignr}${fs_used /mnt/disks} / ${fs_size /mnt/disks}
#${color slate gray}/var/log/everything.log:
#${color}${exec tail -n33 /var/log/everything.log}
#${font Sans:normal:size=7}${color1}${exec dmesg | uniq | tail -n 5}

TEXT
${offset 4}${voffset -3}${color light blue}${font URW Gothic L:size=60}${time %I}
${offset 100}${voffset -125}${color light blue}${font URW Gothic L:size=32}${time :%M}
${offset 165}${voffset -73}${color light blue}${font URW Gothic L:size=13}${time %S}${color}
${offset 165}${voffset -7}${color light blue}${font URW Gothic L:size=13}${time :%P}${color}

#${color #1793d1}${hr 1}${font}${color}
${color #9DCAFF}${hr 1}${font}${color}
       
${font DejaVu Sans Mono :size=10}${execpi 60 DJS=`date +%_d`; cal | sed s/"$DJS"'\b'/'${color #8a6a3e}'"$DJS"'$color'/ | sed s/^/'${offset 20}'/}

${color Cyan}Crystal Lake Weather ${hr 2}$color${execi 600 sh /home/lleu/conky_weather/weather_script.sh}
${font conkyweather:size=35}${execi 600  sed -n '4p' /home/lleu/conky_weather/weather1}${font} ${voffset -20}${execi 600 sed -n '1p' /home/lleu/conky_weather/weather1}


${rss http://rss.accuweather.com/rss/liveweather_rss.asp?metric=0&locCode=60014 10 item_title 1}
${font conkyweather:size=35}${execi 600  sed -n '5p' /home/lleu/conky_weather/weather1}${font} ${voffset -20}${execi 600 sed -n '2p' /home/lleu/conky_weather/weather1}


${rss http://rss.accuweather.com/rss/liveweather_rss.asp?metric=0&locCode=60014 10 item_title 2}
${font conkyweather:size=35}${execi 600  sed -n '6p' /home/lleu/conky_weather/weather1}${font} ${voffset -20}${execi 600 sed -n '3p' /home/lleu/conky_weather/weather1}

To get the weather section running correctly be sure to visit this thread for reference
http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1156383
The relevant information is in the first section labeled 1)Accuweather RSS

Have fun with conky!

fbpanel - text configuration in a nice panel

2010-06-03T08:52:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd post my fbpanel config to give an idea of how things are done in this excellent panel.
Starting from the left we have
1. Start icon - this was downloaded from http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/5+ubuntu+menu-icons?content=63133. I simply pointed fbpanel to the location of the extracted chosen icon and I was set!.
2. File manager - I pointed fbpanel to pcmanfm. You're free to substitute whichever file manager you are using of course. Thunar and xfe also work nicely in my experience.
3. Terminal - I chose sakura. It's full featured, light-weight, few dependencies, and supports tabbing and transparencies.
4. Web browser - I chose firefox. On a lighter box I'd be likely to choose midori, but on this box, firefox is fine.
5. Text editor - Geany is my choice here. It's a great drop in replacement for gedit, and it doesn't do anything you don't tell it to.
6. Iconify. This is your basic "show desktop command"
7. Desktop switcher - The default is 4 desktops. I trimmed this to 2.
8. Dock - Active programs are listed here.
9. Volwheel - great little app to control volume.
10. Clock - Lists the time

And here's the code stored in ~/.fbpanel/default

# fbpanel <profile> config file
# see http://fbpanel.sf.net/docs.html for complete configuration guide


Global {
    edge = bottom
    allign = left
    margin = 0
    widthtype = percent
    width = 100
    height = 24
    transparent = true
    tintcolor = #ffffff
    alpha = 35
    setdocktype = true
    setpartialstrut = true
    autohide = false
    heightWhenHidden = 2
}

Plugin {
    type = space
    config {
        size = 2
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = menu
    config {
        image = /home/lleu/Downloads/orb-big-white.png
        systemmenu {
        }
        separator {
        }
        item {
            icon = gnome-settings
            name = configure
            command = configure
        }
        item {
            icon = gnome-session-halt
            name = shut down
            action = sudo /sbin/halt
        }
        item {
            icon = gnome-session-restart
            name = reboot
            action = sudo /sbin/reboot
        }
        item {
            icon = gnome-session-logout
            name = exit
            action = openbox --exit
        }        
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = space
    config {
        size = 5
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = launchbar
    config {
        button {
            icon = gnome-fs-home
            tooltip = PcManfm file manager
            action = pcmanfm
        }
        button {
            icon = gnome-terminal
            tooltip = Terminal
            action = sakura
        }
        button {
            icon = mozilla-firefox
            tooltip = Firefox web browser
            action = firefox
        }
        button {
            icon = accessories-text-editor
            tooltip = Texteditor
            action = geany
        }
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = space
    config {
        size = 8
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = wincmd
    config {
        icon = gnome-fs-desktop
        tooltip = Left click to iconify all windows. Middle click to shade them.
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = space
    config {
        size = 7
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = pager
    config {
        showwallpaper = true
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = icons
    config {
        DefaultIcon = /usr/share/fbpanel/images/default.xpm
        application {
            icon = gnome-terminal
            ClassName = XTerm
        }
        application {
            icon = gnome-terminal
            ClassName = mlterm
        }
        application {
            icon = gnome-terminal
            ClassName = URxvt
        }
        application {
            icon = gnome-emacs
            ClassName = Emacs
        }
        application {
            icon = mozilla-firefox
            ClassName = Firefox-bin
        }
        application {
            icon = mozilla-firefox
            ClassName = Firefox
        }
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = space
    config {
        size = 5
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = taskbar
    expand = true
    config {
        ShowIconified = true
        ShowMapped = true
        ShowAllDesks = false
        tooltips = true
        IconsOnly = false
        MaxTaskWidth = 150
    }
}


Plugin {
    type = tray
}


Plugin {
    type = dclock
    config {
        ClockFmt = %R
    }
}

The more things change...

2010-06-01T10:22:00.001-07:00

I noticed that the more things change for me in computing... the more they stay the same. I've changed distros many times, and yet they all tend to end up looking and functioning the same... which is one of the strength of open source, and the main reason I still haven't moved back to distros that I tend to like better.

I've been running an ubuntu system for a while now, though at a casual glance, most ubuntu users wouldn't tend to recognize the layout of my system. Even though I have a decent system hardware-wise, I'm a big fan of non-bloated software. Couple that with no fear of text based configuration files, and I've said bye bye to gnome, kde and xfce. What I'm left with is a highly configurable window manager in openbox.. a great panel in fbpanel... and of course conky for those little bells and whistles that tell you how your system is performing.

The funny thing is that I'm more comfortable in Arch or Slack, as these use text based configuration files out of the box... But as I've found, the distro doesn't really matter in the long run... It's all linux, and it's all easily customizable. I'm finding myself simply too lazy to install Arch or Slack, since this Buntu install is still chugging along nicely. At some point I may return to my roots... but for now I'll simply enjoy my fully functioning and customized OS.

WXCam is a great webcam app for logitech 3000

2010-05-18T11:53:00.000-07:00

After a few days of wrangling through bug reports and kernel recompilations, just to try to get my webcam to work properly, I stumbled upon this great little app that handles my webcam and it's little quirks just fine. It's called WXCam and it's a fantastic little app.

I know most of you are wondering why I simply don't use cheese (gnome based) or kamoso (kde based)... well... to be quite honest, I did try both those apps... in addition to quvcview, camorama and a host of other webcam apps as well. Cheese would not even start... there is apparently a gstreamer issue and it kept issuing this type error...

(cheese:2237): GStreamer-WARNING **: pad source:src returned caps which are not a real subset of its template caps
Segmentation fault

The funny thing is, when selecting the cam directly with gstreamer-properties, the test worked just fine at full res, so I knew it wasn't a hardware problem.

Kamoso worked, but it hiccupped with v4l2 demux errors and wouldn't allow adjustment of brightness or exposure, Audio would not record and there were few options to actually adjust... I'm unsure as to whether or not this is due to not having kde fully installed, the distro I'm using (xubuntu), or some other combination thereof.

WXCam on the other hand worked flawlessly. It detected the cam right off the bat, has a host of configuration options, allowed resolution up to 640x480 (the max for this cam), and also records and syncs audio from the builtin mic on the cam. You can find the source code on the homepage here... http://wxcam.sourceforge.net/index.php

It comes in a precompiled i386 binary for debian/ubuntu, or ya can download a tarball to compile from source for x86_64 systems or other i386 compatible distros. It's also available in the AUR in arch linux, and a simple yaourt -S wxcam will download and compile it to your system... One note, the pkgbuild is out of date at the time of this writing, so be sure to modify it to download and install the latest version.

Happy webcamming!

ubuntu cdrtools script

2010-05-13T12:59:00.001-07:00

It's been a while since I've posted on here, but I thought I'd give the revised version of my cdrtools script that replaces cdrkit... and since I'm using ubuntu at the moment, it is formatted for sudo (though any other distro set up for sudo access should have no trouble).

#!/bin/bash

#compile smake for ubuntu
cd ~
wget ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/smake/smake-1.2.1.tar.gz
tar -zxf smake-1.2.1.tar.gz
cd smake-1.2.1
sudo cp Gmake.linux /usr/bin/Gmake
sudo make
sudo make install
sudo cp /opt/schily/bin/smake /usr/bin
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/smake

#compile cdrtools for ubuntu
cd ~
wget ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/alpha/cdrtools-beta.tar.gz
tar -zxf cdrtools-beta.tar.gz
cd cdrtools-2.01.01
sudo smake
sudo smake install

# Ensure root ownership for proper operation
sudo chown root:root /opt/schily/bin/*

# Backup cdrkit files
cd ~
mkdir cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/wodim ~/cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/readom ~/cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/genisoimage ~/cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/btcflash ~/cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/devdump ~/cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/isodump ~/cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/isodebug ~/cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/isoinfo ~/cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/isovfy ~/cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/icedax ~/cdrkitbackup

# Remove soft links to cdrkit programs
sudo rm /usr/bin/cdrecord
sudo rm /usr/bin/cdda2wav
sudo rm /usr/bin/mkhybrid
sudo rm /usr/bin/mkisofs
sudo rm /usr/bin/readcd

# Create soft links to cdrtools programs
# Create soft links to cdrkit naming conventions for compatibility
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/cdrecord /usr/bin/cdrecord
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/cdrecord /usr/bin/wodim
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/mkisofs /usr/bin/genisoimage
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/mkisofs /usr/bin/mkisofs
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/mkhybrid /usr/bin/mkhybrid
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/readcd /usr/bin/readom
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/readcd /usr/bin/readcd
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/cdda2wav /usr/bin/cdda2wav
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/cdda2wav /usr/bin/icedax
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/btcflash /usr/bin/btcflash
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/isodebug /usr/bin/isodebug
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/isodump /usr/bin/isodump
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/isoinfo /usr/bin/isoinfo
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/isovfy /usr/bin/isovfy

there is a harmless error at the end of installation, so don't worry, it will have installed cdrtools correctly. Good luck!

project on hold

2009-10-19T07:25:00.000-07:00

Just a quick shout out to let everyone know I'm putting this project on hold for the time being. I had good intentions of continuing this, but time constraints being what they are, I simply don't have enough time to give this blog the attention it needs or deserves at the moment.

Some day I may reopen this blog, but for the moment it's closed. Good luck!

Winfast 2000 xp tv card on Arch linux

2009-08-02T13:44:00.000-07:00

Well, my wintv card finally crapped out on me, so I popped in a spare tv card. This card is a leadtek winfast 2000 xp tv card and for whatever reason, the arch linux kernel misidentifies this card.

The arch wiki gives a good hint of what needs to be done.
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Tvcard

Ironically, the example card is the exact same model as my own card. The wiki must have been written when 2.4 kernels were the norms in arch, as it states to place the needed code in /etc/modules.conf. The code itself tells ya to place the code in /etc/modprobe.conf for v.2.6 kernels. Even this is incorrect at the moment as arch currently uses /etc/modprobe.d. So the correct placement of the code is /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf.

Tvtime then was able to properly utilize the card.

I'm back

2009-07-26T20:39:00.000-07:00

Things went a little haywire there for a while, and my online writings went by the wayside. I do plan to update my blog here in a relatively timely fashion however.

So stay tuned for some good ole linux fun!

How to compile a slackware kernel

2009-03-31T10:01:00.000-07:00

There are many reasons to build a new kernel in a distro like slackware. It could be that you bought a new usb camera or printer that the new kernel supports. Or perhaps a newer kernel has better support for your wifi card. Whatever the reason, we'll cover here how to build the latest and greatest on your box. At the time of this writing it's the first release of the 2.6.29 tree.

The first thing we need to do is to download the source from kernel.org. The 2.6 tree is found here.
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/

Scroll down to the desired version to be compiled and select "copy link location". Then open a terminal and become root and change to your build environment. We'll use /usr/src as the default.

su -
cd /usr/src
wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.29.tar.bz2

now we need to unpack the tar ball.

tar -jxf linux-2.6.29.tar.bz2

Next we're going to remove the current symlink to the linux directory and link to the new directory.

rm linux
ln -s linux-2.6.29 linux

Now we'll move into the build directory.

cd linux

To get this far means that you have a working kernel. So we're going to utilize the current kernel config to build our new kernel.

zcat /proc/config.gz > .config
make oldconfig

New additions to the kernel will be displayed and you can choose which ones you want to keep and in what form. It will ask you to keep them in module form (m), or you can select y for it to be built in to the kernel, or n for it to be left out. Simply hitting enter will do the default action, which the dialog will tell you what that is.

Next we can alter anything we want in the kernel itself.

make menuconfig

There are a couple of things I always change here. One is the processor support. Scroll to processor type and features, and then processor family. For my celeron M on this laptop I pick the pentium M option. For my core 2 duo system, I choose the core 2/ newer xeon option.

We then exit from the processor type and features menu back to the main menu.

Next we scroll down to Device Drivers and select it. Then we select usb support. Finally we modularize "USB Mass Storage Support" by pressing "m" while it is highlighted.

We click exit to exit out of our submenus all the way back to the main menu. Hitting exit one more time, will ask if you want to save the kernel configuration, to which we reply yes.

Now we want to build the kernel so we type

make all

This can take a while, depending on your processor, so grab a cup of coffee, read the paper and come back in a little while.

Once that completes, we'll grab a nice script by Dagmar to install the kernel in /boot.

wget http://dagmar.droplinegnome.org/experimental/installkernel
install -m 755 installkernel /sbin/

Then we execute the following to be able to use the new kernel

make modules_install
make install

These commands will install the new modules and copy the config, system.map, and kernel to the proper locations in /boot.

now we'll change to the /boot directory to modify a few things.

cd /boot

It's time to remove the current symlinks to config, System.map, and vmlinuz.

rm config
rm System.map
rm vmlinuz

and then link them to the new kernel.

ln -s config-2.6.29-smp config
ln -s System.map-2.6.29-smp System.map
ln -s vmlinuz-2.6.29-smp vmlinuz

At this point it's a good idea to create an initrd. For ext3 we use the following command. Note that sda3 is my root partition. be sure to alter yours accordingly.

mkinitrd -c -k 2.6.29-smp -m mbcache:jbd:ext3 -f ext3 -r /dev/sda3

For reiser it would be

mkinitrd -c -k 2.6.29-smp -m reiserfs

next, we'll edit lilo to use the initrd.gz. we add the following line above "root = /dev/sda3"
initrd = /boot/initrd.gz

so it will look something like this.

image = /boot/vmlinuz
initrd = /boot/initrd.gz
root = /dev/sda3
label = Linux
read-only

Now we need to run lilo to update it.

/sbin/lilo

That's it. upon rebooting you should now be utilizing your shiny new 2.6.29 kernel. If you somehow messed something up, and you end up with a kernel panic, you can use your slackware 12.2 cd to boot your system in a pinch.

Good luck and happy slacking!

I borrowed heavily from this excellent guide on the dropline wiki.
http://wiki.droplinegnome.org/index.php?title=Building_a_new_2.6.x_kernel_with_Slackware_12.0

How to use slackbuilds

2009-03-21T08:01:00.000-07:00

I posted this on the hackmy forums and figure my blog is a good place for this as well. Enjoy Slackers!

If you're using slackware, you'll find there are many packages not "included" with the base distribution. Slack tends to use vanilla packages with little or no patching from how the application was intended by the author upstream... so this means that you can build virtually anything you need with the excellent build tools.

Utilizing slackbuilds from slackbuilds.org is a good way to do this.

First, we need to su to root so that we can build and install the packages. so we open a terminal and type

su -

then we need to create our build directory. this can be anywhere, but you may want to put it in your user's home directory. So we create the directory like so.. substitute your user name where "user" is listed.

mkdir /home/user/build

then we'll change directory to our build directory

cd /home/user/build

now we can begin building packages. navigate in your favorite web browser to http://slackbuilds.org/

On the right hand side of the screen you will find a search navigation tool, and the version number. So if you're using slackware 12.2, you select that and then search for the package you want to build. Let's try something simple like flash... which brings us to this page.
http://slackbuilds.org/result/?search=flash&sv=12.2

now at this point the different options available for building flash are listed. We'll simply go with flash-player-plugin so we can watch some videos on youtube.
http://slackbuilds.org/repository/12.2/multimedia/flash-player-plugin/

Now that we're on this page, we have access to the slackbuild tar ball and a link to the source required to compile it. It's a good idea to read the README file linked to at the bottom of the page and to peruse the slackbuild script.

Next we'll download the slackbuild in our terminal session using wget which is very reliable. Simply right click on the link to the slackbuild source under "Download slackbuild" and select "copy link location". Then type

wget

then leave a space and right click in the terminal and select paste. this will paste the location of the source slackbuild for you to download. then hit enter. so in this case it would look like this.

wget http://slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/12.2/multimedia/flash-player-plugin.tar.gz

now we need to untar the archive

tar -zxf flash-player-plugin.tar.gz

now we need to see what directory has been created, and we can do this with ls

ls

it will show the directory. in this case it's "flash-player-plugin". so we'll change to that directory.

cd flash-player-plugin

now we'll download the source linked to on the slackbuild page under "Download Source"

wget http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_10_linux.tar.gz

we now want to make sure that our slackbuild is fine, so we can open a text editor and take a look to make sure everything seems fine. sometimes the slackbuild site doesn't link to the latest version available, so we can navigate to the homepage of the original author, download the source and edit the slackbuild. we'll cover that another time however and focus on installing this slackbuild.

next we have to ensure that the slackbuild is executable.

chmod +x flash-player-plugin.SlackBuild

now we're ready to build the package.

./flash-player-plugin.SlackBuild

the program will compile now, assuming we've met the needed dependencies. flash-player-plugin doesn't have any additional dependencies, so it should compile just fine on a stock slack install.

the created package is created and moved to /tmp, and the full file name is listed. we can either cd to the tmp directory and then use installpkg, or we can simply use the full path. so our next step is to install the package now.

installpkg /tmp/flash-player-plugin-10.0_r22-i386-1_SBo.tgz

congrats! you have just compiled your first slackware compliant package and installed it.

ice ice archie

2009-03-12T19:50:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a icewm rpm in pclos, and decided to port it to a pkgbuild in arch linux. I absolutely love the result. I used the ybutton.cc patch to give borderless buttons on the toolbar and it looks fantastic in my opinion.

Here's the revised pkgbuild. Be sure to modify the pkgbuild to use your path to the ybutton patch, or comment it out if you want borders on your buttons. I got the patch from the silverxp theme here.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/icewmsilverxp/

The theme used is called eleganceice and I got it from box-look.org
http://www.box-look.org/content/show.php/Elegance+Ice?content=65022

$Id: PKGBUILD 25822 2009-01-30 08:33:36Z eric $
# Maintainer: Eric Belanger
# Contributor: dorphell

pkgname=icewm
pkgver=1.2.37
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="A Window Manager designed for speed, usability, and consistency"
arch=('i686' 'x86_64')
url="http://www.icewm.org/"
license=('LGPL')
depends=('gcc-libs' 'imlib' 'libxrandr' 'libxft' 'libsm' 'libxinerama' 'giflib')
source=(http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/icewm/${pkgname}-${pkgver}.tar.gz icewm.desktop)
md5sums=('970a21588d26eb361020fd60a61a482c' 'a3ed467f0199792205b04272402a9945')
sha1sums=('bee1ca66d2282888807551bc28a65b08e4108027' '7dcb1f2c89792a35b687182584ed9baa0d34cc80')

build() {
cd ${srcdir}/${pkgname}-${pkgver} || return 1
cd src
patch < /path/to/patch/SilverXP-1.2.17-single-1/Linux/ybutton.cc.patch
cd ..
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --with-imlib \
--enable-shaped-decorations --enable-gradients --enable-antialiasing || return 1
make || return 1
make DESTDIR=${pkgdir} install install-man install-docs || return 1
install -D -m644 ${srcdir}/icewm.desktop ${pkgdir}/etc/X11/sessions/icewm.desktop
}

here's a direct link as blogger doesn't format the pkgbuild correctly.
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?22cngjjzyyw

icewm in pclos

2009-02-27T20:06:00.000-08:00

I've been testing out the features of pclinuxos with the "big update" and I've been thinking about an icewm remaster. It's exceptionally lightweight and I've ironed out a few bugs, such as setting the dpi correctly for my monitor and customizing the panel a bit. Here's a pic of it so far.

Arch Linux 2009.2

2009-02-18T13:28:00.000-08:00

There was a family issue at my sister's house in which her computer died, and a certain program had to be run that could only be done in windows.... so I wiped the hard disk with the perfectly working slack install and installed xp (ugh).

Needless to say, we ordered new parts for a computer and now I'm left with a laptop with windows xp on it.... this will never do! So after a quick perusal of distrowatch.com, I noticed that arch linux had a new release iso, so I figured why not?

The install was fairly straight forward.... One thing that I noticed was that my rc.conf didn't have any modules populating it... after checking the forums, I discovered that udev handles all that now, so I really only need to populate it with items that I want to blacklist. Nice eh?

I ensured that wireless tools and b43-fwcutter were installed and then had to figure out a way to get the firmware, as this laptop does not have a wired nic, only a wireless one. So I downloaded the firmware onto a usb stick on another computer and plugged the stick into the usb slot on the laptop. I checked /dev before and after inserting the stick to see what the stick came up as, and then I created a mount point in /mnt of usb... so it's /mnt/usb. The command to mount was mount -t usbfs /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb. From here, I copied the firmware over to /tmp, extracted the tarball, cd'd into the driver directory and used b43fwcutter to installe the firmware. This allowed me to access my wireless network using wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd.

At this point I configured pacman and it was off to the races installing whatever I wished to. My girlfriend likes gnome and xfce and gets confused when I get all geeky and install something minimal like awesome or openbox... So to keep the peace, I figured xfce isn't TOO bloated and took the plunge.

The very first thing I noticed was that the fonts were AWFUL. So I searched the arch wiki and found clear instructions on lcd fonts on the fonts page. Then I enabled anti-aliasing for fonts, hinting and sub-pixel hinting and the screen looks nice and sharp.

The standard vesa driver is fine, but there is full support for the graphics chip in this laptop with the r128 driver, so I installed that, set the bit depth to 16 for better performance and I'm back to 500 fps in glxgears. =p

I compiled a custom tuxonice kernel with the help of the aur and ran into a few problems. Tuxonice apparently doesn't like the uuid scheme of things, so I had to edit my /etc/fstab to the old /dev/sda way of doing things and then run mkswap on /dev/sda1 (my swap drive) for arch to detect the swap drive. I also kind of rushed through the wiki and missed a few steps with mkinitcpio and I was surprised that hibernate wasn't working. The second time through I took my time and got it right and now hibernate works as expected. I may try to get hibernate working from a graphical environment, but I'm not sure I'm going to bother. Logging out to the command line and running hibernate is not a big deal to me.

I'll keep you posted on how things are going!

Refining the install

2009-02-10T16:04:00.000-08:00

On the dell inspiron 5000e with 320 megs of ram, I ran into an interesting phenomenon with pcmanfm. If I allowed pcmanfm to manage the desktop wallpaper and produce desktop icons, I ran into a spike of approximately 15 megs of ram usage and general slowness while scrolling.

I'm not sure what the correlation is, but when I switched to feh to handle the wallpaper and disabled desktop icons, scrolling became smooth once more. Weird eh, as even when I have other applications using up more memory than pcmanfm did while handling the wallpaper and icons, scrolling was still nice and smooth.

For those times when I simply want a dock instead of a full blown panel, I installed stalonetray, and it works great. It puts out a memory footprint a full 5 megs less than fbpanel, which is quite a nice improvement. It's not a big deal on this laptop, but if I were more memory constrained, I would definitely ditch fbpanel for stalonetray.

I've also grown to really love pysolfc as it has so many card games that it's insane! I can't count the number of hours I've spent playing this while watching tv or talking to the girlfriend. =p

The custom kernel I built is working great. It utilizes pentium 3 coppermine optimizations and I can really tell the difference in speed over the stock ppro kernel. I also cut out a LOT of cruft from the huge.smp kernel and slimmed it down big time. This was quite interesting as I noticed almost no difference in speed in my two faster boxes that run slack (a 1.86 ghz celeron m with 1.5 gigs of ram and a 2.4 ghz core 2 duo with 2 gigs of ram) when customizing the kernel. I guess the optimizations are most important on slower processors.

At this point, I consider this project pretty much closed. I'm very satisfied with the performance of this old laptop and see no need to upgrade this box further. I was considering buying another 256 meg stick and maxing out the memory, but quite honestly can't justify it. If I wanted to run gnome or kde, then I would probably do so, but with the way the system is set up right now, there is really no point.

Slackware on Dell Inspiron 5000e part 2

2009-02-05T07:49:00.000-08:00

Putting the final touches on an operating system is always very satisfying. When that operating system is Slackware, this is especially true. Slack is one of the quintessential "hands on" distributions where you really get down and dirty with the essentials of just exactly how your OS functions. Doing a full install of software with Slack will give you a plethora of tools with which you can build your own programs. The only portion I did without was KDE, as there is no way I will obtain any kind of performance with it.

A great resource is www.slackbuilds.org. slackbuilds are so useful because of their excellent documentation, and they build slackware packages with proper permissions and install locations. Slackbuilds.org also lists dependencies that need to be built before the slackbuild will compile correctly. It can be a tad annoying tracking down all the dependencies before building the program you wish to use, but it would be FAR more annoying trying to build the program and not having the dependencies already installed. I won't bore you with how to set up a user account... One of my arch linux blogs documents this, and the functionality is the same in slackware.

The second step was to get the wireless functional as this laptop does not have an ethernet port, so connecting to the internet would have to be accomplished by the belkin wireless card that utilizes the broadcom 4306 wireless chip. The native stx broadcom driver does not include support for the 4306, so I would have to use either the b43 module or ndiswrapper. Slackbuilds.org has slackbuilds for the b43, so I built the b43 module against the proper firmware and I was in business. One of the first things you'll want to do with slack is to build your own custom kernel. Without gnome or kde running things for power-management, I decided to compile in support for tuxonice to enable hibernation. Trimming unneeded items out can take some time on a custom kernel, so be sure to take your time and get it right the first time.... that and compiling on a 600 mhz celeron will take HOURS. I found best results with hibernation from the command line. So exiting out of x and issuing the /usr/sbin/hibernate command saved an image of what was running, and resuming brought the system back up in 10 seconds flat. Not bad for an old 600 mhz celeron.

The window manager selection was easy for me to decide on. Openbox is both lightweight and yet very robust in it's configurability. Had I not upgraded the ram to 320 megs, I would have gone without a panel to save on resources, and simply used alt-tab. Since I do have over 256 megs of ram however, installing a panel is perfectly acceptable and won't impact performance. There are many good choices for panels, such as pypanel and lxpanel, and I could have installed stalonetray or trayer just for a dock, but I tend to like having a menu accessible on my panel, so I chose fbpanel.... not because fbpanel is any easier or better than the other afore-mentioned panels... but because I've used fbpanel for a long time and I'm intimately familiar with just how it functions and how to configure it. In fact, now that I think about it, I do tend to reuse many of the same programs, as I find it more productive than constantly learning new ways to achieve exactly what I want. That's my story and I'm sticking with it. The slackbuild for pcmanfm compiled and installed perfectly, and I was set with a lightweight filemanager which can also handle desktop icons.

Getting volwheel to work with Slackware was a tad difficult, only because of the fact that there is no slackbuild for it, and also no slackbuild for it's needed dependency (perl-gtk2-trayicon). This required little in the way of real innovation. The aur in arch linux has a pkgbuild for perl-gtk2-trayicon, which also includes what it depends on which is perl-extutils-pkgconfig, which does have a slackbuild. Then I followed the instructions in the pkgbuild for perl-gtk2-trayicon, which involves downloading the source of gtk2-trayicon, unpacking the tarball and issuing the following command to build it with perl.

PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT=1 perl Makefile.PL
make
make install

Then, I was able to utilize volwheel normally. It was good to see the documentation updated with very specific install instructions by the way. Props to Oliwer!

I also have enough ram to utilize wicd to handle accessing different wireless networks. The command line or a script would of course use fewer resources, but I wanted to see how the system would respond with 320 megs of ram and wicd. I installed wicd from /extra and the system didn't seem to suffer in usability, so I told it to start on bootup by adding wicd-client to my autostart.sh.

With conky installed I had access to some common features that I like to be aware of... such as ram usage, cpu usage, cpu temp, battery charge, file system usage, and network usage.

alignment top_right
background yes
border_width 1
cpu_avg_samples 2
default_color cornflowerblue
default_outline_color white
default_shade_color white
double_buffer yes
draw_borders no
draw_graph_borders yes
draw_outline no
draw_shades no
gap_x 25
gap_y 15
maximum_width 225
max_port_monitor_connections 64
max_specials 512
max_user_text 16384
minimum_size 330 10
net_avg_samples 2
no_buffers yes
out_to_console no
#wm_class_name Conky
own_window_colour black
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_type normal
own_window yes
stippled_borders 2
update_interval 2
uppercase no
use_spacer yes
use_xft yes
xftalpha 0.8
xftfont arial:size=9

TEXT
${color #9DCAFF}${font impact:size=12}$sysname $kernel ${alignr}$color${time %l:%M:%p}
${color #9DCAFF}$nodename
${font arial:size=5}
${color #0077ff}${font arial:bold:size=12}System:
${color #0077ff}${font arial:size=9}Uptime:$color $uptime ${color #0077ff} Load:$color $loadavg
${color #0077ff}CPU 0(${freq}mhz):${alignr}$color ${cpu cpu1}%
${color #0077ff}${cpubar cpu1}
${color}CPU Temp: ${color #0077ff}${acpitemp}${color}Celsius
${color #0077ff}RAM Usage:${alignr}$color $mem${color #0077ff}/${color}$memmax - $memperc%
${color #0077ff}$membar
${color #0077ff}Swap Usage:${alignr}$color $swap${color #0077ff}/${color}$swapmax - $swapperc%
${color #0077ff}${swapbar}

${color #0077ff}${font arial:bold:size=12}File Systems:
${color #0077ff}${font arial:size=9}/ ${alignr}$color${fs_used /}/${fs_size /}
${color #0077ff}${fs_bar /}
${color #0077ff}/home ${alignr}$color${fs_used /home}/${fs_size /home}
${color #0077ff}${fs_bar /home}

${color #0077ff}${font arial:bold:size=12}Processes:
${color #0077ff}${font arial:size=9}Top CPU ${alignr}CPU% MEM%
$color ${top name 1} ${alignr}${top cpu 1} ${top mem 1}
$color ${top name 2} ${alignr}${top cpu 2} ${top mem 2}
$color ${top name 3} ${alignr}${top cpu 3} ${top mem 3}
${color #0077ff}Total Processes:$color ${processes}

${color #0077ff}${font arial:bold:size=12}Network:
${font arial:size=9}${color #0077ff}
${color #0077ff}Net Down:$color ${downspeed eth0} k/s
${color #0077ff}${downspeedgraph eth0 104E8B 0077ff}
${color #0077ff}Net Up:$color ${upspeed eth0} k/s
${color #0077ff}${upspeedgraph eth0 104E8B 0077ff}

${color #909090}AC Adaptor: ${color0}$acpiacadapter
${color #909090}Battery: ${color0}${battery}
${battery_bar}

blogger.com never seems to format this correctly, so if you need my conkyrc and can't figure out where blogger screwed it up, just drop me a line.

Here's a list of what I chose

Window manager = Openbox
File manager = pcmanfm
Panel = fbpanel
Terminal emulator = sakura
Graphical text editor = geany
Mplayer = movie player
Mplayerplugin = movie player in firefox
Browser = firefox
Music Manager = Quod Libet
Card games = Pysolfc
Chat program = pidgin, xchat irc
Email client = thunderbird
Bittorrent client = transmission
Word processor = abiword
Calculator = galculator
Graphical archiver = peazip

These are all lightweight, or fairly lightweight applications that function well on older hardware. There are of course ways to go with even lighter software, but I didn't feel the need as these all function well and are easier to use (IMHO) than their more lightweight alternatives.

The 5000e has an 8 meg ati m3 graphics chip that utilizes the r128 module in xorg.conf. Changing the driver to this and a couple of other tweaks allowed me to achieve 530 FPS in glxgears. I know... I know... glxgears is not a benchmark, but it showed that 3d was working and I could utilize basic 3d functions. Installing frozen-bubble confirmed this. It was very slow at the default settings, but turning it down one notch (removes the penguin firing the bubble animation) allowed decent play.

Section "Device"
Identifier "VESA Framebuffer"
Driver "r128"
VideoRam 8192
Option "AGPMode" "2"
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "on"
# Insert Clocks lines here if appropriate
EndSection

I love to encourage people to still utilize their older hardware. It's always great to have the latest and greatest to run the newest version of kde or gnome with all the bells and whistles, but the funny thing is that older hardware like this laptop are still perfectly usable with the right choice of window manager, software, and available hardware upgrades.

This has been a fun project, and I encourage you all to dig out that old desktop or laptop and resurrect it to usefulness.

Dave

Slackware on Dell Inspiron 5000e

2009-01-30T14:41:00.000-08:00

The other day, the hard drive I'd been waiting for, an 80 gig Samsung 5400 rpm 8MB unit finally arrived! I slapped it in, and replaced the old 5 gig hard disk and decided that the operating system I'm going to use on this is Slackware.

I'm really quite fond of Slack 12.2 and I LOVE how it's performing on the acer laptop. Slack is so rock stable on it, that I've had to do ZERO tweaking/repair for my family since I installed Slack on to it.

I'm going to once again try to walk that fine line between usability and speed in my all my choices due to the limited abilities of the hardware on this laptop.

I'm a tad pressed for time at the moment, but here's a teaser as to the fairly finished project. I'll post what programs I built and am utilizing on this install.

Dave

Network card has arrived!

2009-01-26T10:26:00.000-08:00

I just received the replacement wireless network card and installed it in a pcmcia port. It's a Belkin F5D7011 wireless g card utilizing a broadcom 4306 chipset.

The 5 gig hard drive currently in this Dell inspiron 5000e has windows XP on it. I know... I know... I'm not a huge windows fan, which is why when the replacement 80 gig hard drive shows up, it's going to have some form of arch or slackware on it. I have XP on the 5 gig drive to ensure that if there are any hardware problems with any of the upgrades I've made to this laptop that tech support can't whine that I'm using an unsupported Operating System. That and I dug out my old Civilization 3 cd's and I've been rather addicted to this series of games for years.

I must say that I've had zero problems with this card and XP detected it out of the box as a dell mini pci card and installed the broadcom drivers automatically. When I install linux on the new hard drive, I'll be using either the b43 module, or ndiswrapper. The STA drivers don't support this card, but I've had good success with b43 and ndiswrapper with my broadcom 4311 chipset on the Acer laptop.

The hard drive is due to arrive on the 29th and I'm excited. It's a Samsung SpinPoint 80GB UDMA/100 5400RPM 8MB unit and I expect performance to be quite an improvement over this 5 GB UDMA/66 4200 RPM 2MB IBM travelstar hard drive.

I'm thinking of using openbox or pekwm with fbpanel, pcmanfm, geany, peazip, and an assortment of lightweight applications to top it off. Goggles music manager looks interesting, and I may try mpd as well.

I'll keep you all posted on how things turn out.

Dave

Slowest RMA processing on the face of the Planet

2009-01-17T21:23:00.000-08:00

I've been waiting... and waiting... and waiting.... more or less impatiently for my RMA to process. I must say that this is the slowest service I've ever received from an online vendor. I made the initial purchase on the 17th of December, and received the products on the 23rd. All three components ordered were DOA. I received an RMA and sent them back on the 27th. They were not acknowledged as received until January 8th, and I STILL have not received credit for the items to even reorder new parts. It just goes to show you that going with well established and reputable companies is preferable to dealing with online retailers who may have the lowest price... but not the reputation to go with it.

So I got impatient and ordered a 256 meg stick direct from Crucial and I'm playing with an arch linux install on the old 5 gig hard drive. The realtek wireless usb dongle works fine and I have a basic openbox setup with fbpanel and conky working.

Performance-wise, I really can't complain. It's no barn-burner, but it runs firefox with flash and wicd connects on bootup with no issues whatsoever.

I installed sakura for a terminal emulator and it is both lightweight and very functional. Geany works fine as a text editor, and lxappearance sets the gtk themes.

I'll have more to report once I finally receive the stinking rma and some new parts. Here are some screenshots with wicd and volwheel running.

320 megs on a dell inspiron 5000e

2009-01-09T20:42:00.000-08:00

As I've stated previously, I'm still waiting for my rma to clear and to order new parts. It seems that this dell laptop is very picky about ram, so I ordered a single 256 meg stick from crucial that claims to work in this system. The laptop can have a maximum of 512, and has 2 slots, but it came with a single 64 meg stick.

Adding the 256 meg stick has worked wonders for the responsiveness of this old laptop. The install of TinyMe (lightweight pclinuxos) went smoothly now that I had enough ram for the livecd to run and for the installer to do it's work.

On the positive side, it picked up the 8 meg mobility m3 (rage128) card and set the native resolution to 1024x768 with 3d enabled. The ess maestro sound card was also autodetected and worked out of the box as well.

As I'm waiting for some other parts to arrive (a 60 gig seagate 5400 rpm 8 meg ide hard drive, and a wpa2 pcmcia wireless network card), I'm stuck with a good old 5 gig hard drive and a usb wireless card.

And here was the first show-stopper. Since TinyMe uses such an old kernel, to get the realtek wireless card to work requires the eeprom and rtl8187 module to be patched... and since this old laptop does not have a wired internet connection, I'm at a bit of an impasse. I suppose I could download the files on another box and place them on my 1 gig usb thumb drive and then transfer them over, but that's a bit of a pain as there is only one usb port on this laptop, so that means swapping the wireless dongle and the thumb drive... but I'll probably just download the kernel source and build a more current kernel myself and include the rtl8187 usb support as all kernels 2.6.23 and later have it... it just needs to be enabled.

The decision to use an older kernel like this seems to be a bad choice in my honest opinion. The 2.6.26 kernel is rock solid and supports MUCH more hardware than the old 2.6.18 series. It also plays nicely with drm modules for older hardware as well.

In fact, a LOT of the software seems very outdated as well... and remember... I'm a long time Slackware user, so I don't HAVE to have bleeding edge software.... but c'mon.... ndiswrapper 1.48? 1.53 has been out FOREVER and it's still not included?

I think I'll only keep this installed long enough to help another user with his troubles with the mach64 driver and pclos, and then I'll wait for the new release of pclos to come out and then I'll modify my own openbox setup on it and see how that is.

I'm sure some users love TinyMe, and I'm trying very hard to like it... but with it's current limitations I'm finding that impossible at the moment. Pclos really needs to get their next release out the door and start progressing again or you'll find many more users moving on to other distros as well.

In fact... I have a freshly burned zenwalk cd calling my name.... hmmm.... =p

Waiting... waiting... waiting....

2009-01-02T12:15:00.000-08:00

The joys of waiting for new equipment to arrive to continue adventuring in the world of linux has nearly driven me mad! Well.... perhaps that was a tad overdramatized... The point is that I'm still waiting for my credit, so that I can reorder parts to jumpstart the life of the dell inspiron 5000e laptop.

In the meantime, I've had to do absolutely no maintenance on the acer 3680-2682 laptop running slackware. It's so rock stable that I find it a tad boring to be honest. My main desktop, a core 2 duo @ 2.4 ghz, has been running arch linux and I tinkered a bit with pclinuxos on it as well. I'm waiting for the new pclinuxos release to try it out on my desktop, but it still has not been released.

I'd also like to try out tinyme on the dell after receiving the ram and hard drive upgrades, as the installer hangs with less than 64 megs of ram.

I'll post my openbox setup with pcmanfm and conky to show what I've been working on lately.

Hope you all had a great holiday season!

2008-12-24T12:29:00.000-08:00

Happy Holidays everyone!

I've been taking a break from computing for a week or so, and I'm just now back and rarin to go!

Got a hold of a Dell Inspiron laptop 5000e with 64 megs of ram, a 5 gig hard drive and no networking. Ordered some parts to upgrade the ram to 512 megs and a wireless pcmcia card for networking, and every single part did not work. So I'm waiting on an rma for these, and in the meantime decided to see if XP pro would even install on it. It did, and performance is actually ok. I'm going to wipe it however, and install tinyme or vectorlinux lite once I get working parts.

I did install vector linux lite and tinyme on here to see how that would work. VL-lite actually performed quite well. Tinyme however didn't. I can't blame the distro though as the minimum specs are 64 megs for tinyme, and since the video shares 8 megs of this ram, that left only 56 megs of usable ram, so I'm not surprised at the performance being sub-par.

Hopefully you all are having a wonderful holiday season and I'll post back soon.

Dave

Slackware on the Acer Laptop

2008-12-15T21:12:00.001-08:00

It didn't take long for the family to bork things on the ubuntu install with this laptop... The latest upgrade of wicd broke compatibility with the wpa network, and compiz somehow ended up broken as well... probably from my own user error in switching things over to xubuntu from straight ubuntu. ;p

So I had this nice and shiny slackware 12.2 dvd and it was time to replace ubuntu with something rock solid that would be less likely to suffer breakage.

The install for slackware hasn't really changed in this past millenia, so I won't bore you with the details. It's ncurses based, but very straightforward and easy to do. Once the base system was installed, I had a fully functional vanilla kde 3.5.10 desktop.

One nice caveat is that the card reader that I had to manually configure in ubuntu was found, and functional straight out of the box in slackware! I'll have to be sure to keep the relevant kernel modules in play after I trim down the huge kernel for everyday use. The huge series of kernels tend to be a bit bloated, but have a TON of stuff compiled right in, so just about all hardware works right out of the box.

The generated xorg.conf is quite bland and vanilla, as it requires user intervention to get it functional. I copied over the xorg from my old arch linux install and it works nicely. Even the synaptics touchpad works perfectly with scrolling in all directions.

Since Slack uses the older and more stable 1.4.2 version of xorg server, I was able to use the "export Intel_Batch=1" hack to increase graphics rendering speed. I added this to the bottom of /etc/profile to activate this system wide.

I used slackbuilds.org to build most of my packages, and slacky.eu to download a few binaries that either wouldn't compile from the slackbuilds or simply were not available. The transcode binary built for version 12.1 is such an example as it fails to compile in 12.2, due to an imagemagick error, yet the binary from slacky.eu built for 12.1 works perfectly.

The longest compilation was for qt 4.4.3, as it took nearly an hour to compile... yet it did so with no errors, and works just fine.

For wireless, wicd is included in /extra and I used ndiswrapper for the broadcom wifi card and experience very few drops. I like the stx driver, but it's not quite as stable as simply using ndiswrapper, so I'll stick with ndis for now.

I was going to recompile the kernel, but can't find an excuse to do so quite honestly. Boot up times are a tad slow, but nothing terrible, and the system is running quite nicely, so I'm loathe to really mess with things.

Openoffice 3.0 compiled and works great, and so did wine, devede, smplayer, and mplayer. We're using Thunderbird for email and Firefox for browsing, and the included software is quite robust.

Ran into one issue with installing playonlinux (which is great for managing wine games and programs), as the program would not run when invoked from the command line, but gave no error message. The arch linux aur version has a nice pkgbuild which gave me the hint I needed, as wxpython is needed, so I built this from slackbuilds.org, and playonlinux launched and ran just fine.

Slackware isn't for everyone, as some people simply just don't like compiling their own programs from source.... for a variety of reasons... but if you put in the time and effort, you have a rock solid Operating System with exactly what you want running.

I'll be happy to post my xorg.conf or help with compiling packages upon request.

Slackware 12.2 and TinyMe 8.1 are out!

2008-12-11T12:41:00.000-08:00

Now I'm really pumped. The distro that I cut my teeth on has a new release... That being Slackware of course! I'm downloading the dvd as I write this, and lemme tell you I'm excited. All my custom slackbuilds will have to be updated, and reinstalled, but that kind of controlled tweaking is my forte. This is a perfect opportunity to document my entire install process and to show prospective new slackers just how much power is under the hood.

That being said, I'm also excited about TinyMe 8.1 issuing a new release. It's a slimmed down PclinuxOS utilizing the lxde environment, and I saw just how lightweight lxde can be on my nieces arch linux installation. We'll see how it compares to my custom pclos install with openbox, pcmanfm, and fbpanel. The lxpanel is based on fbpanel, so I'm sure some tweaking can be done with this as well.

I'm going to install Slack on a spare 20 gig ide hard drive, compile all my programs and then use that hard drive on the legacy pentium 233 system that I'm looking to build. Should be fun.

Ubuntu 8.10 on Acer 3680-2682

2008-12-10T07:41:00.000-08:00

After a few hiccups and a few needed tweaks being applied, the laptop is finally fully functional and working nicely.

I had done an initial install of straight ubuntu with a full gnome desktop. Everything went fine as the installer makes things really easy for the user to gain a fully functioning system quickly.

I did end up with a couple of show stopping issues right off the bat. Gnome-network manager did not want to play nicely with the new broadcom wireless drivers. I've been a fan of wicd for some time (it's easy to set up on Slackware as well), so I added the wicd repos to synaptic and replaced gnome-network-manager with wicd and my wireless worked nicely. The far larger problem was that nautilus was crashing frequently, and this is not something that one can deal with very well on a gnome desktop. So I figured that Ubuntu has many options available and instead chose to install Xubuntu-desktop (xfce) and replace Ubuntu-desktop (gnome).

After installing the xubuntu desktop, I had a few things to configure. The fonts were much uglier than a default gnome install, so I changed the font to dejavu-serif bold, changed the font dpi to 100, and turned on full hinting and subpixel hinting.

I moved all the default applications to one panel and deleted the top panel, and it looks very similar to a gnome install. Installing the medibuntu repositories enabled me to install mplayer and mplayer-plugin, and then installing adobe-flash and sun-java6-jre rounded out a nice browsing experience.

Virtual Box compiled nicely and they now have a nice windows xp installation within ubuntu. This is important for a few of their programs that are windows only (such as their massive solitaire suite).

The 2nd show stopper was that the media card reader built-in to the laptop was not functioning. No devices were found initially for the card reader, so I had to do a little investigating to get it to work. lspci showed the hardware to be a

Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments 5-in-1 Multimedia Card Reader (SD/MMC/MS/MS PRO/xD)

The relevant modules are "tifm_sd, tifm_7xx1, and tifm_core". So I added these to /etc/modules and at boot the system detects the card reader and when plugged in thunar shows the sd card on the left as accessible! There is no xd card support yet, but luckily they have sd cards and only one xd card.

All in all it works rather nicely. There were a few issues, but with proper tweaking the system is now running great.

Building really old computer

2008-12-08T13:32:00.000-08:00

It's been a few days since I got my hands dirty, so I'm looking for some new projects.

I got my hands on an old sis 5598 motherboard that's a socket 7 and uses edo ram! It has 128 megs installed on board, and has an es1869f (ess audiodrive) sound chip built in.

I'm pumped at the thought of putting this back to work as a torrent slave. Now I just have to get a cheap computer case, as I already have a 200 watt atx power supply sitting here doing nothing. I'm going to pop in an old pci voodoo 3 card for video, and I have an ancient 3com etherlink 3 isa network card that I'm dying to see if it still works. I also need to locate an old socket 7 processor, and it can't even do 100 mhz for the cpuclock, so I'm probably going to try and snag a pentium 233 mhz mmx processor instead of a k6. I'll keep you all posted on this, and if any of you have thoughts on which distro to try, please drop me a line.

My other project is converting an acer 3680-2682 laptop from windows vista (ugh) to ubuntu intrepid 8.10. This should be interesting as well. I upgraded the ram to 1.5 gigabytes from the standard 512 megs and saw performance at least become somewhat bearable. I also know that ubuntu is no speed demon, but it should behave nicely and easily for my parents to whom this laptop is going.

The onboard video is an intel gma 950, again, no speed demon, but more than adequate for basic video needs. It has an 80 gig hard drive and a cdrw/dvd combo drive. I'll tackle this one shortly and post back here.

Openbox on Pclos part 3

2008-12-04T17:30:00.000-08:00

Well, I think I've tweaked my openbox setup to a nice and usable desktop environment on pclinuxos. The software works well and it responds much better than the initial kde install, which just felt.... slow....

The gtk themes work nicely, as do the icons, once you figure out how to make openbox access them. To access your icons you create a file called .gtkrc.mine in your home directory and add your icons in this format

gtk-icon-theme-name = "nuoveXT-aero"

Where nuoveXT-aero is my choice for the icon theme. You can see what icon themes you have installed in /usr/share/icons. Simply substitute for your preferred icon theme. Then you log out of openbox and back in and your icons will have been changed!

Obconf handles themes, and you can install new themes into /usr/share/themes for Obconf to easily find.

When I opened up openoffice, I found that it had NO clue what theme to use and saw a REALLY ugly interface. So I added the following to my ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh file

export OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP=gnome &

This told openbox to force the nice gnome gtk theme on openbox so it doesn't look hideous.

I installed xscreensaver, which has several nice sets of screensavers actually in the repos, and told openbox to start it on login by adding to my autostart.sh file

xscreensaver -no-splash &

Pcmanfm is a great file manager and it can handle both your desktop background and desktop icons. I don't like desktop icons personally, but if you do, then do the following

pcmanfm -> edit -> preferences -> Desktop

Then click manage the desktop and show file icons. You can then choose your wallpaper and how to display it. Easy eh?

Although I love pcmanfm as a filemanager I don't want icons on my desktop... and I also want to maintain my ability to right click on the desktop and bring up my openbox menu, as sometimes it's just faster than moving the mouse all the way to the bottom of the screen on the left to access the fbpanel start menu. So I'll use the great little program called feh. It can be found in the repositories.

Simply execute the command

feh --bg-scale /path/to/image.file

Where /path/to/image.file is the full path to your desired desktop background wallpaper image.

Then you add the following to your autostart.sh file

eval `cat $HOME/.fehbg` &

This will cause openbox to load this wallpaper upon login.

Here's what I added to my ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh file

pcmanfm &
conky &
fbpanel &
volwheel &
eval `cat $HOME/.fehbg` &
xscreensaver -no-splash &
export OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP=gnome &

Have fun with openbox!

Openbox on Pclos part 2

2008-12-03T20:06:00.000-08:00

My quest to tweak Pclinuxos continues.

Today I decided to tackle the mplayer/smplayer update. As I mentioned in part one, these are very out of date, and I prefer to run the svn version of both mplayer and smplayer. Which also meant a rebuild of the svn versions of x264 and ffmpeg. Not a huge deal as these are fairly easy to compile with mplayer. For reference I used the following script and created the packages with checkinstall.

#!/bin/bash
if [ "$UID" != "0" ]; then
echo The mplayer installation requires root privileges.
echo Please login as root, and run:
echo mplayer.sh again
echo Press ENTER to continue...
read dummy
exit 0
fi
# Use checkinstall to create uninstallable rpm's for your system
apt-get install checkinstall git-core
# move to build directory
cd /usr/src
mkdir mplayer
chmod 777 mplayer
cd mplayer
# update mplayer source
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer

# update ffmpeg source
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg

# update x264 source
git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git

#configure ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg
./configure
make
cd ffmpeg
checkinstall
logout
cd ..

# configure x264
cd x264
./configure --enable-pthread
make
cd x264
checkinstall
cd ..

#configure mplayer
cd mplayer
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --confdir=/etc/mplayer --disable-gui --enable-largefiles --enable-menu --with-extraincdir=/usr/src/linux/include:/usr/src/mplayer/x264 --with-extralibdir=/usr/src/mplayer/x264
make
cd /usr/src/mplayer/mplayer
checkinstall
# note the location that checkinstall moves your rpm's to as you will have to manually install with rpm

This all compiled nicely and I was able to install with rpm.

Next up was smplayer.... which was not nearly as nice. The svn version of smplayer requires qt4 and specifically qmake for qt4. I installed everything qt4 from synaptic (from the testing repo) and did not find qmake anywhere on my system. I thought it would be installed from "libqt4-devel" but it was not. So I figured what the heck... may as well install it from source!

So I grabbed the tarball from here , unpacked the tarball. Ran ./configure make and make install and, after a 45 minute compile, I was good to go! As an aside here, I've done this before so I know that uninstalling using make uninstall works great, which is why I didn't bother rpm'ing this.

It iustalled to /usr/local/Trolltech/Qt-4.4.3/ and since /usr/local was already in my path any apps I wanted to install would find the executables! a quick "which qmake" confirmed this and I was then able to compile smplayer. Checkinstall choked on the rpm creation, but SMPlayer also plays nicely with make uninstall, so I wasn't too worried about not having an rpm for this either. So long as I was careful not to delete these directories, I'd be fine.

Everything is working great and I have no complaints at this point. It's entirely possible that I did something screwy with the rpm's downloaded using synaptic and qmake with qt4 is in fact somewhere on them. Or possibly the mirror I was synced to just hadn't updated properly or recently. Who knows. It doesn't really matter as qt-4.4.3 is running fantastic.

Note that on the mplayer portion of the script at the ./configure section... it's one line and ends with x264. So if you're copy and pasting be sure to edit that portion!

2008-12-03T07:51:00.000-08:00

I received this comment and felt it warranted a revised script on my blog.
kdulcimer said...: There's one issue with your script: anything coded for PCLinuxOS shouldn't use sudo! PCLinuxOS isn't set up for sudo. You should have your script check to make sure it's being run as root instead; .

Thanks for the input. I setup my pclos install to use sudo out of habit. All it takes is to edit the sudoers file with visudo and add the user like so.

# su -
# visudo

Then edit the user privelege specification so it looks something like this.

"# User privilege specification
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
mini ALL=(ALL) ALL"

Where mini is the name of the user. Substitute your user name of course.

type "wq!" to save and exit and sudo is setup!

Revising the script to your specs would look something like this. With files downloaded and compiled in /tmp. It checks to see if the user is root and if not, then exits.

#!/bin/bash
if [ "$UID" != "0" ]; then
echo The mplayer installation requires root privileges.
echo Please login as root, and run:
echo cdrtools-install.sh again
echo Press ENTER to continue...
read dummy
exit 0
fi

#compile smake for pclos

cd /tmp
wget ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/smake/alpha/smake-1.2a41.tar.gz
tar -zxf smake-1.2a41.tar.gz
cd smake-1.2
cp Gmake.linux /usr/bin/Gmake
Gmake
cp /opt/schily/bin/smake /usr/bin
chmod +x /usr/bin/smake

#compile cdrtools for pclos
cd /tmp
wget ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/alpha/cdrtools-beta.tar.gz
tar -zxf cdrtools-beta.tar.gz
cd cdrtools-2.01.01
smake
smake install

# Ensure root ownership for proper operation
chown root:root /opt/schily/bin/*

# Backup cdrkit files
cd /tmp
mkdir cdrkitbackup
mv /usr/bin/wodim /tmp/cdrkitbackup
mv /usr/bin/readom /tmp/cdrkitbackup
mv /usr/bin/genisoimage /tmp/cdrkitbackup
mv /usr/bin/btcflash /tmp/cdrkitbackup
mv /usr/bin/devdump /tmp/cdrkitbackup
mv /usr/bin/isodump /tmp/cdrkitbackup
mv /usr/bin/isodebug /tmp/cdrkitbackup
mv /usr/bin/isoinfo /tmp/cdrkitbackup
mv /usr/bin/isovfy /tmp/cdrkitbackup
mv /usr/bin/icedax /tmp/cdrkitbackup

# Remove soft links to cdrkit programs
rm /usr/bin/cdrecord
rm /usr/bin/cdda2wav
rm /usr/bin/mkhybrid
rm /usr/bin/mkisofs
rm /usr/bin/readcd

# Create soft links to cdrtools programs
# Create soft links to cdrkit naming conventions for compatibility
ln -s /opt/schily/bin/cdrecord /usr/bin/cdrecord
ln -s /opt/schily/bin/cdrecord /usr/bin/wodim
ln -s /opt/schily/bin/mkisofs /usr/bin/genisoimage
ln -s /opt/schily/bin/mkisofs /usr/bin/mkisofs
ln -s /opt/schily/bin/mkhybrid /usr/bin/mkhybrid
ln -s /opt/schily/bin/readcd /usr/bin/readom
ln -s /opt/schily/bin/readcd /usr/bin/readcd
ln -s /opt/schily/bin/cdda2wav /usr/bin/cdda2wav
ln -s /opt/schily/bin/cdda2wav /usr/bin/icedax
ln -s /opt/schily/bin/btcflash /usr/bin/btcflash
ln -s /opt/schily/bin/isodebug /usr/bin/isodebug
ln -s /opt/schily/bin/isodump /usr/bin/isodump
ln -s /opt/schily/bin/isoinfo /usr/bin/isoinfo
ln -s /opt/schily/bin/isovfy /usr/bin/isovfy

Openbox on Pclos part 1

2008-12-02T20:05:00.000-08:00

Well, I decided to play around a bit with pclinuxos and tweak it to my liking.
I installed openbox, with obconf, fbpanel, pcmanfm, conky, and a little app known as volwheel that acts as a mixer with a panel icon. I also installed menumaker to update the openbox menu, and feh to handle the wallpaper.

I tweaked fbpanel as for some reason, the included firefox svg file didn't show correctly. I downloaded a set of icons, and installed one that was to my liking in the /usr/share/fbpanel/images/mozilla-firefox.svg location. Right were the fbmenu default file looks for it. I also pointed the terminal icon to gnome terminal, the file manager to pcmanfm, and the editor to geany. The default star icon was ok, but I found one more to my liking, placed it in the images folder mentioned above and pointed the fbpanel default file to it instead.

Volwheel is a great little program that adds an applet to your panel dock and it works as a front-end to alsamixer so you can easily change your volume with a few clicks. The homepage is here. http://oliwer.net/b/volwheel.html

For some reason, the included icons weren't being called upon, which I found kind of odd as they were included in the download and there were no instructions for placement. Luckily, the coder is a fellow Archer (arch linux user) and he had a pkgbuild in the aur. After perusing the build I found the icons were supposed to be placed in a folder called /usr/share/volwheel. So I created the folder, and placed the icons folder within it. I then restarted openbox and voila! volwheel had a nice little icon and was ready to go!

All in all, it doesn't run too badly. Some of the apps are outdated, like mplayer and smplayer, and I'll probably rebuild them right quick, but the box seems pretty stable since I cut the cruft off of the bloated minime install.

Once I get all the programs finalized, I'll post the results.

Arch linux resurrects ancient Desktop Part 2

2008-12-01T08:49:00.000-08:00

Back again with the good old 450 mhz p2, and now that lxde is installed, I've decided on some software to run with it.

GDM -> graphical login manager
Yaourt -> Access additional unsupported repositories using pacman-like commands
Firefox -> Web Browser
Flashplugin -> view flash in web browser
jre -> view java in web browser
mplayerplugin -> view embedded video in web browser
Thunderbird -> lightweight Email Client
Mplayer -> Movie viewer
Songbird -> music collection manager
Abiword -> Word processor
Abiword-plugins -> Common plugins
Transmission-gtk -> Bittorrent client with gtk gui
Xpdf - > view pdf documents
Limewire - > gnutella/bittorrent client
Pidgin - > Chat software
Shaman - > Easy program manager

I won't be going into detail on how to install these packages. If you read part one, then you have a handle on how pacman works. Yaourt works in the same manner, it can download pkgbuilds from the aur however and compile them on your machine. To check what versions of a package are available use the pacman/yaourt search function ie..

yaourt -Ss filename

What I will be doing is informing on whether or not the programs were able to perform acceptably, and if not, what programs I chose to replace them with. These tests were my subjective analysis of what I felt worked best and fastest. No quantitative evidence is shown to support my theories, so your results (if you were to try this) may vary from my own.

GDM - > The system seemed slow to boot with GDM, and the options available turned out too confusing for my niece to handle. I removed GDM and replaced it with SLIM. The default options and simplicity are just what the doctor ordered, and the improvement in bootup time was noticable.

Yaourt - > Works as advertised! If you don't have it... GET IT! Fantastic tool to simplify installation of programs not in the regular repositories.

Firefox - > Surprisingly the default firefox install was the best performing of the browsers I tried on this box. I was expecting kazehakase and opera to outperform firefox, but they did not. Flash performance was noticably better on Firefox than the other browsers and embedded video was shown flawlessly. A note on flash, performance is not fantastic, but it's definitely watchable. I kept firefox on this machine, although I was fully expecting the need to switch.

Thunderbird - > Thunderbird performance was not what I would call usable. With other applications open, such as firefox and songbird, we quickly entered the realm of swap usage, and on this old machine that just won't cut it. I replaced Thunderbird with Sylpheed and ended up using about 40 megs of ram less! Sylpheed lacks some features Thunderbird has, but is more than adequate for her basic email needs.

Mplayer - > Performance of the base mplayer seemed ok. It lacked the ability to show video in 16:10 ratio, so I installed SMplayer to handle this. Smplayer then complained about the version of mplayer installed as being too old to utilize all smplayer functions. I replaced mplayer with mplayer-svn-nogui (no need for a gui as smplayer handles this ) from aur to gain full functionality. Installing codecs and libdvdcss allowed her to watch dvd's from the drive as well.

Songbird - > I like the promise of this application. When the bugs have been worked out, I think this will be a great app. Unfortunately, that time is not now. seg faults were common and the app didn't always cleanly shut down, requiring a killall songbird from the terminal. This might be ok for me, but not for the inexperienced. I replaced Songbird with a couple of apps. Gtkpod to sync with her ipod and Quodlibet to handle her music library. Gtkpod works as advertised and her ipod collection was quickly assimilated on this box. Quodlibet seems very lightweight and handles her music playback needs great.

Abiword and Abiword Plugins - > Work as advertised! Lightweight compared to openoffice and very functional.

Transmission-gtk - > Seemed to work ok, although the version in the repository I was connected to seemed outdated. I replaced this with transmission-svn from aur and now she's running the latest and greatest.

xpdf - > Works as advertised! lightweight and functional. Look no further than this for your pdf browsing needs

Limewire - > A bit of a resource hog to be quite honest, but an easy way to access the gnutella network for your filesharing needs. The one thing that bugged me was limewire continually asking me to upgrade to the Pro version. I installed frostwire instead and have an almost identical interface and no more complaining about upgrading! WOO HOO!

Pidgin - > Worked out of the box with no problems whatsoever.

Shaman - > A gui front-end to pacman. Very simple to use and my niece can upgrade her system on her own without outside intervention! A bit of a resource hog, so I made sure she understood to shut down other programs first before running this.

So the final list of installed apps is:
Slim -> graphical login manager
Yaourt -> Access additional unsupported repositories using pacman-like commands
Firefox -> Web Browser
Flashplugin -> view flash in web browser
jre -> view java in web browser
mplayerplugin -> view embedded video in web browser
Sylpheed -> lightweight Email Client
Mplayer-nogui-svn-> Movie viewer
SMPlayer-svn -> Slick gui for mplayer
Quodlibet> music collection manager
Gtkpod -> Sync ipod
Abiword -> Word processor
Abiword-plugins -> Common plugins
Transmission-svn -> Bittorrent client with gtk gui
Xpdf - > pdf viewer
Frostwire - > gnutella/bittorrent client
Pidgin - > Chat software
Shaman - > Easy program manager

All in all, it works pretty well. Some of the programs are a bit slower than on modern system, such as flash and shaman, while others are pretty much unusable on such an old system. However, with a bit of tweaking and proper software selection, you too can save an old system from the scrap heap and put it back to work.

Tips and comments are welcome.
Dave

cdrtools script

2008-11-30T12:17:00.000-08:00

Based on a thread over at the pclinuxos "hack" forums I've found there to be a decent demand for the cdrtools package as opposed to cdrkit that is included in many distributions.

I've written this script for pclos, but it should be applicable for just about any linux distrobution.

The script assumes proper setup of sudo on your distro for your user.
Be sure to chmod +x the script before running it.

Here is the script for reference.

#!/bin/bash

#compile smake for pclos
cd ~
wget ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/smake/alpha/smake-1.2a41.tar.gz
tar -zxf smake-1.2a41.tar.gz
cd smake-1.2
sudo cp Gmake.linux /usr/bin/Gmake
Gmake
sudo cp /opt/schily/bin/smake /usr/bin
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/smake

#compile cdrtools for pclos
cd ~
wget ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/alpha/cdrtools-beta.tar.gz
tar -zxf cdrtools-beta.tar.gz
cd cdrtools-2.01.01
sudo smake
sudo smake install

# Ensure root ownership for proper operation
sudo chown root:root /opt/schily/bin/*

# Backup cdrkit files
cd ~
mkdir cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/wodim ~/cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/readom ~/cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/genisoimage ~/cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/btcflash ~/cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/devdump ~/cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/isodump ~/cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/isodebug ~/cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/isoinfo ~/cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/isovfy ~/cdrkitbackup
sudo mv /usr/bin/icedax ~/cdrkitbackup

# Remove soft links to cdrkit programs
sudo rm /usr/bin/cdrecord
sudo rm /usr/bin/cdda2wav
sudo rm /usr/bin/mkhybrid
sudo rm /usr/bin/mkisofs
sudo rm /usr/bin/readcd

# Create soft links to cdrtools programs
# Create soft links to cdrkit naming conventions for compatibility
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/cdrecord /usr/bin/cdrecord
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/cdrecord /usr/bin/wodim
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/mkisofs /usr/bin/genisoimage
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/mkisofs /usr/bin/mkisofs
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/mkhybrid /usr/bin/mkhybrid
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/readcd /usr/bin/readom
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/readcd /usr/bin/readcd
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/cdda2wav /usr/bin/cdda2wav
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/cdda2wav /usr/bin/icedax
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/btcflash /usr/bin/btcflash
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/isodebug /usr/bin/isodebug
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/isodump /usr/bin/isodump
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/isoinfo /usr/bin/isoinfo
sudo ln -s /opt/schily/bin/isovfy /usr/bin/isovfy

Arch linux resurrects ancient Desktop Part 1

2008-11-30T11:52:00.000-08:00

Those of us that have worked on computers for a while invariably end up with other people's discards. It was my luck to come into possession of an old Gateway ---. It's a pentium 2, with a 450 mhz processor and 64 megs of ram. It also comes with a 24x cd-rom (dead on arrival), a ten gig hard drive, and a standard floppy. It came with a voodoo banshee 8 meg agp card, but the vid card is dead (hence the reason for my coming into possession of this box).

I figured that it was time to pimp this bad boy out and put it back to work, and my niece was in need of her own computer... So I scrounged around and decided to add the following .A 32 meg matrox g450 to handle the video duties. A soundblaster live! (emu10k1) sound card will handle audio (as the onboard audio is crap). An additional 10 gig western digital hard drive, slaved to the 10 gig matrox for storage... An addition 192 mb of pc100 ram, in the form of another 64 mb stick, and a 128 mb stick. Standard ps2 keyboard and mouse, and a 4.8x Toshiba DVD drive to replace the cd-rom. I also wanted wireless, so I threw in an old atheros wireless card that I had recently resoldered. A 15” packard bell monitor, and some old stereo pc speakers round out the hardware, and it's on to choosing an operating system to power this machine.

There are many possible choices here, and a good case could be made for many, but at the end of the day, I chose Arch Linux to power this machine. The reason being, I'm very familiar with Arch, and I've been running Arch on my main desktop (a core 2 duo 4300 @ 2.4 ghz) for quite some time. I also knew that I would be building the OS from the ground up, and I would choose EXACTLY what was going to run on this machine.

I followed the excellent instructions from the beginner's guide located at http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners_Guide

For my installation media, I burned the current core iso, as an ftp install could be a pain as I'd have to get wireless up and running first.

I entered /arch/setup and started on my way. I ignored the section on networking at the start for now. The current kernel has both the ath5k module and the ath_pci module available so I knew I was going to have to deal with this in rc.conf, which I'll cover later.

I decided to set up a one gig swap at the beginning sector of the first hard disk (sda1). I probably could have gotten away with a 512 mb swap, as hard disk thrashing could slow things down considerably on an old machine like this, but I wanted to ensure that my niece's computer was rock stable.

Normally, I like to have a separate /boot partition to house grub as my boot manager, but as this was going to be the only operating system on this computer, I didn't feel the need to do this. So I simply made a root (/) partition for the remainder of the first hard disk (sda2).

The second hard disk houses home (/home), and I used the entire 2^nd hard disk for the user and her files.

The installer wanted a reboot at this point so after entering /arch/setup once again I was back on track.

It's time to select and install packages! The only things I really had to look out for in choosing packages was to make sure that I selected the madwifi packages, wireless tools and wpa_supplicant. If I forgot anything else right now, at least with these packages installed, I can access the net later and install them.

I didn't need to customize anything else with the kernel, and then selected nano as my text editor, which I would need to edit the config files next. Vim is great, but I tend to be a tad lazy sometimes and nano is just too easy.

Next up was editing rc.conf. There were a couple of things I wanted to take care of here. First off, I changed the timezone to “US/Central”. Next up, I checked out the modules. Sure enough, both ath5k and ath_pci were listed, so I placed a ! in front of ath5k to let rc.conf know not to load it. The ath5k module has come a long way, but it's still not at the functional level of ath_pci at this point, and since I'm going to be connecting to a wpa2 network ath_pci is simply a better choice at this time.

Commenting out the eth0 portion was my next step, and then I added a line under that one so that my atheros wireless card could access dhcp. (ath0=”dhcp”)

Heading on down to the daemons section of rc.conf, I placed a @ in front network, so that the machine wouldn't wait for network to come up before fully booting. Ctrl X and I was done with rc.conf

I verified /etc/fstab and found it to be populated correctly. Since I'm going to be using hal to mount my dvd drive, I placed a # in front of that entry to comment it out, so that hal will handle the drive.

The next file I had to look at was /etc/hosts. /etc/mkinitcpio and /etc/modprobe.conf didn't need any editing. In /etc/hosts I added the hostname for the computer like so

127.0.0.1   localhost.localdomain   localhost yourhostname   She's not going to be using ssh, so /etc/hosts.deny and /etc/hosts.allow can be left in their default state.  On to /etc/locale.gen.  Upon perusing the file, I ensured that en_US ISO-8859-1 and en_US.UTF-8  were uncommented.  Ctrl X out of this file and locale.gen generated my locales.  Setting a root password and selecting a local pacman mirror were done.  I had to edit one line in grub to set root to hd0,1. Saved the file and I was ready to reboot!  I rebooted into my new arch system and decided my next step was to get wireless running.  A quick lsmod showed me that ath_pci was loaded.  The iwconfig command verified that I had a usable interface (ath0).  Next was activating the device which was done with “ifconfig ath0 up”. I then typed “iwconfig ath0 essid MyNetwork” to associate with my network.  It was now time to configure wpa_supplicant.  I typed “mv /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf.original” to back up the wpa_supplicant file in case I somehow managed to hose it.  Then I had to generate the code that wpa_supplicant would use to access my network “wpa_passphrase myssid mypassphrase > /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf” where myssid is the name of my network and mypassphrase is the name of my password to access the network.  “nano /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf” and verified the files and success!  It's time to activate wpa_supplicant “wpa_supplicant -B -Dwext -i ath0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf”. And then “dhcpcd ath0”. “ifconfig ath0” verified that I was indeed connected to my router and net access was attained!  “pacman -Syu” was my next step to fully update the system to current.  The wireless needed to come up with the machine and automatically connect, so I selected the package known as “autowifi”. I also wanted dhcp to be used so I selected dhclient as well. “pacman -S autowifi dhclient” Following the arch wiki http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Autowifi , I added this to the begining of /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf “ # general options # Don't change this path to something else: ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant # Give everyone in the group "users" access to the control interface # required if you want to dynamically configure the network via wpa_cli or wpa_gui # without being root ctrl_interface_group=users eapol_version=1 ap_scan=1 fast_reauth=1” Then I edited the file /etc/conf.d/autowifi to access my ath0 module and not the default wlan0. “ INTERblsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_40">ath0" CONFIG="/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf" “

/etc/autowifi/networks/default had dhcp selected, so no modification was needed here.

I was sure to add dhclient to my daemons array in /etc/rc.conf and I backgrounded it to speed up bootup. Ie, added a @ in front of the dhclient entry. Then I added autowifi to my daemons in /etc/rc.conf file as well to ensure it would start at bootup as well.

It was now time to reboot the system as when updating the system, there was a new kernel and several other new files as well, and to take advantage of them a reboot was in order.

After the reboot it was time to set up a user account. Logged into root, and then issued the following:

useradd -m -G users,audio,lp,optical,storage,video,wheel,power,hal -s /bin/bash myuser

This gave me a user with access to common functions, and ensured she would be able to access her external usb hard drive, and her ipod.

Sudo was the next item on my list to install, so I went ahead and typed “pacman -S sudo”.

As a side note, you can use nano to setup visudo (the sudo configuration file). I didn't bother as I'm familiar with vi, but for those that aren't you can start visudo with nano by issuing this command

EDITOR=nano visudo  In the section labeled User privelege specification add your user like so

# User privilege specification

root ALL=(ALL) ALL

myuser ALL=(ALL) ALL

Ctrl X to save in nano or :wq! In vi and you're set with sudo!

It's now time to install alsa for sound and xorg for a working graphical environment. The soundblaster live! and the matrox g450 are both well supported under linux, so this should prove no trouble..

“sudo pacman -S alsa-utils”

Then “sudo alsamixer” I set the volume and tick the soundblaster digital output jack. Escape to exit and then “sudo alsactl store” to save the settings.

I want alsa to start at boot so I add it to the daemons array in /etc/rc.conf

“sudo pacman -S libgl”

“sudo pacman -S xorg”

“sudo pacman -S mesa”

“sudo pacman -S xf86-video-mga”

This will install an xorg environment for use with the mga matrox video driver.

There are several ways to detect your hardware in xorg. I prefer an application known as “hwd”.

“sudo pacman -S hwd”

“sudo hwd -xa”

This will populate xorg, and it does a pretty good job of this.

“sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf” to peruse the results. The little 15” monitor doesn't handle 1024x768 very well, so I removed those resolutions from the modes subsections of the screen section. Saved and exited.

With the limited resources of this box, I would have to choose a lightweight desktop environment to gain functionality. Since I promised my niece the use of this box once I'd fixed it up, it would also have to be easy enough for her to use with minimal intervention of my behalf.... so a straight openbox build was not going to be familiar enough for her. I narrowed it down to 2, IceWM and lxde. Seeing as lxde will auto populate the menus without outside intervention, and also the fact that I've never used it and I'm curious about it, lxde it is.

I want pmount to handle automounting of disks, and the filemanager pcmanfm handles this task nicely with pmount... which is a good thing as pcmanfm comes standard in an lxde install.

“sudo pacman -S pmount”

This pulls in hal and dbus as well.

Then I added hal to the daemons array in /etc/rc.conf to start at boot.

It's now time to install the DE.

“sudo pacman -S lxde gamin”

This installs lxde along with gamin, which is a drop-in replacement for fam. Fam is default on arch, but I've always found it pretty buggy and much prefer gamin.

The lxde programs installed are gpicview, lxappearance, lxde-common, lxlauncher, lxpanel, lxrandr, lxsession-lite, lxtask, lxterminal and pcmanfm.

“As a note here, lxterminal segfaulted whenever I tried to run it. So I installed gnome-terminal instead. “sudo pacman -S gnome-terminal” gnome terminal does not require gnome to be running and pulled in no other dependencies.”

It's now time to set up my .xinitrc file to allow logging into X.

“cp /etc/skel/.xinitrc ~/”

“nano ~/.xinitrc”

There is no default entry for lxde, so I added the following line

“exec startlxde”

I made sure there was no # before it and that all other entries had a # before it. Saved and exited the file.

I figure it's time for some fonts so that the DE doesn't look like crap. =)

“sudo pacman -S ttf-ms-fonts ttf-dejavu ttf-bitstream-vera”

It's now time to see what we have.

“startx”

I've now booted into a nice shiny lxde installation and I must say that it looks good. It's laid out in a sane manner, with a nice menu.

That's all for today. Next up, I'm going to select lightweight software to run on this box and install the login manager “slim” to start at bootup.

Thanks for reading and if you have questions, feel free to drop me a line.