Bragging Rights

This December 2016, I had a first one: A performance where my old,
secondhand Thinkpad did the whole of a show running QLC+ for lights,
ShowQ for sound & sound effects, and mpv for video - yep, that's a
Triple, Full FOSS achievement.

I am used to do shows from my Arch or Ubuntu laptop, but usually with
dlight which isn't open-source; for that particular show, involving
1080p video, precise timing of sound effects, and about 40 light cues
over 58mn of performance, I had one luxury: time. A full 15 days of
paid-for, 9-5 day-job, pure technical and rehearsal time. Well, if you
wanna work with QLC+, you better have time.

Happy, or not.

Not sure.

Haven't wrote in a while here; in a sense, I just kept using FOSS just out of habit, part political stance, part un-willing to pay for stuff or endorse piracy by resorting to it.

Right now, it's been months since my wife has last complained about her laptop (no brainer: ubuntu 10.04) - she sees so much viruses and malware all around that she's quite happy with it. Plus, OO.org seems
to have made huge progress in the compatibility department. If only you could plug-in a beamer for meetings...

My laptop, then, is Debian 'current'; and in this case, current means 'always something wrong, always'. I keep telling myself that the next time stuff works I will stop upgrading anything, but dam'it, there is never such a moment. Lately, suspend was dead, now it's bluetooth and startup screens that are borked.

The desktop received the Arch treatment, and I was astonished, mainly by the level of documentation; their wiki is wonderful, and so far I have resorted to the forums only twice. To no avail, by the way. As it is, this wonderful pile of documentation is alas not necessarily useful outside of Arch. If Arch wasn't doing all the startup sequence in such a special way, then the heap of docs would be much, much more usable for everybody. Now, the basics work great up to silly details like numlock and such. But the everyday part, normal-user mode with Enlightenment DR16 and some x services running without a proper Login Manager doesn't work well: radiotray crashes the startup of E16, and empathy slows it down seriously: you can't just autofire them through scripting, you have to wait for E to be loaded and then manually start your needed services. Sure, it ought to come from my obsession with minimal services/install, but yet it 'just doesn't work'

Ah, then, the Old Dog: Slackware is back (again, after being my distro of choice for years) in 13.1/64 form: installed 3 times already, tried to upgrade to current, crashed it sometimes as soon as after first reboot, opening a menu in Konqueror - crash and that was 20 seconds
after the fresh thing was up and running! Still no luck with dual screen with Nouveau (blacklisted by default in Slack ?!?) and without nv... Back to proprietary, again. (was same with arch). Good point is that I can install Slack in less than 30 minutes now :)
It still has this cool feature of not installing/pushing a bootloader if you don't want to, neat!
What's less neat is that udev joke that kills localisation that still around... I have to work on this one.
Hmpf.
More news. or not, if this mail-to-post work.
With attachments?
re-hmpf.

Webcams: What's wrong with these devices? In the same room, same light, one is doing blueish green (if not the opposite), the other bland white and the last a kind of Tuscan afternoon yellow. And, yes, I am especially found of controlling computers remotely & I should tidy a bit around my desk. Indeed.

Image-on-the-right Ubuntu-powered AspireOne wins, for it's auto-whitebalance cam is the most convincing of the bunch, eventhough it's got nothing to do with reality. At least, you look healthy, as the opposite with the left one, ASUS F9 laptop (a Syntek webcam) which is plain bland, and just about forget the Logitech one (center picture) on my desktop machine - it won't even work with skype anyway!

Funky anyway, I use VNC to connect to those two laptops that sits across the office, fire up the webcams & grab a snapshot.

It works; sometimes.

Bleeding Edge should be an option, not a competition

Re: [ PPLUG ] Tropical Ice Cube Newsletter #7: A Flurry of News!
From: "Jean-Philippe 'Tropical Ice Cube' Monteiro"
To:
pplug ::at/ googlegroups.com
Date: 09/02/16 - 19:08

On Monday 16 February 2009, j. Tim Denny wrote:
> Jean-Phillipe
>
> seems you are really down on Ubuntu in this news letter? what is wrong?
> chat?
>
> cheers
> tim

Hi Tim, Ye Chanpion of Looong Threads here on our PPlug planet!

Old story between me and U - I'll put it down to the famous motto: "Linux is all about Choices" - When one distro is on such a World Domination Rampage, the future just looks gloom again. And in this case, a rather brownish shade of gloom, which doesn't help at all.

:)

http://getshotwithlinux.zenerves.net/2008/08/top-10-reasons-not-to-use-ubuntu.html

The long-ish answer is that progress has never meant "Better"; it just means "Different" in all aspects of human life.

it's the same old story:
A hundred years ago, there where on traffic jams, it was so better
A hundred years ago there where no ambulances, and that sucks.

[The first one to say that a hundred years ago you could be at the hospital faster because of the uselessness of ambulances in traffic jams is to me a very healthy individual, thank you!)
_______________________________________________________________________________________________

And so it goes with software; once Linux was blazingly fast on your 256megs of ram old laptop, and 2 years later OpenOffice takes a full minute to start, crashes and do not recover stuff because the RAM is overcrowded, you aging old 5400rpm IDE swap disk stuffed... Not mentioning that your trackpad module was dropped in the meantime, deemed obsolete, and your only solution is to stick with an unsupported, outdated distribution that you can't really maintain...

The Benchmark Story in Newsletter #7 is true, and I don't care much about Mac OS X results since they run an X server too, and they do push upstream lines of code to the BSD project - which is more than what Ubuntu does, since U recipe for victory is to attract, and keep attracted in the halo of it's brownish, t(h)ree-hugging warm light a maximum of individuals who would contribute to U rather than push stuff upstream. And U doesn't fix the kernel, U patches it for it's own use, that's all.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?p=3443116#post3443116

The above is only my post, but if you read upwards, someone like me suffered a regression in hardware support. Slackware's boss, P. Volkerding, said it: WHY FIX IT IF IT AIN'T BROKEN?

[Yes, I run Slackware!]

Watchdogs of the OpenSource Movement considers the kernel a viable project because... it is growing
10.000 lines a year - !YIKES, soon my 2.66DualCore2 monster won't be able to handle it!

And I say: It's all because of U.
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpost.php?p=1166026&postcount=47

Because of this pressure put on a six-months release cycle - something that only works for them, because it contributed to attract a crowd of novelty-avid followers and tinkerers that are happy re-installing their system every six months. Sh*t, I like to fool around, but I use sandboxes and virtualmachines for that, not my desktop!

C'mon, when you watch the websphere today, it's like every distro release out there has to be on U's pace. That' s crazy. Since when do you hurry respectable old ladies in the stairwell? Debian and Slackware both looks like they are running out of breadth, while knowing they can't compete. Luckily, they achieve stable releases we can work on. KDE 3.5.10 anyone? You can't beat Konqueror wealth of features and file handling compliances in 3.5.10.


I _just_ mistakenly, as root, deleted my full /usr folder. Has anything stopped running? no, Slack is light on RAM. How long did it take me to recover a system that just lost _all_ it's executables?

25 minutes, including the extra tarballs and special Window Manager I compiled from source. (e16)

Did I had to reboot? No. I am still writing to you. :)


Rock Solid Old Dog - that's the way it should be.

Bleeding Edge should be an option, not a competition. But it seems it has become part of linux success, and as such it is now an egg/chicken problem.

So, to people out there that would have made it down here: NEVER assume a newer version number to be better; If your version is working, KEEP IT! And if you do have issues, don't assume: you can only click on "upgrade" with hope, nothing more.

Jean-Philippe - Slackware 12.2.
--
Celebrate Hannibal Day this year. Take an elephant to lunch.

On the Inability of this whole system to actually help you in any useful way

Howdy, Nixettes and Nixers!

In my article "Bug Bang II: Revenge of the Devs" I was unfair; boldly, plainly unfair, but you'd have to dig into Fedora/RedHat strategy of dodging the bullet to learn how misplaced one can be when ones submits a bug, sees it discarded, and shamelessly, rudely even, makes a fuss about it.

Doing so, you are hitting the wrong person. I was crawling the fedora quite obscurely organised sphere of "community" websites (Join! Get! Communicate! Wiki! Planet!! - ??) and realised this: They've build their own Community Firewall of volunteer bug-bashers. Who are they? They are not RedHat people, they are volunteers that commit self-sacrifice of their free time in reviewing bugs, tasked by their masters with one duty in their faithful lives: bash them, squash them, write off a maximum of them 'cause so much of them aren't really bugs. You know that, they aren't bugs, they are features. duplicates,... Or temporary shortcomings. Or, mainly, they are Someone Else's Problem. And certainly, you can't waste precious Devs time reviewing them.

And so if for one moment you felt you did your community job of End User by taking the time to register to a website, search for duplicates, submit and document your issue, all because it's not because you can't code that you can't participate, you are wrong.

Users are such a pain in the ass. Why should Devs, the semi-Gods of OpenSource, have to bear with them? They are incompetent, they cry over the littlest of glitches all the time (469045: No DVD Drive! 251080: Laptop doesn't switch back on!). EndUsers can't compile code anyway, let alone commit a patch: Pussies!

The fundamental concept of SEP (Someone Else's Problem) is one that allows our SemiGods to focus on the all-important matters of providing us with a new version of their almighty, sacred Code, again and again in their imaginary world of up-to-date-bleeding-edge novelties, as soon as possible, so that they don't feel left behind, outdated, discarded (and disrupted in their Sacred Workflow); and to do that, you have to be protected from them, and also you have to distract them by coercing these fucking users into upgrading their whole operating system every six months (for as utterly crazy as it sounds), and download gigs of all-important updates in the meantime. I can actually understand that, from the human side: Who, seriously, likes to have its failures documented, published, and be publicly requested to amend and fix them? Nobody, of course.

One thing may explain the other anyway: Obviously, why focus on a bug in code that has an official life expectancy of barely six months? (and hurting someones' valuable self in the process?) The first to answer "So that the next release is bug-free", please go back to whatever FairyTale world you happen to live in: I upgrade my desktop, webcam ceases to work; I upgrade the laptop, Compiz crashes the system twice a day.

And when will NetworkManager actually remember my fucking password? When will Gnome restore autologin? When will they really come around a real one-click solution to mp3/DVD reading that doesn't involve buying stuff from the Internet or discarding multiple hypothetical patents warnings? You can hardly do that in one click. Will my Syntek webcam die when the kernel starts to include drivers for it, while it works perfectly if I compile the module myself, like it happened with my Logitech STX? When will Linux systems start to use the same amount of battery power as XP does?

When will they start committing and releasing code with an actual life expectancy of more that a few moths?

When will they start pushing code up & downstream when it is actually ready for production?

Bug Bang II: Revenge of The Devs

If you've read BugBang One, you probably won't be surprised that it just lies there, with no one assigned to it. It's not much of a surprise, really. It's called:
re-enable the Autologin feature through a Login Management GUI

And if you try a search with "Autologin"as keyword in the gnome-bugzilla you won't find it. How interesting.

In the meantime, I attacked Fedora up front with a nasty one: with certain sets of icons, the on-display visual for AudioVolume Up/Down/Mute is ugly: an unscaled, very little icon made big by compiz.

On-Screen display of sound volume on laptop
screens is blurry, ugly

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

Fedora 10 - was perfect, crisp and detailed with F9

How reproducible:

Choose any install media (liveCD, txt-installDVD,...)
they do the same.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Assign ctrl-F10-11-12 to the sound volume Mute-Down-Up
2. Use it
3. See the poor on-screen result

Actual results:
Poor, blurry graphic

Expected results:
Crisp, like the one for Laptop Brightness

If you care checking the link, you will learn more than I know, since after being Deeply and Vastly explained that if my computer looks shit it's because of custom icons that I fiddled with, and that then, it was up to me to report the bug to each icon set's maintainers so that this behaviour stopped. Before I quit getting back to the thread again and again, (they closed it anyway) I took some carefully chosen words to explain them that I didn't agree and that maybe, if the community is doing its job in reporting bugs to the distribution, it could be up to the distro maintainers to actually chase them with the FlyTox can.

That was after getting this, as the issue after being told to issue strange command-lines as root and edit some obscure config-files:

Feel free to file separate bugs against the icon
theme that are causing problems.
gnome-settings-daemon only use
gtk_image_set_from_icon_name() with
the size GTK_ICON_SIZE_DIALOG,
looking for audio-volume-* icons.

I felt somehow compelled to write that:

I kind of can't escape the feeling of being at
the wrong desk at the post office,
in front of a 50-ish hair-coloured lady
busy doing her knitting... In a foreign country
where I don't speak the language.

So much for _my_ time then.

I have a laptop that looks shit to
the outside world; would the community-spirit answer
be "Hey, that's a Fedora install, we can't ship that!
I'll pass the info along, and since I am getting paid
 and not you, I will even take care that it actually
get fixed"?

Never, ever.

CLOSED - NOTABUG said the lady. Next please!

I know they replied, but I didn't bothered to check/assess/relaunch the flame part. I did my job. And at first, I even did it politely.

Oh, and the faulty icons are standard, out-of-the-box, normal ones from a conventional install.

The Gremlins of Open Source Software

What a fucking day today.

It seems that every time stuff kinda works, and in any possible, logical way I want to built upon it to improve/update/refine, the rest has to fail.

For two years, this Fedora 7 workstation served me well. It was so bloated with the hundreds of libraries and concurrent applications running together than it has become a dog, slow like hell on this otherwise upscale dualcore 2.66Ghz.

Time for an upgrade, and, what the heck, my little Tropical Ice Cube http://tic.zenerves.net is here to provide me with all the latest software, isn't it?

There are myths out there, Distributions famous that you know if you "master" them you will be safe, and sound. And a little bit proud, too.

Here is My Fucking Failure List; All that in One Single Afternoon, believe it or not:

-Gentoo install: no X system, no graphic nothing then, no network. I knew it, though, it's not my first try. The last time, network was achieved with some nasty scripts... Can't remember...

-SabayonLiveCD: knetworkmanager forces addresses out of my ip range, lock them with no option to define manually - a pity, looks superb, and comes with nvidia drivers, SecondLife, googleearth and other nasty goodies [assaultcube2 :) ].

-Sabayon Install plain crashes "exception this/that" WTF.

-CentOS Install fail to get the three other OS on this machine, graphic installer send my screen haywire anyway. I don't want to ruin my boot partition, so didn't went any further.

-Slackware, the so-introduced "Main Workstation @ tropical central": no printer client running, no microphone, no webcam - the gspca maintainer hasn't been seen on his sourceforge page since at least 4 months, why the heck is this module compiling fine on Fedora 7 (a hog) and not on Slackware, the supposedly Ultimate Compiler Machine? Then, I realised that the firewall is wide open with not the slightest GUI in sight from the over-bloated KDE control Centre (unlike SuSE) and what else? There were things that worked out-of-the-box: Flash on Youtube, DVD playing... Shitte, I almost mistook the Old Slack for Linux Mint here. Is it really supposed to be failing to connect to a cups server, but allow you spend your afternoon whatching http://www.europafilmtreasures.fr/PY/298/ ? And I am still doing a non-gaphic login, on top of that, after switching to runlevel5.

THEN, one "customer" from yellowpages calls to complain about his ubuntu install: no automatic way to hook to SAMBA network share when he boots his computer; no SAMBA printer in view either. Sent him on the PPLUG list, http://groups.google.com/group/pplug, said he should ask there since I, for one, know I can't help.

Especially, today.

And I am out of bandwidth for the whole month with all this twitteries & facebookage and bloggerish you are supposed to do to be in the loop.

Long Life Free Software, Freedom to Damn Yourself to the teeth in half-breed libraries, unsupported hardware and arcane text-file-based unix-like-20-years-ago Operating Sytems.

Bug Bang !

Yo. The small Cultural Center/Community Education place I used to work for has closed its door (as scheduled) so I do have a lot of free time now, and decided to take an aggressive stance on those bugs that bother me since ages and that nobody seems to take care about.

Here is Bug N* 1, submitted to
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=565150


Bug Description
2008-12-20 03:17 UTC
Getting back what we had before, and what KDE, OS X and M$ users still have today: Allow a simple GUI tool to configure allowing the user of a simple machine to boot all the way to the Desktop without prompting for users, passwords whatever.

Other information:
[Pressure is building up] I read somewhere that re-enabling the feature was "under way" but the basic user of a basic computer that is not your usual over-paranoid *nixer still has to perform quite dangerous tasks to get to the same point; and it conflicts with stuff like WPA automatic reconnection which is a plain shame. Once and for all: It's not because Linux aims at being overly secure that I cannot CHOOSE to lower the machine to "zero-credentials-needed" mode. I see tons of reasons to do so, and not every chip on the planet has multiple users each with carefully encrypted personal files. [Steam released, thanks and sorry - keep up the good work].


Voilà. from my experience, I know that the first thing that will probably happen is this "bug" to be quoted as Duplicate and get discarded - it's quite difficult to do an effective search on similar, but phrased differently, bugs. We'll see, I'll keep on: Target is One Bug a Week :

Phnom Penh

What a strange way to start it - I mean, what's got a third-world, far-end of the world city do with Linux, or Free Software, or even Computing for that matter?

Well, more than you'd think; first, we have a LUG, as you could guess, named the PPLUG. It's probably only the 1000th to be called like that, but few got two P's I reckon.

PPLUG Mail Group

At 32 members, this is not bad a rate I believe; especially when you notice that there's a fair number of Khmer people among that handful. Not bad, not bad.

Then this is Asia, and for those of you that don't know it, Asia is Tech Friendly; they love it, 85% of all electronics are being built nearby anyway, and these kids, being from Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok or Phnom Penh they love Technologies. To such an extend that we have here a self-advertised NERD community that is organising a BarCamp !

Their Mail List is here & there is 132 guys on the list. yep, 132 dudes who claim being Geeks, Nerds, and so on in a city that far away.

[Yes, I am a member of both. Why'd you ask?]

The last thing that pleases me here, is a little detail I noticed while "shopping" for this new laptop: A lot of them are being sold without the M$ suite; Very few comes with Linux for instance (although I spotted the EeePC with Xandros at 350USD @ Central Market), they are quoted as being "with DOS" (Or sometimes "Linux" but there's nothing inside). Well, basically they are empty, which is god for my purposes, but you don't have to worry for the less tech-savvy customers: actually, when you buy it, they take it away from you for 'setup'. What 'setup'? well, you know, the one that includes popping an illegal copy of the most frequent Operating System on the planet, so that you can actually use your new computer. How nice, isn't that Service or what?

The most hilarious moment was for me when I noticed how shameless it was: in the middle of the "service" area of a prominent reseller here, branded importer of well known hardware, sat a guy so used to this XP disk he was 'setting up' all day long that he actually memorised the key. Yeah, by heart. I don't remember how long it is, since I haven't had to install a M$ product for ages, but I do remember is quite long, and obscure.

Well, I guess after the 1000th time you enter it, you get to know it.

Cheer fun; few perspectives for Free Software Adoption

A last, quick note on which I'll probably come back later:
Check out these two websites, they represent quite an achievement:

www.khmeros.info and www.open.org.kh/en

cheers

top-10-reasons-not-to-use-ubuntu

Thanks to the Phnom Penh Linux Users Group, I found this link;

http://socializedsoftware.com/2007/10/30/top-10-reasons-not-to-use-ubuntu/

Which is fun in places, but not everywhere. There are actually reasons for being unhealthily, politically incorrectly against the current Champion of the Open Source Cause.

There may not be a serious 10 of them though, but I promise I'll add them up as they appear/come to mind.

1. UBUNTU is a monster, an ogre, a spoiled kid with its pockets full of banknotes. It is build on a pseudo-quite-charity model and in more than ten years of existence, still hasn't come up with a credible Business Plan; they do better than others because they don't have to bring in a single penny. Is that Fair in any way? How long will that money last?

2. UBUNTU's so big it became selfish, putting back very few lines of code back to Debian or in the vanilla kernel; disregarding compatibility issues just because they are richer and then, move faster. The ones that commit the more lines of code to the kernel are the real businesses that really want the whole model to improve, namely RedHat, IBM and such.

3. UBUNTU devs truly works... for themselves, refining UBUNTU up until firing it up or installing it reminds you of XP: little control, all niceties. And a full wealth of Politically Correct Gibberish. Wouldn't a serious part of us be, like me, attracted by the Anarchy Side, the Dark side, the Resistance side of it? UBUNTU is playing Nice, Ideal Son-In-Law here, the one you wish your daughter would marry. Boring. At least, I still can prevent my daughter of using UBUNTU !

[It's all FEDORA here :) ]

4. Without any financial guarantees, your distribution of choice could as well be discontinued tomorrow; nobody knows how much Sutthelworth is ready to pay for his first travel on the Moon or anything like that.

5. By trying to set a foot into government, pre-installed on hardware and such, UBUNTU drives real money away from real businesses, people that need this money from DELL or the French Parliament, and really intend to keep on the good work with it.

6. UBUNTU will always be FREE, yes, mommy, sure; if they don't crash or disappear tomorrow, see above, then it's because after 10 years they realize they will have to start asking money sometimes. And start speaking about "enterprise" editions of which we foolish little creatures are being guinea pigs of.

7. And then, this mix of Money and Power makes them creating de facto standards, or at least push them: who want Zimbra? not me, I am not a yahoo customer. What's UNISON? I don't know, a .com that's supposed to help us communicate. and such, like Alfresco, a content management system.

8. Power and Money... Well, they have to get money from somewhere, don't they? Konversation, ekiga or spip will never buy space on the UBUNTU spins, neh? Yahoo, on the other hand...

9. UBUNTU weights a ton; even in xubuntu form, it is still slower than slackware with KDE!

10. I hate Brown. Praise them from going away from Blue, but I just can't stand it. I hate their T(h)ree-Hugging Spirit logo too; it's a fine distro, but my eyes just bleed when I stand in front of it.

Cheers all *nixers. Watch your back, stuff is happening!

Contigency Measures

!! Try them all, kiddo, that's the beauty of the Linux world: choice !!

"Yeah, and do they do Mayonnaise, too?" would've asked my mother. Let's focus on the important stuff: what's important to you? My wife and I are geeks, the laptop has to be sexy, nerdy, and do all the nerdy things we do with a laptop in a sexy fashion.

FORGET IT

At first, your primary battle is still usability; even though there's been huge progresses, you still just struggle to past beyond the simple point of "Yep, It Boots, we should all be Happy".

I was astonished at first: the piece is cheap @ 1.000usd bought in a remote place like this; with 1gb ram and this 2.1 dual celeron the engine is quite on the high-end scale of the smallish (12.1, feels horribly heavy and wide to us) laptop scale. Well, for the next two months, for sure.

Then some part of the software went really OK, brightness screen on special keys, suspend from lid closed; I had to trick the sound system as expected, and to fiddle with the codecs, but that was still in the range of acceptable burdens of living the Open Source Fantasy.

Where it stopped being nice, is with F7 and F8 unable to accommodate a WPA wireless connection, UBUNTU 8.04 unable to do anything wireless while supporting the webcam out-of-the-box - and no, F9, which does WPA, does not bring the webcam to anything better than 2 frames a MINUTE with the same stk11xx driver.

Aren't we been told that Bug Reports are All-Important, and that it's Our Duty to follow up in order to help the community? I understand the post I left on the Fedora Forums to have overwelmed the modest capacities over there, but I wrote to the devs in their SourceForge Forum TWO weeks ago.

Yikes. It's all about what's important; years ago we'd be weening about having to pass special kernel options just to have a working tty terminal, now we are complaining the webcam is not functional.

Or is it? Yeah, with UBUNTU. Which can't handle wireless because... Just because their code isn't right, since the same applet works in Fedora!

All these people are pulling code from CVS, do their own tweaks to them, and pass it on to the community with rather poor testing. All this bleeding edge stuff that I love (F9 is great for that, LOT's of novelties) are using us as a testing ground for the commercial distros to follow. Even UBUNTU is now talking about an "Increased in Stability and Security Enterprise-Level Solution" (based on their current LTS releases).

So people, wake up: your average openSUSE, Fedora, UBUNTU package is not a free alternative to closed source OS'es in a closed source world; it's using our free time, our expensive hardware, our skills and patience to test for free whatever they are going to put for sale, at a premium, a little bit later.

All for the better in the better of worlds isn't ?

Asus; the F9 that is, NOT the Eee, Eeee, Eeeeeeee whatever.

ASUS F9E-2P174(F9E-1B2P) (Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 2.1GHz, 1GB RAM, 120GB HDD, VGA Intel GMA X3100, 12.1 inch, PC DOS)




The Good thing: it came WITHOUT windoze, I didn't pay an unwanted license.
The bad thing: this model seems to exist only in Vietnam (bought it in Phnom Penh, since that's where I happen to live)... A copy? Are there fake, full-scale copies of laptops around?

No, it's not: the box was cluttered with the usual amount of fine-printed unusual warnings and other CE notices, this ought to be real.

The keyboard makes "springy" noises, Boing-boing style. It' so annoying I do not even want to write more.

With DualCoreDuo and 2.1Ghz engines on board, it's lightning-fast on my Fedora8 and eats up all its batteries, shutting down without notice, in two hours. Processors can't go underneath 800Mhz, so the two of them just sucks power faster than any useable necessity. I guess that's a side effect of vista. Vista is such a processing power ogre that any 'puter that plans on running it has to have guts. Balls-Burning big guts: It makes a lot of heat too. And the Asus website recommends vista. Pigs. 20 minutes of video at 20% brightness lowered the batteries from 98 to 72%, bang. When I neared 40, it just powered down, not shutted down, without warning.

When my wife saw it, she made "yikes, it's ugly". that's because this 1000USD piece is the final replacement for our 3-times-in-4-year Dead 2000usd 10.1 Vaio, Only one under warranty, for sure: GraphicCard in full short-circuit, thingie fozen, dead. At lest, the Asus has a TWO year warranty, but this keyboard really drives me nuts.

Fedora 8 went quite faultless though, and that merits a mention, both to the manufacturer for complying to current standards, well-established chipsets, and to the 2.6.25 kernel. As a quick list:>
-NO the WebCam DOES NOT work, for sure. What'D'ya think? You High or Something?
-Boot form CD/DVD yes, LiveDisk: Perfect (with that power + 1Gb ram, hey, has to "just work")
-Recognize HDD yes,
-USB yes
-WiFi YES, LAN too
-Correct screen size as soon as installed, 1280x800. Could have gained more in def, like in the 1340 range...
-Some switches fn+ works out of the box, namely Screen Brightness, not Sound though, but Ext Screen seems to work too! (Some really do have strange signs on them, I'd rather not touch them unless I get the near the Manual. The Manual is Home, amd I am some 9.000km away on holidays.

Sound was not working, but as usual a quick look on the UBUNTU forum gave me the solution: These 'newer' ac97 intel chips, the ones they call "HighDefinition" or "HD" needs the full ALSA bundle, and since ALSA is so good, why the heck isn't it the default choice in the first place? Installing Fedora8, I also new that PulseAudio was just giving more trouble than music, that's quite documented too.

I miss an external MuteSound button; there are two Power Buttons though, One for, I guess Suspend and the other for Shut/Down. What else? Keyboard noises sucks.

AMAROK Fun

Amarok's pissing at my pants. Well, it's just plain pissing me off actually. I now once again remember why I do NOT use it.

An old while ago, I needed a playback interface for a live performance; prior to install on my Laptop, I reviewed what was available on my desktop. I did the same preformance already with the laptop, but it was with UBUNTU 6.06LTS at the time: having my .ogg sounds on the desktop, it was enough to single click on them to start playback in xmms. Fun. Easy. Unbeatable.

In the meantime, I've switched all machines to Fedora7, and XMMS is getting older and older, wasn't behaving the same, and no xmms-special-shortcut-keys package was available as .rpm for Fedora (it's called xmms-itouch); OK, let's try something else.

Target is: play any song that's "at hand" in a single click, no preload, no playlist load, minimal latency between action and sound, single key play, single key stop, single key pause, and the sound has to stop naturally at it's own end, not continue playing the remaining of the folder, list, disc whatever. Well, that's just a setting where you point'n'click to get a sound played and nothing else, it's as simple as that & don't expect any software player to behave like that. Don't.

[End of the story is that I compiled itouch myself since nothing but xmms agrees just to play something without doing/taking any other action]

And what of amarok? The standard in sound processing tools for play/pause, including audacity, is SpaceBar, so I used the amarok shortcuts configurator to point it on spacebar as Play/Pause shortcut. did the job as uch but since it require extra input to stop at end of track or to add a track to a playlist, it wasn't the tool I needed. But nice anyway, with the Covers, Lyrics, Wikipedia lookup and all that.

Since then, I have to choose between listening to music or do some real work when my real work happens not to be playing some music, since every time I hit the spacebar in a text editor a sound start or stops. I've reverted, defaulted, edited the config file as root whatever a 1.000 times, the SpaceBar is now my play/pause shortcut for Amarok. The Music is with Me; for as long as I do not trow this thing out the window.

Fedora Bandwidth

Last week-end update of my Fedora7 workstation was 112Mb. This week it was only 95. It's a plain fucking shame. We are not talking Fedora9 Alpha Whatever, no, it's the soon-to-be-discarded F7 that still needs that much of "fixes" or "improvements".

For whatever improvement the end user may notice; after all, when something gets SERIOUSLY bettered, you do notice. Notice articles, weblogs, advertisements, mail announces, shit, you can't miss it. Who in the Linux world doesn't know about kde4? I don't care much, but at least I know that I know. Gimp 2.4 too, great improvements. But it's 2.4 that's great; why the hell did I since had three successive download of the entire package + docs of said Gimp? You are going to tell that I repeat myself but CAN'T THESE PEOPLE WAIT FOR SOMETHING TO BE MATURE BEFORE RELEASING IT?

Well, I could run Debian if I didn't wanted to face these issues. The issue-within-the-issue being that features=modernity, and Hardware-Compliance=modernity too. So you can't just get out of the Upgade-Constantly/Eat-up-all-your-credits mess if you want features. Slack11 with its 2.4 kernel was great but heck, real life people do use USB drives all the time.

And stop bullshitting me with either " Hey that's simple just open a terminal as root and..." or the "Read the manual you moron if you are not good enough go die with shame on your face": that's not helping FOSS. Not at all. I am into FOSS for Political reasons, I don't understand why I have to suffer from bad engineering reasons.

VNC Blopper

I am always sorting out what still needs to be done in with all these computers over here so that everything is fine and everybody is happy: Family can watch movies, download music, colleagues can open my files and send me stuff back & so on.

One more of my unuseful sidenotes: a daughter of mine was willing to watch a movie this afternoon, asked for the laptop since the young one was busy watching TV in the mean time... I went it all the way, slipped the disc in, started VLC, passed the Lang & Subtitle menus, went to the movie and pressed the spacebar, Pause. HAnd over the laptop to the kiddo, said "that's it honey, it's paused you'll only got to press the spacebar again to watch your movie" 20 minutes later, I was upstairs & what, the big one is watching her movies on the TV. "Hey kiddo, I asked you to get me the Laptop back downstairs when you finished... But, what are you doin' anyway? She said that it "doesn't worked" and that Mom tried it as well & shot down the machine.
Fuck people, that's about FOSS Advocacy again: So we have a computer where you just CAN'T watch a movie, that's it? I mean, simply slip the disc and push Play? Fuck, that's nuts really.

I sure can watch a movie, but it involves the kind of trickery that nobody else on earth is willing to learn just to watch a movie.

But then, back to my fantasy list; among stuff I thing shoulg go just right is: networking several machines in a single LAN. will give you a glimpse of what I am talking about. The fun part is the one with VLC where you grab someone elses desktop, mouse et al. and toy around from your station, that's too fun. Kids love it and, when you do have kids not even able to play a DVD by themselves, it can be useful. It's over-the-shoulder peering too, there isn' much privacy left for your target. Still, it can do stuff when it comes to Remote Graphic Administration, and would be a great tool to monitor the Web actuvity of kids in a classroom fdor instance.

And Now, Ladies & Gents, for the Blopper: try to switch down the remotemachine and it will crash as soon as you confirm. /bang. Must have something to do with the way itloses connection; frozen hard I can tell. To switch off, you have to do like with ssh: /sbin/shutdown -h -P now

tons of screens

A GLMatrix screensaver thnigy is doing the background image in Enlightenment DR16:



Let's get the same, but at 80% opacity!



That's not much my style to just fill some webspace just to show activity, but I've been screen-capturing lot's of stuff &, what, let's share:

The Real-Life-Use of a good little hack: a terminal, transparent, set below: nice, usefull, so much funkier than the usual terminal... E16 always.


While the Transparent-Terminal-As-Background is really cool & is part of my everyday environnement now, even if I change 'bout anything else...

Yo people, That's it. Use' E DR16 & nothing else!

[well, yes, it seems I am back on E16 now. Bye Raster, Hi Kwo!

Killing Distros by the Dozen

Where is the fun here, ladies & gents ? I am a true apostle of Open Source Software; since I cannot code I do contribute to Documentation writing, I test innocuous stuff & report back to the maintainers. As a start, what was thrilling was the corpus of stuff to learn, the seemingly endless possibilities of tailor-made your system with sometimes chill-in-the-spine Root potentially destructive operations.

Now when you look at it straight in the face, openSUSE, UBUNTU, Fedora & al. would probably install flawlessly on your computer; They will not ask you one thousand questions during install (UBUNTU has become a really Slip-the-Disk & Forget operation as of now) so gone ois this part of the tweaking. That leaves you with the robustness of a secure, forgiving system that is open to (much more obscure) tweaks afterwards, if you gain the knowledge, if you raise the question, if you can afford the time spent. 'Cause otherwise, today's distro compared to 3 years ago feels much like the switch from W95 to XP, where you stood in control, and responsible if you brake something within 95/98/Me & became some kind of minor disturbance to the operating system that would re-paste the Not-To-Delete-Files for you after you knowingly deleted them because you don't need them: To hack XP you needed special tools, bruteforce-like. Ubuntu, but not only U, feels a lot like that today, whit the differenvce that SUPPOSEDLY everything is there under the hood, but you are somewhat discouraged from opening the bonnet. Think AppArmor, SELinux and such: we are not talking Secure Tools here, but Dumb-Proofed software because it is now intended for the masses. All the better says the advocate in me, while the LEGO fanatic thinks: Where's the fun ? The DIY ? In only two years of experience, things have become so tasteless, distros fight only on Shininess of Spalsh Screens & number of recognized WiFi cards...

Killing the First One: Ubuntu

As ranted earlier, U install didn't offer me the flexibility I wanted in the Hard Disk Mount/Format during said install. On the whole, I think Gnome is tasteless and the brownish theme just sucks (albeit I praise them for departing from the usual ubiquitous blueish that seems unavoidable since W3.1). It's a shame truly, since U has a core of fanatics that makes it the best forum around, and by far, I swear out of experience. I still hang there when I look for an answer, although I run an RPM based distro. Their aim was to seduce the mass; unsurprisingly that's the moment when an older population, nearer to the debut of the distro will step away, waving "Safe Trip" at the enthusiastic crowds coming aboard while we are leaving.

Some of us seems build like that; anything revered by more than 0.1% of the population just becomes less exiting.

So exit the tasteless Golf Rabbit of them all, the mighty U despite its community that so fierce you'd be sure someone, somewhere, would have attempted, documented and achieved anything you could dream of doing on your system. Exit the best software manager around (Synaptic) and its 17.000-some
available softwares...

Killing some more, but faster: Gentoo, Slackware, Debian

Gentoo never made it to X; thanks globally to the same usual issue regarding my 8800 Nvidia and the 1440x900 screen - although, it just NEVER made it, even in any safe mode. I am getting tired of the "No Screen Defined" warning, especially when you have one defined. They (Who "They3 ? 'Haven't got a clue; me maybe given the FOSS context) should re-work some of these messages. Debian played it even dumber, not recognizing one out of three perfectly identical HDD's; beside, it's the only one, if I remember well, that didn't hook itself to my Linksys router...

But all this is old news, kind of: in both cases, I re-downloaded (I am doing it again, right now) fresh install discs, wiped clean 2 partitions & srtarted all over since then; with same, lame result.

And then, on my somewhat trusty Fedora running Enlightenment with mostly KDE apps, I worked. Yeah, this happens; And I took some holidays even: The island of Bali seriously lack computers, at least where I went - namely volcanoes and coral reefs; I didn't really notice their absence to be honest.

And I came back, full of energy: I want Slackware to do what I want, not what Volkerding's decided! And I want Gentoo too! And it's been 3 full months since I haven't hacked a single config file, and the pile of .txt helpfiles printed at the time has gained serious dust on the corner of my desk...

Aiming at removing engage as Login Manager to switch back to the native KDE slackware provided, I realized I had forgot it all. Time, job, a bit of marine & mountain exhilaration has erased it clean, and I don't feel like going over it all over again; I'll stick to the mainstream, they are boring, sometimes dangerous (Fedora and it's Bleeding-Edge obsession!) resource-hungry (compiz! Glad I run E! Bandwidth!) but the other ones, the ones I praise for working the way I want just are too much for me.

Please nevertheless write down somewhere that even Slackware in it's r12 flavor started doing strange things with the .rc and init files, and coming from r11 I found a lot of classic stuff to be missing from their traditional place in r12. Fedora is even worse on this aspect though, with all the startup scripts being hidden somewhere and the full .rc architecture completely empty; same applies for the Kernel Sources that require a separate download & need you to build a mirror tree in your user account to be able to compile you own kernel... Shite.

Allright ladies and gents, it's getting late here & I don't feel I aw writting anything woth of awything anyway, so G'day to you in the Happy FOSS World.

Fedora survived, but for how long ?

Indeed folks; Now given the pace at which I update this thing, well yes I've been involved in real-world issues & spend a tad less time fooling around with this computer. To be fair, I spend an awful lot of time doing Lego Technic with the kids though.

Fedora survived, and yet on the moto (already advertised) of "Download More, Get Less". Scrambling the forums, I found this dependency issue to have been spotted already; the LiveCD is faulty, not me.

Guess what ? I downloaded the full DVD, over a 64kbps link, over the course of 5 nights... After that at least I got an install, fought the usual fight with xorg.conf for which it seems that anything not 1024x768 in VESA mode is utterly exotic & far too much bleeding edge for not crashing upon, and ended up with (several xorg.cong backups) no I mean, a usable distro that as soon as the update daemon kicked in gently proposed me with a mere 680mb of updates. Hmmpf. This took three more days for sure; I noticed that everything was VERY up-to-date, very, incredibly so...

And that's the summary of today's Fedora: @ release 7 I am already outdated, but anyway you can be sure that they will feed you around 100megs of updates a week. Don't kid me folks, if kernel 2.6.23 is out one week and an update is posted with a new kernel the following week, that's not only due to the massive core of acute developers out there dedicating their every single minute of lifetime into coding new, better, on the edge stuff: there's a FULL FUCKING LOT OF BUGSOLVING over there. Have a look for yourself, my fellow *nix-ers: everytime a major stuff get a major release (OO.org, firefox, the kernel,...) there'll be full versions to re-download several times in the following three or more weeks; my bet is that on one side they are not ready but nevertheless there is a pressure into increasing the release figures, which leads to the other hand: they don't test enough, check enough & find horrendous bugs as soon as the stuff is out in the open for real.

Let's take a short break from today's rants:

For a change, here comes one more of my 'shots. Admire the dire simplicity of Enlightenment DR16 (Yes, again, yes) running an idea I found on ubuntu-unleashed which proposed an overcomplicated way of getting your terminal becoming your background; well it took me three clicks with the mouse here to realize the same & I must recon this blogger to have pushed forward a very graphic, neat idea that puts the black terminal of death, boring and dull, right into your colorful, spinning (for compiz) or sliding (with E DR16) desktop. That's (fake) integration, but at its best & most fun.

A Quickie on Debian (and UBUNTU)

OK so the Fedora thing is flawed, mostly because the live disk not handling dependancies properly I agree, but yet I had to look in another direction.

A felt confident: Fedora7 was only the first of several distros on my desk awaiting to set itself on my new PC; reviewing them & choosing the best fit was supposed to be 80% pleasure and 20% learning interesting things.

Well, I learned some, indeed:

Debian install is exactly the same as the old ubuntu, prior to the live disk with an install icon on the desktop present favored strategy. Debian never reached my network hub, acknowledged only 2 out of three perfectly identical sata drives, and never entered Graphic Mode, saying in an error message that some xorg.conf file was faulty "no screen defined" - so far, OK, lets give it a look: at least I know where xorg.conf is (in /etc/X11), and I had the older desktop with openSUSE to compare with. Well, nothing was missing I am afraid to say, every item being defined & referenced in a seemingly logical way... sure some parameters where not the same, the very name of the items differing but straightforward... then, when it installed GRUB the bootloader on the HDD, it did not spotted FEDORA but only XP that the computer shop installed (for free, hum) on this new machine. Not only did I waste my time, but as well my previous install, grrrrrrrr.

So, we all know that debian is a great tool for others to develop on (and is always slightly late), so lets hop on to ubuntu 7.04, the most modern, up to date thingy, the one that's targeted to dumb users also. ubuntu, in live disk mode, was a tiny bit above: it gave me a graphical environnement, no network and three hard disks at least. Without the network, I dropped the ball since the fedora disk operated perfectly with my integrated network card, I assume it's not _that_ exotic. If ubuntu aims at being the easiest on earth, well, they have some way to go, still.

Enough for today, I am struggling with mounting permissions to be able to write to my other partitions in a fresh Fedora install. I tend to think I'll have to wait for openSUSE 10.3 to be released...

Always ready to try...
Sometimes slightly discouraged.