lynx; the workaround

That's a screenshot (again!) of one terminal running two instances of the "lynx" text-based web browser, allowing you to log into multiple accounts in gmail at the same time, within the same window, only one Tab away.

Lynx is truly configurable, supports mouse, scrollbar, bookmarks &, as it's best feature, doesn't display any graphics: you avoid most ads, the things loads pretty quick. Lynx is an especially useful browser if you are over a poor connection, suffer from bandwidth limitation (costs).

The screenshot is taken from my new, fresh install of openSUSE10.2. Lynx is running in a gnome-terminal over the Enlightenment DR17 window manager. The still camera you see in the toolbar is, indeed, the snapshot tool.

Dropped the ball on Slackware

Yep, indeed.

This a real, if unfortunate, Work Story. We are not talking Leisure activity here: I got a quota issue with our mailservers at phpnet.org: huge amount of spam, first, and a host that changes your mb-per-mailbox allowance on our phareps.org website all the time. Currently, down from "unlimited" to 38 megs. bitches.

As I tend to be over-paranoid with stability & safety of work, and I had to re-work all the backup strategy & auto-forwards of mails, I choose to leave my current workstation untouched, and switch to a new install, erasing the current TestBed openSUSE 10.2 with E17 of which you can enjoy the screenshots below. A pity, but openSUSE failed the tryout to become my next workstation distribution, upgrades & general Package Managing System too slow, buggy. And, there is all that fuss about Novell signing a tie-your-hands yourself, buy-the-rope-to-be-hanged-with-yourself with M$, hence being flamed by the OpenSource Community. Not that I have that much of an opinion to that matter, but OK, it stinks & 10.2 wasn't that convincing. A shame for my dependable 9.3 (that actually started to get old & buggy as well).

So, with remote work at hand, emails forwarding, new mailboxes to create, new accounts-rules & filtering to handle, and a workstation that wasn't getting younger, it was time for a fresh install of some dependable, trustable workhorse to become the new core of my mostly-sitting-at-a-desk job. Guess what, I wanted Slackware, one of the oldest distros out there, with a rock-solid reputation & a core of fanatics. With the release of Slackware 11 equipped with an option to handle modern 2.6 kernels, it looked that the time was right. And, given it's developper orientation, I may even Compile myself someday...

This is about work, but I needed to do it all after hours, so I warned the family I'll be handcuffed to my PC for the whole weekend, and started on the Saturday. Plan was one day to install & configure the new OS, and Day Two to get done the online job and its related retrieval-download jobs.

Failed, it's already Sunday afternoon now, and I only sterted installing... openSUSE 10.2!

Target was tu run Slackware 11 with Enlightenment DR16.

Yep. Sackware, after 1 full day of tampering, left me with no sound, no mouse, no internet, and an US keyboard instead of AZERTY one. But, I did not dropped the ball THAT fast, some edit of config files allowed me to retrieve the correct keyboard, browsing the forums showed me that a lot of knowledgeable people won't post a helping link to assist newbies (typical reply is "google around mate" if not 'RTFM you jerk!". I didn't even post myself, didn't had the time to wait for an answer. Bad vibes from the Linuxquestions/slackware forums, I can tell.

Mouse decidedly did not wanted to move, info on forums where laconic if not insulting, I knew I'll have to address the sound issue sooner or later anyway. I actually dropped the ball when I changed the runlevel to 5 so to speed up the X login, and noticed a bug that locked the ctrl+alt+F1 pseudo-terminal access: can't get out & back to X, can't restart X, have to log onto tty6 to reboot once more, hoping some edits of configs worked this time... Oh, and I forget the Sarting Step: I wanted to rely on GRUB as boot manager, so did not installed LILO, expecting to be able to copy backed-up GRUB files to the right location & edit them. A PITA, when you finish Slack Install, it must reboot, the created-by-slack floppy failed, grub was NOT in place so I had to go again with the install DVD, get out of it, mount manually every partition needed, copy the thing, back off & start again... Pfuh.

End of Day One left me with a command-line boot up sequence, with no X login. No Mouse, no Network, no sound. Dropped by sunday noon.

Now, what else to use ? A fresh SuSE93? c'mon, 93 is really outdated... this EliveCD that runs on Debian & implements DR16 & 17 ? Okay, cool but a bit not on the Most Trusted Distro list, this stuff is confidential, I needed a base system that can switch to E DR16 at will, not that skeleton of a system for all purposes. Sadly, feeling like dropping the ever-broken unuseable Jaguar Type E for a Toyota build-for-the-masses reliable Camry, I shoose to slip an UBUNTU disk in the tray. I run UBUNTU on this laptop, it's great. Just feels like leisure, not work, but the community is great. Let's go down the Build-for-the-masses road then, swallow your technical pride, face it, you are not good enough for slackware (spotted on the forums: "Slackware is for real men"!).

You know what? UBUNTU installer, which is the simplest-fastest to use, wanted to re-format my SuSE93 Swap partition, no way I can get it NOT to touch it & use the former Slackware Swap Partition instead. That's the issue with dumb-user setup systems, easy and fast but they do what they want. One of the main moto in the linux community is the ability to control things, but the way UBUNTU is targeted makes it a winner for most systems, and can lack THIS tiny bit of flexibility you need sometimes. And I don't like their No Root user strategy, it's not safer (you can destry anything with "sudo") and I do like to get Rooted like once a month.

[Funky stuff: on the 6.06 laptop, the non-root policy is broken, YAY! dunno what mistake I did (it was around the time I implemented enlightenment DR16), but I can su to root now, cool]

So, back to openSUSE 10.2 then, the one that WAS on the system before, and its wonderfull installer that's slow, but in full control... I know I will struggle with the updating system, I know I hate the XEN, YaST & other SuSE helping hands, but I know I'll have a mouse, sound & internet. DVD's & mp3's will be for later, of course, time is running & there is no "automatix" script available like in UBUNTU. The real Copy & unpack of the 4Gb of stuff I selected to install is about 80 minutes to get done, that's reasonnable. I will skip the Online Update during Setup though, last time it was 350megs heavy... Yikes.

That's all for today folks, the laptop is gonna do real Mail Admin tasks from now, while I setup the Desktop on suse102 to retrieve & keep safe all our mailboxes: only 20 of them!

Enlightenment DR17 on openSuSE10.2

Hi Community

I gave a go on Enlightenment DR17 lately. Got pros & cons, but on the Look side it's a winner.
[more on the pros & cons later, including comparison with DR16 which is still my favorite]




This is running on openSuSE10.2, using the .rpm package available on the GURU repositories, buid date is 01/01/2007. Not flawless, it's PITA to start, especially if youy want your Flashdrives to show up.

No Scanning & Printing tested yet, just fooled around with these screenshots listening to a webradio, watched a DVD in Borderless mode, fiddled whith this & taht, you see. Pottering around.








To get this as my workhorse, I need to sort out this automount of Flashes, find an easy way to log in (what I found on the net on this topic is frightening, the kind of edit of Config Files you'll be damned rather than touch them by any means)









As of now, I log as normal user with KDE, check my flashes, then start another session in Failsafe mode in the terminal of which I can then order "enlightenment_start" & get in. Pff...





The image above are some shots of my usual 9 virtual desktop setup. You'll recognize the Baby from previous deskshots, this time inside a gnome-terminal without Toolbar & borderless.

And, these backgrounds: yes, moving, animated ones. Funny, an not that ressource-inetnsive (these one at least, more heavy ones do not run that smoothly on this ol' 1.6 box).

Easiyer to handle than DR16 actually, more feature-packed (so, more confusing at first), it missed the straightforward, sleek & fast look & feel of DR16. My 10-years old daughter favour it, though, as there is proper menu lauch and these so funny backgrounds.

openSuSE 10.2

I am testing openSuSE 10.2 on a spare partition as of now. Can't determine if it's truly better, it just seems not to share the same bugs with SuSE 93 !

In 10.2 there is serious trouble managing multiple panels - managing them, not using them. It seems that the properties of each panel does not reflects the one you find in "configure desktop" window, and you need to reboot to see the destroyed panels disappear from the said window. Well, when your layout is done, it's not an everyday trouble anymore.

Very nice start menu by the way, clever & fun. Unusual, excellent in KDE, not as good in Gnome.

The main drawback everyone complains about is the software manager, for me it's slow but OK (Using YasT); I've got more inconsistencies with the auto-updater which sometimes throw 32 updates @ me & sometimes Zero. With my connection here in Cambodia, 32 updates overkills the connection anyway.

I may use it for real though, if Enlightenment works: I love this WindowManager, never got it right on SuSE 93.

Improving my Graphic Skills

I did some banners yesterday to advertise our organisation on the web, using The Gimp. Lately, I had a short argument about Win vs Linux, where I stand to the point that Linux is good enough as long as you can do everything you need with it

Isn't that true ? Look at your needs, and then define what you buy/use/promote. If I am not wrong, unless you are desperately a fashion victim, that's the way we do in every other field, buy things, when we can afford them, depending on usage of it. Err, OK, mostly or hopefully, I agree.

So, if that's the way you buy a book, a car, rent a house, shop for food, why not applying the same to software? This Linux box of mine, SuSE93, does it all. Almost:

On the Pro Front:
-No equivalent to Adobe Premiere, so can't edit our promotional DVD's, but given my processor age, it's an issue I can't really address,
-Haven't found yet Animated GIF soft, but sure it should exists somewhere.

On the Leisure Activity side:
-No Easy 3D modelling tool. several available, all a nightmare to use if you are not Milkshape/StudioMAX specialist,
-Not the latest in 3D games, but plenty of them anyway.

Out of this scope, I can't see anything missing: kmail is the best-ever email client I worked with, OPERA & FIRFOX are great web browsers, OpenOffice does the job pretty well if you have not too much of charts in it. Only the equivalent to PowerPoint is under-average in terms of compatibility, but not to the point I can't send presentations to colleagues.

So far, so good: there is actually a lot of different choices out there (where I would not actually recommend anyone going for an OS/2 install).

One small point: it's free. Looking at all I got in my box & in the laptop - what a value here, without license expiration, shareware online payments, secret codes not to loose after install.

And one, main point, that makes the full difference: If you need a soft, you'd usually google it, right ? browse through 1 thousand vendors site, try to find a demo, download & try, get expired, re-install, run into compatibility issues and so on... Given the very nature of Open Source, you don't do that with Linux: You got this "repertoire" of available softs tailor-made for your flavor of Linux, choose them using keywordsearch, the soft then checks compatibility & missing items that are needed; Click start & you got it! Currently, UBUNTU has 17.000+ softs available, not somewhere on the net, not by outside vendors, no, just trough a simple interface which allow you to browse & select!

That Soft-at-hand feature, and the Multiple Virtual Desktops, makes me an addict.

Changed My Desktop

I was browsing several tabs @ the same time of looking for a new wallpaper, saving a lot for later review, I eventually found on wallpapergate.com, section "anime", sub-section "anime babes" this wonderfull drawing which I edited for color channels using the Gimp (Tools/Color Tools/Hue-Saturation). I can't post a link since they change their index all the time, probably on the purpose of forbidding pepole to link ressources to their server too often. Author is Unknown, unfortunately.


You are aware of the Multiple Deskops System on Linux, right ? if not, browse below for my previous entries on the topic.

This one above is more or less the original one, I only enlighted the background a bit.

Full Black & White on Light Background

Black & White the Dark Way

This one is my RGB version: Red, Green, Blue...

Original Body on Black & White back

The Settings aren't finished yet, but I enjoyed quite a change in look on my screen: see below.

Actually, it all came from deviantart.com, where I saw this wallpaper used in a BlackBox theme by jimmyblack. If you run BlackBox or FluxBox, enjoy:
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/35522223/?qo=41&q=blackbox+boost%3Apopular+age_sigma%3A24h+age_scale%3A5+in%3Acustomization%2Fskins%2Fthemes%2Fblackbox

Lots of fun.

OffTopic: If you google around "Manga Wallpaper", you'll end up with lots of porn stuff. For a bit of first-hand experience, I am looking for this since a while ago, and, given the childish nature of mangas drawing, you'll understand some stuff comes borderline... If not totally pedophillic. I am happy to report here that I found really shitty stuff through Del.icio.us, reported it both to del.icio.us & the three first watchdogs I found on the internet, and yes, this website was now a deadlink one month later when I resumed my searches on the topic.
I am nothing of a netCop, but I guess anyone around here got its limits.

Enlightenment, Ubuntu Latest

Seems I can't get to run Enlightenment on my SuSE 93 desktop. I tried downloading the highly fashionnable DR17 &, yes, compiling it myself without success... Forget me when it comes to self-compiled stuff: Never works with me. So, LATER I found that Enlightenment was available, both in DR16 & 17 flavour, in the "Package Manager" (this tool dedicated toinstal & remove software on linux). Now, I know my package manager has some flaws in the way it addresses & updates the servers holding the softwares, but yet, It looks just as easy as click on "Install Package". Well, I bet that without any knowledge on how to remove the half-installed previous attempt, it cannot work in any way.

More of my mistakes: the lates release of DR16 & 17 are suppose to co-exist peacefully, so I tried installing both. No Way.

I have deleted anything Enlightenment 17-related on the hard disk, installed DR16 only from the package manager, and now Enlightenment do not show up on the login/choose your session type screen. I'll try uninstall-reinstall later on. This tastes like Windows, doesn't it ?

On the Testing Drive, I tried Ubuntu latest, the 6.10 "edgy-something", also with Enlightenment DR16. Worked OK, as usual with this f**cking way of releasing a new version every 6 months I spend some hours configuring the system to my taste, ten tried to truly work - for that, I needed this Package Manager again (called Sybaptic in Debian distributions): Let's have true fun here, this dumb soft tried to access it's sources for the softwares on... 127.001.001, which is my computer intenet address... Sure, I wasn't able to download much...

Yeah, dream about it.

Yeah, dream about it: modem ? not working; as soon as I was in the office in Battambang - the main office of the NGO "Phare Ponleu Sepak" I am working for, I tried to get my mails: The thing connects, and disconnects automatically as soon as I try to use it (firing Opera or clicking "Fetch Mail" for instance); Good.

Enlightenment is definitely nice, but beware of what they call Epplets: if you start one, you'll be in a mess if you do not want it to be starting again at next boot. Destroying it just makes 2 samples to reappear the next time. And so on, and so on... Killing indeed. At some point, I ended up with 16 occurrences of "Toolbox", 10 of "Emixer" and so on.

Now, my SuSE93 box is slowly decaying. The automatic upgrade still works, so I guess overall stability is not threatened, but I cannot fill in repositories for extra software download anymore: the form window is dead, with the empty fields unreachable in a non-stretchable window.

Lately, with the Ubuntu laptop & its brand new 6.06LTS release, I (and many others) experienced troubles with the Security repositories as well, with Synaptics, the software in charge of keeping the system up to date & to install and remove programs unable to download list of files from them.

That's not serious, and I was lucky I did not fall into the wrong X11 update they released some weeks ago: it was faulty, and killed the desktop system of many users, leaving them with a black terminal instead. If, like me, you don't know nothing about "sudo apt-get" & the like, you are dead.

Bad times, great times. Shitty times this time.

Tech Update

Some more around recent exhilari-wathever times with the Laptop: 
Got Dual Screen solved,
 it look I now have a Modem working for when on the move, 
and I found a fantastic Window Manager to add up to this
 attractive piece of technology;

Check out www.enlightenment.org for more.

A Modem, Better and quicker looks, and the ability to use the tiny thing for presentations with an external videoprojector, it's coming ladies & gentlemen.

Modem thanks to www.linuxant.com

The dual screen thing is very impressive -and quite a hack: Originally, the Vaio PGN-T17GS is not ment to do more than replicating your screen on the external output, which is problematic given the wxga (widescreen) nature of its display.

Out of factory, locked on XP, you cannot display different things on the two outputs. Now, thanks to Xinerama, ubuntu forums and a german guy from HK called Wieman01, I successfully enabled Dual Head & fool around with a screen def of  1280x1792, they are stacked/configured one above the other & allow me to use the small laptop LCD as a Dashboard for the things happening on top. With the added glamour featured by Enlightenment, it's cheer Class. Slowly appearing windows, transparency, minimalism (lack of menubar/systemtray/icons) & just plain elegant design makes this trully appealing. Techno-aristocratic, yes indeed, but so good.

cheerio, life's good today.

If you look at the Deskshot below, you'll see my usual stolen-punk-baby-blue, with not much than the display of a transparent "iconBox" where minimized softs go, the 2x2 virtual desktops in 1280x768 mode, and a row of tiny "epplets" featuring a timestamp, a command-line fied, music and battery + a toolbox of buttons to access the most usefull softwares.

Yes, I added a little Logo: it;s the official Tux truncated by a line in a color taken from the baby's sunglasses on top of the VAIO sign. Nice huh?

Thanks to The Gimp for Graphic work on this.

Sleek. Hard to understand, pain in the ass to set up, crashed twice in three days, totally counter-intuitive, and

just plain gorgeous.

That's the Laptop DeskShot !

 
That' it ! The Sub-Vaio running ubuntu with the Enlightenment Window Manager. Great, sleek looks, good speed. love it.