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A new laptop and time to try a new distro

December 8, 2010 No comments

I have already mentioned that my PC is getting on a bit, and that the CD/DVD drive is pretty shaky these days. A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to thinking about a replacement and, yesterday, it turned up making me the proud owner of a shiny blue Dell Inspiron 17R.

With the new hardware, I am also intending to take another look at Sabayon. This is a distro I played around with earlier this year and one that has a lot to like. It’s a solid – and gorgeous looking – distro that does a great job of handling whatever media you throw at it. This media-orientation is highlighted by the fact that the distro integrates the XBMC media centre very nicely – and this is something I do want to spend more time with.

I did run into some issues with the distro and, due to a combination of lack of time and only having one PC, eventually re-installed Ubuntu. Now, though, strikes me as being a good time to see if I can put together a laptop environment that fits what I want to do.

The first step was to squish Windows – or resize the Windows partition as small as it will go. And some credit should go to Microsoft here as Windows 7 does make it very easy to resize your OS partition. I still have the Dell Recovery partition to deal with but am intending to get rid of that when I am ready to start installing Sabayon.

The ISO is downloaded and has been burned to a DVD. So here goes…

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Understanding the Open-Source Quality Process

November 1, 2010 No comments

One of the concerns often floated whener people talk about implementing open-source solutions in a corporate environment is around the security, trust-worthiness, of the code. This is a concern that stems from a failure to understand how open-source development is done.

This month’s System i News addresses this concern by explaining how open source development works. It’s worth reading the full article but if you don’t the essential quote is this:

Just because someone has access to the code doesn’t mean that they can inject changes into that code unseen or un-reviewed — the exact opposite is actually the case.

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Improving Ubuntu performance on older hardware

September 11, 2010 7 comments

I first tried Ubuntu way back in 2007 and finally abandoned Windows when Hardy Heron came out on April 2008. At the time Ubuntu was a lot faster than Windows XP – and probably still is. However, I have found that as time has progressed it has started to creak a bit on my desktop. I tried a few other distros earlier this year but eventually came back to Ubuntu mainly because it does just work.

A few weeks ago I had a bit of time and started looking around for lighter distros again. At this point I discovered that my CD/DVD drive had finally crapped out to the extent that burning an ISO was a gamble and trying to boot from it was hopeless. So now it’s time for Plan B – rip out all the stuff that I’m not using.

First to go is Gwibber. I started using this shortly after I signed up to Twitter and it does have some nice features. However it has also become something of a memory hog and appears to be struggling somewhat with the authentication changes Twitter recently implemented. Right now I’m satisfying my microblogging cravings with Pino on Identi.ca and am not missing Twitter at all. Even though Gwibber isn’t running on my PC, gwibber-service is sucking up memory so it’s been completely uninstalled.

Next to go is Ubuntu One. I know there is a fair bit of hype around this but, since it was introduced I can count the number of times I’ve used it on the thumb of one hand. The ubuntuone-synchdaemon is sucking up a sizeable chunk of my minimal memory, so it has to go.

Next to go is DesktopCouch. The desktopcouch-service is costing me half as much memory as Ubuntu One was and, since I’m no longer using Gwibber, I don’t need it. The question of why a twitter client should need any sort of database is something I shall leave to more surreal minds than mine.

Not deleted but no longer used is Firefox. For a while I have been using Epiphany as my main browser – it’s blisteringly fast very light, and has by far the best approach to bookmarks that I have seen. Rather than having to maintain a bunch of folders to manage your bookmarks what you do with Epiphany is simply tag each bookmark with as many or as few tags as you want and then let the browser figure out the folder structure for you.

There are a few services that I don’t expect to use but might. These have not been uninstalled but have been removed from my Startup Applications. They are; the Bluetooth Manager (I have a Bluetooth dongle but it’s horribly unreliable); the Evolution Alarm Notifier (I don’t use alarms in Evolution); and the Power Manager (I have a desktop PC, not a laptop).

Since Upgrading to Ubuntu Lucid, I’ve found that the memory usage on my PC regularly rises to 80% and everything starts grinding to a halt. I’m now using less than 50% of the available memory and am, once again, enjoying a slick and speedy desktop experience.

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Pino: another microblogging client

August 22, 2010 2 comments

Until recently, my microblogging client of choice has been Gwibber. When it was first released, Gwibber was fast, stable and – most importantly – allowed me to follow multiple streams from the same window. But time moves on and Gwibber has become increasingly bloated and, frankly, a lot less stable than it should be.

So now I’m giving Pino a whirl. It’s not in the Ubuntu repositories yet, but it can be grabbed from the Vala team PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vala-team/ppa
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:troorl/pino
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pino

I’m impressed so far. Pino is fast and light and the only problems I’ve encountered so far can be put down to the fact that Twitter is being unbelievably unresponsive – again.

It would be nice, however, if I could follow both streams in the same window.

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World Sunlight Wallpaper

July 20, 2010 No comments

I’ve just noticed that die.net has a world sunlight map – a computer-generated illustration of the earth’s patterns of sunlight and darkness updated every three hours. A bit of poking around revealed that the map comes in various sizes and I started thinking about trying to turn it into a desktop wallpaper. So here goes.

First up is a short Bash script to download the image to my Backgrounds folder. Obviously, you need a Backgrounds folder for this to work, or you can change the script to point to a folder you do have.
#!/bin/bash
cd ~/Pictures/Backgrounds
wget -r -N http://static.die.net/earth/mercator/1280.jpg

I saved this as Sunlight.sh and then set up a Crontab to execute the script every three hours:
# m h dom mon dow command
0 0,3,6,9,12,15,18,21 * * * ~/Scripts/Sunlight.sh

So now the image will be downloaded every three hours to ~/Pictures/Backgrounds/static.die.net/earth/mercator and it is a simple case of changing your desktop background to use this.

When the new image is downloaded, your wallpaper will automatically use it.

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Linux none

Unexpected Inconsistency: Run Fsck Manually

July 14, 2010 No comments

Here’s a good one. If your PC doesn’t shut down cleanly, Linux will carry out a filesystem check to clean up the stray bits of crud. Sometimes, however, this automatic cleanup will halt and tell you: Unexpected Inconsistency: Run Fsck Manually

So you need to know a bit about the fsck command. What this command does is checks and (optionally) repairs your file system, and it’s the repair that you need to use.

The basic format of the command is:
fsck [options] /dev/partition

So you need to know what partition to check. Normally, the Unexpected Inconsistency error will tell you this. If not, you can check the partition name using
mount | grep ' on / '

You need the partition to be unmounted before you try to fsck it. So unmount it:
umount /dev/partition

And then do the fsck:
fsck -y /dev/partition

The -y in the above command tells fsck to attempt to fix every filesystem corruption it detects. If you don’t use this option, you will have to answer a ‘fix this?’ question about every bit of filesystem corruption it detects.

Then reboot, and you’re done.

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Honesty in advertising

July 5, 2010 No comments

Via The Register

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Humour, Linux none

Stellarium: My new favourite toy

June 14, 2010 No comments

Stellarium screenshot I’ve been playing around with Stellarium for most of the weekend and finding it utterly fascinating. The program is a free and open-source planetarium that runs under Linux, Windows or Mac OSX and it shows you a realistic 3D view of the night sky. This is impressive in itself and provides a useful tool for deciding which are the best nights to take your binoculars outside. But there is much more to it than this.

As well as allowing you to select any location on Earth, Stellarium also allows you to pick locations elsewhere in the Solar System. This is the closest I will ever get to standing on Mars and watching the Earth rise and, even virtually, it’s a stunning sight.

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eBooks on the move

June 12, 2010 No comments

Screenshot As someone who is unable to resist a freebie, I have acquired a number of novels in various electronic formats over the past few years. When offered these books, I download them with every intention of reading them but not a great deal of thought as to how or when.

Obviously, I could read any or all of these on my PC but the reality is that sitting in front of a screen is not a comfortable position for ploughing through 400 pages of fiction. So I have finally taken the plunge and installed FBReader on my N810. It’s lovely.

As you can see from the screen shot, the display is nice and clear and when you go to full-screen mode you get a decent sized page of text which can be conveniently navigated by way of the + and – buttons on the top of the device. FBReader supports a variety of formats including Fictionbooks (FB2), ePub and Mobi (excluding DRM’ed files). One format that it doesn’t support, however, is PDF. Guess what format most of my downloads are in?

Luckily there is Calibre.

Calibre is an eBook library manager but it also includes a stack of conversion options – including PDF to FB2. The conversion is not always perfect and odd bits of extraneous data can end up in the FB2 file although it looks like the issue is down to poorly structured PDFs rather than a problem with Calibre. Since FB2 is an XML format, imperfect conversions can be very easily fixed using the find and replace options in your text editor of choice.

And just to expand my ever-growing pile of unread books even more, I have found a few sites that distribute eBooks for free, including ManyBooks.net (who have an RSS feed) and Fictionbook-lib.org.

I’m still not entirely convinced how well a small, backlit screen will work as a replacement to reading a full-sized ink on paper novel but being able to fit a small library in my pocket is certainly convenient. The real test will come when we next go away which is very likely to turn into a test of comfort versus convenience.

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Linux, Mobile , , ,

Firefox Performance Tip: Clean up the cruft

May 20, 2010 No comments

I have found, after I’ve been using Firefox for an extended period of time, that it slows right down and starts to become quite a bad memory hog.

This can be resolved by compacting your SQLite database. Close down Firefox first and then past this command into a terminal window:

for f in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $f 'VACUUM;'; done

Voila! Your Firefox is as good as new

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