Linux

Want to win a war when they can’t even put gas in the car.

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Hi guys, I recently updated Arch and I got the new gtk3 stuff. All would be fine except for the fact that now, my gtk2 apps use a theme and the gtk3 ones use another (ugly) one. I searched the forum and I basically found that I should wait for gtk3 and gtk2 to become armonic or gtk2 apps use the gtk3 libraries

via Gtk3 apps in XFCE (Page 1) / Newbie Corner / Arch Linux Forums.

This is why Linux will never win on the desktop, and I have been a Linux desktop user for 5 years now.

No, it did not work.

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In short, KDE 4 is about one thing and one thing only: 3D rendered eye candy. If that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll get, in spades. But as a desktop, as a single, integrated, holistic sense of place and set of potentialities and operations that are intuitive, minimal, and streamlined and that support productivity, KDE 4 is an epic fail in a way that makes KDE 3 roll in its grave.

via KDE4: It hurt, but did it work? | Linux Journal.

That specific comment states the plain truth about KDE4. I tried to run it on my trusty Thinkpad T60 for a few days, finding out it is basically unusable with compositing turned off. Turning it on makes it work too much for too little return; I couldn’t even listen to music on Grooveshark without the music slowing down!

Linux + Bluetooth

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What a fucking joke. Save yourself the trouble and stick with Windows.

Yet another source of constant annoyance for the so-called “Year of Linux on the Desktop”. It is not worth your time to fight Linux on this.

C’mon, now

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I’ve been trying to get the damn Debian Wheezy installer to work via USB on a Thinkpad T60 for the past three days without any success. Sure, it works like a charm when put on a CD or a DVD and booting from there, but that is beside the point.

I’ve tried various methods I’ve found on the web and on the Debian wiki without avail. To use any of them, you need to fuck around with the terminal, or installing things (as in the case of unetbootin). As it is right now, most Linux installers still can’t easily be put on USB drives without fucking around on the command line and getting things wrong a few times.

I realize I’m just venting, but… really, it is now past mid-2012. Apple is selling its OS X via digital delivery. Microsoft is about to do the same with Windows 8, and did sell Windows 7 installers on USB drives.

Linux should have gotten there years ago, to make it easy for people to try it out and keep their files around with them. Instead, we have lots and lots of guides for “the perfect $LINUXDISTRO USB install”, all of which are outdated within a few months. This would have led to Linux spreading virally among the common user, instead of just staying in the nerd ghetto.

Combine this with motherboards implementing UEFI and Linux installers not supporting it, and the future is getting ever dimmer for “Linux on the desktop.” Next time someone says “This is the year of Linux on the desktop” I will laugh at them on their face.

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The correct time to back up your computer was today, two hours ago.

 

The easy way to print from Linux to Windows

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The usual way printing works on Linux is by connecting your printer directly to your system, or printing through IPP. But what if you need to print to a printer connected to a Windows system?

Here is how to get it working while keeping fuss to a minimum. Once again, these instructions are made with Debian Squeeze in mind, so adjust them if you’re using a different distribution. I used Windows XP but I believe these instructions should also work for Vista and Windows 7.

  1. In Windows, make sure the printer is shared.

    2. Make note of the printer’s share name and the system’s hostname, viewable in System Properties (right-click the My Computer icon).

  2. Install smbclient.

    3. # aptitude install smbclient

  3. In GNOME go to System/Administration/Printing. On the menu bar go to Server/New/Printer. You’ll probably have to provide your root password to continue.

  4. Click “Network Printer”, then select “Windows Printer via SAMBA.”

  5. On the right pane you’ll see a textbox to enter the address for the printer itself. Click Forward.

    6. You have to enter both the Windows hostname and the printer’s share name, so you’d type something like mywindowspc/myprinter. Make sure you get the case right.

  6. It is likely CUPS already has a working driver for your printer, so look for it on the list of drivers. If you want to provide a PPD file or look for another driver, you can also do that.

    7. In my own case there were three available drivers for the printer, so I went with the one marked “recommended” by the wizard.

  7. Assign a printer name, description, and location. You may have to re-enter your root password to save all settings.

  8. Print a test page.

That should do the trick. If it doesn’t work you can try using another print driver. If that still doesn’t work, try looking for a Linux driver for your printer.

Set Qt mouse pointer inside GNOME

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You don’t have to install theme packages, engines or extra apps. All you need is already on your Debian system:

# update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme There are 2 choices for the alternative x-cursor-theme (providing /usr/share/icons/default/index.theme).

Selection    Path                             Priority  Status
------------------------------------------------------------
* 0     /usr/share/icons/DMZ-White/cursor.theme   90    auto mode
  1     /usr/share/icons/DMZ-Black/cursor.theme   30    manual mode
  2     /usr/share/icons/DMZ-White/cursor.theme   90    manual mode

Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number: 1 update-alternatives: using /usr/share/icons/DMZ-Black/cursor.theme to provide /usr/share/icons/default/index.theme (x-cursor-theme) in manual mode.

If you’re not using Debian, it seems the way to go is to follow /usr/share/icons/default/index.theme with the following:

[Icon Theme]
Inherits=DMZ-Black

Either method sets the cursor theme systemwide through Xorg itself. To set it for a single user, add the following to ~/.Xdefaults:

Xcursor.theme: DMZ-Black
Xcursor.size: SIZE #optional

In my own case, I was using the the DMZ-Black theme on GTK applications, but Qt3/Qt4 applications (Amarok 1.4, Clementine, Skype, KeepassX) had the mouse pointer switch to DMZ-White when it entered their windows. Nothing that would cause trouble, but annoying if you want a consistent look across your environment.

As said before, this avoids unnecesary cruft on your system and works for all desktop environments you might have on your system.

Tips grabbed from here.

The no-bullshit Samba plus Nautilus network shares method.

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Here is how to setup Samba and GNOME Nautilus to allow user directory sharing without having to allow root access. These commands are made with Debian in mind, so if you want to use them for your Linux distribution, you’ll have to adapt them.

  1. Install samba and nautilus-share.

    2. # aptitude install samba nautilus-share

  2. Rename your smb.conf to smb.conf.master

    3. # cd /etc/samba
    # mv smb.conf smb.conf.master

  3. Add the following to smb.conf.master somewhere under the [global] stanza using your favorite text editor.

    4. security = SHARE
    usershare allow guests = Yes
    usershare owner only = No

  4. Run the following command:

    5. # testparm -s smb.conf.master > smb.conf

    This tests the samba master configuration file, then outputs the results to the file samba itself will use for its configuration. If it finds errors, it will warn you about them.

    According to the Samba docs, a small smb.conf file improves performance. It also improves readability once you’re familiar with Samba options.

  5. Restart samba.

    6. # /etc/init.d/samba restart

  6. Add your user to the sambashare group. If more people use the system and they need to share files, make sure to add them as well.

    7. # useradd -G sambashare foo

  7. Log out of your user session, then log back in.

  8. On Nautilus, when you right-click directories you will now see a “Sharing options” item. Through this item you can:
    • Share the folder, assigning a share name.
    • Allow read/write access.
    • Enable Guest access, which allows people without a user account on the system to access the share.

This last option is the most useful as people can now get stuff through the network without having to deal with usernames or passwords. Does this make the Linux system behave like a Windows system? Yes, it does.

There is something to be said, however, about the convenience of creating shares without having to muck around the smb.conf.master file whenever you want to make a change.

Cablemas DNS

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So it seems cablemas decided to block DNS requests (port 53) going out of their network. I’m not sure if they’re doing this at the network level — which would be extremely stupid on their part — or by reconfiguring their modem. Either way this means:

  • Cannot use OpenDNS or Google Public DNS for domain resolution.
  • I’m forced to use Cablemas DNS servers. They are very, very slow. Most lookups are above 20s, with 30s-40s latency being common.

Since DNS queries take long to resolve, internet connectivity is slow as hell. Enter DNS caching (DNS proxy).

Most DNS servers can do caching on the side (BIND, djbdns, dnsmasq) without too much additional work. The problem is most of the time the cache disappears when the computer is rebooted. If your system is a server, you’re fine. But what if you’re on a laptop or a desktop? It’s no good having a cache if you have to rebuild it every day.

There isalso the fact the electric system in Mexico isn’t the best, so often computers go down hard when the electricity fails. UPS units are expensive to put them on a single desktop computer.

So that’s when I discovered pdnsd. It’s a light DNS proxy that can act as a caching system, working on localhost to speed up queries.

Being on Debian Sid, all I had to do to install it was

# aptitude install pdnsd

When asked which mode to use, I chose ‘manual’. When it was done I added my ISP’s DNS servers like so to /etc/pdnsd.conf

server {
        label=cablemas;
        ip=200.95.144.3;
        ip=10.147.0.43;
        ip=10.147.0.15;
        timeout=30;
        uptest=ping;
        ping_timeout= 300;
}

You’re free to use other DNS resolvers like OpenDNS or Google Public DNS obviously. The caching will work regardless of what upstream server does the actual resolving.

Then set it up so it runs on boot by editing /etc/default/pdnsd

This sets up the daemon to work; you still have to set up your network interfaces to make use of the cache. In my own case my system is getting an IP address from the cablemodem itself dynamically, so I had to edit /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and enable the prepend domain-name-servers directive:

prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1

If you’re setting manually via /etc/network/interfaces, you’ll have to manually edit /etc/resolv.conf so your local DNS is queried first.

Once everything is done, bring down the interface (eth0 in my case):

# ifdown eth0

Then bring it back up:

# ifup eth0

I’m pretty sure it’d be same for wlan interfaces. This should be more useful on laptops or systems that connect to networks of unknown quality.

This all goes to show Cablemas is one of the worst ISPs around and you should avoid it like the plague.

Sources:

Debian

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Lenny is good. Rock solid, just like the name ‘Stable’ promises.

But it wasn’t enough. So I updated to Squeeze.

That wasn’t enough. Went up to Sid. These guides helped.

So now I’m running the latest and would-be-greatest. Going to run a server with it.

Yes, I’m insane.

Songbird

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Used version 1.2.0, which is the one currently being offered as stable. The application itself takes some extra work to get it going since it’s a XUL application. There are pre-built Ubuntu packages which you don’t get from the developers themselves, but rather from third parties who offer them. This means you have to trust these packagers when performing the installation.

The program doesn’t integrate into the desktop environment at all either. Sure, you can install “feathers” (skins) on it, but if you like a unified look across all your applications you’re out of luck. It can’t be that hard to use system bindings, surely.

Any playlists imported into it need to be coded in ANSI (ISO-8859-15). If you try to import anything in UTF-8 you will get lots and lots of ghost songs in the database. In my case I ended up with 4K ghost songs in a library of 13.4K songs. All these songs would have to be rated again. Screw that.

Now, here’s the kicker. It likes to eat RAM like a legislator takes money out of the public treasury, often going into the hundreds of megabytes of RAM usage.

Gotta keep looking for a decent music player. There’s gotta be something comparable to Winamp at the very least.

Exaile

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After my update to Karmic Koala I found myself in need of a new music player, specially after using the godsforsaken mess that is Amarok 2. In my search for a new music player for Linux I happened to find Exaile. It describes itself thusly:

Exaile is a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python. It incorporates automatic fetching of album art, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm scrobbling, support for many portable media players including iPods, internet radio such as shoutcast, and tabbed playlists.

It takes a lot of inspiration from Amarok 1.4 in its layout and design choices and since it’s written in GTK you don’t have to install any KDE dependencies.

Even though it’s up to version 3.0.2 at the time of this writing, it should be considered alpha software. Beta at the most:

  • Playlist import/export doesn’t really work. You can import only from M3U playlists and export to XSPF playlists. The other choices don’t work.
  • Overuse of playlist tabs.
  • Most plugins don’t work the way they’re supposed to.

On the plus side, the developers offer a repository for it, so you don’t have to jump through hoops like you do when you want to use SongBird.

After attempting to use it for a couple of days, I’ve decided it’s not for me. Hopefully I’ll get SongBird working without too many problems.

Sonido en Linux, o la falta de

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Tons esta este articulo en el sitio del New York Times acerca del enfoque de Ubuntu en lo Mainstream. Es un buen articulo. Pero nunca va a pasar.

Preguntas por que? Por el sonido. Ya sabes, la cosa que tu cerebro procesa como entrada auditiva.

No voy a decir mucho al respecto, ya que otros lo han dicho mejor de lo que yo lo podría decir:

Yo solamente he tratado de hacer funcionar una diadema con Skype en mi computadora. Tuve que molerle a las cosas durante una hora antes de que Skype funcionara como se supone debe hacerlo. Esto con una diadema barata de 50 pesos sin control alguno; nada de esas chidas diademas USB para mi por que ya se que no funcionan con el sistema operativo de mi elección.

Todos esos APIs, servidores de sonido, sistemas y demonios…. son ganado Augeo cagándose en el establo; necesitan ser llevados al rastro y el establo ser limpiado. Quiza el Sr. Shuttleworth lo pueda hacer.

Sonido en Linux? Esta completamente roto; cada vez que veas artículos anunciando “Este es el año de Linux en el escritorio” por favor procede a abusar del autor hasta que te canses.

Digo esto como un usuario de Linux — tanto en casa como en el trabajo — y como alguien que empuja software libre encima de todo mundo. Supongo tendré que dejar de empujar la gente hacia Apple ahora.

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