Traveling plans for the first half of 2009 //at 16:12 //by abe

Since the time between the years is traditionally family time for me, I never were at the Chaos Communication Congress. So I wasn’t at 25C3 either. All the more I look forward to HAR2009 this summer (13th to 16th of August near Vierhouten in the Netherlands), but also because, for the last three years I always have been in the Netherlands for one week in summer, sailing with friends on the IJsselmeer.

But before HAR2009, there will be a bunch of other events to visit and people to meet in real life:

• I’m looking forward to see @evan, @cemb and many other identicatis in real life at Microblogging Conference ‘09 in Hamburg next week on Friday and Saturday (23rd and 24th of January). Will go there by train.
• Two weeks later there will be FOSDEM in Brussels (7th and 8th of February) where I hopefully will meet Savago from the Amora Project and many other friends from the FOSS community. Will go there either by train or car.
• On 14th and 15th of March, the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage take place. I’ve submitted two talks for beginners and will be there with the usual suspects from Symlink (Venty, dino and P2501 so far). We’ll go there by train.
• Luckily not overlapping with the VCFe this year is the SPEZI at Germersheim near Karlsruhe which takes place on 25th and 26th of April. I plan to go there, maybe by train and Brompton, but nothing yet sure.
• The, one week later over the long weekend around the 1st of May there will be Vintage Computer Festival Europe (VCFe) 10.0 at Munich featuring Raffzahn. Will be there with the usual suspects. I’ll maybe prepare an exhibition (“Debian on dead hardware”, i.e. PowerPC, Sparc, Alpha, etc. or so) or a talk, but not yet sure. Will go there by (vintage) car as usual.

Then there will be the big summer holidays driving around in the middle of Europe with the 2CV and taking part in most likely:

• Sailing with friends from 31st of July to 7th of August,
• HAR2009 one weekend later, and
• FrOSCon at St. Augustin near Bonn another weekend later.

This also means that I’ll probably miss:

• DebConf 9 at Extremadura (Spain) from 16th to 30th of July (can’t get so fast from Spain to neither the Czech Republic nor the Netherlands with the 2CV),
• The 18th International 2CV Meeting at Velebudice, Czech Republic from 28th of July to 2nd of August (overlaps with sailing)-:, and
• Bünzli 18 from 14th to 16th of August at Winterthur, Switzerland (overlaps with HAR2009).

… at least unless one of the other events I plan to visit doesn’t take place as expected or my plans change heavily.

P.S.: Anyone thinks this amount of events justifies a Dopplr account? ;-) Or is there somewhere a free online service similar to Dopplr, but runs software under the GNU Affero General Public License like e.g. identi.ca and many other Laconica instances do for microblogging?

How I use my virtual desktops //at 14:09 //by abe

Many months ago I stumbled upon this German written meme about how users use their virtual desktops. I use virtual desktops since my very early Unix times (tvtwm on Sun Sparc SLC/ELC/IPX with greyscale screens running SunOS 4.x), so in the meanwhile I use them nearly everywhere the same way.

Short Summary

3x5, no overlapping windows, either tiling or fullscreen, keyboard navigation, xterms, yeahconsole, FVWM, panel for systray.

Window Manager of Choice

My window manager of choice is FVWM since more than a decade. I tried others like Sawfish, Metacity and Compiz, but I couldn’t get them behave like the FVWM I got used to, so I always came back.

Since I hate overlapping windows, I use FVWM a lot like a tiling window manager. FVWM has this nice function to maximize windows so that they occupy as much space as available, but do not overlap other windows. This function was also often missing when I tried other window managers. I though do not want to use real tiling window managers since I have a few sticky windows around (e.g. the panner with the virtual desktops and xosview) and they shouldn’t be overlapped either.

Virtual Desktops

Switching between virtual desktops is done with the keyboard only – with Ctrl-Shift as modifier and the cursor keys. The cursor keys are usually pressed with thumb, ring and small finger of the right hand. Which hand presses Ctrl and Shift depend on the situation and keyboard layout, but it’s usually either ring and small finger of the left hand, or pointer and middle finger of the right hand. So I’m able to switch the virtual desktop with only one hand.

I have always three rows of virtual desktops and usually four or five columns.

The top row is usually occupied with xterms. It’s my work space. The top left workspace usually contains at least one xterms with a shell and one with mutt, my favourite e-mail client since nearly a decade. At home the second left virtual desktop in the top row usually contains a full-screen Liferea (my preferred feed reader) while at work it contains the GNU Emacs main window besides two xterms. Emacs and the emacs server are automatically started at login.

This also means that I switch the virtual desktops when I switch between mutt and Emacs for typing the content of an e-mail. Did this already during my studies. (At home mutt runs inside a screen, so there I just switch the virtual terminal with Ctrl-A Ctrl-A instead of the virtual desktop. Not that big difference ;-)

The other virtual desktops of the the top row get filled with xterms as needed. Usually one virtual desktop per task.

The middle row is for web browsers. One full screen browser (usually Conkeror or Opera) per virtual desktop, often opened with many tabs (tabs in Opera, buffers in Conkeror) related to the task I’m accomplishing in the xterms in the virtual deskop directly above.

The third row usually contains root shells for maintenance tasks, either permanently open ones on machines I need an administrate often (e.g. daily updates of Debian testing or Debian unstable machines), or for temporary mass administration (Linux workstations on the job, all Xen DomUs of one Xen server, etc.) using pconsole.

yeahconsole

Additionally I have a sticky yeahconsole running, an xterm which slides down from the top like the console in Quake. (It’s the only overlapping thing I use. :-) My yeahconsole can be activated on every virtual desktop by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Z (with QWERTY layout, Ctrl-Alt-Y with QWERTZ layout). It’s the terminal for those one-line jobs then and when, e.g. calling ccal, translate, wget or clive.

Changes over time

Of course the desktop usage changes from time to time:

At work I have more than one monitor, so in the meanwhile the second row with the web browsers “moved” to the second screen – with independent virtual desktops (multiple X servers, no Xinerama). The second row on the main screen at work is now used the same way as the third row with a slight preference for the permanently open shells while the third row is more used for mass administration with pconsole.

At home I used XMMS respective Audacious for a long time (my FVWM panner and xosview are exactly as wide as WinAmp2/XMMS/Audacious, guess why:-) which usually was sticky the same way as the panner and xosview are. But when I started using last.fm recently, I moved to Rhythmbox (after testing some other music players like e.g. Amarok) which I use in fullscreen as I do with web browsers and the feed reader. So it occupies a complete virtual desktop, usually the second one in the middle row – below the feed reader because I don’t need a corresponding web browser for the feed reader. (Just found out that there is a last.fm player for text-mode, so maybe that will change again. :-)

Another thing which changed my virtual desktop usage was the switch from a classical tabbed web browser (Galeon, Kazehakase, Opera) to the buffer oriented Conkeror. With a tabbed web browser I have either no overview over all open tabs (one row tab bar or truncated tab menu) or they occupy too much space of the browser window. That was another reason for more than one browser window and therefore more than one virtual desktop with fullscreen web browser windows. With Conkeror tabs are optional (and not even enabled by default), Conkeror uses buffer like Emacs and if you want to switch to another buffer, you press C-x b and then start typing parts of the buffer’s name (e.g. parts of the URL or the web page title) to narrow down the list of buffers until only one is left or until you have spotted the wanted buffer in the list and choose it with the cursor keys. So the need for more than one browser window is gone.

For a long time I didn’t need any task/menu/start/whatever bar on my desktop. But since neither NetworkManager nor wicd have a comand-line interface (yet) and bluetooth seems also easier handled from the system tray my laptops also use either gnome-panel (big screen, long sessions with FVWM) or lxpanel (formerly used trayer; use it on small screen, short sessions with ratpoison or matchbox) on my laptops. It’s sticky and always visible. (No overlapping, remember? ;-)

The panel is usually at the bottom on the screen as by default with Windows or KDE, not at top as with GNU Network Object Model Environment">GNOME and MacOS. Only on the OpenMoko, I have the panel at the top to be close to what I’m used from Nokia mobile phones.

Things I tried …

… but didn’t survive in my setup:

• Desktop icons – nearly always covered if you use a tiling window manager. (I though use root window menus – mostly for starting applications later occupying that space where I clicked. ;-)
• A button to minimize all windows. Only sissies without virtual deskops need that. ;-)
• Automatically scrolling logfile content on the desktop (root-tail, root-portal, etc) – the space was too precious to not use it for xterms or web browsers. ;-)

Systems without Virtual Desktops

Anyway, there are systems where I don’t use virtual desktops at all. On systems with a screen resolution so small that there’s not enough space for two non-overlapping, fixed font 80x25 xterms on the screen (e.g. on my MicroClient with 8” touch screen, the 7” EeePC or the OpenMoko) I do not use virtual desktops at all. On such systems I use all applications in fullscreen, so switching between applications is like switching virtual desktops anyway. My window managers of choice for such systems are ratpoison for systems with keyboard and matchbox for system without keyboard. With ratpoison you treat windows like terminals in GNU screen, so there are no new keybindings to learn if you’re already used to screen (which I use nearly daily since more than a decade).

Mini-ITX based Home Server: Hardware Review //at 13:39 //by abe

Mostly for my backups needs, I planned a Mini-ITX based home server around the Chenbro ES34069 Mini-ITX case which features four hot-swap S-ATA bays. I wanted a low-consumption motherboard and CPU in there (not only because of the default 120W power supply) and since low-consumption mainboards with 4 S-ATA connectors are quite seldom I’ve chosen the not so cheap VIA EPIA SN18000G mainboard with actively cooled 1.8 GHz VIA C7 processor and a maximum power consumption of less than 30W (including CPU).

Waiting for delivery

While the Chenbro ES34069 case I ordered at digitec “only” needed a few weeks to deliver, the VIA EPIA SN18000G mainboard from Brack took over eleven weeks to deliver, it finally has been delivered on Wednesday, 5th of November 2008.

I initially ordered the VIA board for CHF 324, now it’s at CHF 397 (without rebate even at CHF 439) because Brack seems to have had a lot of hassles to get some of them at all. Although they usually sell for the prices at the time they ship the hardware (market price), they sold it to me at their purchase price, so it became only about CHF 15 more expensive than when I ordered. And since the RAM price dropped by one third during those eleven weeks, the whole order became about CHF 25 cheaper, the order was CHF 10 cheaper overall than when ordered. :-) (Still waiting for the according voucher, though.)

So I’ve joined the two main components together, installed Debian Lenny on it, crammed four 400 GB Samsung S-ATA disks (formerly in a TheCus N4100) and the 160 GB 2.5” harddisk from my MicroClient JrSX (I never really used it in there, it always runs from CF card) into it, created a software RAID-5 and now fill it with music, games and backups.

But not everything was as easy as it sounds above. Although Chenbro lists the VIA EPIA SN18000G as officially compatible mainboard for the ES34069, not everything really fitted as expected. So here’s my review of this hardware combination.

Chenbro ES34069

It’s really awesome how much features you can stuff in such a small case. Of course it’s not as small as a thin client case or the mCubed HFX micro case, but it’s smaller than most book-size cases like the ASUS Pundits, just a little bit thicker.

Inside the case (laying on its left side) there are two decks. The lower deck contains the 3.5” hot-swappable S-ATA harddisk bays, the internal part of the power supply and the two fans for cooling the interal power supply components and the disks. The upper deck has space for the mainboard, a 2.5” harddisk, a slim-line optical drive slot and all the front-panel stuff (card reader, LEDs, USB sockets).

Both decks are divided in two section. The front section belongs to the case itself and the back section containing the mainboard mount points and the two fans can be easily unplugged after removing four screws and keeping an eye on the cables from the lower to the upper deck. That way the mainboard can be mounted very easily. So far a very convincing design.

To mount the 2.5 harddisk in between the mainboard and the front panel, it’s not really necessary, but convenient to remove the slim-line optical drive slot, since you then have better access to the harddisk’s IDE socket. To remove the slot, you need to remove the front cover. That sounded easier than it actually was and I nearly broke of one its catches. :-/

Although all parts of the case seems to fitting very well together, the bays for the hot-swappable drives weren’t perfect: The drive slots not always connected even if the latch iss already closed. This was definitely better with the TheCus N4100. Additionally the bays seem to be made for slightly larger disks, so mine had play and the screws pressed the it together and you need to take care that the screws don’t cant.

A big positive point of the case was that there were all necessary screws included and they were fitting. This was a bigger problem with the TheCus N4100, since many harddisks ship with their own screws, but those are seldom the needed flat-head ones.

Even a P-ATA to slim-line optical drive adapter was included, so I don’t need to buy one. (Would have costed CHF 42 at digitec.)

VIA EPIA SN18000G

While it’s surely not the most performant board out there, I’m quite satisfied with its performance. I installed BackupPC 3.1.0 as backup system on it and it works like a charm. It daily backs up up to 14 machines over ssh tunnels – more to come) and is way more performant than expected. But I probably had very low expectations due to everyone arguing about the bad performance of the VIA C7. ;-)

Not nice, but known is the problem that most (but not all) USB connectors on the SN mainboard have 2.00mm pitch while all the case’s plugs have 2.54mm pitch. Apropriate adaptors are available from Mini-ITX.com. Thanks to Akim for this tip!

Power consumption

I hoped to get more details into this posting, e.g. measured power consumption, etc. But then I recently read in the c’t magazine how inexact my watt meter (from Brennenstuhl) is, so its values would probably bring more confusion than help. Additionally I don’t feel like powering down the server just for measurement.

Feedback

I got quite a few mails with hints to further Mini-ITX boards and TDP but also with questions about the case. I hope that this blog post asnwers some of the questions also for other readers. Thanks to all who replied to my initial blog post about my Chenbro/VIA based home server, either by mail, or comment, or both. :-)

Further plans

For deploying music to my other computers I tried both, mediatomb and gmediaserver but none really convinced me. Currently I just mount the media directory using the FUSE and ssh based sshfs. Not sure if I’ll add NFS due to it’s user base syncing hell.

Further plans are an HTTP proxy with ad filtering and caching capabilities, it’ll be Privoxy combined with either Squid or Polipo. Maybe even a Tor SOCKS proxy.

Sedating irssi’s nick highlight for microblogging messages //at 18:39 //by abe

My favourite IRC client is irssi. I like it so much that I even use it for all my instant messaging needs. The gateway of choice between irssi and mostly Jabber is Bitlbee.

I also microblog on identi.ca, a free (free as in AGPL) microblogging service based on laconi.ca. In comparsion to the non-free and proprietary Twitter microblogging, identi.ca has all the features which Twitter turned off already again.

For me the most important feature of Twitter was tweeting via XMPP (aka Jabber). Since Twitter turned off that feature, Twitter increasingly fast became unimportant for me. Identi.ca still has this feature and cultivates it further. So usually don’t visit the identi.ca website that often anymore but get the microblogging stream of my friends via XMPP and Bitlbee directly into my irssi.

Although this is very convenient, it has one big disadvantage: In comparison to an IRC channel, not only notices directed to me personally but every incoming notice beeps, because Bitlbee sends them either as /MSG or prepends my nick name. For normal IRC communication /MSG should beep, and you can’t make exceptions for that so easily in irssi.

I asked on #bitlbee (OFTC) and on #irssi (IRCNet). On #irssi funnily the first answer was “I tried that yesterday, no success” from Shrike. — So I’m not alone, although Shrike uses Jaiku and not identi.ca. Then I had the idea to get Bitlbee to not prepend my nick name for all those identi.ca notices which go into the &bitlbee channel — but I didn’t find a way to configure this in Bitlbee. But Shrike found a way to do this with already existing irssi plugins:

The trigger.pl plugin (available e.g. in Debian’s irssi-scripts package or on scripts.irssi.org) can add triggers which replace parts of the message. So the following three lines helped me to reduce the noise microblogging causes in my irssi:

/script load trigger
/trigger add -publics -masks 'identica!update@identi.ca' -channels '&bitlbee' -regexp "^XTaran: " -replace ''
/trigger save

And on the command line I just needed a symlink to automatically start the trigger plugin on irssi startup:

ln -vis /usr/share/irssi/scripts/trigger.pl ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun/

So now again only the important messages beep. :-)

e-mail.is-not-s.ms //at 18:30 //by abe

When I first read http://two.sentenc.es/ in (if I remember correctly) madduck’s signature, I thought something like “This can’t be! Why are people castrating themself?”

Although I really understand that the inventor has good reasons for such a personal policy, I notice how much time I waste by trying to fit all the information I want to transmit in the 160 characters a short messages allows — or, even worse, into the 140 characters microblogging services like identi.ca or Twitter allow.

So I had to oppose something to this, but even to only reach the coolness level of the domain “sentenc.es” is hard, you probably can’t top it at all. For luck, I’m not alone and Venty had the right idea for a hostname which has at least some geeky niveau.

So here it is, our pleading for e-mails as long and detailed as necessary:

http://e-mail.is-not-s.ms/

A German version will be available soon at http://e-mail.ist-nicht-s.ms/.

Feel free to add either URL to your e-mail signature. :-)

Oh, and thanks to the Government of Montserrat which allows strangers to register .ms domains without any hassles. :-)

Update / FAQ

Seems to be necessary to make a few things clear…

1. No, I do not think that everyone using two.sentenc.es has neither style nor knows anything about grammar or punctuation. What I say is that the site two.sentenc.es itself with its comparision to short messages (and especially without reading the author’s blog post about the site’s background) indirectly suggests to drop grammar, punctuation and style by cramming all information into a limit number of characters as often done with short messages or microblogging. And the limitation in senctences leads to tapeworm sentences which I try to avoid since they’re considered bad style, too.
2. And yes, it’s consciously written and designed to be the opposite of two.sentenc.es — even the colors and the font — and therefore is of course very close to the original. See it as it parody or satire if the closeness makes you angry.
3. And no, I currently don’t care if the site makes less sense if you don’t know two.sentenc.es — people usually can follow hyperlinks on websites.
4. We weren’t the first ones who noticed that e-mail is not SMS. An example of the problem described above from 2001.

water-proof mice //at 22:18 //by abe

When I blogged about water-proof keyboards a few months ago I did not really expect that there will be water-proof mice (no IP classification though) so soon, too. (Found in an advertisment in the current issue of the German c’t magazine.)

But the idea of water-proof mice in general doesn’t seem to be as new as I initially expected, at least the web design of http://www.waterproofmouse.co.uk/ is very nineties. ;-)

RuggedTech even has washable, wireless, IP66 (protected against powerful water jets) mice with a scroll-wheel and completely silicone sealed IP68 mice (protected against immersion beyond 1m).

NSLU2 in a Tux Case //at 02:46 //by abe

It started harmless when Thomas asked on Linux User Group Switzerland mailing list if someone knows a tux-shaped alarm clock. But the topic of that thread quickly moved to two other things in tux shape: the Tux Droid, a device similar to the Nabaztag, but needs a Linux host with USB, and ACME Systems’ Tux-Server, a ETRAX CRIS based Foxboard inside a tux-shaped case.

We found out that Telion, the Swiss importer for Foxboards, also imports ACME Systems’ Tux Case — although the Tux Case is not mentioned on their website. Even better: They had a few old Tux Cases in stock which don’t fit anymore on current Foxboards since the position of the power socket changed. (So only one hole in the case was missing.) And they wanted to get rid of them quite fast: They offered us the Tux Cases for 10 CHF (6€) each instead of 28 CHF each (17€) if we buy all of them. Of course we couldn’t reject this offer and bought all five remaining cases.

Another part of the thread was about performance. Although ETRAX CRIS is used by its inventor AXIS in many of its products (they’re famous for the Linux based web-cams) many were not sure if the board’s performance would be sufficient for their ideas. Another disadvantage of the ETRAX CRIS architecture is that no mainstream Linux distribution supports it.

Another point was the Foxboard’s price (169€, ca. 268 CHF). Bones just mentioned that an NSLU2 costs only about 100 CHF (60€).

Probably on IRC someone (probably Bones, too) wondered if it’s possible to fit a NSLU2 into such a quite inexpensive Tux Case. We took Wikipedia’s picture of the NSLU2 board, compared the size of the USB ports on that picture, compared them with real-life USB ports and found out the size of the board that way. And when I got my Tux-Case I noticed that the NSLU2 board really could fit into the Tux-Case.

Since I’m already building a bigger NAS-like home server, I have no use for another, much slower NAS. But since I more or less gave up the also ARM-based Thecus N4100, another ARM-based machine in my hardware collection wouldn’t be bad.

So it didn’t took long and the idea was born to build the NSLU2 board into a Tux-Case and let the website tux.ethz.ch run on it. (I inherited its administration from Beat and it’s currently just a virtual host on one of our webservers.) Then it would be a server named Tux, serving Tuxes, looking like a Tux and running Tux’ operating system Linux. :-)

I ordered an NSLU2 at Brack for 117.60 CHF (ca. 70€). Played around with the original firmware for a moment, but it’s horrible from a security point of view: You can’t even change the admin password (default: “admin”) if no USB harddisk is attached. And no, a USB stick doesn’t suffice. So I didn’t wait long and tried to install Debian’s “armel” (ARM, Little Endian) port on it. But the NSLU2 refused the “new firmware” with the error message “Upgrade: no enough free space.”. While this is not in the Debian specific NSLU2 FAQ, it is mentioned in the general troubleshooting FAQ. As described in there, first upgrading to the most recent firmware version and then uploading the Debian installer worked fine.

After I had successfully installed Debian Lenny on a pqi 4 GB USB sticked into the NSLU2 and verified that everything is working fine, I opened the NSLU2 case and checked if it really would fit into a Tux Case.

It does, but very, very close. You’ll have to drill some holes and the ethernet socket will stick out Tux’s shoulder, but everything else should fit perfectly after a few mounting parts inside the Tux Case have been removed. As a proof of concept I laid the NSLU2 board on the Tux Case’s back:

Pictures taken with my Nokia E51

So later the LEDs will be in Tux’ one shoulder while the network socket will be in his other shoulder. And the USB stick will be inside his paunch via a USB hub.