Goodbye Woody, Welcome Etch //at 00:53 //by abe

It finally happened. I installed Debian Etch on my last Woody box, a 400 MHz Pentium II with 576 MB RAM named gsa which is my home desktop since I bought it at LinuxTag 2003 in Karlsruhe.

And no I didn’t do a dist-upgrade, neither direct no via Sarge. As already planned I removed some no more necessary operating systems from that box and installed Etch on the freed disk space. Woody is still installed on that box in parallel and was recognized perfectly by Etch’s installer.

I took a few hours but also was big fun to go through Etch package list and to decide what to install. Overall the installation of 5 GB of software took about half a day.

In general everything went fine, the only thing I’m yet missing is sound. Etch didn’t seem to recognize my soundcard at all although it’s a well-known brand and defacto standard for many other soundcards: a Creative Labs Soundblaster. Well, the 16-Bit ISA version, needing the full length of the slot. Worked fine under Woody. Well, I hope I’ll get it working again manually.

What on the other hand is really nice with udev hell —eh— hal and all those new automatic bells and whistles: The desktop (well, at least GNOME Nautilus as well as XFCE, but probably also KDE) recognises when I insert a 3.5” floppy into the drive and shows me a nice floppy icon on the desktop. You think, that’s impossible? Floppy drives don’t inform the rest of the system when a floppy has been inserted without you polling the drive every few seconds? Well, USB floppy drives can. And they do. :-)

I still need time to migrate all the old settings from Woody to Etch. I’ll probably stick with FVWM, but perhaps will use the GNOME enabled version. What’s already done is the migration from tcsh to zsh. On all new or dist-upgraded systems after Etch I’ve chosen zsh so with my last Woody installation retiring I’ve also fully migrated to zsh.

So I’ve got now most of my active private boxes running Etch. Only the noone.org web and mail server “sym” (an amd64 box) as well as my 133 MHz ThinkPad “bijou” are still running Sarge, both with 2.6 kernels.

So with switching to Etch on gsa, I also got no more Debian box running a 2.4 kernel. The only 2.4 kernel I run is on my FreeWRT WLAN router named pluriel, which runs 2.4.33.3. But I expect that 2.6.18 will be as stable and long lasting as the famous and rock-solid 2.4.18 from Woody. 18 seems to be Debian’s favourite kernel minor version recently. ;-)

VCFe talk online / bijou vs Etch //at 00:18 //by abe

With a few days lag, the slides to my VCFe 8.0 talk Aktuelle, freie Software auf alter Hardware (“Up to date, free software on old hardware”, held in German using Kazehakase and S5) are now online. In comparision to my former talks on that subject (held at some DebianDays), this talk was not Debian focused but focused more on not so well known, but resource-friendly free software as well as focused on an audience which has more knowledge of old hardware than of current software. :-)

Additionally, I updated my old blog post about X on my ThinkPad 760ED named bijou so that now also my current XF86Config-4 for Sarge on that box is linked in there.

Apropos bijou: I couldn’t recommend Debian 4.0 Etch that much for old computers with not so much memory since especially aptitude has grown much in regards of it’s memory and performance needs. Regarding my experiences with Etch, any computer with less than 50 MB of RAM will start to swap if aptitude is only started on such a box. I’ve looked throough the aptitude documentation, but I haven’t found a way to switch of some of the tables it generates internally. E.g. I have no need for the tag database it always generates. I really would be happy, if someone knows a way to turn even only that feature off. Then I may dist-upgrade bijou to Etch, since I found that dselect is no real alternative to aptitude anymore.

Oh yeah, and I of course bought new old hardware at the VCFe: A 386SX Thin Client named Flytech Carry-I 9300 from 1991 with about 200 MB of harddisk and 10 MB of RAM.

The days of my last running Woody are numbered… //at 23:05 //by abe

As many of the Planet Debian readers know, I bemoan Galeon 1.2 and therefore Woody. For a long time I haven’t found an appropriate browser replacement for Galeon 1.2 in Sarge, so I never switched my home workstation called “gsa” (Pentium II, 400 MHz, 572 MB RAM) to Sarge, since Woody was rockstable and just worked.

Though, after a few Galeon 1.3/2.0 rants, someone pointed me to Kazehakase, which indeed is a fine Galeon 1.2 replacement. But I noticed that Kazehakase in Sarge was in an early stage and the Kazehakase from testing (now Etch) were already much more matured.

So in comparison to Sarge with Etch I won’t have the problem of not having a mature and sage web browser in main. And due to security support for Woody ceased a few months ago and Etch is now declared stable, it’s time to reinstall my last Woody box with Etch.

For that, a repartioning of it’s two hard disks (8 GB and 40 GB) sounds like a good idea and so I had look, what’s on all those partitions where I once had a shot on quite a few Linux distributions and other unix-like operating systems. (Although I was already a big fan of Debian at that time, I wanted to look over my own nose and ordered a few CDs of free operating system at LinISO.de.)

So here’s what I found, never really used and will throw away quite soon:

• RedHat 9
• Mandrake 9.2beta2
• FreeBSD 4.8
• OpenBSD 3.3
• one more, not yet identified (or perhaps even never formatted) Linux partition

That should give enough space for an Etch installation without touching the Woody installation first. Thanks to Venty, I’ve got a DVD drive for that box, so I can install from DVD.

And for toying around with all those other neat and free operating systems nowadays, I’ve got my MicroClient Jr. named “c2”.

Surfing on two screens? //at 22:31 //by abe

At work, I’ve got two screens on my Sarge workstation “snitch”. Since I want to switch virtual desktops independently on both screens, I don’t have a Xinerama setup but a Dual Screen setup. So my left and right screen do have different $DISPLAY (“:0.0” and “:0.1”) set.

This is neither a problem for FVWM nor xlock nor XScreenSaver. But it is a problem for nearly every modern web browser available which checks, if there’s already an instance of it running. So if you try to start a new instance of a web browser on the other screen, most graphical web browsers make more or less problems:

• Galeon 1.3 and Epiphany always opens new tabs or windows on the display where its first instance is running, i.e. ignores $DISPLAY completely except on the first call.
• Kazehakase (0.3.7) just opens a new tab in the running instance.
• Firefox 2.0 thinks it crashed and asks if it should restore tabs and windows. Haven’t tried any further.
• Opera 9.20 pops up a dialog, says, there seems already a copy of Opera running and asks if it should continue with startup. If you say yes, only the bookmarks of one of the two instances get saved, probably those of the one with the last added bookmark or the one which exited last.

The only graphical web browsers which simply just work on a Dual Screen setup are Konqueror, Links2 (called with the -g option for a GUI), Chimera 2, Amaya and of course Dillo. Unfortunately I’m neither a fan of KDE nor of Konqueror and I do want a web browser with CSS and tab support… And Amaya is, well, only a reference implementation… (Chimera 2 from Sarge btw. segfaulted on two of the four pages I tested it with. Seems to have problems with PNG images.)

So my current setup is to have Kazehakase as my main work web browser (with all the local web applications I need) on the right screen while I have Opera on the left screen for surfing, looking up documentation, testing web pages and other things.

BTW: I don’t use Gecko based browsers for surfing on that box at the moment, since there are some web pages (the spammer vandalised Kazehakase wiki for example, at least a few months ago) which manage to be rendered in such an ugly way by Gecko so that XFree86 with the binary Nvidia (at least the last five or six versions I tried) just crashes away — either at once or when you try to switch to a text console by pressing e.g. Ctrl-Alt-F1 while such a page is displayed.

New virtual home //at 01:36 //by abe

There were quite a lot of small changes in my personal e-mail, web server and DNS infrastructure during the last months. While for more than ten years all my mails came together on a Linux account at the Students Representatives of Computer Science (German: Fachschaftsrat Informatik, short: FS Info) at the University of Saarland and all but one domain was hosted at my former employer, now nearly everything (including this blog) has moved to a Hetzner root server run by me and some friends and running Debian Sarge for AMD64. Most of these moves happend divided in small steps during January and February this year.

Only one move happend a little earlier than expected: Without any notice all external mail to my FS Info account got lost in a black hole one hop in front of the FS Info mail server. It looks like the RBG of the Dept. of CS at the University of Saarland didn’t like my face —eh— mails anymore and just dropped them. No bounces, no notices. Not that I knew them as friendly and kind, but blackholing active e-mail accounts without notice leads to dismissal at other places. They should really go and hear alphascorpii’s BOFH talk.

So my long-time e-mail address abe@fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de is no more valid and any mail there won’t get read or answered. But I don’t mind if you send any junk there, it’s not my job anymore.

For luck the hoster of my deuxchevaux.org domain, Internett, which I used for all non-university e-mail, changed the forward within a good hour, so I only lost incoming mails of about one and a half day (which was the time until I noticed the blackholing), namely most mails written to all of my addresses at 30th and 31st of January 2007. If you wrote me around that time and miss the answers, you now know why. The few people I expected mail from, already have been contacted.

So for the future, write emails only to abe@ either deuxchevaux.org or — if you can’t remember how to spell that (no, you’re not the only one ;-) — noone.org (“no one” as in “nobody”, not “no. one” as in “the best” ;-)

And so since then none of my coworkers can make fun of me because I don’t have root on the box where my mail is received. ;-)

One of the moves also gave me the possibility to get “my own” Jabber server, so the time with those two jabber addresses (abe@jabber.noxa.de and abe@amessage.de), where usually at least one had some problems with some gateways are also over. If you want to contact me using Jabber, use abe@noone.org, equal to my easier to remember e-mail address. ;-)

So there’s still left to move: web, mail and DNS of deuxchevaux.org and beckert.at (domain of my parents) and my old web pages on fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de as well as Planet Symlink. And of course the redesign of my web pages, which I’ve planned since more than a half decade… ;-)

The infrastructure in my real-life home also changed: My gateway to the world is now a 266 MHz MIPS based ASUS WL500g Premium (which I named “pluriel” after the multifunctional Citroën C3 Pluriel) running FreeWRT 1.0.1 which replaced tryane, an as noisy (power supply fan) as compact Unisys Aquanta CP mini-desktop with a passively cooled 200 MHz Pentium MMX.

Gaia resurrection //at 20:35 //by abe

On Thursday, 24th of November 2006 evening (about one and a half week ago) we got an anonymous Symlink submission about gaia 0.1.0, a simple, but free (GPL‘ed) client for Google Earth, solely based on reverse engineering. Liked the idea of a really free client for such a popular service, so I posted it as Symlink article (German) quite shortly after noticing the submisson.

Since it’s under GPL and uses only libraries already being in Debian (OpenGL, SCons, cURL, SDL, libjpeg, libpng, libgps and Doxygen), I really would like to see it in Debian. But since I have never programmed with most of them, I did not try to compile gaia but instead took the easy way for myself and filed an RFP bug for it in Debian.

The next day in office, Gürkan, a coworker of mine and currently in NM, told me that he tries to package gaia for Debian and that it doesn’t compile on Sarge. So I gave him access to my Sid chroot and asked him if he has read about the RFP at debian-devel or debian-wnpp. To my surprise he answered that he didn’t read about it on Debian lists at all but on Symlink and therefore didn’t knew about the RFP at all.

So I pointed him to the RFP just to notice, that it wasn’t an RFP anymore but already an ITP. Strangely I didn’t get any mail notice about this change although the retitling happend only shortly after the initial RFP… Of couse, Gürkan wasn’t very happy about this, since he planned to maintain gaia himself, but at least he provided his working proof of concept package for Sid to Jordà Polo who intends to maintain an official Debian package of gaia. We then also met Jordà on the #debian-games channel in OFTC. He told us, that he’ll check some more licensing issues before uploading a package of gaia.

Well, since I had a working gaia package installed in my Sid chroot, you can probably imagine what I did half the evening? Right: Surfing around the earth with gaia and visiting my favourite places on earth. While virtually visiting places here and there, I listened to Venty’s first podcasts and seem to have downloaded 444 MB of Google Earth images (at least according to du -sh ~/.gaia). Goddamned addiction! ;-)

During the night from Friday to Saturday, I got a mail that the RFP/ITP has been closed and that Jordà was right with his suspiciousness: Google has sent a cease and desist letter to the gaia developers and they removed the downloads from their site. (So how was that Google motto? “Don’t be evil”? Well, good joke! Yet again the monopolist clearly shows that it doesn’t really mean what it says.) Since the gaia developers were allowed to post the mail from Google on their website, you can read parts of it there. I really wonder what was written in the left out parts of the mails. Job offers? ;-)

But it’s interesting to see that until one week ago gaia 0.1.0 already made it into the FreeBSD ports as well as into the ArchLinux User Repository. Both noticed, too, that gaia version 0.1.0 has been withdrawn by the authors.

Today in the morning Gürkan noticed that there’s a new version (0.1.1) of gaia at SourceForge using free NASA WorldWind / OnEarth imagery. Although the imagery is far away from the detailedness of the Google Earth imagery, this has one big advantage: There wasn’t really a X port for the windows-only client from NASA until now. (No real wonder, since they use proprietary and operating specific libraries such as .NET and DirectX…) And now we have gaia, a free client for free imagery on free operating systems. That made my day!

I hope that this will revive the packaging of gaia, at least Gürkan has already built a new proof of concept package of 0.1.1 for Sid. (Today in the afternoon, they released 0.1.2.) And if everything goes fine and Dunc-Bank manages to delay Etch until gaia has been 10 days in Unstable without bugs, we’ll have it even in Etch. ;-)

The mouseless side of X //at 00:48 //by abe

Although I like the idea of a tiling and completely keyboard focused window manager, I never fell in love with Ion because the default keybindings weren’t really intuïtive (to me). A few months ago I noticed, that ratpoison is also a tiling and completely keyboard focused window manager, only with much more intuitive usage: If you know screen and it’s keybindings, you also know ratpoison and it’s keybindings: Just exchange Ctrl-A with Ctrl-T. This sounds perfect for usage on my low performance laptops, where I have small screens and usually also no virtual desktops in use.

There’s only one thing which annoys me in ratpoison: If I use a mostly mouse driven application like e.g. a webbrowser with ratpoison, I have no problems to click on links, even if the webbrowser is not in the so called “current frame”. But if e.g. click into an input field, I usually notice much too late that while the mouse works fine in the browser, keyboard focus is still in some other window. Currently they all use flwm, the Fast and Lite Window Manager.

So what I would need is a tiling and keyboard focused window manager but with “focus follows mouse” politics. And since the laptops on which I intend to use such a window manager, all have a touchpad or thumbstick, the mouse there counts as keyboard focused, too somehow, doesn’t it? :-) I wonder, if an ion3 could be configured to use the same keybindings as ratpoison. That would probably fulfil this desire.

On the other hand, there are browsers which are fine without mouse. lynx or links2 for example, so the focus problem I have with ratpoison wouldn’t occur. But what if I need or want a keyboard driven and full blown webbrowser? Ok, Firefox as well as Opera are not that bad in keyboard only use, but they still are focused on the mouse using user.

But Gecko wouldn’t be Gecko, if there wasn’t some Gecko based browser with this features: On the ratpoison website I found a link to a very interesting Firefox plugin which makes Firefox a complete new browser, a keyboard driven webbrowser named Conkeror. It has no toolbars at all, no (visible) tabs, no menus, no nothing — it shows only the website in fullscreen, a status line and a multipurpose command line — exactly like the mini-buffer of GNU Emacs.

But not only the layout, even the keybindings are very emacsish: C-x C-f opens an URL in a new buffer -eh- tab, C-x 5 C-f opens an URL in a new frame (window), C-x C-v opens a new URL in the current tab (buffer) with the current URL as editable default value, C-x b switches to another tab, C-x k kills -eh- closes a tab, C-x C-b lists all open tabs, l goes back (remember the Emacs info reader, eh?), C-g quits accidently requested dialogs or stops loading a web page, Ctrl-s and Ctrl-r give you forward and backward i-search, C-n, C-p, C-f and C-b scroll, etc. Even M-x works, e.g. will M-x revert-buffer reload the web page. (Unfortunately Esc-x doesn’t work. Yet.) And for vi freaks, there is even M-x use-vi-keys. There’s even one lynxish keybinding: \ lets you view the source.

And although it’s one of the strangest webbrowsers I saw yet, I somehow like it and also would like to see it in Debian as package, since it is the perfect companion for ion or ratpoison. Looking through apt’s package cache as well as the wnpp bugs, I haven’t found any hint on somebody already packaging it, so I’ll have a look on it and on how to to package a Firefox extension for Debian.

BTW: While looking through the wnpp bugs, I found bug #335459, which is the ITP flock, an also Gecko based browser with a lot of cool features for blogger who like social network tools.

Another nice thing I found today in Debian was the xfonts-artwiz package whose small fonts are very suitable for small resolution screens, especially if a tiling window manager is used with a e.g. 800×600 resolution. Unfortunately they aren’t available in a charset with German umlauts.

Apropos tiling window managers: Anyone tried pconsole with an automatically tiling and resizing window manager? I wonder if it’s usable. At least on MacOS X with its cascading window positioning algorithm, pconsole is a pain. — But even without cascading windows, MacOS X is a pain for keyboard users. Just think of its default behaviour when using the tab key inside a form mask: It will skip all buttons, all checkboxes, all radio buttons and all select boxes. Argh!