How to get Network Manager working with ratpoison //at 00:59 //by abe

Using GNOME Network Manager is a neat way to connect to wireless or virtual private networks from a laptop running Debian Lenny, Sid, Etch with Backports or any of the *buntu distributions. You can control everything from the system tray. But not all window managers have a system tray. And with some window managers it’s not obvious how to make them work with one of those lean third party trays and panels.

Especially my favourite window manager for small displays as on the EeePC – ratpoison – insolently puts any panel or tray in the middle of the screen by default. It took me a moment to find out how to make ratpoison work with my favourite third party system tray trayer (which can handle transparency and is only a system tray, no taskbar).

First we need to make ratpoison ignore the trayer on the one hand and and reserve space for it on the screen. Fiddling around with preconfigured frames didn’t work well and the following way is also more straight forward:

1. trayer always has “panel” as window title, so adding the following line to your .ratpoisonrc makes ratpoison ignore trayer:

   unmanage panel

2. Now all windows overlap the trayer, so we need to configure the space for it. Trayer in the default configuration shows up at the bottom and has a height of 26 pixels, so we tell ratpoison to add a padding of 26 pixels at the bottom of the screen by adding the following line to the .ratpoisonrc:

   set padding 0 0 0 26

Now we are confronted with the problem that these settings only apply to new windows, not ones which were already running when ratpoison starts. I usually start my X session using an .xinitrc or an .Xsession which calls the window manager using exec at the end.

We can start the trayer later though by spawning a subshell in the background with a sleep at the beginning. Also the Network Manager applet (nm-applet) can be started that way. In my case the end of the .Xsession looks like this:

( sleep 1; \
  trayer --align right --edge bottom --distance 0 \
	 --expand true \
	 --transparent true --alpha 128 --tint 0 \
	 --SetDockType true --SetPartialStrut true & 
  nm-applet & ) &

exec ratpoison

The result could look like this:

The other programs in the system tray are from right to left: nm-applet (GNOME Network Manager), Twitux (GTK Twitter Client), Audacious, Opera, Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM), Icedove (unbranded Mozilla Thunderbird). The clock on the bottom left is from the package osdclock.

Oh, and although I’m fine with trayer: if anybody knows a possibility to control the GNOME Network Manager without the need for a system tray, I would be very happy if you could tell me. :-)

Update 18-June-2008 23:45:

Matto Fransen used my howto to get ratpoison and nm-applet working together on Ubuntu. He also explains in his blog post, what may be necessary to get nm-applet working as intended in the first place — things I already had forgotten when I wrote this posting initally. :-)

Fedora Legacy useless? //at 15:16 //by abe

For a (much too long) time, we ran our three AMD 64 bit virus scanners and spam filter boxes with Fedora Core 4. Since the the official support ended a few months ago when Fedora Core 6 Test 2 came out, so we decided to switch them over to support through the Fedora Legacy Project.

For testing purposes we first switched over one of the three boxes. But the test failed: Although the changes (as documented on the Fedora Legacy home page) seemed to work fine, not a single update came until the end of last week, even though there were partially remotely exploitable security issues in OpenSSL, OpenSSH, gzip, etc. during that time. There were also no announcements on the list since FC4 switched over to the Fedora Legacy Project, not for FC4 nor for any other distribution maintained by the Fedora Legacy Project.

So what the heck does the Fedora Legacy Project if not security updates?

I would be very happy if I could switch over those boxes to Debian or even Ubuntu, but there’s no BiArch support (running 32 bit applications on 64 bit operating systems transparently) in Debian (and therefore neither in Ubuntu) yet without a lot of manual fiddling and chroots, so we can’t run our 32 bit virus scanners on those 64 bit boxes with a debianesk operating system yet.

Today we’ve upgraded the last of those three boxes to Fedora Core 5.

wApua 0.06 released //at 03:33 //by abe

I today released version 0.06 of my WAP browser wApua (Release announcement at Freshmeat).

The one big new thing is user friendly documentation: wApua and wbmp2xbm (which has been renamed from wbmp2xbm.pl) now have POD documentation and therefore also man pages. Besides that a lot of minor bugfixes and enhancements complete the new version.

The other big new thing is that there now is a Debian package of wApua. The package should work fine on Debian Woody (3.0), Sarge (3.1) and Etch (upcoming 4.0) and probably also works on other Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu.

Thanks to sponsoring by Christoph “Myon” Berg the Debian package is also in the Debian New Queue and hopefully will be included in Debian Etch.

Software Freedom Day 2006 //at 02:07 //by abe

Today, well, yesterday was Software Freedom Day and the Chaostreff Zürich organised an information booth with support of the Linux User Group Switzerland at the Orell-Füssli Bookstore at Zurich and giving out Ubuntu CDs — and only Ubuntu. (Ok, and also Kubuntu CDs, but that doesn’t make a big difference.)

After writing a Symlink article about the Software Freedom Day, I went to Orell-Füssl, of course equipped with my 10 years old Pentium-I-ThinkPad bijou which is though running Debian Sarge and the latest Linux kernels, namely 2.6.17.13 and 2.4.33.3, both only about one week old.

Onsite, I tried to get access to the WLAN, but it didn’t work. Asking the network responsible guy from the Chaostreff, the reason was found quickly: The WLAN was WPA secured and older WLAN cards don’t work with that. No problem that far, but what I found very inappropriate was that this guy then told to put away that old computer since we only want to demonstrate on recent hardware.

First I still can’t understand why such intolerance happens even on a day having the word “Freedom” in its name and secondly I think that especially the ability to give old computers a second (or third) life is notable feature of Free and Open Source Software, Windows can’t offer at all.

So I did not feel like explaining someone the advantages of Free Software or Linux, since I’m not allowed to show some of it nicest features. I started folding some flyers which just had been printed. I accidently also started reading them and I found two grave errors in the content, especially in the context of a day about “Software Freedom” and not about “Open Source” or “Linux”:

1. Free Software and Open Source Software were declared as being the same thing.
2. Only the Open Source concept was explained.

So I used the rest of the event to chat with some of the SheGeeks I knew and a few people like Fabrizio who I just knew from mails and never met in real life before. I also had no guilty conscience to leave the event earlier since I didn’t like it — even if it probably was a huge success and I met there many people I like.

The late afternoon I helped a friend of mine moving. Well, actually I helped him transporting all the new furnitures he bought at IKEA to his new home with my CX Break.

And after returning home, I had to read on Symlink, that Rob Levin aka lilo from Freenode died yesterday after being hit by car while riding on his bike on Tuesday. May he rest in peace.

So somehow the Software Freedom Day 2006 was quite a sad day to me. :-(

Now playing (from compact cassette :-): David Hasselhoff — Looking For Freedom

New talk proposal, new Linux distribution found //at 01:47 //by abe

After talking with some LinuxTag guys about which kind of talks are still missing for the upcoming LinuxTag, I submitted another proposal for a still only roughly sketched talk: KISS – Keep it simple and stupid, also on the web.

KISS – “Keep it simple and stupid” is an old and successful principle in the Unix world: Small and simple programs, doing only one thing, but they’re doing perfect, fast and reliable. This principle can also work on the web and make webservers or surf terminals out of already discharged computers.

I planned to show “simple” (or at least “simple to use”) tools like Blosxom or the Website Meta Language, a more slim webserver than Apache (e.g. fefe’s fnord or one of the ACME webservers thttpd, mini_httpd or micro_httpd), slim web-browsers (e.g. like Dillo, Opera, glinks, ViewML or Minimo) and one or more Linux distributions optimized for low end PCs. While thinking about low end PCs, usually the following distributions come to my mind: DeLi Linux, fli4l and Debian Woody.

But none of them seems to fit for my talk as perfectly as I would like:

• DeLi Linux is no bad distribution, since it’s designed especially for 386 to Pentium I, but I have some strong disagreements with the maintainer of DeLi Linux, since he sees a very small package list as necessary requirement for a distribution for old PCs. He states that distributions for old PCs “don’t have that many harddisk space” (beyond other, more realistic arguments — but it seemed to be his main argument) while I see a rich package diversity as an quality criteria. (One of the reasons, why I like Debian and dislike Ubuntu.) So I’m not sure if I should present a very raped DeLi Linux to the audience, just to make it fit my needs, although I’m quite curious about his upcoming 0.7 release with the low end, KHTML based ViewML webbrowser. (Apart from me seeing PHP5 and KDE as a big nono on old PCs…)
• Although I still like Debian Woody very much (you know that old story… ;-), it is just too old for making a talk about how to turn old PCs into being usable again. Sarge would be fine, but it was suggested to showcase an easy and fast way to get something ready to run, and I can’t give the auditors a list of all the Debian packages with low resource consumption and therefore usable on low end PCs.
• I haven’t used it yet, but fli4l seems to be very good distribution to turn an old PC into a ISDN or DSL router, even without harddisk. The last time I had a look at fli4l, it used an Apache as (optional) webserver, which wouldn’t fit into my scheme, since I would like to show an alternative to Apache. But as I found out today the recently released version 3.0 of fli4l uses the already mentioned ACME mini_httpd. Cool! They’re on the right way! ;-) Unfortunately it only seems to be used for serving information pages about the fli4l status and not as common webserver. (Please correct me, if this is wrong! I would appreciate it, if I’m wrong at this point. :-)

Since I first read about viewml on the DeLi Linux page, I looked for Debian packages of viewml today. apt-cache search hasn’t found anything on Woody or Sarge and packages.debian.org is still down, so I used Google. I found out,  that there at least was a viewml package in Debian since at least 2001, so I expect, it just didn’t make it to stable.

But I also found this interesting page on a webserver called www.ubuntulite.org. Ubuntu Lite? That sounds very interesting, since I see Ubuntu not as the baddest idea (expect for it’s horribly resource hunger and only offering one package per application by default ;-), but having an Ubuntu derivative prepackaged for low end PCs and with several webbrowsers instead of only Epiphany (and probably Firefox, don’t they?) would be perfect for my purpose.

So I’m currently downloading an Ubuntu Lite ISO and will give it a try on one of my Pentium MMX boxes. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to support Pentium I or AMD K5 since Ubuntu itself only supports i686 and upwards. :-/

But this also means, that it’s no occasion for my Pentium I Compaq LTE 5100 (which I probably will name pony), but currently, after Bartosz’ recent post on Planet Debian, it looks like Debian GNU/kFreeBSD could also be an interesting OS, since it fits all requirements perfectly: Free, Modern, Exotic and all conveniences of Debian. ;-)

Now Playing: Jefferson Starship — We Built This City

wApua 0.05.1 released //at 21:21 //by abe

After more than five years without new release, there is now a new version of Perl written WAP browser wApua: 0.05.1. (Release announcement at Freshmeat)

It mainly fixes the use with newer Tk version as shipped with recent Ubuntu and Gentoo releases (Sarge still works fine with 0.05, but Etch won’t). It also fixes the local installation documentation.

Thanks to all who reported these bugs.

SuSE sucks! //at 02:24 //by abe

Since SuSE closes the security support two years after release and the recent KDE JavaShit remote code execution hole wasn’t patched as fast as I would have expected it (the patch came out after the upgrade I’m writing about here) in the SuSE 9.0 which was installed on my 2.66 GHz AMD desktop at work (it started as in 2002 as a SuSE 7.3 on a 400 MHz box and has been upgraded since then to 8.0, 8.2 and 9.0 IIRC), I decided, it’s now really time to upgrade to SuSE 10.0. (Although 10.1 will be out soon, I just don’t want to wait for it.) And since my boss only wants SuSE boxes and neither Debian (which I would prefer) nor Gentoo (which a colleague prefers), I couldn’t simply install Sarge on this box although I would have chosen that option if it would have been available.

Since my former SuSE experiences told me that this would mean a lot of trouble, I took notes from the beginning, once for the blog and once for my boss to show him, that most trouble doesn’t come from me being a power user used to being allowed to touch any config file (like I am on Debian).

Preparations

So I begin with the preparations: Starting the 400 MHz Debian Woody box on my desktop (whose operating system is more than a year older than SuSE 9.0 and still has security support, yeah!) I usually need to build custom Debian packages for customers. There I could chat in IRC and took notes while trying to upgrade and get the whole thing working again.

When everything was ready, I put the SuSE DVD in — just to notice, that it’s just a CD-ROM. So I put the SuSE 10.0 CD1 in the CD-ROM drive and typed “sudo shutdown -r now” in the shell. The box starts shutting down and tells me:

Please stand by while rebooting the system…

But it didn’t reboot. I waited for several minutes, nothing happend. Well, seems as if the SuSE upgrade already starts as I expect it to end: Horrible.

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