Suggestions for the GNOME Team //at 23:01 //by abe

Thanks to Erich Schubert’s blog posting on Planet Debian I became aware of the 2012 GNOME User Survey at Phoronix.

Like back in 2006 I still use some GNOME applications, so I do consider myself as “GNOME user” in the widest sense and hence I filled out that survey. Additionally I have to live with GNOME 3 as a system administrator of workstations, and that’s some kind of usage, too. ;-)

The last question in the survey was Do you have any comments or suggestions for the GNOME team? — Sure I have. And since I tried to give constructive feedback instead of only ranting, here’s my answer to that question as I submitted it in the survey, too, just spiced up with some hyperlinks and highlighting:

Don’t try to change the users. Give the users more possibilities to change GNOME if they don’t agree with your own preferences and decisions. (The trend to castrate the user was already starting with GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 made that worse IMHO.)

If you really think that you need less configurability because some non-power-users are confused or challenged by too many choices, then please give the other users at least the chance to enable more configuration options. A very good example in that hindsight was Kazehakase (RIP) who offered several user interfaces (novice, intermediate and power user or such). The popular text-mode web browser Lynx does the same, too, btw.

GNOME lost me mostly with the change to GNOME 2. The switch from Galeon 1.2 to 1.3/2.0 was horrible and the later switch to Epiphany made things even worse on the browser side. My short trip to GNOME as desktop environment ended with moving back to FVWM (configurable without tons of clicking, especially after moving to some other computer) and for the browser I moved on to Kazehakase back then. Nowadays I’m living very well with Awesome and Ratpoison as window managers, Conkeror as web browser (which are all very configurable) and a few selected GNOME applications like Liferea (luckily still quite configurable despite I miss Gecko’s about:config since the switch to WebKit), GUCharmap and Gnumeric.

For people switching from Windows I nowadays recommend XFCE or maybe LXDE on low-end computers. I likely would recommend GNOME 2, too, if it still would exist. With regards to MATE I’m skeptical about its persistance and future, but I’m glad it exists as it solves a lot of problems and brings in just a few new ones. Cinnamon as well as SolusOS are based on the current GNOME libraries and are very likely the more persistent projects, but also very likely have the very same multi-head issues we’re all barfing about at work with Ubuntu Precise. (Heck, am I glad that I use Awesome at work, too, and all four screens work perfectly as they did with FVWM before.)

Thanks to Dirk Deimeke for his (German written) pointer to Marcus Moeller’s interview with Ikey Doherty (in German, too) about his Debian-/GNOME-based distribution SolusOS.

unburden-home-dir uploaded to Sid //at 02:54 //by abe

Most popular web browsers cause quite a lot of I/O on a user’s home directory and their cache’s also take up quite some disk space – with Google’s Chrome/Chromium you can’t even configure how much disk space should be used for the cache.

This causes unnecessary network traffic and no more makes sense if the home directory itself comes over the network, e.g. via NFS or Samba. And on laptops it spins up the disks and unnecessarily costs battery power and therefore lowers the potential battery life.

Such caches also costs scarce disk space on SSDs or flash cards as common in laptops, netbooks and other mobile devices, and often get backed up without any real use.

To take some of this burden off our NFS servers at work I started to develop an Xsession.d hook which moves off such caches to the local disk and puts in symbolic links instead into the user’s home directory when the user locally logs in.

This hook quickly became a standalone Perl script named unburden-home-dir and the Xsession.d hook just a wrapper around it. Due to some unsolved issues I didn’t feel it’s good enough for Debian Unstable, so I uploaded it just to Debian Experimental back then.

Pietro Abate’s recent blog posting about unburden-home-dir on Planet Debian gave me the right kick to make another try to solve the remaining issues.

And the mental distance gained over the time indeed helped and I could fix the remaining issues. So I added some polish to the package and uploaded it to Debian Unstable.

If you used the previous version from experimental, you have to take care of a few things:

• Previously some configuration files sported unburden_home_dir as base name while others used unburden-home-dir as base name as that’s also the package name. Now all configuration files use the package name, i.e. unburden-home-dir as base name.
• “Conffiles” under /etc/ should be renamed by dpkg automatically, but per-user configuration files ($HOME/.unburden_home_dir and $HOME/.unburden_home_dir_list) must be manually renamed to $HOME/.unburden-home-dir and $HOME/.unburden-home-dir.list.
• By adding UNBURDEN_HOME=yes to $HOME/.unburden-home-dir every user can decide himself if he wants the Xsession.d hook to be used when he logs in under X. On managed workstations with many users this eases testing of unburden-home-dir with just a few users a lot.

You can follow the development of unburden-home-dir also on GitHub and on Gitorious as well as on Ohloh.

Enjoy!

SuSE sucks! //at 05:44 //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.

Read more…

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.

FrOSCon, COSIN und ein zu Kazehakase bekehrter Ex-Galeon-Fan //at 03:16 //by abe

Bereits zwei Wochen her, aber trotzdem nett, war die FrOSCon (Free and Open Source Software Conference), auf der ich im normalen Vortragsprogramm drei Vorträge und am Debian Day einen weiteren gehalten habe. (Die Folien zu diesen Vorträgen sind seit dem Wochenende nun auch alle online.) Wie ich schon auf schrieb (und von der Online-Zeitung doppelpunkt: der Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg bereits zitiert wurde), war ich von der FrOSCon recht beeindruckt: Dafür, dass es diese Veranstaltung dieses Jahr zum ersten Mal lief, war sie verdammt gut organisiert. Und trotzdem schien keiner der Orgas Stress zu haben oder liess sich diesen zumindest nicht anmerken.

Die FrOSCon hat in meinen Augen definitiv das Potential, um sich neben den Chemnitzer Linuxtagen zu der Community-Konferenz im deutschsprachigen Raum zu mausern: Eine im Westen, eine im Osten. Ich freue mich jedenfalls schon auf das nächste Mal.

Dieses Wochenende war ich auf dem nächsten Event, der (oder “dem”?) Chaos Singularity (COSIN) im Kulturzentrum Bremgarten (KuZeB), einem bisher noch kleinen, aber dennoch feinen Schweizer Hacker-Treffen, welches von den verschiedenen Chaostreffs der Schweiz, den SheGeeks und trash.net organisiert wurde.

Neben dem Wiedertreffen bekannter Namen und Gesichter habe ich auch viele neue Leute kennen- und schätzen gelernt. Ich muss auf jeden Fall auch mal den Zürcher Chaostreff besuchen.

Und natürlich habe ich auch wieder mal einen Kommandozeilen-Workshop mit Lynx als Präsentationsprogramm auf meinem Pentium-1-ThinkPad bijou (ein Restaurant um die Ecke hieß witzigerweise genauso) gehalten, der anscheinend, wie im Rückblick behauptet wird, dafür sorgte, daß »einige der Besucher […] in bisher nicht gekannte Sphären ihrer Shell eintauchten«. Beeindruckend beim Workshp war für mich, daß extrem viele Zuhörer mitdachten, interessante Fragen stellten und z.T. auch gleich selbst beantworteten. Der beste Dank an den Referent war aber auch hier wieder die leuchtenden Gesichter von Spielkindern, die gerade ein neues Spielzeug gezeigt bekamen. :-)

Direkt nach dem Workshop bin ich noch mit Folken ins Gespräch gekommen und er hat irgendwann zwischendrin mal über Webbrowser geflucht und als in diesem Bereich in der Zwischenzeit sehr sensible Person konnte ich nicht anders und etwas in der anscheinend noch offenen Wunde herumstochern: Und siehe da, ein weiterer Galeon-1.2-Fan, der von Galeon 1.3 und von Epiphany und Firefox erst recht massiv enttäuscht ist. Während ich über viel Konfigurationsgerödel mit gconf-editor und anderen wilden Sachen meinen Galeon 1.3 einigermaßen gefügig machte, bis ich Kazehakase entdeckte, ging er einen wesentlich radikaleren Weg: Er stellte auf links2 im grafischen Modus um. Als ich ihm dann nach etwas Zappeln-Lassen Kazehakase und die wichtigsten Einstellungen (UI-Level auf “Expert” setzen) zeigte, gab es ein zweites Mal an diesem Abend leuchtende Augen. Wieder einen zum einzig wahren Browser™ bekehrt. ;-)

Sehr gut war auch noch das Essen (Dank an Beni vom KuZeB!) und sehr nett auch noch die abendliche Beschallung mit Welle-Erdball-SIDs von einem echten C64 aus. (Deswegen einen anlachen werde ich mir trotzdem nicht. :-)

Und da Venty ja dieses Wochenende im Triemlispital lag, hat er mir für diese Zeit sein TomTom zur Verfügung gestellt. Für die Hinfahrt war das ganz nett und funktionierte wunderbar, aber auf der Rückfahrt (mit tiCo zusammen zum Triemlispital um Venty zu besuchen) hat es uns sooft fehlgeleitet, daß wir per Landkarte vermutlich schneller gewesen wären, weil ich mir dann den ganzen Weg einmal im Voraus angeschaut hätte und nicht nach jeder vom TomTom fehlgeleiteten Kreuzung erstmal rätseln mußten, was jetzt schon wieder schiefgegangen war und wo wir wirklich hin sollten. Mal ganz davon abgesehen, daß eine Ente mit Navigationsgerät doch schon sehr komisch anmutete und Landkarten da einfach stilgerechter sind. ;-)

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

Galeon, GNOME and all the rest //at 02:07 //by abe

I feel that I still owe a few answers on the recent Galeon discussion on Planet Debian and apparently also other planets, so here they are… (But I try to keep them short. :-)

First, Erich’s question Why are not-gnome users complaining about Gnome? — Because some people do not use GNOME but do use GNOME applications like Galeon. They don’t use them because GNOME is cool, useful, user-friendly or what else — they use them because these applications are cool, useful, user-friendly or so. They would also use them if they were plain GTK or maybe even KDE applications. For example, I also use Gnumeric or AbiWord, because I like them and not because I like GNOME. (Which — in general — I do btw.) I also use KDE applications although I don’t like KDE in general. (I don’t like KDE for much more emotional reasons compared to Galeon 1.3 btw., so I won’t rant about that. ;-) ark is a nice example for a KDE application I like. Unfortunately some distributions seem to have dropped it. At least I missed it recently on some box.

Then there was Gunnar Wolf’s question if it wasn’t Galeon 1.2 which went off the path. He maybe right, since I’ve never seen a Galeon version before 1.2 and the fact that the former Galeon lead developer dropped Galeon for the very spartanic Epiphany also suggests that. But since Galeon 1.2 took the right path in my eyes, Galeon 1.3 seemed at least to change (back) again to some wrong path from that point of view. We’ll see if Kazehakase really keeps following the “right” path.

JFTR: Interesting to read were also the discussion between Og, Erich and some more in Og’s journal as well as Wouter’s postings on the subject.

Oh, and in general: Thanks for the really nice discussion. Rants seem always to get more constructive responses than just asking for them. That’s one reason why I like to rant. ;-) Another reason is that it frees your mind if you know that people have read about what bothers or annoys you. So also thanks to all who followed the discussion (or still are following it if it hasn’t ended yet ;-).

Now playing: Roxette — The Look