Multiple Move & Co. //at 00:08 //by abe

nion’s blog made me notice that many people don’t know mmv (multiple move), which approximately works like this:

mmv '*.htm' #1.html
mmv '*.foo.*' #1.#2.bla

Additionally, mmv also can copy, link or even append files when called as mcp, mln or mad respectively with the appropriate command line options.

When I told nion in IRC on #debian.de about mmv, HE pointed me to the Perl script /usr/bin/rename, which is in Debian’s perl package and therefore installed on nearly every Debian system by default. It moves files by applying perl subsitutions to file names:

rename 's/\.htm$/.html/' *.htm
rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *

Being curious, if the newly found tool is not only available in Debian, I looked on a SuSE 9.0 box and indeed, I also found there a /usr/bin/rename. But — surprise, surprise — it’s not a Perl script but an ELF binary. And although it does similar things than mmv and Debian’s rename, it is the simplest of the three commands:

rename .htm .html *.htm
rename foo foo00 foo?
rename foo foo0 foo??

Note to my self: Nice add-on for your command line efficiency talk.

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…

Last day at work //at 19:00 //by abe

As some of my friends already know, I’ve quit my current job and will start working at the Department of Physics of the ETH Zurich in May.

Today is my last day at work here and I feel a little bit sentimental. Most co-workers became friends during the last four and a half years and I’ll move away from a bunch of friends at Darmstadt and from some friends in Mainz and Frankfurt/M. And I’ll leave the Rhine-Main area just shortly before LinuxTag moves in. Fsck.

But it had to be. Although I like creating dynamic web pages with Embperl and Apache, I became sick of working with SuSE Linux, sick of developing with OpenLDAP, sick of developing web applications which must (also) run with Apache under Windows or with MS Access. Since I understand that for the success of my current employer the use of these products can’t be changed that easily, the only solution for me was to quit the job.

My new job at the ETH Zurich will be administrating mostly Unix systems at the Department of Physics as well as some Unix user training. I won’t get rid of Windows and OpenLDAP there though, but I won’t have to develop software with them. What I’ll get rid of is SuSE: I will have my beloved Debian around me (which I can use here only for building Debian packages for customers) and some FreeBSD (no change here ;-), too. So I really look forward to my new job.

Therefore I’ll move to Zurich soon. And since I have down there a lot of friends, too — not only through Symlink and the Linux User Group Switzerland but also people from the 2CV scene — it’s not so hard to the leave the current environment and jump into a new one. Another advantage of moving more southwards is that I’ll be closer again to the rest of the Beckert family, at least the part I’m related to. (The biggest number of Beckerts seem to live near Chemnitz according to Geogen, so perhaps I should pay attention to this when visiting the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage the next time.)

But I’ll come back and visit the Rhine-Main area probably quite often, not only for LinuxTag.

P.S.: It maybe that further blog postings about my move to Zurich only appear in the German written part of my blog and therefore not on Planet Debian (but Planet Symlink).

Stöckchen fangen: Vier Dinge //at 01:27 //by abe

Nu mussich aber, nachdem jetzt nicht nur Priska sondern auch dyfa mit Stöckchen um sich wirft, und Jiuka seines auch schon recht flott gefangen hat. Übrigens haben sowohl dyfa als auch Priska das Stöckchen von der Thildkröte gefangen. Bei SvenK habe ich das Stöckchen als erstes gesehen, dort hieß es allerdings noch “Tag”. :-)

Read more…

Orpheus on Woody //at 02:26 //by abe

Nobse’s blog posting about his ITP the text mode menu- and window-driven front-end to mpg123, mpg321 and ogg123 orpheus made me curious since I was also unsatisfied with the audio players I used so far and mostly ended up in using mpg123 -Z *.mp3, because it works fine and is not as resource-hungry as XMMS. And for CDs I usually used a self-written perl wrapper around the command line tools of cdtools (mostly cdir and cdplay).

I first installed orpheus from sources on my SuSE box at work today while waiting for a windows box to upgrade to some service pack. At home I took nobse’s debian packages sources and recompiled the package on my Woody running desktop. After installing the required build dependecy dpatch from backports.org, the package compiled through without any problems and I now have a very useful and slim text mode audio player.

And orpheus and aumix look fine together inside transparent aterms.

Now playing in orpheus of course: Jean Michel Jarre — Je Me Souviens

Supporting Free Software via vendors //at 02:25 //by abe

Steve wrote in his blog:

I’ve seen this argument before “Buy distribution of GNU/Linux and support free software programmers”. The only problem I have with it is that it is incorrect. Buying GNU/Linux distributions helps the vendors who created it, certainly, and may indirectly help pay for some free software in the sense that the vendors might ship free software they wrote (e.g. SuSEs Yast{2]). However plonking down real cash-money for a boxed set of SuSE gives no money to the people who created MySQL, no money to the people who created Firefox, no money to the people who created Emacs, Vim, Bash, and Catan/Pioneers, etc.

I think, in general you’re right. And if you — as you did :-) — take SuSE, it usually works. And you’re probably also right for most people who just know the big, commercial distributions. But what if you take a free distribution like Debian or some of the BSDs, e.g. OpenBSD? How much truth is in there then?

Especially in the case of OpenBSD your view doesn’t seem work, because if you buy an (official) OpenBSD box, you pay the developers — or at least a few of them — of the operating system core and some mission-critical applications.

But what if you take community based distributions like Debian? You distinguished between distributor and authors of free software. In my eyes especially Debian, but also some other community based distributions are both at same time. So IMHO you can put them on the author side of your view.

And since many Debian vendors (at least those I saw) donate a part of the profit they make from selling Debian CDs or DVD to the Debian Project. Or they offer additional shopping cart items “Donation to Debian” if you order a Debian item. (Example: LinISO.de)

Another question in this context would be, how the FOSS world would look like if there are or were no commercial distributors. It probably would be much smaller because some marketing and some lobbying would be missing. Although that’s the only implication which comes to my mind, I’m sure, there are many more possible views on this subject.

But as I said, IMHO you’re right for most cases.

SuSE: Amüsantes im Abo //at 01:35 //by abe

Ein Blog-Eintrag bei Jörn (das Blog habe ich über einen Blog-Kommentar bei nion entdeckt) erinnerte mich daran: Gestern kam in der Firma die SuSE 10.0 aus dem Abo an. Was mich am SuSE-Abo ja am meisten amüsiert sind die Werbesprüche auf der Packung:

Früher (bis SuSE 7.3) waren da ja mehr amüsante als hilfreiche Texte drauf, so z.B. die Fragen der FAQ:

• »Nach der Installation bekomme ich immer die Fehlermeldung “login:”. Was mache ich falsch?«
• »Ich habe mich eingeloggt und sehe nur “linux #” – Wie komme ich denn nun in Linux hinein?«
• »Ich habe mir versehentlich einen Kernel kompiliert. Wie bekomme ich wieder den originalen SuSE-Kernel installiert?«

Danach kam erstmal eine Weile Bücherwerbung auf den CD-Verpackungen, seit einiger Zeit aber wieder zumindest milde amüsantes Marketingblabla:

• »Keine langwierigen Downloads, direkt von CD oder DVD installieren« — Hmmm, warum habe ich mir (bzw. in meinem Fall der $BRÖTCHGEBER) das Zeugs wohl gekauft?
• Oder der hier: »[…] im openSUSE-Projekt […] treffen sich Linux Entwickler, Software Designer, und Anwender, um die beste Linux Distribution weltweit zu entwickeln.« — Ahja, kaum tut man so, als sei man keine kommerzielle Linux-Distribution mehr, darf man größenwahnsinning werden? Wobei, ja, ich vergaß: Vergleichende Werbung für kostenlose Dinge ist ja schon seit Ewigkeiten in .de erlaubt. (Von den ganzen fehlenden Bindestrichen des Marketingsprechs will ich hier mal abgesehen…)

Aber nicht nur der Amüsantheitsfaktor, auch die Qualität der Verpackung wird immer schlechter: CDs und DVDs sind diesesmal in Papiertüten in einer kleinen Box. Das letzte Mal war’s wenigstens noch ein Pappheftchen mit unübersichtlich vielen Faltungen… Tja, früher war halt auch bei SuSE alles besser. (Bis auf YaST oder so… ;-)