Tag: Linux

Losing my edge?

So I haven’t really been actively involved in the Microsoft/Windows development crowd in years (ever?). I have gone spelunking through the KB and the MSDN site on occasion and come back scarred and generally unhelped. It’s kind of a running gag with some folks in my circle that the difference between Linux and Microsoft forums is that one is a MMORPG with lots of flaming and camping and the other is more of a FPS set in a post-apocalyptic world with you as the sole living survivor.

But because I’m actually interested in using the Microsoft Edge browser and because I am becoming quite attached to my Surface 3, I’ve joined up with the Windows Insider program. I trade my skills as a beta tester and bug writer for early access to Windows 10 and related ecosystem updates. Maybe because Microsoft is actually engaging in proselytizing instead of assimilation or maybe because it’s comprised mostly of devs feeling out the work of other devs, the community forum is a rather enjoyable place to be.

Witness threads like this one. In a Linux distro forum reading a thread that started off with a generic out-loud bellyaching would require flame retardant long johns. But in the Insider community we see a well-positioned Insider (read: guessing a Microsoft employee or contractor) walk someone off a ledge and then engage in a fruitful dialog resulting in a serviceable solution for the OP.

I don’t know that this sort of bonhomie survives the masses–if it ever gets opened to them–but for the time being this is a help forum that is actually quite helpful. I’m also jonesing for updates because they’re near to having the browser plugin framework together…and the WWW without ad blocking is seriously painful.

Gentrified

This last weekend I was huddled in the basement instead of soaking in the abnormally warm weather. What started as a collection of minor annoyances with Sabayon’s Linux distro turned into a full-blown fit of pique. Yet another distro that drove me bats with frequent updates that broke nvidia drivers each time. Then some obscure process pulled the vboxusers group out from underneath my account so I couldn’t run my Win7 VM. That’s the box configured to VPN into work. Normally a great idea because it keeps my workstation mainly off the LAN at work. Sometimes it presents wrinkles and that makes supporting builds at 0600hrs difficult. Of course, it really wasn’t until Sunday evening that I even figured out why I was having VirtualBox issues.

And, really, rigo is not as hep as emerge.

So I pulled the training wheels off and went full-on Gentoo. Well, mostly Gentoo. I still outsourced my kernel configuration. This time I relied on the good folks over at Funtoo. The guy behind Funtoo used to be a lead at Gentoo but had philosophical differences I guess. All to the good for me because I love Gentoo while I had micromanaging my kernel and USE flags.

They’ve got a series of Stage 3 tarballs pre-rolled for architectures and processors. Along with the tarball comes a sensible collection of USE flags and kernel configurations. They also provide a collection of Portage overlays that greatly simplify USE flag management. You get all of the gains of highly-individualized, locally compiled code without quite as much of the headache.

The biggest sticking point, again, was futzing with X11 and nvidia drivers. However, I’m a bit more confident in things sticking this time around since Gentoo necessarily gets you closer to the update/upgrade process. I also discovered blacklisting in modprobe so now nouveau is hidden from view and should no longer rear its ugly, underperforming ass.

Another point of contention was that the Funtoo overlays were masking pulseaudio which doesn’t really make a whole heck of a lot of sense given everything is counting on that laying about and providing the interface to the audio hardware. Once that was fixed, though, I could emerge Firefox, Thunderbird, and Spotify. That gets me about 83% of the way to a functioning workstation. Of course, there was Eclipse, GVIM, VirtualBox, and the Calligra suite as well. There’s a few more things to iron out, a few minor annoyances to be righted, and then some customization of the theme (natch) that will make things feel like home again.

Oh, and I’m not 100% sure yet, but there’s a better than even chance that I trashed my entire media collection accidentally. So I’ll likely be starting from scratch again. Joy. Definitely need to get the record-from-soundcard thing working with Spotify again. Either that or dig out the giant box of CDs and rip them all over again. Yick…

So I spent a good part of this last weekend watching consoles scrolling compilation logs. There’s a lot of code that sits behind a functional operating system and windowing environment. Easily 10 hours and that’s with eight overclocked cores and 32GB of RAM.

Better than anticipated

Back in the day I’d digitize stuff by taking audio off my receiver and run it into the audio-in on my computer. I was lazy the other day and decided I wanted to try to pull sound directly off the sound card. And that’s how I found Audio-Recorder [1]. It’s easy enough to install and I was able to pull sound directly off the sound card. Nice.

Then I started playing with the Source configuration. It detected all of the expected /dev foo coming off my audio card. Then I noticed it also detected RhythmBox and Spotify as audio sources. I accidentally left it configured to Spotify and wandered off.

This evening I was listening to They Might Be Giants’ Lincoln [2] album on Spotify on my phone. I was rocking out to Mr. Me when I got home so transferred my Spotify session to my workstation downstairs. Bigger and better speakers, the better to share with Elizabeth. That was well and good.

After dinner and then some time sitting out in the rain with my lurvly bride I went down to the Man Cave and started puttering around–listening to the rest of Lincoln on Spotify. I happened to notice out of the corner of my eye that the system tray icon for audio-recorder was glowing. So I opened the app, and lo, it is dutifully recording songs off Spotify as I play them. And stuffing the resulting files full of metadata. And organizing them by track name inside folders for each artist. Didn’t even ask it to do this for me.

Brain asplode! I can own the entire Spotify catalog by doing nothing more than queuing songs up and playing them 24/7. At least until I run out of disk. And now I’m one happy Fezster.

[1] https://launchpad.net/~osmoma/+archive/ubuntu/audio-recorder
[2] http://tmbw.net/wiki/Lincoln

Fail-state = FAIL

Using Ubuntu 14.04 which is the current LTS release I was able to install Gnome-Do [1] and basically rock it. Gnome-Do is a port/clone of the Quicksilver app for Macs. It’s a launcher but so much more. It follows a subject/predicate/[object] syntax activated by a key combination. It’s also scriptable. Suddenly the mouse/touchpad becomes an optional device on the Mac. Which is a good thing, by the way.

Executive summary: If you’re on MacOSX[foo] and you’re not using Quicksilver [2], then you’re wrong and you probably won’t have any viable progeny.

With that out of the way, you can see how one would find a port/clone of this app on a *nix box to be a good thing too. I mean, there is always a terminal window open and any .bashrc file worth its salt will have shortcuts galore which mirrors the launching half of what Quicksilver provides. But the scripting? Again, you can predict much of that and stuff that into your .bashrc (you are using bash, right?) but when it comes to on-the-fly scriptability, Gnome-Do was tops.

Until I upgraded anyway. The move from 14.04 to 14.10 may not have been wholly advisable–after all there isn’t much new in 14.10 and certainly nothing I needed. But the upshot being, I did the in-place upgrade and that absolutely killed Gnome-Do. In fact, it killed Gnome. It killed everything Gnome related. No Unity, no Gnome-shell, no Cinnamon, no MATE. Nothing.

Luckily I’d installed Fluxbox because it’s never lost its old-school charm. Sometimes you want a windowing system that is lightweight and not loaded with geegaws. At any rate, Fluxbox –> Terminal –> apt-get purge and everything was cleaned up in regards to that.

Of course, I ended up re-partioning and pulling my /home/nhansen across on an untouched partition anyway because the upgrade also blew up all of the gnome-related sound processing during video playback…and that problem wasn’t so easily solved.

So how did you spend your vacation days in November, Nick? Troubleshooting an in-place upgrade and ultimately Un/re-installing a base operating system on my primary workstation. Hooray for fun times!

At any rate, in the process I have a more robust partitioning scheme, a fresh 14.10 install, and a newfound respect for the Mint distro’s [3] folks fear of in-place upgrade installs.

Oh, and so the funny thing? I got everything fixed and then tonight apt-get installed gnome-do again. Before reinstalling Fluxbox. Why? I wish I had a good answer to that. Anyway, thank the higher power that Ctrl-Alt-F[2 -6] brings up a terminal windows from which I could apt-get purge that little fucker.

Never again, Gnome-Do! Do you hear me? Never fucking again! Bastard.

[1] http://do.cooperteam.net/
[2] http://qsapp.com/
[3] http://linuxmint.com/

Bindings

Usually the Windows key bindings are available in every installation of GVim I’ve played with. Not so on my Mint-ified MacBook. And, yes, I know the traditional vi bindings…I’ve just spent so long outside of vi and in a Windows/Mac universe that the muscle memory is just too damn great to overcome. I’ve spent a year or so trying at this juncture.

So, nice to find this: http://superuser.com/a/10604. How to enable mswin behaviors in GVim. Yay!

There’s worse

Started using Everpad [1] on my linux workstation this evening. It’s more responsive than the crapping Thunderbird extension [2] which, in the end, is merely a Mozilla browser window embedded as a tab running against the Evernote [3] site. Using Firefox is fine for that, as far as that goes…which isn’t far at all.

The good:

  • Heavily integrated into the Gnome/Cinnamon desktop
  • Lightweight and highly responsive
  • Supports some of the fancy note formatting available in the Windows/Mac client but not online or in the Thunderbird add-on

The bad:

  • Horrible sorting—no ability to sort notes by tags with a click
  • No ability to select multiple tags
  • No ability to select a tag + notebook combination

The bad things make it almost unusable as a primary GTD tool [4], which is what I use Evernote for. And, yet, I think I it makes a nice addition to the desktop. It’s under active development so here’s to hoping some of these crippling limitations are overcome in the near future.

I also spent a few minutes getting Infinality [5] installed/configured on my linux box. My font rendering is now on par with MacOS. The difference is truly incredible. Font rendering is one of those things that is generally pretty horrendous on *nix and after using MacOS, and I’ll even give Microsoft some love here, going back to a *nix box to plonk around on at home hurts. Infinality addresses this very well with the default settings. I’m not even sure it will be worth my while to wander back into that nest to do any additional tweaking.

All-in-all, a productive night on the laptop. I should do this more often.

[1] https://github.com/nvbn/everpad
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/evernote-tab/
[3] https://evernote.com/
[4] http://lifehacker.com/5952540/get-things-done-with-evernote-using-templates
[5] http://www.infinality.net/blog/