erroneous thoughts

Taking the suggestion of a colleague, I decided to install Arch Linux on my home desktop. Considering that Arch is one of those distros in which you setup most of the stuff, and the fact that I used LVM on top of LUKS encryption, I’d say the installation process (all three attemptsof it) went rather well. And being a long time KDE user that shifted to GNOME when KDE 4.0 (which was more a pre alpha release than a full blown 4.0) came out. But a long of work has been done from KDE 4.0 to 4.2, and as this was the version available in Arch, I decided to give it try. And while it still carries a lot more of eye-candy than I either need or want, many of the usability problems that riddled 4.0 were solved. In particular, I could now create a bar at the top edge of my screen, and throw shortcuts to applications in there. This is in no way as trivial as in KDE 3.5.*, but it turns out it’s not that complicated either. For the applications that have an entry in the K-menu, just drag them to the bar and you are done. For the ones that don’t, create a folder somewhere in your home—I use the Desktop folder, because shortcuts you place in there won’t actually show on the desktop; only widgets are shown—create the desired shortcut (in Dolphin), and drag to the top bar. You can do the same with links to some location (as opposite to shortcuts to an application), but I don’t do this because you can’t change the icon that gets placed in the top bar, and so if you place more than one, you can’t distinguish between them unless you hover the mouse each one).

Overall, it’s being a pleasant (if far from bump-less) ride. Arch seems to have the right trade-off (for me, at least ) between low and high level. About KDE4, I’m still forming my opinion, but I like what I’ve seen so far

Oh and as a final remark, the default KDE theme, dubbed Air, in blueish tones, is so much better than the previous! (which was dubbed Oxygen, and was in tones of… black. Go figure…)

While tweaking thunderbird, I started from the command line, and closed it after a little while. When I started it next, ALL ACCOUNTS WERE GONE!

Looking more carefully, I notice that both the address book and the list of extensions are intact, but no accounts show up; what does show up is the wizard for creating new accounts! Google discovered that these are the classic symptoms of a corrupted profile. In my case this turned out to be an easy fix: just replace the prefs.js in TB settings folder for a non-corrupted backup. It was easy because I had the backup!.

But that’s not the funny part. The funny part is the reason why I had that backup. You see, just yesterday I was working on a shell script to properly automate backup tasks, but it’s still not completed! (it just got a MAJOR boost in priority, though). No siree, regular backups were not the reason I got away with this so easily. The reason was that a couple of days before, I decided to give the TB3 beta 2 a try. But it expects its settings in a different folder (~/.thunderbird) whilst TB2 (in Ubuntu at least) expects its settings in ~/.mozilla-thunderbird). Having more free disk space that I realistically need, the simplest solution was just to make a copy of the latter named like the former. And hence the origin of the backup.

Well, and now I must excuse myself: shell scripts are waiting for me!

One of the first things I did after changing to Ubuntu was searching for a replacement for the one and true music player, amaroK. After much, much, much searching, I came to the inescapable conclusion: you can’t. But I had to, and so I kept searching. And earlier today I stumbled upon the discovery: my inescapable conclusion is still, well, inescapable (you can’t beat amaroK ), but as it turns out, you don’t have to. That’s right, amaroK has been “ported” to Gnome, thus giving birth to exaile. Granted, the name could be less… tacky, but the software is great. It has one small catch: searching, specially complex searches, can be noticeable slower than with amaroK. I don’t know if that has to do with the fact it is written in Python or not, but still, I found my replacement! YaY!

For some weird reason, probably related to some of the default settings of video acceleration (I now have an nVidia), playing DivX5 videos caused a green vertical bar to show up. This happened with all the players. I don’t know where the definitive solution lies, but for VLC I found the solution in this thread:

Go to the preferences menu in VLC and go to the video options, in the output i just played with the settings and X11 works for me.

This exact thing worked for me.

I just recently found out a little bit of knowledge that should be WAY more spread. It appears that when a Linux system freezes to death (a situation that’s sadly often if you happen to own things like ATi graphic cards…), you can unfreeze back into the world of the living, without the (hard) reset button! Quoting:

1. Hold down the Alt and SysRq (Print Screen) keys.
2. While holding those down, type the following in order. Nothing will appear to happen until the last letter is pressed: REISUB
3. Watch your computer reboot magically.

Here’s the lengthier explanation. Remember, “Raising Elephants Is So Utterly Boring” …

If, like me, the reads happens to use Linux, and own an ATi graphics card, then surely you need not be lectured on how much said drivers suck. In my case, I own a Radeon 9600, and whilst in Winblows it works reasonably good, in Linux it just sucks big time. For instance when I tried to play Unreal 2004, it always crashed under 30 seconds! [note 1: by "crash" I mean I had to hard reboot the machine; note 2: in the few seconds the game lasted, it work rather smoothly, i.e. the graphics hardware was working fine]

Well, now it appears that ATi is going to open source some of their drivers. Let’s hope this inspire some major changes in what Linux drivers are concerned.