May 2011 Archives

Now that our 7-year-old's laptop (the former $0 Laptop, aka Gateway Solo 1450) has WiFi hooked up to the sub-$10 USB hub (along with wireless mouse) plugged into the sole-working USB plug, I've been sitting at her little table using this perfectly servicable installation of Ubuntu 10.04 (upgraded from 8.04).

I'm usually pretty hard on Ubuntu (all the while explaining that I still have this particular Ubuntu installation going strong), and I stand by my assertion that despite its high profile and the troubles that brings, Ubuntu is a very fine desktop system.

Whether all of that fades in the post-GNOME era remains to be seen. But for now we still have this excellent LTS (especially now that I don't touch the "social" desktop or Ubuntu One).

The Debian GNU/Linux project has a new primary mirror in China offering the distribution's repositories as well as CD and DVD images at ftp.cn.debian.org.

The University of Science and Technology of China is hosting the mirror.

More users of Debian is always a good thing, and I welcome Chinese users of Linux to the distribution I rely on more than any other for my day-to-day work.

DokuWiki is the wiki that works with flat files (i.e. without a database) and, with the proper plugins functions as a flat-file blogging system.

I'm already thinking of using DokuWiki as an actual wiki, but the software's extension into the blogging space is also of great interest to me.

To look into DokuWiki, start with the Planet DokuWiki blog aggregator, the DokuWiki page on blogging and this extremely recent entry by Andreas Haerter on the newish BlogTNG plugin.

With this setup, you're already using SQLite (part of PHP 5, which is needed for DokuWiki, if I have this right), so we're veering away from the flat-file landscape.

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Maybe it's time I opened my mind back to the database-driven blog. I want speed, whether in a dynamically delivered (WordPress-type) or statically compiled (Movable Type-type) blog.

While I like the concept of creating entries in any text editor, I'm more comfortable in a "traditional" web-form-driven environment accessible from any browser.

More later ...

I've always been an advocate for using the packages supplied by the distribution/project you happen to be running as an OS. Rarely do I go outside the "official" repositories for something shinier and newer. That's changing, and swapping the Chromium browser in Debian Squeeze for the Google Chrome browser directly from Google is my latest shift in this direction.

Why did I do it? Well, I've had more than a few incompatibility problems with the Version 6.0.472.63 of Chromium that is in the Debian Squeeze repositories, which won't be updated for anything but bug fixes for the life of Debian's stable release.

Chromium is still super fast, just like Chrome. But now with Google Chrome 11.0.696.68, all the trouble I've been having with complicated web forms has vanished.

And since Chrome/Chromium is pretty much a moving target development-wise, I'm not worried about the browser suddenly "breaking" on me, especially if the version shipping with Squeeze is old enough to be somewhat broken already.

The only problem with the Google package is that Chrome didn't automatically get into the "Internet" section of the GNOME menu. Instead, it's buried deep within the "Debian" menu. Since I wanted to launch it from the upper panel, I just dropped the icon right there, and load it that way every time. That's a small "fail," that is more than made up by the fact that v.11.x works so much better than v.6.x.

Note: I realize that I could find a more up-to-date source of Chromium, but while I'm not 100 percent comfortable with Google's handling of the data they receive via Chrome and other products, I'm willing to accept that for the moment (but reserve the right to change my mind at any time).

I've come to see the wisdom of a stable operating-system base -- such as Debian Squeeze, the Ubuntu LTS, Slackware, or anything that works well in your particular situation -- combined with newer (or even "rolling") versions of key applications such as web browsers, still-alpha-quality video editors, or other fast-developing software that doesn't benefit so much from standing completely still.

Hence I've used the Debian Mozilla team APT archive for newer versions of Firefox/Iceweasel and Thunderbird/Icedove, Liquorix for newer kernels (though now that new kernels are moving through Debian Backports, I should give them a try), and Dropbox.

I have all of these accounted for in separate .list files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, which means that if/when the packages are updated by their respective maintainers, they will flow into my Squeeze box at those intervals.

But there are pitfalls. There's something to be said for sticking with what Debian brought, but any longtime user of Linux/BSD knows that there are packages that become "problematic" in a particular release and are either slightly or completely broken. However, today I'm trying to at the Mozilla Debian team's site, and it appears to be offline. Maybe I need to go straight to Mozilla and try their packages?

I haven't made the leap from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, from OpenShot 1.1.x to 1.3.x, or even for a newer gPodder. If (and as) I stick with Debian Squeeze, all of this will be on the table. Having the latest Mozilla and Google web browsers, a kernel that works with my hardware (I stalled at 2.6.37) and Dropbox, with the rest of Debian Squeeze chugging along nicely, is keeping me quite happy for the time being.

I hoped Ubuntu would do the right thing and start an official derivative featuring the GNOME 3 environment. That has not happened.

But there is a new project, the Ubuntu GNOME Remix, offering a PPA today and an ISO install image at some point in the near future.

The project aims for a Canonical endorsement, as seen on its "about" page:

This project is run by teampr0xy.net and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Cannonical or the Ubuntu team. Eventually, we would like to see this project become an official Ubuntu project, similar to Kubuntu or Xubuntu.

Seen on Phoronix is a GNOME mailing list post from Red Hat/GNOME developer William Jon McCann about how GNOME should target Linux and not worry about compatibility with other OSes that include the BSDs and Solaris:

... The future of GNOME is as a Linux based OS. It is harmful to pretend that you are writing the OS core to work on any number of different kernels, user space subsystem combinations, and core libraries. That said, there may be value in defining an application development platform or SDK that exposes higher level, more consistent, and coherent API. But that is a separate issue from how we write core GNOME components like the System Settings. ... I think the time has come for GNOME to embrace Linux a bit more boldly.

"Put that in your pipe and smoke it," he seems to be saying. I, for one, appreciate the ability to run GNOME (and Xfce) in BSD environments and think there's a lot to be said for code that runs across the various Unix-like operating systems out there.

Even now there are plenty of parts from GNOME -- and increasingly in Xfce with version 4.8 -- that won't run in a BSD system, and I accept that. But abandoning BSD? I don't like it.

Clean code not tied to a particular OS is better than something that only runs in one environment. What's next? A GNOME that only runs in (insert distro name here)?

Update: It's been slash-dotted.

From free, open-source software user, to blogger, then Linux distro developer.

That's the path of 20-year-old Jeff Hoogland, who in 2010 started Bodhi Linux, a distribution based on Ubuntu that features the latest version of the Enlightenment window manager and key newer applications in a stripped-down base that lets users set things up the way they like them.

I've been reading Jeff 's Thoughts on Technology blog whenever one of his entries appears in LXer, and he seemed to go from passionate Linux user and advocate to lead developer of Bodhi Linux in maybe a half-dozen blinks of the eye.

LXer user Tracyanne, via Curt Howland's blog post, let me know about Brosix, which though still a proprietary technology does offer an alternative to Skype that's aimed at businesses and features Linux client software that isn't inferior (like that of Skype) to its Windows and Mac offerings.

The service is free for personal use and reasonable for businesses.

Video chat, voice chat, instant messaging, a virtual whiteboard, screen-sharing, screenshots, file transfer -- it's all part of the service.

Tracyanne seemed to say that Brosix was interested in getting its Linux client software into the repositories of Linux distributions. Haven't seen that yet. If anybody knows of a distro that packages Brosix, please let me know.

Now if I can only figure out how to easily record both sides of a Brosix voice chat, we're in business.

I was able to extract this tidbit from the O'Reilly Radar interview with Netflix cloud architect Adrian Cockcroft, How the cloud helps Netflix by Jenn Webb (emphasis mine):

Netflix doesn't ask customers to change much on their side (browsers, speeds, etc.) -- how do you achieve this level of inclusivity, and do you see it continuing?

Adrian Cockcroft: We have very wide ranging support for streaming devices and expect this to continue. We are working on the HTML5 video tag standards, which may eventually allow DRM-protected playback of movies on any browser with no plugin. We currently depend on Silverlight for Windows and Mac OS, and we don't have a supported DRM mechanism for playback on Linux browsers.

It's been this way ever since I began using Debian in the Etch days (circa 2007) -- GNOME is generally pretty fast in a distro like Debian, and you can get a lot done with the tools provided by the desktop environment.

In the case of Debian Squeeze I'm talking about GNOME 2.30. Now that we're in the GNOME 3 era -- and very early on -- I can only hope that the dust will settle and GNOME will be just as functional, if not more so, in the year ahead.

Not that I've tried GNOME Shell (or GNOME 3). The last time I tried a live distro that offered the new shell, for one reason or other it didn't work, and I was in the "classic" GNOME environment.

Mind you, on this same hardware I was able to run Unity in Ubuntu 11.04. Not that I'm going to throw over GNOME 2.30 (or Degbian Squeeze) for Unity and Ubuntu, because I am not an early adopter.

I'd prefer that all the enthusiasts out there (that's a nice way of saying fanboys) try out these new desktop environments, file tons of bug reports and hopefully yield something useful many months from now.

Not that it's GNOME or nothing (even though I am one of the most enthusiastic users of NetworkManager you'll ever find). I've spent considerable time running Xfce and could return to it in an instant. I just installed Fvwm2 (a holdover from my OpenBSD desktop days) on my Debian system, and the only reason I don't use it more is that I'm using Dropbox, and while it's certainly possible to use that service without GNOME, it's by no means easy or instant.

And why fix what ain't broke?

So for the foreseeable future, I'll be using Nautilus to manage my files, NetworkManager to switch between wired Ethernet, WiFi and 3G broadband connections, Gedit when I don't need to make changes across a dozen files at once (and Geany when I do), Rhythmbox and Totem for multimedia those few times I need them, the GNOME terminal (where the default type size/style in Debian looks so great), Brasero, gThumb (my No. 1 Linux app) and all those little utilities to configure this and that.

GNOME is good. Hopefully it'll stay that way.

Rael Dornfest's Blosxom blogging script showed just how little code is required to put a blog together, leveraging the power of Perl to compile a blog out of flat files -- with no database required.

But Blosxom itself is pretty much dead as far as development goes, what with Dornfest being a bigwig at Twitter.

From the Blosxom developers' mailing list:

FWIW, I'm working on a blosxom-3-like-thing at the moment, but it's a complete rewrite, rather than a fork. It's also static-only, rather than mixed static/dynamic. And it's not quite as minimalist e.g. the core uses modules rather than a single file, and makes use of a few CPAN modules.

It keeps text-based posts, hooks and plugins, flavours and themes, and
generally has a pretty similar structure to blosxom. And so far it adds
config files and built-in pagination to the core.

It's pretty alpha right now, under-documented, and things are still
moving around a lot. I'm planning to port my blog over to it once I get
the tagging and markdown plugins done, and the plan is to release it via
CPAN as a perl module/app, and for non-core plugins to be released as
separate CPAN modules (in the Statik::Plugin namespace).

It's called 'statik', and code-in-progress is on github:

https://github.com/gavincarr/statik

Contributors very welcome. :-)

Cheers,
Gavin

Not that there aren't other Blosxom-inspired projects, including PyBlosxom and Ode.

The more projects, the merrier, I say.

Later: A new Blosxom website, http://muli.cc.

This new Blosxom site includes a forum post linking to yet another Blosxom derivative, BlogZen. Only problem: There's nothing there yet.

Now that I'm running Iceweasel (aka Firefox) 4.0.1 on my Debian Squeeze laptop and Firefox (not aka Iceweasel) on my Windows XP box, I decided to use the newly built-in Firefox Sync to have my bookmarks, history and such track across my two instances of the browser.

That way I don't have to maintain two sets of bookmarks.

So far this is way, way better than Google Chrome sync. In Chrome's version of the utility, I'm not sure whether or not I can exclude passwords from the sync (which I am doing in Firefox Sync and want to do in Google).

And here's the killer feature for Firefox Sync: Your sync information is encrypted, only you have the key, and neither Mozilla nor anybody else can decrypt this information or use it for marketing purposes.

While Google does encrypt this data during transit, what makes you think the company is NOT using your Sync data -- decrypted on their side -- to compile a profile on your web use and target you with advertising?

From Google Chrome Help (emphasis mine):

You have total control over your information.

To keep your information secure, synced data is encrypted when it travels between your computer and Google's servers. As an added layer of protection, your saved passwords are encrypted on your computer and on Google's servers using a cryptographic key.

The data held by Mozilla for Firefox is encrypted on their servers (emphasis again mine):

Where's all my data?

It's encrypted with your Sync Key and safely stored on the Mozilla servers. Because Sync uses advanced security measures your information is never vulnerable to online bad guys or companies that will sell your information.

And while I don't see anything about this option when I look at the Mozilla instructions for Firefox Sync, I remember there being an option in that setup to use a server other than Mozilla's -- perhaps your own?

Open, above board. Not evil (even potentially). I like that. Chalk one up for Mozilla -- and users.

(If somebody can tell me that the sync data isn't unencrypted and usable for targeted advertising or other Googlish profiling, I'd love to know about it. Ah ... it's only "evil" if you don't want Google knowing about your bookmarks. Right?

But doesn't Google deserve our private data in exchange for all their wonderfulness?

I'm going to say no.

My journey is only beginning on what data companies such as Google should have from users.

What I do know is that we should have alternatives that allow us to keep our private data just that -- private. I'm working on it. And questioning free e-mail, web-based "productivity" software, social networking and even search.

And yes, I'm thinking about the Freedom Box. And large segments of people who don't seem to care about privacy or a lack thereof -- and certainly don't know what they're giving up (and what the consequences could be).

Steve Kemp's resignation from the Debian Project (reasons unknown by me) left me wondering about the Chronicle blog compiler that he coded and packaged for Debian.

Steve says he will continue to develop Chronicle, and Debian Developer Cùran will take over maintaining the package.

Very coincidentally, Cùran's blog provides an excellent example of Chronicle at work.

Nick Schmidt's blog has more (better) OpenBSD tips than anyone these days (and his are way better than mine because he knows more).

Most recent is OpenBSD Laptop mini-HOWTO, which has quick tips to get the particular model he chose (Lenovo u150, a hint that this particular laptop is BSD- and Linux friendly) with a few hardware-agnostic pointers, especially on getting video chat going.

Other worthwhile entries include:

• Debian Server vs. Ubuntu Server

And pretty much the only entry of its kind (written in the last year and pertaining to "modern" OpenBSD):

• Configuring OpenBSD softraid for encryption

One of these days I will do an install this very way ...

Seen in the OpenBSD Journal and confirmed in the bioctl(8) man page:

The following command, executed from the command line, would configure the device softraid0 with one special device (/dev/sd2e) and an encrypting volume:

# bioctl -c C -l /dev/sd2e softraid0

bioctl will ask for a passphrase, which will be needed to unlock the
encrypted disk. After creating a newly encrypted disk, the first
megabyte of it should be zeroed, so tools like fdisk(8) or disklabel(8)
don't get confused by the random data that appears on the new disk. This
can be done with the following command (assuming the new disk is sd3):

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rsd3c bs=1m count=1

More information at softraid(4):

Initialize the partition table and create a filesystem on the new RAID volume:

# fdisk -iy sd0
# printf "a\n\n\n\n4.2BSD\nw\nq\n\n" | disklabel -E sd0
# newfs /dev/rsd0a

The RAID volume is now ready to be used as a normal disk device. See
bioctl(8) for more information on configuration of RAID sets.

Don't try this at home ... yet: The partitions don't exactly "track" from example to example there. I will try this on my OpenBSD 4.8 test system and modify this entry accordingly.

Later: Clearly there are more steps than this. Using bioctl neither worked for me nor destroyed anything.

While Firefox 4.0 is no faster than the Google Chrome web browser, 4.0 is certainly faster than Firefox(es) 3.5 and 3.6, all of which I've run extensively on both the Linux and Windows platforms.

And while there's a lot to like about Chrome/Chromium (I run the one in Windows, the other in Linux -- currently Debian Squeeze, if you want to know), I lean toward Firefox/Iceweasel because one of my key web-accessed applications not only prefers it but pretty much demands it. (It could be worse; the same app used to prefer Internet Explorer and begrudgingly work in Opera).

Whether you call it irony or just business as usual, I've had trouble with both Firefox and Chrome in the recent past when it comes to stability.

I haven't yet checked to see whether Firefox continues to be a resource hog, grabbing CPU and rarely letting go (just about any other browser is better in this metric). But 4.0 certainly feels snappier.

My main complaint with Firefox is that over the course of a long browsing session, the app can slow to a crawl, and you can't do anything having to do with Javascript, or even access the menu, until you kill the process and start anew.

I haven't logged enough all-day intense use of FF 4.0 to say whether or not this problem has been addressed/lessened/eliminated.

And while Chrome/Chromium is generally lighter on CPU (and willing to give up cycles when not being actively used), I've had more than a few crashes of the browser in both the Windows and Linux environments.

So yes, a less-resource-hogging Firefox that doesn't completely fall apart after a few/many hours is something I'd use more.

Later in the afternoon: The speed boost is more evident on my older XP box than on my newer Debian Squeeze laptop, but it's still there.

While Firefox 4.0 still seems to be greedy when it comes to CPU, it's still faster than before, and while it doesn't go as low at idle as Chromium, it's still manageable (especially if it stays fast).

I'll have to put in some longer days running both browsers before I can say more.

I didn't just upgrade my Mozilla-made mail program (call it Icedove if you wish, or Thunderbird) because I wanted a higher version number — or any other feature except for one.

The almighty "Quick Filter."

It's better than the old "Search All Messages" box, which is still there. Now I can more easily sort mail on the fly by any criterion I wish and then read, move or delete it all a whole lot faster.

That's why I made the move from Icedove/Thunderbird 3.0.x to 3.1.