Escape to Linux

It was four years ago this weekend— yes, Labor Day weekend 2003— that I went over to Linux. I had ordered and received a boxed set of Mandrake 9.1, and also a used and reconditioned IBM ThinkPad T20. Installing Linux on the ThinkPad was a breeze, though it took me two or three months to find my sea legs. You know, little things like getting the computer to work with floppy disks or a printer. But before the end of the year I found myself doing anything with Linux that I pleased. If I didn't know how, I could look it up. Wrote a little piece about my experience, Escape to Linux, which achieved some minor notoriety in certain limited quarters in cyberspace.

After Mandrake 9.1, I went over to Mandrake 10.1, then to Mandriva 2006, and most recently to Mandriva 2007. I dunno, I might feel tempted by Ubuntu, but I'm long since familiar with Mandrake/Mandriva, and there is that learning curve to consider. Basically Mandriva just works, or pretty close to; easy to use, and yet at the same time it's easy to get down and dirty with the technical side of things if you want to.

The most annoying thing about Mandriva is their carelessness with quality assurance: you can just bet each final release will come with an armful of obtrusive bugs, some of which they will never get around to fixing. Oh well. Mandriva 2007 is the best release in this regard, of those I've used, since Mandrake 9.1.

And recently I've come full circle: brought that second computer back from vacation with me, the one with Windows XP on it (mostly as a bargaining chip with my ISP, which "doesn't support Linux"). Though I still rely on my ThinkPad, and Linux, for my everyday work and leisure.

GNOME Icon Themes

Last night I finally resolved one of the few remaining annoyances with my recent install of Mandriva Linux 2007. Namely, no matter which GNOME icon theme I chose, it would display a mixture of the chosen icon theme and the default GNOME icon theme. Some default icons, some icons from whichever other theme I'd chosen.

Not that I use the GNOME desktop, mind you. I use Fluxbox, with certain other elements borrowed from GNOME via the GNOME settings daemon.

And not that I have icons right on my desktop. My desktop has no icons on it— whaddaya think this is, Windows?! No, we're talking about icons in the Nautilus file manager. Nonspatial Nautilus, thank you.

Anyhow. Turns out the problem is, icon image files used to have names like gnome-mime-image-jpeg.svg. Well, now it's just image-jpeg.svg. And (par for the course) they didn't even tell anyone about it, just left us to dope it out for ourselves. Or stumble across it in this thread on MandrivaUsers.org.

And now that I've clarified that...

Playing Old DOS Games Under Linux

Grand Moff Trojan was mentioning a site where you can find zillions of old computer games. Alas, says I, my computer has Linux on it, and not Windows.

Well, says he, have you ever tried DOSBox? Lets you run ancient DOS programs under Linux. In the midst of installing a new release of Linux recently, I tried it out. And lo and behold! I won't guarantee it'll run your favorite old game. But just now I tried out my own modest contribution to the world of computer games— Jetan 2.2, written by yours truly back in 1992, and based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' game of Jetan or Barsoomian Chess— and it works just fine! An old DOS program, running under Linux.

Clean-Up Job, Mandriva 2007

This morning I'm about 80% of the way toward having my computer pulled back into its wonted customizations. What remains is to configure the printer; install Windows TrueType fonts (yes, I still have the Win98 license which came with this computer, even though I long since got rid of any other trace of Windows on it); and clean up a handful of minor items such as why I have no wallpaper in Fluxbox. (Answer, which I just doped out a few minutes ago: because I haven't reinstalled the Esetroot utility. Gotta find which RPM Esetroot is in.)

At first it looked as though Mandriva 2007 wasn't recognizing my zip drive, or my flash drive, or for that matter any of my USB devices. Turns out all I had to do was add a few cryptic lines to /etc/fstab, such as:

/dev/sda4 /mnt/zip vfat noauto,user,rw,exec 0 0

and voilà! Now I can mount drives from the command line at will, which never worked before, because previous releases of Mandrake/Mandriva had the bad habit of overwriting /etc/fstab with default settings every time I booted up.

Ah, the joys of Linux! As Neal Stephenson put it, "If you don't like having your choices made for you, you should start making your own."

Mandriva Linux 2007.0

Yesterday evening I finally bit the bullet, and installed a new release of Mandriva Linux on my IBM ThinkPad T20. Mandriva 2007.0 (no, not the "Spring" 2007.1 release, I'm not quite that bleeding-edge). It replaces Mandriva 2006, for which security updates ran out a good month ago. Actually I've had the Mandriva 2007.0 DVD around here for a couple of months, though only now, as I head into the slower season of the year, have I found time to install it.

Installation went smoothly. Stayed up late last night downloading security and bugfix updates, hundreds upon hundreds of megabytes. Was at it again this morning, and now have most updates in place. Then comes restoring my custom configuration, which I'll do in bits and pieces over the next several days.

And need I say? Linux rules!

My Computer Is Switched to Daylight Savings Time, Is Yours?

So I managed the transition to daylight savings time. Three weeks early this year, thanks to a meddlesome Congress. I even got my computer adjusted for DST, despite the fact that my usual Mandriva 2006 repository out there somehow neglected to post the update in time.

Really, setting your computer to work with the new DST dates is simple, and amazingly cool, if like me you're something of a Linux propellerhead. All you need to do is go to the BASH command line (not to be confused with the DOS command line) and use wget to download from a government FTP site a tarball which contains the latest DST settings:

$ wget ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007c.tar.gz

Then create a temporary directory and untar the tarball in it:

$ mkdir test; mv tzdata2007c.tar.gz test; cd test
$ tar -zxvf tzdata2007c.tar.gz

At this point you will have to use zic to format the data properly, then log in as root user and copy it to /usr/share/zoneinfo:

$ zic -d zoneinfo northamerica
$ su
Password:
# cd zoneinfo
# cp -r * /usr/share/zoneinfo/

Then you will have to set /etc/localtime to the values for your timezone, in my case Central Time. There are a couple of ways to do this, I found it simplest to force a symlink:

# ln -fs /usr/share/zoneinfo/CST6CDT /etc/localtime

And voilà! You can run zdump to verify that DST now begins on your system on the correct new date:

$ zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007
/etc/localtime Sun Mar 11 07:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 2007 CST isdst=0 gmtoff=-21600
/etc/localtime Sun Mar 11 08:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 2007 CDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-18000
/etc/localtime Sun Nov 4 06:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:59:59 2007 CDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-18000
/etc/localtime Sun Nov 4 07:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:00:00 2007 CST isdst=0 gmtoff=-21600

Certain items running on your system will have to be restarted to use the new time data, may be simplest just to reboot.

And that's all there is to it.

Ummm, your computer uses Windows instead of Linux? Sorry, I haven't a clue...

Penguin's Progress

(Yes, I know, I recycle images shamelessly... so sue me! :-)

The tidying up of my Mandriva 2006 installation proceeds apace. Last night I restored the Windows True Type Fonts— last remaining vestigial trace of the "alas poor Yorick" Windows 98SE which was on this IBM ThinkPad when I bought it. (No, my computer is not dual boot. No Windows anymore. Linux-only.)

Took care of the disconcerting tendency of the cursor to change size, depending on which window it was hovering over. This called for adding to my .Xdefaults file the line:

Xcursor.size: 24

And I found out how to deactivate that dang resource-hog desktop-search-tool "Kat"— not documented anywhere, except in the Google cache of a single website; here it is, add the appropriate empty file to your home directory by running the following command from the command line:

touch ~/.mdv-no_kat

And so it goes. Step by step I pull the loose ends together.

My Computer Is Back Up to Speed

Well, everything's looking good with my recent Linux upgrade to Mandriva 2006.


Or I should say, after installing it once and getting it right on Monday, then blowing it, I reinstalled it and got everything back to normal yesterday. Now I'm just chasing down a few remaining loose ends.

That, and trying to figure out how to deactivate (or safely uninstall) that desktop search tool Kat, which is still a resource hog.


Those screenshots are actually from before the change, but same difference, as my screen's appearance is precisely the same now as it was before. If you want to see a full-sized screenshot (runs to about half a meg) it's right here.

Linux Update: Mandriva 2006

Well, what with this unanticipated accession of free time, I gone and done it yesterday. Installed Mandriva Linux 2006 on my IBM ThinkPad.

And it worked very nicely, too: I was surprised, after some of the horror stories I'd read out there. It worked very nicely, until I tried to remove a resource hog desktop search tool called Kat. I removed it, all right; and messed up the system in the process.

So I got up early this morning, and reinstalled everything from scratch. Give me a few more hours here, and I'll be right back to the perfected Mandriva 2006 install I had yesterday evening. Right before I removed that desktop search tool.

In the meanwhile, a first: I am posting to my blog this morning from the Lynx browser. :-)

Linux Upgrade

Well, security updates for Mandrake Linux 10.1 expire as of the end of this month. So I sent away, and yesterday Mr. UPS Man delivered a Mandriva 2006 Powerpack to my door. Mandriva, of course, being the new name for what used to be Mandrake Linux. (Well, plus a couple of other smaller distros they've absorbed.)

Now I've got to make preparations to install this newer release. Back up personal data. Back up other customized and/or necessary files. Track down RPMs or tarballs for various third-party software I use. And so forth. If the past is any guide, a leisurely installation ought to take less than 45 minutes. Then downloading Mandriva 2006 security updates over DSL (which I didn't yet have back when I installed Mandrake 10.1) ought to be a snap. And restoring and tinkering and getting everything squared away, well, give me a full day off and I ought to be back up and running. Though with Lent coming up in just a few days, it's not clear whether I'm going to get around to it this Monday, or next Monday, or when.

Uptime 18d 14:53

Looking at my IBM ThinkPad this morning, I see from GKrellM down in the corner of the screen that my uptime is now 18 days, 14 hours, and 53 minutes.

Yes, that's a new record. I haven't rebooted my computer since January 12. Gone are the days of enslavement to Microsoft, gone are the days of the blue screen of death. Ah, the glories of Linux!

Another Useless Geek Achievement

And of course I had to bring my IBM Think Pad along with me on vacation. Been tinkering with geek stuff. And last night I finally managed to get a Shogi program for Linux to compile successfully.

Okay, Shogi: that's Japanese chess, not to be confused with the not-quite-as-obscure-in-the-West game of Go. Here's a Go board:


And here's a Shogi board:


I've been into the game of Shogi, more or less, for thirty-odd years now. Long story— some other time.

Anyhow, I found a tarball which contained the source code for both gnushogi (the game-playing engine) and xshogi (the graphical front end). Downloaded it, and then the damn source code wouldn't compile. Searching through the error messages, however, I managed to dope out the problem. Went in and edited one line in one file. And abracadabra (Linux translate: "./configure, make, make install"), I have a working Shogi program for Linux.

What, you may ask, am I going to do with a Shogi program? Well, I'm the dude who once spent hundreds of hours writing up a program to play Jetan, alias Barsoomian Chess, from Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel, The Chessmen of Mars. (Available here, source code included.) You begin to get the picture. ;-)

More on "Mandriva"

By my unscientific estimate, reactions at Slashdot, OSNews, and alt.os.linux.mandrake have been running 50 to 1 against "Mandriva" as the new name for Mandrakelinux. To quote only one comment among multitudes: "Did they think at all? Did the board meet and seriously think this was a good idea? I just can't understand how these things happen. I can't comprehend one person being so stupid, let alone an entire corporation. Was there no one to stand up and say 'STOP, this is quite possibly the WORST NAME EVER INVENTED'?"

I also notice that, if you Google on the term "Mandriva," one of the top search results is a recent anti-"Mandriva" thread on MandrakeUsers.org entitled, "let's choose a better name for OUR distro." Mysteriously enough, if you click on the link, you are led to a completely unrelated thread entitled Software group joins EC's MS crusade. But you can still find the original thread (and it's an eye-opener) cached in Google.

Mandriva??!

Yes, it's true. Following its recent acquisition of Conectiva, Mandrakesoft has announced that Mandrakelinux is now...

MANDRIVA

Man-WHAT?! Is that "Man-driver"? Or is that "Man-dreeva"? Either way, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Mandriva. What kind of a name for a Linux distro is that?!

I understand that Mandrake has been embroiled in a trademark lawsuit over possible confusion with the comic-strip character Mandrake the Magician. But fer cryin' out loud, couldn't they have come up with something better than Mandriva??!

I mean, come on. Mantiva. Condrake. Mandows/Manspire. Mandragora. Anything but Mandriva!

It's enough to make a grown man switch to Ubuntu.

Mandrake 10.1

It's been a bit over three months now since I installed Mandrakelinux 10.1 on my IBM ThinkPad. And things are going very nicely indeed with it. One thing I've been tinkering with is the look and feel of things in the Fluxbox window manager— that was always sort of a side concern with me before, don't ask me why. You can see the results in the screenshots.

Fluxbox has KDE support and partial GNOME support. You can get full GNOME support— at least, full enough support for my look-and-feel purposes— by adding the GNOME settings daemon to your Fluxbox startup file.

It so happens that I have matching Qt and GTK themes which imitate the look of the old SGI IRIS Indigo. Very nice for those of us whose theming taste already runs to greys and purples. My wallpaper was reconstructed by copy-and-paste from an IRIS Indigo screenshot I ran across somewhere. I like my brother's description of my wallpaper: "like the cast iron fretwork that used to appear on turn-of-the-(twentieth)-century building interiors as decoration, especially in Chicago." In Nautilus (below) I also use IRIS Indigo icons— found those on some site out there, though I don't believe it was on GNOME-Look.org.


Window borders are Klowner's Graphite Integration. (I also did find a CDE/4dwm Motif-like window border theme, but come on, ugly is ugly.) And to top it off, I use a transparent redglass cursor, which you can get in Mandrake 10.1 by adding the following line to your .Xdefaults file:

Xcursor.theme: redglass

So there you go. Rather retro look, I like it. Oh, and you can also find a full-size screenshot right here.

Mandrakelinux 10.1: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Well, it's been over a week now since I installed Mandrakelinux 10.1 on my IBM Think Pad T20— a week largely taken up by the weekend of Christmas, and then several days away on vacation. I've been tinkering with things, reconfiguring my system back to what I'm used to. Not quite there yet. But getting there.

General impressions? Mandrake 10.1 is very slick, noticeably faster than Mandrake 9.1 (which is what I was using before), and, if you're semi-technical to begin with, it's quite user-friendly. There are a few bugs. But overall, it's quite slick.

I did tons of downloads, 50 megs to set me up with the UW-Madison computer science department FTP mirror, 84 megs of security updates, 80 megs for Fluxbox (that's 800K for Fluxbox itself, the rest for dependencies), 30 megs for a real noncrippled version of mplayer, another hundred megs or two of miscellaneous stuff, and 290 megs of bugfix updates. All done over a dialup connection, pretty much around the clock, in those days before I took off on vacation.

OpenOffice.org opens way faster than before. Featurewise, Fluxbox 0.9.10 is just light years ahead of the dinosaur version (0.1.14) I was using under Mandrake 9.1. The GEdit text editor now color-codes HTML tags; The Gimp 2.0, there's no comparison... (Nautilus has regressed, but hey, that's GNOME for you. ;-) Overall the software that comes with Mandrake 10.1 is, well, a year and a half more advanced than what I was using before; and it shows.

I've been reconfiguring things back to the way I'm used to. Am surprised and pleased at how much of that I'm able to do off the top of my head. Experience does add up, and it does make the job much easier, compared to a year ago in September, when I was diving into Linux for the first time, sight unseen.

Problems. There are a few problems. The system often shuts down uncleanly, requiring lengthy file scanning when next you boot up. Worse, the 2.6.8 kernel plays ball only intermittently with peripherals plugged into my USB port: I understand this problem afflicts only some computer chips, evidently including mine. Yes, I've found workarounds, gleaned off the Net; but bugs like these should never have been let out the door in a "final" release.

Oh well, if I wanted to live safely, I shouldn't have settled in Dodge City, out here on the frontier. I'll take the rough-and-ready freedom of the frontier any day, over living sedately in "sivilization" under the thumb of Bill Gates. And meanwhile, step by step and tweak by tweak, Mandrake 10.1 is progressing toward all the Linux goodness I had before, and more.

Mandrakelinux 10.1, Installed at Last

Well, late yesterday afternoon I got home from visiting someone, sat down at my desk with my IBM ThinkPad, clenched my teeth, and finally installed Mandrakelinux 10.1, which I've had sitting around now for a couple of weeks.

And it works. It works beautifully. Though I have a lot of tinkering ahead of me these next several days, restoring the data I backed up to zip disks, and reconfiguring everything back to the way I'm used to.

The installation went quite smoothly. I did a clean install, repartitioned my hard drive so as to get rid of that small Win98 partition that I haven't used in ages.

The old Savage S3 "scrolling hang" bug is still present, a characteristic not of Mandrake but of my graphics card. I edited a config file, added a line which cures the problem.

At present I'm using the KDE desktop, Mozilla, and my old Hotmail account (ke4081_3 at you-know-what, for anyone who absolutely has to reach me right now). Over the next several days, as time allows (I would have to do this right before Christmas, wouldn't I?!), I'll be migrating back to the Fluxbox window manager; Opera; and for e-mail, Sylpheed. By the way, you would think they'd still include Fluxbox on the Mandrake CDs?! Oh well, I've already downloaded a tarball of the source code for the latest version of Fluxbox, I can compile it if need be. Or probably I can find it in contrib, once I set myself back up with the UW-Madison computer science department FTP mirror.

Screenshots once I've gotten things back to something like normal!

Anyhow... after a couple of weeks of dawdling around and not having (or finding) the time, I've got Mandrake 10.1 up and running at last!

Switch to Linux

Here's a flash cartoon about Linux which pretty well sums up my mood right now. Maybe you should switch to Linux, too? :-)

(Tip of the hat to Dean Esmay)

Mandrakelinux 10.1 Has Arrived!

Yesterday afternoon Mr. UPS Man pulled up out front in his van and delivered a package. Yes, my Mandrakelinux 10.1 PowerPack is here at last!

I'm not going to have time to do more than glance at it for the rest of the week, as today I launch into yet another busy work week. Maybe next Monday— Monday being my day off. I expect installing MDK 10.1 on my computer, in place of my present MDK 9.1, is going to be an all-day task.

First I'll have to back up my data onto zip disks— basically, back up my entire /home directory. Then note down necessary settings to configure for use with NTP servers out there; to set up an alternate config file for running the Tor Proxy with Privoxy; to set the "ShadowStatus" option in case XOrg has the same "scrolling hang" problem with my video card as XFree86; and all those other geeklike things beloved by anyone who likes running Linux.

The new Mandrakelinux 10.1 PowerPack comes with six CDs and two manuals. One of the manuals is on the order of "Why is Mozilla so great? And what is a spreadsheet?": sorry, I didn't need that last time around, and I don't need it now. But the second manual, which wasn't included with Mandrake 9.1, is a more technical reference manual on command-line utilities, managing mount points, installing a new kernel, etc. I doubt much of it will be news to me now, a year and some months after I first switched to Linux; but something like it would've smoothed my path back a year ago in September. It will probably be handy for quick reference.

I expect once I finally sit down to this project— next Monday or so— installing MDK 10.1 will take well under an hour. I'm going to repartition my hard drive, get rid of that rump 1.1 gig Win98 partition I never use: no more dual boot for me! Then restore my data, tinker with appropriate config files, install True Type fonts, and download security updates. That last step will probably take some hours over my dialup connection: I hope the UW-Madison computer science department FTP mirror is ready to go with 10.1, they didn't have everything in place yet when I checked yesterday afternoon.

I'd also like to install XOrg 6.8.1, so as to have true transparency on my transparent Aterm windows (that is, you'll be able to see one window behind another). And try out some of the transparent themes for Fluxbox, and so forth!

Ah yes, for one more-or-less computer geek out here in the Iowa countryside, it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas...

Linux

I'm waiting for the newest version of Mandrakelinux to arrive.

My main computer is a laptop— an IBM ThinkPad T20, Pentium III, 700 MHz, 384 megs of RAM, 11.2 gigabyte hard drive, running under Mandrake Linux 9.1. I've grown very much attached to the computer, and to Linux. You couldn't pay me to go back to Windows.

I jumped the track a year ago in September. Ordered a boxed set of CDs and manual from Mandrake— I could've ordered the disks cheaper from elsewhere, or downloaded them from Mandrake and burned my own CDs for free, but ordering a boxed set is my way of supporting the Open Source movement.

Installation was surprisingly easy— about 45 minutes, and there I was. I had to go in and edit one config file afterwards to cure the S3 Savage "scrolling hang." And of course with Linux you generally need an external modem (I got a Zoom Modem PC Card) instead of an internal winmodem. Also, I eventually got smart and cured several minor annoyances at once by disabling supermount. Apart from that, installation was easy and trouble-free.

It took me two or three months before I found my sea legs with Linux. It is different from Windows, after all. There's certainly a great deal about Linux that I haven't yet mastered. But I've long since reached the point where I can do everything I ordinarily need to do, easily and without thinking. And like I say, you couldn't pay me to go back to Windows.

Linux is all about choice. The two most widely used Linux desktops are KDE and GNOME. I use a third choice, the Fluxbox window manager (pictured above).

Now I'm waiting for Mandrakelinux 10.1 Official to arrive. (Note, now spelled as one word, due to legal wrangles regarding the name of a certain comic strip magician.) When it arrives, I'm going to do a full reinstall on my computer. Ah, this ought to be fun!