Linux

Samba

2005-09-25T18:33:00.000Z

Today I set up samba properly. Previously it only worked one way (viewing windows shares on the linux box) and involved typing the tedious command "sudo mount -t smbfs //192.168.0.1/share /mnt/share" and entering two passwords (one for sudo, and one for the mounting).

Firstly I set up a line in /etc/fstab to make this much quicker.

//192.168.0.1/share /mnt/network smbfs _netdev,noauto,users,password="",fmask=777,umask=777 0 0

Now I can just type "mount /mnt/network" to mount the share. No password is necessary (in actual fact, you could just put a blank password when mounting it manually) since it's in the fstab command (password=""). I also changed sudoers to allow this command to be run without a password, so overall it's much quicker to mount.

The fmask=777 and umask=777 are important as they give regular users permission to write on the shared drive (since windows doesn't have permissions).

The other stage of setting up samba was getting the windows computer to see me, and be able to access my files. This was achieved by setting up a smb.conf file like this:

[global]
workgroup = MSHOME
netbios name = Tux
security = user
password level = 8
deadtime = 3
guest account = nobody

[homes]
browseable = no
writable = yes

[mp3]
path = /home/ian/Music
browseable = yes
guest ok = yes
writable = no

It's quite straightforward since there's not printers or anything complicated to set up. I have two shares set up, for home directories (which require correct username/password to view) and for my mp3s (read only, can be viewed by the guest account, nobody). You have to set up the accounts for any users logging on like this using smbpasswd (just "smbpasswd -a username" as root, there must already be a local account with that name).

More sudo

2005-08-07T11:18:00.000Z

I've set up the sudoers file a little more sensibly now.

%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL
%wheel ALL = NOPASSWD: /sbin/poweroff, /sbin/reboot, /bin/mount /mnt/cdrom, /bin
/umount
%wheel ALL=(ALL) !/bin/su

The first line says that anyone in the wheel group (i.e. me) can run any command as root, but needs to enter his password first.

The second line says that I can do some mundane tasks like mount the cdrom drive, or poweroff without needing a password at all. This line has to be after the previous line - if it's before, you still need a password as the other line overrules it or something.

The third line says that you can't sudo to su. I originally put this in a security thing, then realised that if someone unauthorised got access to a wheel group user, they could just sudo everything and wouldn't need the su to root at all. So in reality, its function is more to make sure I don't forget the root password, and slow me up from running lots of commands as root, where I might make silly mistakes (such as "rm -Rf /").

In fact, the whole file doesn't really increase security at all (although it'd be just as hard to get access to my account as root's). It just serves to save me typing passwords on mundane things, and make me type passwords on anything that could actually damage the computer. It's just a way of stopping and saying "wait a minute, are you sure you want to do this?" before I blow up the computer.

xscreensaver

2005-07-31T09:25:00.000Z

I'm not a big fan of screensavers since they tend to either look rubbish or use up lots of processing power, but I figured I needed something to lock the screen whilst I'm away. After a little experimenting with xlockmore, I figured it probably wasn't worth going against the norm and installed xscreensaver.

My biggest gripe with xscreensaver is that ugly screen you get when you go to unlock it. It is truly unpleasant. However I found out that you can change that by editing /etc/X11/app-defaults/XScreenSaver. I'm not sure if you can do it on a user level by editing ~/.xscreensaver.

Here's the relevant section. Basically I just changed all of the colours to black and white and removed the "XScreensaver vX.Y. This display is locked" text. It looks much better than before, although I couldn't figure out how to get rid of the xscreensaver logo.

! Resources for the password and splash-screen dialog boxes of
! the "xscreensaver" daemon.
!
!*Dialog.headingFont: *-times-bold-r-*-*-*-180-*-*-*-iso8859-1
*Dialog.headingFont: *-helvetica-bold-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-iso8859-1
*Dialog.bodyFont: *-helvetica-bold-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-iso8859-1
*Dialog.labelFont: *-helvetica-bold-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-iso8859-1
*Dialog.buttonFont: *-helvetica-bold-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-iso8859-1
*Dialog.dateFont: *-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-80-*-*-*-iso8859-1
*Dialog.foreground: #FFFFFF
*Dialog.background: #000000
*Dialog.Button.foreground: #000000
*Dialog.Button.background: #000000
!*Dialog.Button.background: #D6D6D6
!*Dialog.Button.pointBackground: #EAEAEA
!*Dialog.Button.clickBackground: #C3C3C3
*Dialog.text.foreground: #FFFFFF
*Dialog.text.background: #000000
*passwd.thermometer.foreground: #FF0000
*passwd.thermometer.background: #000000
*Dialog.topShadowColor: #000000
*Dialog.bottomShadowColor: #000000
*Dialog.logo.width: 210
*Dialog.logo.height: 210
*Dialog.internalBorderWidth: 0
*Dialog.borderWidth: 0
*Dialog.shadowThickness: 0

!*passwd.heading.label: XScreenSaver %s
*passwd.heading.label:
!*passwd.body.label: This display is locked.
*passwd.body.label:
*passwd.user.label: User:
*passwd.passwd.label: Password:
*passwd.passwdFont: *-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-iso8859-1
*passwd.thermometer.width: 8

.bashrc

2005-07-29T22:26:00.000Z

For some reason, .bashrc is not running when I log in. This is a pain, since aliases such as poweroff="sudo /sbin/poweroff". Ok, it takes seconds to type the extra characters, but it bugs me nonetheless. And I may want to put other stuff in there at some point.

I added the following to /etc/profile:

if [ -x ~/.bashrc ]; then
. ~/.bashrc
fi

Problem solved.

[EDIT]
I did a little more searching and found out that slackware doesn't use .bashrc, but does have .bash_profile. Anyway, I removed the lines from /etc/profile, and put all my user stuff in .bash_profile. It works fine, no point adding extra files for no reason, it'll only complicate things.

Email

2005-07-27T14:58:00.000Z

My email setup consists of fetchmail, procmail, mutt, nbsmtp and msmtpqueue.

Setting up fetchmail and procmail is not really a problem, there are umpteen guides on the net.

Sending mail is a little harder. I don't use sendmail/qmail etc. since they're far too advanced for my needs, and I have no idea how to set them up. Instead I go for small smtp programs such as msmtp, esmtp or nbsmtp.

msmtp and esmtp wouldn't work. I have no idea what was wrong, instead I just gave up and installed nbsmtp, which works fine. I set up mutt with "sendmail = 'nbsmtp -h smtp.gmail.com -p 465 -U username@gmail.com ...'" and it sent mails through gmail just great.

The next thing to do was set up so that I could switch at will between gmail accounts when I compose and email. This is a case of constructing a macro in mutt which changes the sendmail option to pass different option to nbsmtp (i.e. a different username and password), and also change the from address in the headers.

I came up with a line which looked a little like this:

macro compose \e1 "\ef^uJoe Bloggs \n
set sendmail='/usr/local/bin/nbsmtp -f joebloggs1@gmail.com -h smtp.g
mail.com -p 465 -s -U joebloggs1@gmail.com -P joespassword'" 'choose
Joe Bloggs smtp profile'

I'll dissect it bit by bit:

macro - this is a macro...
compose - it works if you're on the compose screen (the one after typing your mail but before sending it)
\e1 - it's activated when you type escape, then 1
"\ef^uJoe Bloggs \n - this changes the from header to "Joe Bloggs ". (escape f means change the from line, control u clears it, then Joe... \n is equivalent to typing it in followed by enter.)

set sendmail='/usr/local/bin/nbsmtp -f joebloggs1@gmail.com -h smtp.g
mail.com -p 465 -s -U joebloggs1@gmail.com -P joespassword' - this simply changes the sendmail option to nbsmtp...

'choose Joe Bloggs smtp profile' - the text to display in the help screen

I have a line like this for each email address I will be sending mail from.

The final part of the email setup is set up msmtpqueue scripts so that it doesn't matter if I'm online when I send email in mutt.

The scripts are set up for use with msmtp, but it works with nbsmtp if you simply change the relevant line. I also changed the names of the files, folders, variables etc. from *msmtp* to *nbsmtp* to avoid confusing myself.

Now mutt sends mail to the msmtpqueue script ("sendmail=/usr/local/bin/nbsmtp-queue -h smtp.gmail.com etc."), with the same options as before (they are passed onto nbsmtp). If the internet connection is up (tested by pinging google, probably not the best way) it runs the sendmail script straight away. If not, the sendmail script runs every 5 minutes as a cronjob, so the mail just sits in the queue until the net is up and then gets sent.

More Lilo

2005-07-26T17:47:00.000Z

Finally got around to setting up lilo properly today. Here's my lilo.conf:

boot = /dev/hda
install=text
vga = 773
delay=0
password=""
default=Linux

# Override dangerous defaults that rewrite the partition table:
change-rules
reset

image = /boot/vmlinuz
root = /dev/hda1
label = Linux
read-only
restricted

other = /dev/fd0
label = Floppy
mandatory
unsafe

other = /boot/cdboot.b
label = CD
mandatory

Key things to note:

install=text - I hate the crappy ascii menu.
delay=0 - boot straight away, no waiting.
password="" - when you run lilo it asks for the password to use and stores it somewhere safe, not in lilo.conf.
restricted/mandatory - you need the password to boot from floppy or CD, or to pass options to the kernel (you also need to put scroll lock on otherwise you won't get the chance as delay=0).
unsafe - you need this to get the floppy bit to work. It tells it not to check what's in the drive when you run lilo (although I think putting a bootable disk in would work too)

And finally:

other = /boot/cdboot.b
This is a little hack I found here to allow me to boot from CD "through lilo". It's explained better on that page, but I'll give it a go in case that site goes down or something.

Basically, lilo can't boot up a CD (or it can, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work). Instead, it tells the BIOS that it failed to boot from the hard drive, so the BIOS then passes control to whatever is next on your boot order, which conveniently is the CD drive.

cdboot.b is the program which tells the BIOS that the hard drive failed. It consists of 512 bytes and goes: CD 18 00 00 00 ... 00 00 55 AA. So that's CD, then 18, then 508 lots of 00, then 55, then AA.

mp3cddb

2005-07-25T20:03:00.000Z

mp3cddb is a mp3 tagging/renaming perl script. After a couple of days of searching for a suitable program to do my tagging, I found this, and it suits my needs quite well. No real problems installing, just had to make sure all the dependencies were installed (and they were easily found once I found a working website for the project, since the link on freshmeat is wrong).

It's very simple - you take a directory of mp3s, it finds the track information from freedb.org and presents you with the most likely match. You can then edit the tags if necessary, and then it writes the tags to the files and renames them for you. Everything you could want in an mp3 tagger.

The only minor inconvenience is that to find the correct information the tracks need to be named in the right order (e.g. "01 catch the pigeon.mp3"). This is fine since most of my ripping will be using cdparanoia and give me tracks imaginatively titled "track01.cdda.wav.mp3". But since I have a few albums which need to be tagged which were ripped on windows and given names in the format "title.mp3", they're in the wrong order.

Sudo

2005-07-16T13:13:00.000Z

To speed up tasks which would otherwise require me to login as root, I very quickly hacked to sudoers files to allow all users in the wheel group to sudo any command without a password, and added my user to wheel.

Whilst this is very convenient in speeding up the time it takes to mount the cdrom drive, mount samba shares, poweroff the computer etc (especially by using aliases such as poweroff="sudo /sbin/poweroff" in ~/.bashrc), it is also pretty insecure, since any user who gains access to my account can run any command, or become root by running "sudo su" with no need for a password.

So bear in mind, this is not a permanent solution to my annoyance at having to be root to turn off the computer (and other such things). I really need to tighten up the security on the computer a lot (if only I wasn't so lazy).

More Pytone

2005-07-16T12:03:00.000Z

I'm not sure having pytone running through xmms is such a good idea.

Firstly, there seems to be some coordination problems between what Pytone says it is playing, and the sound coming out of the speakers. I don't know that this is strictly a problem with xmms/pytone, and not just pytone itself, but I suspect that it may be the cause.

The other thing is that today, whilst listening to music on my dad's windows box, I came the the conclusion again that computer speakers are just too small for music. So I thought... wouldn't it be cool if I could work at this computer, but have the music playing out of my Linux box. And then thought... wait, I can do that!

I got the linux box running sshd, and then logged in from the windows box using Putty. Unfortunately, to get pytone running it needed X (due to xmms), which required me running an Xserver on the Windows box (I found a program called XLitePro which served the purpose well). Overall, it was more work than it was worth. A better solution would've been to run the Xserver on the linux box, with xmms working on that, but I couldn't figure out how to get that going quickly.

Of course, with pytones internal player, or mpg321, I wouldn't have needed X (and won't need it for any other things I ssh to do), and the whole process would be quicker and easier. It might also fix the coordination problems.

[EDIT]
I've now gotten pytone to work without xmms, using its internal mad based player. The problem before was that I didn't have the pymad library installed - simply downloading and installing this solved the problem.

In doing this I've fixed the problems of pytone saying its playing one thing when actually something else is playing, and can also run it purely in a terminal (no X required). I can also utilise the cool crossfading effect (although on the default length of 6 seconds to crossfade between songs it just sounded like a mess)

Pytone

2005-07-11T20:11:00.000Z

"Pytone is a music jukebox written in Python with a curses based GUI."

It's also, as far as I know, the music player which best suits my needs.

A little background info - a while ago I decided that it was time to make my CD collection obsolete. I got to a stage where I had so much music on computer which I hadn't bothered to burn to CD that my music listening was split between the CD player and the computer, which seemed a bit stupid. I also had some problems with dodgy connections on my CD player, which means half the time I was only listening through one speaker, which was very frustrating. Hence I decided to migrate all of my music listening to be computer based.

Since I already had all my CDs in mp3 format anyway, this should've been a quite straightforward task. The first problem was that of connecting decent speakers to the computer (the computer speakers were fine for computer use, but just too damn small to listen to music on). Connecting bigger speakers directly to the computer wouldn't work, since the signal coming out of the computer is too small, so the sound was practically inaudible at full volume. My solution was to send the signal into the computer speakers (which have mains power and a little amp in them, and also helpfully, a headphone plug), and use them to amplify the signal, then send it to the big speakers through the headphone plug. It's not particularly elegant, but it works.

Then I needed a jukebox type player thing. I'd always used xmms, but this lacked the functionality to maintain a database of music and easily add and artist/album to the playlist. At least, if it did, I never found it, nor a plugin for it. All credit to Microsoft, I was looking for something more like Windows Media Player (although many aspects of that program I detest).

All of the programs which I found with the kind of features I wanted were bloated, or just plain wouldn't run on my system. And then I had the idea of using a terminal based player - terminal stuff tends to be very lightweight, and hence fast, especially on a system of my calibre; and also with pseudo transparent terminals, looks surprisingly good at little cpu/memory expense, and matches most other programs I might be running.

Pytone is a breeze to install, you just extract it to a folder (/usr/local is where I install all manually installed stuff), bung the configuration file in the right place (~/.pytone/pytonerc) and edit it, and then run it.

Of course, that's the theory. This time around I had some problems getting it to play, my initial choice of using mpg321 to do the actual playing part failing. Rather than trying to figure out what was wrong with it, I opted for the easy choice and changed the choice of player to the internal player. Of course that didn't work either.

I ended up trying pretty much all of the players in the conf file with their default settings, and none worked easily. However, xmms did give a reasonable error message, so I decided to work on getting that to work (since xmms works ordinarily, it seemed the easiest choice).

The error message was something like "module xmms.control not found", so I tried a "swaret --install xmms" to see what xmms related stuff I could install which might be needed. I noted two packages which I might need, xmmsctrl, and pyxmms (since it's a python based player).

I tried xmmsctrl first, based on the error message, but it didn't work.

Installing pyxmms did work however. Problem solved. (whether xmmsctrl is needed or not, I don't know, but the error message stayed the same after installing it, so I presume it's not),

Sound + Alsa

2005-07-05T18:40:00.000Z

This was deceptively simple to set up. All I did was run alsaconf as root, follow the instructions, let it probe a little and voila, it was done.

Since this isn't particularly useful, here's a copy of the relevant output of lsmod, maybe someone else can figure out exactly what the program did. I should really avoid using these automated setup programs, part of my reasoning behind using Linux is to have complete control and know what's going on, which in this case clearly I don't

snd-pcm-oss 37736 0 (unused)
snd-mixer-oss 12504 0 [snd-pcm-oss]
snd-es18xx 17644 0
snd-pnp 3168 0 [snd-es18xx]
snd-pcm 56072 0 [snd-pcm-oss snd-es18xx]
snd-page-alloc 6328 0 [snd-pcm]
snd-opl3-lib 5892 0 [snd-es18xx]
snd-hwdep 4804 0 [snd-opl3-lib]
snd-timer 13604 0 [snd-pcm snd-opl3-lib]
snd-mpu401-uart 3200 0 [snd-es18xx]
snd-rawmidi 12740 0 [snd-mpu401-uart]
snd-seq-device 3888 0 [snd-opl3-lib snd-rawmidi]
snd 30852 0 [snd-pcm-oss snd-mixer-oss snd-es18xx snd-pcm snd-opl3-lib snd-hwdep snd-timer snd-mpu401-uart snd-rawmidi snd-seq-device]
soundcore 3396 3 [snd]

Poweroff

2005-07-05T18:35:00.000Z

I always thought my hardware was too old to support powering off the PC automatically when you hit shutdown, and hence I never bothered trying to get it working. However, when I tried Ubuntu recently, it worked with the default setup, proving that my software was not too old.

In fact it was ridiculously easy to get it to work - all I had to do was load the apm module ("modprobe apm"). Or alternatively, to make it load every time I booted, uncomment that line in rc.modules.

At some point I will have to explore more of this power management functionality.

Window Manager

2005-07-04T13:20:00.000Z

I've now tried a variety of Window Managers in order to determine which I would go with. This is a very important choice for me. I dislike screen clutter (lots of icons, taskbar at the bottom, that kind of thing) as it takes up valuable screen retail space, and previously I've been stuck with very old monitors which won't go above 800x600. Although I do now have a better monitor which can at least to 1024x768 (maybe more if I play around with it), I'm still a fan of the simple look.

I'm also very keyboard orientated. It's much quicker to do things through keyboard commands and shortcuts than a mouse. This also goes back to old hardware and fighting with a mouse to move the cursor, but even with a modern optical mouse I find it much more comfortable and quick to type than click.

As a result my ideal desktop environment is something simple, fast and customisable. I like to have a nice background picture and nothing else on screen when no applications are open. Right/Middle Clicking on the desktop, or using keyboard shortcuts gets menus for launching apps or a list of open apps. I find a setup like this fast and efficient, and easy going on the resources (I'm using a 300MHz processor...). It also looks good, simple and elegant. Throw in a transparent terminal (I don't use "file managers" at all, everything like that is done on a terminal) and the whole thing is very sleek.

I tried out a few window managers to decide what to use. There's a nice way of quickly switching from one to another which is very helpful - copy /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc to ~/.xinitrc, and then change the last line from "exec ???" to "exec xterm". Now when you startx you will have a single xterm window, which you can use to load a window manager (typing "fluxbox" for example), and then close it with ^C and load another. Makes trying out a few much quicker as you don't have to keep restarting X.

Anyway, I tried fluxbox (my previous WM of choice), blackbox, XFCE and openbox, and eventually settled on openbox. Fluxbox and blackbox would've suited me fine too, but openbox just grabbed me (it had the best looking default setup of the *boxes), and seems very customisable and downright cool. XFCE is probably a tad too bloated for my liking, although I have used it before and liked it.

It loads very quickly, the background is set by Esetroot (included with Eterm, which allows it to have partial transparency which looks oh so cool), the keyboard shortcuts have been customised slightly to suit me as well. This is all pretty straightforward from reading the Openbox docs and editing the sample config files.

I particularly like the fact that if you open a sub-menu near the edge of the screen, it shifts the whole thing slightly so that the menu never goes off screen. Very helpful for when I'm opening menus with the keyboard and not the mouse.

Xorg Keyboard and Mouse

2005-07-03T11:11:00.000Z

A couple of problems with X which needed to be sorted out. The keyboard layout was incorrect - fine for alphanumeric stuff, but some of the punctuation was in odd places - and the scroll wheel on my mouse didn't work. Both problems were solved by some simple editing of xorg.conf.

For the keyboard, I added the lines 'Option "KbdModel" "pc104"' and 'Option "KbdLayout" "gb"'.

For the mouse I added the line 'Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"' and changed the protocol from PS/2 to IMPS/2.

Swaret

2005-07-03T11:00:00.000Z

After playing with Ubuntu for a few weeks, and experiencing the apt-get package management system for the first time, I decided I rather liked the ability to find, download and install a package with one simple command. So I set about installing swaret, which is slackware's equivalent.

Since it's not included on the slackware 10.0 CDs, I downloaded it from sourceforge and installed it ("installpkg swaret-1.6.2-noarch-1.tgz").

To set it up I made a copy of the example configuration file to create /etc/swaret.conf which I edited according to the comments and ran "swaret --update" to get a list of packages from the CDRom and slackware mirror sites. Unfortunately this only has the official slackware packages though, so when I tried to test it by installing firefox, it couldn't find it.

So I added one of the mirrors of the linuxpackages.net repositary to swaret.conf, and lo and behold it found firefox. It's quite an old version, so I ended up downloading the normal firefox installer and running that to install it, but at least swaret is working.

It might not have up to date versions of every piece of software I want, but it still has it's place. I've installed Eterm and atk (library needed by firefox) with no problems, and it's much quicker and easier than finding and downloading and installing the files manually.

Network

2005-07-02T19:21:00.000Z

I have a very old NE ISA network card, which has never been detected automatically by any distribution. This was no exception.

To find the card is a simple case of loading the correct module. This could be done by "modprobe ne io=0x280 irq=10" to quickly test that it works, but since I want it to do this every time I boot, I simply uncommented the appropriate line in rc.modules (/sbin/modprobe ne io=0x280). This successfully loads the module, so it turns out that you don't actually need to specify the irq.

With the correct module loaded for the network card, some network stuff worked. For example I could ping other computers on my LAN, and even mount shared drives from them onto my box.

However I couldn't access the internet. My dad's WinXP box has a broadband modem and hence direct connection to the internet. This connection is shared, using Windows' helpful "Internet Connection Sharing" utility, which in theory should allow my computer to connect directly to the internet if I set that box as a gateway. Unfortunately this didn't work, giving "host not found" messages.

I started by rerunning netconfig, the tool used during installation to set up network connection. However I was pretty confident that everything was correct - a correct static IP address and subnet mask were right, gateway was set to the WinXP box's IP address, hostname isn't strictly important so I set it to "Tux" for want of anything better.

After much faffing around with different network tools and utilities and such, I found out that the problem was with the name server which I had given. The problem being that I hadn't given one. Turns out I need to answer yes to "Will you be accessing a name server" and give the IP address of the gateway computer when asked for the "Primary name server to use". Netconfig creates the file /etc/resolv.conf with this information, and once that was present and correct restarting the network stuff (rc.inet2 restart) made everything work correctly.

Lilo

2005-07-02T18:52:00.000Z

My first reboot after installing Slackware hung on the bios line "Booting from hard drive (C:\)".

The problem was that in the installation I had set lilo to install on the root partition of the linux installation (/dev/hda1) and not the master boot record (/dev/hda). The slackware installation told me that this was safer but would only work if the partition had been set to be bootable when doing the partitions with fdisk. However despite doing this, it didn't work.

Now I'm not really too fussed where lilo is installed, so the fix was quite simple. I first booted onto the machine using the boot disk which I made during setup - if you didn't make one (due to laziness, running out of working floppy disks five years ago or not even having a floppy drive in your machine) you could use the slackware CD.

It was then trivial to change one line in lilo.conf from "boot = /dev/hda1" to "boot = /dev/hda". Run lilo, restart the computer and "hurrah!" we have abrand spanking new bootable Slackware system.

Lilo still needs more work to get rid of the disgusting menu and increase security, but we'll come to that later.

To-do List

2005-07-02T08:29:00.000Z

My hard drive is here, and I may start fixing my computer up today, so first I made this list. It is basically all of the things which I want to get sorted on my computer.

- Basic system installed and customised (re: security and optimisations)
- Graphical environment installed (make it look pretty but retain usability and speed)
- Sound
- Mp3 player/encoder/tagger/ (probably Pytone, lame and easytag, but I'm not so keen on the latter)
- Network (quick and easy to connect to other computers and transfer files)
- Internet
- Email (I like Mutt/fetchmail and whatever smtp I can get to work)
- TV card (unlikely to work, seems to conflict with the motherboard)
- Power management (computer turns off itself when I say shutdown - I thought my hardware was too old for this, but it works in default Ubuntu setup, so it must be possible)
- Games (Windows via Cedega, but I haven't had much success with this in the past, DOS games through dosemu [I'm still a big fan of a lot of DOS games and abandonware], and any good Linux games that don't need a stonker of a 3D graphics card (that includes Nethack/Slashem for certain).
- Printing via network (this has been temperamental in the past at best)
- Audio programs (tracker or synth type stuff so I can try my hand and composing without having to actually play the instruments. This makes sound setup harder, a lot of them require JACK which I've never gotten working)
- GNUCash or similar if I deem it's worth setting it up (it's not like I have a lot of money to manage)
- Decent productivity software, particularly spreadsheet which is compatible with Excel (NOT OO.O , I detest that program)
- Latex and shell scripts which will turn a plain text file into a beautifully formatted essay for me. (Makes schoolwork much easier as I don't worry about formatting, yet my work always looks better than everyone else despite spending no time doing the appearance)
- Decent program for using my Creative Zen. I've used Gnomad, but it's not that good.

More things will be added I'm sure. I also need to record all of my Mum/Dad's records and tapes to computer at some point. Well, not all of them, there's a fair bit of rubbish in their music collection.

Ebuyer Returns

2005-06-23T20:47:00.000Z

Received an email from Ebuyer regarding the hard drive I am returning. In fact, I received a series of emails - the first saying that they'd received it and it would be tested in the next couple of days, the second saying that it was faulty and be replaced, and the next three didn't have any proper sentences or comprehensive English but as far as I can tell were just confirming that it would be replaced.

Pluses - very quick service (and they are replacing my harddrive - I'd be a bit peeved if they didn't seeing as there's no way it should fail within a year)
Minuses - Incomprehensible email messages. Ah well.

Once my new hard drive arrives I can set about installing Slackware and documenting the process, which is what this blog is supposed to be about.

Ubuntu

2005-06-19T16:56:00.000Z

Until I get my new harddrive, I've installed Ubuntu on a small 3GB hard drive I had lying around, and I'm currently using it. Seems nice enough, although I have a few problems which would probably be easily solved if I could be bothered to hunt through some documentation. As it is, I know I'm only going to be using it for a couple of weeks max, so I'm happy without sound and everything being tweaked perfectly.

One thing I don't like is Gnome. I have an inherent dislike of it due to its bloat (although if I remember correctly, it's faster than KDE) and the fact that I have a toolbar at the top and bottom of my screen, which on a small monitor at 800x600 resolution results in me having a tiny space to actually view things in. I'm sure if I had the time I could set it up to give me much more room, and use more intuitive keyboard shortcuts to speed things up, but I can't be bothered, Oh well, I'm such a lazy sod.

In fact, the slowness of Gnome, the amount of screen-bloat and the ugliness of it is rather reminiscent of Windows. I'm yearning for Fluxbox.

Aiming for Slackware Perfection

2005-06-18T10:04:00.000Z

One reason I started using Slackware Linux was the belief that I would be able to set it up, get everything working exactly how I wanted it, and then leave it and never have to tweak with anything ever again. Unfortunately, so far this hasn't happened.

A while ago I decided that one day, when I had time, I would start again. I would reformat my hard drive, install from scratch, and achieve this aim. I also decided that as I did it I would document everything and publish it to the web, both for my own future reference, and in the hope that my experience could help someone else.

A few weeks ago my hard drive started making those nasty grinding noises which tell you that something's not right. Since it's under warranty still, I'm hopefully going to get it replaced, and then it'll be time to start my quest for computer nirvana, recording everything I do here.

On a completely unrelated note, I just received 10 Ubuntu Linux CDs in the post. They're giving them away for free - which may not sound surprising as it's open source software, but in this case, you don't even have to pay for the Postage/Packaging/Media costs. See here for more details.