Crunchbang 11 Waldorf First impressions

I decided after using Waldorf on my Eee pc since just after it’s release that it was stable enough to warrant being installed on my main laptop so last night I made sure to back everything up to 1 of my 2 external drives and today I did the installation.

My first impressions were as with any Crunchbang release very good. The installer always seems to run faster than other installations that I’ve done and it doesn’t ask the user any difficult questions. When it came time to partition my hard drive I opted for guided partitioning with a separate /home directory and I chose LVM (logical volume management). I accepted the defaults of 10G for / (root) 8G for /swap and the remainder of the space for /home. I was surprised at the amount of swap the installer decided on as this laptop  has 4G of ram installed and the general consensus at the moment is you could probably do without swap if the machine is only going to be used for general web surfing and sending email. Considering I have a 500G internal drive I decided to leave it as it was.

After finishing the install I rebooted and the post install “cb-welcome” script ran. This is a great idea as it allows you to update the system and install other packages you may want and support for things like printing.

If you want an indication of just how lightweight Crunchbang is once everything was done I looked at the ram usage as displayed in the Conky script running by default on the desktop and it showed current ram usage as a tiny 149 megabytes. That’s right a fully featured operating system that can do anything you could ask of it and it’s barely ticking over on the ram gauge leaving more for the things you want to do which is as it should be if you ask me.

This is just a quick review of my first impressions of Crunchbang Waldorf once I’ve tweaked the hell out of it and used it for a couple of weeks I’ll write another more in-depth review.

Staying safe online

Staying safe online is something we all should care about. This video covers some good suggestions that everyone can do to make themselves safer online. Take a look.

 

Facebook adds Organ Donation (howto)

Facebook today announced their new organ donation feature was going live to Australian users of the site but what does it all mean and how do you opt in to the service?

One important thing you do need to understand though is this isn’t an official organ donor registration page it’s still just your Facebook page and it’s purpose is to let your family and friends know your wishes should they ever be in a situation where they need to give consent to a doctor. To make it official you still need to register with your states organ donation registry. A link to the relevant site is provided during the sign up process.

Now for some reason Facebook hasn’t made it easy to find the sign up form so I’ve put together a quick howto for you.

Step 1 log in to http://www.facebook.com

 

Step 2 click on your name in the top left corner there just below the blue bar

Step 3 click the Life Event link

Step 4 click Health & Wellness

Step 5 click Organ Donor

Step 6 fill out your details and click “save”

Don’t forget to click the link on the right hand side of the registration box and register your details with your state organ donor registry

That’s it! Your now listed on Facebook as an organ donor and with your state registry. Now go and have the discussion with your other family members and friends so maybe they will sign up to be organ donors as well.

Crunchbang 11 “Waldorf”

It was announced today at Crunchbang Towers that the first testing build of the new Crunchbang 11 is available for download. Obviously there is still work to be done so expect a few bugs. If fixing/testing distros is your thing then head over there and check it out. For the rest of us it’s just good to know that a new Crunchbang release is on it’s way.

More can be found by following this link.

Setting wallpaper from the cli

System:

Crunchbang Statler Gnu/Linux 64bit
Openbox window manager
Debian base

By default Crunchbang comes with Nitrogen to manage your wallpaper, for a gui tool it’s nice, lightweight and does what you want it too do but I have a love of all things cli and also of using the least amount of system resources to get the job done.

So I found a little program called Feh that can handle setting the wallpaper from the cli for me. By itself though it doesn’t maintain the wallpaper setting across reboots requiring you to reset it each time you restart the computer.

So we need to add a line to the Openbox autostart file that takes care of reloading the wallpaper when we reboot.

Here’s how it’s done.

Step 1.
Open a terminal and type “sudo apt-get install feh”

Step 2.
Locate an image on your hard drive that you want to use for your background.

Step 2a
If it’s named something stupid like 000001244587_11542.jpg like mine was rename it something you can type easily like wkend_trip_with_family.jpg.

Step 3
Set the background by typing “feh –bg-scale /home/user/file.jpg” when you’ve done that your background will be set and a new file called .fehbg will appear in your ~/home directory containing the exact command you just typed.

Step 4
In your terminal cd to the openbox directory “cd ~/.config/openbox/”
Then edit your autostart file for this I used vim if your not familiar with it you can use geany instead. Launch it with either “vim autostart” or “geany autostart”

Step 5
Scroll down until you find the option “## Set Desktop Wallpaper” then delete the following line “nitrogen –restore &” and add “sh ~/.fehbg &”

Step 6
Save your file by hitting esc and typing “:wq” or “ctrl+s” if you used geany.

Step 7
If your happy with your new setup then before you close your terminal type “sudo apt-get remove nitrogen”

There you have it. A low resource, minimalist way to set your desktop wallpaper from the command line. Should you ever want to change your wallpaper simply run Step 3 again. It’s as simple as that.

Note: I hope it’s obvious but if not I’ll mention it. Don’t type the quotes when entering these commands in the terminal they’re just here to separate the commands from the rest of the text.

New look for the blog

People that know me are well aware of my crazy obsession with all things black. I have black canisters on my kitchen bench, black coffee tables in my lounge room, I got excited when they released the black Nintendo Wii and yes now I own one!

Well today I was checking out the new themes @ WordPress.com and I came across this all black theme and when I tried it out I was instantly sold.

So anyway I love the new theme and I hope you do too. I’d like to post more regularly than I have been and kind of get some structure into the blog that has been lacking since I created it really. Hopefully this will herald a new beginning for Mindless Blathering.

Edit: How could I forget my favourite black thing of all and the operating system I am using while writing this post, Crunchbang Linux. Check out the review I wrote a while ago. Crunchbang review

Tweetdeck on Unsupported Browser

If you’re not using Google Chrome as your primary browser but would still ike to use the awesome Tweetdeck web app then all is not lost. Simply fire up your browser of choice and enter https://web.tweetdeck.com/web/#/ once you've done that and hit enter you should see the login screen.

Tweetdeck Web App login page

Happy tweeting!
Edit: I tested this in Firefox 11, I can't vouch for Internet Explorer, Opera or Safari.


Video Player Review – Proprietry vs Open Source

Media Players : VLC vs Windows Media

Installing a newer version of a package on Debian stable

I wanted to install Wireshark a network packet sniffing program today but when I checked the version available in the Debian stable repository I noticed it was several versions behind the latest available on their website.

This is a common occurance on Debian as they prefer stability over cutting edge software but sometimes you need the latest version of a software package so how do you get it when it’s not in the repos? The answer is app pinning.

Debian has several repos, stable of course as well as testing and unstable. Many people use the testing repo as their main package repository on a daily basis without major dramas. Unstable is the very top of the tree where the latest packages are introduced to the package tree and they are often the least stable as a result.

So to begin with we need to alter several files. These are /etc/apt/sources.list & /etc/apt/preferences

It’s good to get into the habit of creating a backup of any file you edit in Linux so I started by doing sudo mv /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.nfo & sudo mv /etc/apt/preferences /etc/apt/preferences.nfo

This way if you totally screw something up it’s easy to boot your system with a live cd (I recommend the System Restore Cd) and delete the modified config file, rename the backup and you’ve got a working system again.

Also you might be wondering why I used .nfo as the extension well I forget where I read it now but someone suggested using your initials for the extension so that’s what I do.

To start with open your start menu and click “Run Program” then enter "gksudo [editor]" (I use gedit)

Now we need to know what repositories to add. I added

## Testing
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free

## Testing Security updates
deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib

I just added these to the bottom of the list already there. Also i realised I mentioned unstable earlier in this post but I don’t really want to mess with that on this machine so I stayed with testing only. I also changed the existing repos from “squeeze” to “stable” just to keep everything the same.

Now we open /etc/apt/preferences and add

Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 650

Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 600

As you can see the Pin-Priority numbers decrease from stable to unstable this is because apt prioritises the highest number so you don’t end up upgrading every package on your system only the one you actual want.

Right so save that and return to your terminal.

Now I ran sudo apt-get install wireshark/testing but that returned errors due to incompatible version numbers of dependant libraries.

Just when I was about to pull my hair out I found this little gem sudo apt-get -t testing wireshark I ran that and it installed perfectly. So I had to check out the man page to find out what this magical -t flag actually did.

Trying to install wireshark with the first command wireshark/testing was only going to install the wireshark package from the testing repos and none of the dependancies but using -t testing means it gets everything it needs to install wireshark from the testing repo in other words the main package and all the dependancies.

Very nice and definately one to remember for future use.

Using Gnu Screen

To start a session in Screen for the first time open a terminal and type “screen”. You should now get the standard start up message simply press the space bar and it will take you to the next screen which is your basic shell prompt. Now you can start an application by simply typing the name of it as you would normally do in a terminal.

I’ll use Mutt my cli based email client for this example.

becker@crunchbang:-$ mutt

Now I have mutt running but my status bar at the bottom of the window which shows me all the windows I have open doesn’t reflect that. The problem is by default they all say (x$bash) where x is a number starting at 0. Now that’s not very helpful if I forget what window I opened something in so the easiest way to remedy this is to set a window title. To do that we use the key combination

C-a A. this means you press the Ctrl key at the same time as the “a” then you release both keys and press shift (to get capitals) & “a” again. This allows you to set the window title which in this case I’ll call Mutt although email would work as well.

Another command that you need to know to get the most out of Screen is

C-a c This is how we create new windows inside of Screen. You’ll remember from the previous example that the C-a means press Ctrl and “a” together then release and then press “c”

Now we have a few windows open obviously we need a way to move through them. The easiest way to do that is using the “Previous” & “Next” commands C-a p & C-a n respectively

Now the final tip for now. What do you do when your girlfriend wants to quickly check her email and you’ve got 3 or 4 different programs running inside your screen session? The easiest way to protect it from any unplanned interaction is to use the command C-a x. What this does is lock the screen session and require your user password before it can be accessed again making sure nothing changes whilst your away from the keyboard.

If you spend any time at the command line I’m sure you will see the value in learning and using the Screen program. It cleans up your desktop by getting rid of those multiple terminal windows you used to have open and putting them all into 1 window. Having everything controlled by keyboard shortcuts means you leave your hands on the keyboard instead of always moving away to grab the mouse making you more productive.

Edit: I made reference earlier in this post to the status line at the bottom of your Screen window. What I failed to mention is that Screen doesn’t have a status line by default but you can add one yourself. Now I must confess I didn’t write this myself and in pure code form I really have no idea what it all means but when it’s up and running it gives me my system load averages in the bottom left corner, the window titles of all open windows in the centre of the screen and the time and date in the bottom right corner. So as you can see it is actually very useful.

Here is the code:
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string ‘%{= kG}[ %{G}%l %{G}%H %{g}][%= %{=kw}%?%-Lw%?%{r}(%{W}%n*%f%t%?(%u)%?%{r})%{w}%?%+Lw%?%?%= %{g}][%{B}%Y-%m-%d %{W}%c %{g}]‘

To use this code you simply add it too your .screenrc file. If you don’t already have one just create it then paste in the code and save it to your home directory.