zen.org Communal Weblog

A friend hooked me up with a 5-CD copy of the SuSE 9.2 Professional distribution of Linux. Yay! It’s now been about a week since I got it. Our son decided that 4:30am was a wonderful time to wake up, and stay awake, so after about 45 minutes I gave in (gave up) and brought him downstairs so at least Elana could get some decent sleep. She’d let me sleep in til 10am yesterday since I stayed up til about 2 in the morning getting WordPress to behave properly for enclosures for our first podcast of The Accidental Cook. After a few repeated nights of fitful sleep, no reason not to let her get some extra rest.

Anyway, there we were, Patrick and I, down in the living room happy as can be. (Read that literally.) Well, he was wide awake and firing ideas of activities at me faster than your boss sensing your time management needs improvement. So we played with blocks, puzzles, drawing shapes, whatever. But first, I brought down my laptop and the CDs and started a crisp fresh install of SuSE 9.2 on it. The machine is a Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046, carrying a 10.4″ screen and very little weight. I got it nearly 3 years ago and absolutely adore it, even if it’s only 800MHz in the face of 3GHz and up appearing on the market.

In the last 9+ years I’ve moved around from RedHat to Mandrake to Debian to SuSE to NetBSD to FreeBSD to OpenBSD to Fedora and finally back to SuSE where I think I’ll stay for a while. That’s my choice for both my laptop and the box under my desk. To me, the be-all end-all qualifier has been YaST2 and the ability to use a GUI for as much system setup and maintenance as possible. I’ve done my time doing 32-hour marathon typing fests to get stuff done, and can’t withstand the painful side-effects of that much typing anymore. (Not carpal tunnel, but pretty harsh RSI when I’m not careful and don’t take typing breaks.)

When I first tried putting SuSE on it I was running into problems with the 2.4.x kernels and the driver for the laptop’s hard drive (the alim15x3 driver) which would freeze during the boot. I had to force the boot params ide0=ata66 ide1=ata66 to be able to use the system. The built-in 802.11b wifi support took some work but finally got going too.

Anyway, as SuSE and the kernel have matured, so has the usability of the system in general. With SuSE 9.1 I was finding very little work in making it all come together. I had to tweak its XF86Config-4 file to make X use the full 1280×768 screen, but that’s about it. The 2.6 kernel in SuSE 9.1 comes with the corrected code for the alim15x3 disk driver so I could finally go without directly hacking and recompiling it to make it work.

As I’m playing with Patrick, I’ve got the laptop on the table in the living room plugged in for both power and the network, only intermittently changing CDs as the install does its work. (Not much configuration at the beginning.) It all looked great! I didn’t get to really do much with it until P sat down with me to eat a bit of yogurt.

I found that SuSE 9.2’s choice of kernel now comes with ACPI support that actually functions for the Lifebook, so I don’t have to fall back to using APM anymore. I used the GUI to tell it to use “hibernate” for closing the lid, which worked like a charm. (For some reason, the ACPI sleep choice of S1, to just go to standby mode, isn’t available according to /proc/acpi/sleep.) In fact, everything was coming together just fine.

Well, just about. A quick df to see how much space is left shows that I’m down to about 1Gb out of the full disk’s 20Gb. But then I noticed that the size of the filesystem was claimed to only be about 12Gb in total. A run of ‘fdisk’ showed that there were in fact two partitions, one just over 12Gb (/dev/hda6) and the other just over 6Gb (/dev/hda1). I looked in /etc/fstab and discovered that hda1 was listed to mount to the /data1 directory. Gahh.

I mount it, look inside, and there’s a nice crisp 2Gb of everything that was initially installed, everything in the root filesystem and all of the apps under /usr and /opt. Sigh. But how could the system be working? For some reason, everything’s also in /dev/hda6. I know it formatted the partitions at the start, so I wasn’t looking at old stuff. Weird.

I tried just taking the existing directories (without /home or /data1) and dropping them on the root partition, then thru the Boot Loader Configuration part of YaST2 I added booting from /dev/hda1 as an alternate choice. Didn’t quite make it, but in retrospect I realize I probably needed to recreate its initrd RAM disk image.

Gahh. Probably won’t have any time to touch it again until tomorrow. Still the mystery remains as to why it cast the “real” root partition aside and put everything on the other 6Gb one that was undoubtedly intended for /home. I’ll look at the sources under /usr/share/YaST2 and see if I can figure it out before I bail and reinstall everything. I’d put in all of the software I wanted and had just finished using rsync to bring over my home directory when I realized that the numbers looked funny.

Hmm…did I unconsciously skip a step?

We did our first podcast of The Accidental Cook. It’s our own approach at a cooking show where we talk about what we made recently, complete with some production notes offering recipes and links to what we were talking about.

It’s a 9Mb mp3 file for about 18 minutes. We’re looking at fixing the sound levels (too quiet), adding some music, and using a better microphone.

No matter how few or how many people choose to listen, it’s a lot of fun to make.

Elana was hacking away yesterday trying to get her iBook to create a decent recording. It’s a first step to being able to do her own podcast. As a test she left an audio comment for Adam Curry, who put it into his Daily Source Code show.

It sounded pretty cool, particularly when you consider she started from scratch only a few hours earlier.

For a couple of days I’ve been trying out the Acqua theme for my linux-based KDE desktop. It makes everything look like a Mac, even if it’s just a costume.

I wish they’d make Darwin, the open source copy of Mac OS X, function on x86-based processors instead of just the PowerPC. Seems like that’s what I want to play with next. Ideal: Mac OS X with full linux binary compatibility running on the new paper-thin Sony Vaio X505 laptop.

When I’ve got a work contract, I’m upstairs in the office (rear bedroom) hacking away and like to listen to either music or podcasts of different kinds including Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, the Rock and Roll Geek Show, Air America Radio shows, Reel Reviews, iPodio news, RasterWeb! Audio (silly jokes), and lots more. A visit to audio.weblogs.com shows you the last 100 podcasts to be put on the Net, which you can also have feed right into your player to let you listen to a wide variety of things.

While this started to give yet another cool way to use your iPod, if you don’t actually own one you can still listen to the mp3s for it on your PC, or on your own mp3 player of another company. (Though you’re probably still reconsidering your choice and looking at the iPods of others with a bit of envy, right?) The iPodder client is available for MacOS and Windows, with a Linux version being worked on as we speak. Right now I use the bashipodder scripting hack, though it’s got one bug: sometimes a revised mp3 on a server can trick it into downloading it again. (Update: a tweak to cache the RSS file for comparison based on modification date reduces the need to repeatedly download the full file, and a look for the local file using the basename of the URL to get the name of the mp3 avoids multiple downloads.)

Anyway, I was working away with my headphones on listening to the awesome Rock and Roll Geek Show. Elana came into the office and started cracking up. She said, “Don’t you hear that?” I took off the headphones because I didn’t know what she was talking about.

Only to hear the podcast coming out of the speakers on my desk. I’d not actually turned them all the way down. Duh!

(What’s a podcast? It just started in August 2004; a small blog post offers some history behind it.)

The Planetary Society has set a launch window for the Cosmos 1 solar sail, from March first, 2005 through April seventh of the same year.

When citing something in the ISO C++ Standard, or many other such standards, there’s a common notation shared for email or quick notes. Sometimes it looks like “$5.4/2”, “5.4p2”, and others use “$5.4(2)” or even “5.4.2.1.3”. Anyway, a reference like “$5.4.1” often means “Clause 5, Section 4, Paragraph 1”. Or even “Section 5.4, paragraph 1”.

Clause 5 happens to be titled “Expressions”. While looking for something else, I came across a great post someone made trying to explain this odd notation:

> What does 5.7p6 mean?
Section 5.7, paragraph 6.
Alternatively, The Book of Expressions, chapter 7, verse 6.
...
> {It's the C++ Standard, which for C++ programmers is pretty close to the
>  'Bible' -mod/fwg}

Heh.

It only takes a glance at an annotated map of Ireland to see just how DSL really doesn’t exist for most of Ireland.

If you need ways to connect to your system remotely, but in a secure way and only when you want it to be available, check out Paul Keck’s really creative use of SSH keys. With a cron job using curl or wget, you could create a file on a particular web server that would cause an ssh tunnel (by way of that cron job) to be created from the inside of your system. That tunnel would listen on a port on the remote end, which you can then use to ssh in. Really handy sometimes. (Assuming my description is clear enough that if you have experience with this stuff you know what I mean, of course.)

With a little tweaking you can make KDE look like a Mac with the menu properly planted up at the top of the screen. I’ve never considered myself in the closet about honestly liking Macs even if my day-to-day box has been Linux for nearly 10 years. Yet this still feels like I’m exposing something about my inner self that has been put away safely for no one to see.

While we’re on the topic, MacOS should be available to the public for the x86, not just the powerpc. With the FreeBSD guts to it, I’d have a blast trying it out. I can see problems with the array of hardware that could be put onto the system in comparison to Apple’s very finite and clearly defined set they’re willing to support. But why should all hardware vendors accomodate Microsoft, maybe a bit of Unix, but never MacOS? Yeah, market share. Maybe that’s why they’re moving onto the GNU/Linux bandwagon. But it’ll take a fleet of GUI experts kidnapped from Apple for the interface of KDE or Gnome to ever touch the Mac despite everyone’s great efforts.