2008 June from The Adventures of Brainy Cat

Friday, 27/06/2008 ≅06:13 ©cat

http://www.scottklarr.com/topic/115/linux-unix-cheat-sheets---the-ultimate-collection/

Tuesday, 10/06/2008 ≅14:06 ©admin

After years of using slackware through it's various stages, I came to a point where it wasn't meeting my needs anymore. I bought a refurb ThinkPad T-30 with a p6 1.8G/.5GB RAM. Output is handled by the ATI Radeon 7500/16MB driving a 1400x1050 LCD. For a console junkie like me, this is heady stuff.

I booted the Elyssa beta I picked up from a buddy at work. I'd driven his machine for a little bit, and I liked the way the UI just... it just worked. I use XP-Pro.sp2 every day, and I use slackware/afterstep everyday on the aforementioned hardware. Practicing my workflow in this new UI presented no surprises. There was a decent selection of software off the bat, and I'd heard that ubuntu had a decent set of packages.

Why do I need a new distro for my laptop? Because I want things to just work. Because I want to focus on the things that make money - webdevelopment and sysadminning. I want a unified system to take care of getting this laptop connected to the rest of the world. I shouldn't have to dig around for obscure apps to string together to get simple things done. Because this is the best hardware I've ever had to do whatever I want with, and I want eyecandy and multimedia without any gymnastical scripts. Additionally, this needs to happen without interfering with my beloved window manager AfterStep, my trusty sidekick elvis and my secret weopon, bash. Don't get me wrong, I owe my allegiance to Slackware and forever until I die any distro I have an opinion about will be compared against it. But Dr. V had to make a decision, and he chose what's best for his distro. Unfortunately, at this point in my computing career it's a choice that leaves me on the outside. It's a good excuse to learn about this whole deb/ubu/gnome/sysv/grub phenomenon anyways. So after rsyncing a bunch of config files over the fileserver, I issued shutdown -r now for the last time on Slackware 12.0. I popped the iso in and took some notes. What follows is the mostly unedited notes I took as I imbibed in Lemon Hart and limeade while installing LinuxMint v5 Beta vx.x. Observations from retrospect will be denoted by C style comments

lcd is awesome. found mouse. connected itself via ethernet.
found my windows domain. was able to clickopen .txt files with gedit. Saved to desktop.

actual time: 6/7/2008 20:00PDT displayed: 6/8/2008 03:45

start > preferences > appearance > prefs > [unable to select any desktop effects] /*kernel did not load the improved radeon driver with gl*/

sound and video > pulseadio > [nothing]

internet > firefox > (chronixradio.com > playlist.pls) > play with default > Music Happened! very impressed with how good the video looks. dragging window or going back to window mode disables video though. /*maybe because the radeon's gl isn't enabled?*/

thinkpad buttons: volume up/down, but the mute button does not unmute. stop/restart mp3 stream player, still mute. /*very typical for the thinkpads. It's worked before, it'll work again*/

lets disable eth0 and enable eth1
administration > network tools > eth0 stats works
whois works
> configure [error: interface does not exist]

opened terminal. VERY extensive module list! much more than I had installed on slack. Some were features I don't use: parport, irda. bluetooth was loaded. radeondriver (administration > video settings showed that my monitor was at 50hz and 1400x1050, but no bitdepth??) was installed. No orinoco or hermes modules.

saving a file to ~/Desktop/ does NOT create an icon on the desktop. Is there a refresh function? Can I automate this check? Or will I need to learn to have seperate workspaces for the gui and the cli? that actually makes sense... break up coding versus my pim

clicked on desktop icon in bar... help menu not found

clicked on network icon in tasktrayish thingy. was able to locate my wifi, but was not able to authenticate when cutnpaste 128b WEPkey from firefox.

wlan0 as an interface? why?

ssh worked to local fileserver

netstat -atpn does not show mysqld or httpd, and what is gvfsd-smb-bro !?!?!? is that the gnome FS I saw something about on their site? port 127:139 is connected to 127:54591 what is that?

default vi is vim. elvis not installed, but it offered to install it for me. svn was offered. mysqld was offered. httpd was not.

smb shares show up as desktop icons. i think it did this since boot, but I just noticed. nice touch, that's what I wanted gnome for.

kyeboard shortcuts utility: nice touch! set "launch media player" to ctl-f8: worked. Set "run terminal" to shift+t: worked. THIS IS A KILLER APP. THIS MAKES ME HAPPY!!!

virutual terms 1-5 showed user mint already logged in. The term size seemed to be very small, but it filled the screen making each char large. I'd rather have a smaller font and more characters.. ls is colored, thank you. I find myself impressed.

Interesting environmental var: RUNNING_UNDER_GDM=yes

keyboard shortcuts: ctl-c/ctl-v work AND SO DOES *NIX mouse select!!!!! OMG!!! Another KILLER APP!!! > gedit seems to be the default editor. Ideally, this will be tweaked to launch elvis in a term when non-binary files are selected.

Overall, I am impressed. More features are working out of the box than I bothered to get configged under slack. My biggest concern is the wifi connectivity, but that needs more testing and this is a hotmount environment. There's no way I can work with metacity. I need virtual desktops, window control and wharf.

My mind was made up, I committed the box to an installation...

Also filed under sysadmin ♠ comments: ∅

and what next?

First, I need bugtracking software. I was originally trying to commit myself to making sure I had my codey notebookwith me at all times... but I've been doing it that way for years and it hasn't gotten me very far. I need an indexed system to track all the stuff I want to fix and help me stay focused on my roadmap. And if it has a timer, so I can see how much time I'm spending on certain projects or types of projects.

And I work with several ticketing systems, so I'm not at all intimidated by them. I looked at the Dreamhost wiki to see what other people are using... the packages were all familiar, but there aren't any that are auto-installed. Mantis of course strikes my fancy. Clean and lean but still robust and intuitive. Software written by people who depend on it is a beautiful thing. And I found some great instructions explaining exactly how to integrate mantis and subversion. Happiness ensues!

I'll actually be able to get some work done in a timely manner with a decent toolset. Now I just need to find more time in the day to do all the coding I want to do. And I need to figure out how to post faster. Sometimes it seems like such a hassle. Why won't they just integrate SEO into the core?

Also filed under sysadmin ♠ comments: ∅

brainycat version 1.0 unleashed

Version 1.0 of The Adventures of BrainyCat is now in production. Violating every rule of what blogs look like, it looks like what I like to see on my screen.

I've added many features. Let's see... post via email, post to bookmarking sites, rewrote the rendering inside the loop, new colorscheme.

I could not have done this without subversion. It's been a little challenging at times to get my head around it's way of doing things, but I've certainly gotten to a point where I feel comfortable navigating the repo as well as my workspace. I'd been having tremendous difficulty with trying to undo changes. While reading up on tags I found the directions for undoing changes. Oops.

If I wanted to start the svn configuration over from scratch, here's what I'd do: