It’s not e-waste until the hardware is dead

LOT of PCs that were perfectly fine 5 years ago were made obsolete not by dysfunctional hardware but by resource-greedy monopolistic and monolithic operating systems such as Windows Vista. This was bound to be a blessing to GNU/Linux, said one member of the Manchester LUG around 2006 when Vista was being finalised. He was right. Several years down the line, machines which were back then acceptable cannot possibly run the latest Windows, leaving GNU/Linux to fill the gap with its many distributions (suiting old and new).

Some machines, such as this one, come with Puppy Linux by default (I’ve just bought one to serve as a services monitor). There are other such machines that typically run GNU/Linux.

So yes, I’ve been checking about an extra unit to run a third monitor on. What strikes me as important is that the only two sites that I found so far [1, 2] both indicate that OpenOffice.org is a hot item even on Windows. With ODF and all, how would Microsoft feel? And to what extent will GNU/Linux benefit?

y most used and highly valuable applications are probably Kate, which I wrote about some days ago, and Thunderbird. KNode and Firefox used to be used a lot before I found ThunderBrowse.

Here is a sort of overview of how I used Thunderbird, in case someone ever thought of it as a weak application. Click on the image below for an explanation of my workflow in desktop 2.

everal years ago in this Web site I explained how I work with KDE. It was so long ago that it was KDE 3.1 and I also worked with 4 or 8 dual-head workspaces (now I have 10 that are actively used). But today I would like to share some working tips that are based on adaptations I made over the years in order to increase efficiency in workflow. The short story is, just as activities should be divided conceptually based on some criteria of commonality (e.g. which window needs to be near which other windows), so should text files. It sounds very obvious, but let’s have a better, more detailed explanation.

My favourite text editor is Kate (I use xbindkeys to launch a new instance of it with CTRL+ALT+W). It is very powerful for both development and for writing. It has syntax highlighting for loads of languages/markup, on-the-fly spellchecker, indentation, etc. It also can manage sessions, where basically one can save program state with settings and then load everything from a profile. This includes plugin settings, e.g. tabbed interface for text files. I started using this feature extensively years ago, especially with tabs. Some months ago, however, I found that sometimes I needed text to be in other desktops where it can be adjacent to the windows that correspond to it. For example, development I do in workspace 8, monitoring work in desktops 5 and 6, and news/research mostly in desktops 1 and 2. So I basically broke down my editor into 4 separate sessions, each of which containing particular text files of relevance. In the picture above, shown are two text editors in tandem. One has an archive of my past posts for quick lookup that requires little browsing/navigation, just text search in an enormous text file (tens of megabytes). The top part has about 4 files open, ranging from posts in progress, links that are accumulated, quotes I commonly use, and also some templates of value. There tends to be more in there.

The bottom line is, if you work a lot with text, consider working with raw text and a powerful editor. Putting the whole thing through an HTML-based piece of software like WordPress or even LaTeX-powered software/front ends like LyX is always possible to do at the end. But the real power is in words; the lighter and faster, the better. To improve access to files and information of interest, divide the text editors/sessions into separate desktops. This reduces movement between desktops and enables focus on particular activities, leaving distractions aside. If you have to open the file manager a lot, then perhaps a better workflow is being missed. Shortcuts too can help.

By the way, my KDE session as shown above has run for over two months without even a second login. The desktop’s robustness sure is impressive! The tips above apply not only to KDE. Other editors can achieve something similar.

My last KDE3 desktop on the left and the current KDE4 desktop on the right

Y FIRST experience with KDE4 was KDE 4.1. I had not had a reason to abandon what I was using back then (no upgrade treadmill). I finally started using KDE4 (full time) when 4.3 came out. From that point onwards I could not really go back to KDE3 and be happy. There was nothing in KDE3 that I really did not have in KDE4.

GNOME seems to be going through a similar phase of transition right now. Linux Mint is clinging onto GNOME2 and some users abandon GNOME altogether because of Unity or Shell. Eventually, however, it will probably stablise and users will come to accept change. It can take time (maybe years) and despite minor changes that take some time getting used to, KDE3 does everything substantial that KDE3 could do and it actually does a lot more with decent performance (comparable or better than) w.r.t. to KDE3 on the very same hardware.

All improvements come with a learning curve.

Summary: Weakness in 3-D desktop effects in KDE4

THERE seems to be a deficiency or a bug that may or may not be present upstream/in Compiz too (I seem to recall it not being present in Mandriva 2008 with KDE and Compiz). Basically, as the screenshots below show, the desktop wall separates the left and the right hand side monitors in a rather awkward way, such that they basically completely diverge and do not align horizontally, either (due to different screen sizes). For visual demonstration, here is what the wall looks like:

Here is what the sphere of my desktop looks like:

The connection between left and right is correct in this case. Scale and the other 3-D plug-ins work just fine, but the split in the wall is clearly a bug.

esterday I dumped visual media players — a decision that I stand up for at least for now — instead using more flexible scripts to play just particular parts of songs/tracks that I enjoy, even repeatedly. I use mplayer and bash to do the heavy lifting. This is handy when good segments, e.g. one part of a long concert, need to be isolated. Segments like these are usually to be found in very large files, which can be found either by name:

find -type f | grep PATTERN

To isolate large tracks (by file size), use something like:

find . -type f -size +{10000}k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $8 ": " $5 }'

$ find . -type f -size +50000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $8 ": " $5 }'

The self-explanatory shell script to write would look something like

mplayer /media/disk-8/Music/volO/AugMix.mp3  -ss 0:20:0 &
sleep 600
killall mplayer
mplayer /media/disk-8/Music/volJ/concert.ogg -ss 0:35:0 &
sleep 200
killall mplayer

Enjoy.

EDORA 11 is a fine distribution of GNU/Linux, but my session got stuck (frozen) today. Generally, scheduling on the desktop in this out-of-date operating system is somewhat deficient. Windows sometimes do not respond for a period of several seconds. The bug where a text selection cursor is made permanently visible and allows no real interaction with any applications kicked in… again… today. It happens quite rarely with other distributions and there’s an escape route out of it, e.g. if the terminate signal can be sent to the application causing it, assuming it can be identified. But not this time though. Bearing in mind that it’s not the very latest version of Fedora and having used the fourteenth release since it was made available (even installed it for others), it does seem fair to say that for a smooth experience on the desktop, one is still better off going with the Debian family. Mandriva (predominantly but not strictly RPM-based) has been very good too, probably a lot better than Fedora.

The problems with Fedora are not really caused by adherence to freedom. Some creases and bugs, however, might not be addressed early enough because Fedora’s adherence to freedom (not strict adherence, but better than Ubuntu’s for example) limits the extent of its userbase, which in turn reduces the incentive Red Hat has to concentrate on the desktop side of things.

I have been working with Fedora 11 since last Friday (just waiting for my home computers to get back online with the new line activated) and as much as I try to love Fedora, I cannot help feeling that Kubuntu and Ubuntu have been giving me less hassle. Deep inside I wanted to declare that Fedora was better, but the experiences simply suggest that any such claim would be wishful thinking, even deceptive. The problem is that Canonical was made quite arrogant (hello Hubris!), which harms Ubuntu on technical and communal grounds alike. Canonical could use more competition.

It may be true that Linux in the mainstream is all about Android, Google, Ubuntu, mainframes, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux these days. That’s fine. As long as Fedora uses and reuses the same pertinent packages, there is no risk of Fedora truly falling behind. The wonder of Free software is, as long as one is allowed to copy the competition or branch out of it, unfair advantage is harder to gain. Canonical and Google have both attempted to produce “added value” (or enhancement) which is hard to emulate, replicate, or even get involved in. They are using some very vendor-specific code, which changes the balance of control not just with copyright assignment. It’s not progress and it is usually counter-productive.

Next week I will resume GNU/Linux advocacy and do a lot less programming (below is a new screenshot of the application I have been developing, but it’s unfortunate and regrettable that the code depends on a proprietary framework) and there is a lot of thinking to be done regarding strategy. Generally speaking, the world’s population loses control over technology at a very rapid pace^* and software freedom is no longer the only freedom worth pursuing by a developer with passion for humanism. The head of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has just stepped down and it is hard to blame him; maybe he too reached similar dilemmas and came to realisations that software freedom is not enough. Collaboration too is crucial (GPL encourages it), not to mention education in general.

____
^* I spent half an hour this morning chatting with a lady in her 70s. She too — not too surprisingly — feels as though mobile phones are a burden rather than a blessing. In general, she is also concerned about today’s society which lacks face-to-face interaction and intimidates her generation that’s not at all accustomed to a technological control grid. Free/libre software is being used a lot in this context (primarily for companies to bring their user-hostile proprietary layer to market immediately), not as much is being produced though. If technology is not built to provide the user some more control, then it usually tries to control the user. But people are not made sufficiently aware of it, unless the FSF speaks out, as it recently did against Android.