Cover your eyes!

Well – I must admit, after getting a new laptop with a fresh install of Microsoft Vista sometime during the summer, I have been quite content. I am almost inclined to state, from a personal perspective, knowing I might ruin my reputation completely – Windows Vista does not suck that much! It is actually quite user-friendly for mortals.

The time span from my last Linux post till this one is not an indication or proof of any kind that I have started to regret enjoying free beer – oh no – I totally believe in FOSS and GNU/Linux, and other good freeware made available such as Opera, Skype and openSolaris. But I am a fulltime Windows user at work, and whenever I work from home via Citrix, it is more convenient to use Vista. Now, I am my groups test person of Windows 7, and I am actually looking forward to being apart of the workshop trying to migrate fully to 64 bit.

Ah well – Linux rules! But Windows Vista does not suck that much any longer.

Microsoft Office on the other hand…

Facebook – you are not safe!

I have been a member of the social network for a couple of years now. Never been much of a fan, but my girlfriend is… and it does come in handy from time to time.

Today, Facebook suggested a friend for me – which I have absolutely no affiliation with on Facebook. We have no common friends, and no friends of friends or the like. Why and how on earth does Facebook try to “pair” us up?

The reason for this rant, is that I actually know this person! The person lives in another country, but I have actually played bridge with her. But we do not have any other connection. So my question is : does Facebook have access to my Gmail contacts? That does not make sense either, because I use a different email account on Facebook.

Can someone please tell my how this has happened?

Apartment

I have been looking for a new apartment the last couple of weeks. Also, the summer has gone by really fast, so I have not had much time focusing on linux tweeks. Anyway – I am looking forward to moving into my new place

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

My first distro I installed two years ago was Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn; It simply rocked! Then came Gutys, which surpassed it. It was downhill from there.

Now, I am running Jaunty, and so far, I have no complains. Sound is a bit akward – I have no sound at about 60% sound level. Also, the huge memory usage is a bit unneccessary if you ask my, but I have more than enough of it! I feel it is way to heavy for my P4 1.8GHz, though Xubuntu 7.10 ran quite well on it.

Ah well – it’s fun to visit old friends

Mint google custom search

I am currently trying out Mint on my new laptop. I love its easy of use, and the fact that things simply works. My main issue at the moment is that I am unable to get sound from my headphone jack. After som searching it seems to be a kernel bug.

But the most annoying and intrusive behaviour is to be seen in Mint’s version of Firefox – the have their own custom google search. I like Google’s normal search result page! After some ranting on their forum, I eventually found a link to an old blog post explaining why they have included it. And I must admit – I understand their reasons. Also, I am very thankfull that they have posted a workaround or revert procedure on their own.

The reason is simple – money. They get money for using this custom search. So everytime we use, we are actually supporting Mint.

Read more at http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=142

I ended up installing the original Google search. Time will show which one I’ll be using.

Mint – THE Ubuntu spinoff

I recieved my new laptop from work yesterday. I did not have time to install Linux the first day. This was basically because I wanted to resize the pre-installed Vista partition, but the built in limitations in Vista prevented me from shrinking it to a wanted size.

I ended up reinstalling Vista and learn to find may way around. To the best of my knowledge, being a full-time Linux convert for two years, I must say that Vista suprised me. It is actually quite nice. The Sleep functionality is very good. The GUI is a big leap from XP, but the seeing the old icons from the Win95 days in the administrative windows was a real turn-off. All in all – I might just keep my Vista for connecting via Citrix to work. I have been able to do this on my Debian installation, but some keys are not functioning correctly.

Mint 7

SO – Linux – which distro to choose from… Mint 7 was on the dvd from LXF127 with the VERY COOL ECO-DISC. You can actually bend the dvd 180 degrees! Awesome! So I ended up installing Mint for the first time. I have noticed the increased popularity on Distrowatch for the last year, but I have ignored it. Mostly because I did not understand how a spinoff of the most popular linux distro of all time (Debian) could result in the currently most populare distro (Ubuntu) which again has resulted in the currently fifth most populare distro (Mint).

But to my surprise – it is actually quite nice! It is basically Ubuntu in a new look. The webpage is different too, with is glowing green color. But a second look inspired me – this may actually become the best alternative to future Windows converts!

On my new Dell Latitude E5400 everything worked out of the box. I had some flickering with X when loging out, but that’s not a big deal. Kudos to the team behind Mint!

I don’t know if it’ll remain my default distro, but maybe the GTD distro. I really like Slitaz and I’m beginning to fall in love with Arch. So time will show.

GRUB dual boot

There are severeal ways of doing this. One is to have GRUB on the MBR on your harddrive, and booting whatever OS you have in you /boot/grub/menu.lst.

I have Windows XP on my first partition, Slitaz on my second and Arch on my third. This is only on my laptop. My desktop computer looks even worse

Anyway – WinXP requires to be boot from the first partition following the MBR or something. Go figure. And it has its own bootloader, so GRUB must chainload it. I also did this with my first trial of Arch – chainloading a second GRUB install which deals with its respective kernels. This way new kernels will be populated in its own menu which belongs to the correct partition and OS, which keeps my original menu.lst clean(er).

My /boot/grub/menu.lst which resides on my /dev/hda, looks like this. As you can see, I could install GRUB on my Slitaz partition as well – to keep it even cleaner.

# /boot/grub/menu.lst: GRUB boot loader configuration.
default 2 # 3rd entry
timeout 2 # seconds delay

title     Windows
 rootnoverify (hd0,0)
 makeactive
 chainloader +1

title   SliTaz Latest (Kernel 2.6.29.3-slitaz)
 root (hd0,1)
 kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.29.3-slitaz root=/dev/hda2

title     Slitaz (wireless) (Kernel vmlinuz-2.6.25.5-slitaz)
 root (hd0,1)
 kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.25.5-slitaz root=/dev/hda2

title      Arch Linux  [chainload]
 root   (hd0,2)
 chainloader +1

Python: testing

I am impressed! When writing the header of a function, why not simply write an example and automatically test the function?

#!/usr/bin/env python

import doctest

def fact(n, stop=1, r=1):
 """ An iterative factorial function.
 n!     = n*(n-1)*(n-2)*..*(n-(n-stop-1))*r
 stop    fact(5,3)= 5*4
 r        fact(5,3,10)=5*4*10
 >>> fact(5,3,10)
 200
 >>> fact(4)
 24
 """

 while n > stop :
   r *= n
   n -= 1
   return r    

def main():
 doctest.testmod()
 return 0

if __name__ == '__main__': main()

More here: http://docs.python.org/tutorial/stdlib.html#quality-control

lighttp: python

To get lighttp to run python files, you need to tell it to do so. The standard configuration file that comes with Slitaz only allows scripts to be run in the /cg-bin/ folder. I guess this is personal preference – but I want to be able to run scripts everywhere! This can easily be changed ( the orginal line is commented out):

# $HTTP["url"] =~ "/cgi-bin/" {
$HTTP["url"] =~ "/" {
   ".cgi" => "/usr/bin/python",
   ".py" => "/usr/bin/python"
 )

How hard can it be, right?

lighttp virtual hosts

Setting up lighty is simply too easy! On Slitaz it is a matter of downloading and start the server. Just point your browser to localhost and expect it to work!

When working with different projects it is handy to use subdomains or virtual hosts. Or – if you host different sites, virtual hosting is a must. It is also very simple to setup. Make sure the vhost.conf is read by lighttp.conf, and modify the former with your virtual host:

# /etc/lighttpd/vhost.conf
$HTTP["host"] =~ "(^|\.)bridge$" {
 server.document-root = "/home/tux/www/bridge"
 server.errorlog = "/home/tux/www/bridge/log"
}

Make sure you create the log file and set the approriate ownership on the file which is set in lighttpd.conf before restarting. I use www:www, thus

# su
# chown www:www /home/tux/www/bridge/log

Make sure you add the hostname to your /etc/hosts:

# echo "127.0.1.1 bridge" >> /etc/hosts
# /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart