No customisation for you!

Again this morning I was playing with the fresh install of Etch on my work laptop, and came across an old gotcha with Gnome, which I had totally forgotten about. For some reason editing the menus would be ridiculously hard for a complete novice user. Now whether this is because they don't want a user editing menus, or it was an oversight, I don't know. But come on. It's a universal desire to want to rearrange menus. It's pretty simple in Fluxbox, as its all pretty simple file and directory structures, and pretty simple in KDE, but with Gnome you need to have a desire to dedicate significant amounts of time to understanding the weird layout. Thankfully I know about alacarte (previously smeg), which is a replacement / alternative for the Gnome menu editor. It just makes me wonder though, what sort of crack they were on when this decision was made.

WoW irritations

Chris is trying to get me involved with WoW, so after playing with a character on his account he gave me a guest key, and installed the game. Before even getting into the game I have a few issues;

  • Good lord, a nearly 6GB client?! EVE (which I'd argue is bigger and prettier than WoW), Second Life, Project Entropia, etc. aren't that bad. Hell that's edging past a well used UT2004 installation
  • If you skip creating an account when doing the installation, finding the webpage is somewhat trickier than it should be, as the main WoW-europe page doesn't have a link there.
  • Asking for card details when creating said account, when I've input a guest key, looks unprofessional - you have no need to know that information yet, thank you
  • Bittorrent updater - I'd read about this on Penny Arcade a few months back, when it was first introduced. Now I see why it sucks so much. For the love of god, let me configure my upload rate in the actual program. I share this connection with other people for fucks sake, and doing at the router / with another application is just kludgey.

Debian Etch on a Toshiba Protege M200

This probably isn't news to anyone, but getting Linux on a laptop which is running Windows, and doesn't have a CDROM drive built in, isn't as easy as it could be. For this reason I've never put Linux on my work Toshiba Protege M200; the thought of arsing about with USB drives and making them bootable made me decide that it wasn't worth the effort - especially as I can't actually use Linux for work (we have a new VoIP phone system which has a Windows-only teleworker client).

However, with the availability of the Debian Windows installer and a free afternoon I sat down, fully prepared to have to do a restore next time I'm in the office. After resizing the partitions and running the Debian installer I was through to the usual text installer, which I'm used to. Basically went through the defaults and eventually rebooted into a semi-working Debian Etch system.

From this point it wasn't tricky in the least, as because it is an older laptop a lot of the problems have already been ironed out. Then again, I don't think it's something my sister could've done.

WiFi:
By default Etch comes with wpasupplicant, which does most the hard work with WiFi interaction these days. Unfortunately the actual device wasn't powering up. A quick google shows that the chipset used in the M200 is the ipw2000 - which needs firmware loaded into it at boot. A quick visit to the ipw2000 sourceforge website, a download, mv ./ipw2000/* /lib/firmware and a reboot, and the WiFi is working.

Tablet / touchscreen Functionality:
Etch comes with X.org 7.1.0-11, and the installer correctly works out that you have a WACOM touchscreen which mostly configures the system for you. However, to get the stylus working you need to add the following to your X.org conf:

Under the InputDevice's:

Section "InputDevice"
    Driver "wacom"
    Identifier "cursor"
    Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS0"
    Option "Type" "cursor"
    Option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"

EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Driver "wacom"
    Identifier "stylus"
    Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS0"
    Option "Type" "stylus"

    Option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Driver "wacom"
    Identifier "eraser"
    Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS0"

    Option "Type" "eraser"
    Option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"
EndSection

And inside the ServerLayout stanza:

    InputDevice "cursor" "SendCoreEvents"
    InputDevice "stylus" "SendCoreEvents"

    InputDevice "eraser" "SendCoreEvents"

Save and restart X.org.

I'm yet to attempt getting the hotkeys working for changing the screen brilliance, or the volume, but I'm sure it can be done. The only thing that is really bugging me right now, is the fact that the button on the stylus isn't working yet. I'm sure I'll get it once I start fiddling with xorg.conf some more.

If you're so inclined, the nvidia drivers for the graphics card can be installed in the usual way. I have found that once I installed them (what can I say? I love free software, but I love the beryl project a bit more) the performance was actually slower than the vesa driver. Perhaps nouveau will recitify this.

Overall it was one of the least painful non-windows orientated laptop installations I've done in the last few months.

Silence is golden

For the last few years I've had a computer running 24/7, under the desk in my room, serving the various domains and services under my control. As of a few nights ago 'ezra', as it was known in it's last incarnation of hardware, was turned off.

Overall it felt like quite a sad occasion as the mini-itx box had served me well, and saved my bacon in a number of situations. It's also somewhat disturbing to find yourself missing the low hum of a computer, and getting increasingly pissed off at the ticking sound of your analog clock.

For those who are interested the various boxes previously had ran (in order) Gentoo, Win2000 (briefly), and then from the latest hardware; freeBSD (very briefly), Debian stable, Ubuntu 4.10 (yes, that was before the "server edition"), Debian unstable and finally Debian testing. Out of all of them I have to say that Debian testing was the most enjoyable to work with. Nice and stable, despite its name, and reasonably upto date. I've only ever had a problem when a kernel upgrade went a little wonky.

So now that Zinc has taken over (yes, a brand new naming scheme from now on), I'm somewhat perplexed as to what to do with the inners of Ezra. My primary thought was to turn it into a MythTV or Freevo box, but I fear that despite the onboard MPEG decoder, and using a hardware MPEG encoder won't be enough. My other thought is to turn her into a CarPC, or an all-in-one unit (complete with screen) and use her to take from site-to-site. As usual, any suggestions are welcome :) Either way, I'd dread to have to give her up after all we've been through (sad, isn't it?).

Unappreciated (sys|network|desktop)admins?

Whilst there are a few exceptions which prove the rule, Paul Cesarini speaks nothing but the truth;

Having been on the administrative end of academic technology, I appreciate the difficulties facing the information-technology staff. No one pats you on the back if nothing goes wrong, but if something does — if a virus or worm sweeps through the campus's network infrastructure, or someone hijacks some computers to churn out spam — you are off everyone's Christmas-card list.