endperform.org

I’ve decided to go the Linux in a VM route on my laptop. Yes, I know, bad geek, but I’m willing to take the loss of geek points. My main reasons for switching to this setup is battery life and heat. I know I could spend hours trying to get things tweaked just right, but even so it seems that Vista does a bit of a better job as far as these two categories go. My laptop has enough power that running a VM isn’t going to be a big deal, especially when I can just SSH into my desktop and access just about everything there.

This also means I may post some Windows tips/tricks since I’m going to try to keep this thing running in top shape. I may also review some utilities I’m using as well. While I do prefer Linux, I’m also a fan of using what gets the job done.

Some of you may have heard about the goings-on surrounding Hans Reiser, creator of ReiserFS, and how he was convicted of killing his wife. Most recently, he lead police to her body in an effort to get his sentence reduced. An interesting idea came up on Ubuntu’s Brainstorm site that sparked a lot of controversy. Exhibit A: Brainstorm Idea #10930. The summary is that the submitter things sending a laptop to Reiser while in jail would give him a chance to contribute to society. Ignoring the fact that the laptop would never see it’s intended recipient, some of the comments got rather interesting. Eldmannen, the originator of the post, sees Hans as a ‘victim’ in all of this and has some rather ludicrous thoughts.

There’s this gem:

mtrausch,
Whatever, it was just one kill. Big deal. Others have killed way more. George W Bush is responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people.
Also if he commit a crime, he should be locked up so he is no harm to society. But he should still be allowed participate and contribute to society so that he can become a good and productive citizen.
Plus, she deserved it. She cheated with Sean Sturgeon, embezzled money from his company, and was an irresponsible mother who abused illegal substances such as ecstasy.
Let this be a lesson to all; avoid post-order mail brides.

chipbennett,
It is much better to let him be a productive citizen of society that contributes to society, than have him locked up and do nothing, just waste tax money.

neon,
It is not like he killed Gandhi, he just killed his wife.
Perhaps other people can work on it too, but Hans is the genius who designed it, he can make bring the best to it.

And this is the comment that spurred me to post this:

Endperform,
She was a irresponsible mother abused illegal substances such as ecstasy, putter her kids at risk and who dated Sean Sturgeon a dangerous serial-killer who have admitted to killing 8 people and leaving a ninth for dead.
* http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/05/reiser

I cant imagine the tremendous stress and abuse that poor Hans must have endured. :(
Driving an kind and peaceful man into such an act. :(

“He took someone else’s life and should have to pay for his crimes.”
The guy is paying for his crime. He is doing time.
But he should be given an laptop so that he can be a productive citizen and contribute to the society.

Poor Hans? The guy KILLED HIS WIFE. Eldmannen seems to think Hans is the victim in this, and that his wife drove him to murder her. If you’re having problems with your significant other, there are ways to fix or defuse the situation. If he was really that ’stressed’, he should have separated from her, or better yet, divorced her completely. The fact remains that he killed his wife. We don’t know the exact surroundings of the murder, but to say in no uncertain terms that she deserved to die is just completely insane.

Jon posted an interesting entry concerning KDE3 vs KDE4, and I was all geared up to post a comment to it, but I figured I would go ahead and share my thoughts here, since I had been pondering writing about this topic to begin with. He mentioned a couple of points that I’d like to weigh in on myself. I’ve summarized the points since I haven’t had a chance to ask if I could repost portions of his blog here.

I disagree with the thought that KDE3 is only for power users. I’ve sat quite a few people in front of a KDE3 setup who were totally used to Windows and they didn’t have any issues getting things done. In one case, one person actually liked the fact that settings were at his fingertips and not buried behind various shields. The fact that KDE4 is trying to simplify things doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to appeal to everyone. In fact, some may view this as going along the lines of the Gnome project. My biggest beef with Gnome is the whole GConf setup, and the fact that I have to dig through a special editor to customize some settings. I shouldn’t need to go into a registry-like setup to tweak things. KDE3 exposes these things in via the system settings and various configuration settings, where they should be.

KDE3 was, and still is, a perfectly good desktop for home users. For most people, they may not get into all of the settings, only accessing what they need to. The settings themselves are organized well enough that most wouldn’t need that much hand-holding (if any) to get around things. For some reason, the thought that KDE3 was for power users only just kinda bugs me a bit, especially after seeing quite a few new users take to it nicely.

With that said, let’s turn to KDE4. I’ve tried it, and wasn’t too keen on it at the time. I may give it another shot when 4.1 final is released, but I’m still not sold on it yet. To me, it seems like they focused on the “ooo, pretty” aspect of the desktop and went from there. I wouldn’t call KDE3 vs. KDE4 over just yet. It’s going to take some time before people completely migrate over, myself included.

I’ve started messing around with Emacs in the past few days. It’s installed at work and here at home, but I haven’t done a whole lot of anything with it yet. I’ve been working on my .emacs configuration before I go too much further, setting and unsetting some things to get it to my liking. I found an interesting setup called org-planner mode which may end up in me being able to get organized at work *finally*. Time will tell, but I have to get some of the basics down first.

One thing I keep reading is that a lot of people are switching the Control and caps lock keys in their keybindings. It sounds like an interesting idea, and I can’t remember the last time I hit caps lock on purpose. I might go ahead and swap them out. So far, though, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be too big a deal to learn and use.

I’ve been thinking lately about the configuration time I’ve spent with Arch vs. what I’ve spent with Ubuntu. Now, by configuration time, I’m not just talking about hardware, I’m also referring to customizing and setting up the working environment to my liking. Now, a lot of you might think that Ubuntu is set up in a workable environment to start with. It is for the regular user, however I don’t feel I’m a ‘regular’ user. In Arch, it’s the exact opposite. Once installed, you reboot and have a prompt and a fairly clean slate to work with. Let’s look at what I had to do to get each environment to a state where I was happy with how things were working.

Ubuntu
I rebooted Ubuntu and logged in, greeted by GDM. I logged in and was presented with the default desktop, default apps, no actual ATi driver (using the open source version) but everything worked. So, what did I have to do to get the environment to my liking? I had some things I needed to install:

- ATi proprietary drivers (some may frown on this, but I’d like to use vendor-supplied where possible)

- build-essential, in case I find something not in the repository so I can build it.

- Mozilla Firefox from Mozilla. I find things seem to work a little better with the actual client from Mozilla.

- Media codecs. I need my media to play. This involved adding a new repository and installing a couple of packages

So far, not a big deal. Now we get into the area where I spent a majority of my time, namely removing things I didn’t need and disabling services I had no intentions of using. Don’t get me wrong, I love Ubuntu (and it’s still on the laptop), but I just wish some days for a stripped down version other than the server version. It would be nice to start with a clean baseline install. At any rate, here’s what I ended up doing:

- Uninstalled applications that were of no use to me (bluetooth, evolution, PDA utils, Firefox from the repository, Tracker and a few other things)

- I disabled some services from starting up at boot time that I didn’t need

- Edited some menus to remove / update entries.

- I disable some session startup applications

On top of that, I found my favorite GTK theme and went ahead and installed it.

Arch
Arch is at the opposite end of the spectrum. As I mentioned, once installed, you get a login prompt and can log in as root only. So, the time I spent in Arch was installing / configuring things I need. Here’s what I went through:

- Create my everyday user and add to the needed groups

- Install xorg, flglrx and configure it

- Install Fluxbox and configure it. I should note that as I install / remove apps, I have to edit a menu. No big deal, it doesn’t take too long

- Install some needed services (hal, fam, dbus, cpufreq, acpi) and configure them

- Install the apps I need / want (Firefox, Thunderbird, Conky, Amarok, etc.)

Now, as far as multimedia codecs goes, I didn’t have to add repositories or anything of that nature. One pacman command and I was set up. Not a strike against Ubuntu, just here for comparison’s sake. As of this writing, I have pretty much everything I need to function. Below is a screenshot of my working environment (click to view full size)

In Conclusion
In conclusion, I figure it’s a wash as far as time spent. While Ubuntu will get you up and running quickly, if you’re anything like I am you like to tweak / play / streamline and that’s where the timesink comes for Ubuntu. One the opposite end, Arch starts you off with the bare essentials and you install what you need. Ubuntu resides on my laptop because I’d rather not deal with tweaking it too much since it’s been relegated back to mobile / secondary status. Which one is for you? Well, that depends on what you want. If you want instant gratification and aren’t concerned with default applications, Ubuntu would be the way to go. If you want to learn about Linux and install exactly what you want, go with Arch.

One final note: Arch is a rolling release distribution, which means packages are constantly being updated and there isn’t a set ‘release’ with set versions of software like Ubuntu has. This can be a blessing and occasionally a curse when something comes down the pike that breaks things.