Planet CrunchBang Linux

CrunchBang 11 "Waldorf" Released

2013-05-06T20:53:21+00:00

Debian 7 "Wheezy" was released on May 4th. Congratulations and thank you to all involved; the Debian developers, hackers, testers, document writers, designers, bug reporters and users -- you are all awesome.

Now that Wheezy has migrated to the stable branch of Debian, this means that Waldorf is the new stable #! release. To acknowledge this occasion, I have rebuilt the Waldorf images. The new images are available now from the download page.

For anyone unaware, #! Waldorf has been in development for well over a year and has seen numerous development releases (20120430, 20120806, 20120924, 20120927, 20121015, 20130119). This probably makes Waldorf the most thoroughly tested #! release to date and as a result, I believe it is also the best #! release, ever, truly.

A massive thank you goes out to everybody who has helped with Waldorf, it really would not have been possible without your continued feedback, bug reports, contributions and support.

Note; for anyone who is already running Waldorf, there is no need to download and install these images.

CrunchBang at Linux Fest Northwest

2013-05-02T20:06:29+00:00

[Warning: This will be a long post. For those of you with limited attention spans, for those of you who are too lazy to read, or for those who can't process more than 140 characters at a time, here's the TL:DR version of this blog item: Linux Fest Northwest was enormously outstanding and awesome (attendance is up, too), the CrunchBang booth was a huge success, the CrunchBang talk was well attended, and I stand by the statement I made to Hacker Public Radio last year: This show is so great, I'd walk to Bellingham from California to attend.]

Blame the Econolodge in Bellingham, which should be renamed “the Black Hole of the Internet,” for the complete absence of workable wireless connectability which causes me to compress two fantastic days of FOSS festivities into one blog item written after the fact from the Motel 6 in Salem, Oregon (it should be noted that, unlike the Econolodge, the wireless at both Motel 6 venues we stayed at — in Medford, Oregon, on the way up and here in Salem on the way back — has been quite good).

All of which is to say I apologize for the delay in getting this out.

In short, Linux Fest Northwest nailed it this weekend — the LFNW all-volunteer crew had everything up and running flawlessly in a revamped show area courtesy of some remodeling by Bellingham Technical College that included a auditorium that made for an oustanding expo hall and classrooms with world-class electronics (meaning, of course, my presentation worked with a limited amount of pre-talk tweaking at the outset augmented by prayers to the projector gods).

The normal tsunami of attendees came through the expo floor around 9ish on Saturday, bringing with it the usual hubbub of Linux fest questions, comments and observations. At the CrunchBang booth, media and fliers flew off the table, and folks were trying out the distro on both the old ThinkPad T30 and the newer Toshiba Satellite L455 that were featured on the CrunchBang table. The ebb and flow of humanity — I’m guessing around 1,400 attendees, though LFNW is going to release an official figure soon — rose and fell when sessions were on, but on the whole it was an ideal show for the two days. We ran out of media, fliers and everything by the end of the day on Sunday (OK, I gave the remaining five CrunchBang DVDs to the Greater Seattle LUG, but still).

Some vignettes:

Hey, I know you: I finally got to meet Benjamin Kerensa, with whom I have shared words — mostly kind but occasionally not-so-kind — in the past. Benjamin and his wife staffed the Mozilla table, and it was great to put a face to the name of a true FOSS advocate with whom I can sometimes disagree without either of us being disagreeable (as it should be). Naturally, I’m looking forward to seeing Benjamin and Mozilla at more shows.

Badges? You need steeenkin’ badges: Most folks would find this trivial, but I thought it was fairly cool. The badges for LFNW were small booklets with the speaker schedule printed inside, along with other important information (like directions to the party on Saturday eve). So at the end of your lanyard, you had the entire fest at your fingertips just by looking “inside” your badge (it should be noted, from a logistical standpoint too, that the names were printed on a sticker and put on the badge). Other shows — SCALE, white courtesy phone — need to look at this because it was very helpful.

Lights, camera, action: For some reason, there tended to be a lot of folks there to do media-type work. Hacker Public Radio was there, as usual, doing interviews (of which I was one — thanks!) and Jupiter Broadcasting had the Linux Action Show broadcasting live from their booth on Saturday — it would be interesting to see their take on the show later. Slashdot had an interviewer as well as some independents (e.g., people with video cameras posting independently to YouTube) interviewing folks, and of course I’ve never shied away from a microphone or a camera before. So there are some items of me talking about CrunchBang out there.

This is us: The CrunchBang booth was an unqualified success in large part from the help I got from xor axiom, whom many of you on the CrunchBang forums know (but whose real name is Eric Bortel). About 100 pieces of media were distributed, with the same amount of fliers accompanying them. Last year, we got a lot of “What’s CrunchBang?” This year, there was more “I’ve used CrunchBang before . . . ” so the distro is becoming more well-known. The presentation itself on Sunday morning had about 30 people in attendance and, as the aforementioned new equipment in the classroom helping out, the presentation went off without a hitch.

Sunday’s broadcast: Since Jupiter Broadcasting left the building on Sunday, I decided to crank up one of my favorite Linux podcasts — Linux Outlaws — on the Toshiba to show that, yes, CrunchBang can broadcast with the best of ‘em. So on the relatively solid backbone of the Bellingham Technical College’s network, Dan Lynch and Fabian “Go Penguins!” Scherschel were in the house for Linux Fest Northwest.

Does this joke make me look stupid? OK, maybe it was the delivery or maybe it’s a generational thing. At the end of my presentation I made a point, as I usually do, to say what a great show LFNW is and to thank the volunteers when encountering them for making the show work. The LFNW volunteer staff wears red shirts (you know where I’m going with this). After I asked folks to thank the volunteers, I added ” . . . and urge them not to go down to the planet surface.” Cue crickets chirping. So maybe I won’t be here all week, but still remember to tip your waitress . . .

There is more to follow, but I have to hit the road.

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy, Larry the CrunchBang Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and has just started developing software at Redwood Digital Research (RDR), a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment. RDR is based in Felton, California, USA.

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, LFNW, Linux Fest Northwest, Openbox, Oregon State University Open Source Lab, OSU Open Source Lab Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, LFNW, Linux Fest Northwest, Openbox, OSU Open Source Lab, OSUOSL

North by (Linux Fest) Northwest

2013-04-24T15:46:44+00:00

Toward the end of this week — well, Thursday to be exact — I’ll be loading up the car with a few laptops, about 100 pieces of CrunchBang media (DVDs, not CDs), a paper #! banner, my daughter and her equipment and we’ll head north to Linux Fest Northwest in Bellingham, Washington on April 27-28.

The question now is whether I can get to Corvallis, Oregon, in a day and maybe stop in to visit Lance Albertson and the folks at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab on Friday morning . . . .

As for CrunchBang’s presence at LinuxFest Northwest, we’ll have a booth and I’ll have help staffing the booth (if it’s not too much of an embarrassment to him, a big “thanks” goes out to xoraxiom, a CrunchBanger who’ll also be attending LFNW, and he gets recognition here for help in the booth). We also have a Birds of a Feather gathering scheduled for Saturday afternoon — note to corenominal, it’s 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time, so if you’re around on Saturday around 9:30 your time and we can ping you, your presence is requested — and I speak on Sunday at 11 a.m. on “Intro to CrunchBang.”

Last year, flying the CrunchBang flag was quite successful, as I noted here. Many were surprised that we had a booth, some had never heard of CrunchBang (heresy!) and others were glad to see us there. We even got a couple of new users who tried CrunchBang and liked it. Now if I can get another interview on Hacker Public Radio, we’ll be all set.

Watch this space — updates as they develop.

Things you can do with CrunchBang

2013-04-02T02:16:38+00:00

Erik Schneider, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, did pretty much the unthinkable, and did it well.

Frankly, he nailed it.

I’ll let him tell the story, which he posted on the San Francisco LUG mailing list: “Thought someone out there might be interested in, or know someone else interested in, a distilled account of a successful dual-boot install of Crunchbang Linux on a disk with an existing OS X Lion install, using the system EFI partition directly without the mediation of rEFIt or rEFInd.”

Well, that got my attention.

“The story is long and aimed at Linux dilettantes such as myself, who are adventurous but unschooled. I put in more details than many Linux geeks might need, hoping that assembling the results of several googles would save someone else time.”

So Erik, who is also eriktrips on our own forums, posted his blog item here. Also, there is a thread on the CrunchBang forums here on the topic with additional links and discussion on the process.

In his e-mail, Erik concludes with a statement that should come as standard procedure for CrunchBang forum participants: “Comments are welcome, but please be kind. I’m just a humanities nerd with a technological itch, and I make no claims as to knowledge or method in any field whatsoever.”

Regardless, that was great work, Erik, and you should be proud. Glad, too, that you chose CrunchBang as your alternate OS to Lion.

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, Openbox Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, Openbox

Wheezy by Easter?

2013-03-24T22:59:21+00:00

Now this would be nice to wake up to on Easter Sunday (along with a few colored Easter eggs and maybe a chocolate rabbit or two): According to a The H Open article at the end of last week, Debian 7.0, known to all of us as Wheezy (and, in its CrunchBang manifestation, as Waldorf shortly thereafter), could be ready as early as Easter.

As it stands on Palm Sunday, which is today (yep, 13 years of Catholic school from K-12 are not lost on me), there are 64 outstanding bugs to be wrapped up, so if the cat herding goes as planned, we could have a new version in a week.

So if we get Wheezy sometime during Easter week, it would be great. And with Wheezy, not too much later would come Waldorf; then we’ll all get to start working toward (and waiting for) Jessie, which would be Debian 8.0 (and, of course, following Debian’s lead, CrunchBang’s Muppet Show alter ego would be . . . Janice (and the interesting conversation about this Muppet character on this CrunchBang forum thread here).

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, Openbox Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, Openbox

Hanging with the outlaws

2013-03-21T00:25:11+00:00

[NOTE: This is reposted from the Larry the Free Software Guy blog item today. Because it mentions CrunchBang (however marginally), it runs also as today's Larry the CrunchBang Guy item.]

Sitting at my desk at the newspaper a week ago, I got a tweet from CrunchBang’s lead developer Philip Newborough: They’re talking about you on #LO.

Hmmm. It’s not the first time I’ve been talked about, and thanks to the heads-up from Philip, I got to sit in on a taping of Linux Outlaws No. 302, which is now out in the wider world here. The quote that gave me worldwide renown, at least on Linux Outlaws, was from a recent blog about Ubuntu: “The gravity with which Canonical pulls Ubuntu further from its original FOSS orbit is nothing short of tragic.”

Linux Outlaws, according to their page, talks about anything that runs on Linux, about open source software on other platforms and many other things. Dan Lynch and Fabian Scherschel are the hosts of Linux Outlaws, and the pair go into great detail on the news and other happenings in the Linux/FOSS world. As described on the site, listening to the show is very much like listening to two friends sitting in a pub, having fun and talking about things they find interesting — and thanks to the modern miracle of podcasts, it’s like you’re there with them, pint in hand.

There is gratuitous swearing and neither Dan nor Fabian pull any punches when describing shortcomings or stupidity, intentional or not, and calling people out for it. Ranting seems to be par for the course — again, in a good way, and Dan tends to be low-key and methodical in his analysis while Fabian positions himself on opposite side of that spectrum, sometimes redlining the needle on the rant tachometer. It’s all thought-provoking and informative, punctuated with humor and hilarity.

Of course, while Linux Outlaws is not for the faint of heart, it’s still clearly worth a listen.

I haven’t had a chance to listen to the edited podcast yet, and as I write this, they’re doing the live taping of Episode 303 — and I find myself having to explain to my colleagues what I’m laughing at (long story). However, the live broadcast for 302 was incredibly entertaining, and they have earned a regular fan here.

Keep up the great work, guys!

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, Linux Outlaws, Openbox Tagged: CrunchBang, Debian, Linux Outlaws, Openbox

Forgot That Feeling

2013-03-12T03:47:22+00:00

Hmm. Maybe a pseudo brain dump is the best way to get myself back into writing here. Nothing terribly brave, but baby steps I say.

Sometimes it’s good to just stop for a moment and take stock. It’s been a long time since I’ve really written anything here, and some things have definitely changed. Perspective and situation both I guess.

Same job. That hasn’t changed. I’m tremendously busy on the work front, but happy.

Life-wise, to say it’s been a tumultuous year would be massive understatement. I’ve always been fairly tight-lipped about personal things. That’s not likely to change much yet. Not a bravery issue. Just an issue of prudence. Suffice it to say that I had to make changes. Difficult ones. But all for the better. The only way out is through right?

See, even that paragraph, as dripping as it was in vagueness, was a tough go. Sheesh, I gotta work on that.

So some easier thoughts whirling around at the moment?

Why is it that people are so up in arms about Google Glass? A product that hasn’t even shipped yet. Can’t I already take photos, shoot video and record audio without you really knowing? Sounds rather trollish and attention-seeking to me. Do I think the technology is cool? Definitely. Would I wear them? Likely not. Could I afford them? No. But progress can be scary. New things can be scary. But personally, I welcome these sorts of things. It’s fun to watch change, and all the challenges it brings.

At various times over the past few months I have been close to buying a Nexus7 tablet. But my conundrum is that I am really getting to the point of needing a new phone and not a tablet. And technically I can co-opt my daughter’s Nexus7 tablet some of the time so I’m leaning toward having a little more patience and waiting for what’s next after the Nexus4. Definitely aiming at a Nexus phone too – the new SGS is gonna have to be damn good for me to forego the Nexus route this time around.

I need to shoot more stuff on my DSLR. I blame the winter (which is now melting into spring around here), and a lack of free time, but we both know that’s BS.

I still love working on graphics, but I simply haven’t put the time in lately. Though I did redo my website and I have done a few little things here and there. Still, sometimes I want to find myself bleary-eyed at 2am getting lost in the middle of a design I just have to finish in Inkscape. I miss that.

Speaking of graphics, about four years ago I signed up with Zazzle to check it out and put up a little t-shirt design. I had forgotten all about it… until last week when someone actually bought one! LOL! Now that’s patience! But hey, it might be a good outlet for some personal creative work. Watch this space, but not too intently. In fact, let’s forget that. My track record for actually doing things is not good. If it happens I’ll post about it. If it doesn’t.. well, let’s you and I pretend I never mentioned it. Deal?

On more of a techie note.. I stepped off the Ubuntu train at 11.04 and I’m running Mint 14 on this trusty laptop now. It seems to work fine. I have no desire for an Ubuntu phone or an Ubuntu laptop either. They are purportedly aiming “mainstream” (aka ’let’s design this for everyone’). And I think that’s a shame. Don’t get me wrong. I hope they’re successful, but I think the result you get when you do that is never as good as what you can get when you focus on an actual (realistic, specific, named) audience.

Oh yeah.. I also bought an Aeropress several months ago. It’s good. Not shockingly good. Not world-changing. But I’m happy with it. How’s that for a decisive and thrilling review. I don’t even have any esoteric brewing recipes to share. Shame on me.

So there are some baby steps. It feels good to write.

I forgot that feeling.

Preaching to the choir

2013-03-11T20:53:49+00:00

Yours truly gave the talk yesterday at the Felton Linux Users Group meeting at 1 p.m. at the solar-powered Felton Fire Station (how Californian is that?) on the topic of “An Intro to CrunchBang,” which is the best distro you’ve never heard of. It’s not a new presentation — to be honest, I updated the slides from the SCALE Birds of a Feather meetup, which were updated from the slides from the talk I gave last year (and will submit again this year) at Linux Fest Northwest — and it was very well received, though a little long in the tooth, so to speak.

There were about 15 folks in attendance — a record since we moved the meetings to Sundays (and, finally, I’m able to attend meetings of a group I co-founded) — and it looks like we’ll be staying with the second-Sunday-of-the-month schedule from here on in.

In any case, CrunchBang was very well received during the talk, and rather than talk and then field questions, I let folks who had questions just jump in during the talk, which provided some interesting discussions and enhanced the presentation. The best example of this was one of the Felton LUG members is a Fluxbox user and he gave a much better answer than I did on the difference between desktop environments and window managers (an answer, incidentally, from which I gleaned a lot of information for future presentations).

Of special interest to some of the folks at the meeting were both Conky and Openbox, and lengthy discussions ensued on both topics. I had a chance to discuss our wide range of Conky setups in the forum (which led to a good segue to talking about how great the CrunchBang forum is), and showing off some of what you can do with Openbox.

It was a good warmup for Linux Fest Northwest, which will feature a CrunchBang table for the second year in a row, and which will hopefully also feature a presentation about CrunchBang if the LFNW gods smile upon my submission in the Call for Papers.

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, LinuxQuestions.org, Openbox Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, linuxquestions.org, Openbox

CrunchBang at SCALE 11X

2013-03-03T22:26:31+00:00

One of the problems with working a show like the Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 11X is that I am “working the show,” meaning I don’t get out to see talks or the exhibit floor or much of what makes SCALE 11X the great show that it is. Being the publicity traffic cop that guides reporters to various speakers and exhibitors while posting scores of social media posts and web page updates leaves yours truly with time to do little else. This is not a complaint, but rather an excuse for not having a more comprehensive report from the show.

I did, however, get to lead the CrunchBang Birds of a Feather session — a meetup of the curious and those who use CrunchBang, held on Saturday evening. The gathering of about 20 people — no more than five who either have used or currently use CrunchBang (me excluded) — attended and after my short presentation, a discussion about the advantages of different window managers atop Debian (Openbox is still the general favorite), when Waldorf will become official (when Wheezy does), and other discussions about what tweaks one can do to their CrunchBang install.

Once again, because no one volunteered to staff the CrunchBang booth at SCALE 11X last weekend in Los Angeles, I had to withdraw it (as mentioned before, because I work for SCALE I couldn’t staff it). But CrunchBang was well represented anyway at SCALE 11X both through the Birds of a Feather session and Philip Banks’ item as part of his blog, “20 Days of SCALE.”

So looking ahead to other shows in North America, we’ll definitely be setting up shop in Bellingham, Washington, with a booth at Linux Fest Northwest at the end of April, where I’ve also submitted a talk about CrunchBang (the best distro you’ve never heard of). Then it’s off to Austin, Texas, for Texas Linux Fest at the end of May, with the remote — remote — possibility of my actually boarding a plane (providing government officials allow me to) and flying to Charlotte, North Carolina, for SELF — that’s SouthEast LinuxFest (Linux in the GNU South — always loved that motto!) in June.

If you’re going to one of these shows and you think you can put in some time at the CrunchBang table, e-mail me at lcafiero-at-lavabit-dot-com.

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, Openbox, SCALE 11X, Southern California Linux Expo Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, Openbox, SCALE, SCALE 11X, Southern California Linux Expo

How to resize images with python

2013-02-23T18:38:20+00:00

I love Python, and I’ve been learning it for a while now. Sometime ago I wrote a Python script where I needed to resize a bunch of images and at the same time keep the aspect ratio – the proportions – intact. So I looked around and found the PIL (Python Imaging Library). You will need to install the PIL for the code to work. To install PIL on a Debian based system run the following command in your terminal as root:

aptitude install python-imaging

And now for the Python code for resizing images while maintaining the aspect ratio:

import PIL
from PIL import Image

basewidth = 300
img = Image.open(‘fullsized_image.jpg’)
wpercent = (basewidth / float(img.size[0]))
hsize = int((float(img.size[1]) * float(wpercent)))
img = img.resize((basewidth, hsize), PIL.Image.ANTIALIAS)
img.save(‘resized_image.jpg’)

These few lines of Python code will resize an image (fullsized_image.jpg) using PIL to a width of 300 pixels, which is set in the variable basewidth and a height proportional to the new width. The proportional height is calculated by determining what percentage 300 pixels is of the original width (img.size[0]) and then multiplying the original height (img.size[1]) by that percentage. The resulting height value is saved in the variable hsize.

You can change basewidth to any other number, if you need a different width for your images. Also, notice I saved the resized image under a different name - resized_image.jpg – because I wanted to preserve the full size image as well – fullsized_image.jpg. You don’t have to do this of course. You can use the same filename to overwrite the full size image with the resized image, if that is what you want.

Note: If you are using this script in Zope as an External method you will need the line from PIL import Image to avoid namespace clashes with Zope’s Image.

UPDATE: avsn9849625263 Asked me to share what it would look like, if the height is fixed and the width proportionally variable. It’s pretty much the same thing, you just need to switch things around a bit:

baseheight = 560
img = Image.open(‘fullsized_image.jpg’)
hpercent = (baseheight / float(img.size[1]))
wsize = int((float(img.size[0]) * float(hpercent)))
img = img.resize((wsize, baseheight), PIL.Image.ANTIALIAS)
img.save(‘resized_image.jpg’)

Notice basewidth is now baseheight, since height is fixed. And in the third line we’re calculating the height percentage, so we need img.size[1] instead of img.size[0]. The size attribute is a tuple containing width and height in pixels; size[0] refers to the first tuple element, which is width, and size[1] is the second element, which is height. Line 4 also has this switch between size[0] for width and size[1] for height.

UPDATE 2: Kieran pointed out an error in l.5 in the im.resize() which has now been corrected.

SCALE 11X: No booth, but meetup is on

2013-02-17T19:13:39+00:00

Well, we’ll just have to file this under close-but-no-cigar: No one volunteered to staff the CrunchBang booth at SCALE 11X next weekend in Los Angeles, so I had to withdraw it (as mentioned before, because I work for SCALE I can’t staff it). So our next appearance will be at Linux Fest Northwest in Bellingham, Washington — and I’ll be staffing this one along with anyone who’s attending and wants to volunteer. Other shows where CrunchBang will make an appearance are listed below.

The good news is that the CrunchBang Birds of a Feather meetup is still on. The “Birds of a Feather” (obviously termed because, say it with me, “Birds of a feather flock together”) meetup is tentatively planned for Saturday, Feb. 23 at 7 p.m. Pacific Time. There’s a possibility that we may open this up to a Google+ hangout so others from around the CrunchBang nation and world can talk to those attending SCALE 11X. I will keep you updated on that. And if it’s not too late for him — he’s 8 hours ahead of us — corenominal has been asked to make an appearance if he’s up at 3 a.m., his time.

Again, looking forward to upcoming shows in North America (where I live), we have tables already scheduled for Linux Fest Northwest in Bellingham, Wash., in April and Texas Linux Fest in Austin, Texas, at the end of May (as well as possibly having a table at the inaugural Montana Linux Fest in June at Montana State University — an event that’s still in the planning stages). I’ll be available to staff these tables, and I welcome CrunchBang users who are attending to stop by and help out.

If you’re going to one of these shows and you think you can put in some time at the table, e-mail me at lcafiero-at-lavabit-dot-com.

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, Openbox Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, Openbox

Down to the wire for SCALE

2013-02-10T21:23:55+00:00

As I’ve mentioned a time or two in the past, CrunchBang has available to it a table at the Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 11X, which will be held in Los Angeles at the Hilton LAX on Feb. 22-24 (that’s President’s Day weekend, for those of you in the States). Actually, because I have some pull in the SCALE organization — I chair the Publicity Team — I’ve arranged for us to be neighbors with Debian on the SCALE 11X exhibit floor.

CrunchBang is also hosting a Birds of a Feather meet-up at SCALE 11X as well, but we’ll get back to that later.

As I’ve also mentioned, because I work at the expo as chief cat-herder for the tech and mainstream press, I don’t have the ability to staff the booth. So I’m still looking for CrunchBang folks who are going to the show who wouldn’t mind putting in some time in the booth.

So far, I have no takers, meaning I may have to surrender the space if there’s no one there to help promote CrunchBang. So this is my final appeal — if you’re going to SCALE 11X and you want to help us out by staffing the table, that would be great.

As for the Birds of a Feather meet-up, that will take place regardless of whether or not we have a table on the exhibit floor. It is tentatively planned for Saturday, Feb. 23 at 7 p.m. Pacific Time, and we’ve asked corenominal to drop by via video, as he did at our meetup at Linux Fest Northwest last year. The only catch here is if he’s still awake at 3 a.m. on Sunday, Feb. 24 in Lincoln, UK.

So if you can staff the table at SCALE, let me know by e-mail at lcafiero-at-lavabit-dot-com.

Looking forward, we have tables already scheduled for Linux Fest Northwest in Bellingham, Wash., in April and Texas Linux Fest in Austin, Texas, at the end of May (as well as possibly having a table at the inaugural Montana Linux Fest in June at Montana State University — an event that’s still in the planning stages). I’ll be available to staff these tables, and I welcome CrunchBang users who are attending to stop by and help out.

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, Openbox Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, Openbox

Like pie?

2013-02-05T21:39:32+00:00

Well, folks, the votes are in on the LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice poll, and guess who’s got a 4.7 percent of the pie on the pie-chart?

That would be us. CrunchBang.

Don’t take my word for it. Take a look for yourself here.

The actual polling breaks down like this. CrunchBang garnered 46 votes — thanks, guys and gals! — and our distro of choice outvoted the likes of OpenSUSE (!), Gentoo, Fuduntu, Bodhi and Salix.

Great going, and thanks for those of you who voted. We finished just behind Arch this year, but next year . . . .

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, LinuxQuestions.org, Openbox Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, linuxquestions.org, Openbox

Ostriches and Reboots

2013-01-21T21:29:57+00:00

Did you know that Ostrich Sans is quite a beautiful typeface? In fact, you could probably use it as a heading font for a website design and be quite pleased with it.

Well actually, that’s what I just did. Yes, after literally years of neglect, I finally updated my main website rfquerin.org. Please have a poke around if you have a few spare moments and let me know if you find anything ill-behaving. It’s pretty dead simple, so there shouldn’t be much there to go wrong.

I’m going to try to post here more as well since this blog has seemingly stagnated largely at the hands of Google+ it seems. Not like you haven’t heard *that* before. Sheesh.

Updated Waldorf "Testing" images: 20130119

2013-01-19T21:22:57+00:00

Updated Waldorf images are available now.

It has been approximately 3 months since the previous Waldorf images were built, so I figured the time was right to upload some updated builds. To be honest, I was tempted to wait until Debian Wheezy migrates to stable before updating the builds, but Debian being Debian (released when ready), it could mean waiting a week, a month, or even a year (although best estimates indicate it could be ~3 months).

Anyhow, the new images contain some fixes to the installer that affected installations performed using DVD media. Personally, I tend to install via a USB stick (the recommended method), so I had not come across the bug myself, until somebody else mentioned it. The bug appeared as an error message just before the GRUB install screen, where it asked the user to insert an additional disk. To fix this, I have applied some patches to the apt-setup component of the Debian Installer. I have tested the fixes on a couple of machines and they appear to work, however, it would be good to have them tested by others.

Other minor changes of note are:

Iceweasel updated to version 18.
VLC has replaced GNOME-MPlayer -- back by popular demand.
A Policy Kit Local Authority file has been added to enable easy mounting of internal drives within Thunar.
xfce4-power-manager has been patched to fix a long standing issue whereby the battery status icon would cause a visual error within tint2's system tray, after a system had been suspended and resumed.

As with the previous updated Waldorf images, other changes have been kept to an absolute minimum and any existing Waldorf users should not need to perform a new installation, unless they wish to help with testing the install process.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed feedback, ideas, patches, code and financial help. CrunchBang would not be possible without you! I hope you enjoy these updated builds.

Happy CrunchBangin'!

pytemplate – Creating new python files from a template

2013-01-14T14:51:43+00:00

I love Python. These days, I do almost all of my coding in Python, and what little I don’t, I do in Bash. Since I started hosting my python scripts on GitHub I got a bit more conscious about the way my code looks. I pay more attention to descriptive naming and proper commenting, but I think I still have some work ahead of me, before my code become PEP-8 compliant. In the meantime, I have a command-line python script called pytemplate that generates a new python file containing pre-configured information like file name, author name, email, license, etc. Optionally, pytemplate will also create a git repository for your script. Read the Readme for details on how to use pytemplate.

Tech Predictions 2013

2013-01-03T15:29:02+00:00

Now, it’s about this time of the year that I decide to ramble on about what I think will be the big tech news over the next 12 months. Most of the time, I get it wrong, and actually more recently I’ve gotten incredibly boring and pointless with my predictions. So, this will hopefully be a bit more interesting, a bit more interesting, probably completely wrong still (I don’t have an issue with that) but just a bit fun as well.

The problem with predictions, is that people tend to predict the obvious. Like the BBC “prediction” that the comet next year may show up, or may not. That isn’t a prediction, that’s just stating a fact. The other ones are just extrapolation. Eg…a new iPhone next year. I admit that this has mainly been my issue in the past as well. But this time it shall hopefully be a bit more interesting, but this will also mean that it will be incredibly wrong. Probably. We shall revisit these this time next year.

A new xBox will be announced at E3.

Ok, I immediately broke my own rule. This one really is pretty obvious. Sony and Microsoft have been playing chicken for the last 12-18 months. They both already have their current ideal console ready to announce, tweak a bit, and then release. The issue is that they want to wait until the other one announces first. Because then they can tweak theirs, make it slightly better than the other and they have the best console on the market. The issue is, that with this strategy, they will very quickly be obsolete, as it is probably 2012′s technology released in 2014. The issue with consoles yet again…

Amazon open physical store

I’ve said this one before. And I’ll say it again. I may have the year wrong, but this *will* happen. And I mean very soon. I think it’ll be sooner than most of you think. It’ll be in the US, and it’ll be a cross between an Apple shop and a car showroom. It’ll have a number of products that you can go in to physically look at. I’m not sure what will be in it. Probably the more popular items. Maybe focusing on electronics? I’m not sure. But, mark my words, this *will* happen.

Microsoft will buy Nokia.

Ok, this one is probably a bit far-fetched. For this year anyway. But this is what will happen with these guys. Nokia will continue to lose value, Microsoft will buy Nokia, Ballmer will retire, Stephen Elop will be the new Microsoft CEO, and Microsoft begin to do an “Apple”. They realise they need the hardware of Nokia, and want to own it all. In fact, they have already realised this. It’s been said before, but it’s funny that it’s an ex-Microsofty that took over Nokia right before they went Microsoft and started nose diving. Ok, that’s unfair, they were nose diving before he took over. But he didn’t help.

Just remember this…Nokia’s market cap is $14M. Microsoft have about $50M in cash/cash equivalents.

The first waterproof phone

That’s right. Waterproof. Not just water-resistant. Or splash-proof. Waterproof. The first waterproof smart phone will be released in 2013. Probably near the end of the year, and either by Samsung or LG. It’ll be the biggest feature they talk about with it, and it’ll be basically like this year’s phones but waterproof. We know this technology exists, we saw it last year at CES, but there have been no hints since then about anything including it. I think 2013 is the year.

Colour Kindle

When Amazon released the Kindle Fire, and Barnes and Noble released their tablet as well…people seemed to forget about colour e-readers. I think 2013 is the year of the colour e-reader. We shall have at least 1 released. I think tablets from e-reader companies are just a stop-gap. I think they want a colour, high-refresh rate e-ink device, and I think someone will release one this year. It may not be Amazon, and it won’t be high refresh rate enough to watch videos yet, but it’ll come.

Intel announce first ARM device

Not a crazy prediction. It’s been predicted before, or should I say rumoured. But I think there is a lot of interest in this. Especially as their own phone processors have gone nowhere so far.

A new social network

Someone will announce a new social network. It will be free, but not have ads. How will they make money? By corporate sponsors. Basically, individuals (and charities) will get free accounts, but companies will have to pay to get onto it. Yes, they will have to pay for your nice free social network to get access to you. And what do you get in return? A nice, free, social network with no ads. Sound nice? Well, it’s a shame it’ll fail pretty badly. It won’t last till 2015.

Yahoo build new search engine

Yahoo need a big thing. This is it. Not just a rehashing of Google, Bing, or old Yahoo. But a completely new way to search. I don’t know what this will look like, but that’s why I’m not building it. I just think they will release it this year to massive fanfair. It’ll be integrated into Flickr quite heavily, and together they will be heralded as the rebirth of Yahoo.

Blackberry OS 10 isn’t a fail

Ok, it looks exactly like Android or iOS, but it finally catches up to the times and this stems the blockage of people going away from it. Don’t believe me? Just talk to a Blackberry fan. They are the most loyal customers I’ve ever seen. Even more loyal than Apple’s. Apple’s are sticking around because it keeps getting better. Blackberries are pretty much the same as they were 5 years ago. They are all staying around because they want something to believe in from RIM. They are begging for something new to buy with the blackberry logo on it.

It may not create much growth in their company, but it’ll stop the shrinkage, which is all the can hope for just now.

Google Glassless

This one is part extrapolation, part wild speculation, part repeating what I’ve said for a while. I’ve been wanting this for ages. Augmented Reality contact lenses. It’s the next step, I just never realised there would be a step before it. I didn’t see Google Glass coming. But I have been saying for ages that the contact lenses will be coming. The main reason I think they’ll come quite quickly? People don’t want to wear something ridiculous looking like Google Glass.

p.s I never realised how hard it would be to think of my predictions without extrapolation. Most of what I thought of technically was. And even after all that work, I failed as a few did include it.

Vote CrunchBang 2012

2012-12-18T04:28:02+00:00

LinuxQuestions.org has just opened its 2012 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards, and guess who has ballot status in the Desktop Distribution of the Year category?

Yep, CrunchBang.

Needless to say that we’re up against some pretty big names — Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, that distribution with too many U’s — but it would be nice to make a good showing when all the votes are counted.

Voting closes Feb. 4. Here’s the link. Now go and vote!

Also, Openbox is a candidate in the Window Manager of the Year category.

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, Openbox Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, Openbox

Just one of the guys (or gals)

2012-12-15T18:56:47+00:00

First things first: Unless I’m writing a cover letter for a job, I truly hate writing about topics that have to do with me.

Having said that, there has been some misguided notions or ideas in a couple of threads recently about the responsibilities and duties of the CrunchBang moderators, of which I am one. Allow me straighten this out because it’s very simple and it doesn’t take a lot of thought to comprehend a couple of very basic concepts.

So take notes for the final exam: Moderators are part of the CrunchBang community, no different than those who are non-mods.

To put this in the most basic “Captain Obvious” terms, moderators abide by the same rules as everyone else. The only difference between moderators and non-moderators is that mods have the additional responsibility to enforce the rules of the forums.

In other words, each of the moderators is just one of the guys — or in bobobex’s case, just one of the gals. On the forums mods have contributions to make, solutions to provide, opinions to offer, points to agree and disagree on, and sometimes even wisdom to impart; no different than everyone else who visits, or anyone else who interacts on, the CrunchBang forums.

To put moderators on a higher plane does a great disservice to the moderators, who don’t deserve to be put at any level of superiority despite taking on additional duties. More importantly, to put forum contributors on a lower plane because they’re not moderators does an even greater disservice to those who aren’t mods for essentially the same reason — they don’t deserve to be put at a level of inferiority.

Lastly, it would be a gross understatement to describe me as opinionated. I am. While I don’t expect everyone to agree with me, I gladly welcome debate and discussion. Also, I’m not always right, and I’m glad to be corrected if it’s a legitimate error on my part.

Bear in mind, though, that I make no apologies for my overwhelming passion and deep commitment to making CrunchBang the outstanding combination of distro and community it currently is, and will continue to be, and I would welcome anyone to share this opinion and move forward in this effort.

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, Openbox Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, Openbox

CrunchBang at LISA ’12

2012-12-13T06:44:38+00:00

Along with my two trusty ThinkPads, I’m at the Large Installation System Administration 2012 conference in San Diego — known as LISA ’12, for those of you keeping score at home. At the Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 11X booth at LISA ’12, the ThinkPads were put to work, both running CrunchBang.

One — the T42 with Waldorf testing 20121015 — ran the slide show on a large monitor after a harrowing half-hour of operator error which yours truly miraculously fixed to get it to display right. Once the display and the laptop played nicely together, the slide show went flawlessly all day without a hitch.

The second — a T60 with Waldorf testing 20121015 — ran the registration on for those who wanted to sign up to attend SCALE 11X in Los Angeles in February.

Both machines with CrunchBang ran flawlessly all day, and we get to do it all again tomorrow. Watch this space.

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, LISA '12, SCALE 11X, Southern California Linux Expo Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, LISA '12, SCALE, Southern California Linux Expo

Represent #! at SCALE

2012-11-30T04:13:38+00:00

As some of you already know, I’m the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo, better known as SCALE or, in February’s version, SCALE 11X. If you didn’t know that, now you do.

Chairing the publicity committee allows me to enjoy the expo from the media room, herding the cats known as the tech media who come to report on this event, which — next to OSCON — is the most popular and well-attended Linux expo in North America. As an aside it’s also the largest volunteer-produced Linux expo in North America as well. But I digress.

So why am I telling you all this?

CrunchBang has a booth at SCALE 11X in February. I arranged for the booth, I’ll be making DVDs for the booth and I’ll provide some hardware (ThinkPads, to be sure) in order for folks to make live USBs, if they provide them to us, just like we did this year at the booth at Linux Fest Northwest in Bellingham, Washington. Stickers — like this one for Linux Fest Northwest back in April — will probably be part of the mix as well.

The only glitch is that I can’t staff the SCALE 11X because of the aforementioned cat-herding duties. So now I’m looking to the CrunchBangers out there who a.) are going to SCALE 11X in February, b.) are thinking about going to SCALE 11X in February and need some incentive to go, and c.) are going to/thinking about going to SCALE 11X and want to spend some time in the booth promoting CrunchBang.

So if anyone is interested, you can write to me at larry-at-socallinuxexpo.org and we’ll get you the exhibitors’ credentials and all the other stuff set up.

If you can’t make it to SCALE 11X, there’s always Linux Fest Northwest next year, too — we’re already signed up for the April show in Microsoft’s backyard in Bellingham.

Only the lonely

2012-11-04T19:15:38+00:00

Yesterday, a new CrunchBanger named Alain posted an item in the Off Topic/General Chat forum section entitled CrunchBang Loneliness. To paraphrase briefly, he says he’s got CrunchBang set up just the way he wants . . . so what to do now? What do we spend most of our time doing?

I can only speak for myself, and did so in the thread. First, I’m usually never finished with my CrunchBang setup. From time to time, search parties have had to look for me once I venture into the monthly Screenshot Thread in the Artwork & Screenshots forum (here’s November’s listing), and the same can be said for The New Monster Conky Thread here in the Tips, Tricks and Scripts section.

Then there’s just hanging out in the forums, helping out where I can when a question I can answer — those few-and-far-between rare ones — comes up, or welcoming newcomers to CrunchBang or just learning a thing or two reading through some of the past forum posts.

Yeah, it’s almost as bad as Facebook, but not quite.

So, Alain and others in the CrunchBang realm, there’s never a shortage of things to do around the CrunchBang world.

[Now to post the song mentioned in the title in the "What are you listening to right now?" section in General Chat/Off Topic before fellow Roy Orbison fan VastOne does . . . ]

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, Openbox Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, Openbox

A new look

2012-11-01T18:40:25+00:00

“I will be performing some maintenance on the web server and the forums . . . . Apologies for any inconvenience,” Philip Newborough said yesterday before begging our pardon, regarding the fact that the site and server could be down for a little while.

Yet when it came back today, CrunchBang now has a new, and very much improved, web presence on its new site. There is a lot more information available about CrunchBang right off the bat, and the forums — arguably the best in the wider Linux world — are a lot cleaner and easier to read.

In a few words: I. Love. It.

To be sure, the new site takes a little getting used to, and the navigating to the forums — what was once an almost autopilot move — took a little looking at first (big hint: Click on the Community button in the upper right). Also, want to find something? Yes, the search field in the upper right is gone, but just click on the magnifying glass in the upper right, and you’re ready to find what you’re looking for.

It seems that Corenominal has “lightened up” — that is, the background is no longer #000000 and, to paraphrase one person who posted on the forums, “grey is the new black.” While there might be some loss in contrast, it still looks very clean.

All of all, the changes are not that radical. For those who are not that jazzed about change, these changes in the site are easily adaptable because they’re somewhat intuitive. In addition, the panels of information one can read using the arrow keys on either side of the panels is very informative.

The only drawback for me — and it’s a personal one — is that now I have to try to match the background of this blog to the background of the forums. But never mind — CrunchBang is moving up in the FOSS world, and the new site is one sign that it’s moving in the right direction.

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, Openbox Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, Openbox, ThinkPad, ZaReason

Back to the future

2012-10-29T20:48:49+00:00

Unbeknown to my daughter Mimi — and being the Ubuntu user that she is, sadly I don’t think she reads what her Dad writes in this blog (and if she does, well, consider the surprise spoiled) — she’s about to inherit yet another of Dad’s hand-me-down computers.

First things first: I currently use a ZaReason Alto 3880 laptop, which is a remarkable machine that, sadly, ZaReason doesn’t make anymore — time and improvements march on, and ZaReason has advanced this laptop series to the current Alto 4330.

My daughter, though, has been using for the past few years my old ThinkPad R40, a very sturdy, utilitaran and well-traveled laptop judging by all the stickers on the cover.

Enter a new development: Steam and Valve are ramping up gaming in Linux, and the old R40 — great for her artwork and creating 8-bit music, which takes up most of her digital life — has, well, performance issues when it comes to the higher horsepower needed for games. Her interest in games goes beyond playing them, and with this in mind, I’d like for her to have the better hardware when pitching in on the projects she wants to explore.

Personally, I blame Gabe Newell for Mimi wanting newer hardware, but never mind. Also, for those of you keeping score at home, shelling out for a new ZaReason laptop is out of the question until, at least, Christmas (especially after last week’s $600 car repair which we will not discuss. Ever).

So after saving a ThinkPad T42 from recycling doom recently, I’ve put Waldorf on it — the CrunchBang-11-20121015-i686 version, which works flawlessly (with one caveat, mentioned below) — and I’ll hand down the ZaReason to Mimi.

Now, you go girl.

In the past in other blogs, I’ve said that I am a ThinkPad guy and I have always loved the form factor. That hasn’t changed, and though I’m turning over the keys to the sports car to my daughter and relegating myself to the station wagon, I feel at home with almost any model of ThinkPad.

So back to the hardware I love while looking to the future.

One more thing: There have been installation issues in the past with Waldorf — and, for some reason, it seems to be happening mostly (if not solely) on ThinkPads — where the installation will hang at the “detect disks” point. It came up again yesterday with this current install, and while there’s an extensive discussion involving solutions here, my solution was more simple and straightforward: Disable floppy in the BIOS.

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, Openbox, ThinkPad, ZaReason Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, Openbox, ThinkPad, ZaReason

Not fit to serve

2012-10-24T12:08:57+00:00

Earlier today, I took the British Intelligence Officer Exam ¹, it did not last very long:

MI6: Respond by typing QUESTIONS (e.g. 'What can you see?') and INSTRUCTIONS (e.g. 'Open the door')
MI6: Type HELP to read more about MAP, INVENTORY, SITREP and OBJECTIVES commands.
MI6: Patching you in...
AGENT: Being chased by five armed enemy agents.
AGENT: It's either face them in the open or find somewhere I can even the odds a little. Help.
YOU: Face them
AGENT: Please confirm. Don't want another 'reckless' note on my file. Stand and fight?
YOU: Yes
AGENT: You say it, I do it. Wish this woman the best of British...
AGENT: ...
AGENT: ...

AGENT STATUS: CAPTURED, PRESUMED UNDERGOING INTERROGATION - FAILED
OBJECTIVES STATUS: DATA NOT RECOVERED - FAILED
ENEMY OPERATIVES: AT LARGE, UNAVAILABLE FOR QUESTIONING - FAILED

SIMULATION FAILED

Oops!

Footnotes:

Not a real exam. ↩

--
Tagged: fun, james bond

‘No thanks. I got Linux’

2012-10-21T23:33:09+00:00

Windows 8 will be unleashed, Kraken-like, on an awaiting public on Oct. 26, which is this Friday. For US$79.99 — let’s just round that up to US$80 — one can get the latest version of the Windows operating system which, by many reports, is not ideal yet not as bad a some of the other products Redmond has forced upon the public in the past.

Fellow CrunchBanger merelyjim posted this thread on the CrunchBang Talk forum under the title, “No thanks. I got Linux” where he thinks that this $80 can be better spent elsewhere — like on your current distro or your favorite FOSS program.

I urge you to read the full text on the link above or read merelyjim’s original blog item, but I’ll let merelyjim drive here:

“It’s hard to express what Linux has done for me. I’ve learned more with Linux than I ever did with Windows. I’ve been part of dynamic communities that have engaged in passionate arguments, clever discussions, and crazy flame wars. Like family, you take the crazy (um… that would be me) with the funny. Instead of just allowing me to ‘try and make things work’ on my own, there were those who tried to nudge me along the right path, even when I didn’t want to see it. I have undying gratitude for those who were willing to share their time and experience with me, even though I never knew them in real life.

“So, on October 26th, 2012, instead of giving Microsoft $79.99 for Windows 8 upgrade, I’m going to donate the same amount to the Linux-distro I use the most.

“I invite you to join me in doing this.

“I don’t really care which distro; we’re all family. If you’d prefer, donate to a specific Open Source project, instead. As long as you give something that lets Paypal, Amazon, of Flattr know that something’s going on that day. If you can’t give monetarily, at least spread the word.

“I want the Linux community to show Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle that we matter, we care for each other, and there are a lot more of us than they think. If you contribute, I hope you’ll e-mail or tweet whomever manufactured your machines so they’ll know you use their hardware running a Linux kernel.”

Amen to that, merelyjim.

There are a wide variety of projects you can donate to in the FOSS realm. Start with your distro of choice, even if it’s not CrunchBang. Use a particular FOSS program often and find it useful? Most programs have donation links. There are even some projects that are not software related that deserve special mention: REGLUE, formerly the HeliOS Project, provides Linux-based computers to underprivileged kids in the Austin, Texas, area; Partimus puts Linux-based computers in schools in the San Francisco Bay Area; and one project that I find important is Beth Lynn Eicher’s effort to bring Edubuntu-based computers to schools in Ghana.

For those who do not have money to donate — been there, done that — you can always donate time, which in many cases can be more valuable than currency. If you program, there are places where you can pitch in on distros and FOSS programs across the board. Don’t program? Don’t worry — many projects have needs beyond the 0′s and 1′s that include things like documentation (for the writers out there), design (for the artists), translation (for the multilingual) . . . the list goes on. If you have a special skill set, programming or non-programming, there’s something for you to do.

Got some ideas on where to donate? Post them in the comments.

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, Openbox Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, Openbox

With great power . . .

2012-10-18T18:59:36+00:00

. . .comes great responsibility: You’ve heard this before from a variety of sources, and if you’re observant, you’ve even seen this on a wide range of Debian installs or when logging in as root on a terminal.

With great power comes great responsibility. Although the sentence structure leaves a lot to be desired, it’s very simple concept, to be sure. Unfortunately, though, it’s a concept that seems to be lost on a few people who seem to think that the CrunchBang forums are a do-whatever-you-want, it’s-all-about-me space where anything goes.

CrunchBang has a pretty clear statement of forum etiquette which can be found here. Don’t want to go to the link? I’ll make it easy for you, because it’s only three paragraphs — not a long read.

It says:

“The PRIMARY aims of the #! forums is for users to share information and help each other with CrunchBang/Debian related issues. The Off-Topic section is provided as a courtesy for members but we expect our members to exercise some common sense when posting in there. We do not want our forums to be associated with porn, drugs, criminal activities or any other topic which may inadvertently cause offence to another forum member who reads the thread. If it is deemed to be unsuitable, then a moderator will close the thread. When a moderator closes a thread, that decision is final. The moderator will explain the reason behind closing a thread and if any members then decide to open a new thread discussing why a previous thread has been closed, then that member will face a ban.

“Our moderators give their time freely, with little or no thanks and certainly no financial reward. They perform a difficult task at times, and therefore deserve our support as they carry out their moderating duties. We do not expect them to be vilified by the community for any decisions that they make.

“We are all for free speech but at our heart we are a friendly, helpful forum community and I would like to see us stay that way. If these terms are not acceptable to you, please feel free to leave at any time.”

These are fairly simple concepts to grasp — fairly easy guidelines to follow — and especially the last paragraph emphasizes the kind of community CrunchBang strives to be. If anyone is unclear about the preceding three paragraphs, I’d be glad to explain anything that might be unclear if you want to leave a question in the comment section of the blog.

Want to drop an f-bomb? Depending on the context (and if not just for “shock value”), personally I might be OK with that, though bear in mind I am not the only moderator. Want to complain about the way we do things here? Fine, as long as it fits the guidelines. Want to put snarky signature lines in your forum posts? Go for it, if that floats your boat, and as long as it doesn’t violate any of the conditions in the Forum Etiquette post.

Compared with some of the other distro and FOSS program forums, those who post in the CrunchBang forums get a far wider latitude than they would in other forums, and users are not subjected to the draconian decisions handed down by other forums. Not only this, the CrunchBang moderators — to their credit — go above and beyond in engaging those who might have erred by intiating off-forum communications, whether these communications are acknowledged or not.

I mention the “With great power . . .” quote for an important reason. Many of those who have been involved with CrunchBang for any significant amount of time have noticed that the popularity of the distro is rapidly growing, and with the “great power” of a growing distro — and the growing community that surrounds it — comes the “great responsibility” to be excellent to each other as a community. Like a European football team promoted to a higher league*, the distro is moving in the right direction, and like an American baseball player being called up to the Major Leagues, there’s a degree of responsibility that gets ratcheted up with the promotion.

A profound majority of those participating in the CrunchBang forums and in the CrunchBang community, to use yet another sports metaphor or two, have stepped up to the plate and knocked it out of the park. The CrunchBang forums, thanks to the outstanding community behind it, contains a remarkably miraculous wealth of information, and the community supporting it serves as a textbook case of how helpful people can combine their talents with the talents of others to bring everyone up together.

I understand that most of you get this, and personally I’m grateful beyond words to be part of this community.

Yet this is why it’s laughable to think the moderators here are being “censors” or “fascists” or “authoritarian.” If you think they are, you might want to look up those words.

But before you do that, you might want to look up “community” and understand the concept behind that word.

* OK, to those on my side of the Atlantic, European football teams — or what we in the States would call soccer teams — graduate to a higher division, or conversely are relegated to a lower division, depending on their performance during the course of the season. Yes, I’m out of my element in using this comparison, but I’m hoping the Britons and those in Europe get this comparison.

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, Openbox Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, Openbox

Updated Waldorf "Testing" images: 20121015

2012-10-15T15:51:40+00:00

Updated Waldorf images are available now.

These new images were built to address an issue with the live session, whereby under certain conditions the live session would spawn two X sessions. Whilst this bug only affected live sessions and was not present once an installation had been performed, I still figured it was worth addressing to ensure any live users can more accurately evaluate the system, before performing an installation.

Other changes have been kept to an absolute minimum and any existing Waldorf users should not need to perform a new installation, unless they wish to help with testing the install process.

Other minor changes of note are:

Iceweasel updated to version 16.0.1
To improve the out-of-the-box networking experience, users are now automatically added to the 'fuse' group. This should make mounting of remote filesystems somewhat easier for novice users.
Thunar should now startup without delay. This addresses a long standing issue with Thunar whereby under certain conditions it would pause whilst waiting to automount network filesystems.
Other minor usability fixes which have been documented on the forums over the past few weeks.

A massive thank you to everybody who has helped test and provide feedback on the previous Waldorf images -- I have received numerous messages from people who have said that Waldorf is developing into something quite special and this would not have been possible without you! :)

As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated, so please do not hesitate to post below!

You can’t please everyone

2012-10-11T05:21:26+00:00

I’ve never met him personally, but I’ve had the pleasure of exchanging e-mails and Google+ conversation with Dietrich Schmitz, a Free/Open Source Software advocate in New York.

Until recently, Dietrich had been using CrunchBang and saying nice things about the distro online. But because he discovered that Waldorf is not supporting the Linux kernel 3.5 seccomp-bpf sandbox, he’s moving on to another distro.

Security is big with Dietrich, and I respect that. Apparently without seccomp-bpf, Waldorf for him is a non-starter. From his missive on G+, he says:

“In this situation, I petitioned the lead developer at CrunchBang to give seccomp-bpf his consideration for a ‘backport’. After a few weeks, the developer came back with a reply to the effect that he had his hands full with development centered around CrunchBang’s ‘OpenBox’ gui environment without adding the burden of this request. He offered that Debian, the upstream provider of his CrunchBang kernel, would address routinely any and all security issues.

“Of course Debian will, and, of course, as we all well know they are like ‘Vermonters’ who get around to it ‘when I wanter’ which translates in some cases to ‘when hell freezes over’. So, I was left with the distinct impression that +Philip Newborough was taking a ‘hands-off’ approach and was non-plused by the issue, deferring to Debian to handle.”

While it’s a valid opinion, I would strongly disagree with this assessment. To say not including seccomp-bpf is a shortcoming in CrunchBang is incredibly wide open to debate. I trust Philip Newborough on this one, and I think his position in deferring to Debian on this — waiting for Debian to make that call to include it — is the best way to handle this for CrunchBang, as well as the best way for any other Debian-based distro to handle this.

While I’m sorry it doesn’t fit Dietrich’s standards for security, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to wait for Debian’s lead on this, and I’d be willing to bet they’ll get to it well before hell freezes over.

Not only this, I know several Vermonters and I haven’t met one I didn’t like. In fact, Vermont has the nation’s best senator in Washington, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and the state makes the best mass-produced ice cream.

But back to the point: Dietrich took his proverbial ball and went to another playground, and he is right to go with a distro that suits his needs. That’s what Linux and FOSS are all about. It’s not CrunchBang, but as far as I’m concerned, it deserves nothing more than a shrug and a “c’est la vie.” Choice is good: It’s a good thing that there are about 320-plus distros out there, so we all can get what we want. Fortunately, the number of distros out there affords us the luxury to be this flexible with our choices.

You can’t please everyone, and that’s fine. For me, CrunchBang is still atop my list of recommended distros.

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, Openbox Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, Openbox

Throwing off the training wheels

2012-10-07T20:47:38+00:00

It has been over two months since I posted — hope all of you enjoyed the quiet — and I can only plead guilty to being extremely busy over the last several weeks with various family duties, teaching my Python course for middle/high schoolers and general curveballs that life throws at one when one isn’t paying attention.

But I digress.

While Philip Newborough gets the latest version of CrunchBang up and running — and while the community tests and hacks around this upcoming version, of course — many folks have been taking a look at CrunchBang and liking what they see. Many of them who decide to take the plunge are first-time Linux users, according to their introductions in the aptly named “Introduction” forum.

Normally, I cringe when a new Linux user starts off with CrunchBang. Perhaps the cold sweat that beads on my brow comes from my own experience with trying to compile Gentoo as the third distro I tried sometime in 2006; in the six years of using Linux and FOSS, I’ve never gotten Gentoo to run (Gentoo folks, don’t flame me: Clearly it’s operator error in this case and has nothing to do with your outstanding distro. Honest). I can’t remember the fourth distro I tried, but I would be willing to bet it was a galloping retreat to something very easy to install and run.

Yet several days ago, the CrunchBang community member known to all as pvsage posted something on one introductee’s thread that changed my mind about CrunchBang being only for experienced Linux users. I can’t find pvsage’s post to quote it directly, but I can paraphrase it. It said something to the effect of, “Well, if you came to learn Linux, CrunchBang is the place to be.”

And he is absolutely right. I am taking another look at pointing new users to something more familiar to their Windows/Mac “comfort zone.” It’s very easy to point someone to Ubuntu or Linux Mint or Fedora (yes, Fedora — those who say it’s too “cutting edge” for new users haven’t used it lately) and say, “come back when your ready for CrunchBang.” But I now realize that this is very short-sighted, to say nothing of cheating the inspired new user to learn the wealth of information our Debian-based distro provides.

So I’m changing my tune, so to speak: For those who are interested in learning and growing with a distro, you’re definitely in the right place. The forums are a great place to find answers, both those that have already been answered — use that handy, dandy search field in the upper right — or those that haven’t been given yet and are waiting for the right question to be asked. Also, as an aside, it’s important “how” you ask the question, and I wrote about this a while ago here.

Besides, it’s not like we’re throwing you in to the deep end of the pool and saying to you, “now, swim.” That would be Gentoo (OK, last Gentoo joke, guys and gals. Don’t flame me).

So, again, if you’re a “newb” and you really, really like CrunchBang as your introduction to Linux, and you are inspired enough to learn how Linux works, then by all means, you’re in the right place with CrunchBang. Training wheels are not needed here.

Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and has just started developing software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, Openbox Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, Openbox

Barcamp Blackpool 2012

2012-10-02T09:12:58+00:00

Last weekend, Becky and I attended Barcamp Blackpool. The weekend started on the Friday night when we met-up with some friends to experience the sights and delicacies of Blackpool. The Barcamp itself was held on the Saturday, the doors opened at 9am and closed at 1am. It was a long day, but as always when you are enjoying yourself, it flew by. Some of the highlights of the event included:

Meeting with the Blackpool LUG folks, they are always very welcoming and a lot of fun. The guys were manning a LUG booth and demonstrating a host of Linux distributions on all manner of machines. Good show, chaps!
Meeting with oupsemma, a fellow #! CrunchBang user and forum member. I guess it still surprises me to think that real people actually use CrunchBang. Anyhow, oupsemma is a long-time user, since 2008, and it was good to finally meet her and have a chat.
3D printers. These things are amazing and if I had a spare £400, I might consider purchasing one.
@cjdell’s session, “Concrete 5 - CMS, easy to use, made by geeks”. Chris gave a good introduction to Concrete 5 and demonstrated its features. It looks like a really interesting project and I will definitely be looking at Concrete 5 in more detail; I have at least one project that I am considering it for.
Hama Beads. A very therapeutic experience, although I was slightly disappointed that no hammers were involved.
@BinaryKitten’s session, “Web, Mobile and Lots of Monkeys”. I entered this session without a clue and I was pleasantly surprised. Kat demonstrated Brass Monkey, an Android app that turns your phone into a game controller and your browser into a games console. The concept is a little difficult to explain, so if you are interested, I would suggest giving it a try. Anyhow, the highlight of session came when @ollyclarkdotorg attempted to use his phone to defend himself from an onslaught of bloody zombies. Awesome stuff.
@lallyd’s cakes. Mmm… cakes…
@alexturgid’s session, “An Introduction to GEOHASHING”. An amusing session about the global phenomenon, Geohashing. Described as a spontaneous adventure generator, it looks like a lot of fun and I will definitely consider giving it a try.
FREE FOOD! A fantastic spread, courtesy of the Barcamp Blackpool sponsors.
@alexturgid’s session, “Clive Sinclair Ate My Childhood”. Alex did a fine job with his after-dinner comedy session. During his session, he reminisced over a childhood that was spent with early Sinclair computers. This brought back fond memories of my own childhood, although I was always a Commodore kid myself. Anyhow, it was thoroughly geeky and very entertaining!
20lb Sounds, they rocked! Literally.

All-in-all, Barcamp Blackpool was a truly epic event. My only regret, I did not get to attend all the sessions that I wanted to, but I guess that is the nature of an unconference.

A massive thank you to @biglesp and @lallyd for organising it and to the sponsors (FTP Concepts, FARM Digital, Tweetdig, Magic Missile, Bytemark, MediaBurst & Magma Digital) for making it possible. I cannot wait for Barcamp Blackpool 2013!

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Tagged: barcamp, blackpool

Getting back on track

2012-09-30T21:40:03+00:00

It has always been my intention to have photography as the primary focus of this blog. Beginning today I will be making regular posts about my latest images. Any images that appear here are licensed Creative Commons with full details under each image. You can download the image from here or in a higher res at my Google+ albums.

Aside of the sharing at this blog I am currently developing a new site. It will be a way for anyone interested to help me support my work and maybe update my gear now and then.

grantgalbraith.com

International: This work by Grant Galbraith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Australia: This work by Grant Galbraith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License

Updated Waldorf "Testing" images: 20120927

2012-09-28T09:17:21+00:00

Updated Waldorf images are available now.

The new images should be considered a reissue of the previous builds, built to correct a bug in the install process which rendered partman unable to create a working filesystem table.

Normally, I prefer to give each set of development builds a fairly lengthy trial before updating them, but in this case, I considered the bug important enough to warrant a quick turnaround. My apologies for any inconvenience.

Others changes have been kept to a minimum, with the exception of:

New installations will now use the new Debian repository redirector service.
A new metapackage, 'cb-metapackage', was used during the build process. The metapackage recommends all packages used in the default install.
A new config package, 'cb-configs', was used to include all default #! rc files distributed to '/etc/skel'.

As always with the development images, these builds are not recommended for anyone who requires a stable system, or is not happy running into occasional breakages. That said, thank you to everyone who helped by installing and testing the previous images. You are all awesome! :)

If you install these builds and you have any feedback, please do not hesitate to post a reply. Thank you.

Updated Waldorf "Testing" images: 20120924

2012-09-24T14:48:16+00:00

Updated Waldorf images are available now.

The updated images include the Debian Installer 7.0 Beta2 release. The main bug fix in the installer that concerns #! is #683849. This bug affected a number of users and rendered the previous images as uninstallable.

Other changes have been kept to an absolute minimum and any existing Waldorf users should not need to perform a new installion, unless they wish to help with testing the install process.

The only changes of minor note are:

Due to improvements and fixes applied upstream, the previous Compton/VLC workaround/bug fixing package is now rendered obsolete. If you are running a previous Waldorf installation, you may want to consider removing the package "cb-vlc-fix". The package has been removed from the latest build.
Some basic example templates (.sh & .txt) have been included for Thunar. Thanks to Johnraff.
Some depreciated syntax in the default Openbox menu and rc files has been updated. -- Johnraff.
A new keyboard shortcut has been added for htop (Super+h) -- Johnraff.
Issues regarding gnome-keyring should now be resolved.

A huge thank you to everybody who helped out with the previous test builds. As always, if you install these builds and you have any feedback, please do not hesitate to post a reply. Thank you.

All your base are belong to Canonical

2012-09-24T10:02:21+00:00

Why are you telling Amazon what I am searching for?

We are not telling Amazon what you are searching for. Your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query on your behalf. Don’t trust us? Erm, ~~we have root~~ all your base are belong to us. You do trust us with your data already. You trust us not to screw up on your machine with every update.

Sorry, I could not help myself. Seriously though, Mark Shuttleworth’s argument is technically correct, but I think he could have made it in a more diplomatic fashion, especially when he starts his next paragraph with:

In summary – please don’t feed the trolls.

Doh!

All joking aside, I do feel for Mark and the Canonical folks. It seems that whenever they try something new which has even the slightest hint of commercialism, they catch a tonne of flak. Yet, I rarely read any praise about the sums of money Mark must have personally invested into the project. To me, it all seems just a little unfair.

Anyhow, regarding the new Amazon feature, I think I can understand why it is being implemented, but as many commentators on Mark’s blog have already mentioned, I think this type of service is best suited to a user’s web browser. Erm, unless the aim is to make money, in which case, it makes perfect sense to incorporate affiliate links into an OS’s GUI.

Also, anonymity issues aside (they don’t really concern me too much), my main concerns would be:

vendor favouritism and the possibility that users might not be given, or shown the best deals. I mean, Amazon is normally pretty competitive, but it can often pay to shop around. In which case, a web browser would be the preferred tool.
UI clutter. In comparison to performing other tasks, such as opening applications and searching for local files, how often would the average user open Unity’s dash with the intention of shopping on Amazon? I do not know, but I would question the ratio and therefore I would also question whether Amazon’s (or any other vendor’s) products should be featured at all.

That said, in his blog post, Mark also states:

What we have in 12.10 isn’t the full experience, so those who leap to judgement are at maximum risk of having to eat their words later.

So, it will be interesting to see how this develops. Also, if you have not read it already and you are at all interested, Jono Bacon has written a compelling blog post that highlights the benifits of the recent dash improvements. Personally, I think the jury is still out.

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Tagged: amazon, canonical, ubuntu

Less darkness, less clutter, more responsiveness

2012-09-21T11:25:42+00:00

For a long while, whenever I had the misfortune to look upon my own website, I found myself thinking, “Urgh, it’s a bit dark.” Having such thoughts about my own website was not ideal, so, three days ago, I set about redesigning it. The redesign is now live. For posterity, I present you images of the old design and the new design.

Regarding the process, the actual coding probably took about a full day. The procrastinating over whether to actually perform a redesign of my existing Whird instance, or switch to something more mainstream, such as WordPress, took a lot, lot longer. In the end, I came to the conclusion that Whird serves its purpose quite well, so I decided to stick with it and give my site’s design a bit of a makeover.

Interestingly, or not, when I decided that a makeover would suffice, I only had a few ideas as to what I wanted the design to achieve. I wanted:

less darkness
less clutter
more responsiveness

With this in mind, I completely skipped the creation of any design mock-ups and simply attacked the existing CSS. The first job was to display:none; on every element outside of the main content, including my natty logo, navigation menus and sidebar content. The second job was to reverse the colour scheme. With these two tasks completed, I had already totally changed the site’s design and mentally, I was halfway to achieving my goals.

I was now faced with what was essentially, a very simple design, something akin to looking at a document within an office productivity suite. To be honest, if it was not for the need to have a means of navigating my site, I might have been tempted to leave it like that. But, like all good websites, I really did need to reinstate the navigation menu. It was then, that I decided I could also reinstate my site’s sidebar content, with the help of some jQuery scripting.

Having recently obtained a new Android phone ¹, I was inspired to iconify ² the site’s main navigation menu and use jQuery to help toggle the visibility of my site’s existing sidebar content. I am quite happy with the result and I think I have managed to remove the clutter, but also improve usability, and all with minimal disruption to the existing code.

Finally, I am still working on the responsiveness, but I have implemented the following CSS media queries, which I think should cover most screen sizes and devices.

@media only screen and (min-width: 480px) {
    /* Style adjustments for viewports 480px and over go here */
}

@media only screen and (min-width: 768px) {
    /* Style adjustments for viewports 768px and over go here */
}

@media only screen and (min-width: 960px) {
    /* Style adjustments for viewports 960px and over go here */
}

You know, back in the day, the web used to be so simple!

Anyhow, the redesign is complete (bar the usual tweaks and titivation) and I am quite happy with it. If I have skipped over anything and you would like to know more, or you have any comments or constructive feedback, please leave a comment.

Footnotes:

A Samsung Galaxy SIII, it is like carrying the future around in my pocket (or it would be if Three pulled their fingers out and issued a Jelly Bean update). ↩
Glyphish Pro icons, as used by the likes of Google, Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Cern (which is really what sold them to me!) For an unlimited license, you can purchase them for $25, which IMHO, is an absolute bargain. ↩

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Tagged: code, css, design, icons, jquery, responsive web design, whird

Anonymous #! love

2012-09-16T17:50:47+00:00

This morning, I received this anonymous email message:

CrunchBang is amazing! I have a netbook with only 1GB of RAM and it zooms along very fast. I appreciate what you have made, and I would be heart broken if this distro were to ever cease. Please keep it up Mr. Newborough!

I guess it is possible that my recent posts about GNOME might have triggered this. So, to be clear, yes, I really like GNOME, but no, I am not about to stop working on CrunchBang. That said, like many other Linux users, I occasionally like to play around with other desktops and distros. I believe that experimentation is a healthy pursuit, it helps to provide ideas and stops the rot from setting in. At the moment, I am mostly experimenting with GNOME, but it will not be long until I return to using Openbox.

P.S. Maybe now is not a good time to mention my little foray into the world of Windows 8?

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Tagged: crunchbang linux, gnome

GNOME 3 on my Eee PC 1000

2012-09-13T16:28:25+00:00

Yesterday, I admitted that I got it wrong about GNOME 3 (it really is very nice). I think my admission came as a surprise to some people, I know it came as a surprise to me.

Why did it come as a surprise? Because I was holding on to the misconception that GNOME is sluggish and resource intensive. I am not sure where or when I came to this conclusion, but it simply is not true. This last week, I have found that it performs very nicely and it has been flying along on my machines.

I don’t know how widely my previous misconception is shared amongst non GNOME users, but I have certainly heard it said by others before. As a case in point, yesterday, after stating that I was thinking about trying GNOME on a less powerful system, jotapesse commented:

I would very much like to know the performance you get from an Intel Atom machine (like your EeePC 1000) as I work with 2 of them (EeePC 1000H and an EeeBoxPC 1501P) with Xfce 4.10 (with window composition enabled) wonderfully. I don’t expect Gnome3 to work satisfactorily… am I wrong?

So, this morning, I installed it on my old Eee PC 1000 and the results surprised me again. It performs just fine, in fact, I might be stating the obvious, but GNOME Shell works really well on the small screen format. In the couple of hours that I used it, the only noticeable difference that I could perceive was that the window animations were not quite as smooth as they are on my more powerful systems. Still, nothing critical and certainly not enough to put me off using it.

Now, I don’t have any real metrics to back this up, but, I would say that it performs as well as any Openbox or Xfce set-up that I have previously used on my Eee PC. Surprised? I was.

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Tagged: gnome, gnome-shell, linux

GNOME 3 -- Just the beginning, maybe

2012-09-12T13:05:18+00:00

Over a year ago, I wrote a post entitled “GNOME 3 — This is the end, maybe”. My post was a response to a post on Dedoimedo entitled “Gnome 3 — This is the end, it seems”, where I basically agreed with the Dedoimedo summary:

Totally counterintuitive, inefficient, not really productive, the lack of panels and right-click functionality is a sore, annoying loss. Power users will find the polished, rounded looks nothing more than a costly distraction to their work.

Now, as a self-confessed flip-flopper, I am executing my right to change my mind (feel free to read as an admission to being totally wrong).

I now believe that GNOME 3 is the complete opposite of “counterintuitive, inefficient, not really productive” and I am finally beginning to see that it has huge potential. I have been playing around with it on Debian Sid for the past week and I have really enjoyed the experience. In fact, I have enjoyed it so much, I now have it running on a couple of machines.

Sometimes, it feels good when you realise you were wrong, very wrong.

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Tagged: debian, gnome, gnome-shell, linux

CrunchBang Support

2012-09-03T14:19:36+00:00

Wow, long time, no post. Sorry about that.

Anyhow, James sent a message today via my website’s contact form. The message was short, simple and polite:

Will you help me get a Broadcom wireless card working in #! please?

Problem is, I think James made a typo when entering his email address and my reply got bounced. So, James, if you are reading this, my reply is this:

Hello James

Have you tried the forums and/or IRC channel for support? If not, you really should. The forums are a really fantastic place, filled with knowledgeable folk who I am sure will help you get your system fixed in a jiffy.

Best regards,
— Philip

P.S. Have a nice day and thank you for encouraging me to post on my blog! :)

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Tagged: crunchbang linux

Updated Waldorf "Testing" images: 20120806

2012-08-09T08:50:50+00:00

Updated Waldorf images are available now.

A good few months have passed since the initial Waldorf images were made available and during this time I received lots and lots of comments, suggests and bug reports. I have done my best to work my way through this feedback and make the necessary changes to improve Waldorf's out-of-the-box experience.

I would like to thank everyone who helped test the previous images and provide constructive and helpful feedback. You rock! :)

What's changed:

For the first time, the CrunchBang builds exceed the 700MiB CD limit. I feel that this is unfortunate, but reaching and exceeding the limit was possibly inevitable. If this something that you would like to comment on, please refer to the existing forum thread: Is it time to drop the 700MiB CD Limit?
As suggested, ARandR has replaced grandr as the default tool to help with configuring multi-screen set-ups. ARandR provides a nice feature whereby you can save/export complex xrandr commands to file, which can then be referenced via Openbox's autostart. Also, the default SLiM theme has been updated to also accommodate dual screen set-ups.
Talking of SLiM, a new GUI app has been developed to help configure the login manager. SLiMconf provides basic options for users to easily configure automatic login accounts, as well as other options, such as changing themes etc.
Prettier (highly subjective) fonts. Some changes have been made to try and provide similar font rendering to that of Ubuntu.
An additional 486 image has been made available for use on PCs with a single processor not supporting PAE. Interestingly, or not, a good few #! users seem to still require this and so I am happy to be able to provide it, again.
News from the Bike Shed Painting Committee: following an interesting forum debate, Iceweasel makes a return as the default browser, replacing Chromium.
Sadly, I have replaced (temporarily, hopefully) VLC with GNOME MPlayer. VLC caused issues with Compton, the default compositing manager, and so I decided to replace it with a comparable media player. I am sure that the issues are Compton's, not VLC's, but I am happy to make the switch while I wait for an upstream fix. Providing a stable/solid compositing manager remains at no.1 on my #! hit list.
Johnraff's excellent "Places" and "Recent Files" Openbox pipemenus make a return. John does a fantastic job at maintaining these pipemenus and I am happy to see them included by default. Thank you, John.
htop included by default, as requested.
I have made some modifications to the Debian Installer in an attempt to fix a issue whereby the installer would pause indefinitely on systems containing more than 1 network adapter. Due to limited resources, I have only been able to do limited testing of this, so if you were previously affected by this, I would love to hear from you.
As requested, ClipIt has replaced Parcellite as the default clipboard manager.
PNMixer has replaced volumeicon as the default system tray sound mixer.
Faenza icons.
Numerous other miscellaneous fixes and tweaks.
3 months worth of package updates via the Debian repositories. As always, I and the #! community owe a huge thank you to everyone involved in the Debian project, without which #! would not exist. THANK YOU :)

It’s showtime

2012-07-17T20:33:28+00:00

As you read this — or as least, as I write this — the O’Reilly Open Source Conference, more commonly known as OSCON, is getting started in Portland, Oregon, and will be open for the better part of the week. OSCON is the largest Linux/Open Source conference in North America — though not the best (that still goes to the Southern California Linux Expo, or SCALE) — and if you’re within driving distance of Portland, you should take the time to go to OSCON this week.

I won’t be at OSCON this week representing CrunchBang for a couple of reasons: a.) I have news colleagues covering the Olympics in London and, with the staff being hacked down to bare bones on the news desk, I have to stay here, and b.) because OSCON leans more toward the corporate and less toward the hackers, the spaces for the “dot-org” section were cut, and they were filled very early, leaving folks like Fedora and Ubuntu scrambling for space when they were passed over in the first round of “dot-org” choices. No doubt that’s been settled by corporate masters up a few rungs on the Red Hat and Canonical ladders respectively. But the chances are that we would have probably been shut out of booth space this year. But next year . . .

However, if you’re in the Southwest — Texas or thereabouts — you might want to check out Texas Linux Fest in San Antonio on Aug. 3-4. Again, I’ll be trapped at my desk and won’t be attending, but TXLF is a growing show that is gaining popularity, and if you’re in the area, you should take the time to go.

The reason I bring these shows up is that I think everyone who is near one — by “near” I mean within either driving or bus/train distance over the course of, say, a day’s travel — should go. You learn a lot at the sessions, you get to see vendors who, more times than not, give you more swag than you can carry (for example, I have not bought a T-shirt since 2006: True story) and, of course, you get to meet and talk to other Linux users about about FOSS programs and distros — especially CrunchBang — if the topic is raised.

I don’t know what’s going on in Europe — FOSDEM has passed if I understand correctly, and I know there are other shows there during the course of the year — but I have heard rumor (or rumour, since it’s happening in the UK) that our own Philip Newborough has been coerced into attending OggCamp in Liverpool sometime next month (and presenting, maybe?).

Other than talking to LUGs about CrunchBang for the rest of the year, I think my schedule for expos and shows this year is done. I don’t fly — my arms get tired — and so I’m going to have to miss shows later in the year, like Ohio Linux Fest, but we’ll have a booth at SCALE and Linux Fest Northwest next year. If you’re in the area and want to work the CrunchBang booth in Los Angeles or Bellingham, Washington (north of Seattle), let me know.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and has just started developing software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, LFNW, Linux Fest Northwest, Openbox, OSCON, SCALE 11X, Southern California Linux Expo, Texas Linux Fest Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, O'Reilly Open Source Conference, Openbox, OSCON, SCALE, Southern California Linux Expo, Texas Linux Fest

Graduation day

2012-07-15T06:25:10+00:00

Earlier today, I posted a comment on the Introductions part of the forum on an introduction by a U.S. user named Diplo where, to my credit (I say, as I pat myself on the back), I resisted the temptation to go into full-lecture mode on the topic of whether “someone in the community can comment on the benefits of choosing CrunchBang, and even offer some advice or links to a newbie.”

I replied to Diplo on the forum itself, but I kept thinking about my response throughout the course of the day and what it means to be a Linux user; not just a Linux user, using a “mainstream” distribution — a concept that may have been unheard of 10 years ago — but a user of a unique, quality distro like CrunchBang.

Those of us non-developers and non-programmers who use CrunchBang on a daily basis by and large “graduated” to it after taking baby steps and using training wheels on another distro. Living digital lives around a desktop environment until we changed, it’s a step up to start using a window manager like Openbox, just as it’s an improvement to get comfortable with the command line instead of depending on GUI-based programs (though, as you know, I am always talking about using the GUI-based solutions in the forums, if they exist — I know that’s not very “leet,” but the folks who put the GUI-based solutions together deserve a nod and our thanks).

One thing I didn’t fully outline in the response to Diplo is that there is a wholeness or holistic — forgive me if the Californian is coming out — nature to CrunchBang where the cycle of an outstanding distro following a helpful community following a well-stocked forum leading back to the outstanding distro is complete. These items — an informed helpful community collecting a wide range of knowledge over time on a distro made by an outstanding lead developer — all together in the mix are essentially what makes CrunchBang great.

So it’s quite heartening to see those who are curious enough to see their hardware as a tool, not as a toy, and want to use the best tool for the job, so to speak, joining our ranks, knowing that many will stick around and become productive members of a growing CrunchBang community.

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, Openbox Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, Openbox

The ethical problem with technology prices

2012-06-29T22:01:41+00:00

So, you may have noticed that the Nexus Q, Google’s answer to Airplay, has been announced and, in America at least, it costs $299. Compared to Apple TV, that looks like a ridiculous price. Over 3 times more. What makes it so special? Well, in general…nothing. It has a death star look, and has a bunch of leds, but apart from that, nothing.

The main problem appears to be that it is made almost entirely in the US. This obviously meaning that labour costs are a lot higher than if it had been made in China and this appears to have rocketed the cost sky-high.

Now we are approached with a problem. I highly commend Google for doing this and holding their standards above everything else. Or, maybe it’s just that they have had issues with China, who knows. Either way, it still comes down to 1 problem for normal users.

Cheap, or fair?

$99 for something made by Chinese workers who have almost no rights and get very little pay, or $299 for something made by a company in another country who pay a “decent” wage, or at least have higher standards of working conditions.

I honestly do not thing the capitalist system we are living in is going to give room for something 3x as much just so we can feel good about where it comes from. I mean, look at fair trade chocolate. Pay 20p more on a chocolate bar? No way! I don’t care that it means the farmer gets more money, I can’t afford that.

Especially with the fact that we have spent the last 20/30 years with technology getting cheaper and cheaper. Now we pay more?

I just don’t think it’s going to happen. What do you think?

Leaning toward dropping the limit

2012-06-26T20:59:26+00:00

You may have thought I had dropped off the face of the earth — cause for celebration for some, I willfully admit, and a cause of woe to others (thanks, guys) — but as I may have mentioned before, I usually have a hard and fast rule about writing blog items (well, two hard and fast rules): I only write something when I have something to say (and the second rule is: Make it at least marginally interesting).

Anyway, there has been a discussion on CrunchBang’s never-to-be-outdone, outstanding forums lately about whether we should pitch the 700 MB limit that would fit on a CD and go larger — how much larger remains to be seen (but I can’t imagine it would be much larger) — using USB sticks as the primary medium for installation instead of CDs.

To be fair, I have commented on the forum to raise the possibility that having a CD-sized image could be handy for those who don’t have access to USB sticks and/or DVD burners. I am not thinking of me, of course — like Corenominal, I haven’t installed anything using a self-made CD for quite some time, and I’ve opted for making a bootable USB stick ever since I stopped with the CDs — but there may be others for whom burning a CD may be easier than getting a USB stick. That’s just one argument for keeping the size the same, though it seems to be a minority viewpoint.

[As an aside, too, it's great to see Philip raise a question and step aside and let the CrunchBang community thrash-and-hash it out. To its credit, the community is always very civil about the debate, and kudos all around for that.]

But for me, I am fine with a larger image to be used on USB sticks, and one of the several advantages to add to the speed and convenience having a stick provides, it is also a much “greener” solution, environmentally speaking.

Naturally, it’s easier for me to burn live CDs for shows and expos where I exhibit CrunchBang, but the workaround is a simple one: Live DVDs would take the place of CDs, as well as having a laptop set up where the CrunchBang curious can get a USB stick made (as we did at Linux Fest Northwest).

So, Corenominal, if you were to ask me, I’d choose to forgo the 700-MB limit and make it larger if need be. Again, I’m open to continue discussing this here and on the forum, but that’s my proverbial two cents.

Filed under: CrunchBang, Debian, Openbox Tagged: CrunchBang, CrunchBang GNU/Linux, CrunchBang Linux, Debian, Openbox

Changing the iPhone connection port

2012-06-26T08:35:37+00:00

Or: why this will be a massive mistake for Apple.

So, the world is currently discussing many rumours about the iPhone 5 (yes, again), and just about every ridiculous thing they always do. One of the most common ones is that Apple will be changing the connection port to a smaller one. This may or may not be true (I, for one, know it is happening, but I don’t know for certain what it’ll be like or if it’ll be happening for the next iPhone…and no, I’m not going to tell you how I know it’ll def be happening in the next 2 years or so) but I thought I would discuss why I think this is a very bad idea.

Apple’s business works where you like their products, so you buy their products. Then you buy a whole load of awesome accessories for those products. Then their new product comes out..and you buy that new product because you already have speakers, and a tv cable, and a radio clock, and a computer dock, and a million different cables for it. Then they bring out a different product that uses the same connector and you think “Oh, all these things I have already work with this completely new product” so you buy it again…and then the cycle continues.

This cycle will break.

When Apple change the connector, suddenly everything will be obsolete. Everything. Now, sure, maybe they release a converter as well, but then for your speakers, the iPhone won’t fit right in it, and you need to remember to carry this around with you everywhere. It’ll just be a mess. So really the best thing to do is to buy all new stuff.

Now, Apple are clearly under the impression that people will just buy a new iPhone because they like it. Maybe they will. I’m sure loads will. But there also is involved in this, a huge annoyance. Would you want to go back to that ecosystem when they just moved everything from beneath your feet? Maybe they’ll do it again. They have a history of just wiping the slate clean with their products. It’s not even like companies will continue to make products with the old connector, because Apple license it to them, and they will probably stop licensing it to anyone.

Now, I am all for advances in technology. However, this may just be a smaller version of the connector. If so, that’s massively annoying.

Apple better have some awesome feature that this fulfills that they couldn’t do with the old connector or they are going to annoy a lot of people.

Reposting some old howtos

2012-06-26T02:40:20+00:00

So today I went looking for an old solution to a Linux proxy problem and realised that I probably need to get these howtos etc back up online after letting go of my omnsproject domain. So you'll now see them in this blog but please note that the focus of this blog will be on photography and will remain that way :)

International: This work by Grant Galbraith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Australia: This work by Grant Galbraith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License.

CrunchBang Linux Waldorf - Development Release Review

2012-06-26T02:40:04+00:00

It's not my intention to proliferate this blog with Linux reviews. Its purpose is largely related to my photography interests but occasionally I'll feel the need to put some words down about Linux. My interest in the development of Linux distros has largely dissipated in recent times and I now just use it as one of my preferred tools. In this context I'm now just looking for highly polished distros that pretty much just work out of the box and involve only a small amount of tweaking and maintenance to be productive in other more important areas of my life. An example is my recent Unity setup. It's something I definitely would have shied away from in the past but now I find it to be a very productive environment that suits my workflow. It runs on a machine with plenty of RAM and CPU power so it's shortcomings in that area are not a concern.

All that said I think there will always be one distro I make an exception for and that is CrunchBang Linux. Those of you that know me well would know of my strong interest in this wonderful distro in the past. I was there from the beginning of its community, was its first forum moderator and am somewhat proud of the friendly community we developed there. It was wonderful to see it go from strength to strength over the last 3-4 years. I no longer maintain that moderator and community role but do like to pop in and see how everyone is going from time to time. It's wonderful to see it continuing to prosper and the same friendly atmosphere continuing. It really is quite unique in the Linux world.

Back to the main point of this review and recently Philip Newborough released the first development build for the next stable version of CrunchBang codenamed Waldorf. As most people know CrunchBang follows the Debian release cycle and after Debian's Squeeze and CrunchBang's Statler stable releases we can now look forward to Debian's Wheezy and CrunchBang's Waldorf.

I have been looking for a distro to replace my Fedora 16 Xfce install. It has served me well but there is a significant wireless bug in the Fedora kernels that effectively cripples my ath9k card if I upgrade from the old 3.1 kernel it currently uses. I have been looking forward to Fedora 17 to see if it resolves the issue but this release of CrunchBang proved to be far to tempting :-)

First I would have to say that it takes a tremendous amount to tear me away from my beloved Xfce desktop, especially when Xfce 4.10 has just been released. Openbox really is the only decent alternative and as a CrunchBang user it is the alternative I'm most familiar with. CrunchBang also utilizes Xfce tools like the Thunar file manger so I feel right at home in this environment.

So at the risk of being horribly subjective, here is my attempt at an objective review of CrunchBang Waldorf. As you can probably tell by now it will be a fairly positive review but I have been critical of CrunchBang in the past which upset several people. I do stand by that review and hopefully this one as well :-)

I approach this review from some new perspectives. The first being that I'm quite out of touch with developments in Debian. Most notable is the installer. It really has developed into a mature and intuitive installer and I think this is largely to do with the graphic version being so stable and usable now. The Squeeze installer was fine but I was more inclined to use the non-graphic version. Perhaps that was just familiarity with the way that worked but the graphic installer is now a joy to use and I'd recommend its use in the first instance.

Naturally enough CrunchBang also uses a slightly modified version of this installer. It's sleek and very CrunchBang. The only gripe I have with it is the removal of setting up a root password in favour of setting up sudo. I dislike sudo but this is just a personal preference. Most people coming from bigger distros like Ubuntu will find it very familiar and in the long run its very simple to set up the root account for my needs post install. During install I chose to use the guided partitioning setup. Again this is not something I normally do but I was impressed with the default LVM options and automatic partitioning allocations so decided to proceed with it. This is also the dedicated OS on this machine so the simple defaults are more than adequate. I chose a simple /, boot and swap setup but there are other options for separate partitions like /var etc as well. This further highlights the developments in the Debian installer. It really is a joy to use.

Okay onto my first boot and I was greeted with the SLIM login manager. This choice is fine by me as I only intend to use the default Openbox session. I can see some complaining about having to set it up manually for other environments but when I look at the skill level of users who explore other window managers with a CrunchBang base this really isn't a great barrier. This week I've also noted the development of a new GUI based autologin tool that may incorporate some mechanism for changing the default boot environment as well. From a security perspective I'd discourage the use of autologins but that is a matter of personal choice in the long run. As it stands now though, SLIM is highly effective and does the job admirably.

Onto the desktop and the defining element of CrunchBang kicks into gear with the first boot terminal based cb-welcome script. I'm a little biased because I love developing scripts like this and cb-welcome is the script that I have modified over the years for my own Debian build-scripts. It has developed into a highly efficient set of scripts and provides many options for the first time user. These include an initial system upgrade followed by installation of printer drivers (a compromise over Philip's aversion to printers in general), installation of LibreOffice and other options like extra development tools etc. I've noted several other distros that have adapted this script for their needs and it really is a wonderful tool. You won't see it again after this first boot but it can easily be used again by running the cb-welcome command in a terminal.

First impression of the desktop are that it's very CrunchBang. A simple dark grey desktop, tint2 and conky. Naturally enough I think most users options would be to start fiddling with cocky and tint2 configurations but the defaults are very usable if you've never seen them before. The default wallpapers on offer suit the distro well and I must issue a disclaimer when I state how nice they are. Yes, I created several of them and it always gives me a buzz to still see them included with each release :-)

The other defining point of CrunchBang is its excellent Openbox menu. Everything is included here with easy access to configuration files and tools to begin personalising your desktop to your personal needs. The various pipe menus on offer are excellent with options to install things like LibreOffice if you missed it in cb-welcome and other browsers like iceweasel, chrome and opera. The default install now comes with Chromium which is a nice choice. Normally I would just install Chrome for the extra bits and pieces it provides but Chromium is suiting the simple browsing needs I have on this machine well so far.

Overall impressions are that this release is already very stable. This obviously reflects on the development of Debian more than anything else but it's also great to see Philip putting the same high levels of stability into his his various additions, packages and configurations.

So would I recommend this release to others? Absolutely? This is the first time in quite a while that I'm really enjoying using Openbox again. I'd forgotten just how nice it is and it's a joy to be hacking away at it again. Not that I've made many changes from the defaults, just a few tweaks like tint2 on the left side which suits my screen real estate better. My next stop is conky. I like the default but when I get the time I'll probably dig out some old configs and put together something more suited to my needs.

I guess then that my final words should be a congratulations to Philip for another fine job with Waldorf. It's nice to be back in the Debian world again and given my needs on this machine, CrunchBang is the perfect fit right now.

---------------------------------------------------

My current desktop. Minor Conky/tint2 changes and a few compositing tweaks. Wallpaper courtesy of a friend who recently snapped an image of me doing my thing.

All original images at this blog are licensed under the following Creative Commons licenses, depending on your location.

International: This work by Grant Galbraith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Australia: This work by Grant Galbraith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License

The journey begins...

2012-06-26T02:39:43+00:00

My first go at using open source processing software with my photos. Used in this photo are:

RawTherapee 4.08
Darktable 1.0
Gimp 2.8

I've used Gimp extensively in the past so was more interested in the raw processing and filtering capabilities of the other two. Out of these RawTherapee has impressed me the most and will be the focus of my first review on this blog.

Below is the final image I came up with. If you compare it with the rest of the images in this album on G+ I think you'll agree that these open source alternatives hold up pretty well against Lightroom, Photoshop, Camera Raw etc that were used to produce the rest of the album.

All original images at this blog are licensed under the following Creative Commons licenses, depending on your location.

International: This work by Grant Galbraith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Australia: This work by Grant Galbraith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License

Dual Booting Snow Leopard and Ubuntu 12.04

2012-06-26T02:39:21+00:00

The first step on my open source digital imaging project was to get a Linux system up and running. As I'm dual booting an iMac and don't have a lot of time to mess around with my install I decided to go with a distribution that develops a live image specifically designed for Macs, namely Ubuntu. I've always tested each new release of Ubuntu but I've always had a number of issues with the way they do things so have mainly stuck with the Debian mothership over the years. That said, with this install I was looking for newer versions of imaging software so the Ubuntu PPA's are convenient and effective.

The first task was to install rEFIt and get it set up for dual booting. There are many guides out there on setting up rEFIt and repartitioning your drive so I wont go over it again here. The best one I've found for this task is at the link below.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/10/dual-boot-os-ubuntu/

Please note that I've set up this dual booot on a Snow Leopard machine. I haven't enjoyed the Lion experience and recently set about deleting it and restoring the snow leopard setup that came with my Mac. What I didn't like about Lion could fill a number of blog posts but I also was unable to find a decent how-to on how to dual boot any Linux distro with Lion. I've become increasingly unhappy with Apple in recent years and this may be the last Mac I purchase as I'll probably move to Linux box like this one. At worst I can run photoshop etc in wine or a Windows virtual machine but I'd prefer to keep it as native as possible, hence this little project.

Anyway, back to the install. After setting up refit and ensuring it was booting properly I embarked on installing Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. I downloaded the Mac specific build from the daily builds (April 17) and with only 11 days until the final release I figured everything should be okay.

The install process was fairly straight forward but I did strike a few snags. The install disc itself was easy to boot and when it got to the section where I could I could try the desktop or proceed straight to the installer, I chose to go straight into the install process. I always setup my partitions manually and this is where I struck my main snag. After setting up swap and main / partition I started the install and received an error stating that I needed a dedicated partition of at least 1mb for grub. Back in the installer I setup this partition as advised but still received this error. I tried a number of partitioning scenarios to try and work a way around this and even if I got the install to proceed it failed at installing grub. This install would still show up in redit as an efi boot on restart but it would proceed.

After a number of failed attempts the solution to this was a relatively simple one. By proceeding to the live desktop and launching the installer from there I was able to setup my normal partitions in the dedicated space and everything went smoothly. It's also important to boot the CD by holding down the C key during startup and bypass rEFIt to boot the install CD.

Also of note during the install on my Mac was the wireless card. My model has a Broadcom card so it is an optional install to get it working. The additional driver application starts soon after the live desktop is up and running and the necessary driver can be installed and downloaded from the install CD. You are then asked to restart but this of course defeats the purpose on a live CD so just quit the additional drivers application and within a minute or so your wireless card should roar into life. An active Internet connection greatly improves the initial install with the ability to draw in 3rd party drivers and updates via the connection. It's well worth the effort to get this up and running if you have a Broadcom card in your iMac. Also of note is that any Bluetooth keyboard or magic mouse you may have will not work with the installer so have a USB key keyboard and mouse ready for the install. The mouse can be paired later but I'm still working on getting the keyboard working. If this is the only issue I have I'll be quite happy with the install overall as it was pretty painless once I got past this live desktop installer issue.

Overall I'm quite impressed with 12.04 and Unity so far. I was quite a fan of the 11.04 release but didn't like the 11.10 release when Gnome 3.2 was first introduced. 12.04 and Gnome 3.4 has restored my faith somewhat.

I haven't changed things to far from the defaults as yet except to install MyUnity and tweak the desktop a bit. I really preferred Confity for this task but I'm not sure if it is still alive as a project. I couldn't get the 1.7 release of Confity to work with 12.04.

Other aesthetic tweaks and immediate additions were to install Faenza icons and a few apps like Terminator, Gimp and Darktable to get my project underway with Darktable being the first piece of software I will be reviewing in the weeks ahead. As a Lightroom replacement it looks quite feature rich so I'm looking forward to seeing how it performs, particularly with Raw files.

In wanting to use the most current versions of Gimp and Darktable I've used their PPA's and added and installed Gimp 2.8 and Darktable 1.0 with the following commands.

Gimp:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gimp

Darktable
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pmjdebruijn/darktable-release

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install darktable

Finally a note about the Ubuntu Software Centre. It has improved greatly since I last looked at it and I'll now use it instead of Gdebi to install debs. It handled a Chrome install quite well but I do have reservations about how it automatically handles package dependencies when uninstalling and installing software. Bascially I want to know what's going on and what is being added or removed from my system. For this reason I will probably add Synaptic as it has more control over these sorts of things or more likely just use apt-get at the command line. Old habits die hard it seems :-)

As for the rest of the integrated Ubuntu bits and pieces I don't have any use for them as I mainly use Google and Dropbox for everything in my day to day work. That said I'm really looking forward to firing up Darktable and reporting back on how it performs.

Until then... :-)

Some Screenshots

My desktop

The Dash

Workspace Switcher

Darktable (a Lightroom alternative)

RawTherapee

Gimp 2.8 in single window mode

All original images at this blog are licensed under the following Creative Commons licenses, depending on your location.

International: This work by Grant Galbraith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Australia: This work by Grant Galbraith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License

Ahoy there! - why I support Creative commons

2012-06-26T02:38:50+00:00

As a long term open source software supporter, I've become very comfortable with creative commons licensing over the years. Hence it was quite natural for me to start using it when expanding my photography interests this year. I know all the for and against arguments in regard to copyright of our work but to me creative commons just seems to be the answer to the complex problem of the internet and copyright.

I've seen countless examples of people who are making it work with +Trey Ratcliff and +Thomas Hawk proving that it is a viable way to make a healthy living in a new world. I know that many of you would argue that this is because they have such a high exposure and support base but I'd also ask you to put aside their immense talent and to ask yourself how they became this popular in the first place. I'm sure they sleep much easier than those who worry constantly about protecting their copyright and who disable downloads of their work on G+.

In regard to this point specifically. Most people who want your work for 'personal' use aren't going to be put off by copyright and disabling of downloads. With a big enough screen and 'save image as' your work is more than accessible to many G+'ers. At present all my images are freely available under cc for personal use and will remain that way. When the time is right (and I think I'm not even close yet) I will be setting up a smugmug site for those who'd like to support my efforts further. This amongst other ideas are in development :-)

On the non-photography front I've seen many companies and groups being highly successful with creative commons and open source principles. The greatest example we have is Google itself but there a lots of examples of smaller media publishing companies like +Fabian Scherschel's Sixgun Productions (sixgun.org) who are carving a niche for themselves with creative commons. I think I'd qualify this argument a bit more by claiming that Creative Commons works best on an individual level for people who are prepared to put in the time to develop their presence in (and actively be part of) online communities.

I guess it's all about the way our newer generations interact with each other in a digital word and whether or not we (older generations like me) want to be part of that. In any case I could spend many paragraphs making the point here but instead I think I'll just point towards Trey Ratcliff's excellent article on creative commons and his approach to copyright and piracy http://goo.gl/uBGdQ I'd also recommend this video talk he gave at Google last year http://goo.gl/7vFT0

Also if you a member of +Christian Werner's shared circle that I've previously shared on G+ http://goo.gl/SNKHe I'd encourage you to share that circle to spread the word. If you find what we do as creative commons proponents interesting then it would be great if you could add the +CC Photographers Circle to your pages or just share this blog entry along somewhere :-)

All original images at this blog are licensed under the following Creative Commons licenses, depending on your location.

International: This work by Grant Galbraith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Australia: This work by Grant Galbraith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License

Welcome

2012-06-26T02:38:36+00:00

Welcome to A Creative Commoner. This blog will document my adventures in a a variety of interests from Photography through to open source software. Roughly posts will fall into these categories.

Photography - basically this will be images from my recent shoots. I'll restrict it to what I hope are some of my better efforts and share more details about techniques used, settings and post-processing. This will be more detailed than appears on my Google+ profile.

Photography software - currently I'm embarking on a project to review as much photography related open-source software as I can with the primary goal being to see if the open-source offerings are a viable alternative to photoshop etc.

Open-Source in general - naturally enough to do the above it will work best on a open-source platform like Linux. I'll review other free software for OS X and Windows but these posts with have a large Linux flavour. At the moment I only have an iMac at my disposal so it will be dual booting until a different arrangement comes along. I plan to begin this process with a an install then extensive review of the next LTS Ubuntu release 12.04. Those of you who have known me for some time might find that a bit shocking but my days of immersing myself in the never ending world of Linux are long over. These days I'm just focusing on getting the job done on a platform that has a large package base and a base that the latest release of the packages being reviewed will run on. In that sense Ubuntu wins hands down.

A little later I plan to develop a smugmug site for anyone who might be inclined to support my photography interests in a more formal/financial way. Until then you are free to use my images for personalise use as outlined in the creative commons license. For any commercial use please contact me via my Google+ profile and we'll work something out :-)

All original images at this blog are licensed under the following Creative Commons licenses, depending on your location.

International: This work by Grant Galbraith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Australia: This work by Grant Galbraith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License

A pointed release of CrunchBang!

2012-06-26T02:38:13+00:00

A few days ago some good news arrived with a new point release of CrunchBang Statler. After watching my netbook suffering in the terms of resources overload from Gnome 3.2, I was happy to see this new release. I had been planning a wheezy/compiz standalone netinstall for this machine but it seemed fortuitous that this new release came along. With that in mind I plunged back into the world of Openbox and Debian Squeeze.

I’ll start first with what I like about this release. For Debian lovers you will feel right at home with Statler. I personally really like the Debian installer and it is great to see it being used in Statler. In the past the LMDE installer has been trialled but I’m glad that Philip Newborough has settled with the main installer for the last couple of releases.

After a thorough look around in the live environment I fired up the installer (reboot) and was quickly rebooting into my new system. First observation is that plymouth is gone... Yay!!! It’s a personal preference not shared by many but I can live without plymouth any day. The Slim login manager is the next change and I must say I prefer its simplicity on a single environment install. The default desktop has the usual Newborough feel to it and I am always impressed by the work that Philip puts into developing the various scripts and Openbox pipe menus that go into CrunchBang. From the cb-welcome script through to the scripting magic in the menus, there really is no comparison in other Linux distros and it is the defining characteristic of CrunchBang. We are fortunate indeed that we have at our dispenses so many fine examples of scripts that can be further tweaked, played with and enhanced :)

All these positives aside I must admit I’ve had a few issues with this release. Number one (and it is probably hardware related) is the Openbox session just feels clunky to me on my netbook. It made little difference if compositing was enabled or not but I was experiencing very minor but annoying lags in apps opening and in general things just didn’t feel as smooth as I had experienced with past releases. As I haven’t used openbox for some time I wondered if this may be related to using the 3.5 release instead of 3.4 in the stable repos. My feeling is that it should be enhancing the openbox experience so I’m not sure why I experienced these issues.

In this version of Statler, backports is now enabled by default. My number one issue with this is that it is not a recommended method for maintaining a stable Debian environment. To quote the Debian documentation on backports:

All backports are deactivated by default (i.e. the packages are pinned to 100 by using ButAutomaticUpgrades: yes in the Release files). If you want to install something from backports run:
apt-get -t squeeze-backports install "package"

It might seem an unnecessary concern but I’ve had backports cause me considerable grief with apt a few months ago and I note other issues being raised at the CrunchBang forums. There are methods discussed there as to how to adjust the pin-preferences to be more in line with the Debian way of doing things and I think this is something that needs to be addressed. I know that Statler is a personal project with personal preferences (and I don't think I’ve ever complained about something like this is in the past) but I do think it needs to be addressed in some way.

Finally and this is just a personal preference but it’s fairly clear to me now that I’ve moved on from the stable package base. Put simply I’m now reliant on some apps that aren’t available in squeeze (like FocusWriter that I’m composing this post with). That may seem fairly minor but it’s enough to make me look elsewhere and if you were a focusWriter user you'd understand that it can't be lived without ;) I’m not a fan (anymore) of mixing stable/testing etc to any great degree so it's wheezy+ or bust for me :)

So where does this leave me with this latest release of Statler. Well it pains me to say it but I wouldn't be comfortable recommending this release to others unless they were very comfortable with Debian. That said I wouldn't have recommended any of the previous releases either unless you were someone familiar with Linux, Debian, Openbox and breaking, fixing and tweaking away to your hearts content. I guess this is primarily what brings many to CrunchBang in the first place so in that context this release will allow you to keep doing plenty of that.

My number one piece of advice though would be to address the backports issue before proceeding with system upgrades so that it falls back in line with the Debian way of maintaining a stable system. That's just the approach I'd take but you may feel like sailing in the backports breeze :)

Overall, if you are a fan of CrunchBang you will most likely love this release. I've noted a few people at the forums experiencing some other problems with this release but I guess that is inevitable and will be more so now that a some parts of the distro have moved away from the 100% stable Debian approach. Add in the fact that many will upgrade it straight away to testing or sid and fun times are sure to ensue :P

Finally, when discussing CrunchBang it's important for me to keep in context this previous post about the projects purpose. That said the project does seem to be changing and may move away from the personal project it has been so far. I guess if that comes to fruition it might be time to look at some of the issues I've raised here in a bit more depth.

Until then, happy CrunchBanging! :D

Howto flash a Samsung GalaxyS with Heimdall CLI

2012-06-26T02:37:34+00:00

So, I've pinched this from Rich Scadding who posted it on Google+. I actually hope I won't need to use it but you never know :)

Quote:
Here's the guide I should have been able to find on the DarkyROM froums, but didn't.

1. Download and install Heimdall CLI - Bollocks to the Gui Frontend
2. Download DarkyROM 10.2 Resurrection and unzip everything all into one directory.
3. Open your terminal and cd to that directory
4. Copy and paste this line: heimdall flash --repartition --pit s1_odin_20100512.pit --factoryfs factoryfs.rfs --cache cache.rfs --dbdata dbdata.rfs --primary-boot boot.bin --secondary-boot Sbl.bin --param param.lfs --kernel zImage --modem modem.bin
5. Put your phone into Download Mode (Volume Down+Power Button+Enter)
6. Plug USN cable into computer, then phone, and go back to the terminal and press Enter.

Now watch the Cli do it's magic without GUIs like Odin and Heimdal-Frontend, which are either Windows-only, Crash on Debian, or complain about "No firmware.xml was found" for every .tar you try to load.
/Quote

Edit: Before proceeding, please read some extra background info in a more comprehensive version of this howto http://debianandi.blogspot.com/2011/10/howto-flash-darkyrom-102-resurrection.html

A HTC inspired weather clock for Conky

2012-06-26T02:36:35+00:00

Apart from some recent testing, I haven’t really used Conky for quite a while. However, I stumbled across this setup the other day that looks exceptionally good on my desktop. Put simply it’s inspired by the HTC clock and weather widget for Android. I like it a lot.

Setup is relatively simple but I needed to make several edits to make it work in English.

First, make sure conky is installed. If not run the following in a root terminal.

apt-get update
apt-get install conky-all

I'm not a sudo user but run the same commands in a normal terminal with sudo if desired.

You'll also need Conky Forecast which you can download below. Install it with the deb or build yourself with the tarball. The deb at the moment is an Ubuntu build. If I get time I’ll repackage it for Debian but you shouldn’t have any problems with it as is.

From Launchpad
Conky Forecast Deb
Conky Forecast Tarball

Download Conky-HTC from one the links below and extract. From the extracted folder copy .fonts, .images, .conkyForecast.config, .conkyrc, .conky_start and .vreme.template to your home directory.

At DeviantArt
http://wgacton.deviantart.com/art/Conky-HTC-v1-2-213418718

Copies of the deb and config files can also be found here http://minus.com/mbmYTc6Ra8#8g
conky_htc_v1_0_by_wgacton-d3j2axq

Now we need to configure Conky-HTC:

In a terminal:

gedit ~/.conkyForecast.config

By default the language is set to ‘Pt-Br’, I replaced it with ‘en’/

By default the weather info is set to metric. If you’d like imperial, find ‘unit=m’ and change it from ‘m’ to ‘i’

Setting your weather location.
In a terminal:

gedit ~/.conkyrc

Replace all "BRXX0232" occurrences with your area code. I use the ‘replace all’ feature in gedit to active this. To obtain your country code go http://www.weather.com. Search for you location and copy the country code from the URL for your location once found.

To change the gaps from the edge adjust the relevant gap_x and gap_y values. At the moment I’m using gap_y=50.

To use Conky HTC in English you’ll need to make one more adjustment. On line 51 find where it says - "${time %e} de ${time %B} de ${time %G}" and remove both the ‘de’ entries.

I use Xfce so for true transparency you’ll need to add the following two lines before the TEXT section

own_window_argb_visual yes
own_window_argb_value 255  # 0 = solid colour - 255 = total transparency

You’ll also need to change the own window type to normal

own_window_type normal

Save .conkyrc and exit.

Start conky in the usual way.

Enjoy :)

Here is how it fits on my desktop

It gets better

2012-06-25T18:56:19+00:00

For all those who've been a victim of the collective conscience. A little something just for you :)

Howto: Merge PDF Files in Linux

2012-06-25T18:56:19+00:00

Often I post things here just for my own reference. This is one of them.

Ensure pdftk is installed. pdftk can merge PDF documents, split PDF pages into a new document, rotate PDF Pages or Documents, decrypt and encrypt, fill PDF forms, apply a background watermark or a foreground stamp, burst a PDF Document into single pages. Pretty much anything. Just check the man and help pages. Here I'm focusing on merging documents.

In a root terminal:

apt-get update && apt-get install pdftk

Then in a normal terminal run a command like this in the folder than contains the files you want to merge

pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf cat output out.pdf

This should work on any Linux distro. Just install pdftk with your desired package manager.

There you have it. Nice and simple. God bless the command line :)

The grass is even greener in 64bit

2012-06-25T18:56:19+00:00

Since setting up my new Wheezy Xfce builds I've wondered how long it actually takes to run through this process and end up with a fresh custom Debian Xfce install. The system this was going on is a 64 bit one so I slightly edited the build-script to include the ia32-libs packages and nspluginwrapper. If interested it can be downloaded here. Instructions for its use are the same as in this original post for these new scripts.

Unfortunately I didn't have a usb drive handy so had to go with an install CD for the netinstall part of the process. This slowed things down a bit but I estimated the process would take about 30 mins. The netinstall took 15 mins and would have been quicker via usb. The build-script itself took another 18mins so all up the process took 33mins. Not a bad original guess :)

As is well known, one of the main problems for a 64 bit Linux system is with flash. In the end I opted to still install the 32bit plugin direct from Adobe.

Go to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/

Download the tar.gz installer for Linux systems.

Extract this package then copy libflashplayer.so to a permanent place you'd like to store it. This is a multi user machine so I found a spot for it in /opt.

All that is needed now is to use nspluginwrapper to get it working. Exit out of root and run.

nspluginwrapper -v -i /path/to/dedicated/folder/libflashplayer.so

This will install the flash plugin into the appropriate area of your home directory. You'll need to run the nswrapper each time you download a fresh update as it is essentially just copying libflashplayer.so into the correct area of your home directory.

So no big changes. My system mods were exactly the same as this previous post.

Anywho, its another great spring day here. I'm off to enjoy the sun and first swim of the season at my local beach :D

Howto Debian Live - Build your own distro

2012-06-25T18:56:19+00:00

This post is a reproduction of an excellent howto by rich scadding. hhttp://debianandi.blogspot.com/2011/09/howto-debian-live-build-your-own-distro.html

Enjoy :)

How to build your own debian

Debian live-helper was created to help you to build a Debian Live CD or USB. It is very good and helps you to setup your debian Live the way you want through scripts (called hooks) and preseeding debconf questions (to install packages with personalized settings). It needs a lot of free space and root/sudo privileges.

Installation
You will need an installed Debian system to start. Install the live-helper package. The one in lenny/squeeze repos is fine, but the latest one is better.

echo deb http://live.debian.net/debian/ sid-snapshots main contrib non-free >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo deb-src http://live.debian.net/debian/ sid-snapshots main contrib non-free  >> /etc/apt/sources.list
wget http://live.debian.net/debian/project/keys/archive-key.asc -O - | apt-key add -
apt-get update
apt-get install live-helper dosfstools genisoimage memtest86+ mtools parted squashfs-tools genext2fs mtd-tools sudo fakeroot syslinux grub uuid-runtime win32-loader

Configuration And Testing
Create and cd to a work directory as Root:

mkdir my-livecd
cd my-livecd

To create a simple test Live system (no X, just shell):

lb config

And you should end up with this directory structure:

|-- binary_debian-installer
|-- binary_grub
|-- binary_local-debs
|-- binary_local-hooks
|-- binary_local-includes
|-- binary_local-packageslists
|-- binary_local-udebs
|-- binary_rootfs
|-- binary_syslinux
|-- chroot_apt
|-- chroot_local-hooks
|-- chroot_local-includes
|-- chroot_local-packages
|-- chroot_local-packageslists
|-- chroot_local-patches
|-- chroot_local-preseed
|-- chroot_sources
|-- includes
`-- templates

lb build

lb config will create a config/ directory with some very simple default settings in commented files that can be edited by hand.
lb build will download the packages from the debian repository, install them in a chroot, apply hooks and other things and then create an ISO file which you can burn or run virtually.

Rebuilding
Each time you want to rebuild the live-cd to include some changes, you'll have to run:

lb clean
lb build

The process will be repeated, but this time the packages you downloaded before will be reused from a cache directory where they were saved the first time round.

Build an Xfce4 based Debian

Debian Squeeze with Xfce live USB image and some extra stuff:

lb clean
lb config --architecture i386 --categories "main contrib non-free" --packages-list xfce

You can find more packages lists for gnome, kde and others in /usr/share/live/build/lists/. The i386 architecture boots on 32 and 64 bit processors.

Add some more packages you'd like:
lb config --packages “irssi screen obmenu obconf iptraf vim”

Rebuild

lb build

Customizations
You can make changes to the system interactively during the build process in a shell, using interactive shell parameter.

lb clean
lb config --interactive shell
lb build

A prompt will appear during the build process. Make the changes you want and then log out with “exit” to finish the build process. To disable interactive shell again for unattended builds run:

lb config --interactive disabled

Create Hooks to automate customizations:
Add the following example script inside config/chroot_local-hooks/, make it executable and then rebuild (more hooks in /usr/share/live-helper/hooks/):

#!/bin/sh

echo "HOOK: ssh server"

# install
apt-get install --yes --force-yes -y openssh-server

# disable root login
echo "I: disabling root login in ssh"
sed -i "s/PermitRootLogin yes/PermitRootLogin no/" /etc/ssh/sshd_config

# don't start ssh on boot (safer)
update-rc.d -f ssh remove

Now rebuild.
To add some files to the user $HOME directory, copy them to config/chroot_local-includes to the /etc/skel directory:

lb clean
mkdir -p config/chroot_local-includes/etc/skel
cp -ra ~/.config/openbox config/chroot_local-includes/etc/skel/
lb build

Installing to USB pendrive:
To build and install a USB image:

lb clean --binary
lb config -b usb-hdd
lb build

Now copy the resulting image file to the USB pen drive

dd if=binary.img of=/dev/sdb

Where /dev/sdb is the usb pendrive.

Persistent Pendrive (Allows you to save files and settings)

To save changes between boots (a.k.a. live persistence), create a new partition with the remaining free space in the pen and change the label of the new partition to “home-rw”. Boot with the “persistent” boot option to use it. Now the changes in $HOME will survive. They can be used again booting with “persistent” again.

Installing To Hard Disk

One of the advantages of live-helper is being closely linked to Debian, Debian Policy and to Debian-Installer. Once you have selected the packages you want and have the system setup/configured the way you want with your hooks and preseeds, you can use the livecd iso to install your distro to hard disk with debian-installer (d-i) as with a normal official Debian CD.

The installer work normally (language selection, partitioning) but when it comes to installing the system, it will extract the live system to disk, then remove the live addons and install a bootloader. It is actually much faster that the normal installation, because it doesn't have to unpack all the deb packages.

Links
Much more in http://debian-live.alioth.debian.org/,
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLive/FAQ,
http://live.debian.net/manual/html/index.html,
http://www.debianuserforums.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=185.

Note
In Debian wheezy/testing the live-helper package is now live-build. It’s only a transitional package in squeeze.

Complete Debian Linux Guide – On Your Desktop

2012-06-25T18:56:19+00:00

Another handy tip from my mate rich scadding http://debianandi.blogspot.com/2011/05/complete-debian-linux-guide-on-your.html.

There are guides that can be installed and accessed from your desktop, so no need for searching the internet to learn about Debian linux.

These multilingual guides can be installed with Synaptic or the command line:

debian-reference - metapackage to install (all) translations of Debian Reference
debian-reference-common - Debian system administration guide, common examples
debian-reference-de - Debian system administration guide, German translation
debian-reference-en - Debian system administration guide, English original
debian-reference-es - Debian system administration guide, Spanish translation
debian-reference-fr - Debian system administration guide, French translation
debian-reference-it - Debian system administration guide, Italian translation
debian-reference-ja - Debian system administration guide, Japanese translation
debian-reference-pl - Debian system administration guide, Polish translation
debian-reference-pt-br - Debian system administration guide, Portuguese translation
debian-reference-zh-cn - Debian system administration guide, Chinese(CN) translation
debian-reference-zh-tw - Debian system administration guide, Chinese(TW) translation

For example, run this command in a root terminal:
apt-get install debian-reference-common debian-reference-en

Then once it was installed, exit back into a normal terminal then run:
debian-reference

The complete Debian Reference Guide opened in your webbrowser.