Hello, I haven’t blogged in a long while… my apologies for that. Lot’s of interesting things have happened since my last blog post. For one, I dumped X and now use the console excusively. Yeah, I know it sounds a little extreme in this age of high speed multiple-core processors, video cards and fancy desktop compositing but let me remind you that I still use a very old Compaq Deskpro and yes, most cell phones come with faster processors than my 350Mhz Pentium II processor. I think it’s enough to say, I don’t exactly have much spare processing power. But I digress, using a console only system is not as terrifying as it sounds. There are some pretty easy to use and mature text based applications out there. I use my computer for everyday stuff – music, television, radio, movies, reading, etc. I mess with applications like apache and samba only because I’m curious… nothing more, as in I don’t depend on them for a living. So from any stand point, it really is an overkill to run X in the first place. I basically need the following apps: an audio player, a video player, radio and television apps, a web browser for offline web pages and a pdf reader. I chose MPD and ncmpc for my music management because here’s what I need – the application manages the music, I select what songs I want and click play. Some people like more control but I’m basically a lazy person and I cannot be bothered by the petty details of managing individual audio files and folders.

Every morning, I wake up, stretch and yawn, and thank God for Mplayer. Seriously people, I do not know what I would do without this app. I use it for watching television and playing my video files. It can even double up as my fall back audio player and radio capture system but that’d mean too much work for my lazy fingers. I use fmtools to listen to radio because it’s simple… all I have to do is type ‘fm 101.3′ and I’m listening to the BBC. In line with my industrious personality, I set up aliases so for example, I only have to type ‘bbc’ to listen to the BBC… sweet. Elinks works pretty well when I need to read pages I’d already downloaded from the web or some HTML based documentation like the mplayer documentation.

The only problem is the PDF reader. After searching all over the web, the one thing I can tell you is if there is a console based pdf reader for linux, no one is telling. Luckily, pdftohtml can convert pdfs to HTML so I can read them with elinks. The output can be crappy especially when images and complex frames are involved but I have very few of those ebooks. I like my console system, it is snappy, and it does what I tell it to do without much drama; besides it totally annoys the crap out of my siblings. I’ll go into more details later this week. I have to run.

Software Freedom Day is just around the corner and the atmosphere here in LinuxAccra is upbeat. We got some substantial donations this year so we’re going all out with banners, flyers, radio ads… For my Ghanaian readers, LinuxAccra will hold a SFD2008 event at the Advanced Information Technology Institute on Saturday, 20th Spetember. This link shows how to find AITI:

http://www.aiti-kace.com.gh/?q=node/38

Ciao,
Odzangba

Since yesterday, I’ve been looking for a collection manager for my videos. I want something similar to Amarok’s functionality… for video. I’ve tried a few so-called ‘collection managers’ but they simply did not fit my designs. Tellico. GcStar, Elisa… nope. All of these require you to manually enter entries for each video file and only GcStar came close to allowing you to play the video from within the manager (technically, it called up mplayer but that’s okay). I have tons of music videos, tv shows, movies… and I want to just tell the app “this is the folder in which all my videos live” and let it handle the rest. Yeah I know, I’m, lazy.

I especially want playlists for my music videos and I also want a ratings system… sigh. I guess I’ll just have to keep looking. I’d really appreciate a few hints though.

First, I am annoyed… very annoyed. Now on to why I am annoyed. I tried out the piece of crap encryption software called Conceal or something like that. It was supposed to provide one-click encryption. When I tried to encrypt something on Friday, it just showed me a progress bar for four hours and deleted almost all the files in my home folder. Luckily, I’d done a backup the night before so no real damage was done. But enough damage was done to annoy me. I’d mirrored about 8gb of the hardy repositories… I lost that. So now I’m gonna have to stay here in Winneba for another two weeks to re-download all those packages.

Synaptic gave me at least 15 minutes of pure unmitigated frustration this afternoon when it started choking with this piece of gibberish:

407 Proxy Authentication Required

I’d already configured my proxy settings in apt.conf and my bashrc file, and had assigned the right values to the http_proxy and ftp_proxy variables, not to mention the fact that synaptic had been working okay earlier in the day with no problems so this came as a surprise. Just to make pin-point the problem, I dropped into the terminal and did a sudo apt-get update… worked fine. Tried installing something with apt-get… worked. Tried downloading something with wget… worked fine. Yet synaptic would still not work.

In the end, I tracked down the problem to gksu. When I launched synaptic like so

gksudo synaptic

The problem just disappears and synaptic works… weird. So I used the Alacarte menu editor (right-click on the menu icon and select ‘Edit Menus’) to change the entry for synaptic package manager from

gksu /usr/sbin/synaptic

to

gksudo /usr/sbin/synaptic

I don’t know what caused this problem and I probably should file a bug report somewhere…

Disclaimer: This how-to details procedures for gaining root access to linux boxes. If the linux box is not yours, get the (written) permission of the owner… it’ll save you a lot of trouble. I will not be responsible for anything illegal you do with the stuff you learn on this page.

Okay, so you lost your password? It’s not the end of the world. But first you need physical access to the box.

1. Boot the machine (and press escape at the GRUB menu loading stage if the menu is hidden).

2. Select the correct entry for booting into your linux system – it usually is the first item and is probably already selected – and press “e” on your keyboard.

3. Select the line that begins with kernel and press “e”on your keyboard to edit it.

4. Now navigate to the end of this line, leave a space and type:

rw single init=/bin/bash.

5. Press “enter” then “b” on your keyboard and wait for the system to boot and give you a command prompt.

6. Now you need to use the passwd command to change your password. Do:

passwd $user

Replace $user with your username

7. Enter and confirm a new password when prompted, and reboot the machine with the reboot command. I sometimes get an error message when I try to reboot; if you run into the same problem, use the power switch.

8. That’s it, you’re okay.

Hardy Heron was released about a month ago and I’m still going through the painful process of mirroring the ubuntu servers. It’s been slow going here and it might take me another month to get the major stuff on my hard disk. Then I’ll make to full transitition to Ubuntu 8.04.

I finally got some free time over on Sunday to compile the 2.6.25.3 kernel and I was very surprised at how easy it was. I’ve read some ghastly stories about custom kernel compiles going horribly wrong and most of the initial tutorials I read were unnecessarily long but I found an excellent tutorial on the ubuntu forums that makes things simple. The only tedious part was choosing what should be compiled… that was essentially the whole point of compiling the custom kernel but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. It took just about an hour and a half to finish compiling and then I found out I had not enabled CONFIG_TIMER_STATS (powertop needed it to estimate power usage) and I had to do it all over again.

Now that I know how to compile the kernel however, my natural urge to speed things up has taken over and I spent the best part of the night disabling kernel modules and options I did not need. This might occupy my time for the best part of the week.

I finally got around to downloading and compiling powertop this afternoon but unfortunately, I couldn’t use it since my kernel was just too old (2.6.20-16) and it wanted 2.6.21 and higher. I’ve stuck to this particular kernel (and feisty for that matter) because I only have mirrors for feisty. Internet here in Ghana is usually crappy so until I get the gutsy (or hardy, when it finally gets released) mirror, I’m sticking with safe-and-convenient.

But I digress… I grabbed the 2.6.24.3 kernel and now I’m scouting around on the net for potential issues arising from compiling that kernel version on my hardware. It’ll probably take me another hour or so to make sure all is good (or at least can be made good with a few fixes), write out my will, say my last prayers and then I might probably just be in the right frame of mind to compile the kernel, I think… maybe.

Ever since Akuafo Hall opened up its own ICT centre, I’ve been spending more time on the internet, largely due to the fact that laptops are allowed. Anyways, one of the apps I’ve been trying out it Miro. I’ve played it before when it was going by the name Democracy Player but did not have much use for it since I had such horrible internet. But I pulled it from Canonical’s commercial repository this afternoon and I’ve been loving every minute of it. The interface is very clean and without any screen clutter and it’s terribly easy to use. I’ve a few screenshots to show for my afternoon’s adventure.