Technology Tales

A few more shell commands

Here are some Linux commands that I encountered in a feature article in the current issue of Linux User & Developer that I had not met before:

cd -

This returns you to the previous directory where you were before with having to go back through the folder hierarchy to get there and is handy if you are jumping around a file system and any other means is far from speedy.

lsb_release -a

It can be useful to uncover what version of a distro you have from the command line and the above works for distros as diverse as Linux Mint, Debian, Fedora (it automatically installs in Fedora 22 if it is not installed already, a more advanced approach than showing you the command like in Linux Mint or Ubuntu), openSUSE and Manjaro. These days, the version may not change too often, but it still is good to uncover what you have.

yum install fedora-upgrade

This one can be run either with sudo or in a root session started with su and it is specific to Fedora. The command performs an upgrade of the Fedora distro itself, and I wonder if the functionality has been ported to the dnf command that has taken over from yum. My experiences with that in Fedora 22 so far suggest that it should be the case, though I need to check that further with the VirtualBox VM that I have created.

Getting rid of a Dropbox error message on a Linux-powered PC

One of my PC's has ended up becoming a testing ground for a number of Linux distributions. The list has included openSUSE, Fedora, Arch and LMDE with Sabayon being the latest incumbent. From Arch onwards in that list, though, a message has appeared on loading the desktop with every one of these when I have Dropbox's client set up on there:

Unable to monitor entire Dropbox folder hierarchy. Please run "echo 100000 | sudo tee /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches" and restart Dropbox to correct the problem.

Even applying the remedy that the message suggests won't permanently resolve the issue. For that, you need to edit /etc/sysctl.conf with superuser access and add the following line to it:

fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 100000

With that in place, you can issue the following command to sort out the problem in the current session (assuming your user account is listed in /etc/sudoers):

sudo sysctl -p & dropbox stop & dropbox start

A reboot should demonstrate that the messages no longer appear again. For a good while, I had ignored it, but curiosity eventually got me to find out how it could be stopped and led to what you find above.

Widely differing approaches

The computer on which I am writing these words is running Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop environment, a fork of GNOME Shell. This looks as if it will be the default face of GNOME 3 in the next version of Linux Mint, with the MGSE dressing up of GNOME Shell looking more and more like an interim measure until something more consistent was available. While some complained that what was delivered in version 12 of the distribution was a sort of greatest hits selection, I reckon that bets were being hedged by the project team.

Impressions of what's coming

By default, you get a single panel at the bottom of your screen with everything you need in there. However, it is possible to change the layout so that the panel is at the top or there are two panels, one at the top and the other at the bottom. So far, there is no means of configuring which panel applet goes where, as was the case in Linux Mint 11 and its predecessors. However, the default placements are very sensible, so I have no cause for complaint at this point.

Just because you cannot place applets doesn't mean that there is no configurability, though. Since Cinnamon is extensible, you can change the way that time is displayed in the clock, as well as enabling additional applets. It also is possible to control visual effects, such as the way new application windows pop up on a screen.

GNOME 3 is there underneath all of this, though there's no sign of the application dashboard of GNOME Shell. The continually expanding number of slots in the workspace launcher is one sign, as is the enabling of a hotspot at the top right hand corner by default. This brings up an overview screen showing what application windows are open in a workspace. The new Mint menu even gets the ability to search through installed applications, together with the ability to browse through what's available.

In summary, Cinnamon already looks good, though a little polish and extra configuration options wouldn't go amiss. An example of the former is the placement of desktop numbers in the workspace switcher, and I already have discussed the latter.  It does appear that the Linux Mint approach to desktop environments is taking shape with a far more conventional feel than the likes of Unity or GNOME Shell. Just as Cinnamon has become available in openSUSE, I can see it gracing LMDE too whenever Debian gets to moving over to GNOME 3 as must be inevitable now unless they take another approach such as MATE.

In comparison with a revolution

While Linux Mint are choosing convention and streamlining GNOME to their own designs, it appears that Ubuntu's Unity is getting ever more experimental as the time when Ubuntu simply evolved from one release to the next becomes an increasingly more distant memory. The latest development is the announcement that application menus could get replaced by a heads-up display (HUD) instead. That would be yet another change made by what increasingly looks like a top-down leadership, reminiscent of what exists at Apple. While it is good to have innovation, you have to ask where users fit in all of this when Linux Mint already has gained from what has been done so far and may gain more again. Still, seeing what happens to Ubuntu sounds like an interesting pastime, though I'm not sure that I'd be depending on the default spin of this distro as my sole operating system right now. Also, changing the interface every few months wouldn't work in a corporate environment at all, so you have to wonder where Mark Shuttleworth is driving all this, though Microsoft is engaging in a bit of experimentation of its own. We are living in interesting times for the computer desktop, so it's just as well that there are safe havens like Linux Mint, too. Watching from afar sounds safer.

Improving Font Display in Fedora 15

When I first started to poke around Fedora 15 after upgrading my Fedora machine, the definition of the font display was far from being acceptable to me. Thankfully, it was something that I could resolve, and I am writing these words with the letters forming them being shown in a way that was acceptable to me. The main thing that I did to achieve this was to add a file named 99-autohinter-only.conf in the folder /etc/fonts/conf.d. The file contains the following:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<match target="font">
<edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>

Enabling autohinting improves font appearance in Fedora 15. The TrueType bytecode interpreter (BCI) was recently added to FreeType after its patent expired, but this actually decreased font quality on my system. I applied Kevin Kofler's autohinting fix and installed GNOME Tweak Tool, which lets you adjust autohinting settings. This combination solved my problems, particularly with letters like "k". Now, I am considering trying the same solution in openSUSE, which also has unsatisfactory font rendering, though I'll have to wait for GNOME Tweak Tool until they release a GNOME 3 version.

Moving from Ubuntu 10.10 to Linux Mint 10

With a long Easter weekend available to me and with thoughts of forthcoming changes in the world of Ubuntu, I got to wonder about the merits of moving my main home PC to Linux Mint instead. Though there is a rolling variant based on Debian, I went for the more usual one based on Ubuntu that uses GNOME. For the record, Linux Mint isn't just about the GNOME desktop, but you also can have it with Xfce, LXDE and KDE desktops as well. While I have been known to use Lubuntu and like its LXDE implementation, I stuck with the option with which I have most experience.

Once I selected the right disk for the bootloader, the main installation of Mint went smoothly. By default, Ubuntu seems to take care of this, while Mint leaves it to you. When you have your operating system files on sdc, installation on the default of sda isn't going to produce a booting system. Instead, I ended up with GRUB errors and, while I suppose that I could have resolved these, the lazier option of repeating the installation with the right bootloader location was the one that I chose. It produced the result that I wanted: a working and loading operating system.

However, there was not something not right about the way that the windows were displayed on the desktop, with title bars and window management not working as they should. Creating a new account showed that it was the settings that were carried over from Ubuntu in my home area that were the cause. Again, I opted for a less strenuous option and moved things from the old account to the new one. One outcome of that decision was that there was a lot of use of the chown command to get file and folder permissions set for the new account. To make this all happen, the new account needed to be made into an Administrator just like its predecessor; by default, more restrictive desktop accounts are created using the Users and Groups application from the Administration submenu. Once I was happy that the migration was complete, I backed up any remaining files from the old user folder and removed it from the system. Some of the old configuration files were to find a new life with Linux Mint.

In the middle of the above, I also got to customise my desktop to get the feel that is amenable. For example, I do like a panel at the top and another at the bottom. By default, Linux Mint only comes with the latter. The main menu was moved to the top because I have become used to having there, and switchers for windows and desktops were added at the bottom. They were only a few from what has turned out not to be a short list of things that I fancied having: clock, bin, clearance of desktop, application launchers, clock, broken application killer, user switcher, off button for PC, run command and notification area. It all was gentle tinkering, but still is the sort of thing that you wouldn't want to have to do over and over again. Let's hope that is the case for Linux Mint upgrades in the future. That the configuration files for all of these are stored in the home area hopefully should make life easier, especially when an in-situ upgrade like that for Ubuntu isn't recommended by the Mint team.

With the desktop arranged to my liking, the longer job of adding to the collection of software on there, while pruning a few unwanted items too, was next. Having had Apache, PHP and MySQL on the system before I popped in that Linux Format magazine cover disk for the installation, I wanted to restore them. To get the off-line websites back, I had made copies of the old Apache settings that simply were copied over the defaults in /etc/apache (in fact, I simply overwrote the apache directory in /etc, but the effect was the same). Using MySQL Administrator enabled the taking of a backup of the old database too. In the interests of spring-cleaning, I only migrated a few of the old databases from the old system to the new one. In fact, there was an element of such tidying in my mind when I decided to change Linux distribution in the first place; Ubuntu hadn't been installed from afresh onto the system for a while anyway and some undesirable messages were appearing at update time though they were far from being critical errors.

The web server reinstatement was only part of the software configuration that I was doing, and there was a lot of use of apt-get while this was in progress. A rather diverse selection was added: Emacs, NEdit, ClamAV, Shotwell (just make sure that your permissions are sorted first before getting this to use older settings because anything inaccessible just gets cleared out; F-Spot was never there at first in my case, but it may differ for you), UFRaw, Chrome, Evolution (never have been a user of Mozilla Thunderbird, the default email client on Mint), Dropbox, FileZilla, MySQL Administrator, MySQL Query Browser, NetBeans, POEdit, Banshee (while Rhythmbox is what comes with Mint, I replaced it with this), VirtualBox and GParted. This is quite a list and while I maybe should have engaged the services of dpkg to help automate things, I didn't do that on this occasion, though Mint seems to have a front end for it that does the same sort of thing. Given that the community favours clean installations, it's little that something like this is on offer in the suite of tools in the standard installation. This is the type of rigmarole that one would not draw on themselves too often.

With desktop tinkering and software installations complete, it was time to do a little more configuration. To get my HP laser printer going, I ran hp-setup to download the (proprietary, RMS will not be happy...) driver for it because it otherwise wouldn't work for me. Fortune was removed from the terminal sessions because I like them to be without such things. To accomplish this, I edited /etc/bash.bashrc and commented out the /usr/games/fortune line before using apt-get to clear the software from my system. Being able to migrate my old Firefox and Evolution profiles, albeit manually, has become another boon. Undoubtedly, there are more adjustments that I could be making, but I am happy to do these as and when I get to them. So far, I have a more than usable system, even if I engaged in more customisation than many users would go doing.

Let's finish this with some of my impressions of Linux Mint. What goes without saying is that some things are done differently, which is to be expected. Distribution upgrades are just one example, while there are tools available to make clean installations that little bit easier. To my eyes, the desktop looks very clean and fond display is carried over from Ubuntu, not at all a bad thing. While it may sound like a small matter, it does appear to me that Fedora and openSUSE could learn a thing or too about how to display fonts onscreen on their systems. It is the sort of thing that adds the spot of polish that leaves a much better impression. So far, it hasn't been any hardship to find my way around; it helps that I can make the system fit my wants and needs. That it looks set to stay that way is another bonus. We have a lot of change coming in the Linux world, with GNOME 3 on the way and Ubuntu's decision to use Unity as their main desktop environment. While watching both of these developments mature, it looks as if I'll be happily using Mint. Change can refresh, while a bit of stability is good too.

A look at Slackware 13.0

Some curiosity has come upon me and I have been giving a few Linux distros a spin in VirtualBox virtual machines. One was Slackware, which reminds me of a fellow university student using it in the mid/late 1990's. Since then, my exploration took me into Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake and eventually to Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. Since all of that bypassed Slackware, it was to give the thing a look.

While the current version is 13.1, it was 13.0 that I had to hand, so I had a go with that. In many ways, the installation was a flashback to the 1990's and I can see it looking intimidating to many computer users with its now old-fashioned installation GUI. If you can see through that, though, the reality is that it isn't too difficult to install.

After all, the DVD was bootable. However, it did leave you at a command prompt and I can see that throwing many. The next step is to use cfdisk to create partitions (at least two are needed, swap and normal). Once that is done, it is time to issue the command setup and things look more graphical again. I picked the item for setting the locale of the keyboard and everything followed from there, but there is a help option too for those who need it. If you have installed Linux before, you'll recognise a lot of what you see. It'll finish off the set-up of disk partitions for you and supports ext4 too; it's best not to let antique impressions fool you. For most of the time, I stuck with the defaults and left it to perform a full installation with KDE as the desktop environment. If there is any real criticism, it is the absence of an overall progress bar to see where it is with package installation.

Once the installation was complete, it was time to restart the virtual machine, and I found myself left at the command prompt. Only the root user was set up during installation, so I needed to add a normal user too. Issuing startx was enough to get me into KDE (along with included alternatives like XFCE, there is a community build using GNOME too) for that, but I wanted to have that loading automatically. To fix that, you need to edit /etc/inittab to change the default run level from 3 to 4 (hint: look for a line with id:3:initdefault: in it near the top of the file and change that; the file is well commented so you can find your way around it easily without having to look for specific esoteric test strings).

After all this, I ended up with a usable Slackware 130.0 installation. Login screens have a pleasing dark theme by default, while the desktop is very blue. There may be no OpenOffice but KOffice is there in its place and Seamonkey is an unusual inclusion along with Firefox. Though it looks as if it'll take a little more time to get to know Slackware, it looks good so far; I may even go about getting 13.1 to see how things might have changed and report my impressions accordingly. Some will complain about the rough edges that I describe here but remarks about using Slackware to learn about Linux persist. Maybe, Linux distributions are like camera film; some are right for you and some aren't. Personally, I wouldn't thrust Slackware upon a new Linux user if they have to install it themselves, but it's not at all bad for that.

Command Line Software Management

One of the nice things about a Debian-based Linux distribution is that it is easy to pull a piece of software onto your system from a repository using either apt-get or aptitude. While some may prefer a GUI, but I find that the command line offers a certain extra transparency that stops the "what's it doing?" type of question. That's never to say that the GUI-based approach hasn't a place, and I only go using it when seeking out a piece of software without knowing its aptitude-ready name. Interestingly, there are signs that Canonical may be playing with the idea of making Ubuntu's Software Centre a full application management tool with updates and upgrades getting added to the current searching, installation and removal facilities. That well may be, but it's going to take a lot of effort to get me away from the command line altogether.

Fedora and openSUSE have their software management commands too in the shape of yum and zypper, respectively. The recent flurry of new operating system releases has had me experimenting with both of those distros on a real test machine. As might be expected, the usual battery of installation, removal and update activities are well served, and I have been playing with software searching using yum too.

One thing that has yet to mature is in-situ distribution upgrading, à la Ubuntu. In principle, it is possible, but I got a black screen when I tried moving from openSUSE 11.1 to 11.2 within VirtualBox using instructions on the openSUSE website. Not wanting to wait, I reached for a Live CD instead, and that worked a treat on both virtual and real machines.

Being in an experimental turn of mind, I attempted the same to get from Fedora 11 to the beta release of its version 12. A spot of repository trouble got me using a Live CD in its place. You can perform an in-situ upgrade from a full Fedora DVD, but the only option is system replacement when you have a Live CD.

Once installation is out of the way, YAST can be ignored in favour of zypper and yum is good enough that Fedora's GUI-using alternative can be ignored. It's nice to see good transparent ideas taking hold elsewhere and may make migration between distros much easier too.

When buttons stop working...

One of the things that stopped working as it should after my recent Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade was the Eclipse PDT installation that I had in place. Editing files went a bit haywire and creating projects had me pushing buttons with nothing happening. Whether this was a Java or GNOME issue, I don't know, but I found it happening too on openSUSE 11.2 (there should be more on that distro in a later entry). That was enough to get me looking again at NetBeans.

In both openSUSE (NB version 6.5) and Ubuntu (NB version 6.7.1), I plucked the default offering of NetBeans from the respective software repositories and added the PHP plugin in both cases. Unlike when I last gave the platform a go, things seemed to go smoothly, and it looks to have replaced Eclipse for PHP development duties. While project scanning may take a little while, it's far from annoying, a departure from my earlier dalliance with using NetBeans as a PHP editor was stymied by performance that was so sluggish as to make the thing a pain to use. Up to now, NetBeans' footprint when it comes to its use of PC power never was light, so I am wondering if dual-core and quad-core CPU's help along with a copious supply of RAM. Only time will tell if these initial positive impressions stay the course; for now, I'll be keeping an open mind.

A first look at Ubuntu 8.10

I must admit that my curiosity got the better of me when screenshots of Ubuntu's 8.10, otherwise known as Intrepid Ibex, started to make their appearance. Since it is only at alpha2 stage, it's definitely a no-no for production systems. However, it does run surprisingly smoothly even at this stage. Yes, I have seen rough edges and the biggest of them all has made me install it onto my spare PC; there is certainly a tendency for systems to hang when you try running 8.10 in virtual machines, my preferred method for these kinds of explorations. Try it in VirtualBox and kernel panic messages ensue while you can log in on VMware Workstation only for the desktop never to load. While those could be major deficiencies for some, they have both been reported, with the former being seen by many and the latter being flagged by my own self.

Because I was using a version with the alternate installer, the usual slickness that we expect of Ubuntu installations wasn't apparent. Though I am sure that will change in time for the final release, I didn't find it too taxing to get things going with this means. Despite current changes, I expect a more familiar interface will return during later development cycles, certainly well before the final version is released. Because I was installing over the top of a previous Ubuntu installation, I didn't want to lose everything, but I needed to leave it to wipe out the previous root system partition for it to continue without freezing. Since my home directory resides on a separate partition, the transition occurred smoothly, with settings like desktop backgrounds being automatically detected without any complications. One thing that might annoy some is that all this takes manual intervention; you don't get the sort of non-destructive and seamless upgrade capability that openSUSE 11 gives.

What you get when the installation is completed is a Linux desktop that won't look too different from what we are used to using. The update introduces the New Human theme, featuring elegant chocolate-coloured elements that replace the previous default orange-brown colour scheme. They need to sort out a bug (another of my reports)  where black text is being displayed on dark backgrounds on the default display of dropdown menus in Firefox and maybe look into why changing the level of enhancements from Compiz Fusion messes up the display of the workspace switcher in the task bar, but it's fine apart from this.

Otherwise, it's a case of steady as she goes with OpenOffice 2.4, Firefox 3 and so on. That may change as time goes on, with OpenOffice 3 looming on the horizon. For some, all this continuity is all well and good, but I could foresee comments front some parts that nothing dramatic is happening, and that Ubuntu cannot afford to stand still with the advances of Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva and so on. Saying that, I like the continuity because it doesn't mean that my apple cart is going to get overthrown now and again. Indeed, you could say that the whole Linux distribution market has matured very nicely with evolution being the order of the day and I suppose that Ubuntu needs to be seen to be evolving more than perhaps it has been doing.

In summary, it's early days for Intrepid Ibex, yet it works well even at this stage. In fact, it is running sufficiently so that I am writing this very post in a Firefox session running on the thing.  It'll be interesting to see how it goes from here and if any more pleasant surprises are visited upon us. After the "safety first" approach of Hardy Heron, I suppose that Canonical can feel a little more adventurous, so we'll see what comes. Meanwhile, Here are a few screenshots below for your perusal:

Running Photoshop Elements 5 on Ubuntu and openSUSE

When you buy a piece of software and get accustomed to its ways of working, it is natural to want to continue using it. That applied to a number of applications when I moved over to Linux in the latter half of last year, and one of these was Adobe's Photoshop Elements 5.0, a purchase made earlier in the year. My way forward was to hang on to Windows by way of VMware. However, Elements fails to edit or save files in the Linux file system accessed through VMware's shared folders feature. I have yet to work out what's happening, but the idea of using a more conventional networking arrangement has come to mind.

Another idea that intrigued me was the idea of using WINE, the Windows API emulator for Linux. You can get it in the Ubuntu and openSUSE software repositories, but the WINE website has more to say on the subject. That's only the first stage, though, as you might see from WINE's Wiki page on Photoshop and its like. However, their advice is a spot incomplete, so I'll make it more explicit here. You need to run Winetricks from its online home as follows:

wget kegel.com/wine/winetricks; sh winetricks fakeie6

wget kegel.com/wine/winetricks; sh winetricks mdac28

wget kegel.com/wine/winetricks; sh winetricks jet40

The first line flicks a switch to fool Microsoft components to install thinking that they are installing into a Windows system with IE on board. Without this, the rest will not happen. The second installs Microsoft's native ODBC drivers; Elements will not function at all without these if my experience is any guide. The last step is to add JET support so that Elements' Organiser can get going. With all of these in place, having a working Photoshop Elements instance under Linux should be a goer. Apart from the odd crash, things seem to be working OK on Ubuntu and openSUSE seems hospitable too. Further experimentation may reveal more.

Update: The WINE Wiki has now been updated (and links back here!). As per dank's comment, the above lines can be condensed into what you see below:

wget kegel.com/wine/winetricks; sh winetricks fakeie6 mdac28 jet40