Eee!

Well, I finally went mobile. I got, from Woot, an Asus Eee PC 900A a couple weeks ago. The Linux edition, of course, because I’m sticking to what I said many years ago, and never giving Microsoft another dime of my money if I can possibly help it. It’s a nice little netbook, that I got at a bargain price (under $180 with shipping & handling).

The one problem I have with it, hardware-wise, is that the SSD (solid state hard drive) is only 4 GB. In these times of 1 TB (i.e. 1,000 GB) hard drives, it’s pretty amazing what you can do with just 4 GB. Unfortunately, it’s not quite enough for me to do everything I want to do. I also wish there was a built in webcam. The wikipedia article on the Eee PC says that this model has a (fairly worthless) 0.3 megapixel camera, but it actually doesn’t have a camera at all. There’s a spot where a camera should be, but it’s covered up. On the “wow, that’s slick!” side of the coin, the touch pad on the Eee is multi-touch enabled. It’s easy to scroll down web pages by just dragging 2 fingertips down the touch pad instead of one.

Software-wise, the Xandros Linux operating system was… adequate. I didn’t keep it for long, though. It comes pre-installed with something called DansGuardian. This extremely annoying installed-and-enabled-by-default piece-of-shit software refused to let me access Facebook, telling me that it was “Japanese Pornography”. I tried to google ways to disable/remove DansGuardian, and the search result that seemed most likely to answer my question was also denied to me on the premise that it was “Proxies, Pornography”.  I decided that it would make my life a lot easier just to blast the whole OS away and install Eeebuntu NBR. And I was right. Sort of. It was actually a pain in the ass to install a new OS, because the netbook did not want to boot from USB, even though I put USB first in the boot order in BIOS. It turns out that in order to boot from USB, you have to disable “Quick boot” and “Quiet boot” from BIOS, and then hit the escape key when the screen prompts you to “hit <Esc> for boot menu”. It’s very annoying that the boot order in BIOS means absolutely nothing.

One of the major problems with Linux is hardware compatibility. That’s what makes an Eee PC so nice. Because they are sold with Linux, we know the hardware is compatible, and because there’s a large user base for this particular model of netbook, we have multiple distros out there that customize specifically for this hardware. And Eeebuntu NetBookRemix is far, far prettier than Xandros.

I installed Google’s Chrome (actually, Chromium) browser as my default browser, because Firefox is a bit of a resource hog, and also Chrome’s got the fastest javascript engine out there so far. With only 1GB of RAM and a wimpy 1.6 GHz Atom processor, light and fast is good. I can live without AdBlock if I must… I also installed Gwibber for microblogging, and Wine so that I could install PokerStars and be a mobile Hold’em player. Last but not least, I installed Puzzle Pirates. Of course, that wouldn’t fit… I had to remove some software from the stock Eeebuntu to make room for PP, and then when software upgrades became available I wound up needing to delete more software to make room to download updates. The good news is, I can double my drive space with a $17 USB thumb drive. Actually, if you hunt for good deals, I think you can double it for less than that. I recently saw an 8GB thumb drive for $20, so that’s triple my capacity. And the Eee has 3 USB ports. I believe I can also upgrade the SSD, but I haven’t really looked into that yet. I do know the 1 GB ram is upgradable to 2 GB.

In summary: If you want to go mobile, but don’t want to (or can’t) shell out a lot of cash, the Eee 900A is a lot of bang for your buck. But be prepared to install your own Operating System. Which should be very easy to do now that I’ve warned you about the BIOS settings.

Linux Hold’em

So a couple months back I was reading a Wil Wheaton post about him running a small stakes tourney on PokerStars. I’d tried in the past to use PokerStars, but the software wouldn’t install under Cedega, which is what I used for my Windows games at the time. I decided to try again, and met with outstanding success using WINE.

So I signed up, but not until after the tournament was over. I’m leery about giving my money to an online poker site anyway, so I just enjoyed the play-money games, and some WSoP freeroll tournaments, and life was good. Then PokerStars deposited $2 into my real-money account, “to get me started”.

Well, it did get me started. I tore up the 2-penny tables, and was pretty quickly hooked on this hold’em thing. I put a Hold’em book on my Amazon wish list, and wound up with 2 books for my birthday (the one I asked for, and a different one). I still have not put any of my own money into the site, and I’ve turned that $2 into nearly $5. Yeah, I know… I’m rich now. :-p  But soon I’ll start playing the nickel tables, and the cash will really start rolling in!

Anyhow, the one book I got was about the mechanics (read “math”) of Hold’em, and the other book was about the ups and downs of online play specifically, and basically every aspect of online poker except for the math. These two books really compliment each other well. The non-math book recommends not tying yourself down to just one site, so that you can reap the bonuses from multiple sites, and go wherever the best action currently is. So off I went, in search of more online accounts, which would (hopefully) be as generous as PokerStars and give me free starter cash.

How fortunate I was that I started my journey with PokerStars! Because so far, that’s the only site that will work with Linux at all. I hit a “top 10″ list of poker sites, and didn’t finish it because I got discouraged.

Titan Poker installed with no problems, but it chokes on account registration, which has to be done through their software apparently. I might be able to play if I could do account registration on their website, but that doesn’t seem possible. Not that I’d trust playing on a site where the software isn’t 100% anyway.

FullTilt is a big name in poker, but their software will not run at all. It installed, but when I try to run it, it just dies quietly.

PKR has a beautiful video intro on their software, but that’s all it’s good for. I can’t get past that intro. Worse yet, I can’t even quit the program. I have to go into my process list, hunt for it and kill it.

PartyPoker isn’t poker anymore. It’s now PartyGammon.

PokerRoom I used to play, since they had a web Java interface. Unfortunately, they no longer provide poker.

So that’s it, in a nutshell. Anybody know of any sites other than PokerStars that work on Linux with or (preferably) without WINE?

KDE 4.3

I made the Kubuntu Jaunty upgrade to KDE 4.3 this weekend. Other than the taskbar looking nicer, and having to reconfigure everything back to the way I like it, I didn’t really notice any spectacular difference yet. The upgrade was also not smooth. I had to remove kdebase-workspace-dev to get the dist-upgrade to complete successfully. Your mileage may vary.

There’s some new options for the desktop wallpaper setting, but “Virus” is pretty lame, and “Weather” does not seem to work at all. “Mandlebrot” is pretty cool, though, if you don’t like to put actual photos on your desktop.

The “Info” icon now has a permanent home on the taskbar, instead of appearing and disappearing based on whether or not you have info to see.

Some new plasma widgets (or at least, ones I don’t remember seeing before) like Pastebin and Remember The Milk.

But all in all, I have no idea why other people are raving about this release.

Oh, and the KDE advanced settings for active and inactive transparency levels on a window *still* doesn’t work…

Epic WINE

In an ideal world, the operating system you choose for your computer wouldn’t affect which programs you can run. Of course, we don’t live in an ideal world, but we are getting closer. This morning, I read that Wil Wheaton is holding a little poker tournament today, on his old sponsor, PokerStars. I tried in the past to play in his tournaments, but PokerStars required me to install their (Windows-only) software to play. I tried to install it via Cedega, but it didn’t run right. But, being a perpetual optimist, I decided to check their site again today and see if maybe they supported other operating systems yet. I clicked the download button, and a screen popped up  in Firefox telling me this file is a Windows executable. It asked me what I would like to do with it, the default option being to open it with WINE. Sure, why not? It downloaded to my system and immediately launched into a familiar installation screen, and instantly ran. So far as I can tell, it runs flawlessly (maybe without sound?), and I’m up over $700 on the “play money” tables. This is it. This is the way it should be. I’m very happy with Ubuntu, WINE, Firefox, and any other team that made this a reality. It’s awesome when things “just work”.

Prismatic Web

No, it’s not a new AD&D spell. It’s the concept of having application-specific browser windows. It’s funny that I should read a Linux Journal article about Prism today, because I just installed Prism on my computer last night. I tried it once before, when it first came out (or was that when it first got included into Ubuntu?), and was not impressed. I couldn’t figure out why I would want to run multiple Prism apps instead of one multi-tabbed browser. Then I decided that I tend to have so many open tabs, that trying to find my Gmail tab or my Google Reader tab was a bit of a pain.

Of course, it’s still not perfect. The Prism apps are very lean, tailored to just what you need for a particular site. Or what they think you’ll need. I have some RSS feeds of webcomics and pictures in my Google Reader. Occasionally I find a comic or picture I want to save to my hard drive. No way to do that in Prism. Still it seems like a worthwhile, if incomplete, idea. I haven’t benchmarked the memory usage, but it does feel zippier versus loading tabs in Firefox.

I’m using prism-google-mail, prism-google-reader, and prism-google-talk. Ubuntu also has a handful of others like Twitter, Facebook, and some other Google stuff.

Anybody else using it? Thoughts? Hints?

A Jaunty KDE4 update

A while back I posted that I was giving pre-alpha Jaunty Jackalope a try. I don’t think I ever posted the end result (a short while after Jaunty went beta, the Nvidia driver quit working, so I abandoned ship). I tried Alpha 5 a week or so ago, and couldn’t get past the login screen, but I installed Beta 1 on Monday, and it rocks! Jaunty (Kubuntu, 64-bit) is now my primary box. Part of what makes Jaunty great for me is that the version of KDE4 it uses is far superior to the version Intrepid used (which was so craptastic that I switched to Fluxbox for a few months). I love the fact that I can finally, after years of waiting, use a 64-bit OS without having to tweak anything to make it work.

So I want to also update my opinion of KDE4. Going back to my previous post outlining it’s shortcomings and lack of anything to recommend it…

1. The desktop wallpaper. I can no longer have “centered maxpect” as
   an option. This means that all my pictures too small to reach the edges
   of my monitor stay too small unless I scale them (distorts the image
   aspect ratio) or “scale & crop” them (make them reach all 4 edges,
   and possibly some of the picture is off-screen). Highly annoying, but
   not a show stopper.
2. Rotating (slideshow) wallpaper has no option for how to display the
   image at all. If I want to change from centered to scaled, I have to
   display a single wallpaper picture, make the change I want, then go
   back to the slideshow. Again, an annoyance.
3. Advanced->Special Window Settings->Preferences allows you to
   choose active and inactive opacity levels. Sweet. Too bad it doesn’t
   work at all.
4. Under KDE3, my keyboard volume controls would visibly affect the
   sound level (a graphic would pop up center-screen showing the volume
   level). Gone. In fact, the volume controls don’t seem to affect the
   system sound anymore. They don’t work on Amarok. They do work on
   mplayer.
5. Most of the apps are still KDE3 apps.
6. Most of the plasma widgets are just plain lame (so far).
7. When I click on Logout, Restart, or Shutdown from the K menu, it
   pops up a window asking me if I want to Logout, Restart, or Shutdown.
   This is maddening. I just got done telling you what I wanted 0.1
   seconds ago. Why are you asking me again?
8. The new default K menu blows. Hard. I want my old-style K menu back. They’ve made it super-easy to get it back now.
9. I can add the old-style K menu to the taskbar as a widget, but it
   appears on the right-hand side of the bar instead of the left. There is
   no way to change it.
10. Konqueror is in my “Favorites” on the menu, despite me never using it. Firefox is not, despite me using it all the damned time.

Somebody explained #10 to me, and I guess it makes sense, but I expect something called “Favorites” to automatically populate with the programs I actually use (you know… like that Microsoft OS does with it’s start menu). If I have to manually populate the contents of “Favorites”, what’s the point? I’m just editing the menu…

Now, what do I like about KDE4? Hmm. Hard to say, still. There’s an improved IRC client (Quassel vs Konversation), but I’m not sure if that’s a KDE4 change. More likely a Kubuntu change. The notifications are nice. The Device Notifier is super-nifty. But overall I’m just happy to be getting back to a usable desktop environment. Overall, 4 finally equals 3.5 but doesn’t really surpass it in my mind.

Once more, with feeling

Once again, UUID really sucks. Installed OpenSUSE today on my spare drive, now I can no longer boot into Ubuntu even though that hard drive was untouched. This makes sense how?  Stranger yet is that I installed Linux Mint before OpenSUSE, and if I selected Mint from the GRUB menu, Ubuntu would boot instead. (If I selected Ubuntu, I would get an error, so I suspect Mint fried my UUID before OpenSUSE had a chance to).

No big deal… when I get home, I’ll eradicate UUID from my menu.lst and fstab files AGAIN, and all will be right with the world. It’s just freaking annoying, and I want to document all my UUID hassles so I can easily point to them when people ask why I don’t like UUID.

So ends week 11

Actually, it’s day 1 of week 12, but who’s counting?

A little more than a fifth of the way through the year and I’m still struggling with my new year’s resolution.  I’ve been to 3 practices and 1 event, but only put on armor twice. Not sure if that makes me 4/11 or 2/11, but I’ll give myself the benefit of the doubt. I’m very excited to see a large(ish) group of people at local practices interested in learning Liechtenauer style longsword fighting, and I’ve been participating in those drills (out of armor) whenever possible. A handful of people are practicing what we drill in armor, too. I’m dreaming of a unit of longswords on the battlefield. That would be full of WIN.

Also getting ready for Penguicon, which is simultaneously too far away and too close. I need to get active in bug triage again, and update my “intro to bug triage” presentation before the con gets here.

Decided today to start learning the C programming language. It’s a highly marketable skill (I’ve had 3 potential jobs ask me if I have any experience in C) and something I’ve really been meaning to do for some time now.

Last weekend

Sometimes I don’t even think last weekend existed. Weekends are supposed to have some “sit down and relax” time in them. Last weekend seemed to be almost constantly in motion. I don’t even remember Friday night or Saturday morning.

Saturday afternoon was when the Ubuntu Michigan LoCo got together to participate in the Global Bug Jam. While the stats page was pretty buggy and giving out ridiculous numbers, I still feel justified in saying we rocked it. Five of us in person in the metro Detroit area and an unknown quantity of other online or on the West side of the state manhandled (at latest count) 90 bugs. Plus, we had a good time! Sure, we hang out and talk on IRC, mailing list, and Identi.ca all the time, but there’s something about a face-to-face meeting that just can’t be equalled online.

Sunday, I cleared Saturday’s snow off my driveway and sidewalk. Afterwards I took a short but much-needed nap, and then I went to SCA fight practice, bringing my numbers on the New Year’s resolution to 2/8. So while 25% is a low grade on a test, and not even a great batting average in pro baseball, it does put me on a pace for 13 fights this year, which is quite a bit shy of my goal, but far in excess of any year in recent memory. I would have to go back to before I started travelling to Germany for Chrysler (about 6 years ago) to even come close to that. Also, I intend to improve on that pace, not keep it.

One thing that will make it easier for me to improve on my record is the Liechtenauer training group that has formed at the local fight practice. I’ve talked about this swordfighting style here before, and it really lights a fire in me. In fact it’s the only reason I went this weekend, since my knee was still hurting from the previous weekend and I didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of putting armor on. I was hugely impressed with the number of people who turned out for this group. I had no idea so many others were interested. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many people with a longsword (“bastard sword” or “great sword” in SCA or D&D terms) in their hands at one time before. Now if we can just get all these folks into armor and fighting with this style…

To round out my Sunday, I went to The Fridge directly after fight practice. The Fridge is a refrigerated track toboggan run. It felt more like a roller coaster, except without any turns (and you walk back up the hill rather than being carried up it). It was a lot of fun until my knee decided it wanted no part of climbing back up that hill again. Unfortunately, it decided this at the bottom of the hill… But at least I only had to go half way to get back to parking-lot level.

This weekend I expect/hope to get more rest in, though I’m aiming for practice again on Sunday, even if it’s only for the Liechtenauer training.

Jauntily Jumping with Jackalopes

After hearing from my friend, KE9Vee, that 64-bit Intrepid is actually usable (as opposed to every other 64-bit OS I’ve ever tried), I decided to do a second Intrepid install, to take advantage of the full capacity of my CPU for the first time ever. And I went with Xubuntu since I’m disaffected with KDE4, and still really don’t like Gnome. But since I couldn’t really tell the difference between XFCE and Gnome, I installed Openbox. It’s what all the cool kids seem to be using, and should be similar to the Fluxbox I used way-back-when (and recently reacquainted myself with).

Shortly after that, I decided that since I’m being all cutting-edge and trying-something-new, I might as well hook up with the alpha-quality Jaunty Jackalope release of Ubuntu. The UDS for this release just ended, so I expect to see rapid changes on this desktop. I’ve changed all my “intrepid” to “jaunty” in /etc/apt/sources.list (with the exception of 5-a-day, which doesn’t have a jaunty repo yet), and I’m running a dist-upgrade in a term window as I write this. Wish me luck. I just really hope the USB optical mouse problem I’ve been having in Intrepid doesn’t follow me to Jaunty.

Update: Crap, I’m scared… dist-upgrade just informed me Jaunty uses LiLo??!? I thought that piece of software was outdated and discarded. I’ve been on Grub so long I can’t recall what LiLo was like. Crossing my fingers this doesn’t hose my whole box…