Category: Linux/BSD

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Linux/BSD Software

On Karmic Beta

On Friday last week I happened to upgrade certain packages on my erstwhile Jaunty installation on my laptop. For some strange reason my touchpad ceased to work. I couldn’t move the mouse pointer. I couldn’t even get onto good ole’ Google because I couldn’t click on NetworkManager and select the radio button next to my CDMA USB modem entry!

The next day I issued a ‘do-release-upgrade’ and headed out to watch Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds” with Debayan and Vignesh. After I returned there was still an hour to go and so I continued to bootstrap my Debian-armel on the SD card for the Beagle board. And when it was all over, I had Karmic!

So, the touchpad worked now. Somewhat. I couldn’t tap on the touchpad to click on things like the menubar entries and so on. Turns out that Systems > Preferences > Mouse > Touchpad has a button which says “Enable mouse clicks with touchpad” disabled by default. I, on the other hand, could make my way through up to this point with the keyboard alone and enabled it. Phew.

The improvements from Jaunty are, as expected, quite a lot. And visibly so.

Take the shiny new 2.6.31 kernel, for example. It boots fast. And supports kernel mode setting for the revamped X. The improvements are so obvious that you can’t afford to not say “wow”. I haven’t done the “full-screen flash video” test yet, but I do like the snappiness when I switch between virtual consoles and X. Once again, I can live with the minimal compiz that’s turned on by default on an Ubuntu installation. Oh, and I did have another oh-that’s-new moment with the volume control. It doesn’t look like the old one but it does look like an incomplete version of the Windows 7-style volume manager. I couldn’t find a way to mute my laptop speakers and let all sound be audible only via my earphones. Thankfully, alsamixer works.

UPDATE: It turns out that selecting “Analog Headphones” under Sound Preferences > Output does the trick.

So far so good. Upgrading moar. Oh, and don’t forget ‘do-release-upgrade -d’ in a screen session. Also, E17 looks kickass.

Categories
Linux/BSD Software

On how weechat handled a downloading file

Something really interesting happened on one my workstations which had this weechat IRC client running on it.

Weechat is this irssi-based IRC client for use on a Linux console. The features page lists certain interesting ones and while I first chose it over irssi, the compelling reason was proper proxy support (authenticated ones). I had little idea on how the “FIFO pipe for remote control” would be helpful- until this happened this morning:

I’m usually connected to the Freenode and Rizon networks. Rizon is primarily the japanese-animation/drama hub for various fansubbing groups. Mostly used for co-ordinating among fansubbers and providing XDCC leech bots. So, here I was, leeching an episode off of a particular bot, and not realising that the download had completed, I moved (mv) the file from the default download location (~/.weechat/dcc) to the approriate directory (~/Backups/Videos/Film). This I did, on another console within screen, I switched back (C-a C-a) to the console where weechat was running and was surprised to see that the file I thought had completely downloaded still going down around 98%. Shocked, I `ls -l ~/Backups/Videos/Film` and get even more shocked to see that the file-size of this moved file had grown a bit. What was happening here? When my disk is out of space and a download breaks due to that, I’d see a “broken pipe” message in the log window, so what happened here, I think, is what they mean by “FIFO pipe for remote control”. Even after I had moved an incomplete, currently downloading file to a new location, the download continued without any usually expected re-actions one would see with software on Windows or software such as LinuxDC++ (locked files).

That was an interesting experience and an interesting feature I’d love to see in more software. Good job, weechat. Copy-pasting off a weechat window is sort of stupid, though, owing to the nicklist on the right and fancier formatting. Overall, it’s been good.

Categories
College Life Entertainment Linux/BSD Personal

Updates as of 1st September, ’08

Been out of the blogging scene for a few months now.

Lot of things have happened so far. I’ve got into the fansubbing scene and I’m part of a group a bunch of us started. I do a little bit of translation and video encoding.

Just saw episode 21 of Code Geass R2 and Soul Eater. Very thought-provoking. It’s great how anime in general can satisfy all kind of audiences. I mentioned this to a friend of mine who replied saying, “but most of them suck”, to which I replied without even thinking, “that’s because those don’t satisfy you ^^”

Hoping to see more people appreciate anime, especially those in my campus. And, yeah, hoping that I stop getting those “Jesus loves you” spam.

G’nite.

P.S.: I’m tired of running Linux/BSD on my laptop. I’ve moved onto Vista now. I’ll leave Linux/BSD where it belongs – in the CC server room.

P.P.S: So many tags and categories to deal with, it’s getting random now.