Life at the CLI

Well, it’s day 3 without X and there’s a few things I miss. I gotten better at surfing the web with links (it’s much easier if you use space instead of the arrow keys.) So far I’ve had the need to switch between links and elinks in order to get some pages to work right. w3m is another console web browser that I may have to try. Last time I checked it was supposed to be the most advanced of the console browsers.

One web site that refuses to work is the one for my ISP. It uses a lot of javascript even for simple stuff that shouldn’t need it. (like page redirection) The only way I can use the site is by using google to load a spacific page. This of course means that webmail doesn’t work very well, so I figured it was time to configure getmail.

getmail is supposed to be more secure than fetchmail (how I’m not exactly sure) but it achieves the same overall result. The main difference between the two is that getmail doesn’t need a mail delivery program (like sendmail) to work. The getmail configuration file, at least for me, seems much easier to configure and is easier to understand.

Once getmail was configured to dump mail into the local mail spool all I had to do was fire up mutt and all my email was magically there. Mutt looks more complicated than pine, or elm, but I think it will be more flexible in the long run.

Today I’ve been playing with screen. It’s great!

The thing that probably scared me from using it before was having different windows “lock up” on me irrecoverable (or so I thought) at random intervals. I’d wind up having to kill screen and starting over. As it turns out I’ve been pressing C-a ^S accidently which turns flow control off (xoff). Pressing C-a ^Q fixes the problem.

My only real problem with screen (now that I found why it was getting locked up) is being able to have verticle splits so I can have centericq and weechat open in the same row. There is a patch to enable this, but I’m not quite ready to recompile a working package for only a minor complaint.

Oh, just a word of warning… detached screen sessions don’t stay after restarting. I figured this would be the case, but it was worth a shot.

Fist off, I would like to say that I dislike having to surf the web on the command line. Mostly because of the small screen space. With the framebuffer enabled it’s not so bad, but I still am not real found of it.

My history teacher decided to have us look up propaganda posters for a project we’re doing. At first I wondered how I was going to do this since I’ve had trouble getting links working in graphics mode outside of X. I first tried links -g but got a permission error. I tried changing -driver to fb and everything worked ok. (the command I used was links -g fb) Google image search worked well enough to use and it wasn’t long before I found an interesting poster of Donald Duck throughing a tomato in Der Furher’s Face.

I’d been trying out weechat and centericq since yesterday. I think weechat has perminantly replaced Gaim/Pidgin for my chat client of choice, and centericq is close to replacing Gaim for AOL stuff.

Centericq is really fun to use. The sound effects are just noisy enough without being annoying or boring. The one thing I miss in centericq is being able to group buddies by catagory. I may not have found this option yet though.

Believe it or not both ogg123 and mpg321 can handle playlists. Unfortunatly they can only handle a simple list of files to play and not a simple m3u playlist.

To open up a playlist just type ogg123 -@ playlist_file

Just goes to show what’s in those great things called man pages

After seeing someone try out Windows Vista for 30 days I think I’ll try to use only console apps for 30 days.

I’ll get most of the preparation out of the way today, and then tomorrow… it’s bye-bye X11!

While looking for PHP/Apache mod_rewite help (well, more for rewriting without mod_rewrite) I stumbled upon a google resource page for webmasters. It has some really interesting FAQs on it, like can google index dynamic pages, and how do google robots update a page, and other things you should know about getting your web pages to work with google’s search database.

I first read about this on K.Mandla’s blog. Jamendo is a LEGAL free music site. All their music is licensed under a Creative Commons license. Music is available in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats, so I can take my music on the go with my Zen Sleek Photo, and still enjoy the advantage of the superior Ogg meta-data on my computer. I really like the fact that covers are provide for most (if not all) albums, but I’m not fond of using bittorrent or emule as my only way to download since I think my ISP throttles me for about a week every time I use it.

My only real gripe with the service is the naming conventions. Never have I seen such long folder names and \’s in the file names! I really wish they’d leave the spaces out. They’re horrible to have to type out.

I looked once before, but I don’t really listen to music that much and I’m usually very picky about the music I listen to. (Not that that means I have good taste ) I tried again Friday to look for some purely instrument stuff and found two albums that I like. One is Fin de cavale by Trafic de Blues, (who knew they had blues in France!) and CIA by 7ZBH which is kind of Celtic guitar instrumental.

I also found the coolest (read: geekyist) album ever! It’s called #!/bin/bash. The title of every song is a line of a bash script to encode all the *.wav files to ogg.

If you’re looking for a place to dowload LEGAL free music head on over to Jamendo.

It’s been a while, but SINP beta 1 has finally been released. I’m hoping to get some beta testers from the slackbuilds.org mailing list so I can squash out the last few (or more ) bugs and finish up the documentation before releasing the final 0.1 release.

If you’ve used SINP before, the operation has changed. Now, the switches -s, -d, and -p tell SINP where to stop in the search, download, package, install process. The default behavior is to go ahead and install the package made from the SlackBuild.

If you are interested in beta testing (or have any feature requests/suggestions) feel free to leave a comment here, or use the trackers on the sourceforge site.

You can download SINP here.

Well, both sides seem to have cooled down now. The wording on the wiki now better reflects the problem rather than seeming like an attack against Slackware. (Thanks to rlaager for posting the new wording!) Unfortunatly the damage has been done, and I’m certain there will be many Slackware users who will never run Pidgin again. While I’m no longer opposed to running Pidgin ever again, I think I’ll still look around for a lighter client. (Or make my own )

Here’s a great example of when to keep your mouth shut.

In general, the Slackware community is very vocal, it doesn’t usually care what distro you use, but doesn’t like the distro being trashed (especially not its stability and package manager)

On the wiki page on the pidgin website (the original wording has been changed to keep us from continued complaining ) about why Pidgin is only packaged for certain distros there were some slanderous things said about Slackware, when a simple “We don’t use Slackware, therefore don’t provide packages” would have sufficed.

The comment that seems to have been the most hurtful (for lack of a better word) is about Slackware not having a real (read: checks dependencies) package manager. If there’s one thing you don’t do in front of a Slackware users it’s say that pkgtools are not package managers!

Because of this whole incident, the Gaim/Pidgin package has been moved to slackware-unsupported. So what did Pat have to say about all this? Here’s the excerpt from today’s ChangeLog:

xap/pidgin-2.0.0-i486-2.tgz: Here’s a little excerpt from:
http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/WhyPackagesExist
“We have no developers using Slack, and furthermore, several of us actively
dislike that distribution for its history of broken installs, as well as
for its non-existant package management. You cannot create true packages
for Slack.”
Well, I’m somewhat shocked by this, having never (to my knowledge) done
anything to any of the former GAIM or Pidgin developers to make them mad at
me, Slackware, or anyone on the Slackware team. I guess if they feel it’s
not possible to make a “true” Pidgin package for Slackware, there’s no point
in continuing to try. Having put out 7 security advisories on GAIM, I’m
quite sure there will be less work here if Pidgin is not included.
The Pidgin package has been moved to the “unsupported” directory. For the
record, I do not actively dislike Pidgin or any of their developers, but I
do plan to use Kopete from now on.

I guess I’ll need to find a new IM client (and I was looking forward to the new CLI client too! )

But then again, I guess we could always fork Pidgin. (I vote for the name Slackin )