256 color terminals
While the rest of the techworld is getting excited about their aero, quartz or compiz 32bit color 3D desktop, I reached a less impressive milestone today:
From now on I use a 256 color terminal ;-). Actually I looked into this earlier, but since gnome-terminal and screen didn't support it back then (maybe upstream, but not in my distro), I enabled support just today.
Excellent documentation on this topic is already available on multiple places, but to summarize for myself:
.screenrc attrcolor b ".I" termcapinfo xterm 'Co#256:AB=\E[48;5;%dm:AF=\E[38;5;%dm' defbce "on" startup_message off .bash_profile set TERM xterm-256color; export TERM .vimrc set t_Co=256 colorscheme=asudark
For vim you need a special colorscheme (gvim colorschemes do not work). My vim hacked 256 colors scheme, which work better with a transparent background then the original, is available here.
[Permalink]-- Filed under: [linux]
Back from Vietnam
Back from beautiful country Vietnam and of course updated the photo section of this site.
[Permalink]-- Filed under: [photos] [personal] [holiday]
Ubuntu Hardy Heron
Today I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron on a desktop computer. I am pretty distro/desktop agnostic (see my ten year anniversary post), but since Debian Etch is a bit old for a desktop and Hardy Heron has Long Term Support (I do not want to update/fix a computer every half year!!) Ubuntu was my choice.
There are unlimited gnome improvements which I don't care about, but some things stand out for me in this release.
- Firefox 3 is much better than 2. The memory improvements and the renewed linux (gtk) focus helps. And luckily you can disable the stupid new urlbar in about:config with browser.urlbar.maxRichResults = 0 .
- The way non-free installation for media-playback, video drivers and browser plugins is handled, is sweet! The installation of this software is painless here. I even got a nice 64-bit(!) Java firefox plugin, which I was unable to install in Debian (thanks redhat/icedtea).
- And most important: the colors in the gnome-terminal are smoothened. Now that is what _I_ call eye candy. Less work and much more satisfaction than the integrated compiz.real ;-).
So thanks again for all free software developers!
[Permalink]-- Filed under: [web] [personal] [linux]
Helping the environment
A lot of work is done in making linux suspend work better. For me it works perfect (from linux kernel 2.6.20 or so). Therefore I wanted to go a step further and let my class A, heavy power-using receiver switch off when my desktop computer suspends (to ram). And switch back on when my computer wakes up. The motivation is that I only listen music via my computer.
To achieve this I bought the Gembird Silver Shield, a USB-switchable power adapter. I was prepared to do some nice USB snooping and C programming to get this device working in linux, but (un)fortunately there was already a working utility for this device.
Configuration for suspend/hibernate is not so easy and documentation is sparse for the user mode utilities. Since it took me more than the usual googling I will summarize my conclusions here for later use. First the gnome-screensaver measures the idle time. After this timeout is expired the gnome-power-manager starts to measure his own timeout (so before suspend the two times will stack). When the gnome-power-manager times out it will look at the Inhibit flag. If there is no inhibiting (for example my rhythmbox pushes Inhibiting, because I do not want to suspend when music is playing) your computer will suspend.
Since a custom script should be added to switch the power-switch off via usb with sispmctl the suspend-backend is important. Gnome power manager can use multiple backends to go to suspend mode. This works via hal (the hardware abstraction layer). Configuration for this is in /usr/share/hal/information. HAL is responsible for calling the suspend-backend. The default suspend-backend on my machine is pm-utils. (which can be tested with pm-(suspend/hibernate/power-save etc.). I also have a package called hibernate (which can also suspend, confusing isnt' it?). A third one is suspend2 (which can also hibernate....). These backends have different ways of adding custom hooks.
To add a hook to hibernate I added a file called local in /etc/hibernate/scriptlets.d/. The API is as follows (ugly in my book):
# -*- sh -*-
UsbPowerSocketDown() {
/usr/bin/sispmctl -f1
}
UsbPowerSocketUp() {
/usr/bin/sispmctl -o1
}
AddUsbOptions() {
AddSuspendHook 10 UsbPowerSocketDown
AddResumeHook 10 UsbPowerSocketUp
return 0
}
AddUsbOptions
Pm-utils has a much nicer API. To add a custom hook add a file to /etc/pm/sleep.d . This uses init style ordering. So look in /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/ for a proper number. I needed to talk to the usb-bus AFTER the modules were loaded, so a number lower than 50. So I added /etc/pm/sleep.d/10usbpoweroptions with content like this:
#!/bin/bash
case $1 in
suspend)
/usr/bin/sispmctl -f1
;;
resume)
sleep 1
/usr/bin/sispmctl -o1
;;
esac
After all this fiddling it works like a charm! Now hopefully one standard will emerge; because how to achieve the same result with KDE I don't know. I had to manually patch rhythmbox to change calling (via dbus) the Inhibit method from org.gnome.powermanager to org.freedesktop.powermanagement (because i used a wrong combination of versions..), so this suggests a move in the right direction.
[Permalink]-- Filed under: [music] [linux] [science]
Good 2008 to everyone
There is only one week between this picture and the one below.... The trick is of course the invention of the aeroplane, which enabled me to make a trip to Egypt, a wonderful country. See more soon in my photo section of this site.
Anyway, good 2008 to everyone!
[Permalink]-- Filed under: [photos] [personal] [holiday]