Fortysomething Geek

So Ubuntu 14.04 has been released and it promises to have better support for HiDPI (Retina) displays.

The Qubes were eventually replaced with Raqs due to space constraints. I still have a fondness for these little machines. Come to think of it, a 15ドル Pogo plug can probably do everything these do now. I don't think these devices will have cult status like a Mac Classic Plus.

The only reason why I retired them is because the old versions of BIND were susceptible to security attacks. It was time to move on. Also, the boot times are atrocious. They had slow IDE drives and now take about 20 minutes to boot after various disk checks.






Links: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/1112/Cobalt-Qube-2/

When I first started my career, my mentor showed me a pretty cool trick at the time. He pulled up his desktop screen (which at the time was the first fancy Silicon Graphics 20" LCD) and filled it up with four terminal windows and he simply ran "top" in each window. As a young guy in the business, I didn't know any better and asked, "whatcha doing?" He replied, "making myself look busy."

Supervisors, managers, and bosses may be clueless to the UNIX/Linux world. To them, screens with a lot of cryptic windows makes you look busy. It has worked for many people I know over the years and today, I'll show you some CLI (Command Line Interface) terminal apps to "make you look busy." I won't go into the obvious like vim, emacs, and real productivity console apps.

Since today is the slow Friday before a long three day weekend, this post is appropriate for those slackers. Look below.



Here I have the following running on my Thinkpad : mc, alsamixer, clmatrix, htop, w3m or lynx.


Going from top left:

mc
mc commander is a file manager. It makes you look like you are copying files. Sure, you may be really copying files but I just leave one window open with it. The blue background makes a good contrast and distracts from other windows.

alsamixer
If you are running Linux, you probably already have alsamixer installed. It looks like the metering tool for some energy nuclear turbine levels. Not really, it is simply the command line utility to control your sound card.

clmatrix (cmatrix under OSX mac ports)
This isn't really an app but it looks cool. It is an animated Matrix screensaver that runs in the terminal.

htop

htop is an improvement over the default top. It shows you CPU load and memory usage like your typical system/activity monitor. Believe me, anything with progress bars and scales looks important to the untrained eyes. Bosses think you are monitoring disk space or checking some load balancing. Maybe you are monitoring web traffic. Either way, look for any apps with meters and progress bars.

w3m or lynx

Those other apps are pretty much diversions for the real app you will be using.

You can also go to sites like craigslists, which over the past 15 years, has been very text-only friendly. It is great for searching for your new jobs.

If you are paranoid, run a tab and run one of the previous apps mentioned above. You can always toggle when the bosses come by.

Now go google those apps and figure out how to install them. If you are running debian, you can always do apt-get install 'program_name' like 'sudo apt-get install clmatrix'. And if you are running Mac OSX, you can probably get most of these apps via macports.

Today I am going to give my readers a review of Pear OS 7. Unlike my last "short preview," I have a been using Pear OS 7 on a live machine for more than a month now. If you want to know what Pear OS is, it is basically a Mac OS X imitator Linux distribution based off Ubuntu. It is designed to look like OSX running Linux.

I'll start off by saying. If you want a OS X experience, this is not it. Yes, the look is there and it has lot of cool things but the looks are not skin deep. It doesn't have the Mac philosophy behind it. Skinning something and adding icons does not make it a Mac experience.

Now, for my review.

Read more »

Here is something you don't see too often.

Here, I have Pear OS 7 which is a Ubuntu based Linux distribution running on my Thinkpad. Pear OS is known for being Cupertino inspired. It is pretty much an OSX themed Linux disto. Inside Pear OS, I have Mountain Lion 10.8.2 running inside a VMware Virtual Guest.

I cloned a few of my old Macs on my Macbook using Fusion 5. The clone VM guest was on a USB drive I had and I was wondering if my VM guests would start up in Linux on a different machine. To my surprise, double clicking the .VMX file, the VM guest launch and ran inside Pear OS running VMware player for Linux. It ran with no problem. I thought there would be some sort of check to prevent this but apparently not.

Pear OS is an Ubuntu 12.10 based Linux distro with a Mac-like skin.
They just released version 7 and I took it for a spin. It definitely apes a lot from Cupertino.

From start up, login, launcher, Finder, to even Mission control, this distro is a definitely Apple-inspired. It even has a time machine app called "Back in Time."

Overall, it doesn't work quite like OSX. It is still using GNOME 3 with a skin.
Still, it is an interesting release.

Link: http://pearlinux.fr/


Screen shots for your perusal:







On a 2560x1440 display.






And here is how it looks on a 27" iMac.

Four months ago, I gave a review of Elementary OS. You can read it here.
Now, here is my follow-up after four months of use.

 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable 
 sudo apt-get update 
 sudo apt-get install cinnamon 

If there was ever a reason to get a 15ドル pogoplug hacked to run Arch Linux, this article may sway you.



I'm going to show you how I turn an ordinary 15ドル linux gadget into a useful "rsync" backup client.

The tasks which I will share with my readers is the typical things I would do administering *NIX based servers. We set up redundancy and failover using some simple and tried and true methods. There really is no rocket science involved. After doing it a few times, it becomes second nature. And because of the simplicity, it becomes apparent why I love small gadgets running Linux.

The articles and methods are pretty much simplified but they illustrate the simple and powerful nature of the powerful command line.

Today, I decided to turn one of my Pogos into a remote robo-copying slave. Its only job is to do remote backups of my GIT server. Then I realize, it should be running independently as a working droid (thinking Star Wars) to find,scan my network and backup any *NIX computers running in my household. I have a few spare older 250-320GB drives that needed to put to good use, so I pared them to a Pogo.

Normally, you would initiate the copy and backup from your desktop/laptop to the PogoPlug running some form of Linux/NAS. Here, I do the reverse. I have my pogoplug go out and do all the work.

So if I turn on my NetBSD G4 mac from 5 years ago, or come home with my Thinkpad, or turn on my iMac, it would automatically back them up without my intervention. I wouldn't have to think about it. If I was working on some code on my Thinkpad. I could go out to the back-yard to my patio and from my Macbook, I can pull source code that was already synced 5 minutes earlier off the Thinkpad.
Think of it as a reverse time machine. The concept is not new. We have dedicated backup servers that do nothing else but do remote backups off-site. Here, I am using a low powered PogoPlug running ArchLinux.

In fact, it took me 30 minutes to implement it. This is the power of *NIX. So I will share it with my readers today. Everything is meant to be done on the Pogo itself.

First, I logged into my Pogo and copy my SSH keys from my Pogo to all my target computers. So if I change my passwords, it would still authenticate against it. As I write this, I am thinking R2-D2 talking to the main-frame of the Death Star. If you don't know what SSH keys are, take a detour and google it before proceeding further. In short, keys allow machines to talk to one another without using passwords.

In arch, it is pretty easy.

ssh-copy-id username@remote_server

It will simply copy your keys over to the remote machine.




Next, I wrote a small bash script that pings the remote machine. If the machine pings, it means it is online and it will then attempt to rsync with it. Rsync is the tried and true industry standard for remote file synchronization/file copies.

Feel free to use this bash script. Simply, change the variable of the "remote_machine" to the IP or hostname of the computer you want it to ping and rsync. Since my network employs Avahi/Bonjour, it pretty much works by hostname. EG. My Thinkpad is accessible via ThinkpadT420.local
In this example, my remoteserver.local is my intended target.

I do a simple IF THEN conditional check in my bash script. If the machine doesn't ping, alert us with a message. Otherwise, proceed to rsync.

 #!/bin/bash 
 remote_machine="remoteserver.local" 
 PINGCOUNT=2 
 PING=$(ping -c $PINGCOUNT $remote_machine | grep received | cut -d ',' -f2 | cut -d ' ' -f2) 
 if [ $PING -eq 0 ]; then 
 echo "Something wrong! server: $remote_machine down" 
 else 
 echo "All good: $remote_machine" 
 echo "We will rsync now" 
 rsync -au --progress --stats root@remoteserver.local:/var/www/ /media/passport/rsync/vps/www/ 
 fi 

My rsync command is pretty straightforward here. Archive and update. I added progress and stats for my own reference.

rsync -au --progress --stats root@remoteserver.local:/var/www/ /media/passport/rsync/vps/www/ 

Basically, my rsync logs into the remote server, copying the /var/ww/ into my destination of my 1TB Western Digital USB drive labelled, passport. The copies go into a folder, /media/passport/rsync/vps/www


After writing it, I tested it. I named my script vps_backup.sh

I then change the permissions to executable and did a dry run.



As you can see, the files and folders populate from my remote machine. The below screenshot shows two web directories. One from my iMac and another from a remote VPS.





Lastly, I would use a cron job to run every few minutes. You can even do cron job schedules in Webmin. I would recommend installing webmin so you can have a web based administratie interface of your Pogo. It simplify things quite a bit.

When you log into webmin, head over to System . Scheduled Cron Jobs.


Cron Jobs under webmin is pretty much a point and click.

I specified the user running as "root" to have full system rights and pointed to the script I wrote earlier in /root/vps_backup.sh. For this example, I specified a daily midnight schedule but I could change to hourly or every 5-10 minutes.



And there you have it. A simple (well, at least for me) way to do interval backups from a Pogo.

Will we ever see an awesome Linux tablet or Phablet? Ubuntu and many have been promising glimpse of an Ubuntu mobile OS to challenge Android and other players. I've seen countless dual boot devices that boot Android and a Debian. Yet, I have not been really impressed with anything I've seen. I'm hoping that changes in the near future.

Portable Linux has been the holy grail for me for the past 10 or so years. As far back as 2001, I wanted a portable UNIX like small form factor computing device. I've been using Windows CE as far back as 1996 and I had transitioned to UNIX in my career around that period. I wanted a UNIX version of a Palm Pilot or HP Jornada. I've seen so many products failed in a span of ten years that I conclude that we may never see the perfect Linux MID (Mobile Internet Device). You can call it whatever you want, a phablet, a UMPC, a tablet,etc. I am talking about a small portable device that runs the Linux kernel and a full blown working distro with all the great GNU applications. Android doesn't really count. It uses the kernel but it adds so many layers that it doesn't really count. Basically, I want to run the great GNU open source applications that I've been running for over a decade: ImageMagick, FFMPEG, Postgres, MySQL, Apache.

The Sharp Zaurus was the first Linux based PDA that didn't gain any traction.

Nokia made a great line of PDAs. The N770, N800, N810. They were slider based PDAs with the potential but failed to gain any traction in the market place.
Chinese and Taiwanese companies like SmartQ attempted to make some Linux only PDAs. They also failed to gain any traction. The Stylus for a 5" form factor does solve a lot of problems.




The problem with these older devices is that they did not have an ecosystem in place. Hence,they failed to gain any mass consumer adoption. This doesn't bother me too much because I know I'm part of a fringe group on consumers - uber geeks. Companies rather maximize profits and cater to the general public. Unfortunately, what really killed them for uber geeks like myself was the poor performance and the technology wasn't quite ready.

Well, the iPad changed a lot of misconceptions. ARM architecture is now good enough for my needs. It has a great app ecosystem and the hardware is fairly robust. Touch technology is pretty fast and we now have high-bandwidth cellular connectivity. Yet, it still isn't Linux. However, iOS is still based off OSX. If it gave end-users direct access to the Darwin kernel through an accessible interface, the iPad would be the perfect device. We all know Apple will never open up iOS like that so I hunt for the alternatives.

I've been following the mod scene in Android for a while. There is CHROOT and Linux on Android projects but they are quite not native Linux. They run in a looped file-system and are accessed via VNC that makes them feel as if they are running in an emulated environment.

I got one of those HP Touchpads during the great 99ドル firesale and the first thing I did was install Debian LXDE to see if I could realistically run Linux on a tablet. It was a great exercise. I installed Debian and carefully picked the applications I wanted tailored for my needs. I had LibreOffice, GIMP, MySQL and a full DE (Desktop Environment). Look at the pictures below. Looks cool, huh?

Well, the reality soaked in. A modern Linux distro like Debian and Ubuntu simply sucks on a tablet. X Windows apps are designed for mouses. We are kidding ourselves if we think otherwise.




I tried installing a few open-source multi-gesture and touch-screen input aides. Apps like Easystroke allows you to draw gestures to simulate mouse clicks and key commands. However, in practice, they never worked quite the way I like them to.


The console is the most important application in any *NIX operating system. This is the application where I spend 80% of my time in. Guess what? It is horrible with the onscreen keyboards I've used. I've downloaded quite a few of them to get my cursor and function keys. They don't quite work either.

A reader asked me about Linux and Thunderbolt. Well, I tried it out today and I am here to report some basic findings.

My motherboard is a Gigabyte Z77 Dual Thunderbolt ATX motherboard GA-Z77X-UP5-TH.

I connected an Seagate STAE121 Thunderbolt Go-Flex adapter along with a Samsung 830 SSD. Here are some preliminary benchmarks.




I did a quick 7GB copy which took around 4 seconds to copy from an Intel 240GB SSD.

Elementary OS recently released their Luna Beta 1. It is one of the new and controversial Linux distro due to it's mac-like aspirations.

Here is my take and short review.

My background: I use OSX and Linux extensively. I run a variety of CentOS/RedHat servers and I use Ubuntu 12.04/Linux Mint 13 over a dozen different workstations including a Thinkpad I tote along with my Macbook. I normally don't like using Ubuntu off-shoots and derivatives (except Linux Mint) but I've been tracking eOS (Elementary OS) for a while due to the cohesive design philosophies. On Ubuntu/Mint, I usually run Cinnamon on multi-monitors setups or Windowmaker on single monitor PCs. Unity looks horrid on two large monitors (30 in and 27). I pretty much hate Unity so you now know my bias. Hence, I have settled with Cinnamon Desktop. I am pretty much happy with 12.04 (running Cinammon) or Linux Mint 13 so I don't have a burning desire to test out new distros.

So why did I install eOS? As a Mac user, I like the idea of a well design UI with consistency. After all, I run WindowMaker in Linux because it works for me. I like polish and eOS promises to be those things. Visually, it is the slickest looking distro on Linux. There are only a few apps I need to run on Linux and I'd like a desktop environment that is fast and free of clutter. eOS is also a fresh take.

Furthermore, eOS is based of Ubuntu so you can easily install Debian apt packages the same as you do on Ubuntu.

Now for my review:

Overall, the distro is very rough around the edges.

I first tested it via VirtualBox and liked it enough to try on a dedicated full SSD drive install.

And then the problems arose. First of all, I could not get dual spanning monitors to work on a dual 23" Dell setup. The same machines run Linux Mint and Ubuntu just fine. I tried the normal and proprietary drivers. I don't have the patience to modify .xorg files to get it working.


Secondly, my build (originally done on a AM3+ FX AMD board) would not boot on an Ivy Bridget i7 rig.

I normally install an OS on a single SSD and try to run them on different machines via front panel docking into the internal SATA buses. It simply would not boot on my new Gigabyte Z77 Thunderbolt motherboard with a Nvidia Kepler GPU. I'm certain I could have fix it but I didn't want to go through the hassle. I wasn't ready to do another new install on the i7 rig. I've been having bad luck with new OSes deleting bootloaders off my other drive on same machine.

However, I was able to boot the same build on a Thinkpad T420. It ran just fine on my Thinkpad.

Take note, I firmly believe in the notion of one disk build running off multiple machines. I've been doing this for over a decade on macs and this is something that needs to work on other platforms. I like the idea of taking one SSD and shuttling it from work, client location, to home with all my apps, servers, SSH keys all one one drive.



Performance wise, I could not tell the difference running natively with 32GB of RAM & SSD versus running it with 4GB inside VirtualBox off a standard hard drive. UI responsiveness was the same running natively or virtualized. This is a good thing because it will be fairly responsive on mid-range machines. I'm running some IDE and Java apps so nothing fairly intensive. Windows, scrolling, and opening apps was fairly fluid. I couldn't tell you how fast it ran on my i7 3770K rig because I couldn't get it to boot but I think it will be fairly fast.

Now for the quirks. I accept the fact eOS has little customization and I get that. There is no need to add or modify themes if the built in ones work. And they do for the most part. I wouldn't change much in the UI of eOS. Unfortunately there are some customizations I need to have working. There are apps that I run that don't have Debian apt equivalents so they don't install into your normal Ubuntu App menus. This is fine in Ubuntu because you can manually add them and if you use a OSX like clone Dock like Cairo, you have the option of locking apps to the dock. You can't seem to do that with non-apt install apps on eOS Plank (their name for their dock). For example, I run Sublime 2 and various WINE Windows apps that I like to be permanently affix as a launcher in my dock. Plank is based off Docky so I can probably customize it via a hidden ~/.config/*.dockitem text file but I don't want and need to go through that hassle. It should just work.

Some of the built in apps aren't quite there yet. The calendar app doesn't have CalDAV support. I couldn't figure out how to add additional new mail accounts in their Geary Mail client. You can't quite theme (solarize) your terminal which I understand because of their UI mindset. Overall, this is definitely a beta release and I can accept those limitations. As with Linux, if there is something you don't like, you can easily replace it. I quickly replaced their text editor, Scratch, with a customized themed gedit to my liking.

The OSX comparison.

If you used Mac OSX for some time, you can't help but notice the glaring similarities in philosophies. Would I call it a rip-off? No but the similarities are uncanny. Most notably, the Window Manager borrows quite a bit from Expose/Spaces.

Here is Window workspace switching. You can even configure similar hot-corners. Also, what they call "Exposed windows" works very similar on the Mac's version of Expose. Except, you can do both switching and tasking windows at the same time on OSX.

And on a Mac below. An extremely powerful and thought out concept.



Instead of showing workspaces below, OSX shows it on top with a floating modal for the current desktop. As for exposing windows, it is done at the same time in one swoop.
The OSX implementation is more intuitive and advance in the fact you can re-arrange the order of workspaces (Apple calls it spaces) and drag-n-drop apps from one workspace to another. As you can see above, I drag the calculator app from my current workspace into Desktop 2 (cursor not shown in screenshot). Also, OSX has the ability to have different wallpaper/color backgrounds in different spaces which is handy. Different backgrounds comes in real handy when you are re-arranging the order of virtual spaces. The key strength of OSX is also multi-gesturing instead of using hot corners or keyboard shortcuts. The whole experience of switching and tasking is incredibly fluid on OSX. Multi-touch gestures isn't quite there in Linux yet.

This small comparison isn't mean to be a critique on eOS part. I like their direction but if you plan to lift some ideas from someone, you should go full tilt and improvise on what made the original so good.

There are other Mac-like nuggets like the Mail client and even the system preference seem OSX-like to me. I wont go into details but you can definitely find those screenshots online.

The App Launcher is a modal floating panel in the left mid corner. It is different and I don't have much to say about it. It does the job and it is something different to acclimate yourself to.

Like I mentioned earlier, I could not get dual spanning monitors to work on real hardware but I was able to test out spanning display in Virtualbox and there were some issues. Apps would snap into their respective workspace if you tried to move them across monitors. Screenshot below shows what happens when I tried to move my mail client across.


Minimize wouldn't minimize but move over to the other monitor. There were other issues but I wont bore you with a dozen screenshots regarding spanning display. Surely, these are pre-production bugs.

Overall, I like it but I think I'll wait for the final release to make a final judgement. It definitely looks very slick and performs very fast but there are little things that annoy me right now. Here are a few: To make a new folder in the File Manager requires a contextual right click. I prefer a toolbar button for this and other functions.
There is no minimize window button (you can add an invisible one from reading a few blog posts). There is simply fullscreen and close.



To minimize, you click on the icon on the dock and it makes it feel as if the OS was designed for single app full screen use. I say this because if you have multiple browser windows or text files, one click of the docked app will minimize all of them. Then there is fact that you don't have multiple docked previews of your browser windows in the dock corroborates with the idea of the Single App UI. It feels like they want to make it too clean and simplified.

Lastly, I like to use the mail client but how do I add another account? I don't feel like googling for answers for something so simple and you shouldn't have to in this day and age. It needs to be that intuitive.

If you've been running Ubuntu 11.04 and up, you will notice Canonical no longer provides support for the classic MySQL Query Browser and Admin. Instead, you are relegated to using MySQL Workbench or use an application like Emma.

Well, some people are set in their old ways and do not like to use something monolithic as Workbench. For example, if all you need to do is query, why go through the steps of making profiles to connect to random MySQLservers?

During the Election, Crossweaver gave away copies of Crossover for Linux and OSX. Crossover is a proprietary commercial version of Wine and works quite nice. It is not an OS virtualization tool like Vmware or Virtualbox. It is more of a run-time, application compatibility layer to allow you to run (some) Windows apps inside Linux or OSX. Instead of launching a heavy weighted OS, you launch a Wine Bottle and run your Windows app inside Linux with full access to the native filesystem.

How does it work? Quite fantastic. I installed the classic MySQL windows tool, HeidiSQL (a popular Windows MySQL client), Komodo Edit and Notepad++ with no problems.

HeidiSQL is so far superior to Emma.

Installation couldn't be easier. Build a bottle and select your .exe or .msi installer.






Like I wrote earlier, the app works within the OS. You can access your services locally like you do on any other native application. File-system is visible as well as networking








Crossover works great on Mac OSX as well. However, I don't have applications deficit on Mac OSX so I wont be using it much on a Mac.





If you don't want to use Crossover, WINE is freely available.




Links:
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/
http://www.heidisql.com/
http://www.winehq.org/