SciTE

Oh how I loathe thee. Alright, so I’m currently booting Wolvix Linux as my installed distro. In all honesty I’m to lazy right now to reinstall Gentoo. Its a rather involved process and I don’t feel like doing it right now. Back to SciTE…

I was using it on Wolvix just out of curosity. Yes, I’ve played with SciTE before and I didn’t like it then either but my new experience with it has only made my hate it more. When using g/vim I use inkpot as my theme. So I thought to myself, “Vim themes are easy to script, I’ll just convert it for SciTE.” Sounds simple enough. But no, its not. Its a terrifying process involving a massive cpp.properites script. Which, by the way, apparently contains property values for java and javascript as well. Which makes no sense. But anyway the way vim’s highlighting engine works apparently is nothing like the way SciTE’s works so I ended up coming fairly close before giving up. In the end, it wasn’t worth it. Vim is pretty much a standard on *nix so I’m not even going to worry about it.

SciTE, after going through this, appears to hacked together like the Frankenstien of text editors, so unless you already use it, don’t start.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Debian Post Responce

I’ve got quite a few comments on my post on Debian, which is always nice. But I now feel the need to more or less defend myself. To set some things straight first off, I was using Debian etch x86_64. I did a clean install using as many “default” options as possible. Which is the same route I took with openSUSE and Wolvix as well. So that, along with the reminder my hardware never changed, I made several subjective observations.

The observation that got me the most flack, as one would expect, was that I found Debian bloated and slow. In the end I did not attempt to speed Debian back up. Can Debian be fast? I’m sure with enough tweaking any distribution can be fast. But out of the box Debian doesn’t feel fast to me. Again a subjective claim on my part. Like or not I don’t like Debian. I’m sure the install can be tweaked and the system post-install can be tweaked. Well thats great but that wasn’t what I was looking for.

Finally, my thoughts as to why all of this is. Well, again subjectively speaking here, I believe it a lot of comes down to compile options. Its not secret that distributions that are, within the Linux community, considered “slow” (i.e. Ubuntu) have their packages compiled with as many flags as possible. In the Gentoo community we’ve renamed them USE flags but its the same concept. Other binary distributions that are generally considered “fast” (i.e. Arch, Slackware) tend to take a “Gentoo approach” to compilation choosing to leave out a lot flags that their developers consider unneeded. And if these flags are needed by the end user it is generally left up to the end user to recompile them on their own. Thus you end up with tools like the ABS (Arch Build System). This combined with a “necessity only” attitude toward packages included by “default” your left with a clean, healthy, and generally quick system. Can I prove any of that objectively? No. And I’m not going to try. Its just something I’ve observed during my short stay here within the Linux community and I know a lot of people who would disagree with me.

Either way I really don’t care to be honest. The buck stops here as far as I’m concerned. I’ve said my piece and thats all there really is to it.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Wolvix

This post, in the same tradition is coming from Wolvix. Though the next one about openSUSE won’t because I already blew it away (I forgot).

Most people, if they know of Wolvix, think of it only as a live run distro. Well in reality it works installed as well. Truth be told its nice. Its fast, fairly slim, and looks good. The Wolvix Control Panel has matured a lot and now works well without much fuss. There are some suggestions I could think of for it but nothing that would prevent me or anyone else form using it. It is from the panel that you install Wolvix. The installer is nice and while it doesn’t really provide you any options it does its job well.

The package selection your given by default is nice. Not huge like openSUSE’s or Debian’s but its enough to get anyone started. It also plays wmv and mpg files by default. Which is a common complaint of most distros. In the end, I don’t think I’ll keep Wolvix on the HDD very long though. Its i486 and I really want a distro that 64bit. So other than that Wolvix is great, and without a doubt I’ll keep it around for my liveCD distro.

Enjoy the Penguins!

UPDATE: One small thing I just realized. Wolvix did not properly configure my mouse. Something I would of expected from a distro of this nature. A minor flaw really.

Debian

I’m writing this post from within Debian. Do I like Debian overall? No. Not really. The install went smoothly and the installer is pretty easy to follow and understand if you’ve done this before. I find it really similar to the Slackware installer so if you can do one you should be able to do the other. Perhaps I just didn’t see it, but there didn’t appear to be anyway to select your desktop upon install. I was more or less stuck with Gnome. Which isn’t terrible but I was really looking forward to trying KDE again before it goes 4.0.

The distro itself feels sluggish to me. The default install come bloated with a ton of packages I didn’t want. It feels slow compared to Slackware, Arch, or Gentoo. When compared to Ubuntu though its right on par. So I guess its all in what your looking for. It comes with Ice Weasel instead of Firefox, which I find stupid personally. Thats another story though.

Summing it up I find it hard to really distinguish between Debian, Slackware, and Arch. They all three seem to shoot for the same goal. Well, maybe not, but if your new to this game or you don’t care you’d probably be hard pressed to understand and see the differences in philosophy between the three distros. Slackware shoots for stability, Arch for speed, and Debian for a balance of the two. But in reality the differences are pretty slim in my opinion. Debian would be the most user friendly, and the most bloated. But somehow, through the course of time, user friendly has become synonymous with bloat. Which is pretty sad but nothing I can change or am willing to change at the moment.

Try Debian you’ll probably like it if your a binary type. As for me, Debian has been fun, but it’ll be gone by tonight.

Enjoy the Penguins!

New Distros

I’ve decided that I’ve not tried enough distros out there. Yeah, this is sort of out of the blue, but I can’t stand it. I’ve never used Debian which is supposed to be really good. I’d like to try Fedora 7 to see if they’ve improved it any. I’d also like to try Solaris which finally came in the mail. Any other totally awesome distros out there? I’ve tried

• Ubuntu
• Gentoo
• Wolvix
• Slax
• Kubuntu
• Slackware
• Crux
• Zenwalk
• Arch

I guess thats about all I’ve tried. Which is actually a considerable sized list now that I look at it. Oh yeah, I’d to try FreeBSD as well. I forgot. Well, I’m off to wipe the hard drive. I’ll report back from each!

Enjoy the Penguins!

(Don’t worry I doubt I’ll be able to replace Gentoo)

Lack of Posts

I’m sorry about my lack of posts. I started my new job about a month ago, and as if thats not enough. I had to move four hours from home. Which sucks in multiple ways actually, but now after living month to month for two months I’m moving again to a more permanate place. So I’ve been really busy and Linux has sort of taken a back seat to the rest of my life. So for some updates on Linux and such.

The big news now seems to be about two things: the open sourcing of ATI drivers, and the debate over whether or not to fork the kernel. I’m pretty sure I’ve already given my thoughts on the drivers. As far as the forking of the kernel goes. No, I don’t think thats neccessary. I do think the kernel devs (espeically Linus) do need to step back and take a serious look at where they are going with the kernel. I mean what direction they are taking and more importantly, the method they’re using to get there.

I’m not the first, and I probably won’t be the last, to complain that 2.6.x series seems less stable than the 2.4.x series. When viewed from that light it then really comes as no surprise that Slackware took so long to switch to a 2.6.x kernel for the default install. I find the buggy-ness of the 2.6.x series disturbing. Whats more important, stability or being on the cutting edge? I personally vote for stability.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Tilda

I actually found out about this program through the Wolvix Newsletter. When I first installed it it kept crashing, but now after a reboot I can’t seem to reproduce the error. So in light of that I’m going to pretend it didn’t happen and hope it doesn’t happen again. I did send a email to the creator with the error though. So I at least I tried. Anyway Tilda is pretty sweet. Its stable on x86 and amd64 (other platforms I pay no attention to) so 90% of you are eligible for Quake style goodness.

I’m not really into this resource measuring business. I don’t have a tons of CPU cycles to spare but I don’t generally find my desktop bogged down. Anyway Tilda doesn’t appear to be any more hungry that aterm or eterm. I definitely recommend it. Hopefully someone will figure out how to program real transparency into it instead of the fake its currently running with.

Line from to as Tilda enters screen
7160 steveno 15 0 109m 28m 16m S 0.3 1.4 0:02.22 tilda
(Note: After tilda makes its entrance its no longer on the “top” list.)

If I could figure out how, I’d leave you a screenshot.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Splint

Splint. Its another static code analysis program. It uses a very interesting concept. By placing specially formatted commented in the code, the user enables the program to use more accurate analysis. So for example, you place a comment like

/*@SpecialComment@*/

tells splint what your code is supposed to be doing allowing to more accurately interpret your code. Thats genius. In fact its so genius I almost thought of it. I haven’t used it successfully yet though. I’ll get to that later.

In more interesting news I ran into a problem with Paludis. My problem? There doesn’t appear to be any good offical docs yet on howto setup a repository. So bascially when you create your repository you create a series of directories and sub-directories to hold all your custom ebuilds. I after creating these remembered to create the category folder, but I forgot to create the folder that holds each programs various ebuild versions. For example, I remembered,

/var/gentoo/repos/steveno/dev-util

but I forgot

~/dev-util/splint

So yeah remember that next time you make a repository.

Enjoy the Penguins!

News

OSNews has a headline that reads, “US Backing for Two-Tier Internet.” I find that misleading. I should of known that we would do that though. My own people annoy me sometimes.

AMD has decided to release its specs for ATI graphics cards as open source and even provide small amounts of help in writing the new drivers.  It would appear my current streak of owning nothing but nVidia graphics cards might change. We’ll see though. I’m not up for a new one anytime soon and the drivers will take several releases before you’ll really notice a difference from the open sourcing from AMD I’m sure. So for now I think I’ll sit back and wait.

KDE 4 keeps getting pushed back. No surprise there. I’m still convinced that its a lot of fluff and no stuff. I also noticed after I posted that on my blog it became popular around the net. Several peoples blogs even made it on sites like OSNews for it. Not that I started the trend and they all copied off me, but…

I also tried a new init system. Its called Initng. So far it doesn’t work at all. It segfaults before anything starts. I’m going to play with it a bit more. It supposed to be faster but I wouldn’t know.

I started using Cygwin at work. Its freaking awesome. I wish I would of known about that before I started using Linux. Probably would of helped a lot.

Palm is supposed to be replacing their current Palm OS with a version based off of Linux. They’re also hiring Linux developers. I think it sounds cool to work for Palm, but I’m not qualified for that yet, so we’ll see about it later.

I guess thats it. Its like an RSS feed with out the RSS or the feed. Its just news. Crazy!

Enjoy the Penguins!

Static Code Analysis

There is a thing in this life call “static code analysis.” It does exactly what it says. It analyzes static code. It basically does everything short of linking. While checkers for a considerable number of languages exist C and C++ are by far the most prevalent. Having found this new toy I decided to take it for a test drive. Naturally, there is no better code base to try it on than my personal favorite, Paludis.

Have no fear developers, your source came out with flying colors actually. Only warnings about other ways of doing things. The kinds of results you wouldn’t report if you did this for a living. I ran it through two different tools. Flawfinder and RATS. RATS as far as I can tell has not been updated in several years, but flawfinder on the other hand does appear more active, thus I put more into its results.

I’m not going to publish the results here. I’d be more than happy to hand them out if you want to see them though. Trust me, its not exciting, I promise. Anyway, if it makes you feel better your package manager’s code is pretty solid.

Enjoy the Penguins!

(Anyone else using WordPress noticed this new “Word Count” below the post writing box is broke? Press Spacebar then Backspace and it goes up one everytime. Lame!)