Adventures in Linux-land, Part III

[vakkotaur]

Yesterday I changed lilo's boot delay changed from 120 seconds (1200 deci-seconds in lilo.conf) to 15 seconds. I overlooked that the bootloader can't read the disk and therefore the lilo.conf file, so had some trouble. The file must be edited and then lilo run so it'll read the file.

I also now have startx set to be startx -- -bpp 16 in .bash_profile (24 and 32 bit color depth were tried manually, but without success). I'm not sure this is the best place to do this, but it works.

Rhapsody IRC was downloaded and compiled. As this was done by me as user and in my local directory, it had to be run by issuing ./rhapsody rather than just rhapsody. Things not in the PATH$ are not run just by mentioning them. (I said I was still new to this.)

sshd finally works. Jay noticed that it was generating keys in one directory and then looking for the keys in another directory. Editing a configuration file to make it look in the right place helped.

Discovered I could not su to root, not over ssh and not even at local console. Discovered the newly needed (to me, anyway) suauth file and created it. Edited the group file to add user(s) to those allowed root access. Didn't help. Even with suauth having NOPASS (passwordless root access seems utterly insane) it failed, but at least gave me an error message about setgid. Turns out that su didn't have the right permissions. Once those were changed, su started working. And NOPASS got changed so that a password is required again.

I'd tried to install xchat, having found (an old) Slackware 7.1 xchat package. I ran right into a dependency problem and figured if I took care of that one, I'd likely run right into another after that. Instead, I went looking for an alternative. While not a graphical IRC client, I found something small and not heavy on dependencies. All it wants is gcc (and that's there) and ncurses (and that's there).

Rhapsody is a nice, small, console IRC client. It's still at version 0.23b so it's not too fancy. There's no aliasing commands as far as I could tell so I was stuck with /me rather than my preferred but non-standard /a. I think things like /ping aren't there except as /CTCP PING. As rhapsody is open source, I can take care of this. I'm planning on installing rhapsody on belgian (the machine in the office) but not until after I've hacked at its main.c for a bit. I expect I'll do it in a fairly quick and dirty way for now. The right way would be to have rhapsody look at a file of aliases and then I could just edit that file. I don't know what rhapsody's developer plans. Maybe something like that is in the works. I will say that for being 0.23b it seems very well-behaved.

I think I now have a truly usable system. I'd like to make a few changes yet, but they aren't things that'd drive me nuts if they don't work out. There is a graphical FTP client, but at my screen resolution it can't be used. It seems it won't re-size and the bits I need to see are either off-screen or hidden by the taskbar. I'd been using gftp, but I see that DeLi has removed that from the distribution. Hrm. I'd like to have Nedit, if I could. Or at least a graphical text editor. I'm not sure there is one there already. The console editor, jed, is ok, but I find myself trying to issue commands for another editor. There are probably a couple other things, but I can't think of them just now.

I want to get all this down, and then when wipe breton and start over, hopefully doing things right. Mainly to convince myself that I can. And partly as I might contact the developer(s) with a buglist (su permissions, sshd looking in the wrong place) and/or suggested entries for a help guide or such.

Comments

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Most of those sound like distribution problems. I've certainly not seen things like that in several years, though they used to be commonplace in Linux versions.

I use gedit 2.x for a graphical editor, and it is quite nice. Even knows the basics of html. For a graphical ftp client, gftp, though I'm so used to the old command line client that I use it more often than not. And gaim (versions 1.0.x and higher) is a decent IRC client that runs nicely in xwindows. It started out as an instant messenger for AOL/AIM and grew from there. Now, like Trillian on Windoze, it handles virtually any IM system (AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber and more) as well as IRC. Most (all?) of these are gnome packages, which means you need the gnome libraries and gtk even if you don't run full-blown gnome as a window manager.

If you prefer the KDE approach, they probably have equivalents to all of them, but KDE is always bulkier and slower for me so I avoid it.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I'm avoiding things aimed much at either gnome or KDE with their libraries. I want things to remain rather light and uncomplicated. Though I do believe that GTK is there already.

Curious on the gnome/KDE speed. jmaynard has had the reverse experience.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Speed is both a matter of perception and a mish-mosh of factors. I'm on a slow processor with very tight RAM. KDE libraries seem generally to be large and often more of them are required, which seems to result in a lot of page thrashing while loading a program or shifting between functions. The default KDE screen setup is also unnecessarily gadgety and ornamented, which may add to bulk and slower screen painting.

By contrast, Gnome's screen is relatively Spartan. (Not as plain as some of the real stripped down window managers, but certainly much simpler than KDE.) And by choosing applications that all rely on gtk, I get them all to share the same libraries instead of having each try to pull in two or three additionals. So the mix of applications is a factor. Chances are my typical working environment is quite different from Jay's.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

I gave up on GNOME when, on a 4-CPU Pentium III Xeon 450 with half a gigabyte of RAM and some large amount of hard disk in a hardware RAID 5, I'd click on a terminal window to change focus (using GNOME's terminal program), wait 10 seconds, and type at the wrong window because the focus hadn't changed yet. This was in the days of Red Hat 6.2, but I've seen no reason to try switching back.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Uh huh. That's much worse than any performance problem I have, even with just a 166 MHz Pentium and only 64 Meg of RAM. I see performance really drag when loading a new program, and sometimes when closing one out. Changing focus is only a problem with multiple graphics-laden applications in memory, like say GIMP and Firefox at the same time.

Red Hat 6.x and gnome were a bad combination anyway. They had KDE and gnome all entwined somehow so that you couldn't get one without the other. Both at once is bad news even today.