Vakkotaur

A couple things are of interest to me in this week's DistroWatch Weekly. The first is open source advocate Eric S. Raymond switching to Ubuntu after over a decade of using RedHat/Fedora. I know where ESR is coming from on at least part of things. Fedora is a pain to set up to use the media codecs that people actually use. Ogg Vorbis might be be a great idea, but people actually use mp3. Ogg Theora might be a great idea, but people actually use .mov, .mpg, and .avi.

ESR has his detractors about this, but I see it as two camps. One, the one Fedora and Debian purists follow, is a nigh-on religious instance avoiding any and all formats even hinting of being proprietary. It's a nice idea, but it's not practical for most. Most people, as ESR realizes, just want things to work. This is the other camp, where practicality is a primary consideration.

People want the file(s) to play, not throw up error messages - and if they get an error message, they want to get it fixed. They do not want a sanctimonious lecture about how fixing it is evil.

Right now I am using Fedora myself. That's how I know how much 'fun' it is to get Fedora fully functional. Because I know that pain, I'm a version or two behind. I do not want to have to do all that work over again. I won't be jumping to Ubuntu right off, but I likely will give it or one of its derivatives (Kubuntu, or the newly Ubuntu-based Freespire when it is released) a try and see how things go.

While Fedora is my primary Linux distribution, I use another, lighter, distribution for older equipment, including the laptop. For a while this was Ultima Linux. When the Ultima site went away for several weeks (it's back now) I eventually switched to Wolvix.

When I noticed that the Ultima site was back, I suggested that the developer have a look at Wolvix as both are Slackware descendants and Wolvix had some good ideas worth adopting. The result of that also made it into this week's DistroWatch weekly with the news that Ultima and Wolvix have "joined forces." This doesn't mean that there will be just one (Ultima or Wolvix), but means that both distributions will benefit together.

The laptop I use currently has Ultima Linux on it. I am not providing a link to the Ultima site because it's not there anymore. I have been told by the maintainer that it will be back, eventually. I am at least one version behind, and now have no means of getting the more recent version. It's also been my experience with this sort of thing that 'eventually' tends to become 'never' and so now I again look for a distribution to run on the laptop.

( Zen? Not now. And Wolvix at the door. )

In looking around for linux image viewers that weren't overly window manager dependent, I kept coming back to one. The Mirage image viewer only wants PyGTK (which is already on caspian) and gcc to compile. I downloaded Mirage and extracted the source and found it had a nice Python install script.

Once installed, I started it from a terminal window and found it did what I expected. Mirage is beta and that showed in the occasional warning sent to the terminal window, but there were no show-stoppers.

I tried starting Mirage from xffm (the Xfce file manager) and ran into the same problem as I had with ImageMagick: it would launch to show only the selected image and not acknowledge the rest of the directory. After a few tries at changing that and not really getting anywhere I decided to bypass xffm, at least for now. [ADDENDUM: Telling xffm to 'open with' mirage . with the remember option checked seems to have resulted in what I desire.]

I now have a Mirage button on the Xfce launch bar. This I have set to always load one particular directory. That directory is the one where things saved from Opera or received via dcc get put. It's might not be an ideal solution, but it's a workable one for now.

Ultima Linux has a tolerable terminal text editor, jed. Or so I'd thought. Maybe it was something I did (and by mistake, for I would never intentionally cause this breakage) as I recall I could use the backspace key and it did what I expected: deleted the previous character and moved the cursor back a character. Nice, sane, sensible. Today I went to edit something and found jed instead saw CONTROL-H and rather than doing something sane (acting like a proper backspace, or even just moving the cursor back a character without deletion) it brought up some help lines and changed context on me. That's an EMACS thing. It gets in my way. Modal editors suck[1] (Okkay, so technically emacs is non-modal. It still sucks in its own special way). And even with a (non)modal editor, what kind an incompetent assigns CONTROL-H to help? CONTROL-H for Help makes sense, except that CONTROL-H is universally a 'go back one character' command or would be if EMACS and things stupidly copying it didn't break the standard.

I think I'll get a bit more serious about getting joe to install on Ultima. At least joe doesn't pull this modal crap. I don't need context switching land mines getting in my way.

There is a work-around that works in the Eterm terminal emulator. It is to issue stty erase ^H and to make it so one doesn't need to do it manually all the time, add it to /etc/profile .

[1] Yes, I know vi is modal. It also sucks. It just sucks less due to being an editor rather than a Swiss Army Planet of a program that occasionally masquerades as an editor. Also, as vi is almost universally present, it can be used to render a system working enough to get a proper non-modal editor.

( Compaq Armada 7800, Ultima Linux, and sound )

This entry is for my personal convenience. If anyone else finds it useful, that's a bonus. But I'll put the rest of this ( behind this cut. )

I've been trying Linux distributions on icelandic for a while and I think I might have found one that works.

( Ultima Linux )