Tag: Technology

Arch Linux is pretty cool. It has some good features.

What distinguishes one Linux distribution from another?

1. The package manager and available packages
2. The default software choices and configs
3. Technical documentation

Arch Linux shines in all three of these areas.

The package manager specifically allows for third parties to put together their own packages in the form of AURs. So if something isn’t officially available… chances are it is available as an AUR.

As far as defaults go… you pretty much need to install everything you want. That’s the beauty of it. You don’t get saddled with a bunch of stuff you don’t need.

The documentation available on the Arch Linux site is fantastic. This is a huge help. Before I installed Arch Linux I had read that the documentation alone was a huge plus in favor. And after going through the install process I can say it is a very nice thing indeed.

Some folks maintain that Arch Linux is difficult to run. I haven’t found that to be true. In my one or two days with it… I already have pretty much everything working that I would typically set up on a Linux machine. And honestly it was easier than with many distributions that are oriented toward beginners.

One area where Arch Linux differs from many other distributions is how new releases are done. Arch Linux uses a rolling release system. So there actually are no new releases. Updated packages are made available to the distribution when they become available and are not typically bundled with other packages in the form of a scheduled “release”. 

This means you are always as up-to-date as you want to be. One command will update all of your installed packages in one fell swoop. Of course there is a certain risk of breakage. Maybe a little more than with distributions that used the concept of scheduled releases. The term “bleeding edge” might be somewhat appropriate here.

After a number of weeks messing with Linux on my two PCs awhile back, I finally decided it was really not a wise use of my time. I was learning a few things. But it was seriously eating up all of my time.

However, now that I’ve been back on Windows 8 for awhile I’m getting a little bored. It’s too easy. Things are just working.

I have a laptop that I rarely use. And while I’ve been thinking about playing with Arch Linux on it, I worked pretty hard getting that thing all put back to Windows 8. I’d really rather not have to do that again anytime soon.

Then it occurred to me! I have a spare laptop hard drive! Yay. I will simply pull the current one out with Windows 8 on it all nice and neat, and stick in my spare.

Let the fun begin!

I don’t know who picked the magical “two-year” time span that cellular service contracts typically run. But I know I’m usually ready for a new phone about six months before I am eligible. And my current phone is no exception. I have a Samsung Galaxy Nexus. I am exactly six months from being able to upgrade my phone with a subsidy.

But my wife helped me come up with a plan so that I could upgrade now. We decided to add a line of service and get a new subsidized phone with the contract it would require. The idea is that I will transfer my current phone number to the new phone. And my current phone will end up with the new number. Then six months down the road when my contract on the current phone expires we can terminate that line. Yay!

I’ve had my eye on the smartphone market for awhile. I mean don’t all geeks sort of know which are the best phones at any given time? You’d hope so. Of course it changes all the time. Research confirmed… the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC One were the two top contenders. But Motorola has just released a whole new line of “Droid” phones for Verizon. One of those is the Droid Maxx. Its main focus is having stellar battery life.

When my wife upgraded her phone about 6 months ago, we chose the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx HD, which is pretty much the previous version of the new Droid Maxx. I was totally impressed by its build quality. Nice heft and very solid with a Kevlar back.

After having the Samsung Galaxy Nexus for 18 months, I had direct experience with three things.

1) The whole Nexus thing. Yes, those devices are easy to root and customize. No bloat or crapware. Great. I rooted and unrooted my phone multiple times and ran several custom ROMs on it. Big whoop. I’m afraid I’m not into it. It just isn’t my thing. Which may be somewhat surprising. But I figure the original designers probably sort of know what they’re doing. At least as much as “Swibby”, “Darklord” or whoever it is that hacks on these custom ROMs. The fact that all these developers have cartooney nicknames does not exactly instill confidence. And there is the whole voiding-the-warranty thing. I concluded that I have no real need or desire to root my phone.

2) Build quality. Samsung makes good phones. But they have a real plastic feel to them. When you drop $600 on a phone, you want it to FEEL like a $600 phone. My Samsung always felt like a toy.

3) Battery life. One of the known issues with my Samsung Galaxy Nexus was battery life. I even sprung for the extended battery ($50). It still sucked.

So… Motorola phones have locked boot loaders and are hard (or impossible) to root. Don’t care. The build quality and battery life are important to me. These are the two biggest selling points of the new Motorola Droid Maxx. So I hit the button last night on the purchase.

I have a strange habit. After I make a purchase, I like to surf around a bit more and read reviews and such to “validate” my purchase. At least I suppose that is why I do it.

Well this morning I found a review by a fairly reputable web site. It was not very favorable toward the Droid Maxx. As a matter of fact, they were pretty harsh. But it felt really nice as I was reading the comments made by readers at the bottom of the page. Comment after comment was made by Droid Maxx owners who completely disagreed with the review. They accused the reviewer of having an agenda and obvious bias. They totally loved the phone. Many of them compared the Droid Maxx directly with the Galaxy S4 and the HTC One and chose the Droid Maxx over both of them. A few were still within their return window and said they had no regrets after hands-on experience with the phone and had no reservations sticking with their purchase.

Nice!

Blogging is interesting. I have no idea if anyone is reading this or not. But I think when doing a blog, one needs to ignore that entirely and write as if the whole world is reading.

I came to a conclusion a couple of days ago. And I remembered some of the reasons why I backed away from messing with various operating systems (primarily Linux) a number of years ago.

I don’t have OCD. But I do have tendencies that lean in that direction. As a career computer programmer, that attention to detail and anal retentiveness has served me well. But when it comes to setting up operating systems and software on my personal computer with an infinite number of working scenarios… it tends to really aggravate the whole OCD thing.

Basically, it’s much better for me to just set things up and leave them alone. Ok, not as much fun… but in the long run it’s best. What I really enjoy most about computers is setting them up. Way more than actually using them… the configuration and setup is the part I really like. Getting it all just perfect.

At any rate… my conclusion was… as much fun as messing with Linux is… it’s all just pretty much a waste of time. Reformat, reinstall… configure, repeat. I do learn a lot along the way. But to what use? What difference does it make that I know how to make my terminal screen startup at a certain size? Or that I know how to do that with four different types of terminals?

Linux may be superior to Windows in a lot of ways. But Windows is way better when it comes to things just working out of the box. So at some point it makes sense to stifle whatever idealism and/or curiosity makes me want to run Linux and just go with something that does the job and requires far less time and energy.

So I ended up taking both my desktop machine and my laptop and restoring them to factory setups. So now they’re both happily running Windows and I can once again sleep at night and have time for my wife.

I think I will continue this blog. I did rename it. And it will now be about my general technology adventures rather than focusing on Linux.

So, yesterday I switched my systems back to Ubuntu proper. The purpose was mainly to clean up my installs from all my messing around. I had originally installed both systems as Ubuntu. Then I ran some command string I found on the web that removed Unity and installed the standard Gnome3 desktop environment. And after that I ran another super-duper command to switch those to Xubuntu without reinstalling. Then I decided I would like to go back to Ubuntu. So I did a super-duper command to do that!

But after all that messing around, I was sort of longing for a fresh install. This was particularly appealing since my last command to switch these systems back to Ubuntu caused me to be unable to login to the GUI. I figure it was just too much messing around with various config options in /etc with regards to the various desktop environments. So clean installs were in order.

At any rate, the primary reason for going back to Ubuntu in the first place was… to run the most popular version of desktop Linux. Along with that (in theory) comes the best support. Both in terms of available software packages and in terms of community resources. And also to deliberately divorce myself from the idea that one is someone cooler and more “hip” if they run a more difficult flavor of Linux.

The thing about Ubuntu… it’s pretty much the same under the covers as any of the other Linuxes. If you take away the desktop environment and installed apps… the various distributions are very much alike. Particularly those that are all derived from the same origin (like Debian).

I suppose it would be nice to run a distro that defaults to a desktop environment that I like. But in recent years I’m learning that it’s often times better for me to just adapt to the software I’m using, and yield to the design preferences of the developers rather than trying to force the software to adapt to my preferences by reconfiguring it all the time.

I figure I can live with Unity. I don’t know why not. And I can certainly install and remove any packages I choose. So I don’t see a problem.

Here is a little different example. This script does one of two commands based on the presence of an argument. It displays a sorted list of installed packages using dpkg (for systems that use that particular type of package management). If an argument is passed, it will only include packages that contain that search argument. Otherwise it will include them all.

#!/bin/bash
criteria=”$1″
# If criteria is not specified, show all
if [[ $criteria = “” ]]; then
dpkg –get-selections | grep -v deinstall | sort | less
else
dpkg –get-selections | grep -v deinstall | grep -i “$criteria” | sort | less
fi

In doing some bash scripting… I use some simple scripts to automate commands so I don’t have to type in (or remember) all the parameters. This script uses the du command to show me the disk usage on directories. The depth parameter specifies how deep in the path to go when reporting. I wanted the script to function correctly without an argument. So my solution was to test for the argument and use a default value if it’s not present. Without a default value, this command would produce an error.

#!/bin/bash
depth=”$1″
# If depth is not specified, default to zero
if [[ $depth = “” ]]; then
depth=”0″
fi
du -mc -d$depth –apparent-size * | sort -nr | less

Here’s a cute little backup script I wrote. Just a little smarts to suit my particular situation. But I did learn how to prompt for a parameter and do a case statement. The rsync command is a very powerful backup tool. On this particular backup drive (Lacie) I have two sets of backups… (/backup1/ and /backup2/). This script prompts me for which one I want to use and does the right thing. I’m also using an exclude list in the form of a txt file to omit browser caches and the like.

#!/bin/bash
read -p “Backup number (1/2)?” choice
case “$choice” in
1 ) echo “1”;;
2 ) echo “2”;;
* ) echo “Failure to communicate, try again.”;exit 1;;
esac
path=”/home/”
pathfrom=”$path.”
pathto=”/media/Lacie/backup$choice$path.”
rsync -avAX –delete –exclude-from ‘/usr/local/bin/backup-exclude.txt’ “$pathfrom” “$pathto”

After installing Ubuntu and completely removing Unity in favor of the standard Gnome3 desktop, I found Gnome to be not so much to my liking. But there is a great resource available to those who have installed one of the flavors of Ubuntu (Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu). With one big honkin’ command, you can switch from one of those flavors to the other. And this site provides the necessary stuff.

So… not liking Gnome3 that much? Just issue this one big command string and walla! You’re now running Xubuntu! Yes, that is exactly what I did. Worked peachy. And it was almost entirely painless. It’s really just a matter of removing some packages and installing others. All the underlying configuration stays put. All I really had to do is setup the Xfce panels the way I wanted them.

See the big problem I’m having is that there are just far too many choices in the Linux world… and they’re all FREE. So there is no limit to the things one can try. It only costs time. Could be it’s time to just leave things alone for awhile and use my time for something else.

Now that I’m back on Ubuntu I’m starting to read all these things about Canonical trying to force their own display server (Mir) on the rest of the Linux community. The problem is, because Canonical produces the most popular Linux distribution (Ubuntu), they probably have more leverage than they should on the direction of Linux as a whole. The Linux community is already fragmented enough without this kind of bullying.

But it makes me want to stay far away from Ubuntu and it’s derivatives (now that I have just installed one). Gah! I just can’t win. Although I have no compelling reason to make a hasty decision (and spend more time distro-hopping). I’m sure what I have installed will work well for me for several years, if I want it to. And it will be officially supported until April 2015.

One funny thing happened yesterday evening. Typically when I switch distros, I keep my desktop and laptop machines in sync and switch them both. That has proven to be valuable. As I was configuring my laptop last night… I was changing ownership of the /var/www directory and I messed up big time and changed the permissions recursively of everything in /var. Holy cow!

Of course that’s a big deal because many of the critical running processes keep track of their status using /var and they sort of need the right permissions to access their control stuff. Took me a few hours to straighten that out. And having two identical installations allowed me to compare the broken one with the non-broken one and correct the ownership.