Abandon the GUI!

An Update to ‘Window Managers?’

Don Harper — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 06:54:24 +0000

Way back, I wrote a quick blurb on Windows Managers for running under X.

Well, a while back I switched to Ubuntu for my OS of choice. As you may know, the fine folks at Ubuntu switch the default window manager to something called Unity, which cause a stir. I tried it for a while, but decided that it was too heavy, and to mouse-centric.

So, what to do? Well, I went back to my old standby wmfs, Window Manager From Scratch. This is a modern WM with systray support, full Ximirama and Xrandr support, tiles, and is mainly driven from the keyboard. Life is good.

To install (same steps as for Fedora, RHEL, or Ubuntu), download the source, and install the needed development libraries for: X11, Xft, freetype, Xinerama, Xrandr, and Imlib2. I used the native packages from the OS. Then, simple do a

make
sudo make install

(you do build software as a normal user, right?)

This will install all the needed bits and configs into the correct place. Under Ubuntu 11.10, there was an entry from the login screen to let me chose wmfs.

Config is handled in $HOME/.config/wmfs/wmfsrc which you can copy from /etc/xdg/wmfs/wmfsrc.

The wmfs website has very nice documentation as well as likes to some people’s configs with screen shots.

It runs very fast, and very lean:

 Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used       Program
  3.9 MiB + 310.0 KiB =   4.2 MiB       wmfs

Check it out, I am sure you will like what you see.

There is still life here

Don Harper — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 05:51:12 +0000

Well, somehow this site is still getting traffic, and a few comments in the last few days. So, I guess I need to look at some of the tips and tricks I have been keeping, and write them up for publishing here.

If you have any thoughts on what you would like to see, let me know in the comments!

Don

cmus project restarted

Don Harper — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:24:53 +0000

Just a quick note. The cmus project has been restarted recently, and they are working on a new release. This one should have better integration with things like PulseAudio.

Good news!

Go check out http://cmus.sourceforge.net/ for more details.

Making life easy over flaky links

Don Harper — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 19:12:29 +0000

I tend to work over VPN, which we know can be flaky at times, Since I work on server, I spend a lot of time ssh’ed into hosts. I was getting tired of the lost time having to restart what I was working on every time the VPN dropped (which could be as much as every 15 minutes on a bad day). While I already used screen to handle the lack of terminals (Alas, I am forced to use a Windows laptop to VPN in with), I thought there could be an easier way to do this.

The way I tend to work is that I ssh into a jump server, fire up screen, then ssh into the hosts I need to work on, and fire up screen on those hosts.

Now, this is nice, but it can get a bit tiring to do it all over again. So, I found a tool called autossh which will automatically restart your ssh session if it drops for any reason but a graceful disconnect. (Well, there are others, but this is basically it). Combine this with your ssh-agent, and you can re-attach with easy. I also use keychain to help manage my ssh-agent when I log in.

Now that the connection will come back, I need a way to re-attach to my screen session, or if there is not one, to start one for me. To do
that, I have this is my .bashrc file:

test -x $STY && screen -xR

This will check to make sure that we are not already inside a screen session on the local host (test -x $STY), and if we are not, then either attach to an existing screen session or start a new one (screen -xR)

I have define this function in my .bashrc to spawn a new ssh connection in a separate screen window:

function ss ()
{
  screen -t $1 ssh $*
}

Easy stuff

Welcome back!

Don Harper — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 06:48:22 +0000

Welcome back.

I am restarting this site, and have a few ideas to write about that do not fit on my other sites.

Enjoy!

Search your email!

Don Harper — Tue, 26 May 2009 10:20:47 +0000

One of the features that most of the pretty GUI mailers offer you is the ability to search your email. While this is not a feature I use regularly, it is one which when you need it, you really need it. I have used grepmail in the past, but it slow for me (it scans the mail files every time) and the big thing for me is that is only supports mbox files, and I use maildir since I use offlineimap.

I recently found mairix. While I have not been using it long, so far I am very impressed with it. It uses an index to speed up the search process, and it smartly adds only new or changed files to the index. The first indexing run was only a few seconds on my archive of almost 15,000 mail messages. I have it scheduled to update the index every 15 minutes, and I never notice the load this will put on the system.

To integrated mairix with mutt, I wrote a quick little script to search from within (or without) mutt:

#!/bin/bash
#===============================================================================
#
#          FILE:  mailsearch.sh
#
#         USAGE:  ./mailsearch.sh
#
#   DESCRIPTION:  search mail stuff
#
#       OPTIONS:  ---
#  REQUIREMENTS:  ---
#          BUGS:  ---
#         NOTES:  ---
#        AUTHOR:  Don Harper (), duck@duckland.org
#       COMPANY:  Don Harper
#       VERSION:  1.0
#       CREATED:  05/25/2009 07:03:30 PM CST
#      REVISION:  ---
#===============================================================================

rm -rf $HOME/Maildir/mfolder
echo "       t::word
              Match word in the To: header.
       c::word
              Match word in the Cc: header.
       f::word
              Match word in the From: header.
       s::word
              Match word in the Subject: header.
       m::word
              Match word in the Message-ID: header.
       b::word
              Match word in the message body.
       d::[start-datespec]--[end-datespec]
              Match messages with Date: headers lying in the specific range.
       z::[low-size]--[high-size]
              Match  messages  whose size lies in the specified range.
       n::word
              Match  word  occurring  as the name of an attachment in the mes-
              sage.  Since attachment names  are  usually  long,  this  option
       F::flags
              Match messages with particular  flag  settings.
              s meaning seen,
              r meaning replied
              f meaning flags
              prefixed by a - to negate its sense.

       The a:: search pattern is an abbreviation for tcf:

   Match words
       The word argument to the search strings can take various forms.
       ~word
              Match messages not containing the word.
       word1,word2
              This matches if both the words are matched in the specified message part.
       word1/word2
              This matches if either of the words are matched in the specified message part.
       substring=
              Match any word containing substring as a substring
       substring=N
              Match any word containing substring, allowing up to N errors  in
              the  match.   For example, if N is 1, a single error is allowed,
              where an error can be
       *      a missing letter
       *      an extra letter
       *      a different letter.
       ^substring=
              Match any word containing substring as  a  substring,  with  the
              requirement  that  substring  occurs  at  the  beginning  of the
              matched word.
       d::start-end
              Specify both start and end explicitly
"
echo -n "Enter your search string: "
read string
mairix $string
mutt -f=mfolder
rm -rf $HOME/Maildir/mfolder

Then, I bound this to “S’’ from within mutt:

 macro index,pager S "!mailsearch\n"

This will give me a reminder of the search command, run the search, and then give me the search results in a new mutt session.

wifiroamd, Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG, and Fedora

Don Harper — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 10:08:40 +0000

One of the things that has annoyed me about Fedora has been the decision to switch over to using NetworkManager to manage all network connections.

Now, on the service this has a lot of advantages. A lot of work has gone into it, and it just works for a vast majority of the installations out there. They have made it so the move from wired to wireless and back can be done without the user doing anything. They have also seamlessly tied in Dial-Up Networking if you still need a modem or use a wireless modem. They even have two-click access to your VPN which is pretty cool.

All these are things which are very good for Linux users. The biggest drawback to all this? The need for a user-space program to manage the non-hardwired connections. Which means that in order to be able to have any network running besides the good old twisted-pair copper, you have to have a little applet running as you, and it has to have a systray somewhere to display. Which means you have to be a) logged into the system and b) you have to be running a window manager which supports having a system tray. Now, Fedora gives you lots of choices for the second part now days. You have Gnome, KDE, XFCE, and LXDE. All are perfectly usable window managers. But, they still require you to be logged in to X. And, I do not use any of them.

So, what is a cli-loving Fedora user to do? Well, there is this great program called wifiroamd. It will handle the same basic tasks that NetworkManager handles. It will automatically configure your wifi interface and connect to the wifi networks or the locate hardwired NIC if it cannot. You can configure it to run scripts per connection, so for example, you can change your firewall rules for different networks (shields down at home or the office, but up full at the coffee house), or you could bring up your VPN connection when you start using a given wireless network.

One tip I picked up from the author was that if you have multiple AP’s in range, an you want to select once AP over the other, is under the /etc/wifiroamd/connections directory, simply link the AP info you do not want to the one you want:


ln essid:my_home_ap essid:bad_ap

where essid:my_home_ap is your AP with the keys and other information you want, and essid:bad_ap is the one you do not want to connect to. My neighbors have some very powerful AP’s which have a habit of showing up high than mine, but I have no problem with them now.

I have been using this set up under Fedora since FC6 days, but when I upgraded to F10, this stopped working. wifiroamd would try to scan for an AP, and not find anything. The change, it turns out, is that when I switched from using the iw3945 driver to the native iwl3945, wifiroamd could no longer see the wireless NIC due to the wpa_supplicant process, but NetworkManager could. Simply stopping and disabling wp_supplicant and NetworkManager, and wifiroamd started working again! I am a happy camper again.

C*MUS – A music manager for the terminal

Don Harper — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:44:33 +0000

C*mus is an advanced music juke-box for *inx and Window operating systems. It can handle the modern audio file formats: FLAC, Ogg/Vorbis, MP3 , Wav, AAC , MP4, .mod, .s3m, .mpc, mpp, .mp+, .wma, and .wv . It also can deal with many different types of audio output systems: ALSA, libao, ARTS, OSS, Sun, and WaveOut on Windows. The typical features of an electronic juke-box are supported like play lists and random/shuffle play, in addition to easily switching between playing from the library, an artist, or a single album with a simple keystroke.

C*Mus is pretty painless to install from source. The website lists the build dependencies with links. There is no RPM .SPEC file on the web site, but you can use this one.

En-queuing

One of the features I really enjoy and use is the en-queue function. I tend to use this two ways. The first is when I am listening to a song, and want to listen to similar songs, I go find them in my library, and I queue them up with a simple keystroke. A dynamic play-list, if you will. Then, I can simply create a more permanent playlist from this temporary list.

The second way is using the helper program cmus-remote to be able to queue up tracks from a different terminal, or from a script. My podcatcher program (bashpodder) will queue up the podcasts it just downloaded for me, so I can listen to them first thing in the morning.

Keystroke and CLI

C*Mus is developed to be driven via keystrokes. The default mapping is set up to be comfortable for those use are familiar with VI but, it is very easy to remap the keys to make it more comfortable. C*Mus will automatically save the current settings on a clean exit. The default mappings for selecting and updating views, moving through songs forward and backwards in small and large increments, adding to play list and queue lists.

Filters

One of the very powerful features is simple filters. You can set a filter for your 80’s Metal Bands or your Classical music. Many of the common tags can be used for filter on. Things like filename, artist, album, title, genre, discnumber, tracknumber, date (year), duration (seconds), and tag.

Google’s Calendar on the Command Line!

Don Harper — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:08:20 +0000

You love your comfortable command line, but all the cool kids are playing in the Web 2.0 web space, and you want to stay true to your roots? Want a Web 2.0 calendar, but still love (or need) command line access?

I just found the answer: gcalcli. This little tool will let you list your appointments, get an list your events, get an agenda, print ascii rendering of your calendar for the week or month. You can even add events to the calendar.

I like the fact that I can easly get at my gcalendar from anywhere (even my cell phone), and now I can do it from my shell.

The only downsides so far? The code has not been updated since October of 2007, and the speed can be a little slow sometimes. I am going to play with it for a while to see if I like it enough to replace remind.

Alerting with Remind

Don Harper — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:57:08 +0000

Back in my article on Remind, I talked about the simple power of remind to power your scheduling needs. That is all fine and good, but how to you get it to tell you when you have an event?

In its simplest form, when you run remind from the command line, it will not only display the current day’s reminders, but it will run in the background and wake up to tell you about other reminders on the screen while you work.

This is fine, but what happens if you do not have that termial open in front of you? Well, I have two ways I approach that issue.

First, when I run under X (yeah, yeah, I know, but I use cli tools under X), I have this added to my .xinitrc:

remind -z -k’xmessage -buttons okay:0 -default okay %s&’ ~/.reminders &

Let’s look at the command line:

The -z tells remind to wake up every 5 minutes and reread the .reminders file.
The -k tells remind to run a command instead of simply printing the reminder to the screen
xmessage -buttons okay:0 -default okay %s& is the secret sauce of this. This is the command run when there is an alarm. This command line calls xmessage (which is on pretty much any box with X) to display the alert. You could use zenity or kmessage, or winpopup, or whatever. This is what puts the alert in your face when you are not looking at the screen. The & is needed to make this command non-blocking by putting it in the background.

That all good if you are setting at your computer. But, what do you do when *gasp* you leave to computer? This is a little tricker. For this, my solution needs two things: 1) a computer which is always on and 2) a way to send messages to your cell phone/pager (sms or email). I have a cron job which checks to make sure remind is running, and restarts it if it is not (I use a hosting provider which does not like long running processes). The command line is similar to the one for X, but with a difference:

TZ=CDT6CST ~/bin/remind -z -k”echo %s

Pizza Party – Command Line Pizza ordering program

Don Harper — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:19:16 +0000

Want a pizza, and do not want to fire up that pesky GUI? We have the solution for you: Pizza Party – Command Line Pizza ordering program

Currently, only from Dominos, so if you do not have one near you who accepts on-line orders (*sigh*, mine does not), then you are out of luck.

So you need a calendar?

Don Harper — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 10:55:46 +0000

So, one of the things we have been using computers for is to keep track of our lives. And this means a scheduling or calendaring tool. Some tools out there do this fine, and some do it very well.

I have to keep track of a lot of appointments. From conference calls for work, to each member of the family’s schedules, to random, but highly important reminders. Most calendaring programs out there will let you set up a reoccurring event by day of the month, or the date. But, what if you need to do something two days before the end of the month, every month? Or, you need to do something every full moon, but not on the blue moon? Or, you have a standing meeting with your boss every other Monday morning, execpt when Monday is a holiday, then the meeting shifts to Tuesday? Oh, and you want something that you can run over an ssh session, while on your smart phone, or you friend’s smart phone?

The answer is simple: remind. remind can do this, and more. Need to set something up by the Hebrew Calendar? Check. Want your calendar to run a shell command for you on a holiday, specific day of the month, or phase of the moon? Check.

Most modern Linux distrobutions include remind nowdays, as it is so darn usefull. In addition, it runs just fine under Solaris, and the BSDs, including MacOS X. If fact, over at 43Folders, they have a whole section their wiki for remind. The wiki has many tips and tricks on how to use remind to its fullest.

In my next post, I will share some tips on how I get remind to remind me of events.

Command-Line blog posts

Don Harper — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:45:00 +0000

So, it only seems fitting that I should talk about a command-line interface to posting on this blog. No, I do not mean using links or the like, but a way to post from the command line.

So, this post is being typed up in vim on my Fedora 8 laptop. I will use this great little tool I found called wppost to post. wwpost is part of the perl module WordPress::Post.

A brief summary of its commands are bellow:

       -c category, can be a list separated by commas, no spaces
-t title
-i description, main body of post, if it has a slash, it is interpreted as a file to slurp
like a text or html file
-D iso formatted date for post, can be left out
-T if there are image attachments, place them as thumbnails only, with link, not just resized

Some usage examples taken from the man page:

    Most basic of usage, (provided you have a ~/.wppost file)

wppost -t 'hi everyone' -i 'i just wanted to say hello'

If you want to specify two different categories:

wppost -t 'Another Apple' -i 'Apples are really great. I do love them so.' -c food,rant -D 20071231

If the body of the post is in a file

wppost -t 'title here' -i ./content.txt

If the content of the post is in a file and you want to use the file
name as the title

wppost -i ./Title_Here.txt

If you want to have file attachments:

wppost -t 'recent photos' -i 'these are recent pictures i took' ./*jpg

Pretty cool, huh?

Peace out!

dvtm – dynamic virtual terminal manager

Don Harper — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:35:00 +0000

He’s back! And with with something new/cool:dvtm

Pacman for Console

Don Harper — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 13:12:26 +0000

You are tired of hearing your GUI friends talking about their games? Tired of playing simple Adventure? Why not try Pacman for Console?

The game play is just like the old quarter game you played long ago, and the best part, you can develop your own maps! Check out the screen shot:

Screen – terminal multiplexer

Don Harper — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 19:03:12 +0000

I usually have one screen running at all time, and in that screen session, I ssh to various hosts that I am working, and have screen running on those hosts.

Additional Links

gnu screen – Google Search
GNU Screen – GNU Project – Free Software Foundation (FSF)
GNU Screen – Summary [Savannah]
GNU Screen – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
GNU Screen – Jonathan McPherson
Screen User’s Manual
start [GNU screen]
Deadman.org: SSH-Agent Forwarding and GNU Screen
http://www4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~jnweiger/screen-faq.html
Remote terminal session management using screen: How to use screen to detach from and share terminal sessions
z o r g . o r g – A Brief Introduction to Screen: www.zorg.org! Linux, Home Automation, VoIP, Radio Scanning, PMR446, CB Radio, Cryptography, Handspring Visor, Psion Series 3 and much more.
screen – The Terminal Multiplexer
Power Sessions with Screen

BINS Photo Album

Don Harper — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:15:48 +0000

The BINS Photo Album is a package to generate static web pages from the command line. Why would you want to do this? Well, most of the dynamic web photo albums require that the server do all the work when the client requests the images, thus either slowing it down, or requiring a very beefy server. Also, you introduce the chance for a script-kiddie from hacking your site. Not good.

Enter BINS. Some of its features include [from the web page]:

generated album is static : it’s just plain HTML/CSS/Javascript files (Javascript is not mandatory to view the album), no need of any dynamic language (php, asp, etc.) nor database on server side. Album can be burned on CD or DVD.
album can contains other albums (sub albums): the album can have a tree structure ;
generation of a thumbnail and of scaled images for each picture ;
generated album appearance is fully customizable by using HTML templates (5 different templates sets are currently provided) and configuration parameters: colors, number and size of thumbnails per page, number and size of scaled pictures (in pixels or percentage of the original image for the size), fields to display, etc. Those parameters can be set globally (system wide or per user), per album or sub album or per picture (for example, you can change the colors of one sub album or one just one picture page in an album by editing its description file) ;
several description fields (date, location, etc…) can be associated with the pictures (in text or HTML format). You can easily add or customize these fields ;
description fields can be set or modified via a command line interface or a GTK+/GNOME-based GUI ;
A search engine is included in the album : you can find some pictures by searching keywords in their description fields.
Album can be generated from pictures managed by Zoph.
speed up album browsing by performing a clean up of HTML code to reduce its size and by pre-loading thumbnails in browser cache using JavaScript code ;
Exif information and Digital camera support :
- use the EXIF data structure found on some image files (usually, those produced by digital cameras) to fill automatically some fields (date and time for example).
- BINS use the Orientation EXIF tag (which is normally set when you rotate a image on you DigiCam) to rotate the picture to correct orientation.
- For each image, a page provides all information available on the picture and the DigiCam settings when the photo was taken.
- Additional information are provided for Canon DigiCams.
- Tooltips provide information about the meaning of some of the fields.
- All EXIF information is saved in the XML description file, preventing they disappear when the image is modified ;
internationalization (generation of album in different languages) using gettext. Current languages supported are Catalan, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Traditional Chinese ;
customizable charset encoding for HTML generation, including UTF-8 (Unicode) support by default. Generation of the Apache .htaccess file for correct encoding charset in HTTP headers ;
use of XML files to save user description of pictures and albums/subalbums and Exif data from image file ;
handle correctly file and directory names with spaces or other odd characters (excepted ‘/’), and create valid escaped URLs ;
generate valid HTML/XHTML code. The level of HTML depends of the style used. Some of the styles are valid, table free XHTML.

The web site has some great example. Go check them out.

iKog – the simple todo list

Don Harper — Tue, 22 May 2007 12:19:03 +0000

iKog – the simple todo list

So I am looking for a good to-to list manager, and I stumbled across ikog. ikog stands for “It Keeps On Growing”, and it is a pretty nice todo manager which has been influenced by the GTD school of thought. Currently, I am using it for my daily todo manager, and using the python gtd tool for my long term list management. Give it a whirl, you might like it!

New look and new home

Don Harper — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:42:07 +0000

Well, the look has been updated, and we are at a new home. Main advantage of this home verses the last one? Command line access, of course.

The new look is because I updated the CMS. My work-flow has changed, and I needed to retool some things in response. Look for me to get some new content up here sooner than later!

Strayed from the path

Don Harper — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 16:35:57 +0000

In two ways…first, I have not updated the site in a while, and I
need to get back to updating it.

Second, because I have not been true to my cli roots. I have moved
from my default MUA of the last, oh, 8 years, and flirted with a GUI
MUA, thunderbird. It was pretty.
It was sexy. It let me see everything then and now. It tried to
seduce me into using a GUI for more…

But, then I got behind in my email, and it was taking longer and
longer to catch up. *sigh* Two days ago, I switched back, and now, I
am fully caught up on my inbox, and making headway on my actionable
items.