Older blog entries for yeupou (starting at number 120)

Lightest terminal: urxvt in daemon/client mode?

I still use an old IBM Thinkpad 600E that I bought second hand a decade ago.

It still works. Well, the battery is dead, I added RAM as much as the motherboard can handle (2x 128 MB DIMM modules + 50 MB onboard module – something like that) and I changed, several years ago, the hard-drive, replacing the stock one with a more recent rescued from a short-lived Acer Aspire that belonged to my brother.

It still works. Sure, it is subject to bugs that will probably never get fixed, but none that you can’t work around.

It still works. But… But it is not a very fast computer however. It is not really that it runs slower than in the past. It is not really that we get used to faster computer. The fact is that software developers have not much reasons to write code light enough to run smoothly on this old piece of junk. So they don’t, most of them.

You end up running obsolete software or be very glad to find pieces of software like Midori (lightweight webbrowser based on WebKit).

Yes, yes, I will get to the point.

The point is whatever you can get can make a difference. I tried to run dash instead of bash. Bleua. That’s fine for scripts. But I cannot live with no completion at all. So I stayed with the Bourne Again Shell. But I had to cut of most of completions (how now, the endless scripts in /etc/bash_completion.d) to avoid waiting hours to get a shell to start.

So here comes urxvt. urxvt is fast. Like aterm. But it supports UTF-8. And it matters.
But the really nice thing is that urvxt includes a daemon/client mode. You just have to start the daemon at the begin of the X session, for instand in having the following in ~/.xsession :

#!/bin/dash
# terminal daemon
urxvtd -q -f -o
# desktop
export BROWSER=midori
wmaker

Then, everytime you need a terminal, call uxrvtc instead of urxvt.

You might also want to add in ~/Xdefaults something like:
Rxvt*background: gray23
Rxvt*foreground: white
Rxvt*troughColor: gray33
Rxvt*scrollColor: gray13
Rxvt*scrollstyle: plain

Rxvt*visualBell: true
Rxvt*saveLines: 2000
Rxvt*urlLauncher: midori

Rxvt*color12: SkyBlue2

There are no real-life drawbacks that I encountered so far.

Syndicated 2010-03-06 03:51:27 from # cd /scratch

Superkaramba vs gkrellm

I’ve been using gkrellm since several years – with WindowMaker, KDE, whatever desktop environment. Considering old venerable it is, clearly, gkrellm does not really fit with nowadays eye-candy. So its tempting to give whatever may be available a try.

As I run KDE, Superkaramba it must be.

Well, I tried it a year ago already: it was full of transparencies effects, composite-whatever-2.0, but it was also clumsy, bloated, and definitely prone to segfault.

I gave it another try today.

Well, I took some time to browse KDE apps for nice Superkaramba widget. Not easy to pick, I must say.

I went for EasyMonitor, mainly because it is modular and easy to tune.

So far, no segfault. And it does not seems to consume too much CPU resources – that always the issue to keep in mind, the damn thing is supposed to help checking resources usage, not to burn half of them.

Finally, I customized several files to fit my expectations and limit resources consumption. Here they are: EasyMonitor_Filesystem.theme, EasyMonitor_Memory.theme, EasyMonitor_Network_Interface_eth0.theme, EasyMonitor_Procesor_multi.theme, EasyMonitor_Top.theme. All these files should be put where EasyMonitor is installed, ~/.kde/share/apps/superkaramba/themes/ in my case.

Syndicated 2010-03-06 03:18:26 from # cd /scratch

Looking for a very fast utf8 xterminal?

Give a try to urxvt in daemon/client mode.

For instance, you can have the following in ~/.xsession :

#!/bin/dash
# mouse speed
sleep 5s && xset m 4 &
# terminal daemon
urxvtd -q -f -o
# desktop
export BROWSER=midori
export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$HOME/.config
lxsession

and then call uxrvtc instead of urxvt as terminal.

You might also want to add in ~/Xdefaults something like:

Rxvt*background: gray23                                                         
Rxvt*foreground: white                                                          
Rxvt*troughColor: gray33                                                        
Rxvt*scrollColor: gray13                                                        
Rxvt*scrollstyle: plain                                                         
                                                                                
Rxvt*visualBell: true                                                           
Rxvt*saveLines: 2000                                                            
Rxvt*urlLauncher: midori                                                        
                                                                                
Rxvt*color12: SkyBlue2     

So far, I use it on a very old laptop. But I'm considering using it everywhere.

(side note : bash completion is getting bloated... it is best to use dash whenever sufficient - otherwise, on an old computer, you should at least make sure it only runs the default stuff, not every files in /etc/bash_completion.d/)

1° Getting http://myy.helia.fi/~karte/opml-export-feeds.html to work in order to import akgregator feeds into rawdog.

my $xmlUrl=0;
while (<FILE>) {
    $xmlUrl = $1 if /xmlUrl=\"([^\"]+)\"/;
    if ($xmlUrl ne 0) {
	if ($rawdog_config) { print "feed 30m " }
	print "$xmlUrl\n" 
    }
    $xmlUrl=0;
}
close FILE;

2° trying hard to post this on advogato with konqueror - no luck, I had to do it with iceweasel to avoid getting part of the entry to go in limbo with no explanation.

One more Savane release.

Not much to say, New release of Savane today.

Savane project need people interested in maintaining Savane for distributions like Debian, Fedora extras. If you think you have the profile, you appreciate Savane enough and want to be involved in Libre Software development and distribution in the long-run, please go ahead, start reading docs of the distributions you use and like and start the packaging work. :)

Looking for a nice shell prompt? Add the following in your .bashrc:

red='\[\033[0;31m\]'
RED='\[\033[1;31m\]'
green='\[\033[0;32m\]'
GREEN='\[\033[1;32m\]'
yellow='\[\033[0;33m\]'
YELLOW='\[\033[1;33m\]'
blue='\[\033[0;34m\]'
BLUE='\[\033[1;34m\]'
magenta='\[\033[0;35m\]'
MAGENTA='\[\033[1;35m\]'
cyan='\[\033[0;36m\]'
CYAN='\[\033[1;36m\]'
grey='\[\033[0;37m\]'
GREY='\[\033[1;30m\]'
NC='\[\033[0m\]'

   showuser=''
  if [ "`id -u`" != 0 ]; then showuser="\u@"; fi
  hostnamecontent=`cat /etc/hostname`
  showchroot=''
  if [ "$hostnamecontent" != $HOSTNAME ]; then showchroot="*$hostnamecontent"; fi
  PS1="${yellow}\$(date +%H:%M),\! ${cyan}${showuser}\h${showchroot}:${green}\w${NC}\n  ${grey}"'\$'"${NC} "
  # Define a nice correct PROMPT_COMMAND, which will update to window title,
  # only if we have an X terminal
  case $TERM in
    aterm|eterm|*xterm|konsole|kterm|rxvt|wterm)
        PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME%%.*}${showchroot}: ${PWD/$HOME/~}\007"'
  esac
 

Linux « stable » branch is definitely a meaningless concept. udev and all its ramifications happens on a branch. It already caused 2 of my 4 own computers to be down for a reason or another. Sure udev is great. But it is definitely not production ready.

Linux is now like MS Windows in matter of release policy. Branded stable but not really.

zanee, that's funny, I always thought the standard US assault rifle was the M16, not the M14. Apparently, I'm not the only one.