Openbox Freedom Day

South Africa celebrated Freedom Day, Tuesday 27th April-- a national holiday to commemorate the first democratic election. So I spent the day attempting to squeeze freedom out of my aging 1.8ghz PC with  1Gb Ram.

The solution to achieving the kind of brute-force computing and speed I need in order to have a faster Web experience was to use a different window manager. Creating an Openbox session which free's up  RAM allows my heavyweight Firefox browser to access more computer resources and hence greater freedom. Less caching means the browser can live totally in RAM, which is what the programme was designed to do.

A minimal environment in which the browser and associated applications take center stage delivers a lot more speed than my current Gnome setup. What's more, it is gnome-friendly  -- All my apps just work.

Openbox is still alive --a continuation of the discontinued Blackbox project, a wm which only appears to live on amongst Windows modders. Finding lightweight alterntives to some basic tools took up most my morning and reading through code to implement the decisions and choices wasted the rest of my day, but the end result is probably a lot similar to what is going on in CrunchBang Linux world.

[caption id="attachment_1591" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Openbox with Cairo dock"][/caption]

Window manager: Openbox

Dock: Cairo-dock

Panel: Fbpanel,  Lxpanel, or  XFCE4-panel

File manager: Rox-filer

Package Additions: OInstall

Image-viewer: Feh

Wallpaper manager: Nitrogen

Obconf Theme: Simply Aubergine

Compositor: Xcompmgr

3D Desktop support: 3ddesktop, brightside

Stats: Conky

TODO: Top panel is still a work in progress. None of the candidates do the job well. Issues like menu and icon placement all make the job of installation difficult.

Find way to save the desktop layout on logout. Am busy downloading Oblogout which might fix the problem

Find decent way to load conky at startup. Current configuration fails and it needs to be started manually.

LINKS

Planet Openbox



Debian Openbox page

Ubuntuforums Openbox HOWTO

Openbox Guide

Boxlook

An Openbox2 FAQ

Gentoo OpenBox FAQ

3DDesktop Package

3DDesktop HOWTO

Practical Open Source Software Exploration

Practical Open Source
Download E-book

“Can Professors Teach Open Source?” The answer is a resounding yes. In fact, TeachingOpenSource.org has written a book that work pretty much in the same way as any other open source software project – improvements, technically known as patches, are very much welcome.

The textbook has a foreword by Greg DeKoenigsberg, a Senior Community Architect at Red Hat. He was the founder and first chairman of the Fedora Project Board, the governance body for the Fedora Project, an open source software project.

The textbook team hopes to change the scenario in the academe wherein the computer science professors feel limited in teaching open source, especially when they have not been doing a lot of it, themselves. It is noteworthy, however, that universities and students are getting increasingly more exposed to open source.

The writers hope for this textbook to guide “a whole generation of students who want to learn how to become better software engineers, the open source way.” The open source textbook team has a solid reason for encouraging the academe to keep up with open source developments and thereby influence its students into doing the same. In the words of DeKoenigsberg, “The skills required to succeed in an open source software project are the exact same skills required to succeed in any large software project.”

This textbook is not only for those in the academe to patch and use. It is for everyone interested in open source and has a desire to contribute to the success of open source projects.

Desktops then and now.

Great meme doing the rounds in the Ubuntu community. Apparently started by Jono Bacon. Since I am a relative newcomer to Linux, I'll open it up a bit.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="350" caption="My very first desktop PC had Windows 3.1 - the 32bit version thankfully, a whopping  20MB harddrive and about 512kb of ram"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="448" caption="I spent a large part of the nineties carting around a Powerbook 180  loaded with System 7, with a 33mhz cpu, 80mb harddrive and 4mb of memory."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1575" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="My pc today - Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala on 1.8ghz system with 700Gb hd and 1Gb ram"][/caption]

Opening locations quick tip

Picked this tip up from http://ubuntuguide.net

I used to click Places->Home Folder to browse my home folder and find out something by navigate in this nautilus file manager.Here’s a quick-way to open folders in ubuntu desktop which will save a lot of time.
Just press / key in your ubuntu desktop,and a “Open Location” window pop up.

then,press enter to launch root folder or type ~/ to open home folder as well as Alt+Home key combination,/mnt/ to open mnt/folder:

In this “open location” window,you can also type following:
computer:///
Shows Computer, lists the disk partitions
network:///
Shows the network locations
fonts:///
Lists the fonts installed on the system
burn:///
Opens the CD Writing Window.
themes:///
Lists the themes available for the Gnome Desktop
system-settings:///
Gives access to system settings
smb:///
samba – windows network

Shift spaces with Ubuntu

There is so much happening in the World of Ubuntu, we often forget about the tools which are assisting us. Here are some excellent pieces of browser code I have come across in my journeys across the Net. They all utilise Firefox addons and/or Greasemonkey.

ShiftSpace Project

HelvetiReader

Ubiquity

On my wishlist:

A user script for downloading from ccMixter

A user script which will replace all proprietory links with open-source links.

Octoshape, a simple P2P video plugin

Octoshape is an interesting P2P video plugin with Linux support, also used by CNN and other companies. At the moment it is still just an executable file which needs a script in order to run, so the support for Ubuntu has yet to be implemented. If you want to try it out, give it a bash and see how it flys. Then figure out a way to package it properly. I know it is something I could do, when I get round to reading the debian packaging manual.

Unfortunately the plugin is not GPL'd --  there is a fairly lenient  EULA which gives users a non-exclusive license for private use, and since this also entails interacting with other computers and users in order to create a P2P network, I don't see how the license is actually enforcable. Give it a read, before you do anything rash like releasing it via a ppa, since you might have to ask the company for permission.

A simple mozilla plugin would help viewers deprived of bandwidth and living in the third world. Yes, P2P is a way out of the censorship model.

Download and installation instructions

Google via the command line

Sometimes opening a terminal is a lot faster than opening a browser. If you like me, then you will enjoy having some extra supercow powers at the command line.

Here is how to set up Google on the command line.

1. Install the surfraw essentials

apt-get install surfraw surfraw-extra w3m

2. Setup surfraw

sudo gedit /etc/surfraw.conf

Change the following:

SURFRAW_graphical=no

SURFRAW_text_browser=/usr/bin/w3m

save.

3. Now you have three choices:

A)  You can stick with the default action, which is:

sr google <subject>

B) You can add an alias to your bashrc

gedit /home/<user>/.bashrc

ADD under aliases section:

alias google="sr google"

Save

C) You can add the surfraw ELVIS   dirctory to yout PATH variable

usually /usr/lib/surfraw/ or /usr/local/lib/surfraw/

eg. PATH=/usr/lib/surfraw/:$PATH

This is probably not such a good option since it will also give you instant access to the 80 or so "Elvi" which are  in the surfraw directory and part of the Surfraw suite. Since  some of the commands might conflict with commands already on your system,  we might want to first check to see which Surfraw "Elvi" commands and powers you need and which ones you don't.

Remove the ELVIS  you don't need by deleting or moving the ELVIS from the /usr/lib/surfraw/ and placing it in /usr/local/lib/surfraw/ or vice versa. You really only want one surfraw directory in your path!!!


That's right ELVIS isn't dead, he just lives on as the Shell Users' Revolutionary Front Against the World wide web.

You can still command ELVIS to do your bidding.

More info

Elementary Gnome Menu

Since a lot of the development in Lucid appears to be cosmetic, I'm sticking with Karmic for the meanwhile. I'm a big fan of the Elementary theme whose items seem to complement Human so well and until bits of Lucid Me menu come floating past, I'm happy in elementary-mode. So finding an Elementary-themed gnomenu is great, besides, I think the current Ubuntu "menu bar" (UMB)  in Karmic should rather be a sub-set of Gnomenu, since the xml specification in Gnomenu is a lot better. Ideally I would want to install the default menu bar with the kind of functionality that Gnomenu brings -- UMB really is slow compared to Gnomenu -- but that might be like giving people a high-end user experience, and I don't have any way of comparing this on slower machines without graphics cards, so bare with me.



If you willing to shift things around on your desktop a bit, here is what you need to do:

1. Add the Gnomenu Team Repo

#GnomeMenu
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gnomenu-team/ppa/ubuntu karmic main #GnoMenu Team
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/gnomenu-team/ppa/ubuntu karmic main #Gnomenu Team Source

2. Update and Install Gnomenu

apt-get install gnomenu

3. Remove Ubuntu Menu Bar


right click on the ubuntu icon and remove from panel

4. Add Gnomenu to top panel

right click on panel and add gnomenu

5. Download and Install Elementary Theme

Download this file and place it in a folder somewhere.

Right click gnomenu button, select properties and choose install under menu selection



6. Select the menu button of your choice.

I found this great ubuntu newlook button on Gnomelook uploaded by Bear73



8. Reload Gnomenu

Try it out, if you don't like you can always remove and add UMB to the panel  again.

Some P2P video links

Here are three more projects which provide P2P video support for Linux:

SwarmPlayer

Veetle

Tribler

Both SwarmPlayer and Tribler are tstream capable. Tstream is a new torrent format specially designed for video.

You can find tstream files on eztv.it

Enjoy!

[caption id="attachment_1518" align="alignleft" width="219" caption="Jackalope P2P Easter Bunny"][/caption]

Why bots are big and how to setup a simple IRC-based supybot (part 2)

In part 1 we showed you how to set-up  a simple IRC-based supybot. Don't forget supybot lives in an IRC channel, so you'll need to boot up an IRC client to talk to him. You will also notice that Supybot is not all that bright off the bat. Depending on which plugins you activated upon installation, you'll probably have a few basic commands and some routines, like being able to google for information in your channel. Sounds a bit like any modified shell doesn't it?

Supybot doesn't have much of a personality, so we'll need to download some extra plugins to make him a bit more intelligent than a vacuum cleaner.

A personality plugin is available from Animus. (It is very basic, but a step in the right direction) [be warned, Personality is still a bit buggy, see my comment below]

Download the personality folder to your /botdir/plugins/ folder.

You will need to load the plugin manually.

First make sure you are the owner by identifying to the bot in a private channel;

1. Open a private conversation

/query <bot-name>

or

/msg <bot-name>

2. Identify with the bot

identify <owner-name> <password>

Supybot will either respond or decline your command.

3. Now enter the following command to show the plugins path

supybot.directories.plugins

In my case: /home/freebot/botdir/plugins

4. Load your plugin

@load <name of plugin>

In my case @load Personality

If you're wondering where the plugin file is, its a folder, usually containing plugin.py and some other files. Leave the files alone, or configure them to your satisfaction.

Why bots are big and how to setup a simple IRC-based supybot ( part 1)

[caption id="attachment_1495" align="alignleft" width="242" caption="Powered by Karmic Koala"][/caption]

As more Ubuntu users get stable broadband connections, running a bot to do simple menial tasks such as responding to queries, fetching information and carrying out maintenance will become increasingly common. There are quite a few off-the-shelf bots available. Most of them have been trained to perform IRC tasks, but there is no reason why they cannot live in the shell or terminal and interface with whatever command-line programmes you might have installed. Obviously doing so raises all sorts of questions, which is why you will want to treat your bot as a user on your system without root privileges.

Here is how to install the R2D2 of bots, Supybot:

1. Add new user

addusr <name of your bot>

2. Switch to new user

sudo -u <user> -i

3. Install supybot

apt-get install supybot

4. Create botdir and run supybot-wizard

supybot-wizard

The above command provides nice non-gui interactive wizard which helps you for basic configuration.

5. Start the bot

run following command your new user (non-root).

#supybot /path/to_file/<supybot.conf>

<supybot.conf> can be named after you bot or user, so check first.

Resources:

My experience setting up an IRC bot

Short introduction to Supybot

How to configure Supybot on Fedora

Supybot Resources

Supybook Latest