Specialized layout keyboard navigation is the way to go!

Customized Conky to a top horizontal bar, always visible by setting my desktop margins. Installed Pytyle to organize my windows running on top of Openbox, with vi-like keybindings relying on the Super key, And then hacked in a few Openbox global shortcuts for easy volume management and frequently used applications.

Crash course in navigation

So far I can manage 99% of tasks using the keyboard layout I set out below.

The Super is also known as the Winkey

Window shortcuts

cycle the focused window, Super-J/K

move the active window between panels on the screen, Super-Ctrl-J/K

move the active windows to another desktop, Super-Shift-J/K

switch desktops, Super-Alt-J/K

Change master tile size, Super-H/L

Add/remove master tiles, Super-./,

Media shortcuts

Ctrl-Ins, up volume

Ctrl-Del, down volume

Ctrl-Backspace, pause/play music

Super-V, alsa volume mixer

Super-M, mocp music player

CLI Mode

When it comes to flash in websites that steals your focus, I feel like screaming. Due to bandwidth limits I use the text-mode CLI browser Elinks, and the CLI mail client Alpine.

I rebound many Elinks shortcuts for a vi-like experience to scrolling the page, within the page, browsing history, selecting links and so forth.

I had the inspiration while using the Debian based distro Tails, I wanted to be able to save data onto the USB for later use. Tails is mastered with the iso9660 filesystem,  more commonly used for CD’s,  it is a read-only file system. It’s worth saying this was by design, as a security centered distro it leaves no room for accidentally leaving traces behind.

Some digging found that grub can load a kernel from a ISO directly via a properly configured grub.cfg line, which differs for each distro mind you. This is when I found multibootusb, a shell script that does the heavy lifting, including generating your grub.cfg, and it works on partitioned USB disks to boot – that means we can have a storage partition on the same USB disk too. Perfect!

Prep

Use your partitioner of choice and setup 2 partitions on the USB disk. Partition 1 will carry our grub boot loader and each distro’s files. Partition 2 will be storage. I named my partitions “multipass” and “store” respectively.

Warning: this will destroy all the data on the USB stick. Make doubly sure you use the correct /dev/sdX assignment for your USB disk. You can see it’s device name with ‘fdisk -l’ or ‘df’.

I have success using up to a 6GB partition, I formatted both partitions as FAT 32 for compatibility reasons, using this command:

 sudo mkfs.msdos -F32 -n “multipass” /dev/sdXY

Of course you will replace sdXY with your own device name. Change ‘multipass’ to whatever names you want for your 1st and second partitions.

Setup

Download, extract and run MultiBootUSB as sudo within a terminal so we can  see any output messages:

sudo sh MultiBootUSB.sh

It prompts you to choose your USB device:

Choose to add distros Manually:

Add your first distro:

Choose ‘Yes’ to add more distros, as many as your space allows, and choose ‘No’ when you are done choosing your distros:

Next the script asks us to check which distros to install and add to our grub boot menu:

Now you may go make some tea while the script extracts the ISO’s onto your USB disk, and builds your custom grub.cfg.

Behold the grub boot menu for your multi-boot USB disk:

Geek On

There you have it, a very geeky multi-boot USB disk!

It’s a great way to carry a couple utility operating systems like Tails or Clonezilla, and as you can see I included Crunchbang and Kubuntu too.

I keep the truecrypt setup on my store partition in case I need to access any encrypted containers.

Happy bootin’!

Playing a video in vlc while listening to music, gives us this flak:

Potential ALSA version problem:
VLC failed to initialize your sound output device (if any).
Please update alsa-lib to version 1.0.23-2-g8d80d5f or higher to try to fix this issue.

The solution to my surprise is very simple, yet very obscure. edit /etc/mpd.conf and comment out the “device” line in the audio_output section:

audio_output {
	type		"alsa"
	name		"My ALSA Device"
#	device		"hw:0,0"	# optional
	format		"44100:16:2"	# optional
	mixer_device	"default"	# optional
}

I have no idea why. My guess: specifying a device locks the hardware to send audio to the device directly, while no specified device sends audio via the software mixer. The default probably assumes the hardware does mixing automatically. Audio is still a strange beast in dark realm for me.

There are many helper apps and utilities, together they make a weapon of epic-ness that process, cut, strip, filter and mangle input (stdin) and output (stdout).

stdin can be your keyboard, a file on disk, or even the output from another command. stdout is your screen or a file. That’s the simplified version.

The | (pipe) connects two commands together by their stdin and stdout. We say it pipes the output from one command into another.

*A knife made of pipes*

To print a file to screen, we concatenate (cat) it, we can filter lines with the name ‘monkey’:

$ cat chatlog.txt | grep "monkey"
>
> Jul 22 06:32:00 How do you like your tea, monkey?
> Jul 22 06:32:19 I like my tea with a spot of milk.

I love tea and contrived examples.

Let’s cut out the date/time/nick part, and get a count of the number of words we wrote. Don’t fret about commands you don’t understand, the point is to demonstrate how the swiss army knife works as a whole.

$ cat chatlog.txt | grep “monkey” | cut -b28- | wc -w
> 20

See how each tool does one thing, and it does it well. We just chain the tools together.

We can grep, sed, sort, diff, awk, cmp, cat, tac, join, cut, and much much more.

These Linux tools aren’t without a sense of humor:

‘tac’ prints a file in reverse, the opposite of ‘cat’.

‘more’ prints output a screen at a time.

‘less’ is more: output becomes a vi-like text viewer, with a search function with scrolling back and forth.

‘tail’ is useful to show the last lines in a file, like messages or log entries.

*Meet FIFO, she’s a pipe*

I’ve shown you unnamed pipes, and now I want you to meet FIFO, she is a pipe.

FIFO means “First In, First Out”: whatever goes into the pipe first, will come out the other side first. Just like a normal pipe carrying water or toxic green sludge.

We create a named pipe with mkfifo:

mkfifo monkeypipe

Anything we write to the pipe (cat file > monkeypipe) can be read by another process (cat monkeypipe).

Named pipes is one way for programs to communicate with another. Your music player for example, listens on a special pipe for any commands you may give it, to pause the song or skip to the next track.

Some say named pipes is a fundamental feature of Linuxes and Unices, at least via the CLI. Other ™ operating systems only have named pipe access via coded API calls, and that’s no good nor fun.

*Substitution is better than the real thing*

Wrapping commands in (parenthesis) runs those commands in a subshell, and when you prefix it with < or > the output is redirected to a named pipe, which for all intents and purposes acts like a normal file.

““On a UNIX system, everything is a file; if something is not a file, it is a process.”

So if ‘diff’ compares two files, we can compare two directories by substituting the ‘ls’ output to a named pipe, and feeding those to diff, which sees them as files to read from.

This will compare process lists on two machines, one local, the other remote, via ssh:

diff <(ps axo comm) <(ssh user@host ps axo comm)

(example taken from linuxtutorialblog.com)

*To wit*

What useful applications for pipes do you? Share some of your favorites with us :)

[image courtesy of Wikipedia]

Cryptography comes from the need for privacy, and once upon a time I wrote a nice story about the privacy issues in social networking. In short: Facebook’s privacy policy was a pain to understand if you’re a legal layman like myself.

There’s probably a lot of Doublethink hidden in there.

Google+ makes this much easier!

“Privacy is not just the need for secrecy, it’s the state of being free from unsanctioned intrusion.”

The Privacy Center (via your account’s privacy settings) gives us these 5 principals for all Google’s products:

1. Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
2. Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
3. Make the collection of personal information transparent.
4. Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
5. Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.

These give me insight what we can hope to expect. You find there’s no real need to dissect the policy until it makes sense, it does so the first time. Transparency!

Furthermore, there is a whole section addressing family safety. Nice work Google.

The G+ Privacy Guide lays everything out in nicely categorized sections, easy to find answers.

Keep an eye out for any amendments while G+ is changing, and let’s hope there aren’t any hidden surprises.

Just a thought.

*Linux is turning version 3.0*

Close enough to GNU / Linux’s 20th birthday, Linux is turning 3.0-rc1.

So what’s new? Well, according to Linus, “Absolutely nothing… No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at all like that.” – Of course the usual critical security patches, if any come through; but no ABI, API changes.

The 2.6 release first came out in 2004, and is still being maintained alongside the 2.4 kernel. The first two (2.6) digits haven’t changed since 2004, the third digit updated with kernel releases, while the fourth digit is kept for urgent security fixes that don’t constitute an whole new version.

SOURCE: https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/5/29/204

It does not have a FPU (Float Point Unit, aka math co-processor) but Linux kernels emulate FPU’s if none are available.

Tell us what neat tricks you come up with in JS Linux!

#Create a mounted loopback file system as ~/loopback.img, mounted to /mnt.
#Then copied hello.c to our mount point, unmounted it, and gzipped the image =D

# gzip loopback.img
# ls -lh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1.9K May 17 14:14 a.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 166 May 15 22:15 hello.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 905 May 17 14:23 loopback.img.gz

You hit Ctrl-D (^D) to close a terminal window, a messages pops up, “There are stopped jobs.”, you hit ^D again, gulp some espresso, the terminal fades away.

What did that message mean? Why did it stop the window from closing the first time?

The Simple Answer

A Job (process) can run in the foreground (fg) or in the background (bg), which if there are, you get told this to give you a chance to end those background jobs gracefully.

You can run a job in the background by adding “&” to the command. You can send the current running app to the background with Ctrl-Z (^Z).

Use ‘jobs’ to list all jobs, and ‘fg’ to switch jobs: either by its job number, or the last job you worked on (if no job number is given).

Some Easy Examples

Try these out with me, it’s a great way to learn! (you can use pico instead of vi)

# edit our shopping
$ vi shopping

# complete our shopping list
- buy ground espresso
- buy peaches
~


We have two vi’s running, and switch between them, in the same terminal. This seems arb, since you could just open another terminal window. But this method of managing jobs was a great way to multitask back when X Windows wasn’t always available.

You can see how this is handy in a ssh session: Busy editing your firewall config, you have to check the mac address of your second network card. No need to discard your half-edited file. No problem!

So when you ‘exit’ a session, it tells you that “there are stopped jobs”, just in case you forgot to save your shopping list. If you ignore the message and ‘exit’ a second time, the shell will kill those jobs for you.

For more on this, try ‘man jobs’ and see the entries for jobs, fg and bg

*Pro Tip:* ^Z in a ssh session will background the remote process, while ~^Z (Tilde-Ctrl-Z) will background the ssh session itself. Tilde (~) is the ssh escape character: keystrokes following it apply to the local session.

MeeGo

Version: 1.1 (released 28 Oct 2010)
Live CD/USB: Yes
Tested on: my MSI U100 Plus netbook (Intel Atom N270?)
License: Open Source
Website: http://MeeGo.com

First Glance

This spunky OS, with its simplified navigation, is snappy and responsive. Services like Twitter, Last.fm and IM, are integrated into the desktop environment.

Click images to zoom in / out.

MeeGo’s interface ideology is simple: Visually intuitive, and maximize real estate. You move through the main sections via the top toolbar.

The colorful icons on the top menu zoom and bounce as you move over them. The interface is so responsive and fluid, it feels so crisp to move around.

Myzone is your landing page, it shows updates from all your social accounts on this page, tasks, appointments and favorite apps:

Evolution is used as your calendar and appointment schedular:

Applications open maximized on their own virtual desktops, called Zones. You can also Alt+Tab between zones.

You can search installed applications, and pin them to your favorites list, including the ability to Sync your data, and system updates:

The People panel shows your IM contacts on the left, and conversions on the right. Services like Twitter and Last.fm are managed on the Status panel, you can update your status to all your micro blogging accounts here:

The default IM client is Telepathy, it supports an array of IM protocols:

The Media panel and player is simplified, but fully functional and well intuitive! The backend uses GStreamer, PulseAudio and GUPnP for audio/video playback:

The Media player comes preconfigured to stream from The Internet Archive:

… and Last.fm as well:

Big Buck Bunny is bundled with the setup, and some jazzy music too – great for testing playback on your hardware:

The Devices panel is where you access your files (Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, Videos, Trash) and attached USB devices:

The “All Settings” button takes you to the big guy of software and hardware settings:

You connect to networks via the “Networks” panel:

Those are the panels by default. Opening the Toolbar settings (under All settings), and you can customize the top toolbar. Let’s add the Gadets panel with a couple of gadets:

Other features and things

Connecting a USB drive, or media card if you have a card reader, will ask you for an action:

I installed the Google Chrome edition of MeeGo:

Frozen Bubble!

Through the keyboard settings, I changed Ctrl+Alt+T to run gnome-terminal:

Impression

Smooth and polished, there’s still some work to be done on MeeGo, but what we see has been done well and with intention.

It’s impressive how architecture, API and reference material is well documented. This will ensure consistent applications and usability, at least that is the idea.

MeeGo is sleek and yet new, it is well worth keeping an eye out for. It makes a good OS for non-tech-savvy family and friends. But because it’s still pretty young, they may need some help to make sure it is set up and working. I can see a lot of folks loving it!

For myself, and all you other techy types, we like using terminals and doing our tax returns in hexidecimal (in my dreams!), this may not be your first choice. Try your hand at multi-booting, it may be great for a casual surf at the coffee shop.

Supported hardware includes Atom based Netbooks, and a few other models and devices. Like any free and evolving system, it’s worth reporting and helping with bug reports :-)

Issues

- I had to apply a fix for my wireless to be recognized as a device. It’s a known ralink rt2860 bug, the fix should be in the next release though.

- The Netbook touch-pad did not work. I used a USB mouse to test. This is a known bug.

- Without mousey, I tried accessibility via keyboard and got pretty stuck! The power button did provide a suitable UX action in this case.

Version 1.2

Scheduled for release in April 2011, I’m optimistically certain that many issues are going to be fixed by then. See the version 1.1 release post for more details on 1.1.

Feel unsatisfied? I did not cover every aspect of MeeGo, why not go discover more for yourself! :-)

Keyboardmonkey, out.

Luckily we can use xmodmap to remap your keys to any other we prefer, here is how…

you will need: keyboard, flat head screwdriver, emperor penguin plushy

I want to swap the Ctrl and Ins buttons. In a terminal we run xev. It presents a window that captures keystrokes, and prints the keycode for key presses:

keycode 105 (keysym 0xff63, Control_R)
keycode 118 (keysym 0xffe4, Insert)


We want to swap those two around, so that keycode 105 becomes Insert, and 118 becomes Control_R.

I popped the buttons out with a screwdriver, and swapped them around. Next we write a xmodmap config file to swap the keycodes: pico ~/scripts/xmodmap-config

! comments start with a bang
! remap our keycodes to new functions
keycode 118 = Control_R
keycode 105 = Insert

! clear and reset the control modifiers
! refresh the modifier list
! with both left and right Ctrl buttons
clear control
add control = Control_L Control_R


taking back control

We test this by running xmodmap ~/scripts/xmodmap-config. The keys should now be swapped until you log out.

If we place this same command under System Preferences > Startup Applications, it won’t work, I found there needs to be a small delay before we run xmodmap. I’m unsure why, to be honest, but we can work around this issue with a small shell script, that will sleep for a second, then run xmodmap for us. We create ~/scripts/remap-keyboard.sh:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 1 && xmodmap ~/scripts/xmodmap-config

let’s make the script executable:

chmod u+x ~/scripts/remap-keyboard.sh

and we add this shell script to Startup Applications, under System Preferences, using this as the command:

sh ~/scripts/remap-keyboard.sh

This should keep me happy, until I can get my hands on a Happy Hacker Keyboard. :-)