the corner office

Grumble grumble... I'm sitting here, quietly tinkering away, and I look up at my CPU monitor on my Gnome toolbar and notice that my machine's a little busier than it should be. I take a peek at the system monitor, and notice a process called trackerd is the chief CPU hog. A quick search and it turns out that this is a file system indexer. I recall reading something about this on the new feature list. Not very nice of Ubuntu to not even ask me if I want it running, but it wasn't hard to switch it off via the Indexing control panel dialog.

Whilst searching, I saw a good few forum and blog entries griping about the whole trackerd thing, since a great many people are seeing sluggish systems once this daemon gets going. A fairly common theme is 'Ubuntu is getting bloated'. If tracker-bloody-d is anything to go by, I'd have to agree. I guess it's just symptomatic of other things. It's not going to change, but it's disappointing that inevitable creaping featuritis, mixed with a healthy dose of 'let's dazzle Windows users with crap and hope they convert' is the order of the day with many of these ambitious, heavily marketed open-source projects.

For me, I should really just put some time aside, bump myself over to Xubuntu, or roll a leaner fluxbox desktop or the like, and be done with it. I like many of the Linuxey things you just can't get on a Windows box, but I must admit, I find myself getting increasingly more frustrated with Gnome. It's never been my favourite, but it's starting to really get to me.

I don't want all my posts to be grumbles and whinges though, so on a brighter note, tomorrow night is Friday night, which means pizza night! Mmm pizza.

Today saw the release of Ubuntu 7.10, aka 'Gutsy Gibbon'. I thought I'd go ahead and upgrade. How wonderful 8MB ADSL is... I had the 800 megs in update files in no time. The upgrade went off without a hitch, which is usually the best thing you can say about an upgrade.

This version has Gnome 2.20, which is as unexciting as any previous version. There's also Compiz Fusion support which is really cool but beyond my laptop's graphics capabilities, so I wobbled a few windows and then switched it off. But it's nice to know it's there. Oh, and Nautilus is as rubbish as ever. That's about it.

This is one of those 'I fixed a problem but I'll be damned if I can do it again' posts. I wanted to get my favouritist monospaced font for Linux, Schumacher Clean. It's installed by default on Ubuntu, to a bunch of /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/clR*.pcf.gz files. Linux and X and fonts is a world I've always remained gleefully ignorant of, probably to my own detriment a great many times. Perhaps reading another article or paragraph would lead me to enlightenment, but alternatively, it could just be that X11 font management is a confusing glob of software that hangs together by faith and a bit of wizardry by the 3 people on this planet who really grok it all. Who knows? Anyway, I have no idea what PCF fonts are exactly, but I gather they're basically just bitmap fonts, and Ubuntu, by default, seems to not list these bitmap fonts in the font dialog.

After a bit of digging around, it seems that running dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig does some magic stuff and enables bitmap fonts. I say 'it seems' because I did a few other obscure things along the way, and one or all of them might have played a wee part in the solution, too. Next time I lose my fonts, though, that's the one I'm trying first. I might even bring myself to read the man page.

Other commands which I'll read up on when I'm bored one day:

fc-cache -f -v
dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config

The Ubuntu FontInstallHowto wiki page is somewhat enlightening.

Aug 1, 2007 12:08:15 AM org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina start
INFO: Server startup in 666 ms

Server of the beast!

I realised last week that if I didn't get cracking, the day's going to come when I'll have spent an entire year with Windows XP as my home OS. Can't have that, what would all the cool kids say, so I decided enough is enough and I'm making a concerted effort to boot into Linux and stay there. The problem was that after shutting down my beloved Gentoo box last year and moving over here, it took so damned long to get everything set up in Windows on the new laptop, that I'm loath to have to start all over again in Linux. I can copy and paste a lot of config stuff from Windows and old Gentoo backups, but there's still a lot of schlep involved. But it had to be done. Frustrations aside, it's nice to be back.

Anyway, the change-over is also chance to do some housekeeping. Tomcat 6 got released a few months ago, so it's upgrade time. It implements the Servlet 2.5 and JSP 2.1 specs. Guess I should read the what's new articles (servlet, jsp).

... and I still haven't had a good look at what's new in Java 6.

I decided to take another stab at the Ubuntu wireless thing this evening. I cleared a space in the spare room, perched the laptop on top of a box, contorted and got an ethernet cable plugged in. Not too long after, and I had wireless working. I still don't know exactly what I did, but following these instructions verbatim did the trick. I am now blogging from Ubuntu, and am a happy camper.

Except for one thing. Ubuntu has no black cursor theme by default. I dunno about now, but in the old days, as in the Mac OS 7 days, Macs had a black cursor. Early versions of Windows had white cursors, and ever since, my first act of defiance when setting up a new (Windows) machine is to switch to a black cursor. (The other thing is to move 'My Computer' to the top right of the desktop and the Recycle Bin to the bottom right). Now I see that Ubuntu has white cursor themes, and red cursor themes, but no black cursor theme.

Gonna have to fix that. And track down my old Glass-looking Gnome theme. And get decent fonts installed. And remember how I got my menus to use a 7 point font, and smaller icons. And and and...

But at least Ubuntu's running. I think I shall have some chocolate to celebrate.

It's not that I hate Windows XP, it's just that some parts of it really grate me. I'm sick of NAV freaking out because my virus definition subscription has expired. It's been over a week, gotta sort it out, I have a spare license somewhere here, but it's a mission to dig it up. I have Norton Protection Gulag blasting me with warnings every time I boot up because I choose to review Windows updates before installing them, and every time I shut down, some random Acer utility program won't close gracefully.

All of this means one thing: time for Linux again. I agonised a bit over Gentoo vs Ubuntu, but Ubuntu won. We'd used it on Ronwen's machine for a stretch last year, and it's nice and easy to set up and use, and I can do with easy right now.

I cleared a spare partition, and installed Edgy Eft this weekend (maybe I didn't hug enough bunnies as a kid, but I have to say it: Ubuntu's naming is naff). Anyway... I've never used Linux on a laptop, so I wasn't sure what to expect. Remarkably, the touchpad worked like a charm, even the fancy scrolling-down-the-side feature. The screen resolution is woozy but apparently there's a tool for that. The deal-breaker, though, is that my wireless card ain't working. Being a wireless newbie, more homework is needed. That, and an ethernet cable to my ADSL router. Since the router is behind a mountain of boxes in the spare room, that ain't going to happen for a while.

So I'm sticking with Windows for now. Bugger.

Interesting: Ian Murdock, once of Debian fame, is joining Sun. Quote:

The last several years have been hard for Sun, but the corner has been turned. As an outsider, I’ve watched as Sun has successfully embraced x86, pioneered energy efficiency as an essential computing feature, open sourced its software portfolio to maximize the network effects, championed transparency in corporate communications, and so many other great things.

I wonder how many people would agree that Sun's turning a corner. It must take a lot of guts to make a move like this.

The first of this month marked 1 year since I signed up and rented this virtual server. It's been rather well-behaved:

colin@colinpretorius:~$ uptime
 23:31:08 up 199 days, 17:51,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

I have no idea why it got bounced. Wasn't me, promise.

I also noticed that the kind folks at RoseHosting have bumped me up from 256MB to 512MB of memory somewhere along the line.

colin@colinpretorius:~$ free -m
             total       used     free  shared  buffers  cached
Mem:           512         30      481      0        0       0
-/+ buffers/cache:         30      481
Swap:         4000        611     3388

I've been busy on the server this evening, which has kicked up some dust. The server's been averaging around 25 megs of in-use memory for a while now. The swap file's rather big, but if the OS thinks the gumpf can be paged, it can't be that important. Who says Java apps need to be expensive? I could probably store the whole damned blog in memory, and get away with it.

Anyhoo, the fact that the server's been going for a year, meant I had some emergency admin to do. A year ago I decided I didn't like the way logrotate handled my log files, and found a utility called cronolog which suited my needs far better. Cronolog wasn't an active project though, and I wasn't in any rush to make the change because logrotate would only start dropping log files after 52 weeks.

A week or so back I realised that a year was already up, and it was about time I tweak logrotate or swap to cronolog. Needless to say, I could remember very little about how to do either, so I did some homework, and tonight took the plunge and switched to cronolog, which once again seems to be active. I wrote some notes to remind myself of what I did and how I did it.

Eve Online is fun. Lots and lots of fun. There's only one problem: Eve is Windows-only, meaning I have to boot into my (until now) hardly used Windows partition, whenever I want to play. This is a little suboptimal, because my whole life is now on an ext3 file system. I've tried using Eve with Wine, but it's still a bit broken. It's good enough to log in, update skills training and chew the fat in chat channels, but there are a few memory leaks which leave it all falling apart after a few minutes.

Aptly (pun originally unintended), I read a blog post by Ian Murdock this week, contemplating the fact that Windows still has the best driver support:

Me, I actually prefer the Linux desktop over Windows. But now, with all the improvements in virtualization over the past few years, I can still use the Linux desktop as my primary UI and have access to the most extensive set of device drivers.

Tempting. In my case it's not drivers, it's just that little thing called DirectX 9. I'm rather partial to my Linux desktop too, and all the booting between Windows and Linux is a pain. I think it might be venturing into the realms of overkill to change my entire set-up just because of a game (no matter how addictive), but booting into Windows and running Linux in a VMWare partition would certainly be the best of both worlds...

A link for posterity. Getting this error when starting the vmware init.d script:

VMware Server is installed, but it has not been (correctly) configured
for the running kernel. To (re-)configure it, invoke the
following command: /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl.

... is fixed by deleting /etc/vmware/not_configured. More here, via here.