Tag Archive for 'Linux'

Random story idea

Published at 1:21 pm on September 6, 2010 in Random Stuff and writing.

Found this in my notes. Wrote it about a year ago, never did anything with it.

Post-future dystopian city. In a state of perpetual gang warfare. The major players are Microsoft, who has bribed most of the government, Apple, who manufacturers various gadgets, and the underground Linux Mafia.

Also making an appearance are the GNU anarchist terrorists, the many faces of 4chan, facebook (system used by the government to track down and spy on everyone), Digg and Reddit (this universe’s version of the Crips and the Bloods) and many, many other other Internet cultures and software fanboys.

This is a place where “Flame War” means something involving napalm. GIMP users do drive-by shootings on Photoshoppers. Zune die-hards break into apple warehouses looking for secret plans to the ultimate mobile media device, only to be wiped out by Apple’s iKill security defences.

Dell manufacturers hunter-killer robots. Though most of their robots run Windows, Dell has begun to preload some of them with Linux. This severely strained their relationship with Microsoft, to the point where Microsoft moved a battalion of troops to the Microsoft/Dell border. In an effort to placate their Ally, Dell launched an advertising campaign with the slogan “Dell recommends Windows: Killer Edition for your Deathbot 9000.”

The Industrial district of the city is is ruins, made that way by the never ending war between Intel and AMD. Tanks and infantry roam the streets. NVidia and ATI fight over the scraps. Giant automated factories are hidden underground, producing deathbot after deathbot. Well known military researcher Gordon Moore predicts that due to the rate of technological advancement, wars will be fought with giant mechs soon. Everyone concurs that this will be awesome.

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How-to: WPA/TKIP on Linux

Published at 6:58 pm on April 14, 2010 in Geeky Stuff and tutorial.

It’s simpler then you think. Yes, it involves wpa_suplicant, but you don’t have to edit any config files or try to decipher the wpa_supplicant command that involves a dozen random, mandatory arguments.

First, install wpa_gui. It should be in your repositories (might have to look under “wpagui” — without the underscore). Run it. If it says something like “could not get status from wpa_supplicant” continue on. Otherwise, awesome! The program is a bit non-standard in it’s interface, but it’s really not as terrible as it may seem. Just hit “scan,” double click the network you want, edit the information with everything needed, then hit “add.” Should connect automatically after that.

To get wpa_suplicant configured right, it’s easiest to install ceni. This is a tool created by the sidux developers as a replacement tool for Network Manager. There’s a deb and source-code in the directory I linked, so it shouldn’t be too hard. Though it was created for a Debian-based distro, I’m confident that it’ll work anywhere. (Note: it’s a curses app — console based, but not command line.)

Once you get it installed, run it. If it freezes your system for ~30 seconds, don’t freak. It does that me, too. Dunno why.

Select your wireless card when prompted, then select reconfigure, then roaming. Then hit the continue (shouldn’t need to change the default options) and… ta-da! wpa_gui should work just fine. ^_^

Any problems/suggestions, feel free to comment.

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Firefox doesn’t suck — Ubuntu does

Published at 12:05 pm on November 24, 2009 in Deep Thought, Geeky Stuff, Linux and rants.

“Firefox is bloated.“
“Firefox sucks!“
“Firefox runs faster in Wine, ZOMG!“
“WTF, FX?”

Complaints like these are quite common. A number of people are convinced that Firefox runs like crap on Linux — so slow that even the Windows version running via Wine goes faster.

I, too, was one of those people. When I ran Ubuntu on my laptop, Firefox would take ~5 seconds to switch tabs. It would hang while scrolling. The rise and fall of the Roman Empire took about as long as Firefox did starting up.

It sucked.

I thought Chromium was a gift from the gods when I found it.

But then I switched to Sidux, and last night I gave Firefox another try. And guess what? It’s fast! Not quite as snappy as chromium, but pretty darn close!

The only conclusion I can come to is that Ubuntu is doing something terribly wrong. What, I haven’t a clue.

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Random thoughts on KDE4

Published at 4:27 pm on November 12, 2009 in Geeky Stuff.

Posted this first on the Ubuntu Forums. Added some gripes about Konqueror.

I’m using 4.3 right now for the first time, and I really haven’t made up my mind yet.

I love the QT toolkit look — much smoother then GTK. It’s cool how everything on the desktop is a widget (plasmoid or something?), and I like the fact that the panels scale so smoothly. I guess everything is SVGs or something.

However, I do have some gripes.

A big one is that compositing demands resources that my netbook doesn’t have. On Gnome+Compiz Fusion, even some more advanced effects went smoothly. On KDE, just switching workspaces is enough to lag it up.

Even without compositing, desktop widgets animate like molasses. Oh, and any widget menu (right clicking on the desktop, opening the main menu, etc.) flickers for a split second, like the graphics are getting corrupted or something. The same thing happens with the logout dialog — the entire screen behind the dialog gets skewed. Not pretty.

And then there’s just some small stuff, like the battery indicator text not shrinking with the icon, making it unreadable at small sizes.

And Konqueror sucks for web browsing. Really sucks. History layout is terrible, as it sorts by site instead of page; no from of an “awesomebar” at all; randomly ignores my middle click preferences; hangs for ~5 seconds after navigating to a new site via the address bar…

Ugh.

So, the tl;dr version: KDE is nice, but it needs improvement. I eagerly await the 4.5 release.

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