Eric Bergen

As a third generation mac laptop owner I’ve been able to watch the products evolve over the past 3 years. While I think apple has always designed the best laptop hardware, they haven’t hit the sweet spot for me. I’ve owned 2 giant ipods and one powerbook. All three have had their good features and bad.

Laptop size has is very important. I don’t like that apple always tries to fit the most power into the smallest package. New style wide screens are great. They are have a nice sharp picture and are great for watching movies. They don’t work so well on a laptop. The display is great but because they are wide screen the rest of the laptop has to be built in a rectangle shape. This makes it more difficult to use when laying back on a couch. There isn’t enough height on the base to put it between my legs and stomach (maybe I need a bigger beer gut). It also forces me to look down further to see the screen which is worse for my neck and back. I had the same problem with my powerbook. The height and width of my iBook is perfect. I just wish it was as thin as and as powerful as a macbook. Everyone seems to be very concerned about making things smaller. Sometimes it’s ok to keep something the same size yet make it faster.

My perfect laptop would be a 4:3 screen with the sharp resolution of a 16:9 in a 14″ screen. It would be as thin as a MBP and just as powerful.

Apple has managed to knock one more item off the list of things I think are missing from Mac OS X. Leopard is going to support virtual desktops with an app they call Spaces. I know that Spaces has already been done with an app called VirtueDesktop. While VirtueDesktop does solve the problem it’s clunky and not very intuitive to manage. Spaces borrows a few tricks from it’s older brother Exposé using Mac OS X awesome graphics engine to give an overview of all desktops and drag windows between them. I hope it works as well as they say it does on their site.

I would like to be able to specify window specific settings to be applied to windows that are created. Things like when the javascript viewer in firefox opens it will be a specific size, always on top, and open at a specific position. These things are all possible in KDE but not Mac OS X. They aren’t so important on the laptop as they are on a desktop. On Mac laptops I have found it works well enough to simply flick a finger across the trackpad to an Exposé hot corner to show all windows instead of having several desktops. When that laptop is docked another profile should load that sets up shortcuts for switching to virtual desktops and automatically moves all those windows to the correct desktop.

• The list is down to
• Window specific settings for on top, size, and location.
• Easy profiles for being docked vs mobile.
• Shortcut keys for most window operations like maximize, close, minimize, and open.
• Ability to map those shortcut keys to anything not just a few choices.

Mac OS X is the current leader for my primary OS choice for portable and docked environment. Once they fix the items above (or you submit comments telling me how to easily accomplish those things) I will be able to run my entire computer life from a single box. Something I have wanted to do for a long time. The end to this quest is getting closer but it’s not over yet..

The quest continues… Tonight while working from home firefox crashed. Firefox never crashes on this box. When I tried to start it again I got nothing. Time to revert to the terminal. Starting firefox now returns:

GConf Error: Adding client to server’s list failed, CORBA error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0
Could not set mode 0700 on private per-user gnome configuration directory `/home/firewire/.gnome2_private/’: Read-only file system
Read only? How did the filesystem suddenly become read only? After some more digging I found that it’s a trick ext3 pulls to try to protect itself. From dmsg:

[4671483.997000] EXT3-fs error (device hdb1): ext3_free_blocks_sb: bit already cleared for block 963080
[4671483.997000] Remounting filesystem read-only

I’m pecking this out from firefox in windows in vmware. Since vmware runs off of my second disk it’s still writable.

Well that’s what I get for using a salvaged drive from a 4 year old compaq. So now I’m stuck. I have a nice SATA disk with all my important info on it. The only problem is kubuntu won’t let me install from that disk without formatting it because it’s using reiserfs. I can go back to suse but that would be a step backwards. I am quite disappointed that kubuntu won’t let me install without formatting the disk. I’m open to suggestion for another distro to try or tricks to make (k)ubuntu work on my SATA disk. I was really starting to warm up to kubuntu too.

I was a big slackware user back in the day but I haven’t seen much movement from that project since the yellow lung granule. I would really like to stick with kubuntu for a while but it’s inability to install from an existing reiser parition is a deal breaker. Fedora has a nice usb stick install capability. I might give it a try. I’m going to sleep on it. I hope this box is still up in the morning

Dear clipboard,

Why don’t you just work? When I copy something from firefox and try to paste it into gaim why do you paste something that I copied from konsole 20 minutes ago? I have set kipper to synchronize the selection and x clipboard. Why doesn’t this work? Why do you hate me? You work from home. With the same exact apps. Yet at work when I need you the most you fail. Miserably.

-Eric

This is really pissing me off. I have tried to switching the klipper options, switching from kde. All I want is a little freedom of choice when I copy and paste. It seems that RHEL has squashed that flat. I want to have the choice of pasting with a keyboard command (shift + insert is fine) but I want it to work and paste the thing I just copied, not the thing I copied 20 minutes ago. It’s driving me crazy. I’m not giving up though. My quest for the perfect working environment will continue (probably forever) but I’m not giving up. I have it pretty good right now bug there are a few more bugs to kill. The clipboard is at the top of my list now. I know it’s possible because it works from home.

Kubuntu has been a rough road so far. Most things work right out of the box but it’s missing a way to install most of the common dev packages. The stable tree seems to be missing a lost of common libs (ones that are even available in suse). I had to install all the auto*, gcc and friends by hand. In SuSE this was done by the all encompassing development group selection.I’m getting he hang of switching to the ‘universe’ tree when I can’t find something on stable. Adept, the apt-get gui is very eash to use. My one complaint is that when it detects a broken dependency it won’t tell me what’s broken.

One thing I love about kubuntu and what spawned this post is the ipasq package/script. It’s not flashy and it doesn’t have a lot of output but it _just works_. Literally. I have been dreading setting up ip forwarding on this box for a few days because it’s normally a big pain in the ass. After a few minutes of searching yahoo I found the ipmasq package. I installed it and ran it. It spit about a bunch of permissions errors from iptables. Then I ran it with sudo. I was expecting another error prompting for interfaces what I got as nothing but amazement. It didn’t output anything but windows in vmware suddenly started connecting. Never before has it been so easy to setup ipmasquerading. Thank you ipmasq and who ever built it. You are truly great.

SuSE 10 has failed me. It seems that every new suse release is further behind in kde package version and is lacking another geek package. I end up putting in extra suse sources and searching all over the net for things I want to use. Sorry SuSE, my old friend, it’s time to say good bye. Your default prompts no longer contain the leet aliases of old suse versions. Granted I can just copy my bash profile before upgrading but that’s not the point. SuSE is moving away from a friendly-to-geek-and-normal-user-alike distro to… well… crap. YaST still can’t handle parsing the protocol and path for a source. Several times I have searched yast for packages that existed in 9.3 but have since been removed (Don’t flame me for not having examples. Just trust me that it happens). I have tried fedora in the past but never got used to up2date. Gentoo is a disaster. I won’t get started on source based distros just see funroll-loops.org While I’m writing this my laptop is burning ubuntu. I will let you know how it goes. Feel free to turn this post into a distro flame war with three rules. No fedora, no gentoo, and no suse. Flame on!

At first glance Instant search appears to be our answer to Google Suggest Both provide instant results to search queries as the user types. The differences appear in the actual results that come back.

When I first saw Google Suggest I was amazed. Once again Google had shown me something painfully obvious that, as a developer I had never thought about doing. The idea of using basic css to extend a native browser widget had never occured to me. It’s an elegant solution to the problem of try and miss searching. Instead of clicking back in the search box on the next page the user can now simply backspace and try again. Simple and elegant.

I have used it maybe 10 times. The idea doesn’t really work with the reasons why I try searches again. I do that because the results I get don’t match, not because the possible result count isn’t high enough. I also type fast enough not to need auto complete on my search results. Suggest in it’s existing format would have a better chance of making it into my daily tool set if it provided spell checking on results as I type. It doesn’t as far as I can tell.

I hadn’t thought about suggest in months until I spotted Instant Search on next.yahoo.com. Instant search is one step closer towards being my home page. It provides real results without waiting for the search results page. A few of my favorite demo searches are:

Many of the things I commonly look for are now at my finger tips. I can check the weather in my town and the towns of most of my family (weather is a big thing in my family) in a few seconds. If I missed some football on sunday I can quickly check the scores of all the teams I care about. I don’t have to think about a bookmark or click to a different website. Most of it is right here, most of it.

I want my spelling hints! This is a vital component missing from both Instant Search and Suggest. Both services will suggest alternate spellings if I submit the page but they leave me guessing while typing in the text area. Dyslexics like myself constantly need our spelling corrected. It’s not that we can’t spell it’s just that a lot of time signals from our brains come out in the wrong order and it’s very hard to spot in a quick glance.

Letting me get instant results for many queries from the same search box is good. It’s impressive, but I’m ready for the next step. Skip the browser. I would like instant results (including spelling suggestions, please) from my firefox toolbar, thunderbird, messenger, treo, tv, and the stereo in my truck.

That’s it. I give up. I have tried every pen ever made and I can’t write with any of them. I’ve been fighting this battle for years. I finally got sick of not being able to read any of my notes about two weeks ago and went hunting, once again for a solution. I found it in the form of a device that I once used almost exclusively in grade school. The PENCIL! More precisely the mechanical pencil. Amazing! This device, with the ability to have it’s marks erased instead of scratched out has saved me much frustration over the past weeks. If I focus and write slowly I can actually read my notes. It’s amazing. I do still catch myself writing to quickly and smearing words but when I do this I simply erase it and write it again slower.

As you may know I have been a dedicated SuSE use for a few years. Most distributions support many desktop environments but have only one that they focus their development on. SuSE uses the ‘K’ Desktop Environment or KDE as their primary desktop environment. They maintain packages for several others but the default is always KDE and is the best supported. Gnome is second followed by several others. As I was researching for this entry I ran across some features screen shots for SuSE from Novell. From what I can see they are all Gnome based. This makes me think either somebody wasn’t paying attention or SuSE is switching to Gnome as their default desktop environment. However the current SuSE Live CD uses KDE as it’s default.

After a few weeks of using Gnome 2.6 both at work and at home from SuSE I have noticed a few things. Most important is that Gnome Terminal is horribly slow. Even on my snappy Athlon it devours resources like a football player at a free buffet. I do have a pimped out xterm config somewhere but this is about default installs and what I can get to from menus. The rest of Gnome seems to run very well. It’s theme support extends to more of my default applications such as Gaim and X-Chat. This is a big plus over KDE which left most GTK theme based applications wearing drab federal prison garb.

Both environments took only a few minutes to setup my default keyboard shortcuts and quick links. From SuSE Gnome wins for speed and KDE wins for Konsole and default applications. So far it’s almost even. An update article will come when I get both of my workstations up and running with Fedora Core 3.

If you have a better suggestion of a Gnome default distribution let me know!

While doing research for my desktop environment post I decided to install Fedora Core 3. In my opinion Redhat has always had a clean Gnome setup. My burner has been on the fritz for a few months now so I have been using my iBook for all my burning needs. Well it is also sick so I can’t burn anything to install Fedora. After a bit of research I found some docs describing how to do a Fedora install with the ISOs on a different partition and booting off of a USB drive. This beats the pants off of the old days of switching out 4 different floppy disks. I did run into one small problem. SELinux doesn’t support reiserfs. No big deal. The second problem is the installer won’t allow the partition containing the ISOs to be /. I’m sure they did this so people wouldn’t format the partition that containted the ISOs but the installer wouldn’t let me just assign that partition to be mounted as root.

Tonight I will swap around some partitions and have another go at it.