darkness

Keeping up with a web log is hard. Therefore today you get random bits.

I’ve installed RH9. I had some problems that I initially blamed on RH9, but I think in the end I’ve decided it was some bad/incompatible memory. RH9 is nice enough.

To get Gnome usable, go back to Sawfish! It’s included, just not installed by default; you need Sawfish and rep-gtk from disc 3, then librep from disc 2 IIRC. Once you’ve installed Sawfish, run gnome-session-properties. Remove Metacity from your current session and hit apply. Now rejoice because you have no window manager. Now go to the session startup tab (or something like that; the last tab) and tell it to start Sawfish, order 30 (I think; maybe it was 20?). Save or apply if there are buttons to do so. Close gnome-session-properties. Log out, log back in. Sawfish is now your window manager. Now run gnome-session-properties again and… remove Sawfish from startup programs. If you don’t do this it seems Gnome tries to start Sawfish twice? Close session properties. Log out and make sure to save your session. Now when you log back in you should still have Sawfish. Rejoice again, then run sawfish-ui to get your (almost) familiar Sawfish configuration options.

No need to change window managers in Gnome, indeed! Bastards.

Note that the above worked for me, but I think it was playing with gconf-editor some too. I found the schemas section in gconf-editor, and I get the idea this may show all potential keys that whatever application has registered. Poking around in my GConf registry (*snicker* registry *snicker*) I found that Nautilus has a show_desktop key (or something like that) in its preferences “branch” (or whatever it’s called). I set that to 0 and no more stupid icons on my desktop. Of course… Nautilus went away too. I am not necessarily upset about this. I also found some Gnome default_window_manager key or something that I set to Sawfish. I have no idea what effect changing this key had, if any.

If you run a Half-Life server, it seems typing stuffcmds at the console is… bad. Type it on a full server and see what I mean. Sadist.

There are already errata for RH9.

The Creative Nomad Jukebox 3 is a hard disk MP3 player that has a digital input. It is capable of recording to WAV format at 48KHz. I find this cool. Unfortunately it is unsuitable for any kind of activity, due to its hard disk and too small buffer. The iPod supposedly has a big enough buffer so you can jog with it, but do you really want to jog with a hard disk? Sounds like a lot of stress on the disk. I’m almost resigned to getting a tiny MP3 player/FM radio with removable media for active stuff, and then getting a Nomad Jukebox 3 for recording. DAT is expensive, including portable DAT players. I wish MD would just allow me to get the digital audio off in a nice manner (with tracks boundaries, etc.)

I tried KDE for a bit, but found a few annoying things I decided I couldn’t live without. KWin had no option to show the dimensions of the window that was being resized (Sawfish does). I couldn’t see to get an alt-tab setting that worked like Sawfish (raise window temporarily, display name of window in the middle of the screen, alt-tab starts with the last window that had focus). The task bar boxes would fade out the text towards the edge of the box if the contents wouldn’t fit in the box. KDE is nice though. I used Konqueror extensively today, thanks to Andy’s suggestion. I liked it mostly, though I had a few problems. I suspect it is leaps and bounds better than Nautilus. I suggest Nautilus analyze this claim and, if found to be true, immediately surrender and start working on Konq. I also got freaked out when the KDE screen saver kept running after I started typing my password, and the CPU was apparently so loaded that KDE/X/someone was losing keystrokes. It made typing in my password tricky.

Actually, keep your mitts off of Konq. I’ve seen what some of you guys have done to the rest of Gnome. I think you’re all in league together. Just make everything else in Gnome integrate nicely with Konq.

Fonts in RH9 are very pretty.

I read all about the X-Files story arc at The Ultimate X-Files Information Complex. Unfortunately I found a bunch of stuff in The X-Files that was inconsistent and/or didn’t make sense. I read one person who said that Chris Carter made up the plot as he was going, pretty much. That ass bandit. Get your shit together, like the guy that made Babylon 5. We don’t need everyone walking around bleeding green. This was balanced out, somewhat, by learning that it is probable that Mulder and Scully got together. On one hand that’s kind of like giving in, but on the other hand… awwww. Yay.

Spring has strange effects on me. I suspect it does on other people too. Spring rolls around and you start thinking about love — or maybe just lust. You can get restless. You start thinking about the past, thinking about other people you’ve known. The change in climate is so drastic that it prods your brain to recall what you were doing and who you were with on the day spring broke through from every year in your past. It’s kind of nice. It makes me kind of crazy though. Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll snap, and Spring’s craziness doesn’t help.

I think that’s enough for tonight. I need to get e-mail working on my new RH9 box. Then maybe I’ll put FreeBSD on my old box.