darkness

I’m running out of titles for my entries. I’m also spending a lot of time getting my FC4 box where I want it to be.

I turned off “Use mmap” in the ALSA output plug-in for BMP and it no longer randomly stops playing until I pause/unpause. I think I am getting little hiccups, but I can’t say for sure whether that’s some resource issue on my PC or an actual software problem. It’s all kind of academic, though, because once I packaged bmp-docklet and found that it crashed as soon as I tried to hide BMP, I kicked BMP to the curb and installed the Dag FC3 RPMs for xmms-mp3 and xmms-status-plugin, along with XMMS from Extras. Notification area is a bit uglier now, and I can definitely now tell that XMMS doesn’t use GTK2, but at least I can play a fucking MP3.

dmesg shows some messages from agpgart saying my card is in “0x” mode. (As opposed to 1x or 2x.) I wonder what significance I should attach to that. I’ll cross that road when I start playing games on this box.

Firefox crashed a couple more times. Maybe you could say “it’s the Tab Mix extension,” but should an extension be able to crash Firefox? I guess I need to slap gdb on it.

The previously mentioned Beep Media Player is now randomly stopping during playback. Hitting play makes it go on (the display shows that it’s playing already, though… even though there’s no sound coming out) or a pause/play combo. It seems to happen whenever I do things in… Firefox. Which, to my knowledge, makes no sounds. I think I’m using a bmp-mp3 package from FreshRPMS but it might be Dag. Maybe I just need to go back to XMMS. Progress? What’s that, now?

fam-devel has been replaced by gamin-devel. I found this out when going to build maildrop. yum list fam-devel doesn’t list gamin-devel, but yum install fam-devel installs gamin-devel. Maybe this is a reason to “don’t list, just try installing.”

Fedora Extras has Pyzor and (I think; looking for the incantation to test SpamAssassin) Razor. No DCC. I am unconcerned. (Oh, http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/TestingInstallation is your friend. spamassassin -D < /usr/share/doc/spamassassin-*/sample-spam.txt and read the (ahem) spam from that.)

I think I just horked my system pretty hard by holding down the print screen key, which is bound to GNOME’s “take screenshot” action. I can’t get my panel menu to come up. Metacity doesn’t look like it’s handing out focus to anyone. I had to close about 10 gnome-screenshots. Oh, hold on, it’s more fun than that: no keys seem to really be working. SSH in, chvt 1, and keyboard works fine, so it’s X. killall metacity brought me back to life. Maybe the GNOME keyboard shortcuts dialog somehow got stuck in “grab” mode or something. For fun I set the scroll lock key to Metacity “move window.”

The clamav-server package really just installs the skeleton you need to make your own ClamAV service. The RPM says you should have a separate ClamAV service (read: init script, config, user, clamd process) for each service that needs ClamAV. I find this kind of needlessly complex. I just like having clamd running so every e-mail I get doesn’t have to spawn a whole new ClamAV process. Maybe I misunderstand how things work, or overestimate the pain I will feel from loading ClamAV again and again. On the off chance I haven’t committed either of these mistakes, though, why not ship a clamav-default-server package or something, that has a simple configuration for use on workstations where people don’t need this complexity? I’ll assume there’s something I don’t know/don’t understand going on here. freshclam is also bitching about a missing /etc/clamd.conf that I don’t know anything about.

Thank god GNOME took out the easily-found “new mail” applet. I think it was deprecated in favor of Evolution, which of course you’re using instead of mutt, right? Right. But in case you’re a filthy mutt-using communist, there is apparently mailnotify. “Where’s the package?” you say, noting that there’s no mailnotify package in Extras, et al. Turns out they cunningly named the package mail-notification! yum search mailnotify picked it up in the URL. This is all starting to feel kind of absurd. What was wrong with mailnotify as a package name, to conform with the upstream name? At least the included README.FEDORA file notes that I have to restart my session (which I interpret as “logout and back in”) before I can actually use mail-notification. Also, you don’t add it like a normal panel app; instead, menu->Internet->Mail Notification, and tell it to start at gnome login. My notification area has a bit of a gap on it that I can’t get rid of.

Oh. No. That’s the mail notification applet. I have new mail. The notification area icon has shrunk to some odd column a couple pixels wide. Excellent. Restart it, and it seems to be working fine now. I expect it will break at next login, in the same manner.

When using mv to move my old SSH host keys back to /etc/ssh I got errors to the tune of warning: security context not preserved. I was moving off of NFS, so I suppose the files’ security contexts weren’t saved in the move to/from NFS. After I moved them over, fixfiles check /etc/ssh reported problems (that is, it had output). So I did fixfiles restore /etc/ssh and all was well again (fixfiles check /etc/ssh now had no output).

The high point of my Fedora experience always seems to be yum. It Just Works, and I’ll say these days it’s working faster than in, say, FC2 (what I’m upgrading from). I could swear it installs RPMs faster than rpm -Uvh somehow.

So how’s about that Linux desktop!

I want to play my MP3s. XMMS isn’t installed. Instead I have Rhythmbox. OK, I’ll give it a go. It’s supposed to be the GNOME version of iTunes. I forgot a problem I have with Rhythmbox: it doesn’t show you files, it shows you artist/album. I mean, I have many problems with Rhythmbox (and iTunes, I suppose) but this one is a real show-stopper for me. I need to see my files, not the ID3 tags you’ve read, most of which are completely useless. I’ve got lots and lots of MP3s, and a great majority of them I’ve never tagged (because I have too many to tag up to my standards). I also had to go to the GStreamer Fedora repository to get MP3 support, of course. I recognize that Red Hat/Fedora isn’t really responsible for the lack of MP3 support. Doesn’t necessarily make it any less annoying. You kind of wish they’d just put in a repository file for someone’s MP3 plugins, even if they leave it enabled=0, but I digress. To really please me, Rhythmbox crashed in the middle of scanning my MP3s—not even the big directory, either. So Rhythmbox gets kicked to the curb.

I went to install XMMS and found “Beep Media Player” (BMP) instead. Installed it, looks fine. In fact, I think it looks nicer than XMMS, I just can’t place how it is that it looks nicer. I suspect it has something to do with using GTK2. The equivalent of the XMMS Status Plug-in for BMP is bmp-docklet (horrible color scheme on that page, BTW). No package I can find for it, except maybe NewRPMS’ bmp-extra-plugins package for FC3 which has more dependencies than I care to meet. I suspect it’ll be fairly trivial to package.

Thank god I can finally play MP3s. What’s going on here? Shouldn’t this be a lot easier? Why does Rhythmbox absolutely suck for my needs? Am I so far removed from “regular users”? Sigh.

I’ve found a few more things about Metacity I want to change:

• I really need to make sure focus never gets stolen. I think what I’m going to do when making a decision about focus for a new window is:
  • If there’s no “normal” window on the screen with focus, give focus to the new window.
  • Otherwise, no focus for the new window, but put it next in the stack to be alt-tabbed to.
• Clicks need to not raise the window when I’m using sloppy focus.
• I need the little informational box showing the list of windows when I’m cycling and I need the temporarily-raise-while-cycling behavior you only get when you use the “cycle without box” hotkey.

So I’ll probably hack on that tonight… after I set up e-mail, which has gone far too long.

I fired up Nautilus because I wanted a GUI file manager. It’s fast and I think it’ll be suitable, though I’ve grown quite used to Konqueror. (Reprise: maybe I should switch to KDE?) Tip: turn off “spatial mode.” They’ve got some good arguments for why spatial mode is technically correct in terms of giving the user a consistent view of objects on the system, but I’ve been using file managers for years and I don’t really treasure the idea of having a separate window for each fucking directory. Some of us have directories several (say, seven or eight from /) levels deep that we use on a regular basis. Use gconf-editor to turn off /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser. There are plenty of other settings you can play with in there too, of course.

Firefox crashed on me today too. I’m not totally sure it wasn’t my ipw2100 driver, which seems to be behaving a bit aberrantly as well. (At least, that’s what I blame. I figure it’s the most likely thing to be going wrong. Either that, or IPsec is having problems, or the kernel itself is having problems, or… one of these other daemons is having problems.) I’m not terribly impressed with some piece of software here. I’m just not sure which one(s) to blame.

OK, Sawfish isn’t looking real happy in FC4. I ended up rebuilding Sawfish because paths to rep stuff had changed. Two problems:

1. rep-gtk had to make its own version of a couple GTK functions in the past. Those functions seems to be in FC4’s GTK. However, they must work differently: sawfish-ui makes an assertion failure.
2. When I cycle windows in Sawfish with alt-tab, the box that appears with the window name in the center of the screen stays up until I press another key. So: press alt-tab to cycle to next window, box pops up with name of window that now has focus, box does not disappear like it used to. Press any other key and the box disappears. Key seems to be sent to window that appeared to have focus, too.

So the RPMs I posted earlier are not a panacea. I’m trying to get by with Metacity, presently. Its window placement is likely going to bug the shit out of me. Tip: hold shift while dragging a window with mouse for “gravity.” (Pretty extreme gravity when there’s only one window on the screen. Try it and see what I mean.)

I go to try and fix my mouse problem/switch to the NVIDIA X server simultaneously. Turns out the latest NVIDIA X server, 7664 I think, doesn’t support the GeForce 256 or the GeForce 2, and I’m sure I have one of those. dmesg has a note from the driver telling you to check out the “NVIDIA Legacy drivers” or something, but they don’t exist yet I gather. NVIDIA’s website is kind of a maze. Solution: ATrpms has 7174 packaged for FC4. That seems to work. (BTW, information cleaned from nV News forums.)

nscd is crashing all the time still. I think I figured out how to run gdb over it. Will try and post link to inevitable Fedora bug later.

Turns out the kernel correctly detected my mouse as “ImExPS/2”. I needed to go set Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2" in /etc/xorg.conf. I also used system-config-mouse to change my mouse type to a PS/2 wheel mouse, and edited /etc/sysconfig/mouse so it looks something like:

FULLNAME="Generic - Wheel Mouse (PS/2)"
MOUSETYPE="exps2"
XEMU3="no"
XMOUSETYPE="ExplorerPS/2"
DEVICE=/dev/input/mice

Now scrolling up no longer simulates both scrolling up and right click. Seems like I’ve been here before. Kind of wonder why I can’t select this as a mouse type in system-config-mouse and have this stuff set for me.

I just noticed that Metacity is giving focus to new windows that pop up. That’s probably not cool. I wonder how hard it is to hack on Metacity. I’d use another window manager, but of the ones I’ve reviewed I’ve been kind of disappointed. Window Maker looked kind of promising, but development seems stagnant and there were some annoying placement bugs, IIRC. wmii would probably be cool, but I really want to use gnome-panel. Plus some applications really did behave weird with it; but I could probably get around that with more configuration, or else get used to it. Ion would be neat, but I seem to recall running up against some limitations WRT its Lua bindings, limitations that made me not care to use it anymore. I was fine with using rep (almost-kinda-looks-like-LISP) to script/configure the window manager… not that I ever needed to: sawfish-ui gave me about every option I could think of needing. There are some rumblings on the Sawfish mailing list, someone’s kind of forked it, but I don’t count on bug support. I’m relegated to using the GNOME window manager as long as I want to use the latest GNOME-and-friends.

Continuing yesterday’s entry on FC4 installation.

• Sawfish is just not in Fedora, not even in Extras. I suspect this reflects the lack of anyone caring enough to maintain the package. I should probably volunteer for this. I went ahead and build new librep packages using the newest version from SourceForge (0.17). I’ll put a working set of Sawfish RPMS and their deps (rep) up at [sorry, these RPMs were removed as they don't actually work; try reading forward a few posts]. (Oh, I ended up having to rebuild rep-gtk too, so that’s up there.)
• For some reason, autoconf wouldn’t install because of GPG key problems. I had to manually rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY. This is only unusual because, up until now, this new version of yum has been nice enough to install all my keys for me.
• gnome-wm will, apparently, let you change your window manager in gnome, kind of. Put something like export WINDOW_MANAGER=sawfish in ~/.bashrc.
• With gconf-editor I switched off /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop.
• It is suspected (by me) that the color I like for my background is about #3B748C. I should probably just look at my Sawfish theme and see what color(s) it uses (I suspect it’s a gradient).

Have to go take a Geology exam online now. My mouse wheel up isn’t working. I suspect I need to bring over the same fix I used in FC2… once I remember everything that was involved in it. Will update in next entry.