Wine Is Not an Emulator

Posted on September 6, 2024 by antisol

Lol, someone just tried to split hairs and argue semantics with me, telling me that Wine Is Not an Emulator.

“Did you know that wine is not an emulator? It’s right there in the name! That’s what the acronym stands for!” Uh herp derp.
(I see someone has read the same wine FAQ I read 20 years ago. Yay you!)

I just thought I’d take a moment to agree on a deep technical level with this sentiment. Wine is, indeed, not an emulator. To quote one of the pre-eminent geniuses of our time:

Wine translates windows "stuff" to native linux "stuff"

See, wine pretends to be a different system, and translates “stuff” from the windows system so that it can run on your native (linux) system.

But OTOH an emulator pretends to be a different system, and translates “stuff” from the emulated system so that it can run on your native (linux) system.

The main distinction between the two, of course, being that emulators tend to actually fucking work.

Note

I couldn’t bear the possibility of someone coming along and thinking I don’t actually know the difference / distinction that the wine pedants insist on, so just for the record: the difference is that an emulator emulates the hardware stack whereas wine is totally-definitely-not-at-all-”emulating” the software stack, i.e the windows API.

Command Of The Day

Posted on November 2, 2022 by antisol

The other day I learned about a new command that I wish I’d known about years ago: mountpoint

I’ve done all kinds of things grepping /proc/mounts (or the output from ‘mount’) in the past to try to determine whether a directory is a mountpoint or not, and there was a simple command for it all along.


$ mount

/dev/sdb2 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,discard,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/sda2 on /home type ext4 (rw,relatime)
/dev/sdd1 on /media/external type ext4 (rw)

$ mountpoint /home
/home is a mountpoint

$ mountpoint /home/antisol
/home/antisol is not a mountpoint

$ umount /media/external

$ mountpoint /media/external || echo "Dammit"
/media/external is not a mountpoint
Dammit

# A Better Example:
$ mountpoint -q /some/dir || echo -e "\n** Setting up bind mount, sudo password may be required **\n" && sudo mount --bind /src/dir/ /some/dir

News from another century

Posted on September 27, 2022 by antisol

A long, long time ago – 1999/06/03 – I was brave enough to try (and succeed!) at getting Max Reason’s XBasic running on Linux (Red Hat 5.1, to be precise). I remember thinking it was cool to see my name on someone else’s website when he thanked me. I didn’t even think about it at the time, but this is probably the first time I was able to contribute something back to a free software project.

It seem Max’s site has gone down recently, but here’s the wayback machine link.

(I’d just like to award Max’s parents the “best name evar” award – I think Max Reason even beats out Max Power, particularly for an engineer)

Recursively fixing indentation for a project

Posted on September 18, 2022 by antisol

An interesting thing happened recently. My team had a discussion about various coding standards in order to come up with company guidelines. We all did a survey indicating our preferences on various questions.

One of the questions which came up was spaces vs tabs.

Now, having done a bunch of work with python in the last decade or so, it has seemed to me that spaces are preferred in the python community by the vast majority of people – projects with correct indentation seem to be few and far between, so I expected this question to be a slam-dunk for spaces.

But it wasn’t. It was split right down the middle. And in the end – tabs won out! :O

Maybe there’s still a fighting chance for doing indentation the right way in the python community?

If you, like me, have been stuck in a codebase with incorrect indentation, I’ve put together the incantation necessary to fix the situation:

find . -name \*.py -exec bash -c 'echo {} && unexpand -t 4 "{}" > "{}-tabs" && mv "{}-tabs" "{}" ' \;

Notes:
* you may want to include more file extensions by doing e.g: find . -name \*.pr -or -name \*.txt -exec blablabla
* You may want to change the -t 4 to another value if your project doesn’t use 4 spaces for its indentation width

Moving Linux to an SSD

Posted on September 17, 2016 by antisol

The other day I needed to move my Linux install to an SSD, but there were a few issues:

I was moving to a 240GB SSD from a 1TB HDD
I wanted the OS to be installed on the SSD and to make the 1tb drive a /home partition. When installing initially I didn’t think to use a separate /home partition (I usually do, it’s a good idea)
I didn’t have enough free space anywhere to make a copy of everything on the 1tb drive (I was able to make a full backup to another machine, but doing so meant that there wasn’t enough free space anywhere to use e.g as an intermediate place for doing repartitioning

Here’s how I did it:

Ensure that /etc/fstab is using uuids rather than device nodes (it was, should be the default these days)
Perform a full backup of the entire system
Reboot into a live environment
Partition and format the SSD using gparted
Mount both the old and new disks
Copy the system over, excluding home directories, with:
```
sudo rsync -aXS --exclude=/media/old/home /media/old /media/new
```
(Note: I found that using ‘v’ (verbose) in the rsync command slows things down significantly, since there are many small files and most of the time is spent outputting and scrolling text when in verbose mode)

Prepare the old disk as a home partition by moving the system into a subdirectory and then moving the contents of the /home directory into root:

mkdir /media/old/old_root
mv /media/old/* /media/old/old_root
(check for hidden files/folders in root and move them 
individually with ls -a and mv)
mv /media/old/old_root/home/* /media/old/

use ‘blkid’ to find the uuid of the new disk
edit fstab, adding a new entry for / using the uuid of the SSD (simply copied the ‘/’ line and changed the uuid), and changing the mount point for the 1tb drive to /home

install grub on the new disk. This requires running from a chroot environment:

for f in dev sys proc usr; do sudo mount --bind /$f /mnt/new/$f; done
sudo chroot /media/new
sudo update-grub2
sudo grub-install /dev/sdb

Exit chroot (CTRL-D), Reboot, enter BIOS, and change boot priority to boot from the SSD
Save BIOS changes and reboot
You are now running your existing Linux install, with everything (settings, installed programs, data) intact, from an SSD
Now that my system is running from an SSD with my home directory on the 1TB drive, there were certain things in my home directory which I wanted to speed up by putting them on the SSD. To this end, I created an /SSD directory in the root and then moved and symlinked certain things there, so that they would appear in my home directory but really be on the SSD:
```
sudo mkdir /SSD
sudo chown -Rf username /SSD

mv ~/Work/codebase /SSD/codebase
ln -s /SSD/codebase ~/Work/codebase

mv ~/workspace /SSD/workspace
ln -s /SSD/workspace ~/workspace

mv ~/VMs /SSD/VMs
ln -s /SSD/VMs ~/VMs

(repeat for anything you want to load faster)
```
Since everything is working, clean up by removing the old_system directory (containing the system files from the 1tb disk), will be located in /home: sudo rm -Rf /home/old_system
This had a huge effect on many things: the system is much much faster, it boots in less than 10 seconds, and loading pages in my codebase is now faster than our production server (TODO: move our server to an SSD machine).

Most of the tutorials for moving linux from one machine to another assume that you’re moving to a bigger disk, or assume that you are using less than 50% of available disk space. In my case, where neither of these was true, I found this method of moving things around on the 1tb disk to be efficient in terms of time and space – moving files around on the same disk is very fast on Linux, since it doesn’t actually need to copy the data, so the ‘mv /media/old/* /media/old/old_system’ and ‘mv /media/old/old_system/home/* /media/old/’ took seconds. The slowest part of this entire procedure was the rsync – copying the OS onto the SSD. Overall I found this process to be fairly simple and painless – I was a little apprehensive about it, but it turned out that moving to a new disk really is quite simple.

I found this page quite helpful when doing this (in particular, installing grub on the new disk).

kgrep

Posted on October 26, 2015 by antisol

Ladies and gentlemen, presenting: kgrep – kill-grep

This is a bash function which allows you to type in a search term and kill matching processes. You will be prompted to kill each matching process for your searchterm.

You can also optionally provide a specific signal to use for the kill commands (default: 15)

Usage: kgrep [<signal>] searchterm

Signal may be -2, -9, or -HUP (this could be generalised but I CBF).

search term is anything grep recognises.

kgrep() {
    #grep for processes and prompt whether they should be killed
    if [ -z "$*" ]; then
        echo "Usage: $0 [-signal] searchterm"
        echo -e "\nSearches for processes matching  and prompts to kill them."
        echo -e "signal may be:\n\t-2\n\t-9\n\t-HUP\n to send a different signal (default: TERM)"
        return 0
    fi  
    SIG="-15"
	#yes, this could be more sophisticated
    if [ "$1" == "-9" ] ||  
        [ "$1" == "-2" ] ||
        [ "$1" == "-HUP" ]; then 
        SIG="$1"
        shift
    fi  
    #we need to unset the field separator if ^C is pressed:
    trap "unset IFS; return 0" KILL
    trap "unset IFS; return 0" QUIT
    trap "unset IFS; return 0" INT 
    trap "unset IFS; return 0" TERM

    IFS=$'\n'
	for l in `ps aux | grep "$*" | grep -v grep `; do
        echo $l
        pid=`echo $l | awk '{print $2}'`
        read -p "Kill $pid (n)? " a
        if [[ "$a" =~ [Yy]([Ee][Ss])? ]]; then
            echo kill $SIG $pid
            kill $SIG $pid
        fi
    done
    unset IFS
}

Securing Windows 10

Posted on August 19, 2015 by antisol

How to make a Windows 10 VM secure with a Linux host

Simple! Restrict all intarwebs access to everything that you don’t absolutely need:

run virtualbox with the vboxusers group:
```
sudo -g vboxusers virtualbox
```

allow access to the site you want:

sudo iptables -A OUTPUT -m owner --gid-owner vboxusers -d [ip address] -j ACCEPT

block everything else:

sudo iptables -A OUTPUT -m owner --gid-owner vboxusers -j DROP

In windows you’ll need to edit c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts to
add an entry for the sites you want, since DNS won’t work. Or you could
look at allowing DNS. But I wouldn’t.

If you follow these simple steps, you never have to worry about your testing VM reporting everything you do back to Microsoft.

For extra security, i recommend disconnecting the virtual network cable before you close the VM. That way if you accidentally start it without the vboxusers group it still won’t be able to access the internet.

If you’re running windows on bare metal in 2015 I have no advice for you, you deserve whatever happens.

Shameless plug

Posted on April 8, 2015 by antisol

This kind gentleman just helped me out with a problem I was having on IRC. his How to help page suggests linking to him, so that’s what I’m doing, because I’m damn cheap.

Go visit his website and give him money.

Future History of Init Systems

Posted on December 7, 2014 by antisol

2015: systemd becomes default boot manager in debian.
2017: “complete, from-scratch rewrite”. In order to not have to maintain backwards compatibility, project is renamed to system-e.
2019: debut of systemf, absorbtion of other projects including alsa, pulseaudio, xorg, GTK, and opengl.
2021: systemg maintainers make the controversial decision to absorb The Internet Archive. Systemh created as a fork without Internet Archive.
2022: systemi, a fork of systemf focusing on reliability and minimalism becomes default debian init system.
2028: systemj, a complete, from-scratch rewrite is controversial for trying to reintroduce binary logging. Consensus is against the systemj devs as sysadmins remember the great systemd logging bug of 2017 unkindly. Systemj project is eventually abandoned.
2029: systemk codebase used as basis for a military project to create a strong AI, known as “project skynet”. Software behaves paradoxically and project is terminated.
2033: systeml – “system lean” – a “back to basics”, from-scratch rewrite, takes off on several server platforms, boasting increased reliability. systemm, “system mean”, a fork, used in security-focused distros.
2117: critical bug discovered in the long-abandoned but critical and ubiquitous system-r project. A new project, system-s, is announced to address shortcomings in the hundred-year-old codebase. A from-scratch rewrite begins.
2142: systemu project, based on a derivative of systemk, introduces “Artificially intelligent init system which will shave 0.25 seconds off your boot time and absolutely definitely will not subjugate humanity”. Millions die. The survivors declare “thou shalt not make an init system in the likeness of the human mind” as their highest law.
2147: systemv – a collection of shell scripts written around a very simple and reliable PID 1 introduced, based on the brand new religious doctrines of “keep it simple, stupid” and “do one thing, and do it well”. People’s computers start working properly again, something few living people can remember. Wyld Stallyns release their 94th album. Everybody lives in peace and harmony.

The Neo Freerunner – A Review

Posted on January 20, 2014 by antisol

I just emailled this to some guy who was asking about the freerunner on the openmoko lists, where I still lurk. I was proofreading it and thought to myself “hey, this is actually a pretty decent review of the device”. So here it is for all to see:

The freerunner is the worst phone ever made. It might nearly be usable as a phone now thanks to Radek and QTMoko, but you’re much better off buying an old feature phone or rooting an android phone. I think that while it might nearly be acceptable for a linux hacker, the freerunner software will never be a truly good user experience despite radek’s efforts – it’s too big a job for one person. I hope I’m wrong about that, but I don’t think I will be.

I was particularly appalled at the battery life. The battery used to last about 2 hours, but they have nearly solved all the power management bugs so if you’re lucky you might get ~6 hours out of it these days. It might even last all day if you keep it in suspend and don’t use it. In particular, using Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, or having the screen on will significantly reduce the battery life you should expect to get.

It doesn’t have a camera, though I believe there’s a camera module for the GTA04.

An important thing to note is that due to a design flaw, the device is not capable of fully utilizing it’s accelerated graphics as bandwidth to the screen is limited. therefors it’s not capable of playing fullscreen video at the native resolution of 480×640. It will play fullscreen video if you’re into extremely crap resolution – 240×320. You shouldn’t ever expect to see much more than 10-15fps at full resolution.

The company went out of business because they made a buggy phone and couldn’t figure out what they wanted to do software-wise – they seemed to think that making the UI themeable was more important than being able to recieve phone calls or have working power management. The demise of Openmoko is a good thing.

If you’re looking for a phone, you do not want a freerunner.

If you’re looking for a hackable linux palmtop with a tiny screen, no keyboard, not very much power and a fairly awful battery life when you’re using it as a computer, then the freerunner might be an option for you, although you can probably buy something like a raspberry pi with 3 times the power for half as much money.

Nikolaus’ GTA04 project does seem much more promising and addresses a lot of the shortcomings of the freerunner and may be worth looking into. I have spoken to Nikolaus via email a few times and he seems like a very cool guy – I trust him and I’d buy a GTA04 in a heartbeat if I wasn’t put off by the price – I already spent $400 on a phone that doesn’t work, and I bought a nokia so that I’d have a working phone before Nick brought out the GTA04, so I can’t justify spending that much money to make my freerunner useful.

Routing everything via VPN

Posted on February 18, 2013 by antisol

I have a VPN.

I have it set up in a pretty standard way: when a machine joins the VPN it effectively becomes part of my LAN. But I don’t route everything via the VPN, that would be inefficient and would waste my bandwidth. I haven’t bothered with doing DNS over VPN, as I usually just use IP addresses anyway (one of the advantages of using a 10.x.x.x network), and when you do that you run into all kinds of complexities and problems (like how to resolve names on the lan you’re connected to)

But sometimes I’m somewhere where I don’t trust the owner of the network that I’m connected to: I don’t want to be spied on.

In these instances, it’s handy to be able to route everything out over the VPN connection.

But if you don’t stop to think for a minute and just try to add a default route which points to the VPN server, you’ll instantly lose your VPN connection and all internet access because there’s no longer any way to reach the VPN you’re trying to route through. Doh.

The solution is simple:

#!/bin/bash
#delete existing default route:
sudo route del default
#traffic to the VPN server goes out via your existing connection:
sudo route add <internet-ip.of.vpn.server> gw <your.existing.untrusted.gateway>
#...and everything else gets routed out via the VPN (assuming your VPN server is 172.16.0.1)
sudo route add default netmask 0.0.0.0 gw 172.16.0.1

OK, that takes care of routing. Next you need to send your DNS requests out via the VPN, or you’ll still be pretty easily monitorable – overlords will still know every domain you visit. To do that, edit /etc/resolv.conf and change the ‘nameserver’ line to point to the nameserver for your VPN and/or LAN:

#/etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 172.16.0.1

I recommend running your VPN on port 443. My reason is really simple: in oppressive environments, you can pretty much count on port 443 being open, since it’s used for https, and https is not something that a tyrannical sysadmin/policymaker can get away with blocking: it’s the backbone of e-commerce. In addition, https traffic is encrypted, as is VPN, so it’s less likely to be monitored by things like deep packet inspection, and any not-too-deep packet inspection is likely to come up with an outcome of ‘encrypted traffic, nothing unusual’ when looking at VPN traffic on port 443.

It should be noted that while this is unlikely to set off automated alarm bells, it will look somewhat unusual to any human observer who notices – your overlords will see a bunch of “https” traffic, but nothing else (not even DNS), which may in itself raise suspicions.

It should also be noted that you very likely just added a couple of hundred milliseconds to your latency and have now effectively limited your available bandwidth somewhat, depending on network conditions.

But I know from experience that the victorian government’s IT agency, Cenitex, is incapable of determining any difference between https traffic and VPN traffic going via port 443.

Though, of course, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible…

…In fact, that doesn’t even mean it’s difficult…

…but you should be reasonably safe from the spying eyes of your microsoft cerfitied sysadmin.

Direct Harm

Posted on February 15, 2013 by antisol

Nice:

Nobody should give valve money until they start complying with the Australian Consumer Protection Laws.

Goodbye AWN

Posted on February 8, 2013 by antisol

It would appear that Avant Window Navigator is dead:

Stable release 	0.4.0 / April 11, 2010; 2 years ago

Which is a pity: I liked AWN. But the fact that its task manager doesn’t work properly has become a deal-breaker: after days of trying, I’ve finally given up at attempting to make AWN’s task manager realise that I have Eclipse running.

I have an eclipse launcher set up in awn. While Eclipse’s splash screen is showing, AWN recognises that eclipse is running, but as soon as the main window opens, awn does it’s “window closed” animation and refuses to acknowledge that the window which currently has focus deserves any kind of icon in the task manager.

If it came up with a duplicate icon – one in the taskbar in addition to the launcher – that’d be acceptable. But it doesn’t do that. Instead, it makes it impossible to switch to a minimised eclipse without using ALT-TAB, or the xfce-panel on my 2nd monitor (which isn’t always on). Clicking on the launcher launches a 2nd copy of eclipse, which then (rightfully) whinges that the eclipse workspace is in use and can’t be opened.

I found a couple of people who had similar issues. I tried a bunch of things to work around it.

On one forum, somebody explained that it’s hard to match windows to running processes…which is fair enough…

…except that the xfce panel seems to manage it just fine.
…and so does gnome panel
…and so does cairo-dock
…and, presumably, whatever KDE uses
…and, I expect, docky
…and, more than likely, dockbarx

And the awn devs would appear to have all been hit by a bus: domains have expired and are redirecting to spam sites; IRC is dead, and I’m yet to find any remnant of the awn community. Which is a real pity.

So I’ve installed cairo-dock. It looks nice, and somehow feels ‘more snappy’ than awn: maybe this is because cairo-dock’s ratio of plugins written in python is low: most of them would seem to be C++, with only a couple of the prepackaged ones being python. My only complaints about cairo-dock are:

The ‘Indicator old’ applet is retarded: it has drawing issues (draws a grey box where an icon used to be), and why can’t it just display in the dock, like every other applet in existence? why should I need to click on it’s (nonexistent – it just renders as blackness) icon to actually see my systray? This is only a minor annoyance since the only thing I have which refuses to cooperate with the ‘new’ indicator applet is the seldomly-used fusion icon, and vmware (who’s systray icon i don’t use)
The context menus on some items are behaving suite wierdly: they’re not tall enough. And sometimes they don’t render clicks. except sometimes they do, and that sometimes they are tall enough. It seems very random.

This very likely means that in the near future I’ll be extending NodeUtil to have a cairo-dock applet, since this is the only thing I really miss from awn.

Teeworlds

Posted on January 24, 2013 by antisol

In today’s installment of “Awesome Open-Source Software”, I’m going to talk about Teeworlds.

A screenshot:

This game is a brilliantly playable, amazingly addictive, and hugely fun blend of a 2D platformer (a-la Mario) and a multiplayer FPS (a-la Quake3 or Unreal Tournament).

It’s not complicated: It’s multiplayer only, there are only 5 weapons, and the levels aren’t big or expansive – you won’t spend long looking for your enemy, you’ll spend more time lobbing grenades at him, and then running away frantically because you’re out of ammo and/or low on health.

That’s if you’re playing with only a few others. If there are lots of people in the game, it’ll just be frantic carnage, like any good deathmatch.

It takes its cues from “proper” deathmatch games – the old run-and-gun style: cover systems and regenerating health are for sissies; precision aiming is for people who don’t know about splash damage. Standing still is a VERY BAD IDEA. None of this “modern FPS” crap. This is evidenced most starkly in the fact that you can double-jump, and, perhaps coolest of all, you have a grapping hook, which you can use to climb and to swing yourself to/from places very quickly. If you play in a busy CTF server, you’ll see just how effective the grappling hook can be – these guys are SO FAST!

And it’s gorgeous and has a great atmosphere: cartoonish graphics and sounds. The sounds really do it for me: the cutesy scream your tee will make when he’s hit in the face with a grenade makes it fun to die, the maniacal yet cartoonish laugh your character will emit when your opponent cops a grenade to the face. It’s a really really fun atmosphere.

And I mean that: this is one of those games which is so much fun that you rarely feel like ragequitting, even when you’re losing badly: you will get killed mercilessly and repeatedly, but you’ll have a big smile on your face during the shootout, and when you die you’ll laugh.

And it’s quite well-balanced: none of the weapons are over-powerful or ridiculously weak. This is probably helped by the fact that the weapons have (very) limited ammo, even though running out of ammo sometimes annoys me slightly.

Downsides:

There aren’t enough teeworlds players in Australia, so I find myself playing on servers where I have a ping of 300 or more. This means you sometimes have a laggy experience.
You’ll come across killer bots sometimes. These bots are inhumanly good and can drain the fun out of being repeatedly stomped on, but the game has a voting system which allows you to vote on kicking players, so these bots are rarely a nuisance for long.
It has an ‘auto-switch weapons’ feature which switches when you pick up a new weapon, but it lacks a ‘weapon preference’ order a-la Unreal Tournament, and it does not switch weapons automatically when you run out of ammo. This is sometimes frustrating because you’re firing at your opponent but you only get an ‘out of ammo’ click, and while you’re trying to switch weapons your opponent kills you. But it’s one of those things you learn and it also serves to add tactics to the game – you’re always keeping an eye on how much ammo you have.

TL;DR: Teeworlds is a really really fun and addictive game which cleverly combines cutesy graphics and 2d-platformer gameplay with the frantic action of a golden-age FPS. It’s one of the better open-source games out there. Go and buy it now!

[EDIT: antisol.org now runs a Teeworlds Deathmatch server! ]

want to scp recursively without rsync?

Posted on January 17, 2013 by antisol

rsync doesn’t work on the freerunner for some reason I can’t even be bothered investigating.

So I came up with this without even really thinking about it, googling, etc:

cd /destination/path;ssh user@host 'tar cv /source/path' | tar x

It’s when I do stuff like that without giving it a second thought that I feel like I’m justified in saying that I’m “familiar” with linux. I’ve achieved something since ~2005!

one could add a ‘z’ or a ‘j’ to the tar parameters for compression, but the freerunner’s CPU speed makes compression take longer than transferring the data uncompressed.

HOWTO: Write the worst piece of open-source software in the history of mankind

Posted on January 12, 2013 by antisol

…it’s actually pretty easy: All you have to to is write an open-source emulator (OK, fine, “API Compatibility Layer”) for the worst piece of software in the history of mankind.

In case it’s not completely obvious at this point, I’m talking about WINE.

Wine is a piece of shit. The only reason I don’t rate it as “worse than windows” is that the wine devs don’t expect you to pay for their garbage, whereas Microsoft does.

No, wait, I don’t want you to misunderstand me, so I’ll clarify my statement: wine is a godawful piece of shit.

Legions of freetards will quickly jump to defend wine: They’ll tell me how I have no right to criticise the hard work of all these people who are giving me something for nothing, and they’ll talk about how well the wine team keep abreast of the latest developments and how they’re in an impossible situation because they’re aiming at a moving target and how Microsoft’s documentation leaves alot to be desired in terms of reimplementing the entire Win32 API.

And they do have a point – the wine devs are not trying to do something trivial.

But that doesn’t change the fact that wine is a piece of shit.

I won’t dispute that there are some talented people working on the wine project – I don’t even want to think about how complex such an undertaking is, but if you can’t even make things work consistently when somebody upgrades to a new version of your product, it’s a shit product, and you’re useless, not doing enough testing, and not managing your project properly. Keeping existing features working is more important than adding new features.

Keeping existing features working is more important than adding new features!

KEEPING EXISTING FEATURES WORKING IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ADDING NEW FEATURES!

Wine suffers from a completely retarded number of regression bugs: something which works just wine in version X of wine may or may not work in version X+1. This is an absolutely ridiculous situation.

Apparently “STABLE” doesn’t mean what I thought it meant: I thought it meant “Working, Usable, and tends to not crash horribly in normal use”. But the wine team seems to think that “STABLE” means “This alpha feature is almost feature-complete and almost works. Mostly. Except when it doesn’t”. I can’t fathom the decision to mark Wine 1.4 as “Stable” with its redesigned audio subsystem which lacks a fucking pulseaudio driver! And the attitude they take is “pulse has ALSA emulation, so we don’t really need to support pulse” – a weak cop-out at best. I mean, it’s not like the majority of distros these days default to using pulse… Oh, wait…

Application-specific tweaking. Oh, the essay I could write on the bullshit required to make any particular application work. Here’s the usual procedure:

Go to appdb.winehq.org, see that it’s rated as “garbage”
Note that the ‘Garbage’ Rating was with the current version of wine, and that there’s a “Gold” rating for the previous version of wine. Click on the gold rating to see that review
Scroll down through the review to see if there are any helpful tips as to wierd and wonderful esoteric settings you should change to make your app work
Try all the tips and manipulating all the settings in the previous point, to no avail
Revert wine to the earliest version available in your distro’s repos. It’s important to note here that you probably just broke every other wine app you have installed
When this doesn’t work, download and attempt to compile the version which got the gold rating. If you manage to get it to compile and install correctly (it probably won’t – it’ll depend on an older version of at least one library, which will lead you straight into dependency hell), go back to fiddling with esoteric settings for a few days
When you’re sure you’ve replicated all the tweaks, DLL overrides. and settings for your app as per the gold rating on the appdb and it STILL doesn’t work, scream loudly
Install virtualbox and waste many resources just so that you can run your app
Hope that you used checkinstall when you compiled the old version of wine, so that it’s possible to remove it without wanting to commit ritual suicide
Install the version of wine you had installed from the repos. Hope that the other apps you spent days configuring and actually managed to get working still work.
Hope that the few apps you actually got working don’t break horribly next time you do an apt-get upgrade

I can’t be fucked with any of this anymore, so here’s the process I use:

Create a new wineprefix: ‘env WINEPREFIX=~/wineprefix_for_this_particular_app winecfg’. It’s important to create an entirely new wineprefix for each app, because that way it’s slightly less trivially easy to break all your other apps just by changing one setting.
Run the installer with something like ‘env WINEPREFIX=~/wineprefix_for_this_particular_app wine some_installer.exe’
When things fail horribly (and they will for about 99.999% of apps in my experience), type ‘rm -Rv ~/wineprefix_for_this_particular_app’ and install it in your VM.

The most hilarious and entertaining part about all of this is the way that even after all my experiences which indicate the contrary, sometimes I still tend to assume that things will work under wine – after all, the wine mantra is “if it’s old, it’s more likely to work”. Here are some examples:

“The old PC version of ‘Road Rash’ – the one with soundgarden in the soundtrack – it’s more than 10 years old! It’ll be using DirectX 3 API calls if it’s lucky! SURELY it will ‘Just Work’ in wine, right?”
“Oh, I know – I’ll Install Dungeon Keeper – it’s old – it should Just Work, right?”
“AHA! Deus Ex has a ‘Gold’ rating with THE CURRENT WINE VERSION! Surely that means it will Just Work?”
“Aah, JASC Animation Shop. Such a great little app. I used to use it all the time back in 1997. Is should Just Work, right?”

And now, some questions for the wine developers:

Why is it that Fl Studio uses about 3 times as much processor time in the current version than it did in the previous version? For some of my tracks, FL Studio sits at 90% CPU Utilization when it’s NOT EVEN PLAYING. Trying to play will give you a horrible mess of stuttering as the CPU valiantly attempts to keep up with wine’s bullshit demands. With the previous version of wine and the exact same track on the exact same install of FL Studio with the exact same settings, this track played just fine. I have been tweaking for about 4 days now and have achieved ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in terms of improving this situation.
Why has wine not absorbed PlayOnLinux (another awful piece of code – random hangs FTW!)? This functionality should be included in wine (i.e: a central, per-application/wine version ‘tweaks’ database. You have a nice interface for installing apps. You choose the app from a list, and wine downloads the tweaks appropriate for that app and applies them automatically. This would not be hard to implement, and would solve a HUGE number of issues for a huge number of users.
What genius decided that a version with a broken pulseaudio driver should be marked as “Stable”?
Speaking of re-engineering your audio stack, can you please explain how this new, non-functional audio subsystem is superior to the working one which it replaced?
Do you anticipate that one day wine will actually be able to do what it says on the tin? Or should I just give up on the whole concept? I feel like I am the butt of some huge, multi-year practical joke.

Now, to be fair, this is not all the fault of the wine devs – it’s also the fault of the people who manage repos for the various distros out there: these people should learn, and simply not upgrade the wine version in our repos until they’ve checked whether the fucking thing works or not – it’s a wierd kind of synchronicity that choosing a wine version is kind of like using Microsoft products: You never, ever, ever install the initial release, you wait for R2, when it might actually stand a chance of being something other than utter shit.

Wine sucks. It’s the worst piece of open-source code in the history of mankind. There are two factors why:

Because they’re emulating the worst piece of code in the history of mankind.
Because they’re amateur idiots who suck and can’t manage a project properly and don’t do enough testing. This is evident in that they regularly break backwards compatibility.

There is never a reason or excuse for breaking backwards compatibility other than laziness, and it’s therefore never acceptable to break backwards compatibility.

Wine is a piece of shit.

[EDIT: wine 1.5 is better than 1.4, but still not up to par with 1.2]
[EDIT 2: I'd really really love to hear an explanation of why opening a common dialog crashes metacity]

And Yet It Moves / Braid

Posted on December 8, 2012 by antisol

No, this is not an Ad. Brokenrules are not paying me!

Everybody raves about Braid. It’s clever, with unique game mechanics, and very pretty.

But it’s too short – by the time you wrap your head around a concept, you’re not using that concept any more.

I’ve read reviews praising this, saying that there’s no repetition and not a single “wasted” puzzle.

But you know what? For all my complaints in the past about games being too repetitive, I can handle doing a couple of variations on the same puzzle if it means it’s going to take more than a couple of hours to get through the game.

Don’t get me wrong – Braid is a brilliant game, and the people who came up with those game mechanics are really clever, and the art style is very pretty… but it’s too short – it needs more levels or some different playmodes. It has near-zero replayability.

And Yet It Moves is a much, much better game – easily the most original and fun game I’ve played in years.

This game is fucking awesome in every respect – the game mechanic is deceptively simple – rotating the world, but it gets progressively more challenging and clever about how it uses it.

The game is a good length – it took me longer than Braid did. And it has different playmodes and an “epilogue” set of levels which you can play after you’ve finished the main game which will keep you interested. And achievements are always fun.

And it’s absolutely gorgeous. The “paper” art style is magnificent, and goes through enough variations to always be interesting.

And the music is fantastic – very distinctive and unusual. There’s one particular piece of music which usually plays in-game (usually when you’re jumping onto disappearing platforms) which is especially awesome.

Linux is supported. Steam for Linux is supported. I got it as part of one of the Humble Bundles. It’s going for $10 on Steam right now. You should buy it.

I’m trying to think back to the last time I loved a game this much. It was a long time ago – I’ve been bored with games for a long time. I think that probably the last time I was this impressed with a game was the first time I played Portal.

Here, watch the trailer:

Go and buy this game right now. You want it, you just don’t know it yet (or maybe now you do!). It’s cheap. And it’s a seriously awesome, awesome game.

foxtrotgps / landscape mode X apps on qtmoko / QX

Posted on November 4, 2012 by antisol

I’ve been playing with the latest QTmoko on my freerunner after a couple of years of not updating my distro.

Some thoughts:

It’s great! Very snappy and responsive – congrats and thank-you to Radek and the other contributors, you’ve done a fantastic job and you’ve made some great strides over the last couple of years.

I haven’t tried using it as a phone yet (I’m still put-off by my previous experiences, and don’t have a second SIM), but it looks like it might be *gasp* almost usable! :O I’m tempted to try it out as a phone…

I particularly like what you’ve done with the keyboard – I think it’s about as good as an on-screen keyboard is going to get on this device. Very nice. though I wish I could have it default to qwerty mode.

But it’s not perfect – everything I want doesn’t “just work” yet (though it is very good – things like wifi and bluetooth seem to just work). But that means I get to have some fun tinkering!

I’ve been messing about with making foxtrotgps work under QX on qtmoko for a little while, and wanted to jot down some notes and tips:

When QX asks which X server to install, I recommend xorg – xglamo doesn’t seem to like being rotated. I’d love to make xglamo work, because it seems faster. (Performance with foxtrot on xorg is very usable, but faster == better.)
You very likely want to apt-get install gconf2, or foxtrot won’t save user prefs (e.g mapset, postiion, etc) when you close it.
Rotating the X screen with xrandr doesn’t rotate the touchscreen input properly. To fix this, you need to use xinput to swap the x-axis.

I’m using ‘xrandr -o right’ for my landscape orientation. This means that the USB plug on the freerunner is at the top. If you want to use ‘-o left’ you’ll need to play around with the axis swapping.

There’s no onscreen keyboard for X apps. To fix this, apt-get install matchbox-keyboard matchbox-keyboard-im, and launch matchbox-keyboard –daemon before you start foxtrot. This will give you a keyboard which pops up when you select a textbox. After foxtrot closes, I kill matchbox-keyboard.
QX has a ‘display always on’ option, but X has its own screensaver and blanking/dpms stuff. you’ll want to use xset to turn these off if you want your display always on.
You need to start gpsd before you start foxtrot. I also kill gpsd when foxtrot closes. This means it can take a while to get a fix, but I haven’t done a huge amount of outdoor testing yet – all I’ve done is confirmed that it will get a fix.
Pressing the AUX button to multitask while X is rotated under QT is ugly – qtmoko will work, but its display will be broken – it looks kinda like QVGA mode and is incorrectly rotated. If you can manage to hit AUX a couple of times to get back to QX, and then press ‘resume’ or ‘stop’ in QX, qtmoko will revert to an un-broken state. Ideally I’d like to disable qtmoko’s AUX-button handler while foxtrot is running, or capture focus events to unrotate on lostfocus and rotate on gotfocus, but I haven’t yet found a way to do either of these.
The above ugliness will also happen if X dies while rotated, so you need to xrandr -o normal after foxtrot exits. This means you want to exit foxtrot gracefully. Since foxtrot doesn’t have an ‘exit’ menu item, this means you want to ‘use matchbox’ in the QX settings. You also want fullscreen.

I ended up doing the following to make a wrapper script for foxtrot. It’s a bit of a nasty hack, but it works for me. A slightly nicer way would be to use update-alternatives to use an alternate foxtrotgps launcher script, or saving the script as ‘foxtrot_launcher’, building a desktop entry for it, and setting up a QX favourite for it.

the script below could very easily be modified/generalised to run things other than foxtrotgps!

root@neo:~$ mv /usr/bin/foxtrotgps /usr/bin/foxtrotgps.bin
root@neo:~$ vi /usr/bin/foxtrotgps
              (insert content, below)
root@neo:~$ chmod a+x /usr/bin/foxtrotgps

/usr/bin/foxtrotgps:


#!/bin/bash
#Custom script for starting gpsd and foxtrotGPS in landscape mode:
#xinput stuff liberated from: http://lists.openmoko.org/nabble.html#nabble-td7561815

#ensure GPS is powered up:
om gps power 1
om gps om gps keep-on-in-suspend 1

#gpsd
#service gpsd start
gpsd /dev/ttySAC1

#sleep 1 
# we might have to wait some time before sending commands (I didnt)

#rotate:
xrandr -o right

#disable screen blanking:
xset s off -dpms 

#swap x axis:
xinput set-int-prop "Touchscreen" "Evdev Axis Inversion" 8 1 0
#no axis inversion
xinput set-int-prop "Touchscreen" "Evdev Axes Swap" 8 0
xinput set-int-prop "Touchscreen" "Evdev Axis Calibration" 32 98 911 918 107

#run the matchbox keyboard in daemon mode:
#with matchbox-keyboard-im this pops up automatically
matchbox-keyboard --daemon &

#run the real foxtrot:
foxtrotgps.bin --fullscreen

#foxtrot has closed, cleanup:

#kill keyboard:
killall matchbox-keyboard

#unrotate:
xrandr -o normal

#stop gpsd:
#service gpsd stop
killall gpsd

Converting red-blue anaglyph to stereoscopic images

Posted on July 16, 2012 by antisol

(EDIT: Updated to add black border between images – makes it easier to see the 3d, and makes the 3d image better defined)

I hate those red-blue anaglyphs. The red and blue fucks with my head – my brain refuses to interpret it properly, and the object does this wierd “flashing” between red and blue.

Plus, I’m too cheap to buy (and too reckless to keep) a pair of those red-blue 3D glasses.

So, I installed Imagemagick and wrote myself a bash function:

stereo_convert () {                                                                 
    in="$1"                                                                   
    out="$2"                                                           
    if [ -z "$in" ] || [ -z "$out" ]; then                                    
        echo -e "\nYou need to supply input and output files!\n"              
        return 42                                                             
    fi                                                                        
    convert \( $in -gravity east -background Black -splice 10x0 -gamma 1,0,0 -modulate 100,0 \) \( $in -gamma 0,1,1 -modulate 100,0 \) +append $out;                  
    echo -e "\nConverted red-blue stereo image '$in' to side-by-side image '$out'.\n"
}

Here’s a demo image from NASA’s Pathfinder mission.

Input:

Output:

Notes:

This process removes all colour information, giving you greyscale output. Unfortunately there’s no way to restore full colour to anaglyphs, as the full colour information isn’t there. IMHO greyscale is better than red/blue.
The images may not be exactly perfect due to:
- Red and cyan do not have the same intensity to the human eye – cyan seems brighter, so the right eye may appear slightly lighter. I’ve done my best to eliminate this, but I CBF reading into the science of colour wavelengths etc. right now.
- Some images may be reversed – it appears that there’s no “hard” convention as to which eye should be red and which should be blue. But it appears that “most” are red==left.

Stallman is Nucking Futs!

Posted on May 17, 2012 by antisol

Stallman talks about Valve releasing a Steam client for Linux

Go, read. I’ll wait.

Back? Good.

Oh, Look! Valve got a mention by the mighty Stallman!

He asks what good and bad effects can Valve’s release of a Steam client for Linux have? Well, it might boost linux adoption, and that’s good. But…

Nonfree games (like other nonfree programs) are unethical because they deny freedom to their users. If you want freedom, one requisite for it is not having these games on your computer. That much is clear.

Wait, what?

Hang on a minute… If I want freedom, I’m not free to run these games? huh?

IMHO, having freedom means having the freedom to choose to run nonfree software if I want to. I’d rather play Half-Life or Portal than any open source game (It’s not that there are no great open source games, it’s just that Half-Life and Portal are better than all of them).

Stallman goes on to discourage Linux distros from offering the software to users – i.e deb packages for steam, and says:

If you want to promote freedom, please take care not to talk about the availability of these games on GNU/Linux as support for our cause.

Which is totally…fucking…insane.

I’ll be promoting freedom – freedom from Windows: “You don’t need windows anymore – Steam is available for Linux!”. I’ll be promoting the freedom to finally run good games on my chosen OS without any fucking around with wine. I’ll be (gasp) buying a bunch of games. Because a Steam client for Linux would be totally fucking awesome – I think it’d be the biggest event in gaming since Id released the source code for Doom. Just watch the Linux market share grow after the release.

Stallman says that Linux adoption isn’t the primary goal. That the primary goal is to bring freedom to users (But apparently not the freedom to run games they love). But I think that adoption of Linux at this point is more important than sticking to this (silly, BTW: nonfree != evil) principle – The more adoption we see, the more the community will grow, and the better the software will get. While this happens, more people will be exposed to Stallman’s (unrealistic) philosophy.

Stallman does concede that “My guess is that the direct good effect will be bigger than the direct harm”.

Direct harm? Really? I can finally delete that old windows XP partition, and you’re talking about Direct Harm? You think there’s anything at all bad about Valve’s monumental decision to embrace Linux?

You’re fucking crazy. Even distros that your foundation doesn’t endorse (Prepare to be amazed), like Ubuntu, go out of their way to tell the user that they’re about to install nonfree software. It’s always optional. It’s just been made easy because not everybody is as nuts as Stallman – some people, like me, actually want to use nonfree software. I should be free to do that, but apparently that’s not OK with the so-called “Free Software Foundation”. Apparently software should be free, but not people.

(Update: Late 2013: Valve refuse to give me a refund for the nonfunctional game Fez, in violation of Australian Consumer Protection Laws. They try to tell me that the laws don’t apply. I lodge a complaint with the ACCC and stop buying things on Steam. Maybe Stallman isn’t that nuts after all. No company can be trusted.)

(Update 2: 2014: The ACCC Sues Valve for violation of consumer protection laws. I love those guys.)

(Update 3: Jun 2015: Valve announces that they now allow refunds. This is because they’re really good, caring people, and has nothing at all to do with an Australian judge being about to hand out a $10,000/day fine)

(Update 4: comments disabled on this post due to spam bots following the link here from my squee when steam for linux was announced)

A few months of xfce

Posted on January 25, 2012 by antisol

In mid-late 2011 my “fed-up-ness” with Gnome reached critical levels – it got to the point that Windows has been at for years: me sitting, staring at my screen in disbelief, screaming: “What, exactly, the fuck, are YOU DOING THAT TAKES SO GODDAMN LONG?!?!?!”, or the classic: “aah, good, a minute’s delay while you read something which you ALREADY HAVE CACHED!!!”.

I shit you not, there are tasks which gnome’s bloatware manages to slow down my dual-core >3000Mhz machine with >8000Mb of RAM to a point where performance is comparable to performing the same task on my 7Mhz, 2Mb RAM Amiga 600. This is not an exaggeration – for example, my Amiga will open up a directory containing thousands of files in a comparable time, and it’s reading from an MFM hard disk and has pretty much nothing cached. My Amiga will boot up in less time than it takes gnome to show me my desktop from the gdm login screen.

It’s not that Gnome changed or did anything differently, it’s just that I gradually became less and less tolerant of it’s godawful performance, and the point came where I finally snapped and said “Fuck Gnome”.

No, I haven’t tried Gnome 3. Given an option, I never will – the screenshots are enough to tell me it’s an ungodly abomination. I’m talking about Gnome 2.

The solution I went with was to switch to Xfce.

Since I’m addicted to my pretty wobbly windows, I’ve been running Xfce with compiz as the window manager on my powerful machine. I’m using xfwm on my less-powerful laptop.

I’ve been using it for a few months now, and thought I’d report on the experience.

So, without further ado, here’s an exhaustive list of features I miss from Gnome which are not in Xfce:

—BEGIN—

Coffee – Gnome had this wonderful feature which allowed me to drink much more coffee every day. You see, when I open nautilus in my home folder, there’s a nice ~40 second delay while nautilus does whatever the fuck it does that takes such a god damn long time to do. In this time I used to go make coffee – my workflow went: a) double-click directory b) make coffee c) have a cigarette d) browse through the folder I double-clicked (assuming, of course, that I didn’t open my “mp3s” or “audiobooks” directories – in that case, there’s a step e) – celebrate a few birthdays, grow older and wiser, earn a doctorate, solve the energy crisis, and read every novel ever written ). Unfortunately since thunar will open up my home directory in less than one second, my coffee intake has been greatly reduced.

—END—

This also marks my departure from using the standard Ubuntu distro. I loved it and I wish the Ubuntu team well – 10.04 has been a brilliant OS – it’s served me really well and I’ve been very happy with it in general, but I’m not ever using unity, and next time I need to install an OS I’ll be going with Xubuntu.

Fuck Gnome. Fuck Gnome right in the ear.

Now all I need is for someone to build a web browser that doesn’t completely suck ass. Maybe I’ll give Opera a proper try…

iptables masquerading for freerunner

Posted on October 28, 2011 by antisol

I find myself constantly going to the OpenMoko USB Networking page to find the commands to enable iptables masquerading – it’s the only part of the process I can’t remember.

It’s a bit obscure to find on the USB Networking page, so now it’s here, too:

sudo iptables -I INPUT 1 -s 192.168.0.202 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -I OUTPUT 1 -s 192.168.0.200 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -j MASQUERADE -s 192.168.0.0/24
sudo bash -c 'echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward'

creating a self-extracting bash script

Posted on October 8, 2011 by antisol

You always see things like vmware and unreal tournament being installed via a self-extracting bash script – It would seem that this is the best way to provide an installer which will work on the widest selection of Linux distributions.

After some googlage, I came up with the following. Given a tarball and an installer script named ‘installer’, it will create a self-extracting bash script:

#!/bin/bash
#############################################################
# Self-extracting bash script creator
# By Dale Maggee
# Public Domain
#############################################################
#
# This script creates a self-extracting bash script
# containing a compressed payload.
# Optionally, it can also have the self-extractor run a
# script after extraction.
#
#############################################################
VERSION='0.1'

output_extract_script() {
#echoes the extraction script which goes at the top of our self-extractor
#arguments:
# $target - suggested destination directory (default: somewhere in /tmp)
# $installer - name of installer script to run after extract
# (if specified, $target is ignored and /tmp is used)

#NOTE: odd things in this function due to heredoc:
# - no indenting
# - things like $ and backticks need to be escaped to get into the destination script

cat <<EndOfHeader
#!/bin/bash
echo "Self-extracting bash script. By Dale Maggee."
target=\`mktemp -d /tmp/XXXXXXXXX\`
echo -n "Extracting to \$target..."

EndOfHeader

#here we put our conditional stuff for the extractor script.
#note: try to keep it minimal (use vars) so as to make it nice and clean.
if [ "$installer" != "" ]; then
#installer specified
echo 'INSTALLER="'$installer'"'
else
if [ "$target" != "" ]; then
echo '(temp dir: '$target')'
fi
fi

cat <<EndOfFooter

#do the extraction...
ARCHIVE=\`awk '/^---BEGIN TGZ DATA---/ {print NR + 1; exit 0; }' \$0\`

tail -n+\$ARCHIVE \$0 | tar xz -C \$target

echo -en ", Done.\nRunning Installer..."

CDIR=\`pwd\`
cd \$target
./installer

echo -en ", Done.\nRemoving temp dir..."
cd \$CDIR
rm -rf \$target
echo -e ", Done!\n\nAll Done!\n"

exit 0
---BEGIN TGZ DATA---
EndOfFooter
}

make_self_extractor() {

echo "Building Self Extractor: $2 from $1."

if [ -f "$3" ]; then
installer="$3"
echo " - Installer script: $installer"
fi

if [ "$4" != "" ]; then
target="$4"
echo " - Default target is: $target"
fi

src="$1"
dest="$2"
#check input...
if [ ! -f "$src" ]; then
echo "source: '$src' does not exist!"
exit 1
fi
if [ -f "$dest" ]; then
echo "'$dest' will be overwritten!"
fi

#ext=`echo $src|awk -F . '{print $NF}'`

#create the extraction script...
output_extract_script > $dest
cat $src >> $dest

chmod a+x $dest

echo "Done! Self-extracting script is: '$dest'"
}

show_usage() {
echo "Usage:"
echo -e "\t$0 src dest installer"

echo -en "\n\n"
}


############
# Main
############

if [ -z "$1" ] || [ -z "$2" ]; then
show_usage
exit 1
else
make_self_extractor $1 $2 $3
fi

You have FUD on your shoes

Posted on September 16, 2008 by antisol

(Originally posted on myspace on 16-Sep-2008)

Here’s an example of unbiased and neutral journalism:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7594249.stm

I find the fact that it’s on BBC somewhat strange, as I usually hold BBC to be one of the better commercial news sources.

Granted, their IT section is written by a bunch of clueless morons, but this just takes the cake.

Let’s analyse this article, shall we?

Firstly there’s all the mention of Linus torvalds, and how this guy is cursing his name. No mention of the fact that there’s actually thousands/millions of people developing Linux. the closest he comes is “made the heart of his operating system absolutely free and open source”, which is pretty close to the mark – Linus built the Linux Kernel, and it got plugged into the GNU operating system. Linus is responsible for only a small part of the entire OS, although it’s a major part.

Xandros worked right out of the box. Like most distros it includes Open Office, an open source copycat of Microsoft Office. Word processing, spreadsheets and presentations are no problem.

Xandros connected to the net through my home wireless network at the first time of asking. And surfing was fast and easy.

So, everything worked. Cool.

There were a couple of things about Xandros which I didn’t like.

The music management program – its “iTunes”, if you like – let me listen to music and podcasts on my new laptop but wouldn’t sync anything I loaded on to my iPod. Big problem for a music and podcast junkie.

Plus the desktop – the way the screen looks, the icons it uses to open programs – looks like it’s been designed by a four-year-old with a fat crayon. It’s may be down to personal taste, but I just don’t like the way Xandros looks.

Well, before I’d think about switching away from the preinstalled distro where everything works, by your own admission, I’d consider doing a couple of quick google searches. googling “Xandros Ipod” and “Xandros theme” immediately shows me 3 or 4 interesting links which would seem to warrant reading. and doing two google searches takes much less time than a) procuring and b) installing a new distro.

But linux is all about freedom, so you’re free to install a new distro, I suppose…

I’d also like to point out that if you don’t like the way windows looks, your options are to go and buy a Mac, or install Linux. I guess you could also go out and BUY a different version of windows, perhaps – i.e Upgrade from Home to Professional, although this probably won’t help with the look much.

Except now the internet wireless connection doesn’t work and the music management software still won’t let me sync with my iPod. Mmmmmm……

How is this any different to any other OS? Windows XP doesn’t recognise my wireless card or my UltraATA IDE controller – I Can’t install any version of windows except for a prepackaged XP SP2 on my machine, because without detecting the UltraATA controller, it doesn’t know about my hard drive. I’d call this slightly more serious than having no wireless connection or Ipod connectivity. Granted, in today’s internet-centric world no network connectivity is an issue, but did it not occur to you to try plugging a cable into your ethernet port as an interim measure?

Like most journalists, I’ve the attention span and patience of a gnat. The air turns blue and I inform my wife loudly that Linus Torvalds has much to answer for (I paraphrase slightly).

A gnat has more attention span if you didn’t even try plugging in an ethernet cable… and It’s obviously linus’ fault, and has nothing to do with canononical (who make and distribute ubuntu)…

But I’m completely stumped by the instructions posted on these sites. The level of assumed knowledge is way above my head. I follow a couple of suggestions, try to connect to my router using an ethernet cable, download code that promises to set things right. And fail.

It’s probably worth mentioning one other important point about Linux here. It’s a text-based operating system, which means that a fair few of the things you may want to tell your computer to do – installing certain new software, for example – requires you to open up a “terminal window” and actually type text into the little window.

As someone used solely to double-clicking on pretty pictures to do most anything on a computer this is pretty hairy stuff.

How is this ‘hairy’? somebody tells you to go into a terminal and type ‘X’, so you go into a terminal and type ‘X’. how is this difficult??? are you telling me that you’re unable to copy something that you see written down? you’re unaware of copy and paste? As a Journalist, I suppose, expecting you to type is just a bit too much…

True to form when I’m too stupid to figure out how to do something in five minutes, I phone an expert.

Geek Squad, a tech support service partnered with the Carphone Warehouse, is more used to dealing with problems with broadband and e-mail but later that night, Agent Jamie Pedder walks me through it over the phone.

Download a couple of bits of code from one of the Linux help sites on to a memory stick. Whack the memory stick into the offending laptop.

Bang a couple of lines of code into the terminal window to tell the machine to install what we’ve downloaded. Bingo, we’re cooking on gas.

Ubuntu’s running my wireless network and I’m back on-line. Easy when you know how.

So it works. Cool. So you got it all sorted out reasonably quickly. How is this different to Windows, where you need to install drivers? ever tried downloading windows drivers for your network card? it’s not easy, unless you have a spare working PC and a USB stick…

The fly in the ointment remains the music management software. I still can’t sync an iPod and Agent Pedder reckons that I probably won’t be able to – for now at least.

While Linux is founded on the philosophy of free and easy access to its code for anyone who’s interested, Apple is not. That means no iTunes for Linux, and nor is Apple likely to release such a version.

This, again, is obviously the fault of Linus Torvalds, and has nothing to do with Apple. It’s good to see you’re blaming the right people for your problem at least. Let’s just sum this up, for emphasis:

Apple makes Itunes for Windows and it enables you to use an Ipod on Windows
Apple makes Itunes for Mac OS and it enables you to use an Ipod on Mac OS
Apple doesn’t make Itunes for linux, and it takes a google search to get an Ipod working on linux

Yep, this is obviously because Linux sucks – I mean, expecting Apple to provide Ipod management tools for Linux is just asking for too much, isn’t it?

The iPod out of action is a major irritation, but I’ve not given up hope. There’s software out there – free for Linux users as always – that promises to do what I want. I just haven’t got round to downloading and playing with it yet.

So you’re reporting on how irritating it is, and how you’ve had a ‘torrid’ time with Linux, but you haven’t even bothered trying to install the software which will allow you to do what you want? Here’s a parable for you:

I Install windows
I post in a forum saying that windows sucks because I can’t play Half-Life 2.
People ask me what happens when I double-click on the Half-life 2 Icon
I say “There is no Half-Life 2 Icon”
People ask me if I’m sure I’ve got half-life 2 Installed correctly
I say “You need to INSTALL IT?!? OMFG WINDOWS IS TEH SUX!!!”

This is obviously an entirely fair observation on my part.

For the time being, it’s back to the trusty CD player. All this talk of hippy ideals has put me right in the mood for a bit of Sgt Pepper’s.

So your Ipod doesn’t work. Typing “ubuntu ipod” in google must be too hard, I guess – when I do that I see four links which would probably help, without even scrolling down.

So, to summarise: You bought a PC without windows, and it worked out of the box. You decided to install a different OS, and it broke. This is the fault of the OS, and has nothing to do with you being too lazy to do a couple of google searches to try to solve the things you don’t like about the working distro.

You were able to solve the problems, although you needed to call somebody to help you to do this, because you’re not able to follow instructions. I’m presuming this didn’t involve the 40 minute wait times or hideously excessive charges involved with Microsoft’s support line?

You bought an Ipod, which itself is an idiotic move – there are hundreds of MP3 players out there which present themselves as USB drives and are therefore supported natively by every operating system on earth without the need for any software at all, but you chose the one which requires special software and has ghastly DRM built into it, and this is Linus Torvald’s fault?

I see.

And believing in freedom makes you a Hippie?