"People accept their limitations so as to prevent themselves from wanting anything they might get"

I missed my posting deadline again today, this time by more than two hours. I'm sorry, I try to keep my schedule, but I hardly get time for a private thing like this except at night (though it can hardly be considered private if the website is there for all to see).

I've been quite happy with my Eee PC 901. You get noticed by everyone in the cafetaria (and sometimes mocked, but who cares?), and it's a nifty little thing to have around. Honestly, I sometimes think I only bought it for the cool-factor. You know, like drooling at the iPod section of a store? My inner gadget-freak acting up. However, the Xandros-based linux distro installed on the thing is, frankly... awfull. For, one, the simple GUI which seems to emphasize easy, is just too limiting. And the advanced mode is KDE based, which is just not my cup of tea.

So today I installed Eeebuntu on my little Eee pc, after first trying Eeedora and failing to get either wifi or ethernet working. Now, Eeebuntu doesn't actually support them out of the box either, but at least it makes it possible to install them. Let me show you a list of some things eeedora does not provide out of the box:

• GCC
• make
• G++
• wget
• man
• open-office
• any multimedia applications
  

And probably some more obscure things I forgot about or didn't try. But that is a list of pretty essential things. You don't have internet access to install them, and you can't compile packages from source either. I suppose I could have gone out to find .rpm files for all these, but I installed eeebuntu instead, and got all this and Wifi working by installing two .debs I transferred over via USB-drive. So now I actually have a smooth compiz-enabled desktop with every application I'll ever need. It's a shame that eeedora was being such a royal pain, since I prefer yum over apt-get, but I can live with the way things are right now.

today's quote was already harder to find. It comes from Celia Green. Also, WikiQuote is my newest friend.

Linux: threats are enough to fix it

Firefox was locking up on me again. Mind you, this is not usually a problem with firefox, but Fedora 9 comes with the BETA of firefox 3, and since this is a still unfinished version, I have found it to be somewhat slow on me sometimes, even crashing a few times.

So as soon as I thought it had locked up again, I quickly opened a prompt and threateningly wrote out the following command:

ps aux | grep firefox | awk '{print $2;}' | xargs kill -9

Then, before the final press of the enter button, I switched back to firefox again, just to check. And what do you know? Without intervention, the scared little fox had decided to start running again. Good boy you! I was only midly sorry I never got to use that triple-pipe thing right there.

So there you go. In Linux, even the Beta's work. If you... coerce them, a little.

random backgrounds

Excuse me for all the posts. Since I'm only just starting, I'm trying to get a lot of content out in a short time (get a good start, so to speak).

Recently I got bored with the default Ubuntu background. It's really nice looking with all the swirls and stuff, but I'd been staring at orange for long enough now. So I decided to find some cool looking new backgrounds. Sounds simple, right?

Well, not really. Sure finding a cool wallpaper is not that hard at all. In fact, it's so easy I couldn't decide which one to pick. What I really wanted was a way to get a different wallpaper each time I started my computer. Unfortunately, gnome offers no such option. So I decided to write a little script for it myself. Here's what I came up with:

path="/usr/share/backgrounds"
file=`ls $path | perl -e '@a=<>;print $a[rand(@a)]'`
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename "$path/$file"

It's really even simpler than I expected it would be. picking a file is a one-liner, as is changing the background. I put in a path variable so you can set the location of your backgrounds.
Now all you need is some hot backgrounds, and set this to run every time you log in (using gnome session management at system/preferences/sessions), and you have a random new background image every time you log in.