Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

Frankly, I don’t think that there is any point of discussion, it is hands down KDE’s Konsole, but as recently I’ve been using GNOME 3.16 as my main desktop environment, I thought it will be useful to have a list of features missing from GNOME Terminal to be a contender:

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The Microsoft initiative to open source the .Net platform (which the MSBuild tool is a part of) has been talked about a lot in the past (though I have something to say about this as well, probably later in this post), but the fanfare has died down quite a bit since the last announcement. One might say that the reason they didn’t open source the entire thing at once was so Microsoft can space out the announcement and synthetically generate continued buzz about their platform, but knowing how these things usually work, its much more likely that because preparing a project for open-source is difficult and time consuming and a project as large as .Net doubly so (or a thousand times so), so it makes sense to do so in parts.

But to the question at hand – what does an open source MSBuild means to you? (more…)

Ok, this is not a real solution for all types of problems – just a tip, that worked for me today, to try out if you can’t figure out what the problem is.

I’m running a VM on Amazon EC2, and looking at top, I saw that most of the CPU time was spent either in “steal/guest” or “IRQ“. Now steal/guest is kernel speak for “I wanted to allocate some CPU time for progams, but the hypervisor stole it” – which is not surprising on a a virtualization solution, but if it happens all the time then that means that your physical host is constantly loaded by other VMs that take as much CPU time as they can. The second item “IRQ” is time the kernel spends at handling interrupt requests from the hardware. This shouldn’t consume a significant amount of time unless the hardware has a problem – another good indication that you want to move your VPS to another physical host.

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When installing Ubuntu on a disk partitioned with a GUID partition table (GPT), the Ubuntu installer doesn’t set the boot flag correctly on the partitions, and on computers with older bioses (like my Intel ICH9 board), the BIOS will not recognize the disk as bootable and will refuse to start the boot loader, claiming that “No bootable device found”.

The solution is to set the boot flag on the boot partition (the real one in the GPT) as well as on the “protective MBR partition”:

1. Start your computer with the Ubuntu live CD again, and select “try Ubuntu before installing”
2. When the Ubuntu desktop loads, open the dash and start “gparted”
3. When gparted starts, select your boot drive and from that select your boot partition – usually the first Linux partition on the drive, and right click it and select “flags” in the menu. In the flags dialog check “boot”.
4. Open the dash again and start “terminal”
5. In the terminal type “sudo fdisk /dev/sda” (or whatever your boot drive is). You’d get a bunch of warning about the disk using a GPT scheme – ignore them. type “a” to set the bootable flag and choose partition “1”. Finally type “w” to write out your changes.

Now its safe to reboot and your old computer should have no problem starting the boot loader now.

Powershell is a great command line shell, if you all you know is cmd and batch. There are so many things it is missing when trying to compete with current Unix shells such as Bash, and while some of them have semi-working workarounds, many are sorely missing.

My pet peeves are:

• A decent pager. “more” is basically at the same stage it was when I started working in MS-DOS 3.30, and it is nowhere near the functionality of “less”¹.
• Persistent history. I’ve seen some workarounds but couldn’t get any of them to work properly.

Both of these features have been available to me since I started working with Linux in 1995, and it is really difficult living without them in MS-world. A decent terminal emulator will be nice too – the Powershell box has advantage over the cmd.exe box in that it is blue – other then that they are both in the same sorry state that the “dos box” of Windows 3 fame was at. I’m using “Console 2” to get some useful work done, but it too leaves much to be desired.

Also, startup is so.. fscking.. slow.. Starting Powershell on a brand new machine (with no per-session user scripts) can take as much as 3 seconds. Those are minutes of my life everyday that I would never get back.

1. and I’m not talking about the built-in editor, just being able to “page up” would have been nice [↩]

Its called ldapvi, and its just about what you’d expect with that name :-). The author would like you to think about it as vipw for your LDAP based authentication, and in addition to a few command line option it really isn’t much more then that (UI-wise):

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Nvidia Optimus is a neat solution to the problem of power consumption vs. 3D performance in notebook computers – the computer comes with two graphics chips, an “integrated graphics package” – the Intel GMA embedded graphics and a “discrete graphics package” – the Nvidia chip. The setup works by running your normal windowing UI on the integrated graphics, only powering on the discrete graphics when you want to play a 3D game or something like that.

Recently I had the fortune to work on a Lenovo T420 laptop¹ that has this setup, and it works very well on MS-Windows with the Nvidia Optimus driver – you get battry life around 10 hours with the 9 cell battery.

Unfortunately I spend most of my day in Linux and because Nvidia does not support Optimus on Linux, you have the poor choice of either running everything on the Nvidia chip – decreasing battery life to around 4 hours if you’re careful, or disabling the Nvidia chip completely.

The solution comes from the Bumblebee project – a software suite to handle the switching between the Nvidia discrete graphics and the embedded Intel chip.

The setup is pretty simple to understand (though I suspect under the hood there are many problems to be solved): A service runs and waits for users to ask for 3D accelerated graphics. When a user starts a program using the special command optirun, the service loads the Nvidia driver, starts an X server using the discrete graphics (with the display disconnected from the actual screen) and runs the specified program on that “background” X server. Then it copies the visuals from the program that is rendered using the discrete graphics to a window on the main X server. When the program terminates, the service closes the secondary X server, removes the driver and powers down the graphics card – putting us back into the ~10 hours battery life.

The Bumblebee software had some problems in the past, but the current version – 3.0 – looks very good. There are a few seconds of delay when you launch the application (setting up the driver and X takes some time), but performance is about what you’d expect when running directly on the hardware. All this without any configuration – that is if you are running on the stable Ubuntu version.

As I can’t leave well enough alone, and whenever someone says “alpha”, I say – “I wants”, I’m running the current Ubuntu 12.04 alpha (which is not so bad – due to be released in a couple of months, it works very well). And of course Bumblebee doesn’t work properly here.

So this is what I had to do to get it running:

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1. with an amazing 1600×900 screen, what they call “HD+”. Truly a work of art [↩]

In my company we (still) use an Active Directory domain controller to manage central authentication¹, which is not set up very well – no SSL and the Kreberos setup is not done properly. This makes gives much trouble to modern Linuxes (e.g. not Ubuntu. yes – I’m looking at you Shuttleworth.)  such as Fedora, as Fedora have done away with NSS/PAM based LDAP authentication and instead relies on SSS – which I have yet managed to get working or even find a tutorial on how to set it up properly.

So if you still want to authentication your Fedora installation against the company’s Active Directory – and can’t/won’t rely on Winbind’s notably flaky behaviour, you can always install NSS/PAM ldap authentication manually. Unfortunately its not as easy as it sounds, and as I learned the hard way – one must pay careful attention to SELinux. So here’s the recipe:

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1. there are a lot of MS-Windows workstation, so it kinds of makes sense – but we are planning to phase it out in favour of OpenLDAP, so don’t worry about it [↩]

As most Linux users are aware, you can access network shares with your file browser of choice (Dolphin, Nautilus and probably others) by writing URLs into the file browser’s “location bar”¹.

If you ever had to work with MS-Windows file server, you should know that you can also access SMB file shares using URLs – with the schema “smb”, like this: smb://file-server/share-name.

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1. and this works just as well with the desktop’s “run dialog” – try holding ALT-F2 and typing something like ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/ and up comes your file browser showing the FTP site’s directories. This won’t work for GNOME 3, at least at this time. [↩]

This is a short “how to” article on how to get and install the new Microsoft Consolas Monotype font – this is a very nice programmer font and as described in Dan Benjamin’s “Top 10 Programming Fonts” it is highly recommended for use in your programmer’s editor or IDE (As a side note, his top selection, Inconsolata is also very nice and I highly recommend it if you don’t feel like using Microsoft created software and/or aren’t interested in performing the steps below which may or may not be legally problematic).

The main problem with using Consolas on your Linux workstation, is that this font is provided by Microsoft, and while if you are running MS-Windows (or even Mac OS-X) it may already be installed – as it is bundled with many Microsoft products, us in the Linux world have no easy (and legal) way to get to use Consolas in our code editing. Unlike Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web Consolas is not available for download – probably for the same reason the core fonts packages were pulled. But as Consolas is bundled with many Microsoft products, some are available for free download for anyone, we can use that to get us some nifty Consolas prettiness in our day to day Linux computing.

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