qptech blog

uptime: 3 days, 4 hours, 17 minutes

I setup an ftp server on my linux machine today. It was easy. I wanted to be able to transfer files from Tim's Windows box to my Linux box, but it's a pain to try to connect to a windows SMB network using linux - it is possible, but not easy. SMB is not a standardized protocol, it changes with every version and update to windows and is pretty poorly designed in the first place.

With the ftp server running on my linux machine, I can use any ftp client on the network to connect to the machine, log in with my user account and access my home directory - read and write access. I can setup anonymous login and all kinds of other neat stuff.

I am only running it to allow transfers on my local network, not through the internet, so my router blocks ftp connections.

I may set it up for public access in the near future though.

Uptime: 2 days, 1 hour, 42 minutes

Linux is great. Use it, learn it, love it.

I forgot that I was going to keep track of my uptime. I shut it down lastnight when I went to bed, but I'll keep track starting now.

Current uptime: 29 minutes

I was a fan of the ACDSee image viewer back when I was an MS Slave. ACDSee was pretty awesome compared to some of the alternative image viewers - MS's picture and fax viewer just sucks in comparison. ACDSee can do full screen, auto resizing, slideshow, folder thumbnail view with preview pane, it included a simple, but useful editor. And it was pretty fast.

I spent quite some time looking for a nice image viewer for linux with similar features to ACDSee. I don't care about the editing feature because I have other tools for that, but I at least wanted something that could do a slideshow of a directory and allow you to scroll forward and backward through all the images in a directory.

My mistake was that I was looking for a GUI based package with an ACDSee look and feel. There are a few, but they are a bit lacking in features and interface.

I had looked at qiv a bit, but dismissed it because it doesn't have any GUI to speak of. It's made to be used from the command line and displays the images in a simple window (or fullscreen).

When I did decide to give it a try, I knew that I'd found my new favorite image viewer. Yes, it's started from the command line and has a million option switches, but I wrote two bash aliases in my .bashrc file - one to interactively view a set of images fullscreen, and another to start a fullscreen slideshow. I prefer to use an xterm rather than a GUI file manager, so it's natural for me to start the command from within an xterm - I usually have a few open just for such purposes.

Don't fear the Command Line Interface (CLI). If you learn to comfortably use a CLI, you will find that you can actually do things faster than you can with a GUI. You need to learn to type of course, but when you get used to a CLI, the mouse seems slow and barbaric by comparison. I do like GUI's - they're pretty and they let you view graphical web pages, videos, images, have multiple windows open at a time, etc. But it is certainly counterproductive to rely entirely (or nearly so) on the GUI. In Windows, you can't do much of anything without the GUI and it's very limiting.

Unix CLI tools are designed for scripting... You don't have to type a million commands with a million options every time you want to do something. If it's something that you might do often, then you can write a script to do it. Then you start the script with a much simpler command and it does all the work for you. Or if it's as simple as setting a few options, you can create an alias with those options, making the command much simpler.

CLI commands can be started from a GUI as well - you can make a launcher on your Desktop or Window Manager's menu or set your file manager to launch the command for certain file types, etc.

Now I think that qiv is actually better than ACDSee. It doesn't have any GUI overhead, it can be controlled interactively from the keyboard to do just about anything that ACDSee could do (but it doesn't have a thumbnail view). And it can be started with specific options from the command line and incorporated into scripts. And it's fast.

Learn to use the CLI and keyboard shortcuts - they're much faster than stumbling around with the mouse. When you become comfortable with these, you will realize that you don't need the GUI for everything anymore.

In order to become comfortable with the CLI, you have to use Linux or another Unix. If you try to use the Windows XP command line (cmd), you will not experience the power of CLI - it's just not there. Windows is designed to be a strictly GUI environment and the CLI isn't good for much other than System Administration - and not much good for that either. Unix was designed from the beginning for efficient CLI usage and it's only improved with time.

There's been a lot of drive to create Windows-like GUI software and "look and feel" for linux so that non-Unix people will accept it. Instead, people should learn to use the CLI and to understand more of what's going on when they're using a computer (A lot of people don't know the difference between system memory and hard drive storage). Commercial GUI software tends to assume that the user is stupid and doesn't have a clue - well, if that's the only kind of software a person is exposed to, then that person will, effectively, be stupid and not have a clue about computers.

Ah, enough ranting. Commercial software sucks. Go with Open Source.

Broke my network again. Fixed it by editing one configuration file (two lines). I accidentally replaced my net config file durring an update - my fault, not the update software's. It would have been fine if I had a dhcp client installed, but I don't 'cause I don't like using dhcp. I'm static all the way, baby!

Messed up my xorg.conf file and had to fix it as well. Just one line and I knew which one right away from reading the output from the failed startx command.

I also broke some libraries required for qiv and mplayer. Fixed them - it took a bit longer because I had actually unintsalled them and had to recompile.

The only reason I found config errors is because I rebooted after trying to fix the libraries. It didn't do me any good to reboot and I didn't have to reboot to fix it. It must be some residual instict from the old days with Windows. My uptime was like 3 days and I could be going on 4 if I hadn't needlessly rebooted.

I'm going to keep track of my uptime and post it here every once in a while.

current uptime: 3 hours, 53 minutes.

my linux pc sounds the bell to indicate alerts durring software compiling, but this is very annoying - the thing's beeping all the time because the setup is brand new and I'm still installing all kinds of stuff (nearly all compiled from source). It's been annoying my roommates as well.

My first instinct was to perform a speakerectomy, but while preping the patient for surgery, I realized that the speaker was soldered to the motherboard - the operation would require tools that I don't have at the moment if the patient was to have a good chance of survival.

So, I had to fall back on software therapy using escape sequences. The treatment seems to be working, but will require a reset to each virtual terminal to become permanent.

I use Linux. It rocks. I just setup a new computer and want to use it to get the photos from my digital camera. I know that this is possible and not too difficult because I've done it before (gphoto2 and gtkam). I got all the software setup and my camera plugged in, but it still didn't work. I found the problem within 2 minutes of reading the gphoto manual - you can't have any usb camera drivers loaded in th kernel - you must let gphoto handle the drivers itself. Ah Ha, I had compiled with Kodak DC2xx drivers because I thought I might need them. I just have to recompile my kernel without it and then it'll work. Then I can email my photos to people.

Used Pentium 550 system: $155 at a used computer store
Old 14" monitor: $7 at a local Thrift Store
Old Keyboard: $5 at same Thrift Store
Not using MS Windows: Priceless

Gentoo linux: free and compiled from source code

Gentoo takes a while to install because everything is compiled locally. But it's a pretty good linux distribution - it's pretty easy to manage and everything.