Entries from May 2003 ↓

I installed NetAtalk today, and then tried to get some Macs to use the server. Sharing home directories was easy, but the Macs couldn’t see anything in the documentation directory.

It turned out that Macs don’t like read-only folders, like my documentation dir. They don’t mind read-only contents, but they expect to be able to write information to help them draw the folder on screen. This seems a bit insane, but it probably looks good.

It wasn’t a new problem, so the NetAtalk can handle it: if you want to export read-only directories you must provide a writable dbpath for them.

I installed CGI::Kwiki today. *Kwiki rocks!*

There are lots of wiki flavours around, all with different features. I wanted one that was simple to install and easy to tinker with. Kwiki was trivial to install, and it’s designed to be easily reconfigured and extended. Also, it happened to use my preferred set of wiki formatting rules.

I liked it so much that I wrote a MovableType Kwiki formatting plugin to use it. If you can read this, it works!

Ironically, wiki words in MT::Kwiki version 0.01 don’t link to anything. The next version will allow you to configure your target wiki.

A few days ago I tried to install Debian on a new Dell PowerEdge 1600SC. The PXE Linux boot worked perfectly, but Linux couldn’t find the hard disk! It seems that the new Dell uses a MegaRaid card that doesn’t support RAID yet.

I was happy to discover that this new MegaRaid card is supported by the driver in the 2.4.21 Linux kernel. That hasn’t been released yet, but I compiled 2.4.21rc3 and the disk appeared.

Since I was doing well with pre-release software, I decided to try the new debian-installer. Unfortunately, it only partially worked for my needs. It didn’t appear to support reiserfs, and it failed to make swap. It’s still alpha, or pre-alpha, so I breifly used the older installation system to create the swap and reiser partitions. After that, the debian-installer was happy to continue.

I used to hate all advertising on the Net: not because I thought it was wrong; because I thought it was ugly, irritating, and invasive. But things change, and I don’t hate it all any more. Spammers should still be fined and imprisoned, and people who use popup ads should have to pay the Mozilla developers (thank you Mozilla). But relevant banner ads are ok.

Now that I’ve decided that advertising is not all evil, I’ve signed up for some affiliate schemes. I have some websites that aren’t doing much at the moment, so I might as well connect them to sites that are. If doing this can make money without irritating anyone, why not.

So I signed up with TradeDoubler. My original intention was to sign up for just one scheme with a particular retailer for just one of my sites, but TradeDoubler have a long list of partners in different categories so it was quite easy to sign up to lots of relevant schemes. Their list even gave me ideas for some of my other sites.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time over the last year trying to find the
perfect window manager, without success.

I had been using WindowMaker for a long time. WindowMaker is great, and I highly recommend it, but I wanted to see if there was another window manager that would suit me better: I’m not a typical user. I hate WIMP systems, but I use them because I like crisp Unicode fonts on my tty and browser, and I occasionally need to use some WIMPy applications.

I switched to ratpoison as it was designed for people who share my WIMP hatred; ion is similar. I would really like to use one of these two, but those occasional WIMPy applications really get confused.

I used Oroborus for many months after that. It isn’t the greatest WM, but it is one of the least annoying, and it allows me to center new windows.

During the next phase of my search I discovered a few interesting window managers that I will keep my eye on: cwwm is small and simple, but has most of the features I want; golem has a set of plugins that can be mixed to get the features I want and ignore the ones I don’t; waimea lets me configure behaviour for certain X events to make it do what I want. Unfortunately, none of these three are ready for me to use in anger.

I’m currently using pwm, believed to be the first window manager to use tabbed windows. In addition it has good keyboard control and multiple desktops, my top 2 requirements.

There are man more window managers out there. I have only tried the ones that have official Debian packages, but I will probably try some others in the future.

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My first attempt at installing Debian via PXE had worked, but I wasn’t happy with it.

I tried it with udhcpd again, and it worked, after I removed some of the options from the udhcpd config file to leave it looking like:

interface       eth0
start           10.20.30.50
end             10.20.30.80
opt     subnet  255.255.255.0
siaddr          10.20.30.40
boot_file       /pxelinux.0