Barbed Wire Bytecode Bacon Burger

I recently upgraded to Fedora 12 and now find that my own recipe for making Spotify run under Wine doesn’t work anymore. The fix is not that hard though.

First, download the Spotify-installer for Windows from the Spotify-website. Then you install 32-bit Wine with ALSA-support like this:

$ sudo yum -y install wine.i686 wine-alsa.i686

Then make sure you have pulseaudio-utils installed, like this:

$ sudo yum -y install pulseaudio-utils

Then when running winecfg and set wine to use ALSA-drivers you pass it through padsp (which is in the package you just installed) in order to make the sound play nice:

$ padsp winecfg

Now you run the Spotify-installer with wine passed through padsp like so:

$ padsp wine ~/Downloads/Spotify\ Installer.exe

After this you should have Spotify installed. However, when you run it with wine you still need to pass it through padsp in order for it to work, so I suggest making a little script to start Spotify with and putting it somewhere nice like /usr/bin for example. The script would look something like this:

#!/bin/bash
padsp wine “C:\Program Files\Spotify\spotify.exe”

And there you have, 64-bit Fedora 12 running Spotify.

Have you ever wanted to find a specific string in a log-file and then output what comes after that line in the file? I do this every single day at work and can’t be the only one. Somewhere in a huge log-file, XML-file or other type of text-file there’s a line that equals the beginning of some specific type of information that I’m in need of so I need to find that line of text and output a bunch of the lines following it.

I might for example have a backup cron-job that when it starts outputs “Backup started” to /var/log/messages and then follows that with output concerning how the backup went. Sure, theoretically I could open the file in vim and simply search for the line in question but sometimes text-files are frikkin’ huge and opening them up in a text-editor is just not a viable option. For example, I handle XML-files that are several gigabytes in size daily and loading one of those into an editor will mean nothing but pain and suffering I assure you

So to facilitate this procedure I slapped together this script, which I’m giving the easy-to-remember name fsagsl.sh:

#!/bin/bash
# fsagsl.sh Find String And Grab Some Lines
# 2009 (c) IDontGiveASmegWhatYouDoWithIt License
# by FighterHayabusa <fighterhayabusa@barbedwirebytecodebaconburger.com>
# Finds a string in a text-file and then outputs
# a chosen number of lines from that position onwards.

function is_int()
{
[ "$1" -eq "$1" ] > /dev/null 2>&1
return $?
}

PRG=fsagsl.sh

if [ -f $3 ] && is_int $2; then
LINESTART=`grep -n $1 $3 | sed -e 's/\([0-9]*\):.*/\1/g'`
for L in $LINESTART; do
let LINESTOP=$L+$2
sed -n "${L},${LINESTOP}p" $3
done
exit 0
else
echo "ERROR: Invalid parameters."
echo "Usage: ./$PRG string_to_find number_of_lines filename"
echo "Example: ./$PRG \"Backup started\" 5 /var/log/messages"
exit 1
fi

As you may notice the script also has some simple error-handling and  handles if there are multiple instances of the string that is being looked for.

So there you go. I hope somebody finds it useful

Me, and many with me, have reported problems with getting Spotify to run under Wine in Fedora 11. The support pages at the Spotify-website describe how to install and run it if you’re using Ubuntu, but - surprise, surprise - not every Linux-user uses Ubuntu. Well, I think I solved it and it wasn’t all that complicated either.

More and more computers are running a 64-bit OS and especially Linux-users have very widely adopted the x64-platform. However, the problem with running Spotify in Wine in Fedora 11 seem to be specific to the 64-bit version of Wine. So what I did was simply remove every trace of 64-bit Wine and installed the 32-bit version instead along with ALSA-support for Wine (I read somewhere that the Pulseaudio-drivers for Wine don’t play along with Spotify), like this:

$ sudo yum install wine.i586 wine-alsa.i586

Then I ran winecfg and selected the ALSA-driver for the audio and ran the Spotify-installer for 32-bit Windows.

$ winecfg (configure audio...)
$ wine ~/Download/Spotify\ Installer.exe

That’s it! Now I’m rocking the latest Slayer-album in Spotify on my Fedora-laptop. Very nice!

I found this auction on Swedish auction site Tradera (a site owned by eBay by the way) and I found the item description quite funny and thoroughly stupid. Here it is in English for the benefit of those of you who don’t understand Swedish courtesy of Google Translate.

As you can see this is not really a “real” firewall product. It’s just an old computer with Linux and some firewall software installed on it. Why would a firewall have a graphics card and a sound card for example? It wouldn’t.

What I find so amusing is that he says that “sure, you can use it as an ordinary computer but then you’d have to install Windows or similar on it”. Wouldn’t someone bright enough to handle a Linux firewall also know that Linux is perfectly good as a desktop OS as well? The mind boggles.

Laptop Hunters $1000 – Lauren Gets an HP Pavilion

Now we just have to clue Lauren in on the fact that she could save even more cash if she returned the Vista-license included with the laptop and installed Linux instead

I abandoned the dominating OS (yes, Windows), due to it being - in every sense of the word - crap, about eight years ago and started using Linux instead. With Linux it was almost love at first sight. Sure, it took some getting used to and some things were a bit tricky to get to work back then (soundcards anyone?) but in the end the experience was all in all a lot more rewarding than anything ever was while using any version of Windows. So I kicked Microsoft to the curb and haven’t looked back since.

Since November 2004 when I bought myself an iBook I’ve also been a casual Mac-user. This iBook is in many ways the computer that has served me best out of all computers I’ve owned. It’s taken a lot of abuse but after over four years it keeps on ticking as reliably as ever (it does get a bit hot on occasion though). Granted I had to get a new harddrive for it a year ago but that’s a pretty minor repair considering how much the iBook has been kicked around.

I’ve really grown to like OS X. It’s a robust and easy to use OS which does most things really well. And it’s Unix-like, which is a huge plus in my book. It is a really good fit for all of those menial every day computing tasks (e-mail, websurfing, organizing music and photos, word processing) that we all do. It makes ordinary tasks slick and easy to perform. This is what Apple excels at, dumbing down tasks and putting a shine on them so that they don’t feel as dull anymore. It is a prominent feature of basically all of their products.

So when my girlfriend decided to buy a new computer, a 20″ iMac (the shiny aluminum ones), this past July I got sucked in by the Reality Distortion Field and the Apple tractor beam and bought one too.

For months I was really happy with my acquisition and with “going Mac” full time on the desktop. I even sold my desktop-PC because in the months that followed I ended up hardly using at all. But then something happened.

Over the past couple of months I’ve found my productivity to be declining and a lot of the time I’ve had this nagging feeling that something just wasn’t right. It wasn’t until this past weekend that I figured out what it was. I’m not completely happy with my choice anymore. It’s crept up on me slowly and I haven’t wanted to admit it to myself, but that’s what it is. I’m sure of it.

Don’t get me wrong, the iMac is awesome and OS X Leopard is beyond great, but I think that maybe it wasn’t the perfect fit for someone like me to use for all of my computing needs. It’s sort of a cultural shock that I just can’t shake.

First of all, the Mac platform is way too locked down and obfuscated. Sure, it’s Unix-like and feels very familiar to a Linux-dude like me but it does things in odd and unorthodox ways that don’t make sense to me. Setting up Samba-sharing for example on Leopard is really weird in my opinion. And yes, there’s plenty of ways to customize your desktop-environment and experience but compaired to the endless possibilities when using a more open platform like BSD or Linux it’s not very impressive. You can only change what someone else has deemed appropriate to be changeable.

The biggest thing of all to me is the software culture of the Mac-world. Coming from a world where thousands of applications are free (as in beer and as in freedom) and pre-installed on your system out of the box it’s more than a little annoying to find applications that I take for granted missing from a basic OS X install. I mean, no nmap? Really? No wget? Come on! And what’s with all the shareware littering the software-landscape of the Mac? Every other piece of software is some handicapped version of an app that will cost me $20 to testdrive for real. That’s not what I’m used to and quite frankly it feels a bit like 1998. It also seems a bit like open source is still a bit of a mystery for the Mac-community, which seems very weird to me.

Also, even though many of my favorite applications are available for OS X they far from always behave like I’m used to. Thunderbird doesn’t filter things properly, GIMP looks horrible and isn’t really compatible with the user-paradigms of the rest of the system and the same goes for Bluefish, and the list goes on.

It’s not all bad though - far from it. I love iPhoto and I’m even starting to get along really well with iTunes. Adium is a great IM-client, better than most even. I like Transmit enough to fork over cash for a license. It’s probably the best FTP-client I’ve ever used. Overall Mac-apps have a very robust feel to them and crashes are few and far apart. Also, there seems to be a sense of pride amongst Mac-developers that isn’t always present on other platforms.

Another thing that I haven’t quite been able to get used to is the keyboard. It’s not the whole “use Option instead of Ctrl”-thing though, that’s not a problem. No, my headaches are from the fact that Insert, Delete, Home and End don’t work like I’m used to and these are keys that I use A LOT. So this really slows me down. I actually switched out the slick aluminum keyboard that came with my iMac for a Logitech-keyboard I used with my previous PC hoping that would change things. But that actually brought more hassle since the Mac couldn’t figure out what keys were supposed to go where. I had to use Ukulele to create a custom keymap in order to get the most critical missing keys back. Insert, Delete, Home and End still don’t work like I’d like them to.

Now this might come off as me coming down hard on the Mac, which is not really what I’m doing. I love the Mac and OS X is in my opinion the best commercial desktop-OS out there. I just think that in retrospect this wasn’t the best move for someone like me. The cultural clash between the Mac and Linux worlds was too great to make a full time switch possible. My computing needs require a larger amount of freedom and other things that don’t fit in the tight Apple-machinery. I’m too much of a tinkerer and a hacker, and as such I need more leeway and elbow-room than most. But I let the slick hardware, great OS and a bit of RDF fool me into believing that this was a world I could spend all of my computing time in. But I was wrong, and now I’m feeling really, really homesick.

Basically I need a Linux-PC again and I need it bad. So to remedy this I ordered a Dell XPS today, a notebook that I’ve been eyeing for some time now, and I got a great deal on it too - 3500 SEK off! The first thing I’ll do when it arrives is slap Fedora 10 on there and begin rebuilding the computing environment that I’m used to.

I’ll remain a part-time Mac-user though, so I’m not abandoning the Mac at all because as I said I still love the platform. I’ll still import the pictures from my camera to iPhoto and spin my music and podcasts in iTunes, I might even hack together a Cocoa-app of my own one day. Maybe I’ll downgrade to a Mac Mini though, if Apple decides to upgrade them soon that is. We’ll see.

This is me admitting that I did something that I may not have thought through properly, which is hard in itself, and this is me having learned a valuable lesson. You truly don’t know what you’ve got until it’s “gone”. Good thing though, “it” wasn’t really gone. I can go back, and I am already on my way.

So I’m coming home. Home to where I always belonged, and this I’m sure of now more than ever. Once again I’ll be comfortable in the open embrace of the penguin. (And that didn’t sound the least pretentious or dorky…)

Taken from this article on Forbes.com:

Google employees not using the secret OS are employing various versions of Unix, such as Linux or Ubuntu, and some older operating systems, like X11, he says

And “he” being “Vince Vizzacarro, Net Applications’ executive vice president of marketing”. That sentence is riddled with enough erronous information to make me cringe.

One, Ubuntu is a version of Linux, which in turn is a Unix-like OS. If I was gonna nitpick I could also state that Linux is in fact not an OS - it’s an operating system kernel and operating systems based on it are called distributions. But never mind…

Two, X11 is not an operating system or anything close to it. X11 is windowing system software used by most desktop system for Unix-like OSes, like KDE, Gnome or XFCE for example.

So now I wonder who the idiot here is. Is Vince Vizzacarro with his fancy title as completely misinformed as he seems or has he been misquoted by the writer of the article? Either way it’s a disgrace.

Seriously, what’s up with the people at Asus and why are they so thoroughly raping their own brand? I’m talking of course about the Eee.

What started with a small revolution in the notebook-market, the tiny but nice EeePC, has now become pretty much a farce. First of all, what’s up with the millions of different configurations of EeePCs? Can even Asus keep up with all of them? Secondly, it seems that every other new piece of hardware coming out of their factories now sports the Eee-logo. Every week there seems to be a new model or a new product called the Eee-whatever. It’s getting a bit much in my opinion.

The original EeePCs were made affordable partly because they ran Linux, a modified Xandros-based version that provided a super-simple interface that even your grandma could use without much trouble, making them a good buy for the computer novice not only because of the small price. But it wasn’t long before market forces pressured Asus enough to start offering new models running Windows XP. Fine, if people really wanna run Windows XP let them. I just think it kind of defeats the whole point that the original EeePCs were making with their sleak Linux-powered and almost idiot-proof interface. An EeePC running Windows XP is just like any other cheap laptop, only smaller and with inferior hardware. Plus, the EeePC-models running Windows XP are more expensive than the ones running Linux. The ones that are the same price and model-number although running varying OSes have differences in their hardware specifications, i.e. smaller and cheaper harddrive to pay for the Windows XP-license.

There are now desktop-PCs wearing the Eee-logo popping up on the market. First there was the EeeBox, which I kind of see how it would be useful. It runs Windows XP or Linux, just like many of the netbooks of the brand. And now there’s a all-in-one touch screen PC called the Eee Top. I don’t know much about it yet but apparently it runs Windows XP infused with something that looks like the Easy-Mode UI on the EeePC netbooks. Judging by this video it doesn’t run all that well though…

Too me it seems that Asus are a bit dizzy by the success of the first Eee-branded products and now they think that anything wearing the Eee-logo will become a money-printing machine and by drowning the market in different models and products they may actually kill their own brand in the end.

I’m personally aching a bit for one of the EeePC 901s running Linux and I already own one of the original EeePCs, a 701 4G (with touch screen installed), but this flood of Eee-products leaves a bit of a foul taste in my mouth none the less

Begun the Linux wars has…

As reported and thoroughly investigated in this article on Groklaw a lawsuit has been brought to Linux-distributors Novell and Red Hat. In the article a good case is made for who’s really behind the lawsuit (no, it’s not really the plaintiff IP Innovation..) and you guessed it, it’s Microsoft.

This should come as no surprise though. We all know that Microsoft are scared shitless of the little penguin that could, particularly Steve Ballmer it seems. In my opinion, unlike in the SCO-case this time they’re not even trying to hide that it’s them behind it all. The trail back to them is not very elaborate and good ‘ole Stevie B. even predicted that a lawsuit was on it’s way just the other day, which makes it look like he said “we could do this” and then went on and proved it. Not very smooth if they really were trying to remain the secret backer of yet another patent-claim catastrophe.

Interestingly enough Apple were previously attacked by IP Innovation with a similar claim and apparently have now paid the patent-trolls in order to keep them quiet.

Novell must be damn proud of themselves right now. First they sell their soul to Microsoft and now they’re being stabbed in the back. Nice one, Stevie.