Securitron Doom/Linux Blog.

 

Gnome Rants.

Do you like my new blog page format? I accidentally erased part of my blog
template whilst administering the page so I installed and tweaked a new one.
I have a DIV layer that contains this text and the one next to it containing
links to my blog archives. A bit of a hack but it works. And looks good too.
I have also re-coded the viewblog script at
http://bejiitas_wrath.tripod.com/cgi-bin/viewblog.cgi. Now the date and time
works much better and I have removed the buggy random monster code. I had
not looked at that script for a while so I did not know it was broken. Sorry
about that!

I have updated to a new Kernel for my machine. I had the 2.6.13 kernel that
came with my Suse 10 installation and I got a source tarball of the vanilla
2.6.14 kernel and built that on my system. Now I am very happy with the
performance of my computer. The vanilla kernel works just as well as the
default one, but I have enabled the SE Linux features and I have greater
security and control over permissions regarding access to devices and access
to certain areas of the system. I had to add myself to the audio group and
the disk group and now I can use sound applications like Prboom again. And I
have setup my USB Disk so I can type eject /media/usb as my normal user to
eject and/or unmount a USB Disk. This is more convenient and I still use the
HAL service to mount a USB disk when I insert it. I removed the default Suse
kernels once I had tested my Kernel, I do not need a kernel compiled by
someone else.

I am using the Gnome Window manager and I have gotten over my fascination
with Kde. I prefer something like Gnome which despite it's detractors is the
best Desktop environment there is. I do not like the way that you can delete
files off the Desktop just by having it highlighted and pressing delete. But
I guess you can stop this happening by editing with the Gconf-Editor. But it
is annoying. Someone on Slash-dot said something about Gnome breaking every
rule in the book concerning security. But I do not know what exactly he
meant by that. He did not post anything to back it up. Linus Torvalds has
posted to the Gnome discussion list about the usability of the Gnome desktop
and the `users are idiots` comment. I cannot believe this. Gnome is simpler
than KDE and has simpler features than that desktop. Installing themes and
window styles is much easier and the overall look of the desktop looks quite
good and is the standard desktop of the Ubuntuu distribution for a reason. I
find it easier to make styles and themes for the Metacity window manager
easier than for KDE. Some more work still needs to be done to speed up Gnome
to match Windows. The speed of the Gnome 2.12 desktop lags behind Windows
2000, but at least it is not as bloated as the Open-office.org suite which
takes so long to load on Linux that you can brew a round of coffee for the
whole Australian Winter Olympic team and still have time to spare. If I
installed Ispell I could plug it into Emacs and use that to type up my
documents. It would be a heap of a lot faster than the slow Open-Office.org,
which takes up huge amounts of disk space. Emacs has a great amount of
features and is very customizable and extensible.

I am now using XEmacs and it is even better than the Emacs editor. And has a
useful toolbar for regularly accessed functions. And it can access all of
the cool features of Emacs, such as computing the phases of the Moon and
games. You can play Tetras in the editor!

There is a new computer virus targeting the Apple MAC Platform. It was only
a matter of time before there was a virus that Computer Viruses would work
on the venerable MAC platform. But this is a indicator of things to come.
Soon there will be more. The Apple CHAT program is the one affected by this,
but the user has to say yes to accept the file. On Windows the files can be
transferred in the background. Very convenient for the virus, but not for
the user. But Defense are offering bounties for critical Microsoft
Vulnerabilities. A good opportunity for someone to make some money finding
many of the hundreds of bugs and holes in Windows. There are plenty there to
find too.. Outlook for Windows has plenty of bugs, I hope that Microsoft
will continue with the added security of NTFS and file based permissions
like the UNIX model. Where a file has certain permissions and that makes it
only readable by a certain user. E.g chmod 600 makes a file readable only by
the person who owns it. Much better than Windows XP which gives the ability
to make folders private but does not offer any real security over Linux.
Especially when the people who run it always run as Administrator and have
spy-ware and virus infestations all over the place. Totally bogus. And
Windows XP can run out of virtual memory and totally screw up your day. How
does that happen? I am glad I do not have to put up with such an annoying
OS. Windows 2000 is bad enough, let alone Windows XP and Windows server
2003. Windows Vista will attract attention and be the new Microsoft
installation for many people, despite still shipping with Internet Explorer
and undoubtedly including many security holes. There is one service running
in Windows Vista that opens a port so that law enforcement can check your
machine. Of course it will only be a matter of time before someone exploits
this service and creates the modern equivalent of Back Orifice. I cannot
understand why Microsoft would claim that Windows is more secure and stable
than Linux and still deliver unstable and insecure software like Windows
Vista and Internet Explorer. But this is what I have come to expect from
Microsoft.

I have updated my Portable-Firefox to version 1.5 and it works perfectly
too. I just copied over my bookmarks.htm and my flash plugin over to the new
directories and I was done. It is a little faster than version 1.0.7 and
includes many new features that were only available as plug-ins before.
Firefox version 1.5 is well worth updating to and I recommend downloading a
copy now. It is a great improvement over the older versions and well worth
the download time.

I have installed Abiword as my word processor as Open-Office is far too slow
and bloated to bother with at all. I agree with the back page of Linux
Format January 2006. This program needs a drastic weight loss and it is
about time too. I do not like applications that take that long to load.
There should be a session of bug fixing that concentrates on speeding up
this program. Then it would be greatly improved and maybe worth using. But
for now it is just a bloated mess that cannot compete with Microsoft Office
on Windows 2000, which loads nigh on instantly and runs much faster than
Open-Office.org ever could. And although it uses the MS Word *.doc format
which for some reason has larger file sizes than the Open-Office *.sxw
format, I will still use it in a pinch, although it is running on an
outdated and unstable/insecure OS. Windows XP is pretty bad though. Bloated
and reboot ridden and slow and prone to viruses and spy-ware even after two
official service packs. What a joke. I know that there are security alerts
for Linux operating systems, but most of them take more skill to implement
viruses and Trojan horses for than say, Windows XP. Which as some people
have said is a demonstration of how not to do security, Not to forget that
there was a machine I know of where someone installed Service pack 2 for
Windows XP and the hardware on the machine stopped working. The network and
all. Because the little balloon prompts that come up from the system tray
had warned the user that there were new updates available and they had just
clicked the message to download something to the system.

The above link is to a site that has a list of applications that will not
run in Windows XP in an account that does not have root/administrator
privileges. On Linux, you can install applications into your home directory
as your normal user, such as gcc for example and they will work perfectly.
You do not have these problems unless say, they need to write to /var/log or
/etc.

¶ 3/10/2006 09:29:00 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

 

Brokeback to the Future.

This site is quite cool. Check it out.

<A
HREF='http://youtube.com/watch?v=8uwuLxrv8jY'>http://youtube.com/watch?v=8uwuLxrv8jY</A>

Back to the future reloaded.

¶ 3/06/2006 01:25:00 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

 

Gnome 2.12

There have been more additions to my Hell Gate map. I have added a new area for the player to hide in and this will make it easier for the player to fight the monsters with his newly acquired rocket launcher and avoid damage. It is connected to the starting area and this gives a good sense of connectivity between areas. A sense of realism or solidity to the level some people might call it. I call it cool. And I stand by the DECORATE monsters I have added. They are hard to fight, but I will re-do them if required. But they are not so hard as having 2800 monsters in the map and being swamped with far too many demons coming for you and you cannot fight that many at all. I am working on upgrading my Linux 2.6.13 system to 2.6.14 and I have had problems with loading the Kernel on the reboot. I need to setup an initrd to load the drivers from /lib/modules/2.6.13 that is the step I missed, that is what you get for taking notice of how the Suse kernel loads and not what you need for the 2.6.14 or 2.6.13 kernel. I have re-compiled vanilla source tarballs of xine-ui and xine-lib and I got DVD playback working in Suse Linux 10.0 I have no problems playing The Lord of the Rings DVD, using Xine. That player is better than Totem or Kaffeine. The verbose setup menu makes all the difference.

I have tried out the new KDE that came with Suse 10.0 and I do not think I will be using it compared to Gnome 2.12.0 that is awesome and a huge improvement over 2.10. It has superior performance and the Clearlooks theme engine is the best looking yet. And I can use svg wallpapers that can be scaled to any size. Much better than Windows XP which needs Active Desktop enabled to display any image format other than *.BMP.

Now that is a joke since way back when I used Red Hat 6.2, it could display those image formats without problems. Now when you are using Windows XP it is less usable that way than the aforementioned Red-Hat software. Although, now I use Suse 10.0 which is way ahead of Debian `Sarge` and Red-Hat Fedora Core 4. Kernel 2.6.13 and Gnome 2.12 are way ahead of the competition excepting maybe Ubuntuu. And the Windows XP performance compared to Linux totally sucks. And why does the Windows XP explorer Window not show the space remaining on a drive you have selected in the status bar? Now it only shows the number of objects in the directory instead. Windows 2000 shows this information and it always should be available instead of having to right-click and select the properties of the folder to get the lovely pie graph to see how much disk space is left. That is why Gnome 2.12 is so good, you get the information in the status bar at the bottom of the Window.

The spatial view mode File Browser is better than the Windows Explorer file manager anyway, and Debian `Sarge` will not have that for a while. I tried to build Gnome 2.12 on Debian Sarge and I had to almost re-build the whole OS just to do that. And it only comes with Kernel 2.6.8 although you should be able to build at least 2.6.12. But I tried that and did not have much luck. They should concentrate on Ubuntuu and Mepis which have newer software than Debian ever would. They still only have Gnome 2.8. Zenwalk has the Xfce 4 desktop and I had no problems installing the Gnome desktop to Gnome 2.10 from source. It was very good too, I even installed Gnome-session-2.12 and I would have had no problems upgrading to Gnome 2.12 if I wanted to. Running the Xfce 4 desktop with Nautilus running in the background is a very good desktop indeed. And fast indeed. Much faster than Gnome 2.12. And good looking, since you can use your GTK themes in the Xfce Window manager.
¶ 3/06/2006 10:52:00 AM 0 Comments Links to this post