New GNOME, Slow Nautilus

Posted on 8 May, 2001 by steevithak

Time for another Mozilla upgrade – I’m posting this from Mozilla 0.9 and so far it seems to show the usual incremental improvement. There have been major performance improvements but there still need to be a few more before it’s ready for prime-time. The bookmark manager is still a bit slow and the initial start up is still slower than Netscape but there have been lots of bug fixes and the general responsiveness while browsing is greatly improved over 0.8.1.

I also upgraded GNOME on one of my boxes to Ximian GNOME v1.4. Mostly good with the exception of Nautilus which appears to be a complete waste. Nautilus sucks up huge amounts of memory but doesn’t appear to actually do anything except allow you to get a simple context menu on the desktop and a goofy folder-view of disk directories. The context menu is so slow that it’s virtually unusable (you click on it and nothing happens, you fire up an xterm and do a ps to look for the process to kill and about that time you see the menu option you clicked become hilighted, another 5 seconds or so and the menu option depresses and executes – making something that slow must have taken some work!).

The folder-view thing seems equally useless – it takes up a huge amount of real-estate and the icons are about 4 times larger than they need to be (not to mention that it took around two minutes to open and render for the root directory which has maybe a dozen files and directories to display). I killed all the processes that seemed to be Nautilus-related and GNOME has seemed pretty snappy ever since. I haven’t missed it and GNOME seems to run fine without it, so I guess it doesn’t do anything too important. Now I need to find a way to configure GNOME not to start Nautilus so I won’t have to kill it manually when I start up. Other than Nautilus, GNOME 1.4 seems to have plenty of improvements. The only other complaint I can come up with is that the panel at the top has a clock on it that isn’t removable for some reason (or at least I haven’t figured out how yet).

I was amused to see that Nautilus is so bad that it now has an entire mailing list devoted to flames about it.

robots.net got mentioned on a radio show called Computer Insider about a month ago. I wonder if anybody heard it? (I didn’t even know the radio show existed until I ran across their web site recently!)

Red Hat Definitely Drops Sparc Support

Posted on 1 May, 2001 by steevithak

I finally got a definite-sounding answer in email from someone at Red Hat. It looks like Red Hat Linux for Sparc is officially dead. They said, “We are not offering a SPARC version of Red Hat Linux as there was not enough consumer demand or interest for it. To my knowledge one will not be available, period.”

Red Hat Drops Sparc Support

Posted on 27 April, 2001 by steevithak

I’m annoyed with Red Hat. We run both Intel and Sun hardware and I like to use the same distribution of Linux on all of them to make things more consistent. We’re running Red Hat 6.2 now. There was no Red Hat 7.0 release for Sparc, which was not that surprising as they’ve skipped *.0 releases before for non-Intel platforms. And they assured me at the time that there would be a Sparc release of Red Hat 7.1 but now that it’s out, there isn’t one. When I called today they seemed to indicate that there probably wouldn’t be one (but there might). And they insisted that even if they didn’t release one they would continue to support the Sparc platform (apparently “support” doesn’t include actually having any software that runs on it). Oh well, looks like it’s time to try out some other distributions.

I Finally Have Broadband Thanks to Paragon/ATT Cable

Posted on 4 February, 2001 by steevithak

Saturday was the big day. The Paragon Cable/ATT installers showed up around 10:30am and a few hours later we had a working cable modem. The cable modem is one of the newer RCA types (it’s the one at the bottom of the page next the 3Com Sharkfin). I also picked up a Linksys BEFSR81 Cable/DSL router to act as firewall, router, and 10/100 8-port hub. The Linksys router is pretty cool, allowing a one machine DMZ as well as port-forwarding, DHCP, NAT and several other features you wouldn’t normally expect on such an inexpensive little box.

The install went relatively smoothly. After reading some of the att@home horror stories (or here or here) from other Linux users, I’d moved our real boxes to another room and brought an old clunker from the office and put Windows 98 on it – in case they insisted they only supported Windows or had to install their mutant version of IE. As it turned out though, the installer was reasonably knowledgable about things. He knew what Linux was and had even used it himself. He said I could sign a waiver saying I declined installation support and could then use any OS I wanted. We went ahead and used the W98 box for testing but he provided all the info needed so we could configure the Linux boxes. Third-party routers like the Linksys are another thing att@home theoretically doesn’t support but the installer thought it was a cool box and had never used one before so he wanted to see how to set it up to work with the cable modem too.

I spent a while at a list of bandwidth testing sites trying to get some idea of how fast the new setup was. The slowest download speed I got was around 700Kbps but most tests showed 1.5 – 2.0 Mbps. Not bad for $39/month. Unfortunately, att@home throttles the upload speed to 128kbps to discourage users from running any type of servers but it’s still a lot better than dial-up. :-)

The only strange part of the whole thing is that our home dial-up connection was the last analog modem that I used and heard on a regular basis. I think I’ve listened to modem connect-tones nearly every day of my life for at least 20 years. It’s going to be strange getting used to not hearing them. Made me start thinking again that someone should try to preserve some of those wonderful sounds. Perhaps an archive with WAV/MP3 files of all the classic connect tones – those strange tones the high-end US Robotics models used to make only when they connected with another USR; the old 300 and 1200 Baud connect sounds; the first DSI V.32 and V.32bis connect sounds. Hmmmm… better stop before I get all nostalgic for the good ol’ days.

Richard Stallman Comes to Dallas

Posted on 17 January, 2001 by steevithak

I heard RMS speak at the DFWUUG meeting last night. A lot of other people showed up too, in spite of the cold, wet weather. It’s the first time I’ve seen him in person and he was very much what I expected with a few exceptions. He told the story of the Free Software Foundation, the GNU GPL, and the GNU Operating System project. I got the impression that this was a talk he’d given many times before and much of it was almost word-for-word what you can read on the GNU and FSF web sites.

Overall he didn’t sound nearly as dogmatic as he is made out to be. He said the Open Source movement was not the enemy of the Free Software movement, just “the other political party within our community”. He made a point of saying that while the BSD license didn’t provide as much protection to the end user’s freedoms, it was a Free Software License. He also made a point of mentioning the KDE/QT disaster – noting that QT was now under GPL and the KDE system could be used within a Free Software based OS. He emphasised that Free Software was not about preventing businesses from making profit, just about prevent business from profiting at the expense of end user’s freedom.

He made the usual plea for people to use the correct terminology – use “Free Software” if you support Free Software. Use “Open Source” if you support Open Source. Pronounce GNU as “Guh-new”, not “new” or “Gee-In-You”. Pronounce Gnome as “Guh-gnome” (this one still bugs me – why make an acronym that forms a normal English word and then try to make people pronounce it incorrectly – I say it should be pronounced like it’s spelled. Oh well…)

Towards the end of the talk, RMS donned his famous Church of Emacs outfit including a black robe and disk platter halo.

After the talk there were the usual assortment of questions from the clueless:

Q: How can I make money if I can’t sell my software?

RMS: You can sell your software. The FSF is selling software and books today just outside this meeting room. Please buy some of it.

Q: How did X get its name?

RMS: I don’t know

Q: How many operating systems run within the GNU thing?

RMS: I’m sorry I have no idea what you mean by that.

Q: Is using VI a sin in the Church of Emacs?

RMS: In the Church of Emacs, using VI is a penance.

There were a few more volatile exchanges with someone who insisted he had the legal right to make non-free software and seemed upset that RMS wouldn’t approve of him doing this.

Okay, now the weird part. Why is it that Eccentric Geniuses like Stallman are always so, well, eccentric? He spent about 15 minutes prior to the talk sitting on the floor by the podium with his shoes off reading email on a laptop. All during the talk he drank iced tea (with no ice) from a large glass with two straws. Each time he neared the end of one glass of tea, a courier would rush forward with a replacement glass (each with no ice and two straws). He’d gone through three or four by the end of the talk. In fact, one of the questions he got during the Q&A was, “after all that Tea, do you need to go to the bathroom yet?”. He also would periodically stop talking and spend what seemed like a fairly large amount of time picking things out of his teeth or hair. He looks rather like a cave-man so this was fitting in an odd sort of way but it was clearly creeping-out a lot of people (though some seemed to find it really funny too).

Overall, an interesting evening.

Windows 2048?

Posted on 28 October, 2000 by steevithak

I’ve noticed a lot of attempted break-ins on our servers during the last week. Mostly trying to use the rpc.statd buffer overflow. Looks like another wave of massive, automated cracking going on. Might be a good idea to disable or block access to rpc.statd where possible.

Meanwhile, we’ve been upgrading one of our few Windows boxes from NT to 2000. The first half dozen installs didn’t quite work but we’re begining to get closer. One of the problems in installing 2000 seems to be that you have to completely wipe out any traces of previous version of Windows or it will try to merge bits and pieces of the old installation in with the new one and the result is not pretty. Formatting the install drive will take care of that problem but it appears to not be possible to actually format the hard drive using the 2000 installer. If you select the target partition and ask 2000 to format it, you get a screen that seems to show the drive being formatted (complete with bar-graph and percent-done indicator). However it doesn’t actually format it if it’s already formatted as NTFS from a previous install, it just scans it and then installs on top of whatever was already on the disk. We finally had to use Partition Magic to wipe out the existing contents, and then wiped the MBR manually with FDISK by booting from a floppy with DOS on it. After all that, we got a clean install and things started working right.

What I really found amazing is that the last couple of Red Hat Linux installs I’ve done were actually quite a bit easier. I think we’re getting real close to the cross-over point where Windows is going to start falling behind Linux in ease-of-use.

And one more thing. I keep seeing Windows 2000 referred to as Win2K – but wouldn’t that equate to Windows 2048?