Topic: Technology

Aside from doing semi-perverse things with my email retrieval system, one of my most recent technical/digital obsessions has been with a X11-based window manager called awesome. It’s a tiling window manager, and it’s designed to decrease reliance on the mouse for most computer interaction/system navigation purposes.

Unless you’re in the choir, your first question is probably “What’s a tiling window manager?” Basically the idea is that awesome takes your entire screen and divides all of it into windows that are a lot like the windows that OS X, Windows, GNOME, and KDE users are the same. Awesome also has the possibility for what it calls “tags,” but which are akin to virtual desktops (and I think of as slates) which make it possible to have a great number of windows open and accessible which maximizes screen efficiency and multi-tasking while minimizing distractions and squinting.

The second question you might have, given the prevalence of the mouse-pointer paradigm in computing lo these 30 years, why would you want a system that’s not dependent on the mouse? Long time readers of the ‘blag might remember some blogging I did earlier this year about the second coming of the command line interface. The basic idea is that the more you can avoid switching between the mouse and the keyboard, the more efficient you can be. Keystrokes take fractions of seconds, mouse clicks take many seconds, and this adds up. The more complex idea is that text-based environments tend to be more scriptable than GUIs and coded more efficiently with less mess in between you and your data/task. After all, coding visual effects into your text/word processing application is probably a sign that someone is doing their job horribly wrong.

One of my largest complaints about using GNOME is that it’s terribly inefficient with regards to how it uses screen space. Maybe this is the symptom of using a laptop and not having a lot of space to go around, but most applications don’t need a menu bar at they top of every window, and a status bar at the bottom of every window, and a nice 5 pixel border. I want to use my computer to read and write words, not look at window padding (I suppose I should gripe about GNOME at some point, this is an entry onto itself.) Awesome fixes this problem.

I’m not jumping in to Awesome full time, but I am starting to use it more and learn about it’s subtleties, and hopefully I’ll be able to contribute to the documentation of the project (it needs something at any rate). For a long time I’ve flirted with Linux, but haven’t ever really felt that it offered something that I couldn’t get with OS X, and this changes that pretty significantly.

One of the things that I need to do first is explore Linux equivalents to my remaining OS X-only apps. The most crucial is the news reader, I’m a big fan of NetNewsWire, and I’ve never used a news reader which can top it. As it turns out, between vim and Cream, I’m pretty set in the text editor department (though I need to port over the most important of my scripts and snippets to vim), and although Adium is a port of Pidgin, using Pidgin is painful by comparison, particularly in awesome.

But I have time. I’m doing this becasue it’s interesting interested and weirdly enough, it’s kind of fun.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, I’ll be posting more on the subject as I learn more.

This is the post I promised a few days ago about my linux/BSD/etc. quandary.

I have an old computer that is a handmedown from some friends who moved out of town and had (good for them!) bought an iMac. It’s 2001 vintage PC, branded HP. Say, 512 megs of ram, and a 1.8 ghz Pentium 4. In fact, it’s a pretty spiffy machine, for it’s day. I often think of PCs as being uniformly lackluster, but the truth is that I never had an overcharged machine. For instance, this PC has firewire. Firewire! I’m not sure that they’re putting firewire in PCs these days.

In any case, while the computer isn’t ultra spiffy by today’s standards, it’s not bad. Well, it’s not bad aside from the fact that Windows has… done what Windows does best: break, and crumble under the pressure of every day use. I mean the people I know (ok person) I know that uses windows with any consistency reinstalls the operating system with a degree of regularity that I find almost maddening (Hi C.!).

Anyway, I think if I install a more… lightweight operating system, something unix-y. And this post is half, me thinking out loud, and half me asking you all for help and opinions on the subject.

I might be able to put this computer to serious work doing something around here. One distinct possibility is that I’ll get it ready for my mother to use as her home computer, running mostly web things--email, surfing, IM--and what not. Also being able to run a few things in Wine might help her workflow out. That strikes me as being the perfect use for a straight up ubuntu install. I’ve also thought about Xubuntu, because it seems like it’s pretty suited to this kind of thing (reviving an older computer that doesn’t need to do any serious heavy lifting.)

The second thing I’m thinking of doing with this computer is to find some way of getting it to work (including boot up and all) without needing a keyboard/video/etc. So basically a server set up. I figure it would be the most efficient to be able to access it over the network from the computer that I actually use on a day to day basis. Mostly I’d use it for things like file serving, and backup, but maybe bit torrent and the like as well. Ubuntu would probably work ok for this (and I did grab a copy of the server version as well, if I want to try this. I also thought that trying to run FreeBSD might be sort of fun. I mean: a shell is a shell (I hear freeBSD doesn’t come stock with bash, sigh.) and you know that might be fun. And if I don’t get into graduate school, having unix experience, might be productive.

So I guess, your thoughts on Ubuntu flavors, or I suppose other linux distributions, and also, on FreeBSD if anyone out there in Internet land has experience, it would be great to hear from you on that.

Talk to you soon!

Onward and Upward!