Anything or more and less

A happy new year to all the visitors reading this! Time to have a look into the Piwik Analytics data for the last year from this little server here.

In 2011 we had a slight growth in the visitors number on diekershoff.homeunix.net almost doubling the number. As one can clearly see in the Top 4 graph below the reason for this jump is clearly the ~friendica instance running here now since a year. Almost 40 percent of the page views registered by Piwik were visits to the open socialverse as I’ve called my installation. Another 40 percent (well a bit more, but the two share the fame) of the page views are generated by my StatusNet stream, which in itself more then tripled the visitor count compared to the last year which is no big surprise as I moved my activities from identi.ca to my own server a year ago.

The other big things on the server are this blog with some 15 percent of the page views and my bugtracker with 3 percent of the views.

You are using Firefox (or maybe Chrome/Safari) and some sort of Linux in general visiting the server from 7 to 24 o’clock CE(S)T which is no wonder as I usually switch off the server over night. Sometimes though, intentionally or not I forget to switch it off and you are still visiting, so I really should try to get some plug server or something else so the server can run around the clock.

Slightly more then 25 percent of you are using this alternate operation system called Windows and some of you use the tool to download a browser to actually browse the content here, which is ridiculous because you won’t find a browser here anyway.

The most viewed page from each of the big four on the server are my ~friendica profile, my blog posting about ownCloud, a dent by inforrupt no clue why you are reading it here and the page for my Twitter plugin for ~friendica.

Well, so much for 2011 – happy 2012 again. Time for a cup of tea now, have a nice stay and come back anytime you want

identi.ca was down today, for me it was the morning till the afternoon. Such things happen and they are not nice, not for the users and not for @evan and his team. Nobody to blame except those who blame the team but don’t setup their own StatusNet nodes, which is not that complicated. In fact it is rather easy…

For federated StatusNet user, those of us Laconicats (c.r. identicats) running their own servers or microblogging on federated nodes, that means it gets awfully quiet in the timeline. This time it hit my nerve and I just wanted to have some numbers.

So here they are. My node, since its last crash after the MySQL breakdown in April—so half a year. Nothing said about how active these accounts are, pure number counting here.

These numbers are profiles seen by my StatusNet node. Seen as once or still followed, once answered or once posted to a group I’m member of/was. That is 3440 profiles from identi.ca, 58 profiles from microblogs from the status.net cloud and 140 profiles from other sources (mostly StatusNet but also some Friendika instances). So when the StatusNet cloud is offline, and identi.ca beeing the biggest part of the SN cloud IIRC, that means that 95% of all profiles my node ever saw are gone.

I would not mind some more federated contacts

And for those who are interested, here are the MySQL queries I used (I’m open for other queries)

I’m sure there are better queries, maybe even a count (I’m sure it is) but they did their job and I liked to see the names flying by in the terminal

The next distribution in my little distro hopping on the eeePC was Arch Linux which I wanted to test for a long time now, after Arch lost a coin toss against Gentoo back then when I decided I need a new distro on my Thinkpad. Along the way testing Arch, I also tested Gnome 3, I just had to try it after I heard so many voices pro or against it.

First of, if you are new to Linux you probably don’t want to start with Arch or Gentoo as they are much more flexible then many other distributions and need some Linux knowledge before starting with the installation. The entire installation process, from inserting the Arch USB drive till the ready Gnome 3 desktop took me something like an hour.

As I’m new to Arch I needed some informations about the installation process, found in the following guides from the Arch Wiki, which is a great resource!

• Beginners Guide
• Official Install Guide
• eeePC specific though a bit older

• Gnome

Most of the extra time compared to the other Linux distributions went into cross-reading the articles mentioned above. But then the full system with LaTeX, Opera, Sylpheed, Gnome3 and everything else I needed for the moment was installed.

Arch detected all the hardware components of the eeePC that I use without a problem. Running it, doing the usual things of programming, surfing the intertubes, watching videos, got me a battery life time of five to seven hours, depending on the displays brightness.

Once you’ve read the guides above and used the mechanics for configuring the system and installing the packages, Arch is actually a really user friendly distribution. So maybe you should start with it, but only if you don’t need a colorful interface right now and if you are willing learn terminal magic early (you need that anyway for Linux).

Gnome 3, well I like it. In contrast to the prior versions of Gnome, this one has a nice interface, is good looking with not too many but the right amount of visual effects. But it is not the optimal desktop manager for the eeePC because of the height of the display which is too less for some dialogs, so that some of the buttons go right into nirvana. But I’m thinking about getting Gnome 3 as my default desktop manager on the Thinkpad.

And next? Actually I’ve done my list, but maybe you know some distro I have to checkout before I settle down and choose a distro/desktop manager combo for the eeePC.

In case you are reading this via https you might get the note from your browser. We are running on a new SSL cert on this server.

If you are tired by the warning please import the root cert from CA Cert into your browser.

Assuming I copied the correct strings, here are the fingerprints:

• SHA-1 DA 4B 0C 47 1C 20 69 82 E6 C0 BD 94 C4 54 57 94 B2 13 D7 C2

• SHA-256: 66 59 39 FE ED FE 11 2E 7E 91 28 ED 2C B2 E7 03 80 8F A2 EC C7 88 D4 21 E0 5D B2 A2 79 87 90 77

The latest round of distro hopping was with #! (or CrunchBang 10 “Statler”) on the eeePC a Debian based distribution by @corenominal using openbox as the default window manager.

CrunchBang is a Debian GNU/Linux based distribution offering a great blend of speed, style and substance. Using the nimble Openbox window manager, it is highly customisable and provides a modern, full-featured GNU/Linux system without sacrificing performance.

That’s what they say about themselves and they are right about it. My first thought after the installation process was finished (the creation of a bootable usb stick is described nicely on the #! homepage) was I’m feeling $HOME. You feel that #! is made by geeks for the geeks¹.

The Openbox window manager is nicely customized so that it’s a joy to work with it, even if you have never worked with Openbox before. All the crucial system informations are available with one look and the design is simple but beautiful. The WM keeps itself in the background, thus leaving space on the small screen for the applications that are running and being Debian based #! offers all the apps you need.

All the hardware of the eeePC seems to be supported from the function keys over the touch pad and the WLAN to the web cam. The battery lasts for about 7 hours with #! default settings without further tweaking by me.

So what is next? I’m not sure yet, but I want to try Gnome3 on the eeePC so I’m looking for a distribution with it.

After I had tested Windows 7 and MeeGo on the eeePC I moved on to the next distribution on my list of distros to test, namely Sabayon Linux (Wikipedia). Sabayon 6 (core) was released 4th July this year followed by Sabayon SpinBase releases on the 12th of the same month featuring XFCE, LXDE and E17.

Sabayon is Gentoo based, which appealed me, as I have Gentoo running on my Thinkpad for two years now, and the E17 edition appealed to me as well as I really like enlightenment. So, despite the for me un-understandable warning from the press release

Last and probably least, there is the somewhat i-like-broken-stuff-and-not-being-able-to-change-wallpaper Sabayon 6 E17, well, it’s Enlightenment 17, subversion snapshot, for the braves.

I got myself the ISO image for the E17 spin and made a bootable USB stick with UNetbootin and booted into the LiveCD modue. A fresh installed enlightenment looks a bit naked, but all the hardware worked on the first glance¹ so I installed Sabayon the eeePC. The installation took a bit longer then the installation of MeeGo but offered some more fine tuning so the few extra minutes were acceptable.

Once Sabayon was installed I went to E17 Stuff.org and searched for a nice theme, finally settling with the A-Japan-2011 2.0 by verdegal37. The E17 spin is shipped with a minimum of applications, but beeing Gentoo based there is a wide range of packages in the repository from Abiword, via Firefox, GIMP, Midori, LaTeX and Pidgin to Sylpheed and the zsh. All you need for productive work with current software.

You can use emerge with Sabayon as you do with Gentoo, but Sabayon offers a nice GUI called Entropy for package management and preventing non working setups. Entropy helps you keeping track of the rolling release² of Sabayon too, informing you when the developer team pushed new packages into the public.

Booting Sabayon needs a bit more time then MeeGo, and the battery lasts less time (about 6 hours) even when running enlightenments netbook profile which disables most of the fancy elements and dimming the light. I guess there are some tweaks to enhance both aspects that I haven’t found/searched but two weeks is damn short time for some things

Should I need to setup a new computer, Sabayon definitively is on the list for the distribution to choose. It also got on my list to recommend to people asking Which Linux distribution should I use?

Next on the list for is #! after Jolicloud disqualified itself with unusability with Opera and Firefox 7 and EasyPeasy by the latest news on the next release date.

Recently I broke myself my Thinkpads lid somehow with pure physics 101 thus rendering it unmobile as the lid now cant be closed. Therefore I got myself an eeePC for mobile working and plan to do some distro hopping on the eeePC before I settle down for one. MeeGo will be the 1st one and is covered in this entry.

The eeePC came preinstalled with Windows7 (starter), so the 1st distribution I tested was the Windows7 inthat was shipped with the eeePC. I went through the setup after 5 years of doing not so (the last time I initiated was the preinstalled Windows XP on the Thinkpad when I got it). It took about an hour for Windows to set itself up, during this there were 4 reboots and afterwards it presented itself in a fashion that reminded me on Windows 3.1 with some fancy GUI design you find on any KDE/Gnome for several years now.

All the hardware components of the eeePC were supported by Windows7, at least as far as I tested. There was a simple browser installed, if you can call IE7 a browser, which could be used to install a proper alternative (Opera for me). There is also a Office2010 (starter) and some tools by Asus, which seem to have the function to fill the small screen with icons and widgets… I wasn’t sure whether I should laugh or not about this bundle, but then I never planed to use the eeePC with Windows¹.

The first Linux distribution to check out was MeeGo. I’m now running it for a week without any problems at all. I planned on a one week per distro schema, so I’m now writing this down and try to figure out which distro should be the next.

Installing MeeGo was a bit tricky because the eeePC was new and I had to figure out how to got it booting from the USB stick. That is hit F2 right after the power button to access the BIOS and add the USB stick to the boot devices in front of any other device.

After I had figured that out, installing MeeGo (1.2) was an easy game. A basic procedure can be found at the web site of MeeGo.

The graphical installer did a good job suggesting working default settings and it was easily do able to adjust these settings a bit for my needs (e.g. that I want to keep Windows7 during the distro hopping phase bootable). The system was installed within 10 minutes and needed 1 reboot to get the settings from the hard disk and do the final setups for the user (like encrypting your home directory*). As with Windows7 all the hardware of the eeePC seems to be supported.

The 1st impression of MeeGo is a tab called MyZone where favorite applications are collected, the recently accessed files are shown alongside the calendar and ToDo entries for the day. Evolution is the preinstalled email program, Googles Chrome the chosen default browser. Empathy is installed so one can easily connect to all your IM services. There are further tabs for Banshee for music playing, an overview of the devices and quick entries to various places within the Linux and your home filesystem. I have not jet tested the Status tab which bundles your SocialNetworks but with MeeGo 1.2 there only seem to be bindings for Facebook and SmugMug available, though Twitter and Last.FM seemed to be doable in MeeGo 1.1². Under the hood of the clean GUI is what you can expect from a Linux (bash and the usual tools like python 2.6, ssh and so on).

All in all the MeeGo user interface on the netbook looks very clean and well thought. Their screens concept makes it easy to switch between the running apps (I worked in five apps parallel without any issue switching back and forth between the screens).

MeeGo uses zypper for maintaining software (there is a GUI for maintaining the software too, don’t fear)! The official and community repositories offer a wide range of software usually needed (Gimp, vim, git, Python even LaTeX and matplotlib are available). If something is not in the repositories you can still install it easily, after all you have a Linux box in front of you

But for the basic work of browsing the web, chatting with friends, making some small edits to documents, reading PDF files and so on and so on vanilla MeeGo is just great. It boots fast so you get online just as fast to start working. And it looks really good

Some time ago I made- a follow me at identi.ca button. Now that I moved my microblog from identi.ca to my own server @4yrs2l8 was totally right that I should update that button text accordingly.

So here it is as PNG and XCF file for your enjoyment