The Other Don Kelly

I use Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu, specifically a less-than-current version of Ubuntu for whatever the current version of Mint is. The Ubuntu distribution is in its turn made up of software packages that do not get major upgrades (except for, say, security fixes) within any specific version, so by the time I get the “latest” Mint, the actual programs and applications are actually months, if not years out of date. This drives me nuts sometimes, especially when I run across a bug, Google it and find that it had been fixed last year but it’s not available to me, at least through the official Mint channels.

In situations like that, you can do things the old-fashioned way (download the source and build it yourself) or you could find a pre-packaged installer file with the latest version, but these now knock you off any available “upgrade path” for that application. The better way is to find another channel from which to receive the software packages, one that is more up-to-date than the official ones.

(By the way, these channels are called “repositories,” and they are just online sources for the software packages. The packages themselves are compressed bundles of files that contain the software, along with information about what other software, specifically what versions of other software, the package needs, which are called its dependencies. The “package management system” reads these files, figures out what else needs upgrading — or if it can be upgraded — and takes care of upgrading the software and its dependencies from the lists kept in the repositories that it knows about.)

It’s somewhat frowned upon, since “unofficial” repositories may be malware, or even just poorly made, but I’ve added a few of them to my lists of software sources. I’ve done it to get the latest available Libre Office, and also the latest version of R, for example, and yesterday I decided to do the same with my GIS software, using what is supposed to be a very useful, up-to-the-minute repository.

Well, it was a little more complicated than that, since the version of GRASS in the repository is 7.0, and the version of QGIS was 2.8, and it turns out that the GRASS plug-in for QGIS 2.8 was broken by the newest versions of GRASS, which is bad because a good portion of QGIS’s advanced functionality comes from its ability to work with GRASS. I’d upgraded myself right out of a useful program… I did a bit of Googling, and found that later versions of QGIS had the problem resolved — wait, later versions?

It turns out that this cutting edge repository was also not the latest, and I had to get the latest directly from a repository maintained by the makers of QGIS. I feel like I built myself a house of cards, QGIS repository on top of unofficial repository on top of Mint, but at least I now have the software I want.

I’m not even sure why I turned it on, but for some reason, some time in the past, I did turn on the Compiz effect called Freely Transformable Windows. I probably clicked on it randomly to see if anything dramatic happened, didn’t notice any changes and moved on, but if you look at the description it sounds pretty cool: you can rotate (in 3d) or tilt or scale any window, including its contents. If you look closer at the description though, you’ll also see that once the window has been “freely transformed,” you can no longer “interact normally” with it, meaning you can’t use it at all, or even close it normally — it’s like it’s locked up, with the window crooked.

So like I said, I forgot about selecting it, and had no idea what it did in the first place. Unfortunately, it has a bunch of Control-Shift-Letter commands to initiate the effect, which override other uses of those same keyboard shortcuts, so I would be in Firefox say, press Control-Shift-A for the add-ons page, and instead of getting what I want the window would go crooked and lock up. As far as I could tell, it was some weird and serious bug.

Well tonight I just happened to do a little Googling, and found the info that reminded me of what I did. I turned off the effect, and all is right with the world.

I turned it off, as well as all the RSS feed screenlets I had all over my desktop. (I kept the clock.) Those RSS screenlets turned to be a distraction and an annoyance, and luckily nothing worse, but I’m pretty sure that Conky made my system unstable: whenever I had it running more than a day or so, I started getting weird crashes in other programs. Turned it off, crashes (at least,thosecrashes) went away.

I’m keeping most of my Compiz eye candy, but it turns out I actually prefer a cleaner desktop…

I’m not sure why or even how this happened, but ever since I upgraded to Mint my web server had been dealing with PHP in a very unsatisfactory manner: as long as the PHP file was in the main website area (/var/www/html) it worked fine, but I usually keep my web stuff in my own “user directory,” and in that directory any actual PHP was just totally ignored when the file was served up.

This, for security purposes, is basically the default behavior, and there is supposedly an easy way to change the behavior, which involves minor changes to the configuration files. But, when I made those changes to the configuration there was no corresponding change in behavior… A week or so of Googling for answers, and (in the end, almost random) fiddling with the configuration files, file permissions, etc etc, got me nowhere, so I decided to just live with it for a while.

Fast forward to Saturday night. I have no idea why I decided to mess with things again, but in the end I got so frustrated that I just completely uninstalled both the Apache server and PHP, and did a clean reinstall of them both, just before bedtime… Actually the reinstall went reasonably smoothly, to my considerable surprise. I broke a few other things along the way, PHPMyAdmin among them, but the server was up and running, correctly — after making those configuration changes that refused to work before — before I went to bed.

Yesterday I spent a little time fixing and rebuilding, and today I got the last error messages in PHPMyAdmin to go away. Anne was joking that I love a challenge, but playing with PHP would have been the challenge, and this was more like finding my bike tools needing repair (and in the end, replacement) before I could even work on the bike, to get ready for a challenging ride.

Mixing metaphors: I feel like like I’ve been putting off dealing with a toothache, and am now kicking myself after the dentist visit, for putting it off so long.

I’ve been playing a lot with the “eye candy” aspect of my computer setup lately. Not sure why, but I really got into the Compiz “window cube” decorations — I now have a whole bunch of medieval alchemy images hiding behind my ordinary screen (a close-up of the Crab Nebula), revealed when I spin the cube.

I also decided to put a bunch of screenlets, or desklets, or desk accessories, or whatever they’re calling them these days. I found the screenlets program and I really wasn’t all that impressed, but it led me to the program called Conky, which does pretty much the same thing, only much more impressively. The only problem is that Conky has an unwieldy, text based configuration, which in turn can call the Lua programming language to do fancy effects, and Lua in turn uses the Cairo graphics library. I had no idea any of these things existed…

So I spent some time learning something about these new languages, and now, besides the floating clock screenlet in the upper right, and a few screenlets for RSS feeds floating here and there, on the right side I have a simple conky reporting my laptop’s hardware stats. I don’t know if I need more than that, but may play with it some more just as a learning experience, and to candy-coat my screen some more.