Rubenerd

Now that I've redefined the purpose of my primary desktop machine to make it a lean, mean code compiling machine, file server and Bittorrent downloader, it's graphical performance is much less important. Therefore I've wiped Debian off it and reinstalled FreeBSD, but this time instead of settling on the standard x86 version so as to use the proprietary Nvidia graphics drivers, I've installed the full blown AMD64 64-bit version!

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It's so nice to be back in my familiar FreeBSD environment where everything on the drive is logically and securely organised, where I can use the FreeBSD ports system, where tcsh is the default shell not bash, and where everything works the way I'm used to. Plus running the 64-bit version it can access all of my RAM and generally feels more responsive as a result.

dmesg

For what it's worth, after dappling in Debian GNU/Linux, I still prefer Slackware with Pkgsrc. FreeBSD and NetBSD are still the best though :-).

Any questions?

Despite WordPress assigning this post as p1198, this is in fact the 777th post! Yes, it's time for another one of our really hated loved Useless Rubenerd Blog Milestones!

Given the fact I'm in the 700+ range of posts, there are some posts which have the same number as famous Boeing jetliners. Having nurtured an interest in commercial aviation since I was a kid, I figured I'd create some small posts about these planes. I missed the boat on the 707/720 and 727 (no, I'm sorry the 717 was the MD-95!) but I did do posts on these 7x7s: 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Very sleek Singapore Airlines Boeing 777-300 9V-SWA from Wikipedia by Juergen Lehle

Despite the name "Boeing 777", the Boeing 777 was designed by Boeing Commercial Airplanes in response to the then large capacity gap between the 767-300ER and the 747-400. The 777 is currently the world's largest twin engined commercial airliner; in laymen's terms this means its the largest commercial airliner to have more than 2 full-sized engines, but less than 4. It can carry between 283 and 368 passengers in a three-class configuration and has a top range of 17,500 kilometres, or 6,890,314,960.63 inches for those who use the Imperial system.

The Boeing 777 was the first airliner to be fully designed on a computer; despite this a smaller ratio of airframes have been involved in catastrophic crashes as compared to other airliners currently flying. In another departure (pun intended) from traditional design, eight airlines were directly involved from the beginning of the project (Cathay Pacific, American, Delta, All Nippon Airways, British Airways, Japan Airlines, Qantas, and United).

The latest generation 777s use the world's largest diameter (3.25m) and most powerful turbofan engines currently avaliable: the General Electric GE90-115B. To get an idea of how gigantic these engines are, take a look at this classic Boeing 747 which has been retrofitted with a GE90 (inner) compared to the original engine (outer):

A GE90-115B mounted on the #2 pylon of GE's Boeing 747 flight test aircraft at the Mojave Airport in 2002 by Alan Radecki Akradecki

As of May 2008, 56 customers have placed orders for 1,080 777s, with Singapore Airlines being the largest customer; Singapore Airlines of course being the national airline of Singapore, strange though it may seem.

You can find out more about the Boeing 777 at their official website.

As I increasingly use and rely upon Unix-like operating systems such as FreeBSD (and GNU/Linux) on desktops, I tend to forget at times that I'm using a sophisticated server installed locally to generate my graphical environments, namely X11. And just as with any server I can call it up from another machine and use its services.

X11 was built specifically to serve graphical applications over networks, and can still be used in this way by employing SSH on the client, and installing the desired applications on the server. My primary desktop is a DIY running FreeBSD 7.0 (more on my debacle with Debian GNU/Linux in a later post!), and my primary mobile machine is an original generation MacBook Pro.

USELESS ASIDE: Given the fact it’s about time for my half-yearly move back to Adelaide, Australia I’ve been contemplating how best to access my desktop machines here in Singapore using my MacBook Pro which I’ll be taking with me. These are the things that keep my up at night.

To access desktop applications on a remote Unix-like machine on your Mac, fire up your Terminal and use the regular SSH command, but with the -X flag:

% ssh -X [USERNAME]@[HOST MACHINE]
% Password: [PASSWORD]

Provided you have installed X11.app from either your Tiger or Leopard install DVD; or better yet downloaded the latest community build of Xquartz from MacOSForge; you should now be able to enter in the name of a graphical application and have it appear!

Tunneled FreeBSD X11 apps running on Mac OS X through SSH

For example, I entered % xfce4-panel and used that to launch some of my favourite apps, as you can see above. Over my local home gigabit Ethernet connection and even at Starbucks on the free Singapore public WiFi networks the applications felt like they were running on my local machine.

You may recognise the Xfce panel from my previous post on Xfce and Openbox. There's a reason for that; I'm using the panel remotely from the same machine. Ain't [computer] science wonderful?

Plus then you can do things like run local Mac applications and the remote X11 applications on the same screen:

Xfce's Thunar file manager compared to Leopard's Finder

What started as a mini series on the Xfce Desktop Environment on my university intranet has evolved into an open ended exploration on my public blog, and I’m having lots of fun doing it! Scroll down to the end of this post to view links to the previous posts in the series.

<!– Xfce is a fantastic desktop environment to use on Linux, BSD and other Unix-like operating systems because it provides an attractive, fast, cohesive experience that's a pleasure to use, while being much more lightweight than the de-facto standard GNOME and KDE desktops. –>Part of the Xfce desktop environment is Xfwm, the Xfce window manager. Xfwm provides sophisticated and pretty composting effects such as drop shadows and alpha transparency on windows and menus, while still using less memory and power than competing desktop window managers. Despite this, for much slower machines even Xfwm can be overkill.

ASIDE: "Window managers" draw the widgets, title bars, resize handles and other elements onto application windows. "Desktop environments" such as KDE, GNOME and Xfce bundle their own window managers along with software developed specifically for their environments, such as Thunar for Xfce.

Enter Openbox, again! Openbox is an extensible, standards compliant, very minimalistic window manager that can be used by itself or in place of a desktop environment's default window manager to further reduce memory and processor resources. The separate obconf utility provides a nice graphical control panel you can use to switch themes and adjust settings.

Openbox running in Xfce with the bundled "Mikachu" theme

Most reputable package managers carry both Openbox and obconf, check your distribution's repositories. To install them on FreeBSD ports:

# cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/openbox # make install clean
# cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/obconf
# make install clean

Or from FreeBSD packages:

# pkg_add -rv openbox# pkg_add -rv obconf

Or NetBSD’s pkgsrc:

# cd /usr/pkgsrc/wm/openbox
# make install clean clean-depends
# cd /usr/pkgsrc/wm/obconf
# make install clean clean-depends

Now we want to kill the active Xfwm process in Xfce and open our glorious Openbox replacement. Fire up your Terminal and enter:

% killall xfwm4 ; openbox & exit

It really is smaller in every sense of the word isn't it? To make sure Openbox is used by default whenever you start Xfce, quit Xfce and check "Save sessions for future login".

Don't worry, CC looks pretty confused herself!

You'll also notice that the "Openbox Configuration Manager" has added itself to the Xfce Settings menu! Click on it and have fun with all the different themes, button positions, font sizes and arrangement settings.

Related posts

• Long live the Cobind Desktop 2008.06.21
• Fun with Xfce part 3: Themes 2008.06.18
• Fun with Xfce part 2: Setting up 2008.06.17
• Fun with Xfce part 1: Introduction 2008.06.15
• Sleek Openbox in KDE on FreeBSD 2008.03.19

Mindlessly navigating the intertubes this evening to try to bring myself out of a deep blue funk, I came across an interesting front page news story on CNET's always aptly named News.com site:

Clicking on it as of 22:18 Singapore Standard Time though returns a classic 404 "The page you've requested cannot be found." error.

Is this error just the result of a small slip up by one of the CNET employees, or is this a gentle ironic snub against the Macintosh computer?

Either this is some sort of a conspiracy, or it's some sort of conspiracy. I'm also entertaining the notion as a secondary idea that in fact this is not what it appears, but is in fact some sort of conspiracy.

UPDATE: The light grey text underneath the Mac story reporting the time since it was posted is now saying 3 hours, 34 minutes with no change. Damn it, I want to see the inside of the Mac Classic!

I’m beginning to entertain the notion that this is some sort of conspiracy.

First of all I want to congratulate everyone over at Mozilla for the stellar and record breaking release of Firefox 3. Back when I was a Windows user I was an avid user of Phoenix (the original name) and eagerly awaited with almost fanatical excitement when newer beta releases were released. I'm extremely pleased that there is such a vibrant, usable, free and open source alternative to commercial web browsers on so many different platforms, especially Internet Explorer.

Wait, this isn't Firefox 3…

All this said though, and after upgrading Firefox to version 3 on my MacBook Pro this morning, I'm still typing this entry using Camino. Camino is a free, open source web browser for Mac OS X that uses the same Gecko rendering engine that Firefox does. As usual Wikipedia provides the most succinct description for the software for those who don't know what the heck I'm talking about:

Camino (Spanish for way/path) is a free, open source, GUI-based Web browser based on Mozilla’s Gecko layout engine (also used by Mozilla Firefox) and specifically designed for the Mac OS X operating system.

In heindsight, that Wikipedia quote really didn't add much to my own initial explanation. Mental note: don't add superfluous and useless quotes to weblog posts any more.

Life is a big old circle. There is no beginning, and there is no end. That’s because in a circle there isn’t a beginning and there isn’t an end. And if you had any brains at all, you’d understand that!

Jimbob Kloss, Whole Wheat Radio

It's probably more to do with me being set in my ways or preferring to use what I'm most used to, but Camino to me still provides the best Mac web browsing experience, full stop. This isn't to say I haven't been tempted by other offerings. In my /Applications folder I can count no less than eight web browsers including Camino, Shiira, Safari, Konqeuror, Mozilla Firefox, SeaMonkey (I still see if it can replace Thunderbird, but it doesn't… for another post) and the PowerPC version of Internet Explorer, for testing how my sites render.

If you use VICE with a virtual VICMODEM it would count right?

What makes me keep coming back for more Caminoish goodness is… it's good for me. I'm serious, I don't rip any hair out of my head when I use Camino. That's a big plus in my book. For me it also excels in several critical areas:

Interface

Camino, like Safari and Shiira uses Mac OS X’s native Aqua GUI framework instead of Mozilla’s XUL to draw the elements on the screen (save for the textboxes). This means it works like a Mac application, feels like a Mac application and has all the interface cues we’re used to… because it is a real Mac application! Firefox may have Mac-like skins available, but it does show through that it’s been hacked together in many places, such as the tab bar, preference panes and window controls.

Loading time

Again because it uses Aqua and is a smaller executable, Camino loads with just a few "dock bounces" on my iBook G3 and my original generation Core Duo MacBook Pro compared to the 7-12 bounces to load Firefox each time. I’ve read it argued that Camino loads faster because it’s simply less extensible than Firefox with plugins, but with my version of Camino absolutely loaded with plugins and add-ons from PimpMyCamino.com I question how much that latter reason can really be relied upon as an explanation for performance.

Integration

As I discovered in an earlier post, Camino uses Mac OS X’s keychain to store your passwords, in the same way Safari does. According to the Camino site it also uses the native Mac Bonjour system to discover bookmarks, though I haven’t ever needed to use that feature.

Icon

Camino has the most slick web browser icon (view the image I posted above). This is a critical point and one which must not be ignored for it speaks not only for… ah I can’t pull it off.

All this isn't to say that Camino is perfect for everyone or isn't without faults, but from my experience it's still the best darn Mac browser. I know I've said this numerous times already; it shows how much I believe it to be true.

Older Camino posts

• 2008.05.28: Uncover lost passwords in Camino
• 2007.10.28: Making Camino look like a Leopard app
• 2007.10.21: Camino runs rings around Firefox
• 2006.12.08: HSBC doesn't like Camino!

You've still got half an hour to catch the hilarious, talented, down to earth and very entertaining Steve Durr live at Whole Wheat Radio!

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01:12:11 – Hashing out and talking through some ideas about the future of Rubenerd.com and how I want to move my five separate sites over to it. Might be listenable for a pleasant background distraction if you mess around with weblog engines, databases and whatnot, otherwise don't feel bad giving this one a miss. Looking at Dave Wares' Photo Gallery as an example of where I want to be. To make it somewhat more interesting, I've included some retro audio easter eggs :-).

Recorded in Singapore. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

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40:24 – A rant episode in response to a new technology reported by Webware and an article calling the exposing of P2P as a red herring; talking about net neutrality, attacking symptoms not causes, RIAA/MPAA inspired bullying tactics. Not the same calibre as a Jimbob Kloss rant but I try my best!

Also briefly talk about a fascinating interview article from Slashdot from the inventor of C++, and the internets are working again at home!

Recorded in Singapore. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

33:38 – Locations in web form thingys, a huge power outage in Singapore, nostalgia comparing how we thought of computer speeds in the 80s, 90s and noughties, my vintage 200MHz Pentium MMX machine still running, the megahertz myth, building computers from Sim Lim Square, the Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64 and Commodore 1541 disk drive, 6502 chips in everything, TMnet "high speed" monopoly in Malaysia, getting paid to podcast, stalling internet connections driving me crazy!

Recorded in Singapore. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.