The User's blog

Hi!

Today (yesterday) I have upgraded my openSuSE to version 11.4, I had been using openSuSE 11.3 before. Some days before I had screwed up some stuff with kernel updates and my boot partition (it was too small), removed stuff manually from /boot, used chroot environment, reinstalled kernel-stuff, not perfect at all, today again some problems afte the distribution upgrade, but after reinstalling the kernel and grup from chroot-environment (using an openSuSE 11.3+KDE Live CD), it worked. But since a few days (since the last 11.3 update with /boot ec.) it asks me for my luks-passphrase multiple time, but just the first time is important, after that it continues even with wrong passphrases.
However, let me talk about the upgrade itself. I do never upgrade from CD’s or DVD’s because I want to use custom repositories and custom packages, always using the network-installation for installing a system. Replaced the repositories, disabled the home:-repositiories, I do not actually need, replaced 11.3 by 11.4 for the other repositories. Thanks to the openSuSE-buildservice this approach was successful for most repositories, few less important ones (like Ruby1.9) did not support 11.4 yet, choosed the factory-version. Distribution-upgrade – some conflicts, not everybody likes Python 2.7 – no pykde – more conflicts with libxml and boost_regex, however, not too complicate, one download failed, had to resolve the conflicts ones again (because of DownloadInAdvance in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf), but then I got all the packages. And after the /boot-issue everything worked. Nice compositing with fglrx from the official repositories, unstable KDE snapshots from buildservice-repositories and all the other stuff. The Wacom-tablet still works – although I wondered about the deinstallation of a package with “wacom” in its name – but without the graphical configuration, I do not need. WLAN, bluetooth, power-button, volume-conrol etc work, too, they have always been working. Well, actually I do not care a lot about distributions, but openSuSE provides nice packages and now I can say that I am up-to-date, KDE is running, that is the important thing.

PS:
I like the new artwork.

Hi folks!

Of course I like GUIs and I like KDE and graphical configuration-applications etc. But I am using the CLI (with bash and Yakuake) for many tasks like file-management, compilation, etc. Sometimes it may be even less effective than Dolphin or something like that, but it is quite useful and I got used to it. I am using a lot of aliases (or one-line-bash-script) I want to share with you. I admit that I do not use all of them, but I try to.

Archives

alias ntar="tar -cf"
alias gz="tar -zcvf"
alias bz="tar -jcvf"
alias zp="zip"
alias ugz="tar -zxf"
alias ubz="tar -jxf"
alias utar="tar -xf"
alias uzp="unzip"
alias ltar="tar -tf"
alias lbz="tar -jtf"
alias lgz="tar -ztf"
alias lzp="unzip -l"
alias llz="tar --lzma -tf"
alias ulz="tar --lzma -xf"
alias lz="tar --lzma -cvf"

Show the entries of archives and create or unpack them, easier to memorize than “tar r

#!/bin/bash
LANG=en_EN.UTF-8 g++ -c -Q $2 --help=optimizers > /tmp/O3-opts
LANG=en_EN.UTF-8 g++ -c -Q $1 --help=optimizers > /tmp/O2-opts
diff /tmp/O2-opts /tmp/O3-opts | grep enabled
rm /tmp/O2-opts /tmp/O3-opts

Process management

alias pr="ps -A | grep $1" # all processes matching the parameter
alias out="\$@ 2>&1" # print stderr to stdout
alias en="LANG=en_EN.UTF-8 \$@" # sometimes I do not want to have German translations, especially for bug-reports etc.

Some commands are too “complicate” for an alias:
quiet (suppress output):

#!/bin/bash
$@ &> /dev/null

mute (start an application in the background silently):

#!/bin/bash
echo "$@"
"$@" &> /dev/null &

mk (start an application using kdeinit4_wrapper):

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
pwd = Dir.pwd
cmd = "kdeinit4_wrapper " + ARGV[0]
for i in 1..(ARGV.size - 1)
        if ARGV[i][0] != "/"[0] && ARGV[i][0] != "~"[0]
                a = pwd + "/" + ARGV[i]
                ARGV[i] = a if File.exists? a
        end
        cmd += " \"" + ARGV[i].gsub('"', '\"') + "\""
end
puts cmd
system(cmd)

quitapp (quit an application):

#!/bin/sh
ps -A | grep $1
echo "Try to quit using DBus..."
echo `kquitapp $1` > /dev/null
sleep 4
echo "Try to terminate..."
echo `killall -SIGTERM $1` &> /dev/null
sleep 1
echo "KILL!"
echo `killall -SIGKILL $1` &> /dev/null

restart (restart an application):

#!/bin/bash
~/.script/quitapp.sh $1
~/.script/mute.sh kdeinit4_wrapper $@

suppress (continue execution after a failure):

#!/bin/bash
echo `$@`

File management

alias s=less # show
alias e="mk kwrite" # editor, I noticed that I was using vi just because of the short command, that is why I have added s and e
alias d="du -sh" # size
alias cs='cd $1 && ls'
alias ms='mkdir $1 && cd $1'
alias kc=kioclient
alias ke="kfmclient exec " # open the files using the default application
alias g.="cd .."
alias g..="cd ../.."
alias g...="cd ../../.."

et:

#!/bin/bash
touch $1
mk.rb kwrite $1

dl:

#!/bin/bash
echo $@ to trash
kioclient mv $@ trash:/

swap:

cp $1 /tmp/tempswap$(basename $1)
cp $2 $1
mv /tmp/tempswap$(basename $1) $2

lg:

#!/bin/bash
ls -a | grep $@

System

alias adjusttime="sudo /usr/sbin/sntp -P no -r pool.ntp.org && echo \"New date: \`date\`\""
alias reset-networkmanager="sudo rm /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state"

chrootx (that is how chroot should work):

#!/bin/bash
mount -o bind /proc $1/proc
mount -o bind /dev $1/dev
mount --bind /etc/hosts $1/etc/hosts
mount --bind /etc/resolv.conf $1/etc/resolv.conf
chroot $1 /bin/bash

Hibernation:

#!/bin/sh
sudo echo "Hibernate!"
kscreenlocker --forcelock &
sleep 3
sudo s2disk /dev/sda2

I had found options for kdmctl for shutting down the system, have to look them up again…

Fun

Try it yourself (alsa active, jack not active, espeak installed):

alias randsound="cat /dev/urandom | espeak --stdout | aplay"
alias randsoundde="cat /dev/urandom | espeak --stdout -v german | aplay"
alias reallyrandsound="cat /dev/random | espeak --stdout | aplay"
alias randreallysound="sudo cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp"

Have fun!

The User

Fun! Graphics tablets! Oh, wait, why did I mention the distribution? And The User is not one of those great artists using Krita, he is a clumsy nerd. May it be irony? Maybe, but there has actually been some fun.

Okay, I started at 1:00 last night, I wanted to try a “Wacom Intuos2 9×12” (`xsetwacom list`, I guess it refers to the size) with openSuSE (of course, I do not use any non-GNU/Linux-system). Well, I had some weird problems: First I could just move the cursor, no clicks, then I installed some stuff, and I could use the pen as a mouse, but without pressure detection or anything like that and with an awkward behaviour: After having drawn a line (i.e. after releasing) the cursor did no longer move, until pressing it again or lifting it a few centimetres, drawing lines, hatching etc. are of course not possible that way. So I continued playing around, xsetwacom could not recognize the tablet, openSuSE’s xinput version has this bug, so I was very confused, although it is only a bug in the output and does not affect xsetwacom. I have upgraded X to version 7.6 using this repository, but now fglrx failed, ugly backtraces at startup. I started in failsafe-mode without fglrx and after short time the tablet worked with Krita and different pressures etc. It was 4:30, I was quite tired, and I went to sleep. But of course I wanted to get fglrx back, I know, it is a proprietary driver, but without it 3D is terrible and with fglrx my battery life is one hour longer (without fglrx only 90 minutes or something like that). I downgraded the X back to version 7.5, but after some time (maybe two hours of useless recompiling, reinstalling of drivers, rebooting) I noticed that ATI provides drivers for X.org 7.6 at their website, unfortunately they do not provide official openSuSE-repositories any longer, so I had inofficial, outdated fglrx installed. Now I was confident, it had already worked with 7.6, upgrading, running the official ATI-driver-installation-script (it even generates a rpm, nice)… It did not work, I tried some source-version for the wacom-kernel-module and the xf86-input-driver, but it did not work. But finally I noticed that xorg-x11-driver-input had not been updated, probably because of the dependencies of the inofficial wacom-driver-rpm. And finally everything worked some minutes after 17:00 (I had been afk for few hours, and do not forget sleeping, so it took less than 16 hours ). It is awesome! The tablet is awesome! Krita is awesome! My drawing-skills are awesome, ehh, not awesome!

Long story short for those of you wanting to use a wacom-tablet with openSuSE 11.3:

• `zypper ar “http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/XOrg/openSUSE_11.3/X11:XOrg.repo”`
• `zypper dup`
• Make sure, all xorg-x11-packages are now up-to-date
• Install wacom-kmp-desktop (for desktop kernel) and xorg-x11-driver-input-wacom from some repositories, have a look at http://software.opensuse.org
• Alternatively visit http://linuxwacom.com and install the drivers from source(git://linuxwacom.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/linuxwacom/xf86-input-wacom, git://linuxwacom.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/linuxwacom/linuxwacom)
• Reboot, everything should works now

kcm_tablet does not work for me, maybe it will magically work after some rebooting, but for now it does not detect the tablet. However, the standard-configuration is okay and I can still use xsetwacom for configuring the device. I do not want to tell you about my attempts with UDBA-graphics-driver-installation and the long startup-times of fglrx.

My first work I have stored (the bamboo is a Krita-default-brush ): show image in full size.