On 2013-09-16 16:28, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> Which reminds me... it's probably time to make backups of $HOME again...

Just push them to internet and someone will make the backups for you :)

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Monday, 16 September 2013 at 13:52:22 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> I wish unix had a recursive user system. Where each user is root of its own little domain.
>
> Then each app I install would just be suid to a child user that has access only to its own little installation subdirectory. If it wants to write to my regular home, it can sudo back to my other user.
>
> It'd save the dangers of one account for everything that matters (the difference between me and root is fairly irrelevant - if root's files get messed up, I can just reinstall them from the cd. If my files get messed up, that's a real hassle!)

It can be an interesting core idea for new Linux distro :) Well, after some polishing of app inter-operation of course.

On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 10:24:18AM -0400, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 08:47:32PM -0700, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > - Its default escape sequence is extremely annoying (ctrl-A clashes
> >   with bash's go-to-beginning-of-line, which I use literally *all*
> >   the time).  Switching it to something like ctrl-U makes it more
> >   tolerable.
> 
> I never really got into using C-a for start of line. I just use the home key. (I prefer the arrows to hjkl too!)

I used to prefer those too. But I eventually found that it slows me down because I have to constantly move my right hand over to the keypad and back. With C-a and C-e for home/end, I never have to lift my hands off the keyboard. It's a miniscule time savings, but it does add up when you're editing a complex command-line pipeline.


> > - It doesn't seem to pick up terminal settings correctly sometimes.
> >   Which results in needing to set $TERM manually, or type
> >   `TERM=rxvt-unicode program args`, instead of just `program args`.
> >   Quite annoying.
> 
> Yeah, I've had trouble with this too and got around it by messing with .rc files. My .vimrc
> 
> 
> if $TERM=='screen'
>   set ttymouse=xterm
> endif
> 
> for example. (There's more $TERM hacks in there too.)
> 
> I also changed the escape when puttying in to C-s. The main reason is the laptop's keyboard is laid out differently, so the same finger position for C-a on the desktop hits s on the laptop.

Eek. I use C-s frequently for throttling program output; it would suck to have to escape it! But yeah, the fact that it's configurable is pretty nice. I have my remote screen keyed to C-u, and local screen left as C-a (though ostensibly I should change that since it clashes with C-a as home), and it's nice to be able to suspend exactly the right screen when they are nested inside each other.

On that note, some pretty strange things can happen when you're inside nested screens on the same host, and you try to screen -D between them. :-P


> But a second nice benefit is I can nest screens: use the C-s to switch top level ones and then screen -d -r my project screens, and C-a them. Pretty boss.

Yep.


> My putty shortcut on the laptop also runs screen -S -something laptop, thus creating a screen if needed and reattaching if it is already present.

Hmm, maybe I should start doing that. It would greatly lessen the annoyance of working remotely from a flaky wifi connection that disconnects every 5 mins for no good reason. Screen is one of those things that make ssh sessions even usable on such connections, since otherwise the constant disconnection makes it pretty much unusable.


> So whenever I open that putty window, it goes right back to where I was... and of course, screen -r laptop works on the desktop too if I forget to handle something.
> 
> Really convenient, and works across network disconnects. I love it.

Yeah, it makes it actually possible to get things done over those flaky wifi connections in hole-in-a-hole cafés. Otherwise you're spending 90% of the time reconnecting and getting back to where you were, instead of actually getting stuff done.


> > Whoa, that's a lot. I usually have only 3-4 things open at a time,
> 
> The thing with me is I kinda hate closing things. If I leave it open, then when I finally get around to looking at it again, I can kinda pick up where I left off.
> 
> Otherwise, I'll forget it even exists!

True dat. I really need to get cracking on writing my D replacement for ratpoison... ratpoison is nice and everything but it does have annoying limitations and bugs. One of the most annoying things about it is its inability to handle UTF-8 (in this day and age! seriously!). The other is the inability to handle raw keysyms (see below).


[...]
> > Heh. I used to have *three* X servers running, keyed to vt7, vt8, vt9, for 3 simultaneous login sessions, multiplexed by xdm. I still use xdm
> 
> oh man i haven't used xdm for a while. I used to have a cool diskless terminal setup in my house. Old pentium 1 computers whose hard drives died repurposed into netbooting from my linux box.

Nice! Hmm maybe I should start doing that.

My last hardware upgrade was done a bit too hastily... and I ended up with an unsupported 3D integrated card on the mobo that doesn't work with the Linux ATI drivers (well, it works, but no 3D accel, which sucks). Worse yet, my previous mobo had a *supported* ATI card, but it was AGP and the new mobo is PCIe (a little detail I overlooked while researching the parts to upgrade). So maybe I can reconnect the monitor/keyboard to the old mobo and have it serve as an X terminal, and have the new mobo serving as a headless compute server, then I can have the best of both worlds!


> (BTW there was a place where getting xorg.conf right was a pain! Not to mention other nfs and kernel stuff. I saw more kernel panics while setting that up than I saw blue screens of death in the time I used windows 95.)

Really? I never had a kernel panic from misconfigured X11. But the X server itself *did* crash in horrible ways... in the old days before KVM, it would segfault and drop me back in the Linux console, but with the graphics card stuck in graphics mode and no way of switching it back ('cos the kernel didn't know how to do the mode switch). Pretty annoying, since the kernel (and every else) actually still works, and I can ssh into it, etc., but it's unusable from the desk and requires a hard reboot to fix.


> But then I could just hit the button in the other rooms and get a nice X login screen presented, and my same blackbox based desktop a few seconds later. I liked it.

Nice! Makes me wanna collect used PCs from various people to reservice as X terminals. That would be really nice.


> But with my last desktop hardware failure - a bad power supply killed the motherboard - I decided to finally dive into a 64 bit kernel and with that came updated distro that killed the whole diskless setup.
> 
> Maybe some day I'll redo it, but I don't really remember how it worked and don't want to spend days figuring it out again. I'll just stick to my Windows laptop :<

Well, nowadays X.org is pretty good about autodetecting most settings, so you rarely need a config file anymore. Dunno about diskless X11, though, that might be a bit trickier.


> > (Why multiple sessions, you ask? 'cos at one point I was experimenting with different WM setups to see which one(s) I like better, but I still wanted to continue working on whatever it is I was working on without interruption, so having multiple copies of X running allowed me to keep
> 
> xnest is pretty cool too for playing with window managers.
> 
> > getting interrupted and dropping back to the Linux consoles.)
> 
> Linux consoles rock so much btw. I really enjoy the time I spend on them - when the above mentioned motherboard died, I went back to my old computer for a while and since I was accustomed to Linux by that point, I passed on the Win98.

I *would* just use the Linux console -- it's lightweight, stable, and pretty efficient unlike X11, but it doesn't support unicode fonts. That's a showstopper for me.


> But, that computer was too slow to run the bloated X11. So I just used linux consoles. And it was *awesome*.
> 
> 1) I had most the same programs I use all the time anyway, but now they were prettier! I really like the way vga text mode looks. 80x25 is a bit small, but it is workable and really beautiful.

Heh.  My current rxvt is configured with very large fonts in full-screen so that the resolution is 105*42. If I could, I'd make that 80*whatever. I'm pretty comfortable working with 80 columns, though 25 lines *is* rather cramped once you start using split panes in vim.


> 2) I used some text mode replacements for other graphics programs, like naim instead of gaim. Worked pretty well, though I didn't stick to it once I fixed my newer computer.  (Did however write my own p2p messenger that was beautiful and didn't have AOLs servers to depend on. Sadly, I lost it though, the people I chatted with refused to use it :( Now one of them wants to get on custom stuff again, thanks NSA, but I can't find that code. Meh, eventually I'll just rewrite it in D anyway. (The original was written in C.))

Hooray for rewriting old lost projects in D. :) You'd probably get it back up and running faster anyway, thanks to D's awesome features.


> 3) Less idiocy with incompatible terminals. TERM=linux believe it or not, just works, everywhere I tried it.

Really? It never used to work when I was logging remotely from Solaris. But nowadays, I don't know if anyone even uses Solaris anymore, so I guess it's moot. TERM=xterm tends to work a lot better, actually (even in rxvt, which is AFAICT a backwards-compatible extension of xterm).


> I'm tempted to go back to that for a while, but I probably can't avoid needing to open something in gimp or firefox for a couple weeks straight anymore.

What I'd *really* like, is to extend the Linux console to handle inline graphics (rounded to the next largest multiple of the character tile size). Well, it sorta already supports that (e.g., bootup logo), but it just needs support in the shell and ELinks. Then I'd dump X11 altogether and just use the console. :) It would save so much memory for other stuff, esp. at my old work PC which is starting to show signs of being unable to keep up with the latest bloat everybody and his neighbour's dog is adding to the browser.


> > TBH, I'm still not quite happy with the choice of escape sequence. If I had my way, I'd rather have <windowsKey> <F1..F12> instead. Maybe one of these days I'll write a D replacement for ratpoison that does just that.
> 
> Probably not too hard to just hack the source.

Yeah, but it's written in (rather ugly) C, and has other design limitations as well. If I were to do anything about it, I'd rather just rewrite it in D.


> > (Ratpoison does let you configure the escape key, but it doesn't work with <windowsKey> for some stupid reason).
> 
> xev tells me the Windows key's keysyms are
> 
>  keycode 133 (keysym 0xffeb, Super_L)
>  keycode 134 (keysym 0xffec, Super_R)
> 
> 
> The bbkeys program I uses calls it Mod4 in its config file.
> 
> Maybe one of those names will help?

No, it's a fundamental design flaw in ratpoison that it can only use non-modifier keys for the escape key (why such a lame choice, is beyond my ability to fathom). I'd probably end up rewriting a lot of code just to make it work. Which, if I'm going to do it at all, I rather rewrite in D instead.


> > Yeah, people can rant and rave about how Linux sux and what-not, but the fact of the matter is, I could run 3 copies of X11, each with 15 windows open on a Pentium with 128MB RAM, and be fully functional, whereas it takes every last drop of juice the system's got just for Windows'98 to
> 
> It's not even the memory that is good for me: it is the more efficient layouts.  The Windows taskbar gets unusable with more than about 10 windows (especially on XP+, where it hides entries or combines them. Ugh, the point of the taskbar is that everything is visible at once!)

I never liked the taskbar. I think it's a wrong design choice. Ratpoison had it right -- C-w and it shows a popup at the top right corner of the screen containing a *vertical* list of windows with full names.  Trying to cram everything into a *horizontal* bar just doesn't scale beyond 10 items or so. At least a vertical list, given a small enough font, can support at least 25 items, probably more like 40, before a scrollbar is even needed.


> > lets you use a minimal WM should you choose to, rather than in Windows where you *have* to use whatever MS has decided everyone must use, and
> 
> you can do that in Windows too, actually, though of course it is rare to see in practice.

OK, I learned something new today. :) Haven't used Windows in any significant way for the last almost 20 years, so I admit to being a bit out of touch with the current state of things. :-P


T

-- 
I am a consultant. My job is to make your job redundant. -- Mr Tom

On 9/16/2013 8:02 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2013-09-16 16:28, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
>> Which reminds me... it's probably time to make backups of $HOME again...
>
> Just push them to internet and someone will make the backups for you :)

Since the taxpayers already pay for an NSA backup of all our files, I think they should kindly provide a restore service!

On Monday, 16 September 2013 at 17:04:46 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> It's a miniscule time savings, but it does add up when you're editing a complex command-line pipeline.

You know what would actually be huge for me? The mouse. If you have a 200 character command line, just clicking it would be so nice.

I'm sure there's some ctrl+meta+alt that can do it too, but I don't know my emacs (and readline's vi mode is weak).


Eventually I'll finish my terminal emulator that will include that kind of thing. Probably on a wild combo like ctrl+alt+click so I don't accidentally trigger it when I don't want to. But I'm not in a huge rush to write that since I actually quite like rxvt and xterm.


> Eek. I use C-s frequently for throttling program output; it would suck to have to escape it!


heh, I use gigantic scroll back buffers for that whenever I can.

> inability to handle UTF-8 (in this day and age! seriously!).

The X server doesn't make utf-8 easy... I was looking into utf8 input for simpledisplay.d and it is kinda complicated. (Another advantage Windows has - it's been unicode aware for a long time.)

But, how much do you really need for a window manager?

> have the new mobo serving as a headless compute server, then I can have the best of both worlds!

yes!

(BTW, I just hit esc after typing that. I'm on the website, but that's my vi habit - enter something, then immediately hit esc to get back to command mode. When I was a vi newb I spent most my time in insert mode, but now I'm only rarely in there - just long enough to actually insert, then it is back to command immediately.)


> Really? I never had a kernel panic from misconfigured X11.

The kernel panics were from earlier in the boot process. For example, NFS over my at the time 10mbps hub was very unreliable, so it went to mount the root filesystem, lost some packets, and kernel panicked.

IIRC I ended up fixing that by making nfs use tcp connections rather than the unreliable udp datagrams.


Of course, X wasn't easy either. It didn't autoconfigure right, the driver that was supposed to work for the chip didn't (the screen would be garbled), and the other settings are just whoooo. I can only imagine how awful it was before then - at least my monitors weren't at risk of frying themselves. (or was that a myth too? i don't know but i'd believe it)

It did work with the vesa driver though pretty reliably, but that couldn't max out the potential of that 1 MB of video ram! But that's ok 800x600 looks good anyway.

> annoying, since the kernel (and every else) actually still works, and I can ssh into it, etc., but it's unusable from the desk and

Maybe svgalib could have helped there too. But yeah, X.org my old motherboard would do something similarly annoying: all input and output at the desktop would freeze dead, all of it, but I could still ssh into the machine so clearly the kernel was still alive.

Even switching vt wouldn't work, X locked up and took the hardware with it. Sometimes, kill -9 X via ssh would fix it, but sometimes that just left it in another indeterminate state that wouldn't recover properly either, forcing the reboot.


The weird thing though is sometimes, if I just left it alone for 30 mins or so, it would actually fix itself. Maybe had to do with power management, i don't know.

My new motherboard is a lot saner. Other than the alsa volume control problem (pretty minor all things considered) it has worked very well.

But I guess we'll see if it continues to when it is 5 years old too. My pentium 1 box, now 16 years old, works flawlessly to this day. But cliched as it is, they don't make 'em like they used to.



> Well, nowadays X.org is pretty good about autodetecting most settings,

Indeed, I was pleasantly surprised with the 64 bit install almost just working. I still installed the proprietary nvidia driver for 3d acceleration, but at least it all came up.

The diskless fun was several years ago, I'm sure it'd be better now.


> pretty efficient unlike X11, but it doesn't support unicode fonts.

You sure? I thought it does now, if you enable the kernel framebuffer. (Now I like the vga text mode, so no framebuffer for me, but I'm pretty sure the new stuff is workable there.)

> Hooray for rewriting old lost projects in D. :) You'd probably get it back up and running faster anyway, thanks to D's awesome features.

I can use my own terminal.d instead of ncurses too, yay.

> What I'd *really* like, is to extend the Linux console to handle inline
> graphics (rounded to the next largest multiple of the character tile size).

Heh, I've been thinking about that too. Part of the reason terminal.d has an enum { linear, cellular } is due to a design I've been pondering (and, of course, it matches right up to the alternate screen feature of linux terminals too).

If graphics were available in linear mode, cat file.png would go right ahead and draw it out there. Or something like that, it'd probably need an escape sequence to enable graphic mode to be sane.

And then cellular mode would be a framebuffer as well as a text buffer.

Believe it or not, the BIOS on DOS used to kinda support all this! If you switched to mode 13h and printf()'d, at least using Digital Mars C, maybe it is a dm runtime feature rather than the BIOS or DOS or whatever, but if you did that, the text would indeed output, and you can still write graphics.

In mode 3, vga text mode, the graphics stuff would just be swallowed and/or replaced by alternate text (omg I have a program that renders arbitrary images to ascii art. If you run a .mpg through it, you can actually watch movies on a text terminal! tempting to try to write that... but i'd prolly just keep it simple), but if you're in a graphics capable window and cat image, sure, let's show it.


I almost think I saw a terminal program that did that. But I want to write my own terminal emulator and specification anyway.

> Which, if I'm going to do it at all, I rather rewrite in D instead.

aye

> Ratpoison had it right -- C-w and it shows a popup at the top right corner of the screen containing a *vertical* list of windows with full names.

Yeah, I have something similar on my windows key + tab hotkey as well as right as middle click on the edge of the screen.

But what's important about the task bar is you can see it without asking for a popup. So then, say, I get an IM and it adds a * to the left side of the name, and now I can see it without making an effort.

The other nice thing is the programs stay in a certain space. Most the titles on my thing are just 'rxvt' - pretty useless. But I know the one on the left is one thing, the one in the middle is another, etc.

And of course, gnu screen with C-a " does the list too, which is great.

>  Trying
> to cram everything into a *horizontal* bar just doesn't scale beyond 10 items or so.

I have 17 open on this workspace and can even read the names! My custom taskbar though is 16 pixels tall, writes out the names in fixed-10 font (normally I'd consider that way too small to read, but it looks good down there), has only two pixels padding between the buttons, and almost no nonsense: no start button, quick launch bar, notification area. It does have a clock, I like clocks, but it consumes only about 40 pixels.

One of the reasons I did my own though was that all other taskbars indeed couldn't scale. They made stupid decisions with too many windows and wasted space with too few.

 At least a vertical list, given a small enough
> font, can
> support at least 25 items, probably more like 40, before a scrollbar is
> even needed.



blargh i need to stop dreaming of and talking about my ideal linux and get to work! lol

On 16 September 2013 16:02, Jacob Carlborg <doob@me.com> wrote:
> On 2013-09-16 16:28, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
>> Which reminds me... it's probably time to make backups of $HOME again...
>
>
> Just push them to internet and someone will make the backups for you :)
>

The NSA keeps a backup of your $HOME.  :-)

</troll>

http://boingboing.net/2013/09/01/hello-nsa-i-have-lost-an-e.html


-- 
Iain Buclaw

*(p < e ? p++ : p) = (c & 0x0f) + '0';

On Monday, 16 September 2013 at 13:52:22 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> I wish unix had a recursive user system. Where each user is root of its own little domain.
>
> Then each app I install would just be suid to a child user that has access only to its own little installation subdirectory. If it wants to write to my regular home, it can sudo back to my other user.
>
> It'd save the dangers of one account for everything that matters (the difference between me and root is fairly irrelevant - if root's files get messed up, I can just reinstall them from the cd. If my files get messed up, that's a real hassle!)

Thats what selinux or other MACs are for. No need to set up more user accounts, just limit the application's permissions.

On Monday, 16 September 2013 at 19:59:06 UTC, Johannes Pfau wrote:
> Thats what selinux or other MACs are for. No need to set up more user accounts, just limit the application's permissions.

I've found selinux to be pretty hard to use with what little I've done with it... user accounts are simple.

On Mon, 16 Sep 2013 11:24:49 -0700
Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote:

> On 9/16/2013 8:02 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> > On 2013-09-16 16:28, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >
> >> Which reminds me... it's probably time to make backups of $HOME again...
> >
> > Just push them to internet and someone will make the backups for you :)
> 
> Since the taxpayers already pay for an NSA backup of all our files, I think they should kindly provide a restore service!
> 

Hah! Classic :)

On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 09:53:34PM +0200, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Monday, 16 September 2013 at 17:04:46 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >It's a miniscule time savings, but it does add up when you're editing a complex command-line pipeline.
> 
> You know what would actually be huge for me? The mouse. If you have a 200 character command line, just clicking it would be so nice.
> 
> I'm sure there's some ctrl+meta+alt that can do it too, but I don't know my emacs (and readline's vi mode is weak).

There's a vi mode to readline??

My ideal, actually, would be to liberate the command-line from its single-line restriction. It would be in insert mode by default, to cater for the common case, but hitting ESC would put it into navigation mode, where you can use vi movement keys to navigate. You could construct the command in a block (almost like a one-off shell script) before committing and executing it.


> Eventually I'll finish my terminal emulator that will include that kind of thing. Probably on a wild combo like ctrl+alt+click so I don't accidentally trigger it when I don't want to. But I'm not in a huge rush to write that since I actually quite like rxvt and xterm.

I'm a huge fan of rxvt-unicode. No need to switch between (non-unicode) rxvt and xterm, it handles it all.


> >Eek. I use C-s frequently for throttling program output; it would suck to have to escape it!
> 
> 
> heh, I use gigantic scroll back buffers for that whenever I can.

Well, I do too, but still, sometimes you kinda want a fast key combo to freeze the output from an accidental infinite loop while logged in over a slow ssh connection. It's not so nice to have to disconnect and reconnect just to stop the program (or wait for 5MB of the same text repeated 10 million times to choke through the ssh link). Though I suppose C-c does just as well by killing the program off.

In fact, now that I think of it, my use cases for C-s has drastically diminished over the years. Maybe it's not as important as I remember it is anymore. :-)


> >inability to handle UTF-8 (in this day and age! seriously!).
> 
> The X server doesn't make utf-8 easy... I was looking into utf8 input for simpledisplay.d and it is kinda complicated. (Another advantage Windows has - it's been unicode aware for a long time.)

True.


> But, how much do you really need for a window manager?

Just enough to be able to render window titles in UTF-8 correctly. It's not really *that* important otherwise... it's very rare (if ever!) that the WM will actually need to translate keyboard input into UTF-8, for example. For the most part, it could just treat it as an opaque 8-bit byte string.


> >have the new mobo serving as a headless compute server, then I can have the best of both worlds!
> 
> yes!
> 
> (BTW, I just hit esc after typing that. I'm on the website, but that's my vi habit - enter something, then immediately hit esc to get back to command mode. When I was a vi newb I spent most my time in insert mode, but now I'm only rarely in there - just long enough to actually insert, then it is back to command immediately.)

When I first started learning vi, I steeled myself to learn it the "right" way by only entering input mode when necessary. The learning curve was a lot steeper that way, but then I also learned faster by not acquiring n00b habits that must later be shed.

But yeah, my left little finger has acquired this twitch every now and then to want to hit ESC, even when there's no reason to do so. :-P


> >Really? I never had a kernel panic from misconfigured X11.
> 
> The kernel panics were from earlier in the boot process. For example, NFS over my at the time 10mbps hub was very unreliable, so it went to mount the root filesystem, lost some packets, and kernel panicked.
> 
> IIRC I ended up fixing that by making nfs use tcp connections rather than the unreliable udp datagrams.

I see. Thanks for the tip, I'll have to keep that in mind in case I run into similar issues. :)


> Of course, X wasn't easy either. It didn't autoconfigure right, the driver that was supposed to work for the chip didn't (the screen would be garbled), and the other settings are just whoooo. I can only imagine how awful it was before then - at least my monitors weren't at risk of frying themselves. (or was that a myth too? i don't know but i'd believe it)

All I remember was that the X server was so paranoid about not frying your monitor that it often refused to use a resolution / refresh rate that is clearly advertised in both monitor and video card manuals as supported. I often had to feed fake values into the conf file just to make it do what I want (though I may have inadvertently put my monitor at risk of being fried -- never actually happened, though!).


> It did work with the vesa driver though pretty reliably, but that couldn't max out the potential of that 1 MB of video ram! But that's ok 800x600 looks good anyway.

I ran at 800x600 for many years, before I upgraded to a 1600x1200 LCD monitor. Then 800x600 kinda... didn't fit very well. :-P


> >annoying, since the kernel (and every else) actually still works, and I can ssh into it, etc., but it's unusable from the desk and
> 
> Maybe svgalib could have helped there too. But yeah, X.org my old motherboard would do something similarly annoying: all input and output at the desktop would freeze dead, all of it, but I could still ssh into the machine so clearly the kernel was still alive.

Actually, it was X malfunctions like that that drove me to compile the SysRq hack in the kernel, so when things went awry, I can hit ctrl-SysRq-k to forcefully kill the X server. If that didn't help, I could at least ctrl-SysRq-s to sync the disk buffers, then ctrl-SysRq-R to force a reboot (the sync is so that I didn't have to wait 15 minutes for fsck to run).


> Even switching vt wouldn't work, X locked up and took the hardware with it. Sometimes, kill -9 X via ssh would fix it, but sometimes that just left it in another indeterminate state that wouldn't recover properly either, forcing the reboot.

Yeah I remember doing some research on that. Apparently X leaves the video card in graphics mode in a way that the kernel didn't know how to undo, so good luck getting the console back. If your intuition of exactly how the VT consoles worked was good enough, though, you could login as root (blind), and restart X11, and sometimes it would come back. Provided it didn't outright crash again immediately, that is. I did try editing X11.conf blind once, in an attempt to fix things, but that was a little too complex for me. :-P


> The weird thing though is sometimes, if I just left it alone for 30 mins or so, it would actually fix itself. Maybe had to do with power management, i don't know.

Really? Never knew about that!


> My new motherboard is a lot saner. Other than the alsa volume control problem (pretty minor all things considered) it has worked very well.
> 
> But I guess we'll see if it continues to when it is 5 years old too. My pentium 1 box, now 16 years old, works flawlessly to this day. But cliched as it is, they don't make 'em like they used to.

Hmph. My plan is for my current mobo to last for the next 5 years, if not 10. I deliberately invested in an AMD hexacore so that it wouldn't go out of date for a looong time. But we'll see if the hardware can hold up that long.


[...]
> >pretty efficient unlike X11, but it doesn't support unicode fonts.
> 
> You sure? I thought it does now, if you enable the kernel framebuffer. (Now I like the vga text mode, so no framebuffer for me, but I'm pretty sure the new stuff is workable there.)

Really? I remember trying it, but the non-ASCII characters came out all wrong. Well, the kernel didn't *have* unicode fonts built-in, and there was no way I know of to make it use .ttf, so I gave up.


> >Hooray for rewriting old lost projects in D. :) You'd probably get it back up and running faster anyway, thanks to D's awesome features.
> 
> I can use my own terminal.d instead of ncurses too, yay.

Speaking of which, have you had a chance to look at the latest breakage with DMD git HEAD yet? I'd file a regression on the bugtracker, but I don't know enough about the internals of terminal.d to be able to tell at a glance exactly what went wrong.


> >What I'd *really* like, is to extend the Linux console to handle inline graphics (rounded to the next largest multiple of the character tile size).
> 
> Heh, I've been thinking about that too. Part of the reason terminal.d has an enum { linear, cellular } is due to a design I've been pondering (and, of course, it matches right up to the alternate screen feature of linux terminals too).
> 
> If graphics were available in linear mode, cat file.png would go right ahead and draw it out there. Or something like that, it'd probably need an escape sequence to enable graphic mode to be sane.
> 
> And then cellular mode would be a framebuffer as well as a text buffer.

I remember talking about this before (IIRC with you). If I could do it, I might just be able to get rid of my GUI browser dependence once and for all. :)


> Believe it or not, the BIOS on DOS used to kinda support all this! If you switched to mode 13h and printf()'d, at least using Digital Mars C, maybe it is a dm runtime feature rather than the BIOS or DOS or whatever, but if you did that, the text would indeed output, and you can still write graphics.

I do remember that feature in the BIOS, actually. I also remember it was horrifically slow. In fact, I reinvented my own text output system in assembly which was orders of magnitude faster.


> In mode 3, vga text mode, the graphics stuff would just be swallowed and/or replaced by alternate text (omg I have a program that renders arbitrary images to ascii art. If you run a .mpg through it, you can actually watch movies on a text terminal! tempting to try to write that... but i'd prolly just keep it simple), but if you're in a graphics capable window and cat image, sure, let's show it.

That would be cool. I'd be able to watch videos over an ssh terminal. :-P Or play 3D games. :-P  (And feel nice and geeky about it.)


> I almost think I saw a terminal program that did that. But I want to write my own terminal emulator and specification anyway.

The first thing I'd do if I were to write a terminal spec is to get rid of the stupid dependence on ESC as the terminal control escape code. There are just too many legit user usages of ESC (such as vim!) for that choice to be anything but a horrible one. If anything, I'd use an invalid UTF-8 value like 0xFD so that it will never get mixed up with literal output data. In fact, I'd use all the 1-byte invalid UTF code points as terminal control sequences, for brevity.


[...]
> But what's important about the task bar is you can see it without asking for a popup. So then, say, I get an IM and it adds a * to the left side of the name, and now I can see it without making an effort.

I dunno, I prefer to explicitly check for messages when I want to, rather than being constantly interrupted by dings and beeps and popups, including on-screen text that changes. If anything, I'd have the * added to the window name and I'd look for it when I actually feel like looking at the window list.

I'm a pretty big fan of pull media rather than push media.


> The other nice thing is the programs stay in a certain space. Most the titles on my thing are just 'rxvt' - pretty useless. But I know the one on the left is one thing, the one in the middle is another, etc.

I never leave the title as 'rxvt'; I wrote a little program that writes the escape sequence to change the window title to the command-line args, and the first thing that I usually do upon firing up a new terminal is to set its title to something meaningful.


[...]
> blargh i need to stop dreaming of and talking about my ideal linux and get to work! lol

Yeah I should stop talking about ratpoison replacements, and actually go write one. In D. With ranges. :-P


T

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