Awesome 3.4 is available now so I decided to go through the update process once again. Aside from the change from the 2.3 version to the 3.x version (you know, where the config file became a program) this was the worst experience of the bunch. Actually, thinking about it- this upgrade was really the worst hands down. At least changing to the 3.x branch came with the excuse of having to learn a programming language.
I spent a little time and finally came up with a fairly simple start to integrating Awesome with uzbl. I created a file called favorites and put it in a suitably obscure location. The file format is simply 2 double-quoted fields per line. The first field is a site name, the second is the url. The fields are space separated. For example:
"Mutt" "www.mutt.org"
Lua pattern matching is fairly restrictive, so this was the simplest way to get a lot of possibilities for the name and the url fields.
I’ve been searching for a decent blog client for Linux. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a go to client that everyone is fired up about. Scribefire seems to be the closest, but I don’t like Firefox on my system- it’s sluggish compared to Opera. From my poking around, it looks like Linux people tend to role their own in many cases which obviously reduces the demand. That said, I’ve downloaded and run QTM but it’s too temperamental. It gives me a lot of trouble posting and I haven’t taken the time to figure out why. I saw that BloGTK2 was available now, so I downloaded BloGTK2 last night and decided to try it.
First impression- holy crap there are TON of dependencies. I put it on my EEE and it seemed like I was installing Gnome in order to get it to run. But now that it’s up and running I’d say it has a lot going for it. The interface is intuitive enough that I didn’t have to refer to documentation. I did run into a bug using the account “auto-detect settings.” After I had setup my first account, the app crashed when I tried to use it to setup the second account. The feature worked when setting up my first account. I just manually setup the second account and I was able to post and refresh both accounts without issue. Which was good- I was expecting it to give me fits posting after the setup problems.
I finally got fed up with the attempts to crack my ssh server. I’ve taken the usual precautions with its configuration- I just don’t like the idea of unimpeded attempts at cracking it.
I looked at a bunch of different ways to deal with it but most seemed too complicated for my purposes. All I really wanted was something that would shut down an attacker after some number of consecutive failed attempts. I found Denyhosts today and liked what I saw, particularly its simplicity. So I decided to give it a go.
It didn’t disappoint, shuting off a new attacker this evening. When it started for the first time, it also scans the logs for previous attempts and shuts them down as well. If I had more complicated access needs it might not be quite the thing. But given my fairly straight forward needs, it looks like it’ll be just fine.
During my quest to get HAL working to configure the touchpad on my EEE, I also discovered that I don’t need Touchfreeze to disable unwanted touches on my touchpad. All I need is syndaemon. Of course, in order to use syndaemon you need the synaptics driver running, so my efforts were not wasted.
The command I settled on for syndaemon was as follows:
syndaemon -i 1.5 -t
That’s the command line version. Of course, what’s more useful is having it taken care of automatically. I placed it in my .xsession file with the -d option added to make sure it ran as a daemon. Now it fires up whenever I startup X.
Also, either SHMConfig is enabled by default in the newer version of the synaptics driver, or it is no longer necessary. I removed the option from my fdi file and syndaemon works just fine. No more touches while typing.
I’ve had Touchfreeze working on my EEE for a little while, but lately I noticed it had stopped working. I never really figured out why it stopped working, but it did prompt me to make some config changes and learn some new stuff Linux related. For instance, did you know that you don’t even need your xorg.conf (well, almost)?
Yep. Apparently HAL is what takes care of a lot of that stuff. From my reading, it seems to be the direction things are headed. There’s an excellent primer article here on it. There’s also a bunch of links at the bottom that are informative. I point them out because they led me to resolving my touchpad problems on my EEE.
The lack of substantial posts does not represent a lack of goings on. With 2 kids, 2 dogs, 2 birds, a cat and a wife there is plenty to keep me occupied. Throw on top of this all the projects that are being juggled or are in the planning stages and there is plenty of potentially interesting topics to come. For the moment, however, there are just a lot of little things that kind of add up to a decent mish-mash of stuff that I suppose is worthy of posting in one spot. I’m still feeling this whole thing out and I’m trying to prevent myself from falling into the “I’ve got to post something” trap. Then again, perhaps this post is evidence that I went in to the trap head first…