Tiny Linux update.

The 00e version is same 00d from 15th august, except the Linux package now includes latest libstdc++.so.6 so that it can work on older distros which do not have compatible version of this library. Thanks to users for reporting the issue.

Amarok again.

Looking at it again, 2.1.1 seems somewhat better than 2.1 (a huge, massive, ground breaking improvement: you can disable context thats in the middle and gets in the way of drag)

[edit: installed 2.1.1 . How the fuck do I actually disable that damned panel and get 1 splitter here? A shame, such huge disappointment, I thought I was wrong in my rant. Paranoya: RIAA probably would love that context thing. ISP stores logs for a while and it can potentially be useful as evidence in a court case if they can get logs from isp. Not that I personally care but anyway. Pirates better watch out.]

Upcoming amarok 2.2 (with dockable dialogs, if those will work) look kind of promising on the video, even though the way features are listed (docking just last, not even 'last but not least') doesn't look terribly great if it is any indicator of views on usability or priorities.

What made 2.1 particularly annoying (and prompted lot of ranting everywhere, myself included) is that in case of Mandriva (and, I heard, Ubuntu), after routine update we just find 1.4.10 removed without any straightforward way to revert. I'd blame packagers if it was 'Amarok 2.0.2' or 'Amarok2 0.1' or something else labelled unstable - but as it is labelled stable, it is entirely reasonable for a distribution to have it default.
On Mandriva in particular, you need to get 1.4.10 from 2009.0 repository - you are not supposed to do this (and it may fail to work for people whom did install 2009.1 afresh. 2009.0 RPMs are not supposed to be used on 2009.1 install. It's a luck when that works).

All the problem stems from how "rewrite" retained the name but entirely lost what the name used to stand for. It is not "excellent player 2.1", it's "average player 0.1", and pretty much nobody wants to overwrite "excellent player 1.4" with "average player 0.1".

Link, see comments for how Ubuntu users generally feel about amarok 2

Amarok 2 sucks.

Amarok 2 (new version of a Linux music player) sucks just as much as old Amarok rocked. A lot of major functionality regressions, not to mention screwed up, less configurable user interface (as of 2.1, you can't even fully disable this stupid 'context' panel in middle, let alone use system skin).
That's really sad. It takes intelligence to fix or improve something that's broken or missing. Fixing other people's bugs is not easy, as well as addition of new functionality. Whereas fucking up user interfaces is very easy and every moron can do that; partial 'rewrites' with lot of regressions are relatively easy as well. So when morons take over when transmissible zombie-like insanity takes over the developers, naturally, there's always huge user interface redesign, lot of fixing of things that are not broken, and lot of regressions in functionality, all while nothing that's broken gets fixed. If I were more paranoid, I'd think KDE4 in general is being sabotaged, but as it is I think it's just got damaged by it's own popularity. (edit: Sorry for the harsh language, but that's how development looks from outside when there is a huge usability regression in a 'stable' release; I don't mean bugs and lack of support for various things [evidently ipods are supported now], I mean craziness like, for example, not reimplementing quite successful layout, but rather trying various totally weird stuff like putting 'context' in the centre, in the way of drag and drop path. Rewrites for new frameworks do not have to result in SO massive usability regression; there's no reason not to reimplement old layout at least until new layout is designed)

Instructions for getting Amarok 1.4 back, for Mandriva:

1. Set up repositories for mandriva 2009.0 , via easyurpmi
2. Install Amarok 1.4.10 through package manager
3. As root, edit /etc/urpmi/skip.list , and add /^amarok/ to prevent auto'updates'.

Similar instructions may work for other RPM based distros.

Linux better than pirated Windows

I think that must be repeated more.

Pirated Windows is a second most popular desktop operating system according to Ballmer (and in many regions, the most popular desktop operating system at home and even office).

And it really is a horrible OS. Illegal, immoral, unpatched, full of trojans and malware (often coming with viruses as part of the install), or of third party antivirus and firewall software which slow the system down to total crawl. No support whatsoever. Frequent reinstalls are required. Microsoft's "genuine advantage" gets in the way, and so on and so forth.

But people still pirate windows. Supposedly because they see pirated $250 windows for $0 to have higher value than free Linux for $0

You can argue all day long if genuine Windows is worth $250 or not. Maybe it is, maybe it is not, i guess that depends to what you're doing.
But pirated windows is certainly not worth even $0 .

(that's just my opinion, anyway)

Installing Mandriva; adding new Western Digital HDD

I spent half weekend biking and other half installing Mandriva Linux (version 2008 "One" , spring) on my "server box", the one i replaced capacitors on. Also, on monday I got new SATA hard drive.

The biking deserves its own blog post with photos, though i didnt see or photo anything particularly interesting. Thats the thing with biking, you make bigger distance, but do much less photographing.

So i'll blog about Mandriva and new hard drive.

Installation was very smooth. However there is several nasty quirks in mandriva:
1: Mandatory reboot after fsck. Severety: VERY high. Fix: VERY trivial.
When i disconnected one of hard drives to troubleshoot some hardware issue, and tried to boot, it tried to fsck partitions on removed disk, fsck failed, and it asked for admin password or ctrl-d for continue. After ctrl-d it just reboots. After exiting admin mode, it reboots. Happens in failsafe startup as well. Very annoying.

Advantage of reboot after fsck, if any, seems very, very dubious. Linux only needs reboot when you modify the kernel. It is not windows which needs reboot after everything, and not OS X which needs reboots after many big installs.
Linux always did configure things the right way. So on Linux you normally have to reboot only when it is real, physical necessity, i.e. only after you change kernel.

Disadvantage is extremely massive for newbies: it makes system impossible to boot after one drive has been removed or failed. If course there is workaround - when it asks to repair manually, enter root password, then edit /etc/fstab . Or try init 3 .
Editing is very tricky when you do not have any normal console editor (i made a copy of fstab then used grep to filter out lines that i didnt want) and thats far beyond newbie. Especially when [s]he has 1 pc or no internet, and cannot get online to ask.
Negates the "linux is more reliable than windoze" entirely.
Solution is trivial: locating the idiotic commit that added this reboot behavior, and removing it.

2: It didn't detect my ram size properly, not even with explicit kernel option. I have 1280MB on this machine, thats 1024+256 MB. Mandriva's kernel detected 884mb = 1024-128-12 . I have AGP aperture size set to 128mb, so that might be it. Definately a bug, old ubuntu detected size correctly regardless of AGP aperture size.
Thats no big issue for me, I will rebuild kernel anyway, or install vanilla kernel. But would be bad for newbie.

Some linux tips, while i remember:
Mount drives with noatime,nodiratime option. That disables updating of access times on files (the time when file was last read). It gives much faster, less energy consumption system. In some cases, it gives >2x speedup.
Without this option, when you read file, the access time has to be written to disk. And it has to be written even if file is in buffer. That can more than double overhead for reading lot of tiny files.
I never need access times, and do not have any applications that uses them. Maybe back in seventies and eighties, access times did correspond to user accessing the file and were useful for cleanup and pinpointing unused files, but today, having all sorts of applications that read lot of files automatically and dont disable access time update, and having really cheap hard drives (i got 500gb for 75 Euro), access times are entirely meaningless.
More on access times: http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148

Now about the hard drive. I got western digital wd5000aaks drive (internal), 500GB , SATA2 capable, 3 years warranty.
Minor quirks>:
To connect it to old SATA (also known as SATA 1500 or SATA 150) controller, i had to add jumper (a tiny connector thingy) between jumper pins 5 and 6 . OEM package does not include jumper. You can ask for jumper (and bolts to install drive, too) at shop, any self respecting shop has surplus of those and will provide for free.
For pin numbering, consult label on hard drive. Its second column from the left when label is up and connectors are to the left of jumper slot. (the pin numbering starts from the right, dunno why) . BTW, my label didnt have print about the sata1.
NOTE: if you have different hard drive, do NOT connect jumper based on this blog post. Google for your specific hard drive!

By funny coincidence, some girl i know got same hard drive on same day. Besides jumper, she had to enable SATA in BIOS (some BIOSes have it disabled by default). Search for it in BIOS, check "integrated peripherals" section first.