Why GNU/Linux Rocks

[shikitohno]

Is conky showing up on a second monitor? If that's the case, it's probably showing up on what Xorg considers your primary monitor. If it's on another virtual desktop, I don't know. Also, spell check for what? Aspell and the like kind of suck, but the spell checkers in Firefox or LibreOffice and other programs where I actually care about things being spelled properly works fine.

Those screenshots look like LXDE to me. Couldn't help you with how to configure that. I looked at it once, and found the configuration rather arcane and needlessly complex compared to i3 or something like that. For my tastes, it tries to do too much, and winds up getting silly because of that. I've got one config file I need to edit to change my display and keybindings and stuff. Extra crap like panels or quick launch bars could presumably be added to i3 if you really wanted, but they're handled with their own config files if you add them. This way you don't wind up with a massive config file of random miscellaneous crap all thrown together with no reason, and you also don't need to edit eight different files to get it behaving and looking as you'd like.

[sgreger1]

Can someone tell me what desktop is used in the following screenshots? Is it XFCE? How would I set it up like this?







Also, why does spell check suck so hard on Linux? Is this something I can upgrade? It doesn't recognize basic words.

[sgreger1]

I don't know. Post the script, and maybe something will jump out at me. I'm currently looking for an analog conky clock. I want to try to do everything with conky instead of using separate widgets like I did before.

# Conky, a system monitor, based on torsmo
#
# Any original torsmo code is licensed under the BSD license
#
# All code written since the fork of torsmo is licensed under the GPL
#
# Please see COPYING for details
#
# Copyright (c) 2004, Hannu Saransaari and Lauri Hakkarainen
# Copyright (c) 2005-2010 Brenden Matthews, Philip Kovacs, et. al. (see AUTHORS)
# All rights reserved.
#
# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
#

alignment top_left
background no
border_width 1
cpu_avg_samples 2
default_color white
default_outline_color white
default_shade_color white
draw_borders no
draw_graph_borders yes
draw_outline no
draw_shades no
use_xft yes
xftfont DejaVu Sans Mono:size=12
gap_x 5
gap_y 60
minimum_size 5 5
net_avg_samples 2
no_buffers yes
out_to_console no
out_to_stderr no
extra_newline no
own_window yes
own_window_class Conky
own_window_type desktop
stippled_borders 0
update_interval 1.0
uppercase no
use_spacer none
show_graph_scale no
show_graph_range no

TEXT
${scroll 16 $nodename - $sysname $kernel on $machine | }
$hr
${color grey}Uptime:$color $uptime
${color grey}Frequency (in MHz):$color $freq
${color grey}Frequency (in GHz):$color $freq_g
${color grey}RAM Usage:$color $mem/$memmax - $memperc% ${membar 4}
${color grey}Swap Usage:$color $swap/$swapmax - $swapperc% ${swapbar 4}
${color grey}CPU Usage:$color $cpu% ${cpubar 4}
${color grey}Processes:$color $processes  ${color grey}Running:$color $running_processes
$hr
${color grey}File systems:
 / $color${fs_used /}/${fs_size /} ${fs_bar 6 /}
${color grey}Networking:
Up:$color ${upspeed eth0} ${color grey} - Down:$color ${downspeed eth0}
$hr
${color grey}Name              PID   CPU%   MEM%
${color lightgrey} ${top name 1} ${top pid 1} ${top cpu 1} ${top mem 1}
${color lightgrey} ${top name 2} ${top pid 2} ${top cpu 2} ${top mem 2}
${color lightgrey} ${top name 3} ${top pid 3} ${top cpu 3} ${top mem 3}
${color lightgrey} ${top name 4} ${top pid 4} ${top cpu 4} ${top mem 4}

How do I load themes into this thing?

[lxskllr]

I don't know. Post the script, and maybe something will jump out at me. I'm currently looking for an analog conky clock. I want to try to do everything with conky instead of using separate widgets like I did before.

[sgreger1]

Hey, Conky won't run on my computer for some reason. I even used conkywizard to set it up, and then chose "Run Cony after exit", but it still won't show up. If I start it in the Bash shell it says:

~]$ conky
Conky: desktop window (1000024) is subwindow of root window (159)
Conky: window type - desktop
Conky: drawing to created window (0x2a00001)
Conky: drawing to single buffer

Edit: It seems to have created it in a second desktop. How do I get it to display on my regular desktop, the default one? (It's on the second desktop if you look tot he right on Gnome3, where you can choose between different desktop layers)

[lxskllr]

Here's my new desktop. It's all slowly coming together. E17 is very frustrating to customize. There's a shit ton of features, many of which are ambiguously named. I may have to drop it. I didn't see all the drawbacks when playing with it before, and getting things right is taking forever, and it still has crappy panels. This is Xfce. It has it's own issues, but it's alright. My biggest complaint is you can't customize colors. To change things, you have to download a whole theme. I guess I could edit the theme files, but that's a hell of a lot of work to change some colors around. Maybe some time in the future...

[sgreger1]

I bought this book today (Linux Command Line), gonna read it front to back and hopefully learn more about some of these random questions I have so I don't have to bother you guys.

I've decided to rsync manually instead of automating it with Cron. That way if I delete a folder or something, it doesn't delete the backup too.

[devilock76]

There are several python script admin tools that are recommended to automate on rpm based systems used as servers.

Ken

[devilock76]

So you could use Cron to, for example, run a 'yum update' every week? Wow that's really cool, I am going to learn more about this today.

You could but I would be careful with that personally, especially on a bleedin edge system like fedora. If you do choose to make sure you are keeping good logs of that update activity.

Ken

[sgreger1]

Cron is the basic and main *nix system scheduler. You can use it for many things and should learn the layout of the crontab file.

I know some admins schedule their updates, I prefer to do them manually, although a scheduled reminder might be good.

Ken

So you could use Cron to, for example, run a 'yum update' every week? Wow that's really cool, I am going to learn more about this today.

[devilock76]

Cron is the basic and main *nix system scheduler. You can use it for many things and should learn the layout of the crontab file.

I know some admins schedule their updates, I prefer to do them manually, although a scheduled reminder might be good.

Ken

[sgreger1]

[QUOTE=shikitohno;461093]
If I were in your situation and had static internal IPs as I said, this is what I would do. [quote]

So if I were using an SSH proxy, it would still be cool since that IP address is static right?

Set up the machine you want to back up from to use key authentication rather than password authentication. This will allow your other machine to ssh into it and use the key to log in, rather than having your password in plain-text in a bash script somewhere

I have been wondering how to do this, will have to investiagate this weekend. I was always wondering what the purpose of keys were.

Finally, add a cron job that runs the script at a specified interval. The cron job will let this task run automatically, and you can specify how often you want it to run.

Havn't tried cronjob yet, I didn't know it even existed until yesterday. From what I understand it can be used to run scripts at pre-determined intervals, namely for things like backing up stuff like I am trying to do here?

The biggest issue I see with this approach is handling errors. Chief amongst those errors would be how your script would react if you went to bed and left your computer in Windows rather than Fedora, and it couldn't connect.

I would like to know how to tell it how to handle exceptions, but as for this particular issue I don't think it will be a problem. I almost never use Windows anymore. if I need to upload some pictures and photoshop them or something I just log in to windows to do that and then boot back to my fedora partition.


Speaking of which, is there an easy way to make certain files on my C: drive from the windows partition accessible via my Fedora prtition? Can I just mount the other drives and browse them, or is that bad?

I don't know if it will be an issue for your mother, but to warn you in case it applies and you haven't heard of this yet, Netflix streaming will not work for her under Linux.

Yah that sucks, it's because their DRM won't work. Not a big deal though, we have Roku and she usually watches Netflix on the TV.

[quote]As for a music store, I'll throw in a vote for Google Music myself. Pricing seems generally on par with iTunes, and they've got a good catalogue. Anything you buy, you can download as a DRM-free 320kbps mp3 file. She'll also be able to stream her purchased music from any other computer via their site, and can upload any tracks she owns via the Google Music Manager (up to a 20,000 song limit), and be able to stream them as well.

. Wow, this sounds awesome, especially since she already has a bunch of songs from itunes already, can you upload itunes songs to Gmusic? I am also wondering how it works, does it download the music to a predetermined folder? Can I get Amarok or Rhythmbox to automatically add anything in that folder to the library and then scrape for it's info? I want it to be a system where she clicks buy and then can just go view it on her media player, she doens't like having to do 20 steps for simple tasks.

If you haven't already, I'd also make sure to give her a quick crash course on how to keep her system up to date, and how to find answers to any problems she has. In other words, teach her how to google, and get her to sign up on the Fedora forums.

Lololololool, that's a tall order my friend. It's easier for me to just play family tech support guy than have her touch anything. She seen me using the command line once and was like "Wow it's like the matrix, how do I do that?" and I was like "No worry, you should never touch this". It will only cause more harm than good. I'd rather answer a million questions than have her touch something and fry the whole computer somehow. I can SSH into her computer and update yum etc for her routinely so not a big deal.

Speaking of which, I myself would like to clarify something regarding updates/maintenance. Is there a whole lot I need to od other than update yum every once and a while? Do I need to manually defrag it at regular intervals etc? I am unsure exactly what maintenance is required aside from updating yum.

[shikitohno]

I saw something a short while ago that google had struck a deal to create a Netflix plugin for Chrome that would enable Linux Chrome users to stream videos. There was naturally speculation that if this panned out, someone would come up with a way to make it work with Firefox or other browsers. If not, I could always just install chrome just for using Netflix.

[devilock76]

The official line is that there's nothing comparable to Microsoft Silverlight for Linux that will allow them to exercise DRM so that people can't rip the streams. Without that, they claim their backers won't allow them to stream their titles to Linux machines. Presumably, Android has something like that which satisfies the movie companies.

Where there is a will there is a way.

Ken

[shikitohno]

The official line is that there's nothing comparable to Microsoft Silverlight for Linux that will allow them to exercise DRM so that people can't rip the streams. Without that, they claim their backers won't allow them to stream their titles to Linux machines. Presumably, Android has something like that which satisfies the movie companies.