Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

I’ve been meaning to do something more sophisticated (and rather higher-capacity!) than the current setup for ages. Right now it’s a Ubuntu box with a 320GB disk running Samba.

At a hardware level the plan is to nab a pair of 1TB SATA disks. They can be had for ~AU$250 each. But I’d like to get more than 1TB of storage out of them while also having some data duplicated. Some data matters enough to want it mirrored, some is essentially throwaway stuff: nice to have, but if I lose it I really don’t care that much.

The traditional way of doing this on a UNIX-like system would be to allocate part of the disks to a mirror, and part to a stripe or concat volume. The downsides of doing this are reasonably obvious: if you lose one disk you lose all the data on the concat/stripe, and you have to allocate the storage up front.

(Gross simplification, I know, as you can probably recover data if it was a concat rather than a stripe, but there’s a certain amount of stuffing about involved and I wouldn’t exactly guarantee it working.)

So I’ve been reading about Windows Home Server with some interest. They have a sneaky trick: there’s no mirroring at a disk level, instead you can tell it to mirror individual files or directories and those will then be copied to two drives.

So there’s no need to allocate storage up-front — and in fact WHS won’t let you do that anyway — just mark stuff to be duplicated and it takes care of things. If you lose a disk, you lose anything that was stored on it that wasn’t duplicated, but you don’t lose access to stuff that was stored on other disks because it’s not doing the concat/stripe thing.

There’s a known data corruption bug in the current release version of WHS, so I wouldn’t trust that. But there’s an update being tested at the moment (they’re up to RC4) which is supposed to fix that and improve write performance. That it also introduces an exciting new problem when the disks are approaching full is uninspiring but the development group seems to be aware that it’s a problem and planning to address it, so…

I’ll be grabbing the 2×1TB disks soonish and will at least give WHS a try. The fallback position is the “traditonal UNIX” approach. I don’t see that I have anything but UNIX-geek cred to lose by trying Microsoft’s tool.

(Incidentally, this granular duplication model is something the Linux weenies miss when they ridicule WHS and start in on how people should just use a Linux box instead.)

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Tags: Linux, Tech by matt
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Dell have already shipped clifford. Estimated delivery date is still the 18th, but I wouldn’t be completely surprised to have it sooner than that.

(clifford is an XPS M1530 in red, T9300 CPU, 4GB RAM, 320GB disk, 256MB GF8600M GT GPU. Pretty much a desktop replacement system.)

I’ve ordered an external enclosure for the 300GB PATA disk in the old gaspode (the house server we barely use any more). With that hooked up to clifford via Firewire it may well be faster than the interal disk (7200rpm Firewire vs 5400rpm SATA), will do very nicely for storing all our video/etc, much of which is synced down to the AppleTV anyway.

If I can get mt-daapd playing nice on the AppleTV (and by all accounts it’s a doddle) then the only thing left here that requires an “always-on” computer is the overnight EPG/favourites upload on the Topfield. Which will be moot in a few months when we get TiVo.

This leads to the very-appealing prospect of my only needing one computer for my own stuff, plus one for my partner. This will be replacing three machines (G5 iMac, Core2Duo desktop, Athlon psuedo-server) with one little laptop that’ll sleep at nights unless I’ve got video jobs to run.

I expect this will lead to a fairly significant electricity saving. Which makes me a happy bunny.

The only change I might think about is getting one of those consumer-grade NAS units. The D-Link DNS323 looks like a reasonable choice at AU$300 plus disks. That’d stay on 24×7, but it’d be the only thing that did.

Backups? We use Jungle Disk for our documents/photos/etc — the stuff we’d be really unhappy to lose — and music is synced down to the AppleTV so we’ve automatically got two copies of everything there. Video, well, if I ever fill that 300GB disk (possible, but meh) then we’ll have more than we can copy to the AppleTV, so there’s some exposure there, but really, who cares? Most of it we’ll only ever watch once anyway, this is more about simply having a library of stuff available when we want it, none of it is irreplacable.

I’ve been working for a few days now using Mandriva under VirtualBox on WindowsXP as a “paid work” environment. This lets me use things like iTunes while also being able to have a UNIXy work environment. So far so good, and I think that’ll work out nicely in the longer term. Best of both worlds, effectively, with no great compromise required on either side.

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Tags: Linux, Tech by matt
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I have a need for a laptop, but also have fairly poor vision. So while I mostly don’t need a screen magnifier on my desktop machine I almost certainly will on a laptop, and colour-remapping — swapping light for dark and dark for light — is also helpful.

There are two basic hardware options: an AU$1500-2000 15″ generic laptop from Dell, Asus, Lenovo, or whoever, or a AU$2500 Macbook Pro. The cheaper generic machine could reasonably run Windows or Linux.

I already have an old Mac desktop machine so I’ve been fiddling with the screen zoom and “white on black” display mode for a while. Both work quite well. The magnifier is controlled using control+scrollwheel, inverse mode by hitting control-option-command-8, which is a bit inconvenient but not completely impractical.

ZoomText — which easily adds US$400 to the price of that cheap laptop, by the way! — has what feels like a slightly nicer zoom in terms of image quality, and the inverse-mode hotkey is rather more convenient. The “jump to focus” stuff feels more effective, too. It does a fair bit more than the built-in OS X tools do and is much more customisable, but on the other hand it “supports” Vista by completely turning off the compositing window manager.

Linux, ah.

Compiz has a pretty decent magnifier, but for the life of me I can’t get it to activate using just the touchpad and keyboard on the test laptop. And while it has some colour-filter options none of them seem to do quite what OS X or ZoomText can. On the surface one might think that all that needs doing is to select the “high contrast” white-on-blue Gnome theme and maybe make the fonts a bit bigger, but of course that isn’t really the whole story. A proper screen-inverse feature gets everything, so for example those annoying bright white web pages are suddenly a lot easier on the eyes, and it also fixes the “we have ten thousand different GUI toolsets — many of which don’t honour your Gtk+ settings — and we’re not afraid to use them” problem.

You can work around this by fiddling with Firefox plugins like Stylish to apply custom stylesheets to specific (or all) websites, or using the high-contrast stylesheet that ships with Opera, but those will break some websites. Simply switching the colours around at the display level is a whole lot easier, requires almost no configuration work on the user’s part, and can be toggled on and off at will.

So it looks like it’s coming down to cheaper hardware+much more expensive software or more expensive hardware with the required features bundled. The former is probably still cheaper by one or two hundred dollars but the overall experience is still going to be less productive for a Mac-weenie like me.

But at least I’ve come out of this exercise with a newfound respect for ZoomText, if not for the obscene price the vendor asks for it. It’s quite in line with what other AT costs, but is completely still unreasonable.

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Tags: Linux, Mac, adaptive tech by matt
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Found the source of my sound problem: some changes I’d made to /etc/asound.conf trying to make mpd play nice. Removed the file, rebooted to make sure everything was completely clear, and now it’s working properly.

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Tags: Linux, Ubuntu by matt
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The gnome-pilot kit has driven me to give KDE another shot. Because either you leave that FPOS installed and it grabs the device whenever you try to sync, or you remove it and either take ubuntu-desktop with it or never update the system again.

I mean, who the hell does QA on this thing? It works some of the time. Sometimes the crash is in Evolution or the conduits rather than gpilotd itself getting stuck, but really. It is so far from being usable it isn’t funny. JPilot Just Works.

So far KPilot doesn’t work for me, it crashes when it tries to find the device, but at least it kindly fucks off when I do not explicitly ask for it.

I’ve found KDE apps to be a little crash-happy so far tonight. Kopete doesn’t like MSN. Known bug but with a fix that should go into the repo some time soonish. KPilot crashed trying to find my T|X. Amarok still can’t handle my music collection — the collection scanner stops dead at 5% of the way through — but at least the DAAP support works so it probably doesn’t really matter much anyway.

Konqueror is both excellent and an FPOS. I really love that they thought to include an accessibility stylesheet with a GUI to tweak it, I hate that textareas aren’t being handled properly with my large font.

Dunno how I feel about Dolphin. Will give it some time.

After moving the panel to the top of the screen and fiddling with fonts/colours/widget sets/etc I’m reasonably happy with what I have, though I see that by default Gtk+ apps don’t pick up the KDE font selections. Seems a rather odd default.

No Compiz as yet, I want to figure out how to make that happen so I can have my pretty zoomy swishy effects while waiting for KDE4.

But so far so good.

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Tags: Linux by matt
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Or, more specifically, the sorry state of Linux music player software.

I think I’ve tried most of the available options now. Here are my impressions:

Rhythmbox

I’m used to iTunes on Mac and Windows, so Rhythmbox is an obvious choice. It has a similar three-pane browse interface and that basically works pretty well. What stinks is stability. I do not want my music player falling over randomly. The version shipping with Gutsy is less-prone to keeling over than earlier revisions, but it’s still far too often.

Banshee

Come back when you get a browse mode.

Exaile

This is what I was using on Feisty. Not the version that ships with Feisty, of course, because I wanted DAAP support, but the backport version. That worked pretty well and I was happy giving it to my partner to use. Unfortunately the version in Gutsy has gone a bit senile and now “forgets” track numbers. Which makes it unusable if you’re the sort of person who still likes albums.

Amarok

If Exaile’s UI is OK, then why not try Amarok? Well, mostly because the versions in both Feisty and Gutsy are incapable of parsing more than the first 10% of my music collection before they go catatonic. Yeah, OK, I can accept that maybe there’s some weird shit in my music tags, but I cannot accept that “sit still and do nothing” is the right response. Throw an error and move on to the next file, damn it. I believe this is a problem with the KDE tag library it relies on, but I really don’t care whose fault it is.

Totem

OK, so the fancy-pants library-based players are all failing to work. Surely the bare-bones “movie player” can handle the job? Sadly not. In Gutsy at least it has the random crashes down pretty well, just like Rhythmbox did on Feisty. It’s fine for playing a single track or a single movie, but gets all upset with a playlist.

VLC

Getting really spartan now, aren’t we? This worked OK the first few times, though I don’t know that I like the playlist editor much. But then it started deciding to play only one track at a time: it’ll play a song, then stop. I can tell it to play the next one, but I have to do so by hand. Gah.

Audacious

A “modern” rewrite of XMMS? Yeah, OK, why not give it a try. Feeling a bit like it’s 1999 all over again, but it seems to work. Except for the bit where I start finding Warcrack hiccuping — screen and sound updates pause for a second or two — pretty regularly where it hadn’t done before. This with Audacious idle. Quit Audacious, suddenly the problems go away. Clever.

XMMS

So now it really is 1999. And guess what? It actually works. So far, anyway.

What is so difficult about writing a reliable music player, anyway? Genuine question, I really don’t know the answer. I can understand that the more bells and whistles you add the more likely you are to run into trouble, but this is one area where I think there needs to be a really serious push to get behind one application and make it really rock-solid. You aren’t going to get granny to stick with Ubuntu when it turns out she can’t play her Nirvana albums on it.

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Tags: Linux, Music, Tech, Ubuntu by matt
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Further to my last post, after some more mucking about with Gutsy on the home machine.

The audio problem with Rhythmbox seems to go away if I turn the volume down a little from the default. This is using the application’s volume control, not the system one, which is what I’d been using previously. Presumably it’s doing its own processing and at 100% it is distorting.

Warcrack runs pretty well even with Compiz enabled. Framerates are about what I was getting with Fiesty, possibly a little higher, and it works nicely with Expo mode as you can see in this screenshot. The one flaw so far is that very occasionally — and I’m not sure what triggers this — the Gnome panels will insist on sitting over the top of the Warcrack display and the only way to stop it is to quit the game and restart.

The other small Warcrack annoyance is that the freeze-on-exit bug found in the last few months’ of Wine builds is back. It’s fixed in the current Wine, but Gutsy is using something slightly older. Not a huge problem, and I expect that once Gutsy goes release the WineHQ people will start providing binary packages for it.

One final exciting bug: the title-bar on Firefox (so far) is sometimes corrupted. You can see what I mean here. If it’s forced to refresh (e.g., switch windows) it is redrawn correctly. Most often happens when I’ve switched back to Firefox via Expo mode.

In any event, I am broadly happy using the Gutsy beta both at home and at work, and we will probably install it on my partner’s new machine when that arrives this week. She’s seen what Compiz can do and really likes the look of Expo, Scale, and Enhanced Zoom.

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Tags: Linux, Tech, Ubuntu by matt
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Have been running the Gutsy beta at work for about a week now. So far so good. From an end-user perspective the main change really is just the default use of Compiz, and while that is disabled on my machine — it has an Intel X3000 GPU which is blacklisted — it does mostly work if you remove it from the blacklist. Just don’t use any of the 3D screensavers or the water effects.

And I now find myself missing Compiz when I do stuff at home, specifically the Expo and Scale modes. Having set those to trigger on the bottom corners of the screen, I find myself using them constantly for window and desktop switching. As I typically have a lot more windows open at home I can see it being very very useful.

I’ve tried the Gutsy beta at home but something somewhere is making sound from Rhythmbox distort on bass. Have done a little poking, Totem and Exaile both play the same material just fine, so it’s clearly something specific to Rhythmbox and this machine, as it works fine at work. At least I have a very simple test case: play “Electronic Performers” by Air and the distortion comes through pretty much right away.

This is a pity as I quite like where they’re going with Rhythmbox.

The other question will be how full-screen Wine stuff (i.e., Warcrack) copes. The machine at work is behind the sort of corporate firewalls that mean there is absolutely no point even trying so I haven’t checked this out recently, but last time I tried there was that whole annoying business where the Gnome panels would sit over the top of the Wine window.

The timing of the Gutsy beta is unfortunate in terms of my personal ability to properly test and debug — life has been a bit hectic and draining of late — but I’m sure it’ll be a fairly solid release.

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Tags: Linux, Tech, Ubuntu by matt
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