Hari's Corner

Since the LinuxQuestions.org forum upgrade, users can now have their own "blog" within the forum.

This is a useful little feature and I find that it's a good place to post short Linux snippets and notes. I will still be posting full fledged articles here, but you can also check out the blog there for small random Linux notes which you might occasionally find useful.

Here is my Little Linux tidbits at LQ.org.

A member of my forum LiteraryForums.org, Azrael, decided to declare war on me. Rather than go down to his level and fight, I decided to do the graceful thing and quit from the field. I am too busy in my life to engage in futile online battles and do something that is so distasteful.

I'll tell you how all this happened. Azrael, who's up to now, been a very good member of the forum and a good contributor, started a discussion on google adsense. I merely felt that it would be out of place on my forum (which is my space, by the way) to discuss it because I was a google partner and I felt it was in violation of their TOS.

Now I explained this in a polite manner to Azrael in a Private Message, explaining my point of view. Rather than reading the message, he chose to react in a shocking manner by deleting all his earlier posts and reviews. This is a blatant lack of respect on his part to do that without informing me. I was shocked and not a little saddened because he has been so good up to this point. Being busy with my examinations I decided that I didn't need all this shit. I decided to get rid of my forum for good because managing it has become a pain with guys like him thinking that he owns the place.

Now I left it at that and having made the decision, quietly informed my moderators of my decision and why I did it.

Not satisfied with carrying on like a little child who tears up newspapers for the fun of it, Azrael decided to continue this war against me by posting in my blog with a rude comment calling me a liar. I will *NOT* take this any more. For somebody who calls himself a school teacher, he has lowered himself in my eyes beyond the point of recall. He has burnt his bridges and that has nothing to do with my conduct.

To Azrael: This is my webspace. I reserve the right to using it the way I want to. You have no rights except what I choose to give you on *my* forum. Because I chose to be lenient you took advantage of this and decided to challenge me so blatantly. Please leave me alone, because I don't want to have to do anything with you. Your declaration of war has ruined my weekend. You took a simple moderation action personally and decided that I was the villain without understanding my point of view.

And if you wanted to delete your posts, you could have requested me and I'd have wiped your presence off my database with pleasure. What really annoyed me was your sneaky, underhanded way of doing it. Never ever show your nose here, please.

To everyone else: Please forgive this decision of mine, but I am not going to stand this. I have no time or energy to deal with people like Azrael who think that posting in my blog calling me a liar is supposed to be an insult. It's not. It's pathetic and shows a degenerative mind.

I'll probably re-open the forum with upgrades later on if I want to, but don't count on it.

Regards.

Update: Please read this post here.

My second cartoon character! Accept this profile or create your own if you wish!

Name: Bhoopathy... "Big Boss" Bhoopathy
Character: Dangerous
Curriculum vitae: Gold smuggler, law breaker, gangland boss
Habits: Plays chess with himself
Punch line: "I'm a ba..a..ad man."

No boss can be without a sidekick or a hatchet-man. Blockhead... er... "Rockhead" Joe is his (not so) perfect assistant.

Name: "Rockhead" Joe
Character: Umm...?
Curriculum vitae: Right hand man
Habits: Scratches his head often
Punch line: "Duh... boss"

Having always been satisfied with KDE as the desktop for my Linux box, I decided to experiment with other options in this area, particularly the lightweight window managers. I've been discovering quite a few good ones and I thought I would share the results here.

I'll say right away that if you're perfectly happy with KDE or Gnome, there's no reason to switch. As a matter of fact, I maintain that KDE is the current champion of desktop Linux and I won't be totally giving it up either. However, what I can offer you is a glimpse of some of the alternatives to the two heavyweights of desktop Linux should you be curious enough to experiment. And for those with older hardware and slower machines, these desktop alternatives could really be handy because they're lightweight, configurable and extremely useable. I'll focus on IceWM here, because that's what I've picked as my window manager of choice. Here's a screenshot of IceWM on my Debian desktop with the rox file manager running.

IceWM is actually like a good cross between a WM and a DE. Unlike most WMs, it comes with a few bells and whistles like a little taskbar and panel to hold your minimized and background apps and an application "start" menu. But what really attracted me was the GUI IceWM configuration editor and the menu editor icepref and iceme respectively: no messing around with config files. The basic configuration is quite simple and the UI is very intuitive, especially for users of DEs like KDE and even Windows. What would attract many people is the fact that it comes with a large number of themes. I've chosen SilverXP as my theme because it looks sleek and nice. I've also configured the focus to follow the mouse and made the menus navigable without clicking. This gives IceWM a smoother feel. A couple of things to note, though. Like most lightweight WMs it doesn't come with an integrated session manager, meaning that you cannot save session data whenever you exit IceWM. You will probably need to install and configure one to suit your needs. Another is the fact that you may need to manually create and manage your applications menu in IceWM because your distro might not use a common menu configuration file which works will most WMs and DEs. Luckily in Debian, I was able to solve this problem by using the update-menus utility which creates a "Debian" menu with all the apps installed on my system. Thirdly you will need to configure xscreensaver daemon to load automatically at startup if you want a screensaver option. These issues might not be serious, but they could potentially annoy people used to the conveniences of a full-fledged desktop environment which are taken for granted. The menu problem, in particular, could be a real show-stopper for some users. But on the whole, I would say that IceWM is a minimum fuss WM and you will probably find that you need to do very little initial work to get it to work the way you want.

So would I recommend IceWM? If you want an easy to use WM that's a lot lighter than a full fledged desktop environment, I think you can't go too wrong with IceWM. However, before you make a decision, you might be interested in checking out others like WindowMaker, Enlightenment, and even Xfce which is a full-fledged but lightweight DE. As a matter of fact, I use Xfce on Slackware and I find it to be an excellent desktop environment too. Enlightenment is another good looking GUI and if you're fond of eye-candy it would be a good choice. However, I am not the biggest fan of fluxbox, because it's just too basic by default and requires quite a bit of work initially to become useable. However it has a dedicated fanbase and being extremely lean and mean, it should be really responsive on older hardware.

I've tried them all and I've chosen IceWM. You might pick another one. There are quite a few WMs and DEs I've not even mentioned here and which I haven't had time to play with: the number of options are overwhelming. Did I mention freedom of choice? I'm discovering it every day with Linux.

Titanium_geek gave me a very good idea and so I thought I would start posting my cartoon characters here! Nothing serious, just a series of anonymous characters to satisfy my own creative thirst. I used to do a lot of this a few years ago and Titanium_geek's cute cartoon reminded me of my old hobby. Disclaimer: any resemblance to any real-life character, living or dead, is purely coincidental!

Here's the first one. Raakaa, the rogue. Colourful, ain't he? You can fill in his bio yourself. Let your imagination run wild!