September 2005

Google Blog Search: devlogic:
Woohoo!  Of the 18 results for the search string "devlogic" on the new Google Blog Search, I have the top 18 spots.  That's right, all of them.

I guess nobody else has a weblog with "devlogic" involved.

Sun recently came out with some ads, which the WSJ is refusing to run, that are some of the funniest advertising I've seen in a while.  Jeff Powell's website, nosce te ipsum, was where I found them originally, but Slashdot had a link to the originals on Sun's website.  I'm having a hard time choosing my favorite, but "Benchmark studies prove that Dell sucks" is winning so far.

I'm sure there's a better solution, but since my compiles of the CVS version of Evidence kept failing, here's the solution I used:
 
First, keep in mind that I've installed all of my e17 binaries, libs, includes, etc. in /opt/e17. If you have put your e17 binaries in a different location, you'll need to modify these directions. But if you're compiling the CVS version of Evidence (or anything else, for that matter), you should already know that.
 
Anyway, in the Makefile of each of the following directories, add "-I/opt/e17/include" to the end of the DEFAULT_INCLUDES line. The directories:

• src/thumbnailer/epeg
• src/thumbnailer/xine
• src/gui/common
• src/gui/efl/common
• src/gui/efl/icon_view
• src/gui/gtk2/common
• src/gui/gtk2/icon_view
• src/providers/image
• src/actions/backdrop
• src/actions/tile
• src

 
Now, keep in mind that this step was necessary for me to even finish compiling Evidence; I have no idea if it runs yet (still at work). I'll know more in the morning, and an update (hopefully a one-liner) will follow shortly after testing.

Update: it appears to work.

I won't bother with a full review of my own; there are a couple (1,2) that I've already read online that already say most of what I would have anyway.  So this is just the things that I've noticed with my own installation.
 
Anyway, the important links first:

• Enlightenment
• Get-E.org
• The Enlightenment page at freedesktop.org

Now, on with the show.  I'll obviously be modifying this post with cool screenshots of my own system once I get home (I'm at work right now), but for now I'll start with a timeline of my Enlightenment experience.
 
Backstory:  I don't know if it's in this weblog, or if it was in my old CMS system, but a while back I wrote about switching from Gnome 2.4 to KDE 3.1.  I've kept up with KDE (whatever was in Debian Sid) since then; comes to about the last 2 years, I think.  Before that, I used Gnome from about when Gnome 1.2 came out (probably a good 2-3 years).  And I've found really old screenshots from between 4 and 7 years ago that are of me running Enlightenment and DR16 (and having screenshots of Raster's old E website, I think I may have even used E 0.01; I at least remember configuring those slideouts).  So I really am an "old-school" enlightenment user; I just became dissatisfied with the slow development progress (evidence that it's been about 3 years since a major release) and lack of features that I regarded as critical (like panels and more convenient configuration of themes, launchers, and desktop wallpapers).  Gnome (and later KDE) both had those features and more at their respective times, so I'd switched to them.  Then I got a Mac (last October/November; an early birthday present for myself).  And its easy-to-use, minimalist (in comparison) desktop has really grown on me over the last almost-year; pretty much to the point that when I'm at my Linux workstation, I don't really use 90% of the advanced features that KDE offers me.  All I really want is a desktop environment that does what I want, when I want it to, and cause me the least number of headaches.  Enlightenment now does all of that (well, almost all of it; when DR17 is released, I suspect that "almost" will disappear).
 
Keep in mind that I did just say "when DR17 is released".  DR17 is currently what I'd call either an "experimental release" or "alpha software", depending on the user-level of the person I'm talking to.  I've already had a few segfaults that brought down my entire X session, and I had some problems compiling the stuff (still have, with Evidence).
 
So.  On friday afternoon, I downloaded elive 0.3.  I was going to boot the ISO in my copy of VMWare, and play around with it in a virtual machine.  But I'd apparently upgraded my GCC installation since the last time I compiled my kernel, and the VMWare kernel modules hadn't been pre-compiled for 2.6.12.2.  I forged ahead anyway, compiling with the wrong version of GCC, and promptly screwed up my system in a major way.  Everything I tried to run with sudo would freeze, network operations became slower to respond, and I got a general feeling that I should drop to init 1, then back to multi-user, to fix the problem.  Then I got to thinking, maybe I should just upgrade my kernel; I'd kill two birds with one stone:  I'd have a new kernel, compiled with the same version of GCC that I was using to compile the VMWare modules, and I'd also have to reboot to start running it, which would clear up the pesky sudo problems I was having.  So I started the make oldconfig.  Then I realized that since I was going to reboot anyway, and since I'd already moved my mail server and web server to my other box, there was no reason not to try elive out on my actual box instead of inside vmware.  It was a Live CD anyway, so it's not like I was risking my machine's stability or my data by testing it out.  So I burned elive 0.3 to CD, and left it in the drive.  I also finished compiling that kernel image, and installed it in my Grub configuration (implementation left to the student; see manpage for make_kpkg).
 
A quick reboot (and BIOS reconfiguration) later, and I was using Enlightenment DR17 off of the elive CD.  Well, sort of.  It was running on my machine, but that Radeon 9200 that I have is a tricky beast, and configuring X to span the screens isn't an easy task.  Luckily, I already had a copy of my xorg.conf (well, XF86Config) on my "production" partition, so I copied it over and did a bit of tweaking.  There were a few things that needed to be done in order to make it work (like installing xserver-xorg; XFree86 has languished since the fork and is now missing many features that I find essential), but about an hour later I had E17 spanning both screens (at an effective 2560x1024), and it was sweet.  Snappy application response, excellent window placement, graphics to die for (thanks, Raster!), and the best part:  even though it was experimental, alpha-grade software, it seemed (for the most part) to "just work".  That's right; the same "it just works" that MacOS has.  Granted, this was nowhere near as much "it just works" as MacOS has; this is just the desktop environment.  Things like server manipulation, network configuration, printing, etc. still needed to be configured "the hard way".  But the part that was important to me, the actual desktop shell, was Good.  So I decided to switch from KDE.
 
Reboot, choose the new kernel (linux 2.6.12.2-devlogic-20050910), and find the e sources.  There's a link to get-e.org from the elivecd.org website; page 2.1 of the User Guide was essential to my successful completion of this task.  I tried the Debian packages first, because that would've been the easiest, but some things didn't quite work right.  I don't really remember what they were, but it was enough that I decided to compile everything from CVS instead.  That "page 2.1 of the User Guide" has the correct order to compile the E Foundation LIbraries; follow it to the letter and you shouldn't have any problems.
 
Of course, "shouldn't" and "won't" are different, and I did have some problems.  I didn't figure it out myself until Saturday night (although I guess technically it was Sunday morning; 1AM can be ambiguous at times). So here's what I did wrong, in case it helps anyone with a similar problem.  When I tried to run some programs, like e17setroot, I got an error referencing libebits.so.0 being missing.  ldd confirmed the link and missing lib.  But libEbits isn't part of E17 any more, ever since the edje libraries were rolled in (I found this out through various Google searches).  And I couldn't find libebits.so.0 anywhere on my system, or any reference to them in any source files in my CVS checkouts.  I thought I was at a dead end.  Then, and I forget why, I was looking through /usr/local/lib, and came across libewl.  "That's strange", I thought.  "I've been installing everything in /opt/e17, not /usr/local."  Then I remembered that I'd tried (and failed) to install an earlier version of E17 several months ago.  Apparently I hadn't remembered to remove all of the old libraries, include files, and apps associated with that failed attempt.  And libewl.so.0 (or maybe libecore.so.0; I can't remember) was linked against libebits.so.0, even though that particular lib was no longer on my system.  So a few judicious "sudo rm -rf libe*"'s later (and be sure to figure out what that does on your system before you do it), and I was recompiling everything in the EFL and e17/apps directories again.  But once I finished, everything that I'd noticed being broken before was then working.
 
Which leads me to where I am now, a happy user of E17.  There are obviously still some bugs; it's experimental, alpha-level software.  But the bugs that I've found have all already been mentioned in various bug reports or mailing list posts, which (I assume) means they're being worked on or at least considered.  Heck, if I knew C++, I'd probably try to help smash some of the bugs myself.  Suffice to say that this is. for my needs, a much better experience than KDE or Gnome has ever provided to me, and I give all of the encouragement I have to the E developers; this is already looking to be an excellent desktop shell.
 
Now if I can just get Evidence to compile.  Apparently the makefiles aren't paying attention to the various *_CFLAGS lines they contain, so I'm having to manually specify "-I/opt/e17/include".  I'm sure it'll be fixed some time in the next few checkins.  That, or I just need to upgrade my automake tools.
 
Ah, well.  Such is life on the bleeding edge.

I've been really tired recently.

No, wait.  "Tired" isn't quite the right word.  Granted, if I take out my contacts, go horizontal and close my eyes, I'll sleep.  But "tired" doesn't really cover it.

Neither does "exhausted"; in my mind, at least, exhaustion requires some sort of effort, be it physical, mental, or temporal (sleep-dep the usual cause in my particular case).  So I'm not exhausted, either.

I think the word I'm looking for is weary.  Yeah, that's close enough.  I'm weary.  I'm not sure exactly what I'm weary of (since the weary function requires an argument).  "Weary of life" sounds too . . . hm.  "Contrived" doesn't really work.  Ah, I've got it.  "Weary of life" sounds too Emo.  "Weary of existence" even moreso; I'd have to lose about 150 pounds and start wearing all black to use that phrase in a serious context.

I think I'm getting burned out on the whole "stay up all night, sleep all day" thing.  I've been doing that dance for about 3 years now (this time; the running total is about 6 years of the last eight), and it's really starting to wear on me.  I'm a little concerned that this time a vacation won't cut it, and I really don't want to change jobs or careers again right now.  And since I don't really chat with people in, for example, London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, Casablanca, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Vienna, Rome, or Geneva (to name a few cities in GMT+0 and GMT+1), I don't even have a "tribe" that I can identify with, much less claim membership in (see Cory Doctorow's book Eastern Standard Tribe if you want to try to understand that geek-laden reference).

And to make matters worse, for an unexplainable reason, I now have an inner compulsion to make this more than just my usual rantings.  The only trouble is, I can't think of a way to expand this much more than I have without pushing my (now) limited literary skills past their limits.  I haven't really exercised those muscles in about 5 years (i.e., right before I dropped out of college), and I think that if I tried now I'd just end up hurting myself.  A metaphorical tear in my literary ligament, so to speak (and with alliteration to boot).

Well, I guess I'll leave this was it currently is, and see about writing a part two if this funk doesn't lift.

Technorati Tags: 3rd shift

Homemade Ginger Ale
Sounds easy enough, and the recipe was "cooked up" (pun intended) by a biology/chemistry professor at UC Clermont.  I'll buy a 2-liter of something and the other ingredients some time this week; should be done by the weekend.

I was bored waiting for these stupid de-archives and par2repairs to finish, and spent my waiting-time reading through the QC archives. And I came to the realization, almost as if in a wave of inspiration, that thirty-twelve is the most awesome number ever. It's even better than eleventeen.