Planet TLLTS

Well I am sitting here on Thanksgiving with not much to do because Paige is hogging the PS3 playing Resonance of Fate. So I figured, why not check out KVM, I did download the Linux Mint 12 rc cd image to install on Paige’s Pangolin.

After loading the kvm modules and creating an image use qemu-img I am now most of the way through the install process and I must say, KVM is sweet! It seems much lighter than VirtualBox and I love how it is geared towards the command line.

I plan on testing this out for other things.

I really love text based email clients. They do a wonderful job of keeping distractions out of your way and letting you focus on what’s important – the message! I find that by using a text email client, I save myself probably 30 minutes or more each day (yes, I get a LOT of emails).
For years I advocated and used pine and alpine for my email. I really liked it and still do, however, it just doesn’t perform great with IMAP it seems, and especially multiple IMAP accounts, and that is what the email of today is like. I switched to a more efficient thunderbird email client for a long while, but then thunderbird started addding “features” like local indexing and such. Kind of a turn off.
Recently, I thought I would look around again and landed back on mutt. I had avoided mutt for many years because it used to require you run your own smtp server. That has always been pretty impractical for me. Now, however, I found that mutt does support using an external smtp server and handles IMAP email with ease. Well! It was time to give it a try and boy, I am glad I did. It’s fantastic! It’s very lightweight, fast, powerful and has that manly text based interface that makes you feel like a power user and makes you look like a unix genius.
The key to a good mutt setup is in the config file, and therein lies all the power as well. Here is a peek into my ~/.muttrc file to give you an idea on how to get things going:

set spoolfile=imap://youremailhostaddress.com/
set folder=imap://youremailhostaddress.com/
set record=”=Sent”
set postponed=”=Drafts”
set mark_old=no # does not mark your messages as old
set fast_reply=yes
set include=yes
set imap_user = “yourusername”
set imap_pass = “yourpassword”
set signature=”~/.signature”
set smtp_url=smtp://yoursmtpserver
auto_view text/html
set mail_check=30
set timeout=15
set realname=”your realname”
set from=”your from address”
set use_from=yes
set editor=vim #greatest editor around
unset markers # get rid of those pesky plusses
set ssl_starttls = no # dont use these on my internal srvr
set ssl_force_tls = no # same as above

Those are pretty self explanatory and I find that is a minimum config for me to work with. Now you might (if you are smart and use vim) want to enable a spellchecker in vim as well. That just takes these lines in your ~/.vimrc file:

set spell
set spelllang=en_gb

Once that is in there and you make a spelling error on an email it will be highlighted. Just cursor over the word and press z= for a spelling suggestion.

As for a few tips on actually using mutt, here are some that will get you started:
Cursor up/down and press enter or space to read a mail.
Once in the email space to page/scroll down and – to get back up.
Press v to view attachment list and enter on the one you want to open.
Press m to write a new email.
Press c then tab to change folders and press space to open that email folder.
Press s then ? to save an email to a different folder and select the folder with space.
Press d to delete an email, r to reply to the sender, g to reply to all.
Press a to take an address and save it into your address book. This will make an alias of sorts so that when you create a new mail to an alias of “person” it translates to person@domain.com automatically.
Press D (yes capital) to search for and delete all mail with a subject that matches your expression.
Press D then ~b and expression to do the same within the message bodies.
Press l then expression to filter/search emails.
Press l then ~b and expression to do the same within the message bodies.
Eventually you will want to sync your email and get rid of all the deleted stuff – press $ and enter to do that.
Probably the most helpful is to remember to press ? to get help!

I hops that helps getting you all started with using this great client! Enjoy!

I just couldn’t wait any longer so I grabbed a copy of the gnome 64 bit cd iso image from http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/linuxmint.com/testing/. Well, I also grabbed the DVD image as well, but I actually used the cd image to install. It’s a live cd/dvd so I set about checking out the live version first, of course, just to make sure things looked ok.
I figured I would just go for it and started installing to disk on my new laptop. I should mention here that while I like Mint 11, there are certain things on my new laptop that just do not work well with it. It has a new i5 sandybridge processor and the associated graphics which didn’t do well with acceleration and suspend and my trackpad only registered as a mouse, which was usable but a pain in my behind. Needless to say I have been chomping at the bit for a try at the next release to see which, if any, of these issues might have been addressed.
The installer was quick and efficient and I don’t recall anything in particular standing out from what has come to be a normal mint install. That being said, everything after that was fascinating and exciting.
On your first login you are greeted by the new desktop environment, a sort-of Gnome 3 mashup. It’s Gnome 3 but has some of the niceties that *I* believe are needed to make Gnome 3 usable and all the UI goodness that I have come to expect from Linux Mint (and why I keep returning to them). You have 2 taskbars (one would probably be enough though), icons on the desktop and a pretty looking new menu system, not to mention the interesting Gnome 3 new UI things. Previously I tried Gnome 3 on Fedora and absolutely hated it, but in this configuration, it is quite pleasant and completely comfortable and usable.
After the install you will see that Mint welcome screen, which, at the bottom, gives you the opportunity to ad all the multimedia codecs and also to upgrade to the DVD version. Nop matter what I did, those links did bupkis. Undaunted, I looked at the code behind this to see that the packages that should be installing are meta packages, so I popped open synaptic and after a quick search I found and installed mint-meta-codecs, mint-meta-gnome-dvd and mint-meta-mate, which, after installation seemed to get the welcome screen not to display those links anymore, so I am assuming that’s what was needed. I am sure this is something that’ll be fixed as days go along. After all, this isn’t even really an official RC at this point yet, really.
After doing all my software updates and installing the few packages I just have to have in order to function (sshfs smbfs irssi vpnc screen vlc mencoder vim moc openssh-server subversion git twinkle curl php5-cli mutt clusterssh) I set about checking things out thoroughly.
To my surprise, ALL MY LAPTOP ISSUES have been fixed, or at least seemingly. I now have nice screen acceleration, my laptop suspend works flawlessly, my trackpad has actually been detected as a trackpad and I even have 2 finger scrolling working now. WOOT!!! Of course the rest works too. I have sound, wireless internet, usb support, etc., etc..
This is very exciting for me and I, for one, cannot wait to see the full release coming in the future, but if you think I am uninstalling this in favor of something else while I wait, boy are you wrong. I am hooked! Go Mint!

The Lost Princess of Oz by L. Frank Baum

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hands down this has been my favorite Oz book so far. The adventuring, the party, the obstacles, all top notch.

Ozma has been kidnapped! The Wizard’s tools are missing! Glinda’s power has waned as her magical components have been frisked along with the Great Book and the Magic Picture. Toto’s growl is gone and across the land Cayke the Cookie Cook has her jeweled cookie pan stolen! What is going on? Who is the culprit? Avery and I spent a goodly amount of time postulating who we knew is Oz that could pull off such a heist. Baum kept us riveted to the story the whole time!

To talk about this book is to give too much away and spoil the surprise. My only bit of sadness was there was too little shaggy man!

Top notch story, what I’ve been hankering for for some time!

View all my reviews

In the past couple of weeks I upgraded the family computer to Ubuntu 11.10. This was the first release that the family got to experience Unity for the first time. The kids were o.k. as they’re pretty flexible. My wife on the other hand absolutely hated Unity and insisted I switch to a desktop that’s closer to Gnome 2.*. I wound up putting XFCE on it and she was happy. Everything seems to running without any issues. The only minor thing I had to deal with is that tsclient is no longer supported in 11.10. For anyone who uses a vpn for work and needs to access a windows box it’s a minor problem. I found an application similar to tsclient called remmina. The configuration is actually easier than tsclient. I’ve held off upgrading the Mythbuntu boxes in the house as there’s no reason to do so at this point. MythTV is currently at 024.1 and everything is running fine. I’ll upgrade once MythTV is upgraded to 0.25.