Going Home Stage 2

Continuing the story of my transition to Debian.

KDE4, with its eye candy and many features mimicked almost directly from Mac OS X, softened the transition. But after a while I begun to feel how cumbersome and, frankly, buggy, it really was, and remembered that, hey, this is GNU/Linux we're talking about, with an endless selection of different window managers.

So, just for fun, I decided to look at possible alternatives. One light-weight window manager in particular caught my eye: Sawfish. Apart from generally being completely different from KDE, what really caught my attention was the introduction: "Sawfish is an extensible window manager using a Lisp-based scripting language..." Being something of an Emacs enthusiast (a very powerful editor also extensible in a Lisp-based language) and a Lisp fan in general, this looked like a solution with real potential.

So I installed it, and have now spent a day fiddling with it, and I think I'm hooked. There's less eye candy, but that only means that it feels much lighter and everything works faster. Sawfish, at its core, is a very bare bones window manager, the very opposite of what KDE stands for. But the scripting facilities provide endless possibilities. I've set up some very handy keyboard shortcuts, for instance, which launch applications I use often or switch to them if they're already running. Adding a few scripts from the website gave me some features I've gotten used to, like periodically changing wallpapers.

For the first time in a good while I feel I'm in control of the graphical environment and not the other way round. And hacking extensions with Emacs is lots more fun than than any GUI configuration tool will ever be.

Astrology and Debian

I set up my astrology software for the new Debian installation today. The environment is pretty much the same I had on Mac OS X, based around Matt Skala's astrology LaTeX style, horoscop. But setting up a working TeX installation, complete with custom fonts, is rarely straightforward.

I went with a full TeX Live installation. It's a hefty download, and contains a lot of useless junk, but I didn't want any problems from missing packages. Installing the font for astrological symbols took some trial and error. Finding the right filetree for the files, the right configuration files to edit etc. took some work. But I succeeded in the end and now have LaTeX running without problems, complete with astrological symbols and the horoscop style for drawing good looking charts.

Last, I needed a backend to do the calculations. On OS X I used Astrolog, so I compiled and installed it, without problems. However, I discovered that when I enable ephemeris files provided for greater accuracy, I get some really weird planet positions, at least for Jupiter and Saturn. Without them it works perfectly, and also has the X interface that wouldn't work on OS X. The loss in accuracy should be insignificant for most ordinary needs.

However, on GNU/Linux I've got another option: Swiss Ephemeris from Astrodienst. I coudn't compile it on OS X, but had no trouble now (although I had to fiddle about with the sources a little to set the correct path for ephemeris files). This software has several pros and cons when compared to Astrolog.

On the plus side: It's much newer than Astrolog. It should be very accurate, though, as I said, in ordinary usage this is not a huge factor. It's able to calculate countless asteroids not supported by Astrolog. (Though as of now I'm still using only the seven classical planets.) It's GPL licensed. (Astrolog is basically free, but the terms forbid any kind of commercial use. Which naturally doesn't matter much to me right now, but I can't rule out the possibility of doing interpretation for money some day, even if only on a very small, semi-hobby basis).

The only real downside is that there is no feature rich interface like Astrolog has. It's really intended as a library for developing your own astrology software, but the included demonstration app is good enough to provide data for horoscop. Of course right now a basic, simple birth chart is what I'm mostly looking for, so I guess I'll go with Swiss Ephemeris for now, for accuracy and peace of mind over license questions.

Going Home

Well, after bitching about Mac OS X's shortcomings for a long while, I finally took the plunge and installed GNU/Linux on my MacBook. (Why it took this long was mostly because I didn't have that USB disc to backup my stuff, until now.)

In case anyone is wondering why, let me reiterate. The reason is twofold.

1. Ideology. I'm a devoted supporter of the free software movement. While Mac OS X utilises many open source components, and as a Unix system is fairly compatible with a large number of free software applications, it is still a proprietary system, and many of Apple's policies I just can't agree with.

2. Functionality. While Mac OS X is a certified Unix system, it's focus is on its own desktop environment, which doesn't intergrate perfectly with the Unix core, its command line interface or other Unix software not tailored for OS X. GNU/Linux systems (and probably most other Unix-like systems as well) are much more configurable, use the standard X Window System and are generally more 'whole', not suffering from an identity crisis as OS X is.

Debian GNU/Linux was the obvious choice, as I said before. Installing it on a MacBook isn't exactly a trivial matter, but following instructions on Debian's wiki page it wasn't actually too difficult, even though on the first try I ended up with kernel panic and had to do it all over again. In the end it booted without problems, though, and most features work fine pretty much 'out of the box'. (I still have a small partition with Mac OS X as a backup, and because a pure Debian system apparently still has some issues.)
There's still plenty of configuring to do, of course. The touchpad works, but needs tuning. I haven't been able to figure out how to get custom settings to work yet. And I haven't got wireless yet. It seems that this would require upgrading the kernel to a newer version, which is something I've never done before.

I might have been worried that I'd grown too accustomed to OS X's eye candy and convenient features. Well, I installed KDE 4, and it has certainly softened the blow. It looks pretty, and has pretty much all the desktop and window management features of OS X, such as a grid view of all the virtual desktops. And a slideshow mode for my many wallpapers.

For now, I'm just happy to be back home in a proper free software *nix.

Procrastinating with OS Woes

Still got that flu. Mostly it's just an annoying cough, with a slightly runny nose thrown in. I haven't been sleeping very well either. And I have to go to class tomorrow and speak. Great.

I've really started to yearn for a proper free software operating system again. I've used Mac OS X for well over a year now, and the magic is slowly beginning to wear off. I've written before about its flaws from a Unix user's perspective (just look at the posts labeled Mac OS X). Toss in the ethical problems of proprietary software, and I'm really starting to turn against it. OS X had its attractions, much of which were just simple eye candy. But free software systems aren't that far behind. Just look at these features in KDE 4.

Debian GNU/Linux would probably be my top choice. It's undoubtedly the best GNU/Linux distribution I've used so far. A great package management system with a huge software library is one of it's best features. And it's also more devoted to the GNU philosophy than some other distributions.

But installing a GNU/Linux system on a MacBook is no trivial matter. I need to find out more about how well it actually functions. I certainly couldn't even try it without making a complete backup of all my stuff, for which I would need a USB hard drive, which I just don't have the money for at the moment. Which leaves me kind of buggered. Not happy at all.

Cough and Sniffle

I decided to pull the plug on my forum for the time being. It was just collecting spam, and no actual conversation. (Well, who would want to chat in a forum with no people and no real gimmick?) I've spent the last week with a cold, which, while not terribly bad at its worst, appears to be surprisingly resilient. As for my GNU/Linux status, I switched to Debian some time ago. gNewSense had admirable aims, but in the end, being based on Ubuntu Dapper, its software was simply too old. Nothing much more to report. I hope to have some new game reviews soon, and I'm also going to start running a RPG campaign again, so there'll be info and plot descriptions of that. A happy New Year to everyone.

Crouching Pop Star, Hidden Gnu

Not much new in the past month. I've just added a review for a fun Japanese action game called Bujingai. My current passion is the Free Software movement, and I've been trying to get rid of as much proprietary software as possible. A couple of days ago I installed a new GNU/Linux distro called gNewSense, which shows a lot of potential... There's not much I can do myself for the cause, except make a stand and stick to the Free Software ideology as closely as possible in my own life. If there only were great many of us that did the same, the world might be a better place, at least as far as ethical and sustainable software development goes...