1. Open “Computer Management” (open the Start menu and search for “computer management”), go to “Disk Management” and right click on the partition called “SYSTEM RESERVED” and mark it as active.
2. Install SP1 either via Windows Update or by downloading the appropriate .exe from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5842.

That’s all really. Got SP1 running beautifully now with GRUB working and every OS (or rather “both” — Windows 7 and Ubuntu) booting properly. No need to mess around with Windows Recovery and Linux live-cds and stuff.

One of my problems with Awesome was that I could only switch between a few preset layouts, and those didn’t give me much control of the frame sizes. I actually do want my VIM to be exactly 80 characters wide – no more, no less – and Awesome didn’t give me that option. Ratpoison did, but I don’t like having to hit Ctrl-c t just to launch a terminal, when Mod4-t or Mod4-Enter will do. Those key combo chains have never been my cup of tea, which is why I’m using VIM and not Emacs.

Actually, before I even started looking at tiling window managers, I was using EvilWM, which is absolutely great, but I was getting tired of having to organize my windows manually on every login. Musca can be scripted to do pretty much everything – there are of course bugs and I don’t even know if it’s in development any longer, but it’s so goooood and sexy.

Recently GomTV decided to block any non-GomPlayer applications from accessing their streams. Effectively this means that paying customers using Linux or OS X are now stuck with only the VODs. Hence I can’t feel too bad for posting this workaround.

1. Go to GomTV.net, log in and go to the ‘Go Live’ page.
2. Copy/paste the Javascript for either the SQ or HQ stream into the location bar in your browser while you’re at the ‘Go Live’ page and hit Enter. (Thanks to the /r/starcraft redditors ‘mnjmn’ and ‘Gudeldar’ who came up with those Javascript snippets!)
   This will give you a personalized URL to the stream. Copy that.
3. Now open a terminal and execute the following command:
   curl -A 'GomPlayer 2, 1, 28, 5039 (ENG)' '<stream URL>' | vlc -
   Of course, replace <stream URL> with the URL you copied in 2 (but keep the quotes!).

Voilà!

You can of course replace VLC with any player that supports reading a stream from stdin, and if your system doesn’t have curl installed, you can use:
wget -U 'GomPlayer 2, 1, 28, 5039 (ENG)' -O - '<stream URL>' | vlc -

Note re OS X: As redditor ‘thedz’ pointed out, another way of doing it would be to simply use curl or wget to save the stream to a file and then open that file with your favorite video player. That goes a little something like this:
curl -A 'GomPlayer 2, 1, 28, 5039 (ENG)' '<stream URL>' -o ~/gsl.ogm
That saves the stream to ~/gsl.ogm (~ is a short way of writing /home/username (Linux) and /Users/username (OS X)), which you can open in any video player supporting OGM.

So I managed to finally set up Mutt for multiple IMAP accounts along with some sharing of the configuration via Dropbox so I only have to maintain one configuration between MacOS X and Linux (and whatever else I may use), and I’ll show you how.

First of all, you need to install Mutt. If you’re on any sort of Linux, then there’s probably a native package for Mutt and you should just install that. If you’re on OS X you’ll need to build it from the source, which requires that you’ve have the Apple Developer Tools (gcc and stuff) and probably Fink or MacPorts for dependencies – e.g. BerkeleyDB – and also you’ll have to apply the Trash Folder patch to the Mutt source (at least if you want to use your IMAP Trash folders instead of directly deleting mail). On my OS X all I had to do to build Mutt was the following:

$ wget ftp://ftp.mutt.org/mutt/devel/mutt-1.5.21.tar.gz
$ wget http://cedricduval.free.fr/mutt/patches/download/patch-1.5.5.1.cd.trash_folder.3.4
$ tar -zxvf mutt-1.5.21.tar.gz
$ cd mutt-1.5.21/
$ patch -p1 < ../patch-1.5.5.1.cd.trash_folder.3.4
$ configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-curses --with-regex \
    --enable-locales-fix --enable-pop --enable-imap --enable-smtp \
    --with-sasl --enable-hcache --with-ssl
$ make
$ sudo make install

However, I do have Fink installed, which may be the reason that it was so very easy. If ./configure fails (e.g. because of some missing dependency) you’re on your own. Same goes if you’re using Windows.

Anyways, with Mutt installed, we can now get started on the configuration files. (Mutt won’t do anything for you before it’s configured.) First of all, we need to setup some directories to hold the configuration files, certificates and caches. Now, I don’t want to share certificates and caches between my various machines/OSes (because of potential DB incompabilites), so let’s create a directory in our home directory to hold that. However, the Mutt configuration along with the account settings is what we want to share between machines/OSes, so we’ll create a directory in Dropbox for that and then create a symbolic link between the home directory and the configuration in Dropbox.

$ mkdir -p ~/.mutt.local/cache
$ mkdir -p ~/Dropbox/mutt.config/accounts
$ ln -s ~/Dropbox/mutt.config ~/.mutt

Now let’s go ahead and setup two accounts. I won’t go into too much detail about this, because you can find this stuff all over the internet. So first off we create the file ~/Dropbox/mutt.config/accounts/lillesvin for the first account with the following content:

#~/Dropbox/mutt.config/accounts/lillesvin
account-hook "imaps://lillesvin.net/" '\
set imap_user = "username@lillesvin.net" imap_pass = "PasswordGoesHere" '

set from = "username@lillesvin.net" # From-address for this account
set folder = "imaps://lillesvin.net/INBOX"
set spoolfile = "imaps://lillesvin.net/INBOX" # Inbox
set postponed = "+Drafts" #Drafts folder
set trash = "+Trash" # Trash folder (if you applied the Trash Folder patch)
set record = "+Sent" # Sent messages
mailboxes "+" "+Sent" "+Drafts"
set header_cache =~/.mutt.local/cache/headers
set message_cachedir =~/.mutt.local/cache/bodies
set certificate_file =~/.mutt.local/certificates
set smtp_url = "smtp://smtpserver.example.com"
set imap_keepalive = 900
set imap_check_subscribed

And for the second account we create the file ~/Dropbox/mutt.config/accounts/gmail with the content:

# ~/Dropbox/mutt.config/accounts/gmail
account-hook "imaps://imap.gmail.com/" '\
set imap_user = "username@gmail.com" imap_pass = "PasswordGoesHere" '

set from = "username@gmail.com" # From-address for this account
set folder="imaps://imap.gmail.com/"
set spoolfile = "+INBOX" # Inbox
set postponed = "+[Gmail]/Drafts" # Drafts folder
set trash = "+[Gmail]/Trash" # Trash folder (if you applied the Trash Folder patch)
mailboxes "+INBOX" "+[Gmail]/Drafts" "+[Gmail]/Sent Mail" "+[Gmail]/Spam" "+[Gmail]"
set header_cache =~/.mutt.local/cache/headers
set message_cachedir =~/.mutt.local/cache/bodies
set certificate_file =~/.mutt.local/certificates
set smtp_url = "smtp://username@smtp.gmail.com:587/"
set smtp_pass = "PasswordGoesHere"
set imap_keepalive = 900
set imap_check_subscribed

Now Mutt at least knows about the two acounts, but we’re still not able to use them untill we’ve created the following muttrc in ~/Dropbox/mutt.config/:

# ~/Dropbox/mutt.config/muttrc

# Global settings:
set realname = "My Real Name" # Name to put in From on emails
set editor='vim + -c "set textwidth=72" -c "set wrap" -c "set nocp"'
unset imap_passive
set charset = "utf-8" # We want this and the one below to force UTF-8 (only with UTF-8 terminals)
set send_charset = "utf-8" # Force sending as UTF-8 (only works with UTF-8 terminals)
set mail_check = 60
set timeout = 30
set edit_headers = yes
set move = no

# Make account switching possible
account-hook . 'unset imap_pass'
folder-hook 'lillesvin.net' 'source ~/.mutt/accounts/lillesvin'
folder-hook 'imap.gmail.com' 'source ~/.mutt/accounts/gmail'
macro index <F2> '<sync-mailbox><enter-command>source ~/.mutt/accounts/lillesvin<enter><change-folder>!<enter>'
macro index <F3> '<sync-mailbox><enter-command>source ~/.mutt/accounts/gmail<enter><change-folder>!<enter>'
# Default account
source ~/.mutt/accounts/lillesvin

I’ve stripped almost all unnecessary stuff from muttrc (again, you can find all the gravy by simply googling), but this should be a minimal working setup. To switch between the accounts you simply hit F2 and F3 for the lillesvin account and gmail account respectively. And to get a nice overview of all folders you simply hit ‘y’. Now all there’s left to do is to actually open Mutt and see if it all works as expected. (You better get used to hitting ‘?’ for help – at least in the beginning.)

$ mutt

Enjoy your Mutt!

Now, Starcraft 2 requires a pretty good graphics card, so if I want to stay on OS X, I’m going to have to go with at least a MacBook Pro 15″ — i.e. a 13.200 DKK computer ($2350 / €1770). Now, that’s a hell of a lot of money. Alternatively, if I choose not to care about OS X and just try to get value for my money, I can get an MSI FX600 with equal or better specs for 6.000 DKK ($1050 / €800).

A quick comparison of some key specs. (Specs and prices from http://edbpriser.dk)

Granted, GDDR3 RAM is a lot better than just DDR3 (the G makes all the difference), but it’s not 4 times better.

On top of that, I’ve lost absolutely all respect I had for Apple when I bought my MacBook back in 2007. The upcoming Mac App Store and shit like that is just downright retarded. Meanwhile Microsoft has actually been doing pretty much the same as they’ve always been doing, but compared to Steve Jobs’ insane world domination plot, Steve Ballmer is actually starting to look like the sane one of the two. And Windows 7 is getting rave reviews, so why not give that a try, now that OS X is going “Trumpets!”

Now I’m just left thinking, why would anyone (today) spend money on a Mac, when you can get the same specs in non-Apple computer for less than half the price? The MSI obviously doesn’t look as slick as a unibody MacBook, but it looks alright — I mean, it’s not downright ugly if you peel off all the stickers, and the day I pay 7.000 DKK ($1250 / €940) for just the design, is the day when someone ought to shoot me in the fucking head.

My current desktop.

Who would want to be stuck with OS X or Windows?

Setup:

• GTK2/Metacity: Elegant Cold Blue Flat
• Icons: AnyColorYouLike
• Title bar font: Aldo
• Application font: Butter
• Clock/date font: Digital-7
• Wallpaper: Annotated / Raw
• Conky: .conkyrc
• Docky: bluesmoke

Well, back to work with some LaTeX in Vim. Haha! Even after 10+ years Linux still rocks my world.

They list the steps for a Windows performance boost as follows:

• Update drivers
• Update firmware
• Give Windows less to think about (involving messing with the registry, disabling unnecessary graphic effects, removing unused fonts etc.)
• Overwhelmed by icons? (Involving messing around with msconfig.)
• Malware removal
• Defrag the hard drive

Now consider that updating drivers — and especially firmware — requires very specific knowledge of your hardware, while rummaging around in the registry and msconfig requires a good deal of knowledge about how software works and in some cases knowledge about — or ability to guess — how software vendors may choose to name their executables and the paths at which they might put the executables. Malware removal may have become easier over the years, but to a lot of users the terminology and processes involved seem intimidating, which ultimately stops them from doing it properly; or at all. And finally, defragmentation? Are you fucking kidding me?

Now Linux (let’s just take any Debian based distro for these examples.)

• Updating drivers is handled like all other updates, i.e. unless you’ve specifically disabled the automatic check for updates, you’ll be prompted to install fresh drivers pretty much as soon as they’re available. No manual searching required (unless you have some poorly supported hardware that doesn’t have drivers in any of the available repositories).
• Updating firmware can be a bitch, since most firmware updaters are Win only. On the other hand, I’ve never had to update my firmware from Linux on neither my MacBook nor my ThinkPad, so personally I regard this as a non-issue, but your mileage may vary.
• Cleaning up the registry… What registry?
• Managing applications that auto-start? System > Preferences > Startup Applications — easy and not as potentially dangerous as msconfig!
• Disabling unnecessary visual effects? System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects.
• Malware removal. Not really necessary (for the time being), but under all circumstances no harder than on Windows.
• Defragmentation. No!

So to sum up, all you actively need to do to keep a Debian based Linux box speedy is basically to decide which applications and services you want to start up as you log in. That’s it! (If you’re really picky about getting the most out of your battery, you may want to turn off visual effects while running on battery power; or all together.)

Now I’m left wondering why so many people think that running Linux is for geeks only. To me it seems like running a Windows machine (and keeping it running) requires a good deal of knowledge about your computer’s hardware, it is insanely time-consuming and in general a pain in the ass. (I wouldn’t know for sure since I haven’t done it for several years, but I still help plenty of people with their Windows related problems.) No matter what OS people run, they always tend to have a backup geek they can turn to when things get too complicated — that goes for OS X, Windows and Linux, so why not start relying a little more on your personal Linux geek?

Please note that any or all of these minor problems—maybe with the exception of the everlasting iSight issue—may be fixed in the final version.

First Impressions

First of all, someone has been working wonders on the Intel 945GM video driver, and I’m not talking small, lame wonders like the pyramids or something, I’m talking OMFGWTFBBQ!?!11-sized wonders!

Using wildly unscientific and unreliable readings from glxgears:

– 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex): ~1100 fps
– 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope): ~900 fps (and I’m being generous here)
– 9.10 (Karmic Koala): ~3200 fps!

Yes, you heard (or read) me right — I’ve got 3x more frames per second than I did in 8.10. I bet your puny pyramids are looking pretty silly now, huh? It could of course be because someone just introduced a bug in the glxgears code and I’m only actually getting 4 frames per year, but graphics feel smoother and I think I could almost run a 3D accelerated game on it.

Apart from the hotness that is the new Intel video driver, there are loads of other improvements over previous releases. Boot time has improved significantly, and the same goes for login time, which is really nice. GDM (the login window) has been completely rewritten, which results in a smoother and nicer login experience. (Yeah, I know it sounds lame to be talking about “login experience”, but go ahead, try it! If you’ve ever tried login in to a Gnome desktop before, you’ll see what I mean.) This rewrite also means that I can now suspend my laptop while being logged out, which is really, really nice — and about time.

The classic brown/orange Ubuntu look has gotten even browner (i.e. darker) and it actually looks so good that I’m sticking to the default theme with one of the bundled backgrounds for now. The default icon set has been given an overhaul for the better and behind the scenes we’ve got Ext4 as the default file system, Grub 2 as the new boot-loader, DeviceKit replacing HAL and other nice things.

Setting Up

Almost everything worked out of the box with some minor exceptions though. So far I haven’t run into any problems relating to wifi, suspend/resume/hibernate, graphics/video, bluetooth or any of the things that usually makes installing any OS on a Mac a living hell.

What needs tampering with is mainly the keyboard layout and maybe the sound. If you want to use the built-in iSight, you probably got a little work ahead of you, but otherwise fixing these minor issues will take you maybe 5–10 minutes.

Touchpad Behaviour

This “problem” is so ridiculously tiny, that I’m not even sure why I’m including it, but since I’m installing on a MacBook, I want the touchpad to behave like it does in OS X, and it pretty much does. I only had to open the mouse preferences (System > Preferences > Mouse) and tell it to enable two-finger scrolling and that was that. Right click is—if you’ve disabled tapping the touchpad for clicking—two fingers + click and middle click is 3 fingers + click. If you’re using tapping for clicking, I’m guessing 2 finger tap is right click and 3 finger tap is middle click, but I don’t know, I haven’t tried it.

Keyboard Setup

The keyboard, however, is quite another story, because this koala doesn’t use xmodmap, which us Mac-users previously used to assign Alt Gr-functionality to the key of our choice. After selecting the appropriate keyboard layout (Apple / MacBook/MacBookPro (intl.)) I wasn’t able to write @, $, {, [, ], }, ~ or |, or any other key that required me to press Alt Gr. Fortunately I could for unknown reasons write those characters in my Gnome Terminal (but not anywhere else) and copy/paste from there, but that is no fun in the long run and it certainly proves problematic when you try to log in with a password containing any of those characters.

However, after a little googling I quickly found that commenting out the following 2 lines in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/pc along with a minor adjustment in System > Preferences > Keyboard did the job.

Make sure these two lines in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/pc looks like this (i.e. add “//” at the beginning of the lines):

//    modifier_map Mod4   { <LWIN> };
...
//    modifier_map Mod4   { <RWIN> };

If you don’t know how to edit that particular file, hit Alt-F2 (or Alt-Fn-F2 if you haven’t switched Fn-mode) to bring up the “Run Application” dialog and type:

gksudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/pc

When you’re done editing the file and your changes are saved, go to System > Preferences > Keyboard, select the Layouts tab and click Layout Options. Expand “Key to choose 3rd level” and put a check mark next to the key you want to be your Alt Gr. Personally I’m using “Right Win” (i.e. the Cmd/Apple key to the right of the space bar), but another option is to use that retarded Enter key between aforementioned Apple key and left arrow (check “Enter on keypad” for that).

Function Keys

The Mute/Volume keys (on F3, F4 and F5) and the eject key works out of the box, but the brightness keys (on F1 and F2) needs a little attention — nothing big, just install the package pommed and that’s it.

If you—like me—don’t like the default Fn-key behaviour, where you have to hold Fn to actually press F1-F12 — i.e. Alt-Fn-F2 to bring up the “Run Application” dialog, then there’s an easy fix on the Ubuntu Wiki: AppleKeyboard.

No Sound in Your Headphones?

I had a weird issue with sound working fine with the internal speakers, but once I connected my headphones or stereo to the output jack, I got nothing. At first I thought I was going to have to recompile a bunch of kernel modules, find a virgin to sacrifice and perhaps give away my first-born, but it turned out to be simpler than that. I installed the package gnome-alsamixer and unmuted all channels and everything was fine. Maybe the devs could make sure that all channels are unmuted on install?

Webcam/iSight

The built-in iSight takes a lot of work to get running, and I never ever use the damn thing, so I don’t really care. Of course, it’d be nice if it did work, but Apple is mostly at fault here, because they’re so bitchy about releasing specs and firmware. Back in the olden days you’d have to extract the firmware from your OS X install, which could be done with the package isight-firmware-tools — I imagine that’s still the case. If you try, test it with the package cheese, which is basically a PhotoBooth clone, and let me know how it turns out.

Th-th-th-that’s all, folks! Really! Apart from the iSight (which I couldn’t care less about), everything’s working better than ever and the koala is fast becoming my favorite pet in the zoo that is Ubuntu Linux.

Steve Jobs: “Home sharing: we‘re going to let you copy songs, TV shows, etc. with up to 5 computers in your house.” (Emphasis mine.)

Well, thanks a lot. Are you really going to let me do that? Gee, Steve! I don’t know what to say. I can play my DVDs on pretty much any device with a DVD drive without being limited to 5. I can even let friends borrow them without being worried that I won’t be able to see them myself when I buy a new DVD player because it would just happen to be the 6th device to play back that particular DVD. And don’t get me started on my vinyl collection.^[1]

I’m not sure I want an OS riddled with antifeatures, where I’m at the mercy of what Steve Jobs and Co. will let me do with my data.

^[1]: Irony would have it that in this recent press event, Apple announced the iTunes LP, which is basically nothing like a vinyl, but more like the many failed attempts at releasing extra material in a data track on a regular CD album. So get ready for craploads of cheesy DVD-like animated menus and metric tonnes of completely useless and indifferent bonus material.

This allows you to build your own web server with your favourite applications pre-installed and set up, so all you have to do is install it and boot, and you can also use it to make your own desktop distro with your favourite apps installed, configured and ready to go. Pretty nifty, eh?

For further demonstration check out their screencasts.