No Way Know How

Still enjoying Mint 17. I'm going through my usual new OS customisation processes and it's been pretty good so far. One thing I really enjoyed was being able to right-click on cairo-dock, create a custom launcher, assign the Numix round  Soulseek icon and then enter the command to run it. Et voila, soulseek shortcut in my dock! The reason for this post is, being a slow day at work I'm looking at the Mint user guide. I have to admit, a user guide is not something I'd ever normally read for an operating system, even if one exists. In fact, I'd be judging the OS on my ability to use it without any form of instruction whatsoever. But like I say, I'm skiving and reading this pdf and I come across the following passage: Sooner or later, though, you will probably have be in a situation which causes you to use the Terminal directly, either to access commands that are not available through any GUI, or to get a job done more efficiently. Yes, you read that right! It...

eOS, despite having a nice interface, started to annoy me. Little things that I take for granted, like not seeing the progress of a downloading file (which admittedly might just be a midori thing and not eOS generally), not being able to plug in my scanner and have it work (even though it was detected and correctly identified by simplescan!) and not being able to pin custom app icons to the dock or app menu - even though I was getting my hands dirty making .desktop files in the command line and everything! The music player was doing my head in as well. Duplicate songs might have come from my rsync experiments, but they were a ball-ache to clear up. And I couldn't install Steam via the package manager either, I had to use the same debian script I used for #!. There was some other stuff as well, to do with the file manager. It was death by a thousand cuts really. I'm sure eOS will be really good in a couple of years, but for the time-being I think I need something more fully-...

Soooo... I guess I added her profile to the mitch group and vice versa so we can share the music folder BUT I didn't add the right argument ( -a , I think - look it up!) to the usermod command or whatever I used, so the upshot was that I made her group the ONLY group I was in. Effectively, I deleted myself from the sudoers group and all the other default admin and device groups and whatnot. Real pain, because once you're out, you've no way back in - like the opposite of the Mafia. Looking around there are various suggestions but I went for the simplest one (the one I could understand): Used the eOS usb as it was first to hand, to log into a live session. As noted my previous post , I mounted the root file system: > sudo mkdir hdd > mount /dev/sda /mnt/hdd > nano /mnt/hdd/etc/group then I just added my username to the appropriate groups: root:x:0:mitch and adm:x:4:mitch and sudo:x:27:mitch works!

None of this is particularly complicated, so I'll keep it brief: - changed camille to user group mitch:  useradd -G {group-name} username I think this is the command I used... - added piNAS to the file manager by adding the following to .gtk-bookmarks:  sftp://192.168.1.107/media/Seagate%20Expansion%20Drive Raspberry Pi - downloaded soulseek (I need to create a .desktop executable file to add this to application menu) - something else... what was it? I remember copypasting long statements into the command line... yikes [edit] ah yeah, it was sudo apt-add-repository ppa:versable/elementary-update to add the community repository, and then some themes and stuff.

Quick update on what I've done since my last post: I put Opensuse / and /home on two of the LVs I'd set aside. That was a big iso. 4.3G, so I had to use a DVD. It installed fine, was all very swish. Gnome felt very different from what I'm used to and didn't seem massively user friendly for her to use, so I tried KDE. Lots of bells and whistles there, but also not what I was looking for. Looked at Elementary OS again and still found it very attractive. Found a method by which (in theory) I should have been able to install to the remaining LVs on my hdd: log into a live session and install lvm2: sudo apt-get install lvm2 - this gave me some problems, weirdly, not finding it in the repos and requiring me to try a few times. I went through this process of trying to install to LVs a few times - on some it worked fine. Odd. Then vgchange -a y to "activate" the entries in the volume group and make them available to the kernel. Running the installer now lets...

In some respects I'm living in a brave new world of computing convenience these days. I have my external HDD sitting in the corner with the raspberry pi serving it's contents up to the tv, kindle and ipad. Photographs and music (which I never used to backup in any kind of coherent way), I now send to the HDD over scp by SSH or (latterly) ftp from the file manager. But I want more, dammit! I want the photos and music to be backed up automatically at regular intervals so all I have to do is plonk them in the right local directories and forget about them. I've been aware for a while that rsync might be the way to go about this. After reading about a bit, making sure rsysnc was present on the pi and laptop, etc: rsync -r --size-only /home/mitch/Music root@192.168.1.107:/media/Seagate\ Expansion\ Drive/Music And a similar experiment: rsync -r --size-only /home/mitch/images/photographs/copy_06_june_2014/ root@192.168.1.107:/media/Seagate\ Expansion\ Drive/Other\ files...

I've installed libcrypto.so.0.9.8, or the package that contains it, or whatever, I can't remember now it was last week for God's sake. Useful record, this, right? And I had a bit of a "breakthrough" in terms of starting to figure out what, roughly, I'm supposed to be doing. The package downloaded from http://suse.mes.edu.cu/SLES_11_SP2/CD2/suse/src/libfprint-0.0.6-18.20.1.src.rpm contains various files and I believe it's to one of these that the patch is supposed to be applied. (when I'm home I'll have a look and try to list which.)  I did the patch -p1 < libfprint..blah thing and got some of the patch elements to apply, but not all. Still not sure whether this is going to work with Wheezy of if it might only work with Sid.

Pretty sure I've done some more low-level tinkering that I've not recorded here, but I must've been pretty confident about it. Not so this, my first attempt to get the fingerprint scanner working. I've done a fair bit of reading rather than my usual trial-and-error cut'n'paste command line hackery and here's where I'm at: >sudo apt-get install fprint-demo gets me a way to test functionality before getting too deep into the suggestions here >lsusb shows me that the validity sensor is recognised, but I think I'm missing the drivers * which can be found here , but need converting from rpm to deb >sudo apt-get install alien >sudo alien Validity-Sensor-Setup-4.4-100.00.x86_64.rpm >sudo dpkg -i validity-sensor-setup_4.4-101_amd64.deb Guess I need to go for a reboot now before I can see if it works. ... Nope, still getting Status: No devices found. Could it be that I need the fprint libraries? > sudo apt-get inst...

The rigor of my change-logging has slipped a bit in the last 24 hours! I've copied my slim themes over from the Asus Arch install, and I've edited slim.conf to point at one of them (cb-distress) to give me my custom login screen, which works a treat. I had a bash at suppressing openbox's instruction to paint the back ground grey and then replace the nitrogen wallpaper like I did for Arch , but there's a different thing going on in #! where initrc kicks off a global xsession script, and I don't know how that works. I also couldn't get nitrogen to point to the slim theme - the %theme variable confuses the X session startup and it complains of being unable to find cb-distress session. Installed Soulseek and Skype both by downloading the deb packages and then GDebi. Easy.