Dear Lazyweb: Best Dual-DVI Video Card

What’s the best video card for running X.org with two DVI-connected monitors?

My workstation is a Dell Precision Workstation 470 with the stock nVidia Quadro and two Dell 1905 FP connected via DVI.  I’m running Fedora 11 with the nouveau driver and I’m really happy with it.  But I can’t escape this feeling that I could be getting a better experience with a newer video card.  I think I want an ATI Radeon card, but the last graphics card I purchased was an nVidia TNT2.

Recommendations?

Using Ubiquity to read Planet Fedora

I just realized today how useful Ubiquity can be while reading all those non-native language blog entries on Planet Fedora.  By just highlighting the text and entering the translate command, I can now read most entries.

git doesn’t really take up 100MB

Valent’s post on finding the largest installed rpms sparked my interest.  I’m almost obsessive about reducing my set of installed packages.  But when I saw this output, I was a bit shocked.

  87599107-java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0
  97552966-glibc-common-2.10.1
 100008386-git-1.6.2.5
 106080469-java-1.6.0-sun-1.6.0.11
 112425640-texlive-texmf-fonts-2007
 227731461-openoffice.org-core-3.1.0

While I’m not surprised the openoffice.org and java take up huge amounts of disk space, I was amazed that git does.  After all, most of git is hard linked to /usr/bin/git.  I whipped up a quick awk script to add based on unique inodes.

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN { s = 0; lasti = 0 }
{ if ( lasti != $1 ) { s += $6; lasti = $1 } }
END { print s }

Then ran it on git like so:

[nstraz@tin ~]$ rpm -ql git | xargs ls -lid | sort -n | ./countsize.awk
15956998

Roughly 16MB vs 100MB.  That makes more sense.

gxpp 1.1 released

Since I’m doing released for my other tools I figured it would be a good idea to merge the Makefile and spec changes to gxpp and cut a release too.  You should be able to build an rpm directly from the tarball.

Gxpp is a grep-like utility for XML documents.  It uses XPath expressions instead of regular expressions to query sections of XML documents.  It provides most of the standard grep command line options.

gxpp-1.1.tar.bz2

qarsh 1.24 released

Qarsh is a remote shell for testing environments.

qarsh-1.24.tar.bz2

This release includes several bug fixes.

• Fix a hard to hit hang after a command completes
• Add proper return codes to btimec
• Extend the amount of time btime waits for a response
• Force IPv4 on btimed
• Fix segfaults in qacp

collie 0.14 released

I just pushed collie-0.14 out the door.  This release fixes a really bad bug and introduces a very powerful feature.  The bug would cause collie to suck up CPU while waiting for tests to complete.  That was fixed and collie should now sleep like a baby until your tests complete.

The new feature is the ability to set environment variables in herds.  There’s a new How-To describing how to use this feature. In combination with XIncludes, you can reduce the size of those really repetitive herd files.

A Better Image Viewer?

Dear Lazyweb,

I’m looking for a better image viewer. For years I’ve been using qiv because it load images really fast and it’s not a memory hog. Unfortunately it doesn’t work well with dual screens. The images tend to span both monitors and I really can’t pan the image around well.

What I want is something that understands XRandR so images only display on one screen. I would like a full screen mode where I can easily zoom in and pan the image. I want to be able to launch it from the command line. Extras like exif parsing and a thumbnail browser would be really nice.

Back to IceWM

After a few weeks of trying out Fluxbox on a new Fedora 10 desktop, I’m going back to my long time favorite, IceWM.  I guess I’m just too stuck in my ways to change at this point.

What brought me back to IceWM?

• The command line in the taskbar.  Having it built into the window manager really does make a difference.  Even though I was able to bind CTRL+ALT+SPACE to launch fbrun, it couldn’t launch fast enough.  Often I would start typing before the little window came up and I’d lose a few characters to the last app in focus.  I also miss being able to hit CTRL+ENTER to get the command in a terminal.  I do that often to get the python calculator.  It’s an easy patch, I know.
• All the built-in keyboard bindings for moving around windows.  I really like being able to quickly move between workspaces, dragging windows along with me.  I also like being able to position windows with the keyboard.  In IceWM you can hit Meta4+NumPad to place the window in that section of the screen.  Add shift to the combination to move it in that direction until it hits something.
• I also missed the built-in CPU and Network monitors in the IceWM taskbar.  I like to know when my network or CPU usage spikes.  I probably could have found a monitor to put in the slit, but I don’t really like the idea of the slit.  I never was a WindowMaker fan.
• If you grab the edge of a window in Fluxbox you start to resize the window.  This drove me nuts when I had Firefox all the way on the right, I would reach for its scrollbar and get the window edge instead.  The theme I was using didn’t even have size borders!  I couldn’t find any way to turn that off.

I did like a few things about Fluxbox.

• I liked the sleek look of the toolbar.  I just wish I could have stuck a few more things into it like CPU and Network graphs or a command line.
• It worked well with a dual-head setup.  IceWM 1.3.x has better support, but the taskbar still doesn’t span both monitors.  That bugs me a bit.
• You could set the width of items in the taskbar to a fixed width which made it look really clean.  You could also include only minimized tasks in the taskbar which seemed like a good idea at first.  Then I realized that I’d lose track of windows once they get burried.
• I really liked being able to switch workspaces by using the scroll wheel on the desktop or toolbar.  I’m still trying to do that in IceWM and it’s not working.

I have been wanting to try out Awesome, but I don’t think Awesome 3 is going to make Fedora for a while.  It’s waiting on XCB support to be includes in the Cairo packages.

Bugzilla cc: Preference

Here’s a tip for Bugzilla users. Have you ever added a comment to a bug or changed something about it and it sneakily added you to the cc: list? Doesn’t that drive you nuts when you’re already cc’ed on the bug through a list subscribed to the bug, or, even worse, you filed the bug. There’s a option under preferences, Automatically add me to the CC list of bugs I change with settings Always, Never, and Only if I have no role on them. Set this to Never so you have to explicitly set this to be included on the bug.

Linux Distro Meme

I don’t want to start responding to all the memes, but this one seems like a way to introduce yourself.

1) Which was your Linux distribution story?

I started using Linux on and off when you had to download Slackware on floppy disk sets. I installed it onto a UMSDOS partition and bought a book on UNIX. That was back in high school, pre-1996. During a summer job one of the techs was using “make menuconfig” to compile a kernel and said it was “Red Hat” so I used that when I started college and was still dual-booting between Win95 and Linux. A few years later I learned about the marvel of Debian and apt-get and switched. I was a strong Debian user for years until I joined Red Hat. Now RHEL5 is my desktop distro. I have it customized with IceWM, mrxvt, and custom builds of xchat and vim. I still have a Debian server running which I never intend to reinstall, just upgrade along the Debian lines. I’m trying to configure a Fedora 10 distro the way I like it so I can build some apps from trunk. I need a replacement for mrxvt, something light and includes a broadcast feature.

2) What is your preferred $your_distribution version?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, until I can recreate my environment on Fedora 10.

3) Write a short story (more like an anecdote) about your past distribution.

As a testament to Linux, I upgraded the hardware on my Debian server from a 233MHz Pentium MMX to a 2.5GHz Celeron without having to reinstall anything. Just a new kernel, a few changes for the IDE to SATA transition and it booted. Total down time, three hours.