and all you had to be was willing…

    "they told you your music, could reach millions."
  e ------------------------------------------------------
  b ------------------------------------------------------
  g ------------------------------------------------------
  d --3------7------10--------5------3-------3------------
  a --3------7------10--------5------3-------3------------
  e --1------5------8---------3------1----0--1------------
     (repeat)

  "I hope that you are happy, I hope at least youre having fun."
  -----------3-------------1--------------
  -----------3-------------1--------------
  -----------4-------------2--------------
  -----5-----5---------3---3--------------
  ----------------------------------------
  ----------------------------------------

  "everyone one is a fucking Napoleon"
  ------1------------1----------------3--------3------------
  ------1------------1----------------1--------1------------
  ------0------------0----------------2--------2------------
  ------------------------------------3--------3------------
  --0-------------------------------------------------------
  ---------------3----------------1---------1---------------

This looks so pretty simple. Then why the heck does my left hand wrist ache so bad? And I have only learned the first rhythm, that too half-baked, proof-of-concept types. This sucks! Why the fuck does the rhythm have to be such a rocker? Adios!!

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Everything Zen

So I finally installed this Zenwalk 2.8 desktop by replacing that Dapper Drake thingy in my spare partition. Installation went quick and easy, which was similar to a Slackware’s — only with lesser options. Likewise, it was all geeky command line shit. However, being an ubergeek myself, I didnt have a problem. Yep, I’m the kinda ubergeek you can actually trust. Like I downloaded the Gentoo CDs this one time, and after a week of going thru the online documentation still didn’t have a clue how the hell to get it to install. Henceforth I declared Gentoo is lame.

Now where was I? Yes, the installation took around 10-15 minutes — didn’t clock it, but it indeed was quick. And let’s see, this is a Celeron 850 Mhz box with only 128MB of RAM, so go figure — it’s ancient! Now lets see if Zenwalk and XFCE live up to their claims of being a responsive and usable desktop even on ancient hardware and all.

The default installation comes with only a few applications, but suffices a home user’s needs — hey, a lot more than a bare-bones Windoze gives us. Zenwalk also proves that something lightweight doesn’t have to be ugly. It’s actually quite sexy on the contrary. Also, the GNOME users would be more at home because of the similar file dialogs and GTK-based interface.

Hmm… What do I look for in a desktop again? An audio player (prefer an Amarok-like manager), a video player, an image viewer (which also does a bit of manipulation), a word processor, a pdf viewer, and all those Internet stuff — browser, BitTorrent, mail client, IM client, etc. Zenwalk fairs quite well in all of these categories. And even though it doesn’t provide all my favorite stuff, I certainly won’t drop dead or anything going with Zenwalk’s choices.

A surprise is it’s selection of GXine as the default audio-cum-video player. I would have preferred MPlayer, but GXine isn’t that bad at all. (Actually, I know shit about MPlayer as well. I just hear those not-so-ubergeek human beings out there in the wild think it’s quite rad — read who prefer not to use Amarok.) However, it doesn’t read the id3tags properly, except for when it does. Whether the proper library is missing, it doesn’t support the tags or it’s not configured properly, I can’t really tell, cuz never used GXine before.

Strangely, Zenwalk comes with win32 codecs out of the box. I tested some of these Creed wmv files and a couple of White Stripes real media (rm) files that I have and they all played to my satisfaction. Naturally, mp3 support is in-built as well. The css library for reading encrypted DVDs is missing, however. Though it didn’t have any problem playing Black Sabbath’s Last Supper, which somehow isn’t encrypted or somethin I guess, it started throwing all sorts of weirdo error messages when I tried out some of the other titles.

Anyway, sorry about all that fuss about the “sound and video” stuff. Well, simply put: A desktop without proper support for those is unusable for me. And don’t come lecture me about using oggs for both sound and video. I wouldn’t mind that in any way only if all those musicians out there started putting out stuff online in free formats.

So moving ahead with the rest of the stuff what did I find? Even though the version of XFCE desktop is 4.3.90.2 (or 4.4 beta1), it didn’t crash on me once. (Damn those people for faking stable stuff as beta to shun popularity.) It’s file manager, Thunar, is pretty cool too. I’ll also go as far as to say it’s interface, even though resembles GNOME’s Nautilus, makes better sense. I woulda put a screen shot here, but I couldn’t find an application for that. Go check ‘em out at their Web site or somethin will ya? Other applications I care about — like Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, AbiWord, pdf reader Evince and image viewer GQview — are the latest stable releases as of this release of Zenwalk. And those of you out there who care about stuff like The GIMP and Bluefish have nothing to worry about too.

So finally it was time for me to fire up that package manager tool. What the fuck is it called? Ah, did u know Zenwalk also has a pretty sexy guide available at their Web site? A quick glance through it revealed the package manager is called Netpkg. Aye, what the heck is wrong with it’s interface? (Read: It doesn’t resemble Synaptic at all. Bummer!!) Oh well, it’s alright and all, except for the packages are neither displayed group-wise nor in alphabetical order. Can we have something with a little more sex appeal in the near future? Only the developers could tell.

So I quickly checked BPM (Beep Media Player) and libdvdcss2. And boy was I surprised? This package tool is dead fast. Novell are u listening? Fix your software installers, will ya? So I was playing my music in BMP in no time at all, and I was rather happy. For all those XMMS fanboys, that’s also available. I chose BMP cuz that goes well with the overall GNOME (or in this case XFCE) interface — file dialogs, hello? Anyway, since I’ll try to go with Zenwalk’s one-application-per-task philosophy for a while, I closed the package manager quickly before the developers even noticed what I was up to.

That’s all for now I guess. Zenwalk and XFCE are just brilliant. Imagine a completely usable desktop taking only 1.3GB of hard drive space. On a related note, the packages are in tgz format. Anyone who cares to inform me whether it’s compatible with Slackware stuff will not be rewarded in any means. Adios!!

P.S. –> Everything Zen is a song by this band called Bush and is available in their live album Fucking Up.

Update: PDF viewer Evince crashes every time I try to select text. Note that Evince is not a part of XFCE, but GNOME. It works perfectly alright in my other GNOME installations. So I guess there’s some problem with Zenwalk here.

Disclaimer: Zenwalk is not in any way related to my friend JustZen, tho he might get a kick out of the name, especially when their Web site says: “Ever tried zen computing?” If you want clarifications about the zen philosophy, please go bug Zen. I’m only good with the madcap philosophy.

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Self Evident

so here’s a toast to all the folks who live in palestine
afghanistan
iraq
el salvador

here’s a toast to the folks living on the pine ridge reservation
under the stone cold gaze of mt. rushmore

here’s a toast to all those nurses and doctors
who daily provide women with a choice
who stand down a threat the size of oklahoma city
just to listen to a young woman’s voice

here’s a toast to all the folks on death row right now
awaiting the executioner’s guillotine
who are shackled there with dread and can only escape into their heads
to find peace in the form of a dream

cuz take away our playstations
and we are a third world nation
under the thumb of some blue blood royal son
who stole the oval office and that phony election
i mean
it don’t take a weatherman
to look around and see the weather
jeb said he’d deliver florida, folks
and boy did he ever

and we hold these truths to be self evident:
#1 george w. bush is not president
#2 america is not a true democracy
#3 the media is not fooling me
cuz i am a poem heeding hyper-distillation
i’ve got no room for a lie so verbose
i’m looking out over my whole human family
and i’m raising my glass in a toast

…excerpt from Self Evident, © 2001 ani difranco / righteous babe music. A commentry, a poetry, an aftermath of 9/11. Please have a listen/download here. And yes, Ani did it before any of those major-label artists had the guts to say anything, to the true tradition of indie artists. Following is somethin from an interview…

Q: You performed the song/poem “Self-Evident” as a work in progress for most of the last year, adding and changing lines and musical elements from night to night — you don’t often do that, do you?

AD: That was more of a public process than usual, because of my urgency to speak to the political climate around us all in those early days last fall. We went on tour in September, when everyone else was canceling tours, and there was a palpable energy everywhere I went, everyone thinking of the same thing, searching for alternative voices beyond the t.v. propaganda and the deflating messages from the powers that be. So I began speaking that poem before I’d memorized it, before I’d even finished writing it. I was reading onstage, which is something I almost never do, because I couldn’t travel around in this climate and work on it privately any longer. I felt that since this was something we were all working on together as a nation, I could be a little less introverted with my process. But it wasn’t until I performed it at Carnegie Hall last April that I felt it was finished. I don’t think I’ve ever had as clear a finishing moment for a song; there was something very ritualized for me about going back to New York, where I was on September 11, and bearing witness before … all of the other witnesses. It was one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever had on stage; I launched into it because there it was on my set list, and about 3 seconds in, panic just hit me, like how dare I? Who knows who these people in this audience are, what happened to them that day, or whom they lost? And sure enough, halfway through I could hear sobbing from the back of the upper balcony in that huge, glorious, cavernous, beautiful, silent room. The emotion that I asked us all to share was extremely cathartic and terrifying — and yet empowering. I felt that night like, okay, this is done now; I’ve brought it back to where it came from and I’ve offered it to the people that know, and I apologize for whatever I got wrong or whatever innumerable things I wasn’t able to bear witness to, but here’s my offering, and if they can accept it, then I think I’ll move on.

That’s Ani DiFranco for ya, a true musician and a songwriter. Adios!!

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Still fighting it…

Just how far are you willing to go to stand up for freedom? Is anyone else willing to take up the banner? Richard Stallman and others have devoted many years of their lives to freeing people technologically and culturally. Helios risked his life going to Washington. Why?

Freedom is just that important.

…writes D. C. Parris of Lxer.com. Yes our man Helios is not doing good at all. Wish he recovers as soon as possible. Thanks for all your efforts, and keep on fighting!

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Smack that bitch… up!

Goo Goo Dolls now playing on the Virgin UK radio. ‘Tis pretty cool! I’m using Rhythmbox on my newly installed Debian Sid. Guess I’m switching back to Debian and GNOME as my primary desktop for good after a year and a half of fiddling around with all sorts of operating systems. For a while I thought I might stick to SUSE/SLED, but it’s too fucking slow for my tastes.

Since long I’ve also lost my interest in Ubuntu — it’s too fucking popular, and I hate popular stuff. The version 6.06 LTS was a disaster to begin with. Also I hate what they do to KDE. Anyone who tries the Kubuntu default desktop will think KDE is so freaking deprived as a desktop. SUSE does an excellent job of integrating different KDE apps together — ’tis just perfect. But, wait! PCLinuxOS is even better! It’s just that the development is going rather slow because of some old dependency issues the devs may be facing with old libraries, especially the GCC. But I bet version 0.94 — the one to be rebuilt from scratch — will not just be awesome, but perfect.

Yesterday I installed a couple-of-months-old KANOTIX (RC2 I believe) I had and installed GNOME from there. It was easy cuz Debian has a GNOME meta package called gnome in the repository, which did the trick and saved a helluva lot of time selecting individual packages one by one. Just one request tho: I wish the Debian devs would get the Add Application package (courtesy Ubuntu) in the repos. It’s a great way to install and remove software quickly.

Anyway, I’m not that technically inclined. I was facing some issues with the display frame rates while playing videos. Thanks to beranger I was able to fix the issue. He took some time out of his schedule to reply to my emails. I also learned a new command called ‘dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg’ and that fixed those issues, once I knew what I was doing. I also removed all those extra diver packages — like ATI, synaptics touchpad, and stuff like that — that KANOTIX installed by default.

Adios!!

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Work Your Way Out…

This WordPress thingy as a host is feature rich and stuff except for one thing: I can’t manually edit the templates. Now, I know a lot of people don’t really care, but hey I want my page to strictly stay at 1024 for the width, that is no rearranging stuff to fit a different width. You have a small display, you better use the horizontal scroll in your browser — yeah like a lot of people read me, eh?

Now this template is an absolute rubbish-looking prick, but is the only one that at least lets me view the page properly in a maximized window, however, does rearrange things around when I don’t have it likewise — PRICK!! I also like filling in the side pane with junk stuff that I love to look at, say like my last.fm weekly chart. However, there is no way I can put it here in this WordPress. I mean I dig a lot of it’s features which were simply missing in blogger, or I never discovered ‘em, but the fact that it won’t let me manipulate my template is just plain pissing me off.

Anyway, I liked the way how it quickly imported all my previous posts from my blogger account, even the comments — yeah like a lot of people who read me leave a lot of comments. Anyway, an excellent service I’d say. Then it’d even let me post stuff under different categories. I’m sure there’re a few more things I liked, but I forgot cuz of my frustration with the template. WHY THE FUCK CAN’T I EDIT MY TEMPLATE??

WordPress is Free Software for crying out loud. Why the heck is it imposing restrictions on me like Microsoft? Why should I go get a host and then install WordPress there to get my way?

Oh well, whatever. Hey but I just realized this is my fouth Web log service since I started this blogging thingy in the Summer of 2003. I started with Rediff. Then I moved to blogdrive. Then I switched to another new blog in blogdrive cuz I got bored with the existing one. Then I shifted to blogspot. Then the day before yesterday I finally redid my blogger template to comply with the W3C standards of XHTML — well, as far as I kno. And then blogger was banned. Pretty neat!

I might go back to blogger tho if this unable-to-edit-template thingy keeps irritating me. I mean if I could only get to edit my templates I would have been perfectly happy here. Adios!!

Get in the Ring…

BJP president Rajnath Singh thinks he sounds so cool when he labels the ones behind the Mumbai blasts as Islamic terrorists and jihadis, hey doesn’t George W. also use something similar too often? Stuff like this just plain irritates me. Terrorists are terrorists, you just don’t have to label them with any particular religion bullshit. BJP is associated with things like Bajrang Dal for crying out loud. I could rather label that a Hindu terror outfit, but I wouldn’t cuz LeT and Bajrang Dal are both full of assholes. And thus anyone who’s associated with those is an asshole too.

So here’s what I have to say to LeT: Keep ur struggle for independence or whatever to yourself; and to Bajrang Dal and BJP: Keep your religious fundamentalism to yourself. I just don’t want to see a crazy man with a bomb on my way to anywhere, especially if I am at the receiving end. Maybe they should go buy a piece of land in Antarctica and take their differences there. Just don’t bother the rest of us with it. Or hey Russia could lease out parts of the deserted Siberia to anyone who wants to fight it out. Hey Mr. Putin, these guys are filthy rich, so go grab the opportunity to make those barren pieces of lands productive.

Bajrang Dal could easily borrow some cash from those filthy rich temple trusts. LeT maybe a bit poor, but hey ring up Osama and criticize the West a bit, and get the money to continue ur “struggle for independence” over there. Besides it’s also profitable, since you can sell exclusive TV rights for live broadcasts. That way the cash continues to flow in and helps sustain ur struggle for/against freedom/god (or whatever is the hip stuff to fight for in future). And if in the end you get bored of fighting, at least you’d have loads of money to amuse yourself with something else. Adios!!

Don’t Nobody Know…

I love discovering new stuff, I’m just pretty good at it. So today I discovered Oz guy Ben’s third blog. (Click on third blog, you retard!) It’s fucking hilarious cuz he’s so damn good. Here’s an excerpt…

On another subject, I always try to put at least a grain of truth in everything I write, so let me just add, for the record:

tits.

And they said geeks are boring, eeeehh!! On a related note, I used to think “stuff” as a word is used by people who have a fucking sucky vocab, like me. However, Oz guy Ben once said “stuff” is a pretty technical term. Well, I interpreted “technical” as “geek”. Gooddam! I didn’t kno I’m almost as geeky as those geeks who code. Pretty neat, eh? I knew it was a smart move when I ignored Iram’s suggestion to read books on better vocabulary. Besides, the book she lent me to read, which I never returned cuz I never read it, looks damn geeky on the book shelf too. Now you know how smart I really am and how I don’t really lie when I say I outsmart SMART. So Novell, you better listen to me when I complain. Adios!

R.I.P. Syd ‘Madcap’ Barrett

Syd Barrett, the former lead singer of Pink Floyd and one of the key figures of the 60s, has died at the Cambridgeshire home to which he retreated as a recluse more than 30 years ago. The Guardian has learned that the singer, 60, who suffered from a psychedelic-drug induced breakdown while at the peak of his career, died last Friday from cancer.

…reports The Guardian.

Nobody knows where you are,
How near or how far.
Shine on you crazy diamond.

Pile on many more layers
And I’ll be joining you there.
Shine on you crazy diamond.

And we’ll bask in the shadow
Of yesterday’s triumph,
And sail on the steel breeze.
Come on you boy child,
You winner and loser,
Come on you miner for truth and delusion, and shine!

Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk

At least 100 people are killed as seven bombs explode on the train network in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, police say.

…reports the BBC. You know what, I don’t really care about stuff like bombings and people dying when I get the feed from channels like CNN-IBN. Their Web site’s news report doesn’t read as bad as the channel reporting it live, but it reads poor none the less. But when we have a sissy government at the Center and a media that is more into advertising it’s channel on how it broke the story first, it kinda becomes funny. No offense to those who’re affected by this incident, but I was fed on the news by the wrong sources you may say, and I got disgusted before I could grasp the incident. Maybe, I’d have reacted in the right way if I were to pick up the stuff from the BBC. Well, I definitely would have picked up the stuff from beranger.org. I wish I did, then I wouldn’t have to deal with my insensitivity.

Meanwhile, does Materazzi know he reads rather funny when he says…

“I am ignorant, I don’t even know what an Islamic terrorist is; my only terrorist is her,” he said pointing to his 10-month-old daughter. “I did not bring up Zidane’s mother; for me a mother is sacred.”

We’ve to believe in stuff like he’s not aware of the term “Islamic terrorist”? Has he been living in Mars for the last five years? He wants us to believe that he’s also unaware of terms like “War on Terrorism”? Funny how Herman (Dutchonline) said it first, even before the match, that Footballers are not the smartest people. But they surely outta be kidding me if they think they can pretend to act dumb and fool us with their total-lack-of-knowledge-with-current-affairs crap.

On a completely unrelated note, the upgrade of SLED 10 using openSUSE repositories went alright. Just points to show how SLED and SUSE Linux are after all pretty compatible as my system is neither broken nor unstable after more than 24 hours. Good job Novell, I just became a fan. However, that doesn’t mean ya’ll can get away with the broken package managers. Fix it! It’s dead slow. Adios!!