linux Archives - Page 4 of 4 - Yet Another Linux Blog

The Palm Pre, Linux, and 4G

Whiz bang gadgets and myself are usually not uttered in the same sentence. I’m pretty basic. I like simple desktops like XFCE and Openbox…I like plain things. Give me bread, cheese and water and I’m a happy man. Give me wine and I’m your friend for life : I’ve tried to simplify in the past few years and my cell phone has always been the simplest of the simple regardless of my carrier.

When my family cell plan was set to expire this year, we had a little more excitement than we had in years past. Afterall, phones have become small computers that house cameras, mp3 players, and fully featured calendars and applications. I’ve been doing IT for over 10 years now and have never really worked hard at making text messaging part of my work day. When I started my new job last year, I was suprised to see that that they used a beeper system that utilized SMS technology for on call technicians. This meant that I could get texts when a system went down or when my expertise was needed at work. I needed a phone that allowed me to have more options than the old standard phones I usually picked up with the plan…plus, adding texting to my basic 2 year old plan was EXPENSIVE!

After research, I found that I would go with either an iPhone or the Palm Pre. I chose the Palm Pre for 3 reasons:

Sprint has the first operational 4G network currently which is 3 to 5 times faster than 3G (go live was May 25, 2009…announced in 2006)
Sprint has better overall 3G coverage than AT&T
Palm Pre is Linux

After making that decision and getting my Pre…I have to tell you that I’ve never been more happier with a phone or device. It’s a fantastic device and the app catalog hasn’t even had developer access to it yet! I’m really looking forward at seeing what people create when the SDK is opened up and the app catalog begins to fill up.

I’ve posted a few screenshots of my Pre below…just so you know what it looks like. I’ve posted the most important screenshot at the very bottom of the post…that’s right, Palm Pre works with a KDE4 test build of Unity Linux (duh, it is Linux). I have NO regrets in my choice of the Pre at all.

Do you have any questions about the phone and Linux? Want to see more? If so, please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments section.

Unity 3.7 Snapshot Preview Out

Gettinther announced that build 3.7…a developer environment snapshot intended as proof of concept…has been released. This is an unofficial release…It’s stable…but we consider it not even an alpha quality release…mainly because it is being used as a proof of concept to show the new technologies we’ve integrated. Gettinther wanted to have a bit larger test base for this release so he announced this in the forum only…but I figured that it would be nice to flash it to our Planet Unity readers.

The full announcement is in the forum here: http://forum.unity-linux.org/general-news-and-announcements/release-3-7-out

Gettinther advises, “It’s still rough around the corners so please excuse us for it. Also the shut down script in livecd mode generates errors. Those are not important and can be safely ignored.”

Please note that we have updated rpm to version 5, the package manager is now the Smart Package Manager as apt4rpm development has ceased, the livecd project has been updated quite a bit to conform to our updated toolchain as well, and detection has been pretty much rewritten to accommodate all the upgrades.

Also, remember that this is not a desktop…this is a core. Unity Linux strives to be a base for people to build from.

You may notice that TinyME influences are very pronounced in this release…this is because TinyME allows us to have a GUI with some of the least amount of requirements and dependencies. Developers needed a minimalistic GUI to test core components such as Smart and the updated Unity Control Center. Unity Linux core, on which derivative distributions (branches) will build, will be even smaller than the size of this ISO…as it will not have Xorg or a window environment.

Please report issues to the forum: http://forum.unity-linux.org/unity-linux-discussion/

Adding Color to Bash List Command

One of the things I love is being able to enter into a directory via terminal, list the contents, and quickly see which ones are executable or not and which ones are directories or are not directories IN COLOR (not everyone is perfect right?). This is specifically handy as I move through working with Slackware based distributions like the one I’m using now, Zenwalk Linux 6 and the /etc/rc.d/ directory. Most of the Red Hat based distributions out there that I’ve used have this set automatically…so I’m used to it. When I opened up a terminal in Zenwalk I found no color. A quick investigation of ~/.bashrc showed me that there are aliases set to display color…instead of ls I’d just use the letter L; 2 l’s for another option, 3 for another. It’s interesting, but not normally how I do business. See bashrc below:

devnet[~]$ cat ~/.bashrc
alias lll="ls -al --color"
alias ll="ls -l --color"
alias l='ls --color'<br />alias search='find . -name'
alias aterm="aterm -fg white -tr"
alias version='cat /etc/zenwalk-version'
alias dh='df -h'<br />export PS1='\u[\W]\$ '
export PAGER="most"<br />devnet[~]$

I don’t use those aliases much…others of you might do the ‘ll’ or ‘lll’ but it’s just not part of my routine. So, I added in just after line 4 in the code above:

alias ls='ls --color'

You can do this a few different ways…with any command line editor like emacs, vi, or nano/pico. It’s really up to you. The easiest way for new users is to use a text editor:

devnet[~]$ mousepad ~/.bashrc

This will launch the mousepad text editor in XFCE. If you’re in Gnome, try gedit. If KDE, give kwrite a try. You should see something like the following window pop up for editing:

You should see in the picture above, I’ve added in the alias needed to make me comfortable. After that, File >> Save. You’re set! Except, you may notice that when you type the command ‘ls’ there are no colors. So what gives? Well, we haven’t loaded our ./bashrc since we changed it. You don’t have to logout and back in to get things to work though…you can do this right from the terminal:

devnet[~]$ exec bash

Now try giving the ‘ls’ command a try again and you should see that it is in color. I know a lot of the more advanced Linux guys out there are probably saying, “why’d he waste a post on this! It’s easy” and you’d be right for a majority of users out there…I hope that this post finds some new user out there that may be stuck for an answer on how to do this. One final note on this as well: You will have to do this as the root user and change /root/.bashrc in order for your root user to also have color. Thanks for reading!