How do you do that? The simplest method is to watch the log files. When you plug in a USB the device, your system should make a note of it in /var/log/messages. So you should do the following:

tail -f /var/log/messages

In case you didn’t know, the tail command prints out the last few lines of a text file, and the -f argument basically means “follow”. So tail will basically pring any new lines that are appended into the console in real time. Once you issue this command, just plug in your device. Your output should look something like this:

Dec  1 12:56:44 malekith kernel: [13631.153753] usb 2-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4
Dec  1 12:56:44 malekith kernel: [13631.288125] usb 2-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Dec  1 12:56:44 malekith kernel: [13631.288669] scsi5 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Dec  1 12:56:49 malekith kernel: [13636.295004] scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Kingston DT 101 II        1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
Dec  1 12:56:49 malekith kernel: [13636.295900] sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
Dec  1 12:56:49 malekith kernel: [13636.306962] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] 7831552 512-byte logical blocks: (4.00 GB/3.73 GiB)
Dec  1 12:56:49 malekith kernel: [13636.308590] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
Dec  1 12:56:51 malekith kernel: [13636.315523]  sdc: sdc1
Dec  1 12:56:51 malekith kernel: [13637.905840] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk

Check out the second to last line – it says sdc1. What does that mean? That means that my b0rken thumb drive is assigned to the /dev/sdc1 device. Now that I know that I can easily run fdsk on the device to format it and rebuild the partition table that was messed up by a botched dd command.

It’s that easy. I’m putting it here for future reference more than anything else.

The result is that unless you have a bleeding edge hardware, your new OS is likely to run anywhere between slow and sluggish. Add an array of resident tools such as Anti Virus suite, print monitors, media programs that launch on start up, preloaders of various applications, IM suites and you have a machine that is moving in slow motion from the day one. Any new resident programs and (God forbid) inevitable malware infections will bring the machine to a grinding halt. If not today, then tomorrow when new releases of software will assume hardware moved to the next performance bracket as predicted by Moore’s law.

If you have ever worked in IT you know that the #1 user complaint you will hear on a daily basis is “my computer is slow”. Actually, you don’t even have to work in IT to know that. All you need is to work in any field where you need some technical knowledge. Or hell, if you ever reveal any kind of computer know-how to your friends and relatives you will likely be overrun with questions on how to make windows faster.

Slow performance is such a pervasive issue that even malware makers are using a promise of fixing it as a bait. If I had a penny for every time I’ve seen someone download a “registry cleaner”, “system speedup toolkit” or other “turbo booster” software which was really a trojan, I would be a rich man. People fall for this trick all the time, because they get desperate. They buy a computer which runs fine for 6 months to a year, and then starts becoming more and more sluggish. No matter what they do, they can’t return it to the original performance. Why?

Well, it’s a difficult question. The performance degradation has many possible causes:

1. Malware
2. Resident programs running at start up
3. Unnecessary services running in the background
4. 3rd party software modifying the OS functions ways that degrade performance (a/v suites are big offenders here)
5. Disk fragmentation
6. OS updates that increase memory footprint and CPU load
7. Other software updates that increase memory footprint of running services
8. Gremlins maliciously flipping bits in the memory for LULZ
9. Bit bucket becoming full and overflowing
10. Machine spirits nesting in the hardware

That last one is something I keep warning people about. If you keep personifying your computer, it will eventually cause a machine spirit to coalesce inside of your computer case. These spirits are not really autonomous beings – they are more like an empathic echo. They acquire all the personality traits which the user commonly ascribes to the machine. So if you keep saying something like “this computer hates me” or “I hate this computer” the machine spirit will really hate you, or assume you hate it and will work against you. A machine that is loved, and pampered may behave much better – but it can become moody, and downright malicious when it starts suspecting that the user is planing to replace it. Even if your machine spirit is benign most of the time, it still needs to steal some CPU cycles and some memory to store it’s personality and cognitive processes. The older the machine spirit, the more resources it requires. The only way to get rid of a machine spirit is to stop feeding it. When you think of your machine as an inanimate electronic box, or better yet – a tool, or extension of yourself the spirit will eventually cease to exist.

All joking aside, part of the performance degradation issue lies in the simple fact that most our operating systems are bloated to begin with. So even if you take a slow machine, wipe it clean and reinstall the OS it will still be slow. By the time you install all the current patches, all upgrades and equip it with the latest a/v suite you will be almost back to where you started minus the malware. But the user will install that back as soon as he gets the machine back. This happens because new applications and the OS updates are tailored at current hardware, whereas most users will be running them on a machine that is one or two Moore’s law iterations behind (if not more). Not only that, but our perception of what is fast changes quite significantly over the years. Your machine might have seemed fast 4 years ago, but that’s because it was on the cutting edge back then. Now the cutting edge has moved.

The more complex and feature full the operating systems get, the more prone they become to general crufting. For years now I have been dreaming about a lean, stripped down mainstream OS that would be available to general public, and could be installed on slightly older hardware. I mean, yes – you can do this with a stripped down Linux distro. For example I heard good things about Arch, and Crux. But these are more of a fringe systems that are targeted at enthusiasts. Not necessarily something you install on your neighbors machine when he cries about performance issues. Besides, if you try hard enough you can make those systems bloated as well.

Microsoft has it’s Windows Fundamentals thing, which is a stripped down XP. Still, it can only be obtained via Volume Licensing which means it is clearly not targeted at the home market. Also, Fundamentals seems a bit like an afterthought – it’s not a flagship product and gets limited amount of attention.

What we really need is a modern OS designed from ground up to be lean, mean and optimized for performance. I mean something built for speed and usability – not retrofitted for it by stripping off useful features and degrading user experience. The most user friendly Linux distributions are usually tailored towards feature bloat. Can Google Chrome break that trend?

Google certainly has the clout to market this OS to the masses, and brand recognition that won’t make people run for the hills. It’s still Linux, but people won’t know about it, and therefore won’t be scared of trying it. Could chrome be the first user friendly, mainstream Linux distro tailored towards non-geeks using legacy hardware?

It’s certainly interesting. I’m anxiously awaiting the release of the OS to see if it will follow the same high quality design as most other Google products. I’m also very curious as to how it will be received by mainstream, non-technical population.

The upgrade went smoothly up until I rebooted the machine and noticed that I’m running 800×600 and my dual head setup was broken. This was very noticeable on a 23 inch monitor, and running the new KDE version which super-large windows decorations. So I decided to fix it.

So I did the exact same thing that worked for me last time. I pulled up the KDE Hardware app and told it to activate proprietary nVidia driver. It didn’t work. I tried couple more times, and then restarted the machine thinking that maybe the damn thing is just not registering the change. That’s how I hosed my X. Kubuntu came back in text only mode and I had to hack the xorg.conf and switch it back to the generic driver.

After this I tried following some online troubleshooting steps trying to install, re-install the drivers, hack the xorg.conf and each thing I did made my system more broken than it was. Eventually I managed to delete my .kde folder with several moths of emails (ie. my last backup was few months ago, and I have no one to blame for this but my own stupidity).

To make a long story short, half the solutions posted in the Ubuntu forums are total crap. It became painfully obvious that my problem ran much deeper. Reinstalling the drivers and re-creating the x config just wouldn’t cut it.

For reference my machine is a Latitude D820 with nVidia Quadro NVS 140m board. I was starting to think that there is just no working driver for this card that is compatible with the 2.6.31-14-generic kernel. Finally, after several hours I found the solution.

Alexander V. Røyne-Helgesen deserves one free internet for figuring this out. His fix is the only thing that worked for me. In case you are to lazy to click on the link, here is the solution:

First, open up your /etc/modprobe.d/lrm-video file and comment out every single entry that references nvidia. Your file should look something like this:

 # Make nvidia/nvidia_legacy and fglrx use /sbin/lrm-video to load  
install fglrx /sbin/lrm-video fglrx $CMDLINE_OPTS  
#install nvidia /sbin/lrm-video nvidia $CMDLINE_OPTS  
#install nvidia_legacy /sbin/lrm-video nvidia_legacy $CMDLINE_OPTS  
#install nvidia_new /sbin/lrm-video nvidia_new $CMDLINE_OPTS'

Once this is done, go to your /etc/modules file and add this at the end:

nvidia

Finally, go to your xorg.conf, find the entry that describes your video card and change the driver to nvidia. It should look something like this:

Section "Device"
   Identifier      "NVIDIA Corporation NV40m [Quadro NVS 140m]"
   Driver          "nvidia"
   # more lines here...

Now restart thy X server and… Boom! Back in business.

I should probably mention that I uninstalled and reinstalled the nVidia drivers about 10 times during the whole ordeal. I used various sources. The last thing I tried was the EnvyNG script (the package name is envyng – it’s in the repos). So I can confirm that this method above works with Quadro NVS 140m with a driver installed by EnvyNG. May not work after a straight upgrade.

Did I mention that the upgrade also broke my VirtualBox installation? Yeah, it did, but that’s a topic for a whole other post. Needless to say, I am never doing this sort of thing again on a weekday.

Oops… That CD drive was sort of there for a reason. He realized that after it was too late to do anything. So now he basically wanted to know if it’s possible to install XP from a USB thumb drive. Can it be done? Apparently, yes it can. All you need to do, is google for it.

But at the time we were having this conversation I gave him a benefit of the doubt and assumed he already did search it online, and came up empty. And since I didn’t know the solution of the top of my head, I got a crazy idea.

“Why don’t you just keep Ubuntu?” I asked him.

I mean, it’s a Dell Mini with a 16GB solid state drive and a tiny ass screen – he is definitely not going to use that machine for gaming, photoshop or other Windows centric stuff like that. The machine will likely be used as a hardware extension of a web browser. The OS is mostly an overhead on a machine like that.

Now, I’m not a linux evangelist. I don’t go around telling people to switch to Linux. I honestly can’t do that anymore because I know that my experience with the OS is irrelevant. I am a computer geek a software developer and linux enthusiast. This makes so far removed from the general population, that I can hardly relate to your average Windows user.

Nevertheless I did my best to give him a quick pitch on how the OS will be mostly irrelevant on that machine. And it will run most of his favorite apps – like firefox for example.

“Will it run Chrome?” he demanded.

Of course it will run chrome. Then again last time I used Linux version of Chrome Flash didn’t work yet, but they fucking update it daily. I quickly launched my copy of the browser to check, and lo – it was running flash quite flawlessly now.

My friend was not fully convinced yet. He started asking me about opening Word documents so I pulled up Open Office and illustrated how it works. Then I quickly downloaded and burned him a copy of the Gnome based Jaunty to show him what the OS that ships with his Mini will look like (I’m running Kubuntu on my laptop, and it looks quite different).

I booted it on his laptop, and he was blown away when he realized you can actually run a fully functional OS from the CD like that.

“But how can it do that?”

Well, because it’s really not that impressive. I mean, it doesn’t really matter whether your OS binaries are on the HD or on some other media. You have to load them into memory before they get executed anyway – so where they are originally is irrelevant. There is really no reason why Windows couldn’t have a Live CD version. In fact, you can easily make one with BartPE.

He was also enamored with virtual desktops. “It’s like tabs for your desktop” he said. I never thought about them like that, but yes – that’s a valid analogy. That’s technically how these things work.

He was also amazed on how many “features” were included in the OS itself. I had to explain that most of the applications he saw there were really stand alone open source projects – but by virtue of being free software they could be included in the free OS.

To make this long story short, my friend decided to keep Ubuntu on that machine – at least for now. In fact, he said he might replace it with the Notebook Remix version he found online so he can be running Jaunty (the Dell ships with Intrepid if I’m not mistaken). I told him that if he tries Ubuntu can’t deal with it, I’ll be happy to help him with the XP installation hack. He nodded, but I’ve seen that gleam in his eye that told me it won’t be needed. I think our little community might have a brand new member.

Now, I’m fairly sure my friend will continue using Windows. I didn’t “convert” him and made him into an exclusive Linux user. But he will give Ubuntu a try, and hopefully will like it becoming an OS agnostic nut bag like me. And that’s more than I could ever ask for.

We really don’t need to convert people, or try to ween them off of Windows. All we need to do is to show them the alternatives and find places in which they work well – like mini notebooks for example. This will have far reaching effects. For one, they will no longer automatically assume that OS == Windows. They will see that there are different operating systems that can be used for different purposes. Secondly, they will be now able to call MS on their bullshit as they will see that things can be done differently in the open source world. Thirdly… Well, they will be using linux. The more of us are there, the better. I don’t care if he still uses Windows on the other machine – he still counts as one of us.

Besides, most of the time when I need to use a computer one is readily available for me. For example, when I’m at school I have a PC on the desk in the adjunct office. And since I tend to keep most of my school related files synced with Dropbox they are available to me via the web interface. That said, it is nice to work in a familiar environment using the software you like without worrying about key loggers that other adjuncts doubtlessly installed on the shared office computer. Yeah, I do usually carry a Knoppix CD in my book bag but that doesn’t really cut it. What I’d really like is my own comfy, lived-in environment – not a pristine Live CD boot. You know what I mean?

So lately I decided to do something new. Believe it or not, but in all my years with Linux I have never created a bootable USB type thing. I used countless live CD’s in the past, but it actually never occurred to me to try something more persistent. So I dug out my old 2GB stick and installed Slax.

Why Slax you ask? Oh, I don’t know. It’s small, clean, easy to use and actually designed to work off a USB drive. It’s a minimalistic OS and yet it runs a lightweight version of KDE making me feel like home. I have tried many different desktop environments but KDE was always the one that just felt right. So I’m naturally inclined towards systems that use it.

Not to mention that the installation itself is almost laughably easy. You download a tarball, extract it to your USB stick and then just run an included shell script to overwrite the devices MBR. It literally takes 5 minutes, including the download time (well, depends on your bandwidth, but you know what I mean).

The USB version of Slax is persistent – it will actually write changes to the disk, and allow you to set up your environment the way you like it and keep it that way. If you mess up, you can even reset it to a default state at boot time. It boots around 10 times faster than a Live CD and is quite responsive.

I particularly like how Slax resolved the whole package management conundrum. For example, you can “temporarily” install software with one click of a button. You just go here find your module and click “Activate”. This will download an install the package, but only for the duration of the current session. Once you reboot the package will be gone. Of course you can download the package and permanently install it as well – it’s just that the temporary option is kinda neat.

Of course, it is mostly a toy operating system. I wouldn’t recommend using it for mission critical stuff. I wouldn’t make it your primary OS. But if you want to carry your own customized environment and software in your pocket, it is perfect. Just plug it in, boot the machine and enjoy. I highly recommend setting one up for yourself if you know you will need to use some public/shared machine somewhere. Naturally competent admins of shared machines will probably disable all the bootable devices other than the HD and password protect the BIOS. Thankfully, competent admins are quite rare.

So yeah. Give it a whirl if you are in the market for USB based distribution.

That’s ok though. What do we have ssh for? Am I right guys? Let me just whip out a nice little tunnel that will bounce my IMAP traffic off the home server and I will be back in busine… Oh. Right. Port 22 is also closed. Granted, there is not much use for that port at a location that is running nothing but Windows both on the desktop and the server side. Leaving it open would probably drive the anal retentive admin insane with doubt, and uncertainty. I was foolish for thinking it could be that easy.

Of course I’m not a person who takes closing port 22 lightly. In fact I’m quite attached to that port, and not being able to used it makes me cranky. So I decided to figure out a way to bypass this firewall silliness and share the solution with you.

Lets sum up what we know about this network. It’s locked down pretty tight, but the two ports they can’t lock are 80 and 443. I mean, they could and then force you to use a proxy server but they didn’t. So we have our window – we can send packets out of the network on one or both of these ports unrestricted. Now we just have to jerry-rig something to allow us to redirect ssh to one of those ports. To do that, you will need two things:

1. A corcscrew
2. A HTTP proxy with SSL support

I’m running ubuntu, so installing corkscrew was easy:

sudo aptitude install corkscrew

Alternatively you can just download it from the homepage (linked above) and compile it yourself. This tool will allow you to proxy your ssh traffic (or any traffic really) over a HTTP proxy. The problem of course is finding a proxy that will work. I recommend not even bothering with basic HTTP proxies. Corkscrew uses the CONNECT command that is usually disabled on most servers. Look for SSL enabled proxies instead since they will usually leave that feature on by default since the SSL protocol itself uses it. This narrows down your search a little bit.

You can test prospective proxies like this:

corkscrew prospective.proxy.server 80 your.ssh.server 22

If the CONNECT command is disabled you will usually get an error message, at this point or the connection will simply time out. If the proxy does relay ssh data you will get some feedback. For example, I saw this SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_5.1p1. Once you have a working proxy, add the following lines to your ~/.ssh/config file:

Host your.ssh.server
	ProxyCommad corkscrew working.proxy.server 80 %h %

This tells your ssh to route any connection to your.ssh.server via the working.proxy.server on port 80, bypassing the draconian firewall. From now on, you can simply log in like this:

ssh your.ssh.server

No other setup is necessary. This should also work for tunnels, scp and anything else you can think of. Of course the connection will be slower, and you are routing your traffic through an unknown machine (unless you actually own the proxy) which is obviously a security issue. Still, if you are stuck and you need to ssh somewhere and the syadmin is either a BOFH or simply MIA, this trick will work.

Rather than skipping a day, I decided to post a last minute silly Friday poll:

Wwhat is your favorite unix directory and why?

Me? Obviously I like /home cause that’s where I keep all my “stuff”, but that’s an obvious choice. To tell you the truth I was always drawn to and strangely fascinated by the pseudo devices such as /dev/random and /dev/null. The former is basically an entropy device producing endless, pseudo-random output. The later is a black hole which swallows all the input and never becomes full no matter how much you write to it. They are interesting on a philosophical level because of the two primal concepts they represent – chaos and oblivion.

The other pseudo devices like /dev/full and /dev/zero are not as interesting so I didn’t even include them on the list. Feel free to add them though. As usual, be nice and don’t abuse the write in option. Not that you guys usually abuse it. Surprisingly enough, this blog is one of the few places on the interwebs where the Norris Rule only applies to like half of the polls. I’m just saying that I will go in and delete inappropriate entries if needed.

Anyways, pick the directory in the poll and tell me why you like it in the comments. Being windows user is not an excuse for not participating. You can use windows if you like it – I don’t care. But you should be at least a little bit familiar with unix and linux – os agnosticism is good for you.

The damn thing simply stopped charging one day. Either the AC adapter gave way or the internal power supply went to the big data center in the sky. Either way, the battery juice ran out and the laptop is now just a paperweight. I could buy a new power supply, but frankly, I don’t think it’s worth it. The machine was ancient and in a less than perfect condition (cracks, scratches, dead pixels, etc…). There is just no point in investing any money into it.

The good news is that I found an even older, and slower computer to replace it – a Texas Instruments Extensa Scholar ESS2:

Next to this baby, the Compaq looks like a speed demon. The Extensa is equipped with 133 MHz CPU, sports a whopping 16 MB RAM and has an impressive 1.3 GB hard drive. This thing is ancient beyond words! It is also in much worse condition than the Compaq. Both batteries on this system are dead. The main battery is the size of a a small club, and I’m pretty sure it could be used as a deadly bashing weapon in a pinch. But I’m not worried about that – I can just keep it plugged into AC at all times. What is worse is that the CMOS battery is fried as well. This means I can’t change any BIOS settings such as, for example, the boot order. Or rather, I can change them but they don’t stick.

This effectively means I can’t boot the machine from a CD to install linux. Fortunately the laptop came with an external floppy disk that is the first boot device. So I could use a floppy boot loader of some sort that would punt me off to the CD drive and allow for CD based installation. Slackware ships with the right tool for this. It’s called sbootmgr.dsk. Just create a bootable floppy with that image with RAWRITE, pop it into the drive and you will be presented with a nifty boot menu. The only problem is that I no longer own a computer with an operational floppy drive. The Compaq had one, but it is dead. I actually had to locate an old computer at work, and create this boot disk there.

The question now, is what to do with this machine? I want to install linux on it, but I’m not sure if Ubuntu will actually run on this thing. Any recommendations for super-light linux distros that would be good for this machine? I will probably run it X-less, or with a very light window manager such as ratpoison.

Here are few caveats:

1. The laptop does not have any USB ports
2. It has no network card of any kind
3. It does have a PCIMCIA, but…
4. I do not have any PCIMCIA ethernet cards at home
5. I only have the Linksys WPC54G ver 1.2 Wifi card
6. My Wifi is WPA encrypted

No matter which distro I choose, I will need to figure out how to get that damn Linksys card working. Some distros make it easier than others. I believe newer releases of Ubuntu might actually support it out of the box. In the past however I always had to use nidswrapper for it.

Perhaps I should get myself one of those more widely supported wifi cards for my experiments with these ancient machines. Anyway, what OS would you put on it given the above parameters. Keep in mind that the machine only has 16MB of RAM and 1 GB of HD to work with.

Ladies, and gentlemen, I submit this as a proof that using more than one operating system on a regular basis is good for you. In fact, quite a few students in my two classes were Mac users. I know because several of them brought their laptops to school and wanted to use it for a presentation and couldn’t because the projector in the classroom had only a standard VGA cable. None of them thought to bring the mini-DVI to VGA extension – they probably never even bought one. Still, I have noticed that those students were the ones who rarely asked the questions of the type “how do I do X”. They were the ones able to work with the lab handouts and locate desired functionality by looking on the screen shots. These students were inherently more adaptable (at least to some degree) because they have been exposed to more than one way of doing things.

Your work-flow on a mac is slightly different from the work-flow on the PC. Asa result, any new Mac user is forced to go through the adjustment period when they figure out how to do task A, B or C on their new system. They learn how to explore and familiarize themselves with a new system. They are aware that different systems accomplish different tasks in their own unique way. They learn distinction between basic concepts and their implementation. Next time they are exposed to an unfamiliar interface, they are better prepared to deal with it.

The non technical folks who live firmly entrenched in Microsoft’s monoculture often memorize common tasks by rote. They remember which menu option, and which buttons to click but do not try to understand why. These are the people who like to take notes when you tell them how to do something. They go, “hold on, hold on, I go to Tools, then Pro-per-ties and then click on Add Vance… Oh, it’s Advanced… What’s next?”

Sometimes there are many ways to accomplish a task. For example, copying and pasting. In most applications you can do it using the context menu, the Edit menu or the keyboard shortcuts. Some people will learn just one of these methods, and be at a complete loss when it is unavailable. Whenever you change the interface, they are lost and must slowly learn to use the software almost from scratch.

Of course, there is nothing stopping someone from learning how to use a Mac this way – memorization, note taking and rote drills. It is not uncommon. But the very process of “switching” tends to do something to people. When the switch is done out of ones own free will, it tends to trigger a sudden realization in most people. The Apple software does almost everything that the PC software used to do, just differently. There are different ways to accomplish different tasks. They unknowingly take the huge cognitive leap that allows them to understand machines better. This is why so many non-geeks love their macs so much, and keep telling everyone how easy their OS is to learn. It is not because of the design on OSX (although it may be part of it). It’s because the process of switching the OS opened up their minds, and expanded their awareness. It is easy for them, because they have learned how to learn new OS’s.

A lot of people hate Apple, and the culture that surrounds it. I don’t. I am thankful that we have this system which to me is a small beacon of hope. Unlike Linux, Mac OS seems to be attractive, and accessible to the mainstream public. And because it teaches people that you can actually switch operating systems it does open up new unexplored avenues for linux adoption. Think about it – a person who can use both OSX and Windows with a relative ease, is likely to be open to yet another alternative operating system. OSX can be the gateway drug that may lead some to Linux. Not everyone, but some. And even if it doesn’t, it shows them that there exists a world outside the Microsoft. It challenges the MS monopoly – and that is a good thing.

It turns out I was right. I did write about it last year. Thank you Google! You are by best friend, and nowadays that I actually figured out the site map thing (and by that I mean I found a plugin that will generate them for me) and I’m all indexed up you often work better than the shitty Wordpress search. You know what I’m talking about no? If you don’t look for the search box on top of the side bar. That defaults to the internal Wordpress search, but I might actually switch it over to the googles one of these days.

Anyways, I digress. Digressing is probably one of the things I do well. It is also one of the reasons why my posts are longer than they need to be most of the time. The other is my tendency to use seven sentences where one would be enough. Being concise is a skill that I have never mastered. I am always amazed when people take my 15 minutes of rambling and abstract it into a 5 words or less. I’m like – wow! Yes, that’s exactly what I meant. Of course being a long winded writer has some benefits – for example I never had to worry about meeting length requirements on school papers. My friends were doing all these tricks with changing the font size, changing the face to the widest one available. I’d just write the damn essay, notice it is 3 pages to long, then cut some stuff out, rewrite bits to be shorter and I was done. And that was when I was speaking strictly on topic. Not like I’m doing now.

Anyway, I re-read my earlier post and decided that – what the hell – let’s talk about this again!

How do you organize your virtual workspaces on your machine? Do you organize your windows based across worskpaces based on some sort of order, or randomly assign them to the virtual desktops on a first come first served basis. I’m surprisingly organized when it comes to my worskspaces. Surprisingly, because you wouldn’t be able to tell that if you had seen my actual desk where everything is arranged using a stack methodology. ANd I mean that literally – I stack things on top of each other until they fall off which is what I call a natural stack distribution.

My virtual workspaces however are nearly arranged like this:

It pretty much goes like this:

1. Email – first workspace is always for work/school email. My personal email lives on the second desktop because it is web based, but my work and school emails live inside Kmail and always are located on the workspace number one.
2. Web – second desktop is for firefox, and assorted windows that I use for web browsing, downloading shit from the web and etc..
3. Code – third desktop always holds my IDE. More often than not it is Komodo Edit which I like because it has limited vim bindings. Sometimes it is Eclipse though.
4. Virtual Machines – my windows XP instance lives here. I use it to run shitty Windows only software like Monarch, Office 2007 and some other proprietary apps that my company supports.
5. Stuff – this is the workspace where I open all the random windows that don’t fit anywhere else – like Dolphin for file browsing, random shell windows, random Vim windows, and sometimes Gimp when I need to edit some images (which is almost never)
6. Remote – last worskpace is reserved for remote desktop sessions for the servers that I maintain. Usually they are rdp sessions, but I sometimes I have a VNC window there (for remote support stuff)

How about you? How do you organize your desktops?

Oh, a word about windows – I have yet to find a virtual desktop manager for that OS which would work the way these things work in Linux. The MS Powertoy is slow and buggy in my experience. I found the popular VirtuaWin to be ass backwards and counter intuitive when it comes to moving window across the desktops. The Sysinternals Tool is nice but so bare-bones that it doesn’t even have the functionality to move windows between desktops. Virtual Dimension was possibly the only tool that I knew off that would actually show you what is on which desktop (the way KDE pager does) but it did not integrate into the task bar, and it has not been updated in over 3 years. So meh… I’m not using workspaces on my Windows box. Then again I hardly do any coding on Windows anymore and for entertainment I usually either run Firefox or fullscreen video games so I don’t really need the virtual worskpace functionality for that.

Any suggestions for a working windows virtual desktop manager though?