June Xfce desktop
This month's Xfce desktop was inspired by old Japan.
icons: Feel of Japan
gtk+: Simplistica
xfwm4: axiomd
background: The Great Wave off Kanagawa
cursor: Obsidian xcursors
The icon set is very pretty, with lots of creative touches. It can be a little hard to tell what an icon represents, but the more time I spend with this set, the easier it is to recognize items. Sadly, this set only had one release, and it's still incomplete.
The gtk+ theme Simplistica (from April's desktop) returns for June's desktop. Its colors add an old-time feel to the desktop. The blue menu rollovers even match up with the wave colors of the background image.
The window manager theme is the darker variant of axiom, a simple, elegant theme. Its deep hue provides richly contrasts the sandy, woody tones of the gtk+ theme, and suggests dark, stormy skies to match the waves of the background image.
The wallpaper is a famous woodblock print by Hokusai, from the series 36 Views of Mount Fuji, and a simple Google search turns up any resolution you could want. The Great Wave is one of my favorite works. It was on my February calendar, and now it's on my desktop. The image isn't quite the rustic picture of ancient Japan that I'd like - that would take a couple of weeks to locate - but it's still pleasing. Sakura, from last month's desktop, is another good choice, but variety is the spice of life. The Great Wave goes well with my SLiM login theme, Wave.
I picked the mouse cursor theme because it reminds me of wet ink on rice paper, and it has occasional blue animations that match the wave colors. It's available in Portage; you can install it by running emerge obsidian-xcursors.
The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:
Applications
Thunar is the filemanager open in the foreground. An Xfce terminal shows an update to Gnumeric being compiled in the background.
Running in the panel are an assortment of application launchers, including customized dropdown menus for frequently used programs.
In the panel, I changed the default Xfce menu button (the blue X on the far left) to use a different icon; look in /usr/share/pixmaps for the four menu icons shipped with Xfce. Right click the menu button to change the icon. Since you have to supply the full path, it means that when you change icon themes, any menu icon included will not automatically be applied to the menu button. You'll have to change it manually every time you change your theme.
After the launchers and taskbar, the notification area holds the tray icons for Claws Mail and Pidgin. Then a genmon applet that runs my lastsync.sh Portage script. After genmon, there are plugins for volume control, the Orage clock, and local weather.
Meego installation on a USB stick
This post wouldn't be if the hard-drive from my Acer Aspire One didn't die. I have a fresh backup of the disk (a full 'dd' plus a separate one for just the home partition) so if I need something back, and I know I don't I care but backups are important, I can always mount it in a loopback and copy files.The hard-drive is actually, what I want to call it, a cheap and fake SSD. It's a PATA SSD that I'm sure I will never find a replacement for. Look:
Now the dilemma was easy, or I threw the netbook to trash, or I found something to boot on. I started to look for a solution and Meego just got released, this is crazy timing. I downloaded the boot image and tried it out, and guess what, it is getting better and better. It's definitely more beautiful, it is getting faster, it has better dialogs for customization, well just try it out if you didn't yet, you wont be disappointed but surprised.
So in the end, installing a system on a USB stick is the only solution I can come up with. I ordered an extra USB stick, but mini please, a Kingston DTmini10! Now when I tell people this is my actual hard-drive, they are like “say-whaaat.”
The installation of Meego didn't went that fluently. I have two USB sticks, one with the boot image, another serving as target device for installation. The installation worked fine without any modification, it boots but ends on a black screen with the CAPS del blinking. Boo, kernel panic, or something else ungroovy. I also tried an installation with the file-system ext3, the default is btrfs, but then the grub installer fails and the Meego installer is knocked out in a waiting sequence. So I did a default installation again, sigh. After a search I tried out some parameters for the kernel command line and adding “rootdelay=8” did the trick. In fact, the USB stick boots without problem, but past that there is some delay for the kernel to discover the USB device, you can then see the following message:
sd 11:0:0:0: [sdx] Assuming drive cache: write through
If there is no rootdelay parameter there is no root device found, and booting just ain't gonna work out. End of story. There are some tiny tweaks to be done afterwards. The kernel command line must point to the right root device, just like for the fstab file. The kernel command line can be edited in the file /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf. Everything else works out just fine. Booting time, except the rootdelay, is acceptable, but shutting down seems to be endless, and precisely when I want the netbook to turn off I want it to be really fast. I'm going to send it to sleep more often than usual, by closing and opening the lid, which is the fastest “boot” sequence one can get ;-)
Meego installation on a USB stick
This post wouldn't be if the hard-drive from my Acer Aspire One didn't die. I have a fresh backup of the disk (a full 'dd' plus a separate one for just the home partition) so if I need something back, and I know I don't I care but backups are important, I can always mount it in a loopback and copy files.The hard-drive is actually, what I want to call it, a cheap and fake SSD. It's a PATA SSD that I'm sure I will never find a replacement for. Look:
Now the dilemma was easy, or I threw the netbook to trash, or I found something to boot on. I started to look for a solution and Meego just got released, this is crazy timing. I downloaded the boot image and tried it out, and guess what, it is getting better and better. It's definitely more beautiful, it is getting faster, it has better dialogs for customization, well just try it out if you didn't yet, you wont be disappointed but surprised.
So in the end, installing a system on a USB stick is the only solution I can come up with. I ordered an extra USB stick, but mini please, a Kingston DTmini10! Now when I tell people this is my actual hard-drive, they are like “say-whaaat.”
The installation of Meego didn't went that fluently. I have two USB sticks, one with the boot image, another serving as target device for installation. The installation worked fine without any modification, it boots but ends on a black screen with the CAPS del blinking. Boo, kernel panic, or something else ungroovy. I also tried an installation with the file-system ext3, the default is btrfs, but then the grub installer fails and the Meego installer is knocked out in a waiting sequence. So I did a default installation again, sigh. After a search I tried out some parameters for the kernel command line and adding “rootdelay=8” did the trick. In fact, the USB stick boots without problem, but past that there is some delay for the kernel to discover the USB device, you can then see the following message:
sd 11:0:0:0: [sdx] Assuming drive cache: write through
If there is no rootdelay parameter there is no root device found, and booting just ain't gonna work out. End of story. There are some tiny tweaks to be done afterwards. The kernel command line must point to the right root device, just like for the fstab file. The kernel command line can be edited in the file /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf. Everything else works out just fine. Booting time, except the rootdelay, is acceptable, but shutting down seems to be endless, and precisely when I want the netbook to turn off I want it to be really fast. I'm going to send it to sleep more often than usual, by closing and opening the lid, which is the fastest “boot” sequence one can get ;-)
May Xfce desktop
This month's mostly warm, occasionally cool and windy weather inspired me to create a working environment that called to mind the pleasant days of springtime. The wallpaper is suitably natural, with pale blossoms and soft shadowed reflections at the water's edge.
icons: Crashbit
gtk+: Lila-Xfce
xfwm4: axiom
background: sakura
cursor: gentoo-xcursors
The gtk+ colors were chosen to complement the lavender cherry tree blossoms. While Xfce includes a gtk+ theme with matching colors, Xfce-Cadmium, one of the Lila themes had better-looking widgets. Cadmium is still a good choice, as are Lila-Simple and Lila-Industrial.
The icon set is an older version of Crashbit. The window manager theme "axiom" was chosen because it picks up the neutral background colors. Most themes are designed to pick up one of the primary colors, but that made things too purplish. The Lila project offers a couple of xfwm4 themes, but both are too harsh for this desktop.
The final piece of the theme is the mouse cursor. Normally I just use the Vanilla DMZ cursor theme, but I thought I'd try out a cursor set created specifically for Gentoo, which you can install by running emerge gentoo-xcursors. It even comes with an animated Znurt for "working" operations. The light on his head pulses rapidly while you wait. Cute, very cute. The Lila project also has a few cursor themes, but I decided to stick with the Gentoo theme, because of Znurt.
The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:
It's a pleasantly warm background, medium contrast, so it's easy on my eyes at all times. Plus, the water complements my SLiM theme, Wave.
Applications
Thunar is the filemanager open in the background. An Xfce Terminal displays the working directory for my LogJam fork. (Ebuilds in the overnight overlay.)
The weather plugin is running in the panel, displaying the local forecast, just after the very flexible Orage clock and my lastsync.sh script in the genmon plugin.
Also visible: the Xfce Task Manager and Decibel Audio Player. Decibel is running in Playlist mode, playing the album Raja by Planet Boelex. The album is beautiful, relaxing, entrancing. It's freely available at Soft Phase.
Building a home NAS
Problem
I need to get a NAS. A small one, due to physical space constraints. Yet it still needs to hold 3 or 4 drives. Cheap, too. Ideally I'd spend $150, but I can do more if need be. Total cost must be less than $400.
The single media storage drive in my desktop workstation has run out of room, and the box itself has become increasingly unreliable due to overheating and flaky parts. So before the thing dies and takes my drive with it, I should stick it in a separate box, along with two other drives, and thus put all my home media needs in one easily accessible place. I need to get a NAS that can hold at least 3-4 drives.
Options
There are two ways of doing that:
1. Buying a NAS device.
Synology, Buffalo, QNAP, and others make 2-to-4 drive NAS boxes with decent firmware and web interfaces, and are guaranteed Linux/Mac compatible, which is good for all my machines. The downside is that they typically cost $300 - $500 new, which is more than I want to pay. I've checked eBay, but NASes from these vendors and others are purchased very quickly, as there's a thriving resale market. Even used, the devices command a very high price. QNAP, which seems to have the best NAS devices (according to Small Net Builder, would be my first choice based on firmware features and reputation, but the few 4-bay NASes on eBay are still too expensive, and they're sold within just a couple of hours or days.
2. Building my own NAS device.
In theory, this could be much cheaper than purchasing a NAS from a vendor. The downside is that I have to buy the components, assemble them, hope they all work, find a decent NAS operating system, hope it installs, configure it, and hope it works, and then carefully administer updates and other things I don't want to be bothered with.
That's why I was so set on getting a small QNAP or DiskStation -- the firmware and web UI are already in place, and easy-to-use. I just want to put in the drives and set my sharing services. Paying a slightly higher price in exchange for less hair pulling seemed like a worthy trade. On the other hand, choosing my own NAS OS means support for certain things all the vendor-supplied NAS OSes lack, like better filesystem support, or running all kinds of sharing services without being limited to what's in the firmware, for example UPnP/DLNA.
That brings me to the next part:
Requirements
These things will determine what kind of NAS I purchase or assemble, and what operating system I install.
Media serving
1. UPnP: The UPnP server needs to support streaming to normal UPnP clients and an Xbox 360. There's an ION-based HTPC (Zotac MAG) and an Xbox 360 in the living room, attached to the home network.
Right now the HTPC has XBMC installed, but it's so frustrating to configure I may switch to Boxee or some other more user-friendly HTPC OS. Still, at least it does UPnP, which the easiest way to stream something from the desktop workstation, without having to setup Samba or NFS.
Currently, I run uShare from my desktop workstation whenever we want to watch something in the living room. The workstation has all the media files. However, to access them from the HTPC or the Xbox 360, I have to close all networked programs, turn off iptables, and then start the uShare service on the desktop. Not ideal.
2. MPD: Once the NAS is set up, I figure it's a smart idea to just use streaming players, since there won't be any local playback, except for audio CDs on the workstation. All other music will be on the NAS hard drives.
3. iTunes: We do have a Mac on the network, so I probably need iTunes server support via something like Firefly. That way no matter what's connected, it can still receive media streams.
File serving
1. Samba: The universal file sharing protocol. NFS is too unreliable. Samba can be used by anything and everything. The HTPC needs always-on access to the NAS. Same for the workstation and laptops -- they need to transfer content to and from the NAS.
The downside in Linux, at least, is needing to setup transparent Samba mounts for Xfce. It took me quite awhile to figure out how to setup Thunar, FuseSMB, FUSE, gvfs, and Gigolo. That's far, far too much effort, but at least it works when I needed to send stuff to the HTPC's hard drive over the network. Thunar is not a network-aware file manager, nor are there any plans to make it that way.
2. rsync: Useful for backups, as well as other things, I'm sure.
Filesytems
Right now, all my media is on ReiserFS, ext3, and vfat drives. I have two spare drives formatted with ReiserFS but nothing's on 'em, so I can always reformat if necessary. Whatever NAS or NAS OS I choose, it needs to support these filesystems, preferably read and write. I really don't want to have to swap files around when installing, simply because the OS doesn't support a certain filesystem.
Interface
1. Web GUI: The most important: an easy-to-use, preinstalled web user interface. I don't have the first clue on how to install and configure one myself, and I don't want to learn. It needs to already be there. Setting up a NAS should be mostly painless, so it should already provide easy configuration for Samba, access controls, media serving protocols, scheduled backups, and other bits.
2. SSH: I've discovered that with my HTPC and routers, SSH access is sometimes a lot quicker than going through a web GUI. In the case of the XBMC HTPC, sometimes it's ,em>required for upgrades and troubleshooting. There probably aren't many NAS OSes that don't offer SSH access, but it is something to check.
Which one?
If I buy a NAS, I'm at the mercy of the manufacturer for firmware updates, bug fixes, and new features. If I build my own, then the problem is which OS do I choose?
I probably won't choose Gentoo, given that nothing is ready ahead of time. Plus compiling on a low-power NAS box isn't fun. Stock Debian is right out: again, nothing's setup for serving or the web UI.
FreeNAS is often mentioned, but it has subpar filesystem support, and as a BSD, its nomenclature is quite different from Linux. Hardware support is another issue: it doesn't support as much common hardware (such as NICs) as Linux does, based on a survey of low-power Atom and ARM platforms.
Full-on server operating systems, like Ubuntu Server, seem rather bloated, and most of them aren't setup for the NAS role; they're made to be web servers, not media servers for small home networks.
The rest of the server OSes I've come across are designed as firewalls, gateways, or domain controllers, and only offer FTP access -- there's no real file sharing.
* * *
So, what are your thoughts on cheap home NAS devices? Have you built your own? Which OS did you use? What'd you pay for it? Did you buy a vendor-made NAS? Which one and why?
Lemme know!
get your foresight shirt
Finally after convincing spreadshirt legal department, that I'm a foresight developer,
there is foresight.spreadshirt.net. Maybe I will add a shop at spreadshirt.com for US based people later.
Moblin blazing fast
I updated my netbook to give it a new look. I switched the Xfce Panel against bmpanel2 and changed the background (the previous definitelly lasted very long.) Not much changes, but I topped a cold boot of about six seconds, always faster baby :-P And the window manager is OpenBox by the way.
The only real useful entry missing in this panel is a battery monitor. At least I have an indicator over the keyboard that starts blinking when there is about three percents left. What I like about this panel is the cool themes that it is provided with, however the configuration is set through a hand-written configuration file which sucks but what do you want, it is extremely lightweight on the other hand.
Update: Should I mention I totally forgot about the Xfce power manager? Well I did, and it is provided with a notification icon displaying the battery status :-) However I had to fix the default ACPI script related to the lid, since HAL doesn't list it, in order to get the netbook to go into sleep.
Moblin blazing fast
I updated my netbook to give it a new look. I switched the Xfce Panel against bmpanel2 and changed the background (the previous definitelly lasted very long.) Not much changes, but I topped a cold boot of about six seconds, always faster baby :-P And the window manager is OpenBox by the way.The only real useful entry missing in this panel is a battery monitor. At least I have an indicator over the keyboard that starts blinking when there is about three percents left. What I like about this panel is the cool themes that it is provided with, however the configuration is set through a hand-written configuration file which sucks but what do you want, it is extremely lightweight on the other hand.
Update: Should I mention I totally forgot about the Xfce power manager? Well I did, and it is provided with a notification icon displaying the battery status :-) However I had to fix the default ACPI script related to the lid, since HAL doesn't list it, in order to get the netbook to go into sleep.
Late April Xfce desktop
It's only been two weeks since my last awesome desktop, but already I've found a new look. Where mid-April's look was grungy, stormy, and dark-toned, my newest desktop is sleek, airy, and light. It exudes a reserved warmth; perfect for the approaching summer. Lots of light wood, airy spaces, pale blue skies, and soft shadows.
icons: Simplistica
gtk+: Simplistica
xfwm4: Rezlooks-gtk
background: Shards
The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:
The downside to such a beautifully bright environment is that it's too bright when using the computer in dim light. 'Specially late at night or early in the morning. Dark themes with lower contrast are a bit easier on the eyes in those cases.
The Simplistica icon set is comprehensive and well-designed: It's intuitive and it has more icons than even Tango, at least on my machine. Every icon looks good, though I wish there were a few more mimetype icons, for example .txt and .xml. Something like the appearance of the .zip and .tar icons.
Applications
Thunar is the filemanager open in the background. Check out those icons.
The weather plugin is running, displaying the local forecast.
That image editor is Fotoxx. When you need to make quick touchups or corrections to pictures, give Fotoxx a shot. It's way faster than The Gimp, and easier to use. There's an ebuild available in my overlay, though I need to update the ebuild for the 10.x releases.
Also visible is xfrun4, a popup application launcher that remembers your most recent commands. It's pretty nifty; I like its autocomplete feature.
April Xfce desktop
Behold this month's Xfce desktop.
icons: Smokikon
gtk+: Shiki-Colors
xfwm4: Shiki-Colors
background: paleis by Steven Schreurs
The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:
It's nice and grungy, though the gtk theme's blue highlights aren't quite dark enough. A simple color mod would fix that. I do like Shiki's unified titlebar; it lends an elegant touch. Someone needs to port Shiki to the Rezlooks engine, since Clearlooks is just too smooth, too nice for the grungy wallpapers I favor. Also, there aren't nearly enough decent grunge icon sets. Everything's too bright, too shiny, too smooth, too 3D, etc.
Applications
As usual: Decibel for playing music, and Thunar as the filemanager.
Highlighted in the panel menu is PyRoom. An ebuild for it is available in overnight.
The album featured in Decibel is Rain on Mars by Koalips. It's freely available at archive.org.