Why GNU/Linux Rocks

[Los ßnus]

Man I gotta thank you all again for your help in introducing me to the wide world of Linux. I'm learning slowly and have really been enjoying the whole experience. I was able to get into a small private tracker recently and was able to use my new very basic understanding of linux to get a seedbox set up, learned how to use rtorrent from the command line in it, and finally mastered using screen (not mastered, but can at least move around freely lol). That doesn't sound like a lot but I am sort of learning from scratch here.

And not a moment too soon, the Raspberri Pi is coming out hopefully some time next week and it only runs debian from what I understand so now I will be able to use it!

HELLLLLL Yeah, rtorrent! when you got less than 128mb of ram. rtorrent all day!

just checked out the raspberry pi, model B with 256mb of ram! jesus christ! buy buy buy!

[shikitohno]

Man I gotta thank you all again for your help in introducing me to the wide world of Linux. I'm learning slowly and have really been enjoying the whole experience. I was able to get into a small private tracker recently and was able to use my new very basic understanding of linux to get a seedbox set up, learned how to use rtorrent from the command line in it, and finally mastered using screen (not mastered, but can at least move around freely lol). That doesn't sound like a lot but I am sort of learning from scratch here.

And not a moment too soon, the Raspberri Pi is coming out hopefully some time next week and it only runs debian from what I understand so now I will be able to use it!

Out of the box, the Raspberry Pi will have support for Debian, Arch, and Fedora I believe. There's really no reason anything that has an arm port can't get up and running on it, provided they can any proprietary drivers working.

Also, sgreger, hate to do this to you late in the game, but I've abandoned screen in favor of tmux. Basically, screen isn't getting updated any more, tmux is, and it offers a number of cool features over screen. The controls for tmux are almost completely the same, except you replace C-a with C-b as your escape key. For a couple of the more tangible and quickly understood perks, it'll list all your opened windows in the bottom across a statusbar. The list will include the number (as in, C-b # to go to that window), and it'll automatically display the name of the program running in each window. You can also change what it displays if you want.

For your irssi issue,

/set real_name notsamson

followed by

/save

ought to solve your issues. After you quit and reconnect, all should be good again, so I'm assuming you simply forgot to save the changes to your config file with that second command before disconnecting.

Edit: Concerning multiple monitor support, I'd recommend switching to a different window manager myself. Gnome has its uses, but for some things Gnome flat out sucks. Multiple monitors is one example, though Gnome used to do alright for a while with it. i3 doesn't seem to have any issue with my two monitor set-up, though. Ratpoison did a decent job too, but with no active developement, there was only so much you could do with it in terms of getting new features before you'd essentially have to be maintaining it yourself.

[devilock76]

HELLLLLL Yeah, rtorrent! when you got less than 128mb of ram. rtorrent all day!

just checked out the raspberry pi, model B with 256mb of ram! jesus christ! buy buy buy!

Rtorrent is great regardless of machine specs. In fact it is my general rule to opt for CLI over GUI solutions for a task whenI have a choice.

The rasberry pi thing looks awesome and as an educational product looks interesting. The only business purpose I can think of for it though is as a firewall.

Ken

[sgreger1]

Thanks Shiki! I will try that in Irssi now.

Rtorrent is way better because I am using Putty for SSL tunneling and it allows me to log on to my server, then screen into rtorrent, screen back to check hard drive usage and other stuff etc all from one window (even on my windows computer). Rtorrent is definately awesome, plus you can use RUtorrent as a GUI if you don't feel like doing the CLI thing.


As for the Raspberry pi, I can't wait. It is awesome that you can have all of that in such a small package, I could think of lots of cool things you could do with it. It even plays HDMI videos so I can strap it onto my TV like the Roku, or run a small server off it.

Another cool use I thought of was to buy a car diagnostic cable for like $9 and a small 3.5 inch flat screen rear-view camera and then connect the ECU to the data cable, connect that to the raspberry pi and then connect that to the flat screen. Real time engine diagnostics from an installed flatscreen would be so hipster.

For $25 you could do a bunch of shit. Would be interesting to buy like 10 of these and hook em all together to do some sort of distributed computing on it and have it feed to a screen. I'm sure lots of people will find interesting projects considering how low the barrier to entry is financially.

[devilock76]

Thanks Shiki! I will try that in Irssi now.

Rtorrent is way better because I am using Putty for SSL tunneling and it allows me to log on to my server, then screen into rtorrent, screen back to check hard drive usage and other stuff etc all from one window (even on my windows computer). Rtorrent is definately awesome, plus you can use RUtorrent as a GUI if you don't feel like doing the CLI thing.


As for the Raspberry pi, I can't wait. It is awesome that you can have all of that in such a small package, I could think of lots of cool things you could do with it. It even plays HDMI videos so I can strap it onto my TV like the Roku, or run a small server off it.

Another cool use I thought of was to buy a car diagnostic cable for like $9 and a small 3.5 inch flat screen rear-view camera and then connect the ECU to the data cable, connect that to the raspberry pi and then connect that to the flat screen. Real time engine diagnostics from an installed flatscreen would be so hipster.

For $25 you could do a bunch of shit. Would be interesting to buy like 10 of these and hook em all together to do some sort of distributed computing on it and have it feed to a screen. I'm sure lots of people will find interesting projects considering how low the barrier to entry is financially.

It will be limited as a roku replacement since netflix does not work on linux.

Ken

[lxskllr]

I think the pi would kick ass in the classroom. Have a monitor, and keyboard/mouse built into the desk, and each kid could dock their pi to the desk. Take it home, and hook it to the equipment there. You could carry everything in your pocket, and it's cheap to replace.

[sgreger1]

It will be limited as a roku replacement since netflix does not work on linux.

Ken

Yah well I would just load my SD card with movies and the watch it on there. I won't actually be doing any of this since I already have Roku and don't really watch movie but I for one am impressed that it can ever run 1080p video.

These things are going to sell fast so if anyone wants one, go join their mailing list @ www.raspberrypi.com They should be out some time next week, they finish production tomorrow and begin shipping so should be ready for distribution by that time. For $25-$35 you can't really lose.

[sgreger1]

I think the pi would kick ass in the classroom. Have a monitor, and keyboard/mouse built into the desk, and each kid could dock their pi to the desk. Take it home, and hook it to the equipment there. You could carry everything in your pocket, and it's cheap to replace.

What's great is that you can get a VGA adapter and hook this thing up to an old TV. Entire schools could fill their classrooms with old non-flatscreen TV's that people don't use anyone. The whole thing could be done on the cheap.

Hell, if you got a semi-thick keyboard, you could just drill a hole in the side, embed the raspberry pi inside of it, and then run a cord from the keyboard to the monitor.

[sgreger1]

Out of the box, the Raspberry Pi will have support for Debian, Arch, and Fedora I believe. There's really no reason anything that has an arm port can't get up and running on it, provided they can any proprietary drivers working.

Also, sgreger, hate to do this to you late in the game, but I've abandoned screen in favor of tmux. Basically, screen isn't getting updated any more, tmux is, and it offers a number of cool features over screen. The controls for tmux are almost completely the same, except you replace C-a with C-b as your escape key. For a couple of the more tangible and quickly understood perks, it'll list all your opened windows in the bottom across a statusbar. The list will include the number (as in, C-b # to go to that window), and it'll automatically display the name of the program running in each window. You can also change what it displays if you want.

For your irssi issue,

/set real_name notsamson

followed by

/save

ought to solve your issues. After you quit and reconnect, all should be good again, so I'm assuming you simply forgot to save the changes to your config file with that second command before disconnecting.

Edit: Concerning multiple monitor support, I'd recommend switching to a different window manager myself. Gnome has its uses, but for some things Gnome flat out sucks. Multiple monitors is one example, though Gnome used to do alright for a while with it. i3 doesn't seem to have any issue with my two monitor set-up, though. Ratpoison did a decent job too, but with no active developement, there was only so much you could do with it in terms of getting new features before you'd essentially have to be maintaining it yourself.

Looks like

/set real_name notsamson

Did not work. It says "real name = WHATITYPED but still shows up in the whois.

[shikitohno]

Did you save it and disconnect, and reconnect? Something's not right with things if that's the case. I'd recommend joining #irssi on Freenode if that's the case. They'll be able to sort things for you, though at first they'll probably give you a "Use /set real_name, dumbass!" first since it's in the docs.

As far as the Raspberry Pis go, I think one of the simpler and cooler projects I could think up for it would be as a cheap, high capacity car audio player. Mount a touch screen display with the rough dimesions of an iPhone on your dashboard, and hook it up as the raspberry pi's primary display. Keep the raspberry pi itself in a harness in your trunk, attached to an external hard drive, say a 500GB-1TB drive. You could run the wires underneath the floor and up through the dashboard, and wire it all up to draw power off your car. The wiring would be the trickiest part. Then, you could hook up the external drive to your computer at home, and rip all your music to it as flac files. Bam, high quality versions of your entire music collection whenever you drive. If you've got one of those mobile broadband dongles, you could get streaming web radio. Setting up the touchscreen support might take a bit of work, but a cursory glance shows that at the very least Ubuntu has touch support worked out alright, and it also works under Arch alright from what I've seen. Far higher capacity, higher quality audio, and all could be had for the price of a new iPod or less.

Also, for rtorrent fun, I recently found a new tool that should add some nifty features to it, called pyroscope.

[sgreger1]

Did you save it and disconnect, and reconnect? Something's not right with things if that's the case. I'd recommend joining #irssi on Freenode if that's the case. They'll be able to sort things for you, though at first they'll probably give you a "Use /set real_name, dumbass!" first since it's in the docs.

As far as the Raspberry Pis go, I think one of the simpler and cooler projects I could think up for it would be as a cheap, high capacity car audio player. Mount a touch screen display with the rough dimesions of an iPhone on your dashboard, and hook it up as the raspberry pi's primary display. Keep the raspberry pi itself in a harness in your trunk, attached to an external hard drive, say a 500GB-1TB drive. You could run the wires underneath the floor and up through the dashboard, and wire it all up to draw power off your car. The wiring would be the trickiest part. Then, you could hook up the external drive to your computer at home, and rip all your music to it as flac files. Bam, high quality versions of your entire music collection whenever you drive. If you've got one of those mobile broadband dongles, you could get streaming web radio. Setting up the touchscreen support might take a bit of work, but a cursory glance shows that at the very least Ubuntu has touch support worked out alright, and it also works under Arch alright from what I've seen. Far higher capacity, higher quality audio, and all could be had for the price of a new iPod or less.

Also, for rtorrent fun, I recently found a new tool that should add some nifty features to it, called pyroscope.

Yah I /save then /disconnect, nothing though. When I start it back up, log in to the NicKServ, then whois myself it still comes up. Do you think it's because it's on a password protected NickServ and my account I log in to has it pegged to it or something?

[devilock76]

Yah well I would just load my SD card with movies and the watch it on there. I won't actually be doing any of this since I already have Roku and don't really watch movie but I for one am impressed that it can ever run 1080p video.

These things are going to sell fast so if anyone wants one, go join their mailing list @ www.raspberrypi.com They should be out some time next week, they finish production tomorrow and begin shipping so should be ready for distribution by that time. For $25-$35 you can't really lose.

That might work, however for the price of $50 you can get a Sony Streamer from Best buy which will play everything a roku will and more, plus play media from USB-HD source, plus be able to connect to a DLNA server to stream content over your network via WIFI. I have one and my BSD box runs miniDLNA to serve my content. All things aside it is one of the more practical solutions out there and I like practical.

Truth is my one thought for this box is to use it as the engine to build a linux based synth workstation. Not sure it has the horse power but to build it into a case with midi keybed and a midicontroller + a touch screen could be a neat experiment. Just not sure what I could really get to run even with a streamlined Arch linux setup on that processor.

Ken

[sgreger1]

That might work, however for the price of $50 you can get a Sony Streamer from Best buy which will play everything a roku will and more, plus play media from USB-HD source, plus be able to connect to a DLNA server to stream content over your network via WIFI. I have one and my BSD box runs miniDLNA to serve my content. All things aside it is one of the more practical solutions out there and I like practical.

Truth is my one thought for this box is to use it as the engine to build a linux based synth workstation. Not sure it has the horse power but to build it into a case with midi keybed and a midicontroller + a touch screen could be a neat experiment. Just not sure what I could really get to run even with a streamlined Arch linux setup on that processor.

Ken

Wow I hadn't heard of the Sony Streamer. The ROKU was like $75 and so far I love it, but I don't really use it myself that often, my wife and daughter are the big TV watchers of the house. I pretty much stay glued to the computer most of the time. I also use the home network (or whateve rit's called in Win7) to stream content from my computer to my xbox. I hear you can do this with roku by setting up custom channels but it's a pain so i havn't tried.

[shikitohno]

I might still have to grab a Roku, just because I'm not sure the Sony Streamer could do crunchyroll streams for me. Though I'm hoping even that will be unnecessary once I get my new drive in tonight. Replacing the hard drive on this machine, and it'll be my last one to make the transition from Fedora to Arch. For some reason flash works way better under Arch then it does under Fedora for me. This machine has a better CPU, and a graphics card that is intended to do full HD, and fullscreening 480p flash videos can make it run at 100% for both CPUs and even be a bit choppy sometimes. Meanwhile, the machine in the living room with a crap CPU, half as much RAM, and a nearly 10 year old budget GPU has comparable video quality streaming 1080p when it's only supposed to be able to do 480p...

If flash works as well on here as it does out in the living room on the crap machine, crunchyroll shouldn't be an issue, and the only reason I'd need a Roku like device would be if I wanted to take out a Netflix subscription. I may in the future, but not at the moment. I do they'd work out a solution to offer Netflix on linux, though. Damn silverlight.

[devilock76]

Wow I hadn't heard of the Sony Streamer. The ROKU was like $75 and so far I love it, but I don't really use it myself that often, my wife and daughter are the big TV watchers of the house. I pretty much stay glued to the computer most of the time. I also use the home network (or whateve rit's called in Win7) to stream content from my computer to my xbox. I hear you can do this with roku by setting up custom channels but it's a pain so i havn't tried.

Bestbuy has been clearing out version 1 for like $50 of the streamer, version 2 is a bit more. However deep down inside it is the software they put on their Blu-ray players just without the blu-ray.

I have actually signed up for the RasberryPi mailing list, I figure I will order a model B as soon as I can as part of an experiment. Just to see what I can throw at it...

Ken