I was having lunch with Danita yesterday and said something about how I sort of wished my laptop was still running Xubuntu rather than Debian because of how much better the wireless support is in *ubuntu. I switched to using Debian on it because I don’t use it a whole lot as a portable laptop, and it made more sense to turn it into my Debian development machine for the Debian software packaging that I do. That’s when she suggested that I dual boot Debian and Xubuntu, I can do my development and have my nice portable machine. Duh. Why didn’t I think of that? It’s only got a 10G hard drive, but Debian and Xubuntu could easily co-exist on that. Thanks again Danita for opening my eyes to the perfect solution that I just wasn’t seeing. So I did the install last night, and was quite pleased with how easy it was to resize my Debian partition via the alternate installer and toss Xubuntu on there.
Also on my plate was getting RAM usage under control. I did a pretty standard Xubuntu install on my laptop (500mhz p3 w/ 128M of RAM) rather than the server install + xfce4, so I had some slimming down to do. I was able to get it down to starting up with only 45M of usage by doing things like uninstalling thunar, cups and gdm. But what really launched this “I need to get my services under control” project was my primary desktop. I was in the middle of configuring PostgreSQL for some monitoring software at work on Friday when I noticed my computer was running very slowly, a quick check on RAM showed I was using 1.2G of RAM (out of 2G)! So I spent time this afternoon shutting down services (their runlevel init scripts), uninstalling things, and getting my system running properly. It now uses 75M of RAM when it first starts up, sweet.
This morning I headed out to East Norriton to scope out the spot in Norristown Farm Park that we’re hosting our Ubuntu Pennsylvania LoCo team BBQ at next weekend. It’s a nice spot right near a parking lot, the park superintendent recommended it to me when I dropped him a line about the possibility of us having a BBQ there. Things are coming together nicely for this BBQ, about 10 people have signed up to come so far, and I’m hoping we’ll hit the 20 mark by the end of the week. This should be a pretty fun event after all the heavily tech-related volunteer work the team has been doing lately, we will actually have some face to face time to socialize with each other. Plus we’ll be all rested up for the first phase of the LTSP Project at MALT next weekend.
Ubuntu aside, on the local Linux front I learned a couple weeks ago that the person handling sending out PLUG Central meeting announcements and primary website administration for PLUG is moving out of the state. I’ve been a website admin and had access to the -announce list since March (so I can make edits to the site for Montco PLUG and send out meeting announcements for it). I was a logical choice as his predecessor, so he offered me the position last week and I accepted. This is exciting for me, but also a huge responsibility, the mailing list has over 700 members these days and all three of the PLUG Chapters are doing quite well, the last PLUG West meeting had over 30 attendees, and the last PLUG Montco meeting hit a new record of 12. I keep hearing stories of how LUGs are not relevant anymore, but it’s certainly not the case here in Philadelphia.
Finally, I mentioned that a friend recommended the It’s All Text! Firefox plug-in last weekend and that I’d started using it with vim. But I didn’t realize how it would transform my web usage so much. I was never a fan of editing wikis or writing long forum posts in the provided text box, I always used to write journal entries in vim and then copy them to WordPress, and I still loathed the gmail interface for writing emails and missed vim desperately. No more! All the editing is now done happily in vim, it’s fantastic, I don’t think I could live without it now.
Sunday, Aug 5th, 2007 at 15:53
ohhhhh… i’d love vim for opera .
Sunday, Aug 5th, 2007 at 17:06
Why don’t you set up a Debian chroot in your Xubuntu? This way you wouldn’t need a separate Debian installation.
Sunday, Aug 5th, 2007 at 18:05
Why don’t you set up a Debian chroot in your Xubuntu?
Fair point. I use Debian extensively at work and there are times when I want an actual Debian install around, like when I’m testing kernel upgrades or checking out the versions of packages in Debian.
Sunday, Aug 5th, 2007 at 20:20
Just curious, once you’ve removed Thunar, what makes you prefer Xfce to even lighterweight WMs?
Monday, Aug 6th, 2007 at 6:30
Alex: I haven’t used a file manager in years, so Thunar has nothing to do with my usage of XFCE (indeed, it didn’t even exist when I started using XFCE).
I like XFCE because of the ease of customization (keybindings and such). Most other lightweight managers require you to write/edit config files (I’ve used fluxbox and enlightenment in the past) and while it’s easy enough to do, I simply tired of it and wanted something easy. Plus I just like how the default XFCE looks and works (I change it from Xubuntu gnome-ish look to traditional XFCE). I’ve considered lately moving back to enlightenment though.