Time Management

This video of a talk by Thomas A. Limoncelli contains some nice ideas for time management.  Although nominally addressed at computer system administrators, most of the ideas will be of interest to anyone working in a technical job.  I particularly like his explanation of how to deal with tasks according to how difficult they are and how frequently they have to be done:

• Easy and rare: perform the task manually.
• Easy and frequent: write a program to automate it.
• Hard and rare: document how to do the task.
• Hard and frequent: install a ready-made solution (purchase one or download a free one).

However, I suspect that the usual time management paradox applies: those who most need to watch the video are least likely to have the time to watch it.

Oh Joy! Installing MinGW and MSYS on Windows XP

MinGW (Minimalistic GNU for Windows) and MSYS (Mimimal System) are software packages that enable Unix and Linux programs to be built and run on Windows.  I rely on them quite a lot and try to ensure that they are installed on any Windows PCs that I use regularly. 

However, the installation of these packages is rather complex and I always seem to take me several attempts to get right.  First of all, it is not at all obvious from the download page which files you are supposed to download.  Then some of them are .exe files and others are .tar.gz's.  I suspect that there might be some historical reason behind this, but really, why not just package the whole lot in an .exe file?  There can't be many people nowadays who begrudge the few megabytes of disc space that this might waste.  Then there is the totally unnecessary fuss over whether you should have the MinGW directory as a subdirectory of the MSYS one or beside it at the top of the C: drive ( I always eventually choose the latter).  And finally, there is the almost comical tussle over different versions of the 'make' program  as revealed by this message displayed at the end of a sucessful MSYS install:

Installing Blender on a Multi-user Windows XP Computer

I have recently been using the open source 3D-modelling tool Blender at work and I thought it would be nice to have a copy to play with on my home computer.  However, when I installed it there, many of the options were missing from the menus. 

I had installed the program from an administrator account but was using it from a limited account.  When installing it, I had selected the option to put the Blender data in the Application Data directory thinking that this meant that each user would get copy of the Blender data in their own application data directory.  Not so!  Only the administrator's Blender data was being set up during installation.  

I was able to fix this by logging back in as administrator and manually copying the Blender data directories from the administrator's application data area into the application data area of each user who was going to use the program.

The reason that this problem did not arise at work was because the account I was using for day-to-day work was an administrator one.  Oops! 

Dying Mouse

The Targus AMU01EU wired optical mouse that we use with the laptop has started behaving erratically: it frequently  ignores right-clicks.  At first I thought it might be a Ubuntu software problem but, after finding nothing similar mentioned on Ubuntu Forums, I tried the mouse on our Windows XP machine and it exhibited the same symptom there.  I can see another walk to our local branch of PC World coming up!

Installing Xubuntu on a 200MHz PC

During the Christmas holidays I got my old Dantum95 PC out from the corner of the bedroom where it was gathering dust.  I was intending to throw it out as by today's standards it is seriously under-powered, having  only a puny 200MHz CPU and a mere 98MB of RAM.  However, I had recently come across Xubuntu, the light-weight version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, and I thought it might be fun to try and get it running on the Dantum.  I was at a loose end and didn't have much else to do.   In what follows I describe the main problems I came across and how I solved them in the hope that this might be of some use to anyone mad enough to try something similar.

First, some details of the PC:

• 200MHz Pentium-MMX P55C CPU
  
• VX97 motherboard
  
• 98MB RAM
  
• 10GB ST310211A hard disk drive
  
• Toshiba XM-6182B CD-ROM drive
  
• 3.5 inch Floppy disk drive
  

It also has a 100MB Iomega Zip drive but that stopped working in 2003 so I disconnected it (removing it altogether would have left a big hole in the front of the PC).

First, I went to the Xubuntu home page, downloaded the "PC (Intel x86) alternate install CD" image for Xubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), and burnt it to a CD. Then I set up the Dantum BIOS and changed to boot order to A-drive (floppy) first, CD-ROM second and C-drive third.  I then rebooted the Dantum with the Xubuntu CD in the CD-ROM drive.  Within a few seconds the Xubuntu installation menu came up and I selected "Install in text mode"  (which is the option for the 'standard' Xubuntu system with X-windows). 

The installation ran smoothly, occasionally prompting for input (keyboard type, screen size - that sort of stuff), until 65% of the way through the "installing selected software" phase when it seemed to get stuck installing something called "anthy".  A bit of Googling revealed that this is a known problem with Xubuntu installation on small RAM machines.  Apparently anthy is quite large and the installation process gets bogged down copying parts of it back and forth between RAM and the swap partition on the hard disk.  It also turned out that most people don't even need anthy - it provides support for the input of Japanese characters.  The fix for the stalled installation was refreshingly direct: I pressed Alt-F2 to bring up the second console, entered "ps ax | grep mkworddic" to display the id of the process that was attempting to install anthy, used "kill -9 nnnnn" (where nnnnn is the process id) to kill the process, and then pressed Alt-F1 to return to the original console where the installation quickly ran to completion.

I took out the installation CD, rebooted the PC but it then got stuck immediately after displaying "GRUB _".  Grub is the boot loader that Xubuntu uses to load itself.  I suspected a problem with the way the hard disk was partitioned and I spent a lot of time trying different partions and reinstalling and rebooting, but to no avail. Then I found in the back of my Dantum manual a note, that I must have written several years ago, to the effect that the I should use the BIOS hard disk auto-detection facility and set the hard disk to LBA mode.  I did that, reinstalled Xubuntu, rebooted and evetually the Xubuntu graphical login screen was displayed.

 However, two problems were immediately evident:

• there was no mouse pointer
• the graphical login screen came up extremely slowly

The mouse pointer I was fairly sure I could fix with a bit of Googling, but the slowness of the graphics indicated that the PC was really not powerful enough for a modern X-windows system.  I was quite happy with a command-line only system so I re-ran the installation once more, selecting the "Install command-line system" option this time.

Finally, I was able to log in to my Xubuntu command-line system.  To my horror, I discovered that Emacs wasn't installed, instead the only editor was a Vi clone called Elvis.  For a while I was a bit lost because the Synaptic package manager, that I have come to rely on so much nowadays, requires X-windows to run.  However, I eventually came across Aptitude which does the same sort of things from the command line.  The best introduction to Aptitude appears to be Daniel Burrows' Aptitude User's Manual.

Update on Wed 2007-02-07 by Tristram Brelstaff

I now realise that I should have read the Ubuntu Installation/Low Memory Systems page before trying this.  It contains a lot of good advice that would have helped me avoid quite a few (but not all) of the problems I ran into.

Update on Sat 2007-03-10 by Tristram Brelstaff

A few weeks later I ran through the installation again following the instructions from the Ubuntu Installation/Low Memory Systems page (along with some of the hacks mentioned in the main post).  To make the graphical interface usable I installed Fluxbox and set it as the default window manager.  After using Windows XP, the Fluxbox menus seem lightning fast, even on a slow PC.  One minor niggle, which I haven't yet sorted out, is that Fluxbox desktop colour does not 'stick' through a X-windows restart, however, reselecting the window manager from the menu causes it to be set up correctly. I then tried various lightweight web browsers, such as Dillo, but found them all too awkward to use, so I installed Firefox instead and it seemed to work well enough, if a bit slowly.  I now have a system which should be usable for emergency access to the web if my main PC and lap top are unavailable.