Re: [Slightly-OT] On usability: managing usb devices network profiles in a ion3 environment
On 2009-03-07, Mico Filós elmico.fi...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you all for your feedback. I will play with the scripts a little... While you're at it, write ion-power-manager. Something simple and reliable to replace the awful bloated and complicated gnome and kde crap. No fucking HAL crap; just talk to /sys, acpi, whatever. Can be Thinkpad-specific. Indeed probably should be based on plugins specific to particular computer models or classes instead of over-engineered low-level abstr^Windirection. (I tried reading the gnome-power-damager code to see how it works... with the effort I put into it, I couldn't make heads and tails of how it's interacting with other HAL/DBus crap; how the XSync extension is supposed to keep track of idle times -- the documentation of the extension is poor at best -- if it is supposed to do that. You have to trace a gazillion levels of indirection. I'd probably just use the screensaver extension for idle timing, if it can be tricked into multiple timeouts. After all, you want to run the screen lock _before_ suspend/hibernate; the scripts should synchronise the locking program startup, or just include the screen lock in the power manager. The Gnome crap doesn't do this, and all the system-level scripts have finished restoring the system from suspension -- when all the sun spots are correctly aligned and it all works -- before it seems to run the locker, which is a big gleaming security black hole. But it's a lot of work to do all that, and for now Windows mostly works for me. I'm really liking _reliable_ suspend and hibernate in Windowsland, foobar2k, undervolting -- even that requires a fucking kernel patch on the piece of shit Linux -- etc. Finally even managed to get locales/UTF-8 working in Cygwin: the trick is to use LC_CTYPE=C-UTF-8.UTF-8. The biggest problem ATM is getting a cygwin version of darcs. If it doesn't work out, I may have to switch to Mercurial for Ion and my other projects.) -- In 1995, Linux was almost a bicycle; an alternative way of live to the Windows petrol beasts that had to be taken to the dealer for service. By 2008, Linux has bloated into a gas-guzzler, and local vendors and artisans have had to yield to all under one roof big box hypermarkets.
Re: [Slightly-OT] On usability: managing usb devices network profiles in a ion3 environment
Thank you all for your feedback. I will play with the scripts a little...
Re: [Slightly-OT] On usability: managing usb devices network profiles in a ion3 environment
Hi, Mico! I'm risking to get a pail of slops on my head but stupid, braindead, shit-styled, awful, G*d damned, and despite this widely used desktop environments like *nome, *DE, *FCE etc are much more user friendly than progressive (and marginal, be honest) ones. I use Ion since 2nd release and quite bored to fix daughter windows properties for some poorly designed (actually just not Ion-designed) applications. Last times I run *nome-panel before Ion in my .xsession to get a bit of usability and comfortable mounting also. I like Ion. I like its minimalism. But actually I like the possibility to create/destroy as much desktops as I want and make it dynamically. That is all I really need. Now I'm looking for possibility of this in *nome DE or FVWM, which can be runned beneath *nome DE. If I'd do, I'll leave Ion forever. Man must be ready for hard decisions, yeah... On Tue, 3 Mar 2009 00:29:06 -0500 Mico Filós elmico.fi...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I am just curious to know what do ion3 users do to manage painlessly usb devices and network profiles. I've done my tinkering with udev to configure my usb gadgets, but when I have to read others' pendrives I simply spend an embarassingly long time trying to figure out what node the device is attached to (plus additional time spent on mount points permissions issues). I've heard that graphical environments like gnome or kde do that quite automatically, but I don't see why a non-graphical environment could not do the same thing. The same goes for managing network profiles in a laptop. Gnome has network-manager, a graphical tool that seems to do a good job. Again, there is no need to rely on a widget to do this kind of task, but I haven't found yet a convincing non-graphical solution. Any ideas? Best
Re: [Slightly-OT] On usability: managing usb devices network profiles in a ion3 environment
Hi, It seems that with USB sticks the only option you have (apart from finding and mounting them manually) is HAL-based automounting, for example, HAL + ivman + pmount. Then you can add some nice tricks with mod_ionflux, for example, create a menu with all mounted drives and commands to unmount eject them. With network profiles you actually have a lot of options, starting from ifupdown scripts in Debian, where you can specify a profile manually, through 'divine', a nice small program that is able to send ARP requests to specified hosts to check if they are on the network and then configure the interface, to 'guessnet' - a plug-in for ifupdown, which can do the same things as 'divine' and some more. While the last configuration (ifupdown + guessnet) is quite complex to set up, it offers you the most flexibility - for example. your laptop can select network profiles based on the ESSID of the Wi-Fi access point you are connected to, or on the presence of specific hosts on the wired network, and you can always override the selection manually. On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 12:29:06AM -0500, Mico Filós wrote: Hi, I am just curious to know what do ion3 users do to manage painlessly usb devices and network profiles. I've done my tinkering with udev to configure my usb gadgets, but when I have to read others' pendrives I simply spend an embarassingly long time trying to figure out what node the device is attached to (plus additional time spent on mount points permissions issues). I've heard that graphical environments like gnome or kde do that quite automatically, but I don't see why a non-graphical environment could not do the same thing. The same goes for managing network profiles in a laptop. Gnome has network-manager, a graphical tool that seems to do a good job. Again, there is no need to rely on a widget to do this kind of task, but I haven't found yet a convincing non-graphical solution. Any ideas? Best
Re: [Slightly-OT] On usability: managing usb devices network profiles in a ion3 environment
On 2009-03-03, Vladimir Skuratovich skuratov...@gmail.com wrote: With network profiles you actually have a lot of options, starting from ifupdown scripts in Debian, where you can specify a profile manually, through 'divine', a nice small program that is able to send ARP requests to specified hosts to check if they are on the network and then configure the interface, to 'guessnet' - a plug-in for ifupdown, which can do the same things as 'divine' and some more. NetworkManager (and its applet) are one of the few things that actually didn't totally suck abount Xubuntu. Could even get VPN working with less effort than Windows. (F-secure + Cisco VPN client - BSOD, if you install them in that order. The only one I've had, while Linux has locked up many times on console switches etc.) Otherwise, can't say much good about wireless in Xubuntu: all the radios blasting at full power on startup, have to manually turn them off, instead of it remembering the settings. And in 8.04 the Fn-key radio button just toggled the first device of wifi/bluetooth, while in 8.10 it cycles through the combos without indicating the current choice: bluetooth led works, but wifi led doesn't. In Windows I get a nice popup where to turn radios on/off, and it remembers the settings. (As a temporary measure, I've been just running the XFCE panel as Ion's stdisp for all the systray shit. But it sucks, because it can't align stuff to the right in the non-fullwidth mode.) -- Stop Gnomes and other pests! Purchase Windows today!
Re: [Slightly-OT] On usability: managing usb devices network profiles in a ion3 environment
On the question of detecting usb devices this tool can help on the detection part. lookfor-sd-devs.sh Description: Bourne shell script
Re: [Slightly-OT] On usability: managing usb devices network profiles in a ion3 environment
On 2009-03-03 17:21 -0500, Antonio De Leon wrote:
On the question of detecting usb devices this tool can help on the
detection part.
Here's my ls-removable script too. It's in Lua, and needs
both luafilesystem and posix packages for Lua.
There are two versions. The suffix-1 version worked with
the old 2.6.18 or whateveritwas Etch. Suffix-2 is a
conversion to work the modified /sys layout in *buntu 8.10,
but it fails to work because pmount doesn't seem to have
been upgraded to to reflect that. It, however, shouldn't be
too difficult to create a suid-root counterpart based on my
code, that just calls mount -- this time with sane FAT and
NTFS mounting arguments.
(*sigh*, even the ntfs-3g in 8.10 ubuntu is old, and does
not seem to support .NTFS-3G/UserMapping. A lot of shit in
it is _old_, and yet it has just half-a-year release
cycles.)
--
[Fashion] is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have
to alter it every six months. -- Oscar Wilde
The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven
than women's fashion. -- RMS
#!/usr/local/bin/lua
--
-- Copyright (c) Tuomo Valkonen 2008.
--
require('lfs')
require('posix')
local function filtered_dir(d)
local f, s_, v_ = lfs.dir(d)
local function g(s, v)
while true do
local vn=f(s, v)
if vn~='.' and vn~='..' then
return vn
end
end
end
return g, s_, v_
end
local function readfile(d)
local f, err = io.open(d, 'r')
if f then
local s=f:read('*a')
f:close()
return s
end
end
local function simplify_string(s)
if s then
return string.gsub(s, \n$, )
end
end
local function readfile_simple(d)
return simplify_string(readfile(d))
end
local function removable(d)
return readfile_simple(d../removable)==1;
end
local function removable_class(d)
-- Super-dirty hack
return d and string.match(d, /usb%d+/)
end
local function simplify_path(p)
local capts={}
local start=string.match(p, ^(/))
string.gsub(p, ([^/]+),
function(e)
if e==.. and #capts 1 then
capts[#capts]=nil
elseif e~=. then
table.insert(capts, e)
end
end)
return (start or )..table.concat(capts, /)
end
local function get_device(d)
l=posix.readlink(d../device)
if not l then
return nil
end
if string.match(l, ^.) then
return simplify_path(d../..l)
else
return simplify_path(l)
end
end
local function get_info(dev)
return {
vendor=readfile_simple(dev../vendor),
model=readfile_simple(dev../model),
serial=readfile_simple(dev../serial)
}
end
local function get_info_usb(dev)
par=string.match(dev, (.*)/[^/]+)
if not par then
return {}
else
local m=readfile_simple(par../manufacturer)
if not m then
return get_info_usb(par)
else
return {
vendor=m,
model=readfile_simple(par../product),
serial=readfile_simple(par../serial)
}
end
end
end
local function scan_volumes(bd, d)
local function g()
local found=false
for v in filtered_dir(bd..d) do
if string.match(v, ^..d..%d+$) then
coroutine.yield(v)
found=true
end
end
if not found then
coroutine.yield(d)
end
end
return coroutine.wrap(g)
end
local mounts={}
--local mounts_=io.popen(mount):read('*a')
--string.gsub(mounts_, [^\n]+, function(l) table.insert(mounts, l) end)
local f=io.open(/etc/mtab)
for l in f:lines() do
table.insert(mounts, l)
end
f:close()
local function mounted(v)
for _, l in ipairs(mounts) do
local mp=string.match(l, ^/dev/..v..%s+([^%s]+))
if mp then
return mp
end
end
return false
end
local bd='/sys/block/'
local volumes={}
for d in filtered_dir(bd) do
local dev=get_device(bd..d)
if removable(bd..d) or removable_class(dev) then
local i1=get_info(dev)
local i2=get_info_usb(dev)
if i2 and i2.vendor then
info=table.concat({i2.vendor, i2.model, i2.serial}, )
else
info=table.concat({i1.vendor, i1.model, i1.serial}, )
end
for v in scan_volumes(bd, d) do
table.insert(volumes, {
kernel=v,
info=info,
mountpoint=mounted(v),
})
end
end
end
table.sort(volumes,
function(a, b)
if a.mountpoint and not b.mountpoint then
return false
elseif not a.mountpoint and b.mountpoint then
return true
else
return (a.kernel b.kernel)
