I guess I’m surprised to see a freedom ranger such as yourself using GAFYD for email, even though you work for Google now. I have avoided it out of privacy concerns and now I’m wondering what your perspective is on that, since I’m sure you’ve given it some thought.
— Joel 
I recommend trying fish. A long time ago, I tried zsh and instantly dumped bash. More recently, I tried fish and instantly dumped zsh. YMMV.
— Jeff
Yeah, I tried to living with Awesome WM but after awhile I realized that menubars and icons exist for a reason. And since I multitask between 3 different OS’s everyday it’s hard to remember every single keyboard shortcut for each environment.
BTW, nice tip about OpenMovieEditor. Maybe in the future I can drop Sony Vegas since I only use it for simple stuff.
— Marco Campos
Why do you recommend alternate window managers?
— Steve
About Ksnapshot, its page says this: “It is capable of capturing images of either the whole desktop, or just a single window.”
But the GIMP can also take partial snapshots where you can drag a selection box. I find that really helpful.
Thanks for the list!
— Tim
Thanks for the info. A few questions for you (or anyone else who can possibly answer):
1. Other than the Firefox trademark problem (which I’m not particularly interested in), is there an advantage of running Debian+XFCE instead of Xubuntu (e.g., more updated, more stable, etc.)?
2. When installing Debian, is the netinstall the best way to go?
— Charlie
Do you use any virtualization software? Do you ever spend time in OS X, Windows, etc.?
Thanks, Mark! Quick question: when you backup Gmail with getmail, how do you make sure you get all your emails? Do you archive “[Gmail]/All mail”? Is your backup missing any information that you can only get at in the Google Apps interface?
I’m considering trying out Emacs. Do you use the full-blown Emacs or Zile? Also, does your Linux distribution choice also apply to the server side?
Have you tried ion3? I’ve been through KDE, Wmaker, wmii, and have tried some others (fvwm2 and xmonad) but none of them is so good at *managing* *windows* as ion3. xmonad is close, though.
— Javier
Try a window manager that sucks less. :-)
`sudo apt-get install dwm && sudo update-alternatives –config x-window-manager`
Charlie
My experience is that Debian stable is much more stable than Ubuntu (but older) and testing/unstable isn’t too bad for stability. When a release is coming within 6 months or so, testing seem as good or better than Ubuntu.
Personally, I like Debian’s philosophical positions and the “feel” of the software better than Ubuntu
Netinst is the way to go unless you don’t have broadband
For Gmail backup I use Offlineimap ( http://software.complete.org/software/projects/show/offlineimap ) definitely worth a try, with it I can read all my gmail offline (via mutt, e.g.), and when I delete something locally, on the next sync it will be deleted on the server side too.
— Zsoltik@
You can play DVDs with menus and whatnot in mplayer? I confess, I didn’t look too closely, feeling a vague twinge of shame at using a command-line interface for movie playing in any case, thanks to Jamie Zawinski.
debian is consistent about firmware and firefox – both are bugs and need to be fixed. The differences are how long it’s taking to fix the bug, but the kernel is much more fundamental than some web browser…
— MJ Ray
Screen does rock: http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/screen/
As does ssh: http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html#ssh
I’d love you to expand on:
“If you use the command line more than once a day and haven’t learned about screen yet, you’re missing out.”
I’ve seen a bit of screen lately and can appreciate it uses if you don’t have a tabbing terminal emulator but haven’t learnt what benefits it offers otherwise.
— mike
GNU screen is bloated and insufficient. I used to like it but lost the religion at some point. It would routinely end up being the 3rd largest consumer of memory on my system, and you can’t even get it to where two xterms are connected to the same screen session but show different screen windows, so that you can see two different screen windows at once.
So I use a tabbed window manager (pekwm) to stay on top of the occasional proliferation of xterms instead. That’s useful for things other than shells, too – I often tab multiple browser windows together. For those few console programs that I actually need to be able to background (irssi, rtorrent, et al, all of which are ncurses-based so can redraw themselves anyway), I use dtach.
I find Psi better than Pidgin.
— kael
@ Aristotle,
you can’t even get it to where two xterms are connected to the same screen session but show different screen windows, so that you can see two different screen windows at once.
Of course you can. I do this virtually every minute of every day. Start up a screen session in one xterm, then use “screen -x” in the other. Easy as cake.
When I tried that, I could only get it to display the same screen window in both xterms. Eg. I start a screen session and created two screen windows in xterm 1, and screen window 1 is visible. If I start xterm 2 and connect to the same screen session, and in xterm 2 I switch to screen window 2, then the screen in xterm 1 will also switch to screen window 2. I couldn’t get xterm 1 to show screen window 1 while xterm 2 shows screen window 2 at the same time.
Maybe that was just me. At this point I rather like dtach’s much more minimal feature set and footprint, though.
btw why using debian rather than any bsd ? Just curious.
— benoitc
Inkscape: more can be sourced in SVG than you think. Mozilla Prism (XULRunner), though not sure how that squares with … you know. It’s All Text extension to PhrozenErmine. Absolutely Amarok. Musicbrainz. Terminator, cuz screen’s just too much most of the time — though Guake handles the light work. OpenVPN. VirtualBox, lately, and I’ll be dead before KVM shows up. Webmin: never, ever, forget Webmin. Meld. PHP Markdown Extra, cuz it’s maintained and shit. htop. Thunar: it’s not responsible for gam_server’s profligacy. BitPim, while waiting on a mature gPhone. Oh, and CodeIgniter’s worth admiring, if you’re not as Pythonic as you’d like to be.
LQ
Could you explain how you use getmail to backup Gmail? I’d like to do that, but it looks really complicated.
— Greg
@Greg: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/backup-gmail-in-linux-with-getmail/
— Mark
@benoitc: I have no experience with BSD. IIRC, I’ve quite literally never tried it. How’s the hardware support? I have pure-Free-Software-compatible hardware.
— Mark
@Aristotle: I have never wanted to do that. Also, I have 8 GB of memory.
— Mark
@grendelkhan: no, mplayer does not support DVD menus. I consider this a feature, not a bug. DVD menus rank as one of the worst user experiences in the world — they’re inconsistent (disc-specific UI), slow to navigate, frequently contain “mystery meat navigation” that you can only discover by moving the focus to an item. Also, they make it equally difficult to accomplish wildly unequally likely tasks — playing the movie, viewing extras, choosing an scene, or (God forbid) playing stupid DVD-navigation-based games. I *might* view extras once; I have never, ever chosen a scene from a movie (though I do choose episodes from TV box sets); I played a DVD game once, it was stupid; from times 2 through infinity of interacting with the disc, I want to play the movie. Play the movie. Play the movie. (Or more likely, my kids want to play the movie.) I usually end up re-authoring all of our DVDs to strip out extras and menus and autoplay the main title. And encode it for the AppleTV, which, sadly, is light years ahead of every other play-something-from-my-movie-collection-over-and-over hardware and software. My 2-year-old can use the AppleTV. With the remote. And scroll through the movie list and say, “no, not that one. No, not that one. Yeah, that one!” and hit Play. OK, he’s almost 3, but still. Give him a pile of DVDs with the original menus, and he’s waking up daddy at 7 AM. Or, since we just changed the clocks today, 6 AM.
— Mark
@Michael: the first few times you use getmail to back up your Gmail (or Google Apps For Your Domain mail), it may only download a fraction of your archives. Run it enough times and it will eventually download everything. Set your Gmail account to keep messages downloaded via POP. It backs up the messages in “All Mail”; it does not backup messages in Spam or Trash. It also can not backup labels or stars, but I use those so infrequently that I don’t care.
getmail does not backup your contact list. You can back it up manually if you like. Of course your mail message backup includes the full mail headers of each message, including the To: and From: addresses, so you could recreate your important contacts in a pinch.
— Mark
@Bill: my time on Mac OS X is limited to Firefox and SSHing back to my Debian box. My time on Windows is mostly spent in Google Chrome and other browsers (for compatibility testing), EmacsW32, and our (Google’s) internal IM client, which is similar to the public Google Talk client. I run ZSH and screen through Cygwin, with PuttyCyg, but it’s all a bit buggy and quirky.
— Mark
@Joel: I did run my own mail server for a while; it’s a real pain in the ass. Gmail is “free enough” and allows me to keep my identity (through Google Apps For Your Domain, my email address is @diveintomark.org, not @gmail.com). I automatically kept an up-to-date backup of my mail in case of network downtime or spurious account lockout. Basically I only care enough about software-as-a-service freedom to ensure that I can change providers at a moment’s notice (literally, all it would take is changing a DNS record, point a mail client at my backup dir in maildir format, and import my contacts from CSV) with an acceptable level of data fidelity.
The privacy issue is real, and everyone needs to make their own informed choices about who they trust and why. There’s no one right answer.
— Mark
@Mark,
DVD menus are useful for switching on subtitles for your native language, which is a useful feature for some of us. Of course, DVD menus are useful for that only because most player software a) doesn’t have a feature for that themselves (some do) and b) most player software doesn’t select subtitles automatically, which is amazingly silly.
Thanks for the additional information, Mark. I am also not bothered about labels/stars, etc. so this sounds promising. Do you turn on “keep messages downloaded over POP” because you use getmail’s POP retreiver rather than IMAP? I realise for this kind of archival there is no practical difference between the two, but is there a particular reason you use POP? Is it more robust for getmail or Gmail?
@Michael: yes, I use POP and tell Gmail to keep the messages anyway, and it all works (in the sense that I can’t detect any difference when using the web UI, and I get all my messages archived locally with no duplicates). I forget why I chose POP over IMAP; it’s possible that my setup predated Gmail’s IMAP support.
— Mark
@Lars: my $50 hardware DVD player has a “subtitles” button on the remote, and both VLC and mplayer have a subtitles menu. Don’t use software that doesn’t meet your needs; that’s just silly.
— Mark
List of nice Gnu/Linux software:
htop – excellent alternative to “top”. At least htop has an intuitive and useful interface.
filelight – excellent way to find where the disk space has gone
kdiff3 and kompare – might be some nice alternatives to meld
kopete – I think it is better than pidgin
deluge – a simple torrent client, useful for people who use torrents every now and then
cplay – I use it as a simple music player, just because it is dead-simple and does exactly what I need
I would add links to them, but I’m not sure what syntax I must use in this blog, and also I can’t preview comments.