Division By 0

Once upon a time there was a young man that worked a lot on christmas with his laptop. Of all christmas there was one only that on which he had so much work he just needed to get all done in no time. It could be destiny or just bad luck, but just when those christmas days were beginning, the laptop stopped working and the young man had to send it to costumer service. Even without his laptop, the young man worked as hard as he could.

The laptop was one of a kind. Robust, powerful, beautiful. As the man usually worked with virtual machines he needed a lot of memory, so he bought 4GB RAM when he started working with that laptop. That didn’t work out of the box because of some memory mapping problems with the graphics chip, but there was a official bios update that fixed the problem, so nothing could go better.

When he got his laptop back, the young man was very happy. But happiness usually doesn’t last too much. The memory mapping bug was back, and when he tried to update the bios, he found out the motherboard was different and there weren’t any compatible bios updates. When looking for a solution, he discovered this problem was unsolved since 9 months ago, and the manufacturer remained in silence, ignoring their costumer’s requests. When he read the four character name of the manufacturer he felt hatred. Not only against them, but against all manufacturers in general. It happened with one manufacturer this time, but previously it was with other, and sure it will happen again and again.

And thus this tale ends with a laptop that feels horribly different to how it felt before supposedly getting repaired.

Moral: You cannot trust any manufacturer, it always comes down to this as they grow.

Lately there has been a lot of things going on inside Divide By 0. When I started this little project I had a lot of things in mind, but let’s say that wasn’t the moment. It’s not like this is the best moment, though! I can barely stop to breathe these days, but I hope what has been done will be for good! Let’s take a tour on what’s new.

The blog, also in english!

English right now is quite a universal language, and one of my intentions with this blog was making its content available to as much people as I could. Thanks to polyglot, now I can accomplish that, and I started by translating previous posts. My english isn’t perfect, you are warned! The blog will automatically use the default language in your browser, and you can change that language session-wide by using the flags in the sidebar or in each individual post header.

Another URL

Now it is possible to visit this web by the old http://divisionentrecero.com URL and by the new http://divisionby0.net

Photo gallery

We’re going into the photography world! I always wanted to make a gallery of my own but hadn’t what I needed to. Now I have, so stay tuned there too!The gallery is powered by Zenphoto.

http://gallery.divisionby0.net

Feeds page

There is a brand new feeds page where you’ll find links to all feeds this page offers, including the new english and gallery feeds. You can access it through the top right link or through here. Please update your feed reader with the new URLs.

XHTML1.0 standard compliant

Just as a side note, I corrected some problems with the HTML code that prevented this web from being XHTML1.0 compliant. Bad luck with the CSS standard, though. The CSS validator doesn’t like one of the wordpress plugins, I’ll try to correct it further on.

In one of the last posts we saw how to achieve a lightweight Debian installation with LXDE, a Desktop Environment with netbooks in mind. But there are a lot of reasons to get simple and let behind the Desktop Environment concept (DE from now on) for a Window Manager (WM from now on). The step we are taking now is Openbox.

Openbox is a WM, and just to keep the record, it is the WM LXDE uses (so if we followed the last how-to we are somehow familiarized with it). What is a WM? It is an application that manages the position, size, movement and usually, the decoration (title bar) of windows, besides cool features. The smartest will probably understood by now that every DE uses a WM. There are two types of WM; floating and tiling. The first one is similar to what we can find on DEs: overlapping floating windows we can drag and drop with our mice. The second one is geared towards keyboard users and tries to share the screen space amongst windows following user specified rules, so when the user runs applications the WM adjusts all windows size and position. Openbox is of the first type.

One thing users must deal with with WMs is that a lot of them haven’t panel as is. It is possible to install a lot of different panels, though, but as I see it, Openbox is nearly perfect without one. To realize this, we must think about for what we use panels and how this tasks are accomplished with Openbox:

• In panels we have menus -> In Openbox we can right-click (default) anywhere to get a configurable menu where we clicked.
• In panels we have a list of opened applications -> In Openbox we can middle-click (default) anywhere to get a list of applications in each virtual desktop.
• In panel we have a tray notification area -> In order to achieve this we need to install other software like docker
• In a panel we have widget-like elements like clocks, mixers… -> For this we have to install additional software too, like conky or lal.

Most common features of panels are not only already present in WMs, but usually are better and more usable. Given WMs are simpler than DEs, they are usually more configurable.

The curious thing about this is that as time goes by as a GNU/Linux user and you understand better how things work, you find new ways to achieve what you need easier, getting your user experience better. Those of us who have used Windows for a long time are usually used to getting things in a static, non-customizable way, ad I think it is important to understand what you need and how you can adapt the system to work like you want it to. Habits aren’t that good usually!

Soon I’ll write a Openbox how-to. Stay tuned

Sorry, but this post is not available in english

Sorry, but this post is not available in english