export PS1="\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[01;34m\] \w \$\[\033[00m\] “

which results in a prompt that looks like this:

Ouch, that looks much better in the middle of a console than it does against the white background of my blog. Oh, well.

For root’s prompt, I use a bright yellow hash prompt that reminds me to be careful. I also don’t display the working directory; if I’m root I’ve already made sure I know where I am.

export "PS1=\[\033[01;31m\]\h\[\033[01;34m\] \W \[\033[01;33m\]\\$\[\033[00m\] “

Then I remembered seeing an install script at SlackBuilds.org for it.  Five minutes later, all was good.  I love that site.  While I’m plugging it, I’ll mention that I had a little trouble with their script for the backgammon game gnubg;  I got a version of gnubg without 3D board support.  Within minutes of posting a build log to their mailing list, the script maintainer got back to me, saying that I was missing the package that adds gl support for gtk and that he’d forgotten to list it as an optional dependency.  Again, five minutes later I had everything recompiled and working perfectly.  Those people are good!

Update: I gave up on the approach below and solved the problem by modifying the kdeeject script per comment 13 in this Gentoo bug report.  This seems a lot better than screwing with the device’s permissions.

The only actual problem I have, and it’s really just an annoyance, is with KDE’s option to “safely remove device” for USB drives. That option uses eject instead of just umount. That’s fine, as eject works on my USB drives as long as the user has enough permission.

The problem arises because of default udev rules that make the owner of the device root:disk, and the user isn’t in the disk group. eject calls umount, so the device is unmounted, and no harm is done. But eject exits with error code 1, so KDE throws up an error window (along with its lovely breaking glass sound).

Two solutions mentioned on the intertron are to patch the KDE component which handles “safely remove” or to modify a script KDE uses. The third solution, which I would like to use, is just to write a new udev rule to make sure the device is owned by root:plugdev (and of course the user should be in the plugdev group). I’ve done this for just the WD drive which has the problem, but a rule can be written to handle all removable storage. The rule has to be processed after the default udev rules handling block devices.

That’s a pretty good rundown of my understanding of the problem, but something is lacking in my understanding, because that solution doesn’t work under Slackware. It does work under Gentoo, where I had the same problem.

I’m in the plugdev group, and here are the drive’s permissions:

$ ls -l /dev/bigpassport
brw-rw---- 1 root plugdev 8, 17 2008-05-13 17:50 /dev/bigpassport

I still think it’s a permissions problem, since eject does work when run as root. Here’s the eject output, with the drive mounted first, for user:

$ eject -v bigpassport; echo "exit code $?"
eject: device name is `bigpassport'
eject: expanded name is `/dev/bigpassport'
eject: `/dev/bigpassport' is mounted at `/media/bigpassport'
eject: unmounting device `/dev/bigpassport' from `/media/bigpassport'
eject: `/dev/bigpassport' is not a multipartition device
eject: trying to eject `/dev/bigpassport' using CD-ROM eject command
eject: CD-ROM eject command failed
eject: trying to eject `/dev/bigpassport' using SCSI commands
eject: SCSI eject failed
eject: trying to eject `/dev/bigpassport' using floppy eject command
eject: floppy eject command failed
eject: trying to eject `/dev/bigpassport' using tape offline command
eject: tape offline command failed
eject: unable to eject, last error: Invalid argument
exit code 1

And for root:

# eject -v bigpassport; echo exit code "$?"
eject: device name is `bigpassport'
eject: expanded name is `/dev/bigpassport'
eject: `/dev/bigpassport' is mounted at `/media/bigpassport'
eject: unmounting device `/dev/bigpassport' from `/media/bigpassport'
eject: `/dev/bigpassport' is not a multipartition device
eject: trying to eject `/dev/bigpassport' using CD-ROM eject command
eject: CD-ROM eject command failed
eject: trying to eject `/dev/bigpassport' using SCSI commands
eject: SCSI eject succeeded
exit code 0

I have a Logitech wireless USB mouse. Mousewheel scrolling didn’t work out of the box, but changing the protocol to “IMPS/2″ and addingOption "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" fixed that.

I used GIMP to make a grub splash image. It looks pretty rough when stretched to fit the 20 inch monitor, but my rudimentary graphics skills aren’t up to making something pretty.  Anyway, it works with the grub from System Rescue CD.

Installing the driver for the HP 1020 went just as smoothly as before.

That’s enough tinkering with Slackware for today.  Now I’ll switch to installing the ridiculous number of Firefox extensions I use.

Now, of course, I’m kicking myself. I’ve just installed Slackware 12.1 and am beginning to put back into place the stuff I want or need. And this time I’m going to try to document a lot of it here, if only so I can find it again if I need it. There are some things I do to any GNU/Linux install, and I forget the details of how to do them — I’m hoping if I put them here, I can save myself some re-re-re-googling down the line.

So far, I’ve just installed it and the grub bootloader. The Slackware way is to use lilo instead of grub, but I really prefer grub. Slackware does provide a build of grub, but that’s not much use before Slack is bootable. I use System Rescue CD to install grub; it’s a Gentoo livecd with some good tools, and I’m most comfortable with Gentoo. The stage files grub needs aren’t in the cd’s /usr/share/, but it’s easy enough to copy them from /boot/. Then the grub commands I needed were just root (hd0,4) and then setup (hd0,4).

I couldn’t recall what parameters need to be passed to a Slack kernel, but it turned out that just using kernel (hd0,0)/boot/[kernelfilename] root=/dev/sda7 ro works ok. Later (much later), I’ll at least get framebuffer goodness and maybe a grubsplash. And compile a slimmer kernel — for now, I’m using the huge-smp one.

The desktop only has dial-up, and once again Slackware’s pppsetup works fine to get a connection. I also set up kppp without problems.

I’d forgotten how annoying KDE’s sound scheme is. I turned it all off immediately.

Next up: nVidia drivers and xorg config, udev rules for USB drives.

So then I thought I’d write about some other stuff, including books. But then I did set up a goodreads account, so that stuff goes there now. This somehow forces a few people to actually read it, unlike qblog.

So I don’t really have any reason to blog on any consistent basis. Rather than pull the domain, I guess I’ll leave it here, and maybe once in a blue moon post something.

In other happy news, Richard Thompson is playing JazzFest this year. But it looks like the first Sunday is my must-go day, with Al Green, Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint, Cassandra Wilson, Delbert McClinton, and Del McCoury.

The first one, which is that last one I finished, is William Vollmann’s Europe Central. I can’t give it a proper evaluation, because I didn’t read it fairly. I started it before Katrina. After Katrina took it from me, I bought it again and tried to continue, but it was too dense and bleak for me at that time. (A Confederacy of Dunces, which is partly responsible for bringing me to New Orleans in the first place, was serendipitously lying beside by my bed-in-exile, so I reread that, then started reading the NYT through every day. Confederacy helped; the NYT was a little bleak, you know.)

So, just very recently, I’ve been feeling pretty good, and I decided to go back to Europe Central. Vollmann uses his familiar imagined-history approach, but allows himself much more license for it than in his Seven Dreams. Here he imagines the lives of artists (Käthe Kollwitz, Roman Karmen, Dmitri Shostakovitch), military commanders (Andrey Vlasov, Friedrich Paulus), and others (most notably SS officer Kurt Gerstein) in an ambitious attempt to get at the nature of living with war and totalitarianism in the twentieth century.

Based only on the last third of it, which I just read, he largely succeeds. The prose is as good as anything he’s written. That last third follows Shostakovitch from the end of the war until his death; it ties into some things Vollmann has done nearer the beginning of the book, and I think to really appreciated it I’d need to read it through from the start again. In particular, I should pay more attention to the stretch about Käthe Kollwitz.

But I’m not going to any time soon. Instead, I’m rereading Vollmann’s The Rifles. This one gave me real trouble the first time through, but I since I seem to be in a good place for reading Vollmann, I’d like to see what I can get from it now.

I’m not very savvy when it comes to finding the best deals on air travel. I needed to book a flight, and my plan was to try Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz to see who’d give me the best deal and just take that. Expedia was down for maintenance and said it would be back tomorrow; I guess they have to retool sometime, but I’m not waiting until tomorrow.

Travelocity’s site is FUBAR in my browser, Firefox. Ok, maybe not that bad, but bad enough to make it unusable by me. I use a 20-inch monitor, which I love, at its native 1600×1200 resolution. If I let websites decide what font size they’d like me to see, I’d spend a lot of time squinting at the screen. I set a minimum font size to avoid any such squinting. At Travelocity, this causes the options for flight/hotel/automobile to be covered up by the navigation menu. Also, their “From” and “To” input boxes seem to be covering up some important options.

This sucks for them, since I just used Orbitz instead. Sure, I could have used another browser, or another Firefox profile, or just temporarily changed my usual settings. But with Orbitz one click away, I didn’t.

After buying my tickets from Orbitz, I had a look at the Travelocity page in the DOM Inspector. Their not-so-careful web designer would like the font size of the navigation menu to be 11.7 px, whereas with my settings it’s 14 px. That made the menu wrap, and with their line-height setting and some padding, it pushed the “About Travelocity” link down over the top of the options I most needed to get at.

14 px isn’t exactly an insanely large font size. I wonder how much business they’ve lost because of their misconception that the web is a one-size-fits-all environment. Firefox is not the only browser which gives the user decent control — Konqueror, Opera, and Safari all let their users choose a minimum font size, and I’m sure these are not the only ones.

At Orbitz, I had to click through a great lot of pages to get my purchase taken care of. Every page displayed just fine.

The title of this post is a bit misleading. I’m not going to consider these avatars and what’s so annoying about them. If you like them, fine, and keep looking at them. Did I mention I hate them, though? Well, I do. So I gave a little thought about how to best get rid of them. There are many ways, from just turning off images while I browse forums to writing css to hide them. But the quickest way I happened to have at my fingertips was to use Adblock Plus, one of my favorite Firefox extensions.

A quick look at the Gentoo forums showed that all the avatars live in the same directory on the Gentoo site itself, which makes blocking them extra super easy. (That’s right, I said extra super easy.) I went to a forum page, opened Adblock Plus’ list of blockable items and clicked one of the avatar URIs, then changed the filename to a nice generic wildcard asterisk.

http://forums.gentoo.org/images/avatars/*

So now I’ll never see the cute little pictures while I read about Gentoo. Of course, I’d need to do something similar for any forums I want to read, but it’s simple enough that I almost don’t mind.