Tag: Fedora Linux

i3 window manager – a week later

A week ago I blogged about i3 window manager and my attempt to use it instead of MATE.  So, how am I am doing so far?

The long story short: I love i3.  It’s awesome.  But I still switch back to MATE once in a while.

What’s good about i3?  It’s super fast.  Even faster than a pretty fast MATE.  It’s keyboard navigated, and it only takes about a day to get used to enough keyboard shortcuts to feel comfortable and productive.  It’s super efficient.  Until I tried i3 I didn’t recognize how much time I spend moving windows around.  It is unexcusable amount of time spent needlessly.

What’s bad about i3?  It’s low level.  In order to make it work right with multiple screens, one need to get really familiar with xrandr, the tool I last used years ago.  If you are on a laptop, with a dynamic setup for the second screen (one monitor at the office, one at home, and an occasionally different project at client’s premises), you’ll need a bunch of helper scripts to assist you in quick change between these setups.

And then there is an issue of flickering desktop.  The web is full of questions about how to solve a variety of flickering issues when using i3.  The one that I see most often is the screen going black once in a while.  Sometimes it takes a second to come back, sometimes a few seconds, and sometimes and it doesn’t come back at all.  The more windows I have, spread across more workspaces, with more connected monitors – the more often I see the issues.  It’s annoying, and it’s difficult to troubleshoot or even report, as I haven’t found a pattern yet, or how to reproduce the problem.

With that said though, I am now about 80% time using i3.  I like the simplicity and efficiency of it.  It’s so good, that I work better even without a second monitor.  But when I do need a second monitor (paired programming, demos, etc), or when I have a projector connected, I switch to MATE.  That’s about 20% of my time.

i3 – tiling window manager

In the last few days my attention was unfairly distributed between a whole lot of tasks.  The fragmentation and constant context switching affected my productivity, so I briefly revisited my toolbox setup, in hopes to find something that I didn’t know about, forgot about, or have greatly underutilized.

One of the things that came (again) on my radar was terminal multiplexer tmux.  I’ve blogged about it before.  I used it for a while, but at some point, it faded away from my daily routine.  The two most useful features of tmux are:

  1. Persistent sessions, where you can work on a remote machine, detach your terminal, disconnect from the machine entirely, and then, at some point later, connect again and continue from where you left off.  With simpler workloads and reliable Internet connection, this became less useful to me.  When I do need this functionality, I use screen, which is more often installed on the machines that I work with.
  2. Terminal multiplexer, where you can split your terminal screen into a number of panels and work with each one like it’s a separate terminal.  This is still useful, but can be done by a number of different tools these days.  I use Terminator, which supports both horizontal and vertical screen split.  Terminology is another option from a choice of many.

I thought, let me find something that people who used tmux have moved on to.  That search led me, among other things, to “ditching tmux” thread on HackerNews, where in the comments a few people were talking about i3 tiling window manager.

Continue reading i3 – tiling window manager

How Linux got to be Linux: Test driving 1993-2003 distros

Here’s a trip down the memory lane – “How Linux got to be Linux: Test driving 1993-2003 distros“.  The article looks at some of the early Linux distributions, remember what was already in and what came later.  Complete with screenshots.

I don’t remember for sure which versions of which distributions I used in the early days, but Slackware, Suse, RedHat and Mandrake were definitely among those.  Slackware was probably my first one, when I found the floppies in the only book on Linux at my college library.  Then, somehow, I found RedHat (I think 5.1 or so) in one of the local computer shops.  Later I tried Mandrake and Suse, cause those were laying around at work.  But RedHat stuck with me ever since.  I think I’ve used pretty much every version, including the move to Fedora, CentOS, and even the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which we had the licenses for at some of my early work places.

Fun times!

HexChat IRC Client

Well, apparently I’ve been leaving under a rock for the last few years.  When it comes down to IRC clients, I’ve been mostly using XChat.  Turns out, XChat has been abandoned for years, and it’s still around mostly because Linux distributions care so much about it that they patch it and ship it.

As with anything in the Linux world, there are plenty of alternatives.  And one of them was right under my nose all these years – HexChat:

HexChat is an IRC client based on XChat, but unlike XChat it’s completely free for both Windows and Unix-like systems. Since XChat is open source, it’s perfectly legal.

HexChat is often shipped right next to where XChat is or used to be.  For Fedora users, it’s as close as “dnf install hexchat“.

Migrating to PHP 7

PHP 7.0.0 has been released for a year now.  I wasn’t in a rush to migrate to it, but with all the cool features and performance optimization, it’s definitely something I wanted to look into rather sooner than later.

It turns out that I’ve done my first PHP 7 migration a week ago, when I upgraded my laptop to Fedora 25.  Yup, that’s right.  It’s a bit embarrassing, but I have been developing on PHP 7 for a week without even noticing it.

$ php --version
PHP 7.0.13 (cli) (built: Nov 9 2016 07:29:28) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2016 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.0.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2016 Zend Technologies
with Xdebug v2.4.1, Copyright (c) 2002-2016, by Derick Rethans

I think that was due to a few things:

  • It’s been quite a busy week, so my attention was all over the place.
  • PHP 7 backward compatibility is pretty awesome.  There are only a few things that need fixing in the older code bases, but if you haven’t been living under a rock for the last few years, you probably have nothing to change or worry about.
  • Most of the code I’m working on runs through TravisCI builds, which are executed on both PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.  Since we had this for a while now, most, if not all, of our code is PHP 7 compatible.

The absolute lack of any issues for the last week, related to this upgrade, is encouraging.  Now I will probably try to upgrade our servers sooner than later.

With that, I’ll go back to the wonderful and exciting world of PHP, leaving you to decide whether I’m very serious or very sarcastic…