Snippets: lxrandr, PDFs in Chromium, and a VERY old friend…

GUI tool for display settings

(Please bear in mind during the following, that my Eee is not running any desktop environment (DE—i.e.GNOME, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, etc…)

For some time, I’ve been looking for a non-fiddly (and preferably GUI) way of switching display modes on my Eee, especially if an external VGA monitor is connected. The basic tool for controlling displays, xrandr, is powerful and flexible, but also quite difficult to use if one is not gifted with a particularly good memory for complicated command-line strings (especially if more than one display is involved).

lxrandr

There are a number of graphical front-ends for xrandr, but I found all the ones that I tried, were either clunky, buggy, partially or entirely ineffective, or a combination of these. However, the other day (and I can’t remember where), I read a suggestion that Linux users not employing a DE, could try lxrandr, the display settings GUI used in the LXDE desktop environment.

Installing lxrandr isn’t difficult, as it can be found in the main Arch repositories—a simple sudo pacman -S lxrandr should be sufficient. As you can see from the screenshot, the program makes it very easy to activate, deactivate and configure displays; I have used it to control the output from my Eee to a VGA monitor, and as long as xrandr can detect display modes and the like, then I imagine lxrandr should be able to do so too.

In short: if you’re after a simple but effective GUI for a Linux system without a DE, then you could do far worse than try out lxrandr.

Enabling “native” PDF viewing in Chromium

The default Web browser I use on the Eee is Chromium (basically, the open-sourced relative of Google Chrome without the Google branding and other “hooks”). In most respects, the Chromium in the Arch Linux repositories is more or less identical to Chrome in functionality, but one missing feature—which you may or may not miss—is Chrome’s built-in PDF-viewing functionality.

If you do miss it, the Arch wiki reveals a few options for PDF-enabling Chromium; my preferred option, which I’ve used on the Eee, is to install chromium-stable-libpdf from the AUR. This seems to work without a blip, and Chromium auto-updates from then onwards without losing the PDF feature, so it’s worth a try if you want this (and/or are looking for an alternative to Adobe Reader, Evince, xpdf and their ilk…).

And the “old friend”…

NCSA Mosaic on my Eee, "displaying" the Google home page...

Time to show my age: the first Web browser I ever saw, was NCSA Mosaic, running on Windows 3.1x in the autumn of 1994. It was soon overtaken by Netscape, and I didn’t think much about Mosaic until recently, when I learned someone has been modifying the X11 Mosaic source code, so it will compile and run on modern Linux systems. Moreover, as I suspected would happen, someone has added a Mosaic package to the AUR, so I just couldn’t resist finding out if I could get the ancient browser going on my 701…

And here is a screenshot to prove it: NCSA Mosaic running on my Eee under Arch Linux (the screenshot was taken from a 1280×1024 external display, in case you wondered why it looks larger than 800×480)!

There’s probably a whole blog post to be written about how well Mosaic copes (a) on a modern Linux system, and (b) on the Web after fifteen years of leaving Mosaic behind, but suffice it to say, the screenshot on the right is supposed to be the Google home page. You may draw what conclusions you like from this…

My Eee Desktop – January 2012

I wasn’t sure whether I would post a screenshot for this month, as I thought it most likely that I’d be using a setup more or less unchanged from my second screenshot in October last year (“TheGrid” theme). However, it didn’t quite turn out that way…

My Eee Desktop - January 2012

If you’ve read the last post I wrote on this blog, you will be aware that I am eagerly awaiting the launch of the Raspberry Pi (an ultra-low-cost computer on a circuit board the size of a credit card, running on an ARM processor). To cut a long story short, I’m already thinking of software I could run under Linux on the machine, and the Fluxbox window manager (which I use on my Eee 701) is one possibility I have been considering.

With the above in mind, I thought I would try creating a Fluxbox “style” (theme) based on the Raspberry Pi logo and its colours. Not only would the theme aim to reflect this identity, but I wanted a Fluxbox style which would be clear, minimalist and uncluttered, and be usable and readable at a wide selection of screen resolutions (up to and including full HD (1920×1280), which the “RasPi” is apparently more than capable of).

This month’s “My Eee Desktop” shows where I have reached with the Raspberry Pi style. I created the wallpaper image in Inkscape—the RasPi logo has been made available as an SVG vector image, so I took this and placed it over a gradient-filled circle (to give the “halo” effect) on a black background.

The wallpaper image is set at 800×480 resolution (that of the Eee 701), but if a higher resolution is used, the image is centred on the screen and the background around it is also black, so the style is very adaptable. As I would envisage connecting a RasPi to an HD TV, I chose black as the most suitable background colour for looking at over a lengthy period (just in case!). The menu and window fonts are set a little larger than normal for my Fluxbox styles, to make them more readable at high resolutions, whilst still not taking up too much space on an 800×480 display.

The only other point to note (particularly for longer-term readers here), is the addition of a GKrellM plugin to add an analogue clock. This takes up slightly less vertical space than a WindowMaker dockapp (as do most of GKrellM’s “monitors”), which on a screen with only 480 vertical rows of pixels, makes plenty of difference!

That’s all for this month—see you in February with another desktop

Raspberry Pi: a PC in your pocket?

Raspberry Pi,
originally uploaded by ubuntunewsru.

If you follow the tech and gadget press—and perhaps even the “regular” media’s technology supplements—you may have got wind of a British-initiated IT project which has garnered a considerable amount of interest in recent months… and has now grabbed my attention too

The product in question is the Raspberry Pi, and although it is officially aimed at schools and the education market, the device already has computing and Linux fans straining at the leash to get their paws on one.

Judging by the coverage, the reasons are not hard to understand. In short, the Raspberry Pi is a functioning computer, with (on the “Model B”) an ARM processor, 256Mb RAM, a OpenGL-capable graphics system with HDMI and component video output, audio out, 10/100 Ethernet, USB and 5V micro-USB power… all built onto a circuit board the size of a credit card, and likely to cost around UKP25. Initially, the device will be sold “as is”, without a case or enclosure, though from what I have read, there is no shortage of enthusiasts stepping up to design custom cases, or suggest alternative enclosures (an empty tin of Altoid mints seems to be a popular one!).

There are plenty of news sites picking up on the potential of a device like this. To pick one out at random, The Guardian has given the Pi some attention in its Education section, focusing on the avowed aim of the project to revitalise the teaching of computing in schools (and perhaps even inspire a new generation of coders and ‘hackers’ (in the non-criminal, inventive sense of the term)).

OK… so why am I posting on my Eee blog about the “R-Pi”? One reason is that I’ve always been interested in small and inexpensive computers, from the Psion Series 3x and Series 5mx I owned in the late 90s, through to the Eee 701 itself, and the Raspberry Pi looks like it packs a lot of functionality into a very small and cheap package.

Furthermore, as a leaf through this very blog should reveal, I am a keen Linux “tinkerer” when it comes to my Eee, and the R-Pi provides ample scope for experimentation, with HDMI, USB and Ethernet connectivity in a low-power device. There are a number of prominent Linux distributions which have been ported to the ARM processor family, including Debian and Fedora, but most of interest to me is Arch Linux ARM, as I could hopefully “port” my experience with Arch’s x86 sibling to the R-Pi.

Finally: quite simply, my imagination is fired by the idea of a usable computer which could fit in a pocket. Any HDMI display could be used as a monitor, as well as just about any keyboard or pointing device with a USB interface—even a combined one with a wireless “dongle” should work—so the device should be usable wherever you could find a “spare” TV or HDMI-equipped monitor. I’m not the only one thinking that the R-Pi could make an extremely affordable “media centre” computer, and look forward to seeing how that pans out…

The word is that the Raspberry Pi will be made available to purchase from their Web site from the end of this month (January 2012), and I for one will be keeping an eye on this very closely.

Happy New Year

Well, just as the title says, really

Thanks to everyone who has stuck with this blog since I resurrected it last July—it has had a few quiet periods since then (including December, as it happens), but I have a couple of thoughts for posts this month, the first of which you should see here in a few days’ time.

I’m not sure yet whether I’ll do a “My Eee Desktop” post in January, as my 701′s desktop is likely to look virtually identical to the screenshot in this article (i.e. virtually unchanged), but perhaps I’ll upload a pic anyway to keep the tradition going.

Anyway, thanks again for reading, and best wishes to all you good readers for 2012!