Arch Linux

So I finally got my computer back. Sure took a while. I was sitting with pretty much just a clean Windows Vista install and decided to try something new. Until now Ubuntu has been the only Linux distro that I’ve used so why not try something else. As I’m a customization addict I figured Arch would be a fun choice.

It took some reading, tweaking, testing, installing, reinstalling, uninstalling, partitioning, formatting, configuring and before I knew it I had an Arch system running. Nah to be honest it wasn’t all that bad. I wouldn’t recommend it as a first Linux distro but for anyone who knows a bit about the Linux system it should be doable. And once the actual system is installed it starts getting really fun.

Arch comes with the Pacman package management system which is really easy to use. For a person who is already familiar with apt-get it’s pretty much just a matter of learning the equivelants of already known commands. This makes installing programs and libraries a breeze with Arch.

The real challenge was getting a window manager and desktop environment going. I had decided that I would try out Fluxbox. After messing around with it for a few hours or so I gave up. There were simply stuff I couldn’t get to work that I really wanted. Instead I decided to install XFCE. Again it took a bit of tweaking and configuring but it wasn’t that hard.

So now I got a pretty good and really fast Linux system running on my computer. Still dual booting with Windows mostly so I can develop for both platforms and of course to enjoy a bit of gaming every once in a while. Installing/configuring Arch was a bit of a challenge and this topic might be good for some tutorial later on. However there are plenty to find already if you take the time to look around. I must say I’m really enjoying the distro and I think that I’m going to like it even more than Ubuntu.

Take care everyone
Sigurd

I’m back!

It’s been quite a while since I wrote something and there are a few reasons for this. First of all my GPU kinda crashed in my face and my laptop has been under repair for quite some time now. Secondly I moved to a new city with my girlfriend and I’ve just started studying computer science. To be honest I’m quite psyched. We’re about to write a paper on risks of cloud computing and everything seems really interesting.

To throw in a quick update I can only say that I hope to be back soon. I’m hoping that I can get some articles, tutorials and other fun/interesting things posted here in the near future. I’ve done a load of work on my game engine and I’m looking forward to publishing some snippets.

For the few people who might actually occasionally read my blog I can only say thanks and stay tuned for more to come.

Regards
Sigurd

The Era Astral Project Reborn

On the old version of this blog I had posts about a project know simply as Era Astral. It was a single player RPG project I was working on at that time. I was using C# and XNA for programming the engine of the game and I had way too high expectations especially on my own part.

Now I’m a bit older and a bit wiser. Well not that much older… definitely wiser though. Since then I’ve switched to Linux, taken up C/C++ programming seriously and generally just learned a lot. Recently I then decided to take up the project again. This time around I’ll try and allow other people to do a lot of the work I was planning on doing myself though. To start off with I’m currently working on an initial version of a simple engine and a level editor. This way a lot of the entire design process can be done by non-programmers. This should allow me to really focus on the engine stuff.

Everything is very early in the process as of now but I hope to throw in a few updates here as the project comes along. To start off with here are a few technical specifications of the game and engine.

- Written in C++ and should be generally optimized for speed
- Using OpenGL for graphics wrapped up with SDL
- Cross-Platform! Will run at least on Linux and Windows
- Single player but with the possibility that network might be implemented
- Entire project will probably be open source in the spirit of the GNU/Linux world

That’s it for now. I’ll throw in some more info and maybe even some screenshots once I have something more real to show off.

Stay tuned and take care everyone

Regards
Sigurd

Ubuntu: A Customizable OS!

The first thoughts of new Ubuntu users might be quite different. Some might go
- “Well this isn’t that different from windows…”

Others
- “Damn… this looks good. Nice and smooth…”

While a last group of users may think
- “Wow! I’ve never seen anything this… UGLY!”

Personally I quickly got pretty fond of the general feel to the GNOME Desktop which is the standard desktop environment in Ubuntu. If you like KDE better you could go for Kubuntu. Or for complete simplicity XFCE and Xubuntu might be just your thing.
Whatever you choose there is one major beauty: You can customize pretty much whatever you like. My desktop has gone through countless changes and pretty much every week something is added, removed or just modified. Partly because I like my computer to feel new once in a while and partly because I just like tinkering with stuff.

I’ve just gone through pretty much the biggest changes that I ever made to the look of my system and I have to say that I’m quite pleased with the results. This post is not meant to be a complete customization tutorial. But here’s a screenshot of my desktop and a brief description of what I’ve done to it.

My Ubuntu Desktop

This is just a modified GNOME desktop. The only programs necessary for what you see here is Cairo Dock and Conky which can both be downloaded from the Ubuntu repositories.

sudo apt-get install cairo-dock conky

For now I’ll leave the tweaking to you. There are plenty of tutorials around the internet for how these applications work. Cairo Dock is a highly customizable dock with a pretty good performance and it’s not a memory hog. The icons I used are from various sources. I used GIMP to recolor most of them to fit my system theme better.

Conky is an application which can display informative text about your system and such directly on your desktop. It is – like Cairo Dock – highly customizable and it has endless amounts of possibilities when it comes to tweaking and personalizing the look and feel.

You can find tons of ideas for a customized Ubuntu system around the internet and probably even several hundred screenshots that look better than mine. If you’re like me and like to make your computer feel unique and personal in style then I’m throwing you a couple of links here as a last bonus. These are some great sites that I’ve been using while customizing my system.

GNOME-Look.org – Possibly the best site for customizing GNOME. You can find tons of themes, wallpapers, icons and a lot more here.
Zixpk – Has a great collection of HD wallpapers. Among others the one I’m using.

Tweaking Topics

Basically my operating system never looks the same for more than 2 weeks at a time. At most… I love to tweak every aspect of the system to improve performance, productivity and just the general look and feel. Because of this I almost never get tired of using the system. If you feel the same way to some degree then Ubuntu is a really fun system to use.

In Ubuntu you can easily tweak all sorts of things just from the system and its default applications. I’m sure you’ve already changed your theme, background, fonts and such. But there’s a lot more to do. In this post I won’t really go into depth with these topics but just try and give you a few possibilities for things to look at. Later I might write some detailed guides about some nice system tweaking.

Here’s a list of some applications and such that I’ve found really nice. This list consists mainly of things related to system and performance tweaking.

Ubuntu Tweak
This little sweetheart is a great utility for tweaking some of the more or less hidden features of Ubuntu. The program is constantly being improved and new versions are released once in a while. Another great feature is that the program can easily clean up packages for you. Removing cached packages, configuration leftovers and old kernels no longer in use.

Ubuntu Tweak can be downloaded from the internet or you can add a PPA to your sources list to make sure that the program is always up to date. Everything you need to know can be found here:
http://ubuntu-tweak.com/

Preload
Preload is a utility that tries to predict what programs you are about to use. It will then load parts of the programs into memory to decrease the startup time for applications. It’s pretty nice and needs no configuration what so ever. It’s in the repositories and can be installed (and started) using this command:

sudo apt-get install preload

BleachBit
If you come from Windows you might know about the application called CCleaner. A really nice utility for cleaning up various parts of the computer. BleachBit is quite similar and can easily be installed in Ubuntu. Like Preload it’s in the repositories so installing is very easy. Running this program once in a while will take care of cleaning up after the system and various applications.

Deborphan and localepurge
A few extra applications that can help you remove unnecessary data from your computer. Deborphan can find packages that are no longer in use so you can get rid of them. Be careful though as it might think a package is unused although it’s actually just needed by an application you got from another source than the repos.

Localepurge automatically removes small pieces of data left behind when installing packages and such. It will clean up a bit even if you never call the program explicitly.

And there you go. A few programs that can be used to keep your computer running smoothly. As I said I might go into some more in depth tweaking later on and I might make a similar list for some nice visual tweaks and eyecandy and such at a later time. Feel free to check back once in a while.

Sigurd out…

The Wonders of BASH

Here comes my very first post about my adventures in the world of Linux and Ubuntu. Not long after getting my new wonderful OS I stumbled upon the term BASH. The Bourne-Again SHell is a Unix shell integrated in Linux which allows you to run a lot of useful commands from the terminal. Also you can easily create your own scripts for executing various tasks that you like to perform often.

Here are a few examples of the scripts that I’ve made to make some of the everyday tasks even easier. The first one is a simple script to run through the Aptitude repositories for updates for all my installed packages. I simply created a new file named update-script.sh and filled in these commands:

#!/bin/bash

echo "Updating package database."
sudo apt-get update

echo "Upgrading packages."
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

This is pretty much as simple as BASH scripting gets. I find myself using these two commands often to make sure that my packages are updated to the latest version. Right click the file when you’re done, click Properties and go to Access. Check the “Allow execution of this file as a program” option. Now to make things even easier I decided to make this script callable from a simple terminal alias. You can do this from the .bashrc file located in the home directory. I made a section for custom aliases within the file and added this line:

alias update='~/Scripts/update-script.sh'

Of course you have to use the exact path of the script file here. After this I can simply start my terminal and type update to execute this script.
My second script is a bit longer. It contains some useful commands for cleaning up after playing around with packages and such. This script also uses the programs localepurge and deborphan. These can be downloaded from Aptitude.

sudo apt-get install localepurge deborphan

And here’s the script then.

#!/bin/bash

echo "Cleaning trash..."
rm -f ~/.locale/share/Trash/*/*
echo "Performing clean..."
sudo apt-get clean
echo "Performing autoremove..."
sudo apt-get autoremove --purge
echo "Removing archived packages..."
sudo rm -f /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
sudo rm -f /var/cache/apt/archives/partial/*.deb
echo "Running localepurge..."
sudo localepurge -v
echo "Running deborphan..."
sudo deborphan | xargs sudo apt-get -y remove --purge

And there you have it. This handy script takes care of cleaning up the system in quite a few ways. Archived packages, unused packages and orphaned pakcages are removed and configurations are purged. Also localepurge takes care of removing small pieces of unnecessary data from package installations. Like with the update script I added an alias entry in my .bashrc file.

I use these scripts often and they make it incredibly easy to keep my system up-to-date and running smoothly. I hope to write a bit more about some useful BASH tricks in the future so please check back once in a while.

Happy BASH’ing everyone
Sigurd

The Blog Revival

And so I finally managed to clear out my old blog and get started from scratch. For those of you who have never been here (which is probably most of you) I suppose I can briefly introduce myself.

My name is Sigurd Suhm and I am a 20 year old guy from Denmark. Yup… that’s the small insignificant county right in the center of Scandinavia. Contrary to popular belief actually not the capital of Sweden (or IKEA for that matter). I’m about to start an education in computer science at a danish university and I’m kinda hoping to end up in the software development industry.

Now what would a guy like this blog about? Quit obvious… This blog will mainly consist of various articles and tales from my progress within the world of computer technology. Now if this made you drop from your chair out of boredom then I’m sure you can find a ‘Quit’ option somewhere in your browser. Hehe…

I’m a hobby software devloper playing around with all sorts of stuff. Game programming is one of my passions and I’ll most definately talk quite a bit about that sometime. Over the past few years I had heard the name Linux mentioned several times and during the spring of ‘09 I decided to give it a try. I landed in the wonderful world of Linux just as Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) was released. Ubuntu has been my primary operating system since then and I’ve enjoyed every bit of it. Naturally I’ll probably also talk a bit about Linux in my posts.

Not much else to say. If you – like me – are a person who is curious when it comes to the technical wonders of the modern world then I hope you’ll enjoy some of my writings here. If not… well then I hope that you’ll see the light sometime. Hehe…

Have a blast everyone.
Regards
Sigurd