Read about Linux
I’m considering splitting this blog into multiple blogs, but before I do that I want to find a good desktop blog publishing program to ease the transition on my end.However, I use Linux almost exclusively and from what I’m seeing and reading "good desktop blog publishing" and "Linux" are mutually exclusive.
It isn’t often that Linux fails me, but all I can find are complaints about how Linux Blogging Sucks. I have a few more programs to test but for right now I agree. I am right now testing Bleezer. Although it looked like one of the most promising, I’m not impressed. I’m able to download my last 15 posts, but not my draft posts nor posts older than 15. In the WYSIWYG interface inserting links is rather irritating and I’ve had to come up with "tricks" just to be able to comfortable add links — sort of a non-issue because I’d never use it.
It continually surprises and impresses me, in a good way. As a little background: I’ve used Linux at a moderate to advanced level for a few years now: I’ve never written a bash script longer than 6 lines and never hacked the kernel, but I’m not afraid of the command line and have no problems editing my xorg.conf, grub.conf or any other system files using nano. The command line is my friend, but I still like a GUI admin panel sometimes. I’ve totally switched to Linux as evidenced by the fact that the last copy of Microsoft office I purchased or used on my own computers was 2000.
Anyway, I recently bought a new laptop and I set it up as a dual-boot system with Vista and Ubuntu (I originally had a triple boot system with Open Suse until I remembered how clunky RPM based Distros are and I have a whole post full of “observations” about Vista, but this is all neither here nor there.) I was testing the battery life, ran it down, plugged it back into the power cord, and, for some unknown reason, I right clicked the battery life indicator.
Bash Script to Set Random XScreensaver as background
This short bash script will randomly select a screensaver and display it in your background window, so you can have a random screensaver background instead of having to select a particular. Obviously you will need to have Xscreensaver installed for it to work.
!/bin/bashfiles=(/usr/lib/xscreensaver/*) # Look for files in the XScreensaver folder n=${#files[@]} # For aesthetics "${files[RANDOM % n]}" -root & # Choose a random screensaver and execute it in the root window.
If you haven’t already seen this: the original Star Wars ASCII animation can also be accessed from telnet by telnetting to towel.blinkenlights.nl.
Use the following in your terminal: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
I recently moved my /home folder to its own partition, but in doing so, I broke MySQL. The full error I got was:
Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)
To fix this you need to create the file and make sure that MySQL has access to it. (All commands need to be run as root)
Create the directory (if it doesn’t already exist).
sudo mkdir /var/run/mysqld/Create the file by “touching” it.
sudo touch /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sockSet the ownership of the mysqld.sock file and folder to mysql.
sudo chown -R mysql /var/run/mysqld/You can then start MySQL and breath easier.

