The third chapter in the epic struggles of a Windows geek forced by Vista to move to Linux.
So I have a working Linux system now. But in true geek fashion, I’m not happy with it yet. For one thing, the VMware Tools package (that I finally managed to get installed in the previous entry) has a window that it keeps open on the screen whenever it’s running. If you close the window, the feature that I wanted most from that package (the ability to leave the virtual machine window by simply moving the mouse cursor out of it) goes away too. It can be minimized, but it still takes up space on the taskbar that way. Un-freakin’-acceptable. Research time.
It seems that I can start any program as a background task by putting an ampersand at the end of the command. Great, as a background process it shouldn’t show up on the screen, right? Wrong. It turns out that the ampersand just detaches the process from the terminal window that you’re using, running it in the “background” only with reference to the CPU; the window shows up anyway. Okay, what about starting it before the X-windows system is started? No go there either… I don’t recall now whether it simply didn’t start up at all that way, or whether it started up but displayed the window as soon as the X-windows system appeared, but it still wasn’t acceptable. Back to research.
Finally I ran across an offhand comment on the Ubuntu Forums site that mentioned a program called AllTray. I took a look at it and discovered that it was the answer to my prayers: with it, it looked like I could have VMware Tools (or any other program!) start up hidden, with only a small icon in the system tray (which in Ubuntu is in the upper-right corner, rather than the Windows lower-right) to show that it’s running and call it up if I wanted to change something on it. A little experimentation showed that it worked as advertised, making me a happy camper.
Somewhere in all of this, I discover the magic command-line invocation: “sudo apt-get install X“, where the X is replaced by the name of the package that you want to install, such as “alltray” (without the quotation marks). It’s probably easier to do it via the GUI “Add/Remove Applications”, but as mentioned in previous entries, I’m more of a keyboard and command-line guy; if I’ve already got a terminal window open and I know what I want to do, I’d rather type a command than grab a mouse and maneuver through windows to find what I want.
At least, most of the time. While I was doing all this experimentation, I occasionally did things that the terminal program didn’t like. It showed it’s dislike by issuing a “system beep” — the kind of beep that normally comes out of the tiny, tinny little monotonic and monophonic speaker inside the computer’s case. A perfectly understandable default, since a lot of systems that Linux would be asked to run on might not have more advanced sound capabilities. The hardware provides no way to control the volume of it, but that’s not a problem as it’s usually loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to be offensive. Usually.
Do you recall the scene near the beginning of the first Back to the Future movie, where Michael J. Fox’s character hooks an electric guitar to a set of experimental amplified speakers that are bigger than he is, and upon strumming the first chord, is blown clear across the room as they overload and self-destruct? Unfortunately, on this Dell notebook computer I’m using, the system beep emulates that chord very well… it’s loud enough to wake the dead, and it startled curses out of both myself and my wife several times when I pressed a key that the terminal program didn’t approve of. I didn’t think there was much I could do about it, since under Windows (and OS/2 and DOS before it) it was only controllable at the program level, but I thought Linux might surprise me. It did… Ubuntu’s sound panel has a tab dedicated to the system beep. You still can’t control the volume, but you can turn it off at the OS level, or even supplement or replace it with a screen-flash. Ahhh, the sound of silence!
I also ran into a minor problem, in that Ubuntu (probably due to VMware, though I didn’t confirm that) didn’t detect that I had a mouse with a scroll wheel. It’s amazing how something as insignificant as the scroll wheel on a mouse becomes so ingrained and important in the way you work… fortunately, there’s an easy fix for that problem too.
It’s almost time for software.
To search for a package by keyword on the command line, “apt-cache search foo”. To give a more or less complete description once you’ve got the package name “bar”, “apt-cache show bar”.
Another possibility for the fellow command-line junkie is you can use aptitude as a character-based menu program to search and select packages, or on the command line, with similar commands to apt-get. (The advantage is you, if you use it consistently, can easily remove dependencies along with the original package when you “purge” or “remove” it using aptitude, while you have to choose a separate utility, I think deborphan, to do this with apt-get.)
Of course, apt-get has advantages, you get to see easily the “recommends” and “suggests”, select them according to one’s needs manually (this can be useful when aptitude wants to pull in the kitchen sink from a chain of recommends) and aptitude sometimes thinks it needs to remove things it doesn’t… apt-get of course, does exactly what you tell it. So maybe simply use aptitude to browse for something if apt-cache isn’t getting the right results out of the literally tens of thousands of Ubuntu packages. 🙂
Amongst the GUI tools, if you need a full selection, use synaptic. “Add/Remove programs” in Ubuntu is very user-friendly and has a nice assortment to choose from, but is just dipping its toes in the ocean of choices that await the power-user, command-line or GUI. 🙂 (Personally I don’t like synaptic much, though not because it’s a GUI but because it’s got defaults I don’t prefer to aptitude’s or apt-get’s when adding packages. It’s got decent search capabilities though.)
On any *nix system running X, To turn off the system beep, “xset b off”, this should work on any distro if you’re in the X Window System. (Of course, the ALSA sound system’s mixer has a separate volume for the speaker. Maybe OSS too, but ALSA is the system in all normally configured 2.6 kernels anyway. (OSS can be emulated fine by ALSA.) However, it doesn’t even matter if its Linux, “xset b off” should work in any system running X11 with the usual utilities.)
Clear as mud? 😉
Thanks for the extra info. I wasn’t aware of most of it.