Shanes Place

My view on stuff that I can be bothered to have a view on...

1Password replacement in Linux?

30/03/13 11:51
Linux Revisited
What do I need from a Computer these days?
Choices Choices Choices
Out of the Box
Securing your Laptop
Progress so far…
Dos Games
Photography and Storage in a Mobile World
Photographic Workflow
I love 1Password. It works. I have over 2400 entries in its database. It keeps all my passwords and software registrations. It is integrated into my browser. So now I have to find something that can take over from it that will not be too disruptive of the way I work.
There are quite a few “wallet” type programs out there, but the two that seem to be above the rest are KeePass and KeePassX. KeePass is a windows program that runs on Linux with mono installed, while KeePassX is a qt application. KeePass has a newer, more capable database, while KeePassX is catching up with an alpha release of version 2 databse back-end. KeePass has many add-ons, including “importers” of many other password managers exported contents (plus ascii, csv et al). KeePassX does not, but it will handle an xml file in a certain format.
1Password exports in a tab de-limited file format with fields of your choice included in the export. There are about 20 fields in a 1Password database, many of which do not have corresponding fields in either of the Linux programs, but I will get to that in a minute.

I chose KeePassX, cause I have no use for mono just now, and downloading 160Meg for a “wallet” app didn’t sit well with my leaning towards simplicity.
I installed KeePassX via Gslapt, then I started it up and added a dummy entry to the database. Then I exported that dummy entry - that gave me all the field names and the format for each individual entry in an .xml document.
Next, I exported the contents of my 1Password database in tab delimited format. Be careful with this file as it is in plain text and all passwords and any other “secret” stuff are readable by anyone who can open the file.
The 1Password file was huge, and I couldn’t see any way to match up all its fields with the KeePassX ones, so I went back into 1Password and exported the fields “title”, “name”, “password”, “URL” and “note” - these corresponded to the main KeePassX fields of “title”, “username”, “url”, “password” and “comment”. I didn’t worry about things like “expiry-date” or “pin” as I had nothing in them.

Next, the 1Password file had to become an xml doc in the format defined by KeePassX. I tried the easy way of downloading some scripts that said they could do the transfer, but none of them worked in my tests.
So I wrote a small shell script (uses sed and awk ) to do what I needed. You can find it here.
It’s very simple, and it works, but watch out for the notes field from the 1Password file - I had to delete 2 notes that were long (500 characters+) and contained a mixture of html and plain text, plus the odd newline here and there. Once I got rid of them, the import ran smoothly.

I now have a “password safe” on my Linux box and it has an auto fill feature that works with most websites, but I will need a lot more use of the program to make an informed decision whether or not to keep it. Early days.



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Photographic Workflow

15/03/13 19:52
Linux Revisited
What do I need from a Computer these days?
Choices Choices Choices
Out of the Box
Securing your Laptop
Progress so far…
Dos Games
Photography and Storage in a Mobile World
Darktable is a RAW developer. It looks nice, and it has about a million options. More importantly, it is a non-destructive editor.
There are a number of in-depth walkthroughs for Darktable on the Internet, and I don’t propose to go through it again here, except for the basics and how that affects me.
Currently, I store my pics in folders on my drive. I keep all the changed versions in Aperture, and I use it’s “Edit in External Editor” if I need to travel outside the Aperture universe. The changes only get applied to my images when I export them (for images not edited outside Aperture) and they get exported as is when they have been edited outside Aperture.

Darktable uses an sqlite database to store the changes (and some meta-data) to your pics. It also gives you a .xmp sidecar file that is stored in the folder along with the original image. This means that .xmp “aware” programs can take your image, apply the changes in the .xmp file and you see what you saw in Darktable - and if your Darktable database is corrupted, then on re-importing your images to the database the .xmp file is recognised and incorporated also.

Shotwell will actually index the photos on the disk and use a database as per Darktable, but its organisation features are a better fit for me, and it allows the use of an External editor as per Aperture, which fits the way I work better than Darktable alone.

DigiKam is a KDE program. It will load in all the kde stuff I avoid by using xfce as my desktop environment, so while I think it is the most feature rich organizer out there, I won’t use it at the moment.

Techie note: Shotwell hasn’t been upgraded in a while and it looks like Yorba (it’s owners) are concentrating on other things at the moment. DigiKam, on the other hand has reached v3.0.0 stable, so I am going to bite the bullet and try to build DigiKam with its millions of dependencies…)

So, here’s my new workflow:

Copy pics from camera/card to my folder structure (DigiKam/Shotwell aware folder).
Start DigiKam/Shotwell, point it at the new stuff, wait while it indexes new pics.
Sort, rate, delete, process etc., as per normal, using Darktable/Gimp/etc., putting finished pictures (suitably re-named) back into the same folder as the original.
View/Export finished articles for use in Camera Club comps, flicker, my web-site etc.

Looks like a plan - the only reservation is doing all this in 2Gig of RAM…

Next up: Password management in Linux

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Photography and Storage in a Mobile World

08/03/13 07:56
Linux Revisited
What do I need from a Computer these days?
Choices Choices Choices
Out of the Box
Securing your Laptop
Progress so far…
Dos Games
I have about 15000 pictures from 5 different cameras. Most are RAW files of 10+ megabytes. A lot of the RAW files have been processed into jpgs and tiffs. Many aren’t worth keeping.
All of them are on several different Aperture libraries. My personal photographs are referenced files - which means the originals are in a folder on a disk and the changes I made to them are in the Aperture library.
I also have my Photography Clubs library of digital images as two separate Aperture Libraries which are not referenced - which means that the original and the (rare) changes are inside the Aperture library. Both of these scenarios have to be handled.

Unfortunately for me, Aperture cannot be upgraded until I upgrade my OS, which I am not willing to do, as I can see no positive benefit to doing that. That means that Aperture will not recognise my newest camera RAW files ( it’s a Panasonic FZ-200 ) so I have to run them through ExifChanger and change the camera model to the FZ-150, when Aperture cheerfully imports them perfectly. :-(

So, we are looking for a work flow that is up-to-date and knows my FZ-200 camera, can suck up a boatload of RAW images, jpgs and tiffs and produce jpgs and tiffs to the standard I have become accustomed to seeing from my iMac and Aperture.

Preliminary looks have not thrown up anything that can do it all, but there are some very interesting options out there - to whit:
Darktable (http://www.darktable.org/)
DigiKam (http://www.digikam.org/)
Shotwell (http://yorba.org/shotwell/)

But before we get into looking closer at these, we need a general strategy for storage in a mobile world.

Currently, I have 4 x 1TB drives attached to my iMac. They contain my music collection, my films collection, an astounding number of e-books of all persuasions, 100’s of megabytes of software, a full Time Machine backup, several mirrored folders from my internal hard drive, lots of my work and lots more “stuff” that I know will come in handy one day. All this has to be either handled or dumped.

Obviously, a laptop that is dependant on 4 x 1TB 3.5” drives in caddies is not really a viable solution. The alternatives are (for me, anyway)
◦ Cloud storage.
I live in rural Scotland. Mobile phone signals are hard to come by in my area (some providers signals get here weakly, others not at all), and as I am over 5k from a telephone exchange (and 10 years plus from being cabled) broadband is slow. Because I have so much to store, this is not economical.
◦ Local NAS/SAN
Not really portable, is it?
◦ Smaller External HDD
Portable, but they don’t make 4TB drives that are USB bus powered yet…

Joking aside, the only practical solution is a combination of these techs, and I think that I am going for DropBox (2GB free), Amazon Cloud Drive (5GB free for 12 months) and my existing VPS (10GB, £7.50 pcm). The VPS also runs my web server and mail server, so not all the 10GB is available. The VPS will be for current project backups.
Locally, I will have a NAS box with seldom accessed files, but ones I want to keep.
Portability will be addressed by the laptop hard drive plus a 1TB USB bus powered drive which will hold the majority of my photos, movies and music.
For backup, I will use my current setup of a rotating set of 1.5TB drives where two sets are on-site and one set is off-site.

As well as all this, I will be instituting a new policy of “If it hasn’t been used in 3 years, dump it”.

That should take care of the storage…

So, to get back to my photographs, here is what I plan to do:

Photo Club Aperture libraries will be exported as originals (as I don’t usually work on them , just store them) and put onto local NAS box.
My photos will be exported as versions as .tiffs for any that have work done on them, then stored in the folders with the RAW image they came from.
Then, all photos will be uploaded the NAS box, prior to copying them to the portable SSD.
My music collection {only the .wav and .aiff ) will be transcoded to .ogg format, then all music files ( .ogg and .mp3 ) will be transferred to the NAS box prior to being copied across to the portable SSD.
My movie collection of DivX, mp4 and AVI files and will be transferred to the NAS box, then onto the portable SSD.
E-books will be transferred to the NAS box.
That way, I will have a copies of everything on the NAS box that can be updated from the laptop (I use rsync ) when that changes. Also the NAS box can be backed up via a spare laptop to my backup sets without interfering with current activity on my main laptop.

This will leave about 150GB on the portable USB for a selection of e-books relevant to my current projects, and for “scratch” usage.

I’m exhausted just thinking about it :-)

OK, next time I am going to look at the three Photo apps listed above - Promise!


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Dos Games

03/03/13 10:46
Linux Revisited
What do I need from a Computer these days?
Choices Choices Choices
Out of the Box
Securing your Laptop
Progress so far…
Dos Games
Photography and Storage in a Mobile World
I installed DosBox using the Gslapt package manager. (Easy-peasy!)

I logged onto my Good Old Games account and downloaded “Master of Magic”. I then ran “setup.exe” - the response was “This program needs Windows to run”, so I installed wine from the Gslapt Package Manager and ran “setup.exe” through wine.

Game installed perfectly, although it ran a bit slowly and had a few graphic glitches…

I moved the directory containing the game files to my “Games” folder in my home directory, then started DosBox, mounted the “Games” directoy as Drive c:, then opened the “Magic.exe” file. Working, sort of…
Played around with the DosBox config file for a while, and now I have a working “Master of Magic” game at 1024x768.

I guess most of the other Dos games I own will be just as easy to get going. Harking back to the old days of MS-DOS 5.5/6.2 and the hoops you had to jump through to get EMS/XMS etc working, tuning the autoexec.bat and the config.sys to free enough ram to get things to work, DosBox is relatively pain-free.

Update: Easier just to grab the games directories from my iMac and copy them to my Games folder under Salix. Dosbox sees them all, runs them all.

Next up, some photographic software…

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Progress so far...

02/03/13 16:48
Linux Revisited
What do I need from a Computer these days?
Choices Choices Choices
Out of the Box
Securing your Laptop
Progress so far…
Dos Games
Photography and Storage in a Mobile World
Salix has been installed for a few days now.
I have completed numbers 1,2 and 3 (Rip DVD/CDs, burn CD’s, watch movies, listen to music) on my list. While DVD ripping is slow, it is about half real-time - i.e. It takes about 45 miutes to rip a 90 minute movie, and around 20 minutes to rip a 44 minute TV show. CD’s rip acceptably quickly. I must remember that this my proof of concept machine, and that I will be upgrading to a better machine once I am satisfied that FOSS can do what I need it to do for me, so performance will be better then.

Number 8 (Write documents, spreadsheets and presentations using Pages, Numbers and Keynote) seems to be taken care of by LibreOffice, which will require a small amount of re-adjustment and learning on my behalf.

Number 11 (email, twitter, rss feeds, podcasts etc) is in progress, with claws mail, installing gPodder for podcasts (and rss feeds ?), but I’m still looking for a useable twitter client…

Number 12 (external USB disks etc) works, nothing special to do, but I am still working on (safe) read/write access to HFS+ disks from my Mac, which are just read-only at this point.

Number 9 (Produce and maintain web sites using Rapidweaver) is a good excuse to satrt using a hosted Wordpress setup and forget about the proprietary stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I love Rapidweaver, but its support hardware is damned expensive. Wordpress I can update from a phone :-)

That leaves quite a bit, (Write music; store, catalogue, edit and print my photographs; produce slideshows with my pictures and my music; produce screencasts ), but hey, we are only two days in….

Number 10 (Dos Games ) is next.


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Securing your laptop

28/02/13 07:58
Linux Revisited
What do I need from a Computer these days?
Choices Choices Choices
Out of the Box
Securing your Laptop
Progress so far…
Dos Games
Photography and Storage in a Mobile World
Security, in the sense of making sure you are safe as possible when on-line, means:



1. Strong passwords.
 If you put in your standard, easy to remember, 6 character password for the root account during the install, change it now - preferably for a minimum of 9 characters, some of which are punctuation.
If your user account password is short and easy to remember, change it also.

2. Run a firewall.
 Salix 13.37 had a program called “ufw” and a configuration front-end called “gufw”. They have been re-packaged for Salix 14.0 , but weren’t available at the time I installed 14.0 so I used the following, placed in a file called “rc.firewall” in the /etc/rc.d/ directory :


#!/bin/bash

# Define variables

IPT=$(which iptables) # change if needed
EXT_IF=eth0 # external interface (connected to internet)
WLAN_IF=wlan0 # Built-in wireless interface

FIREWALL_CONF=/etc/iptables.conf

# Enable TCP SYN Cookie Protection
if [ -e /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_syncookies ]; then
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_syncookies
fi

# Disable ICMP Redirect Acceptance
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/all/accept_redirects

# Do not send Redirect Messages
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/all/send_redirects

if [ -e $FIREWALL_CONF ]; then
iptables-restore < $FIREWALL_CONF
exit 0
fi

# Set default policy to DROP
$IPT -P INPUT DROP
$IPT -P OUTPUT DROP
$IPT -P FORWARD DROP

# Flush old rules
$IPT -F

# Allow loopback traffic
$IPT -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
$IPT -A OUTPUT -o lo -j ACCEPT

# Allow packets of established connections and those related to them
$IPT -A INPUT -i $EXT_IF -m conntrack --ctstate ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
$IPT -A INPUT -i $WLAN_IF -m conntrack --ctstate ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

# Allow all outgoing packets except invalid ones
$IPT -A OUTPUT -o $EXT_IF -m conntrack --ctstate INVALID -j DROP
$IPT -A OUTPUT -o $EXT_IF -j ACCEPT
$IPT -A OUTPUT -o $WLAN_IF -m conntrack --ctstate INVALID -j DROP
$IPT -A OUTPUT -o $WLAN_IF -j ACCEPT

# Allow incoming ssh (uncomment the line below if needed)
$IPT -A INPUT -i $EXT_IF -p tcp --dport 22 --syn -m conntrack --ctstate NEW -j ACCEPT
$IPT -A INPUT -i $WLAN_IF -p tcp --dport 22 --syn -m conntrack --ctstate NEW -j ACCEPT


The base script came from Robby Workman (google rworkman) and I added the WLAN_IF bits and bobs. Basically, nothing can connect to your laptop except ssh on port 22. Your laptop, however, can talk to the world, as long it starts the conversation. Make the “rc.firewall” file executable (“chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall” as root) and it will be automatically started on boot.
This is what I would call the minimum level of security on your laptop.

3. General.
Never enable auto-login. Yes, typing your password is a pain, not as much pain as finding someone has opened your laptop and started a “rm -rf ~“ command on it.
Never run as root. Unless you have to. Look carefully at “sudo”, weigh its advantages and disadvantages, then use it if it seems right to you.
Never leave your laptop without locking the screen. Always use a password on your screensaver. Never leave your laptop unattended - in a library, coffee shop or in your car. Assess the need for fully encrypted partition(s). Never use ftp, rlogin or telnet on public networks. Always assume that anyone who has physical access to your machine has access to everything on that machine.

Follow these tips and you will be shutting out most of the nasties out there, but remember, nothing is 100% secure.

Next, progress so far…

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Out of the Box

27/02/13 22:35
Linux Revisited
What do I need from a Computer these days?
Choices Choices Choices
Out of the Box
Securing your Laptop
Progress so far…
Dos Games
Photography and Storage in a Mobile World
I have gone through the pain of getting Slackware to be a rock solid desktop with all the bells and whistles users expect ( like multimedia in the browser, CD ripping, playing encrypted DVD’s (they almost all are!) ) and I really don’t want to have to do that from scratch again.
So I installed Salix.
Working out of the box:
  • Graphical Login. (Long delay before initial log-in screen, probably due to DHCP timeouts ?)
  • USB ports
  • WiFi (once I told Wicd to connect to my access point)
  • SD Card Reader
  • Screen at maximum resolution.
  • External screen. Configured by Xfce display manager
  • Sound, once I un-muted the speakers using the mixer I put in the panel.
  • Suspend to RAM
  • Salix has a “codecs installer” option on its multimedia menu that grabs and installs all the hard to find, obscure bits and bobs that get you enjoying a movie or collecting your CD’s into a media player that can be accessed from any room in the house.
  • DVD’s now play.
  • DVD’s now rip. I use Handbrake, installed by the Gslapt Package manager, my new best friend.
  • CD’s now rip to .mp3. (one day I will re-rip them all into .ogg or .flac files - one day!)
  • Touchpad

Not working
Soft Keys. This laptop has some “touch keys” or areas that you touch and slide for actions like screen brightness and volume adjust and muting. They don’t work. They didn’t work too well under Windows 7 either (too much lag), but they did work. I am not fussed about these and I don’t care if they never work again.
Fingerprint Scanner. Turned of in BIOS. Never used.

OK, so out of the box experience for Salix OS 14.0 xfce version scores an 8 out of 10 (very good,as I am difficult to please ;-7 ) from me, which is pretty damn good for a distro based on the “hard” and “difficult” Slackware.

Next up, Securing your laptop.

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Choices, Choices, Choices...

25/02/13 15:30
Linux Revisited
What do I need from a Computer these days?
Choices Choices Choices
Out of the Box
Securing your Laptop
Progress so far…
Dos Games
Photography and Storage in a Mobile World
How many distros are there? As many as stars in the sky!
Well, not quite, but distrowatch lists 318, which is some choice!


OK, I can discount the specialist distributions like Multimedia only, or penetration testing/security, or games-centric etc. This still leaves quite a few, so listing the “top ten” here and having a short discussion with myself about each one should make the choice clearer for me.

  • Mint. Based on Debian. Rock solid distro, but tends to do things “for the sake of doing them” like obfuscation of start-up scripts/ procedures etc. Never been a fan.
  • Mageia. Formerly Mandriva, based on Mandrake. Never liked it.
  • Ubuntu. All things to all people - the new “Windows” of the Linux world. Sorry, not for me.
  • Fedora. Never liked Red-Hat. Didn’t like what they did when forming Fedora, don't like the way they have things set-up underneath.
  • OpenSuse. Used to be a powerhouse, now in Novell’s hands and going the way of all Novell software…
  • Debian - see Mint above
  • PCLinuxOS - See Mageia above.
  • Arch. Always a good choice, but the rolling release thing is a pain if you miss a few days :-(
  • Zorin. Never used it, but once again based on Debian/Ubuntu.

Well, you can see where this is going - straight to Slackware, which apart from Arch in the above list, is more of a hands-on distro than any of these. And I do like to know why things have gone pear-shaped as they inevitably will at some time. When it happens, the less “stuff” between me and the metal, the better.

But hold on, what’s this? Salix OS? What's up with that?
Here’s a quote from their home page:
“Salix is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware that is simple, fast and easy to use. Salix is also fully backwards compatible with Slackware, so Slackware users can benefit from Salix repositories, which they can use as an "extra" quality source of software for their favorite distribution. Like a bonsai, Salix is small, light & the product of infinite care.”

Salix has both 32 and 64 bit versions, is optimised for the desktop, has (some) dependency checking and aims for one application per task on the install CD. (And it is a CD - about 680Mb of distro only).

I chose the XFCE version of Salix 14.0 32 bit for testing on an HP Compaq 6910p with 3Gb of RAM and a 60Gb SSD. This laptop is about 6 years old, but is still quite quick with the SSD installed.

Next up, out of the box ...

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What do I need from a Computer these days?

23/02/13 16:15
Linux Revisited
What do I need from a Computer these days?
Choices Choices Choices
Out of the Box
Securing your Laptop
Progress so far…
Dos Games
Photography and Storage in a Mobile World
I do very little “technical” computing these days - I am mostly using my computer for the following:



1. Rip my own DVD’s and CD’s for use on my other devices using MacDVDRipperPro, Handbrake, DivX and lame.
2. Burn CD’s.
3. Play music and watch films on my computer using VLC.
4. Write music - or at least I try to, using GarageBand.
5. Store, catalogue, edit and print my photographs using Aperture, Pixelmator, PSE, OnOne suite and SilkyPix Pro (and other utilities).
6. Produce slideshows with my pictures and my music using Aperture and Garageband.
7. Produce screencasts using ScreenFlow.
8. Write documents, spreadsheets and presentations using Pages, Numbers and Keynote.
9. Produce and maintain web sites using Rapidweaver.
10. Play games, mostly old Dos turn-based strategy games, but some Mac specific games lately.
11. Plus the usual email, twitter, rss feeds, podcasts etc.
12. Use external USB and Firewire disks.
13. And lots more that I can’t think of right now.

Can a Linux laptop do all this?

I think the answer is yes, but I don’t think it can with the same ease that I can do it under Mac OS X (or probably Windows).

Many years ago I lived in an area in Australia where most of the houses around mine were “altenative builds” - i.e mud-brick, pole-frame infill, straw-bale infill etc. The owners got loans to build these type of houses by using what was known as “sweat equity” - they put in the hard work themselves and got a reduced mortgage as a result. End result was that the owners had a house that reflected what they wanted in a house at a cheaper rate than any one else - at the cost of some effort.
I think that will be the case with me in this project.

Next I look at what's available in the FOSS world to do my list of tasks above…

Tags:

Linux Revisited

23/02/13 12:59
Linux Revisited
What do I need from a Computer these days?
Choices Choices Choices
Out of the Box
Securing your Laptop
Progress so far…
Dos Games
Photography and Storage in a Mobile World
I use Apple hardware. I have an iPhone, an iMac, a Macbook and an iPad. I used to like Apple “stuff”.



Lately, not so much.

Here’s why:
  • Apple have deprecated my Macbook ( a first generation black one circa 2006 ) by not maintaining OS X beyond version 10.6.8 for its older hardware. Bummer, but understandable in a purely business way.
  • Apple have deprecated my iPhone ( a 3G model ) by not maintaining a version of IOS for it beyond the currently installed version. Bummer again, but again understandable in a purely business context.
  • Apple introduced the Mac Apps Store. The business reasons behind this move make perfect sense for Apple - they get a slice of all third party developers money in return for hosting, distributing and “certifying” software. As a user of the Mac App Store I received lower prices, but that’s about all. No trials. No direct access to developers. Third party developers who have embraced the Apps Store are now locked in to the ever more restrictive “process” imposed by Apple on the software they write. Can anyone say “Way to innovate, Apple!”?
  • Apple have upgraded Mac OS X by two major versions in the last two years for what basically amounts to “eye candy” and “gestures”. Really!?

In short, the “Apple Experience” doesn’t sit well with me anymore.

You may dismiss all this as a “progress”, “sign of the times”, “just bitching” or whatever, and that’s fine - you are entitled to your opinion. The above is mine.

What to do?

Use Windows? How? How does anybody get anything done with that software? It is so “in your face” that it interrupts any thought processes that you may be in the middle of, it requires confirmation for just about every action you tell it to do, and is always telling me things I don’t need to know. (Note to Windows - when I plug in a memory stick, I don’t care that you are finding drivers for it, I don’t need to know that, just get on with it!). To be fair Windows 7 is better at this than past versions, but it also has its quirks. (And let’s not mention Windows 8).

That leaves Linux, something I have used at the server level for many years, but not as my main desktop for about 8 years.

This (and subsequent posts ) will be the chronicles of my revisit to Linux for my only desktop/laptop operating system.

Wish me luck - I am going in!

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