Hilarity ensues
Wednesday July 30, 2003 – 2:12 amIt’s now 12 hours into my reindoctrination with Linux. I’ve only spent an hour or two actually using it though; I’ve had other things to mess with today. So. I found my printer, and it works. Check! Found the plaintext editor, and kick ass, it has a tabbed interface just like NoteTab, my favorite Windows editor!! That sure as hell didn’t exist a few years ago that I knew about. Found the FTP client, and it works for sites on the internet. I tried to find my iBook’s public FTP folder but that didn’t work; I guess I have to set up Samba to get the PC talking to the iBook. (I never could figure out FTP sharing over the network even on the old system, but Samba always worked so I’m pretty sure that’s where I’ll end up.) Found my CD-burner and found the Toast client, but how do I get it to work without entering the root password? Also, I can’t remember where my desktop’s at. I’m serious… I wanna know where it lives on the filesystem, somewhere in /usr/local? Linus knows, but I don’t.
Also downloaded Firebird for Linux, but I can’t remember where to put it without the rpm to guide me. /usr/local/bin? My ancient Caldera system used to use RPMs, so I guess I’m used to things being placed in their proper locations without much help from me. Maybe I should open up the Firebird folder and read the damn instructions, eh? But even if I did install something correctly, I can’t remember how to make a shortcut to put on the desktop. It’s just because I haven’t done all this in so long, I’m a little lost, but it’ll come back to me.
Well… I’m running on fumes, only got 4 or 5 hours sleep, so I’m gonna take a disco nap and fool around with this later. Sure am glad the most important things are already working though! I think that’s just miraculous, knowing what a pain in the ass it used to be to do anything. I guess I’m actually lucky that my PC was state of the art two years ago instead of having something brand-new. So all my hardware’s been conquered already, and now they’ved moved on to technologies I don’t even have, like DVD-burning or god knows what.
July 30th, 2003 at 7:45 am
Your desktop should be somewhere in your home directory. Note: *should be*. Try ~edith/Desktop/ or /home/edith/Desktop/. Good luck with that.
July 30th, 2003 at 9:26 am
I don’t know why, but linux discussion on a musician’s blog (especially when it’s one of my favorite musicians) warms my heart. You’re my hero.
So, let’s see… to burn without root, you can either setuid your burning program (cdrecord?): chmod u+s /usr/bin/cdrecord, or change permissions on the burning device – this might be something like /dev/sd0 or /dev/sg0 or /dev/hdc… the easiest thing is to make them usable by everyone (chmod go+rw /dev/sg0), or you can put them in, say, a cdrom group, then chmod g+rw /dev/sd0, and add yourself into that group. I’m pretty sure you’re an old unix hand and don’t need to be told how to chmod, sorry if it bugs you.
Um, if you’re using gnome, the desktop might be something like .gnome-desktop (the leading . is important).
Since firebird is a bunch of files, I’d put it somewhere like /usr/local/firebird, then create a symlink from /usr/local/firebird/MozillaFirebird to /usr/local/bin. Creating a symlink into .gnome-desktop might work too. It’s been a while for me too, since I’m an OS X convert these days.
on a completely different topic, I can totally understand where you’re coming from about music sharing. I have a friend who’s in a situation like yours – some good press, well-received CDs, but barely able to make a living on it. He’s pretty ambivalent about music sharing, even though he needs listeners. I’m sure he’d be thrilled to be played more on MTV or the radio (even though I don’t think they pay the artists anything either). I guess it must be hard to see your own music being swapped – I bet I’d be angry if I were in that position.
But I am fairly certain that I never would have heard of you without music sharing, and I’m so glad I have. I bought Wonder Wonder, and I intend to buy your earlier stuff – I’ve almost done it a couple of times but I want to order direct from Drag City and their mail-order system’s a little weird…
I bought a ton more CDs while I was downloading a lot (and before the RIAA stepped up its assault, making me not want to buy any CDs at all). I think a lot of people who listen to the smaller label stuff can say the same thing. In fact, I’d be very happy if all the major label music disappeared from the net and the RIAA left everyone alone.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this – I know there are a lot of freeloaders out there, and I can’t say even I’ve bought the CD of every band I’ve downloaded and liked a little. But I know that I’ve bought more CDs than I would have without music sharing, and I’ve felt better about the purchases. And I also think the approach the RIAA has taken, and the hypocrisy behind it (they steal as much as they possibly can from their artists, including copyrights for the music, but they have lobbyists and congressmen drafting, eg, work-for-hire laws, so it’s legal) makes me feel worse about supporting them by buying one of their CDs than I ever did about downloading music.
Lastly, when are you ever coming to NYC again? I promise not to steal tickets to the show :)
July 30th, 2003 at 10:22 am
Joel, how on earth did you know I called my user account ‘edith’? Hahaha!! I’ll try that, I still haven’t found it yet and the PC’s in the other room so I can’t be double-fistin’ it unless I break down and bring my laptop in there.
Brendan… I dunno when I’ll be touring again, but someday I guess I’ll have to break down and do it. I’ve been in this very reclusive geek-mode for the past year or so, all but ignoring music altogether, and now I’m sloooowly trying to get back into it, but keep getting distracted. I’m more concerned with it being really good than I am with timing. So I just hope whenever it happens people will still be interested. They will, or anyway the ones who matter will. The ones who find that I have ceased to be relevant can lick my ass. ;-)
THANKS for all the hints on getting the shit working. I am not an old hand at anything really, because I only remember stuff as long as I have to. Things go in one ear and out the other. If something involves a lot of terminal commands then I just write ‘em all down and hopefully I can find the note when I need it later. I still have a lot of old notes from my Linuxey past but unfortunately they all seem to be very Caldera-centric. I was using KDE instead of gnome, and blah blah blah. So it’s all vaguely familiar, and maybe I’m in a better spot than somebody coming in for the very first time, but not by much.
Hard to know what to think about music sharing. I’m as guilty as everyone else of collecting shit that I never ended up buying, but I also bought a lot more CDs when I was sharing heavily. I think I’d like to see it as networks-of-friends sharing and turning each other on to new stuff, rather than it being such a free-for-all. I’ve ranted about this a lot on my blog, especially via the comments back and forth with people… it’s really impossible to think of it as purely good or purely evil when it’s such a mixture of both.
Whoops, my bot-alarm just went off, gotta go investigate. Fucking cloaked spiders driving me crazy alla time… I’ve yet to see a real human set off that trap!
July 30th, 2003 at 11:31 am
I take that back, I think I might’ve caught an actual human that time. Hard to say but looking at the logs I’m getting the psychic feeling that somebody had a big question mark over their head when it happened. I hope they’ll post a comment using another computer or whatever, otherwise I ain’t gonna worry about it. The only way they’d find the trap is by going places they shouldn’t, but accidents will happen I suppose.
July 31st, 2003 at 12:55 pm
By the way, I’d like to comment that I release a lot of software under the GPL or the LGPL, that is, without any interest in recompense. I work on mutt, which is a very popular mail reader (maybe the most popular MUA among free software advocates), and ices/icecast, the principal open source music streamers. I just mention this to reinforce that I’m not just into free music and software because it saves me some dollars, but because I believe in the sharing of technology and art. I gave money to Drag City, and Sub Pop, and Simple Machines (one of my favorite labels ever, and one that made me shed tears when they shut down) because I believe in DIY and musicians producing their own music. I hope you feel the same way, and indeed I can’t imagine you opposed to the Simple Machines movement. I don’t want to get too political, but please consider those who are producing non-RIAA music, like yourself. Even though I’m only a programmer and a downloader, I’ve written music myself and been close to other musicians who want and need to be heard to survive, and I pray we all understand that the RIAA is worse for your survival than the millions of music sharers who are passionate about unadvertised music could ever be. I’m sure you appreciate your listeners and fans, but I don’t know whether you convey your confidence in them to your labels. And as a downloader yourself, I wish you would. I know that many who download mainstream music have no intereset in providing recompense to the artists, but I think that those who seek out music like yours and other "indie" artists may have very different attitudes towards the music they love. As I’ve said before, I feel great about buying music I love that isn’t RIAA-owned, and very bad about buying CDs that are owned by the association. I would guess that you feel the same way. So I reiterate my request that you support music that doesn’t support the very machine that has been robbing you for decades…
July 31st, 2003 at 1:09 pm
Jeez, I think you’re getting the wrong impression from reading what I said in one comment. Try entering ‘riaa’ in my search engine sometime? I think they’re shit-splats, they need to practice what they preach and pay their musicians instead of keeping them as their slaves. I’ve talked SO much about this, and given so many of my mixed opinions that I feel it would be silly to rehash it again. You can tell that I support indie music by the fact that I’m on an indie label and wouldn’t have it any other way. Maybe you didn’t know that Jenny Toomey is a friend of mine — I sang on her double-CD — and Amy Domingues (also of Tsunami on Simple Machines) is a frequent bandmate. I’ve toured with Danielle Howle, who had a record on that label, the list goes on.
July 31st, 2003 at 1:12 pm
p.s. I wrote a freeware program called ShitList for the PalmPilot. Wasn’t very good, but I’m not exactly a programmer. But it was on PalmGear and got a lot of downloads.