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Email Brian Bilbrey

Orb Grafitti is sometimes a conversation, sometimes a soapbox. I use Linux most often, and I write about that and related software frequently. I also have a day job working as a dogsbody for a small manufacturing firm here in the SF Bay Area. Tom Syroid and I have co-authored a Linux Book. It was cancelled by $LARGE_PUBLISHER, so we're posting it online, here and here. Have a looksee! I'm glad you've come to visit, and always happy to hear from you.

EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so, I'll pay attention to your wishes.

Brian, et al...

Have you seen what is posted where Kaycee's journal was? Any idea just what
is going on? 

I don?t know what to make of all this, but none of the feelings are very
good right now...

Ken
-- 
<><      Ken Scott      http://www.pcisys.net/~kscott
             This is the day that the Lord has made;
             Let us rejoice and be glad in it          -- Psalm 118:24 

Yeah, I saw. I pointed out Randy's post to Marcia right before we
left for the day today. Good writer, great fiction, but I am a big
fan of truth, when truth is imputed. Gave me good things to think
about, and certainly I am not as sucker-punched as Randy must be (as
long as *he* wasn't in on it). 

This will have the conspiracy theorists going for a long time. I
call it an e-ticket ride with a moral (or two). With the current
things we know, this becomes small stuff, and as the saying goes,
don't sweat the small stuff.

Now, good night!

.b

And that's enough said on that topic. Good Morning! It's Monday, but that's OK (more or less). The weekend was computationally challenged - I didn't get nearly everything done that I wanted to. Life is like that, after all, changing the plans and the rules on you with no notice (a lot like the Infernal Revenoo Slimeballs, eh?). At least I didn't fall in the pool. <g>

I haven't tested sound yet on Garcia.... Huh? Oh, yeah, I've buried Grinch - with a new set of hardware, a new OS, and a new window manager, that's certainly enough of a personality change to warrent retiring the machine name. So anyway, most everything's working like clockwork (as it should), but there are bits I haven't brought back online yet. And Marcia's got plans for me tonight, so we'll see how it goes.

As is usual on Monday's, I am a bit tight for time, so I'll bid you adieu for the moment, and catch you back here later. TTFN.

18:45 - Evenin'. How are you? Good, good, glad to know you survived another Monday, too. It's amusing, the first non-list post to the Talkabout mailing list we're running around here ... well, it was a Win32 virus spam, purporting to be revealing about Snow White and the Seven Vertically Challenged Persons... <g>

Talkabout is growing a bit, here and there - I had to recommend a wipe and reinstall today - Debugging a Windows problem when the box isn't right in front of me is so difficult, mostly because the behaviour and error messages are so bad. Of course, that wasn't an option, but then I was out of suggestions. I can usually coerce a Windows box to my will, but only when I am physically present to perform the correct ceremonies and exorcisms. <heh>

There's been a good thread on the topic of Backup on Linux, over on the SVLUG mailing list - to track into it, you can go here, and follow the thread. An especially useful directory of OS backup tools has been setup by Rick Moen, here.

Now I am going to finish my IRC conversation with Moshe, then have supper, work on Garcia's sound setup, and maybe get in some chapter work on The Book. Have a nice evening.

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Good Morning. Well, the good news is that I got the sound bits working on Garcia - I am composing this sentence to the strains of Bruce wailing in Darkness on the Edge of Town. When I did the remodel, I wiped out the partition where the MP3 collection lived (all ripped from discs we own, thank you very much, RIAA). Finally, last night I took the opportunity to reload the new storage partition from all the CDRs that I store the music on. Currently I am only up to 6 discs, about 750 tracks.

Anyway, I loaded up the first disc's worth of music, fired up XMMS (http://www.xmms.org/), and ... nothing - a dialog box asking me if something already had the sound driver locked up, or if I had the right module loaded or ... you know the drill. I keyed in on the second option. I checked that the module I know is correct for this SBLive5.1MP3+ card was present and loaded... Hmmmm. Yup. Head scratching...

I started looking at playing with ALSA (http://www.alsa-project.org/), which has been installed with most of the recent distributions I've worked with. Alsa is the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture project, a replacement for OSS with some nifty features, none of which I've ever taken advantage of. But about halfway through the process of pulling down ALSA sources, setting up the kernel headers properly and other such essentials, I had an epiphany: Do a Google search on Debian sound setup... or something like that...

That revealed the answer - I didn't have permission to write to the audio device. Debian sets up more securely than most distros by default, and that includes not enabling write permissions to most devices for normal users. /dev/dsp is installed owned by root, and belonging to group audio. All I had to do was add my user account to the audio group (type vigr as root to edit /etc/groups), log out and back in, then up came the sound. The logout step forces a re-read of the groups file, giving me the permission I needed.

Then... well, then I started mucking about with the hard drive parameters, and had a couple of exciting moments, but I'll save those for this afternoon. Y'all have a great day, I'll see you later!

19:15 - Howdy. Back again, and conversing at the moment with Greg Lincoln - well, mostly conversing - we've both got Festival setup and reading the output from X-Chat. It's very like the voice from War Games. Whooohooo. A talking computer... Marcia's going to love this ... not!

OK. Hard drive parameters. Bear in mind that you can hose your system playing with these tools. I thought I had for a bit. Let me be more explicit. You may only be able to cook breakfast in your system after mucking about with hdparm. You have been warned. I'll close this section with some references - go, read them, quake in fear. Then you'll probably experiment anyway, but be it not upon my head. I merely hand you the tool. What you do with it is your own damn business. The program in question is called hdparm. Here's the script I settled on, finally:

#!/bin/bash -e
#
# during startup, set up the ide channel devices
# for speed and efficiency.
#
# bilbrey 05.21.2001
#

hdparm -X66 -c3 -m16 -d1 -k1 -K1 /dev/hda

hdparm -X66 -c3 -m16 -d1 -k1 -K1 /dev/hdb

hdparm -X34 -c3 -d1 -k1 -K1 /dev/hdc

hdparm -X34 -c3 -d1 -k1 /dev/hdd

The -X parameter sets the transfer mode (Ultra for the two hard drives, an ATA33 mode for the cd devices. The -c option sets the 32 bit transfer mode to on, with a sync sequenc. Mode 1 might work, with less overhead. More testing will reveal that, but 3 is safer. -m refers to Multisector IO. Very handy to read and buffer many sectors at a time, since most reads (for a workstation, server usages are different) are sequential. 16 is the most my Maxtor drives support. -d1 turns on DMA - the EIDE chipset and all of my devices support this. Finally the -k and -K options provide some retention of features through soft-reset events (like power-saving modes, etc). You'll note that I only have -k1 on the CDRW (/dev/hdd). That's because, as I experimented with the options, one change at time, slowly.

garcia:/etc/rc.boot# hdparm -X34 -c3 -d1 -K1 /dev/hdd 

/dev/hdd:
 setting 32-bit I/O support flag to 3
 setting using_dma to 1 (on)
 setting drive keep features to 1 (on)
 HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(keepsettings) failed: Input/output error
 setting xfermode to 34 (multiword DMA mode2)
 I/O support  =  3 (32-bit w/sync)
 using_dma    =  1 (on)

The -K1 causes the (keepsettings) failed message. So only -k1 for /dev/hdd. Now, what difference does this make in disk operation? Look at this listing:

garcia:/etc/rc.boot# hdparm -X32 -c0 -m0 -d0 /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 setting 32-bit I/O support flag to 0
 setting multcount to 0
 setting using_dma to 0 (off)
 setting xfermode to 32 (multiword DMA mode0)
 multcount    =  0 (off)
 I/O support  =  0 (default 16-bit)
 using_dma    =  0 (off)

garcia:/etc/rc.boot# hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.83 seconds =154.22 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in 15.75 seconds =  4.06 MB/sec

garcia:/etc/rc.boot# hdparm -X66 -c3 -m16 -d1 -k1 -K1 /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 setting 32-bit I/O support flag to 3
 setting multcount to 16
 setting using_dma to 1 (on)
 setting keep_settings to 1 (on)
 setting drive keep features to 1 (on)
 setting xfermode to 66 (UltraDMA mode2)
 multcount    = 16 (on)
 I/O support  =  3 (32-bit w/sync)
 using_dma    =  1 (on)
 keepsettings =  1 (on)
 
garcia:/etc/rc.boot# hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.84 seconds =152.38 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  2.99 seconds = 21.40 MB/sec

There are two different types of text bolded above. First are the commands I typed. By the way, this was captured while I was running the box in single user mode, where there is much less risk to the system from hosing running processes while messing with low-level system parameters. The other bolded data are the buffered disk read data. Note the 5X increase in data transfer for buffered disk reads between the before and after tweaking steps. Impressive, eh?

Now for some more information - links time, people. The Linux Ultra-DMA mini-HOWTO. From O'Reilly, Speeding up Linux Using hdparm, and finally an online version of the hdparm manpage. Please, please, please - be careful with this stuff. If your hardware doesn't support some of these modes, you can damage your data.

Now I have some chapter work to tend to. So have a lovely evening, and I'll be with you again tomorrow. Bye.

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Welcome to the middle of the work week. With several people out of the office until next Tuesday, I passed on the email and early update routine I normally follow, and simply got myself ready, watered the plants, and hit the road. I've ssh'd from work into the home server, and from there into my workstation, and I'm doing this update through the good services of vi.

There's also about 70 or so emails to deal with for me, plus I have three or so boxes worth here to check - that should total out about 300 items to slog through in the next hour or so. Then I have to get a batch of drawings and specifications out for quote in conjunction with our buyer... It'll be a busy day.

OK, a bit of admin work for the Talkabout mailing list (to which you may subscribe by sending email to [email protected] with a subject of subscribe) - a confirm email's been rejected for some reason, and I don't know why until I get a copy of the outgoing confirm message with all headers attached... Whew - 10 more messages came in while I dealt with the first lot.

I suppose I'd best get to work... Y'all have a great day and I'll see you later.

18:40 - Howdy. Dang if it hasn't been a heck of an interesting week already, and an especially bad day today. But before I go zinging off into the stratosphere with topics that I won't quite rant on, let's ground ourselves in the latest snaps from the Patio Farm ©...

First off, above we have a couple of shots from the courtyard below. Marcia managed to sneak in with the herbs. I'll try those again in morning light, where there isn't so much glare. Then there's a couple of pan shots of the whole balcony, with all that growing food.

Then there's more shots of the vigorously growing garden, and a couple of closeups.

Now for the interesting part of my day - the bottom line is that I am job hunting, very actively. I am not out of work, but there are circumstances that require I find a new situation as soon as is feasible. If you're hiring, or know someone who is, sakes alive, get in touch with me!. My resume is here (in HTML) or here (in RTF). Pass it around, tack it up on bulletin boards, whatever works. I sure appreciate it!

Then I am all in a snit because the payment for the Tcl/Tk Tutorial I wrote some weeks back is nowhere near fruition, and there's no end in sight for that process - the buffoon who I must deal with counsels patience. I think I said something along the lines of "If you're going to screw with a man's money, you'd best bring KY Jelly and talk real purty." or words to that effect. Feh!

Now I have to run, things to do, dinner to have, job boards to hit. Take care, see ya tomorrow...

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Hi, good morning. Another frantic day begins. For those of you morning people, last night's update includes pictures of the Patio Farm (tm), as well as some significant news. The news is important enough to me that it bears repeating:

...the bottom line is that I am job hunting, very actively. 
I am not out of work, but there are circumstances that 
require I find a new situation as soon as is feasible. If 
you're hiring, or know someone who is, sakes alive, 
get in touch with me!. My resume is here (in HTML) or here 
(in RTF). Pass it around, tack it up on bulletin boards, 
whatever works. I sure appreciate it!

I spent several hours honing my search criterial over on Dice.com, which has a nice array of features and what appears to be fairly complete listings. The fun bit is just in reading the first sentence or two of any specific description, then determining whether or not it's from a recruiter or a principal. It's actually quite easy to differentiate. I even managed to get several submissions in, by the time my eyes permanently crossed for the evening, about 11:15 PM.

In other news, my Debian system appears to be very stable and well behaved. I mucked about just a bit with Kword last night - two problems that pop immediately to the fore: First, it crashes when trying to import an MS Word document of any size for me. Hmmm, Greg said it worked fine for him, except for the 500 page monster. Second, the print formatting is wrong. I can't quite tell why, but I think that the program thinks it's printing on much narrower paper than I told it, by 35 to 40 millimeters or so... ::sigh::

Now, I have some email to go through, a garden to water, and a commute to face down. Y'all have a great day, I'll do my very best to do the same. Take care.

17:00 - Afternoon. How are you doing? Good, good. Nope, thanks, but no news yet. I've gotten one form letter response to the initial evening's job search. Oh, and no winning lottery ticket falling from the sky either. Hmmmm. So keep hawking this resume for me, will you please? Thanks!

Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 14:13:54 -0500
From: Tim Werth 
Subject: Kword crashing
To: [email protected]
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0)

Brian,

I finally got Mandrake 8.0 installed successfully this week.  Both times I
tried to load an MS Word document into Kword it immediately crashed the same
as you describe.  I just assumed that Kword wasn't capable of importing MS
Word documents and that I would have to install Openoffice or some other
word processor to handle MS Word files.  But from what you are saying Kword
should be able to handle MS Word files so perhaps that will be fixed
sometime down the road???

L8r,
Tim

Hey, Tim -

Thanks for writing. Yeah, I am not so terribly surprised. The
Microsoft format is, by all accounts a weird and wonderful thing,
and the documentation that the KWord team had to work with is about
4 years old (for the W97 format). Since then there have been two
service packs for Office97, either of which could have mucked with
the format.

The problem with an unknown semi-binary format is that once you lose
track of where you are, how do you know when you're looking at good
data again, and when you've just got a set of bits that randomly
correspond to something you think you recognize. It's a thorny
problem.

That's part of what I like about the upcoming XML storage formats.
One can always fail gracefully, by discarding tag pairs that you
can't cope with.

I presume that the KWord people are doing their darnedest to get an
import function going. For export, even RTF would be sufficient, as
long as MS continues to interpret standard RTF, and not reject a
document because it isn't in their proprietary extended RTF format.
Me, I like HTML and Text.

Regards,

.brian

-- 
Brian Bilbrey :: [email protected] :: www.orbdesigns.com
    "Don't use Outlook.  Outlook is really just a security
     hole with a small e-mail client attached to it."
                  -- Brian Trosko in r.a.sf.w.r-j

Say, do you like my new .sig block? I found it resting at the base of a Rick Moen message to the SVLUG list, and liked it so much that I thought I'd ... well, abscond with it actually. Ooooh, wow! I just fired up XMMS to put on some Tom Petty (the closest I'll come to a Dylan tribute today), and forgot that I had the volume jacked way up while I was mucking about with Festival a day or two ago. The good news is that the blast of sound broke up all those nascent kidney stones that were going to cause me problems in a few years. The bad news is that it did so by expelling them from my body and smashing them against the back wall (my kidneys, that is).

OK, not really, but it saves that waking up in a tub of icewater in a strange hotel, with my kidneys stolen... heh. OK, time to prep dinner, then get down to the job search. Take care.

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Good morning and Happy Friday before a 3 day weekend (at least for those of us in the States). I'm sorry, but I haven't got too much to say this morning. I woke up with a horrid headache - one might even suspect a hangover if I'd had a drink in the last 12 years or more, but I haven't. I did, however, eat a pint of Dreamery Chocolate Truffle ice cream last night. I could be still emerging from the sugar shock. Heh.

Anyhow, I've been through the email this morning, and last night, I managed to slog my way through perhaps 300 job listings, finding 5 or 6 interesting enough to send in a cover letter with my resume (which you can find here and hand to the appropriate manager, if your company is fairly local to Sunnyvale, CA and is hiring) - My current search focus is in two areas - Linux/General IT administration, and Technical Writing/Training and Support. There are lots and lots of listings for Linux kernel developers and device driver developers, but one of those I am not (at this moment in time and space)

Now I am going to water the garden, then head into the office. Yeah, I know. More than one person has asked me why the heck I am still headed in to work there each day - well, I have a strongly developed sense of duty and responsibility. The owners are out of town this week and left me in nominal charge. While it's my captaincy, I'll not step foot off the bridge.

Y'all have a lovely day, and I'll catch up with you back in this space later. Oh, and fret not, the balance of Tom and Brian's Linux Book will be out, and soon. I'll put in some time on it this weekend - promise!

Good afternoon. I've been to visit a very nice recruiter today, Steve at SVS. We had a good longish chat, and got a sense of where this job search thing might go. There's one particular thing high on his list for me now, and we'll see how that pans out early next week. I've got info on the client company to check out, so that'll be interesting.

I made it entirely clear that what I expect from him is follow-through. If Steve says that X will be done, then by gum X had better be done. I follow through on my word, and I expect the people I deal with to do the same. Only fair, only fair.

Speaking of which, I promised you a couple of screenshots from the freshly remodeled Garcia, built like a patchwork man, from various fresh parts, and left-behind bits from the death of Grinch. Garcia's much more laid back, no big surprise. Anyhoo, in the shot to the left, you can see the main workspace, configured for job hunting. Lots of mail windows, and a browser pointed to a search site. You'll note the off-white windows - those are RXVT windows running SSH sessions over to Grendel the Mandrake 7.2 based Gateway box that acts as a server around here. By having the window background be a distinct color, I can easily remember that I am not working locally, and do something silly, like su - ; reboot (nah, I've never done that with a remote connection by accident, really!)

In this next snap to the right, we have the Gimp up and running, viewing the first screenshot. In the upper left hand corner we have XMMS running, Cher, I think. The Dock is the group of active iconic programs running down from the upper right hand corner. The Dock Icon itself is at the top of the stack. Below it is a firey CPU load meter, WMFire, then WMND is next down, a network interface activity monitor. Below that is a clock, a Launcher for RXVT windows, and the stack closes with a launcher for the WindowMaker configuration utility. Running programs accumulate iconically to the clip in the lower left corner - I'm thinking of hosing that function, since I can effectively use the screen real estate other ways, and I can get to any running application with a middle button context menu from the root window.

This is a nice desktop environment, snappier in most operations than either Gnome or KDE. I am using applications from the KDE environment, and on initial startup, I pay a performance penalty to bring the application up. But I don't have to deal with the COM and DOM layers that the KDE wm are built on. All in all, this seems to be headed towards a clear winner. More on configuring WindowMaker another day.

Now to get on with the next chores, installing Quake III Arena for Linux, and starting the barbeque. Take care and I'll see you mañana.

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Howdy. Lazy morning, perfect for me after the stress of the week just ended. Well, not all the stress has ended - I remain in job-seeker mode (resume here) - but "waiting is"...

We slept from about 11 last night until nearly 9 this morning, which is an immensely long rest for me. I awoke at my usual pre-dawn hour, without the benefit of alarum, then decided that instead of hopping up and building a better cup of joe, I would instead just rest some more. 3 hours later I was awake again. This pretty much ruins my day for effective performance. That is, I'll be a little drowsy and inefficient from having had too much sleep. But all in all, a good decision.

Since rising, I've had my coffee, caught up with the email and all of the daynoters. Now I think I'll ... have another cup and then proceed from there. We have some shopping to do, and I have some plans to make in anticipation of celebrating our third wedding anniversary, which is rapidly approaching (only four shopping days left). I am going to build and install a more recent Linux kernel here in Garcia, and work some chapters from The Book, in your service. So expect the odd update here and there over the next day or so - we are staying in town over the holiday. Let all the other nuts drive about, and spend too much for the gasoline that has had it prices 'specially jacked up for the occasion.

That's all for now, I'll be back later. TTFN.

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Yep, it's really me - I got a much earlier start today. Good morning!

The real problem (that I noted once again) with sleeping in late is that I never really wake up properly. I take a stab at something and ... blank. Nothing. Little gears spinning in my head, but no connection to reality. We worked on things that should have been easy, agonize over them, and in the end the solution is simple, and accidental. ::sigh:: Let me tell you about it.

First off, I was working with Greg Lincoln over IRC to bring Quake3 online. The output was simply horrid, graphics and sound were choppy, and the mouse responded like a banana slug on quaaludes. Clearly this was not going to be a game-playing bonanza. Instead of point and shoot, I was playing turn and die. We fuddled about for a bit, but it's difficult - the 3dFx Voodoo 3 Banshee is not the best of cards for gaming under Linux. After much wracking about and getting nowhere, I shot down to Frys and picked up a Leadtek GeForce 2 MX SH MAX. I know, I know, Nvidia is not among the most cooperative of Linux supporters - their drivers are partly binary and they don't release full specs, to my knowledge... but by Deus, this card is a screamer!

Then I reinstalled Quake3, then the 1.17 point release, then the 1.27 Beta point release (both game bug fix / upgrade packs). With the Nvidia drivers loaded, this old game rocks. Thanks, Greg, for walking me through most of that. That done, I turned my back on it. Heh.

Now we're going to lead up to Tip of the Week. Following the Q3 odyssey, Greg and I embarked upon a second journey - bringing anti-aliased fonts to Garcia's desktop. I was running a good version of QT, 2.3final4, and the KDE components were of the correct vintage as well. Hmmm. We struggled and slogged for a bit, then I simply pulled down the rest of KDE to see if we could make things work in the full environment. We'd already mucked about to make the correct changes to /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 and /etc/X11/XftConfig - let's have a look at some of these datapoints:

garcia:/home/bilbrey# dpkg -l | grep qt       
ii  libqt2         2.3.0-final-4  Qt GUI Library (runtime version).

garcia:/home/bilbrey# dpkg -l | grep kdebase
ii  kdebase        2.1.1.0-7      KDE core applications
ii  kdebase-audiol 2.1.1.0-7      KDE audio libraries amd modules for kdebase
ii  kdebase-crypto 2.1.1.0-2      KDE core applications (Crypto modules)
ii  kdebase-doc    2.1.1.0-7      Documentation for Applications in kdebase
ii  kdebase-libs   2.1.1.0-7      KDE libraries amd modules for kdebase


garcia:/home/bilbrey# less /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
  * * *
Section "Files"
#       FontPath        "unix/:7100"                    # local font server
        # if the local font server has problems, we can fall back on these
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc"
#       FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic"
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled"
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled"
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Type1"
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo"
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi"
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi"
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/CID"
        FontPath        "/usr/share/fonts/truetype"
EndSection
  * * * 

garcia:/home/bilbrey# less /etc/X11/XftConfig  
#$XFree86$

dir "/usr/share/fonts/truetype"
dir "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Type1"
  * * * 

In the above listing, using the dpkg command, I confirmed the version numbers of critical packages for making anti-aliasing work (though I left out XFree86, which has to be version 4.0.2 or greater, I am currently at 4.0.3). In XF86Config-4, we commented out the font server (put a hash mark '#', at the front of the line), and I subsequently removed the xfs package from my system, since it's not being used. Additionally I added a new FontPath to the list in both XF86Config-4 and in XftConfig (as an extra dir line): /usr/share/fonts/truetype

That's where I mounted all of the Truetype fonts that I've accumulated over the years from various and sundry nameless software packages that I have purchased. Notice - I did not download illegal or pirated Truetype libraries off of the Internet, although I presume such things grow on trees out there on the Wild Wooly Web.

Pretty much, that's it. Now it's supposed to work. I restarted X, logged into KDE and ... jagged type. Way jagged type. Clearly not anti-anything. Greg and I did some serious head scratching...

garcia:/home/bilbrey# echo $QT_XFT
0

Hmmm. That's supposed to be 1. Open up kcontrol (the KDE Control Center, and check Look-n-Feel --> Style... there's a checkbox next to "Use Anti-Aliasing for fonts and icons". It was checked. WTF??? We fiddled around for a bit, manually set the environment variable, no joy. Nothing worked. It was supper time. Bye, Greg, and thanks. TTYL.

Later in the evening, I returned to the fray. Again I worked with trying to make the environment variable register at login. I found online references that said it should be set to "true" as opposed to "1". Mmmm. No effect. I finally found this in /usr/share/doc/libqt2/README.Debian excerpted below:

You can enable XFT support (Anti Aliasing) by setting the QT_XFT environmental
variable.

   export QT_XFT=1   (this turns it on)
   export QT_XFT=0   (this turns it off)

this will only help you out for any apps that are run within that environment.
If you run the KDE window manager, this will most likely not do you much good.
You would be better off turning on AA support within the Styles configuration.

Now this contains several nuggets of information, many of which Greg and I had already addressed. But there was this hint of a shadow of an idea I discerned. For your viewing pleasure, it's the line that's bold in the above listing. So I started up yet another Konsole (KDE virtual terminal application), and typed:

bilbrey@garcia:~$ export QT_XFT=1

bilbrey@garcia:~$ konqueror &

HA! Anti-Aliased fonts! Cool. So what changed? Well, I started the application in an environment where QT_XFT=1 was set. Setting it in a terminal, then starting the application from the menu didn't work because they were both children of the same environment. By starting up Konqueror from inside the terminal window, it is a child process of the terminal application, and inherits it's environment.

The fonts were beautiful, almost. They were the wrong font, they were horrid and small, but they were different and smooth to the eye. OK. So, now that I knew that all the basic functionality was in place all that remained was to find out why it wasn't on by default, as was supposed to be the case. Both Greg and Ivan Moore (the writer of the README above) had tried to help me do everything right.

On a whim, I went to the Styles tab in Kcontrol, un-checked Anti-Aliasing, and saved it. Maybe there's a bug that inverts the behavior of the checkbox. Then I restarted. No joy. So I re-enabled the checkbox, saved again, restarted again. Voila! Anti-Aliasing was on throughout KDE. Hmmm. What changed?

I can only speculate that when all the features are in place to do Anti-Aliasing, that line in the Styles tab makes it's appearance. For whatever reason, it defaults to showing as checked. But until an edit is made to that tab, followed by a save, which writes the values therein to a local configuration file, no joy is to be had in Mudville. Without a local configuration setting, the global config rules, and it was turning AA off, even though (for some reason) it was showing as on.

Now, I don't actually want to run KDE fulltime. I don't want to pay the overheads of the KDE Window Manager. I am really growing to like WindowMaker a lot, and would be happy to continue to use some KDE apps under WindowMaker. So I removed KDM (the KDE Display Manager (login screen and such), and edited this file, /home/bilbrey/.xinitrc:

export QT_XFT=1
/usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/X11R6/bin/wmaker

That sets the variable for me properly, then starts up WindowMaker. Now I have Konqueror and Kmail running with Anti-Aliased fonts, and the other apps just don't look the same anymore. But sometimes (like with Bluefish, which will never make use of the KDE AA facility) the right tool isn't always the prettiest. I'll have a couple of comparative screenshots for you later today, but now it's time to shower and get ready for the Costco and Safeway runs. Y'all have a lovely day. See ya!

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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.

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