Take Screenshots on Lubuntu

I've noticed that a plain vanilla install of Lubuntu (maybe only the PPC version?) doesn't include any program to take screenshots.
So, this is what I added as an alias to my ~/.bashrc file:

sleep 10 && lxsession-default screenshot

It waits 10 seconds, to give you time to minimize the Terminal window, and then takes a full desktop sceenshot, it saves the file as a PNG file

Lubuntu 16.04 on the PowerMac3,5 (Quicksilver)

Yesterday installed Lubuntu on my old Quicksilver, mostly because I thought it would be a fun thing to do.
The install was painless, just remember to press the Option key, in order to select booting from the DVD Drive... I don't know why, but I was sure that if you press the C key upon booting, the PowerMac would boot from the DVD drive automagically... But it doesn't.
Then there was the partition your drive stage, I always do that by hand, and since I was installing onto two 80 GB IDE HDD, I did the partitions by hand.
I went with the following partition scheme:

Drive sda:
newworld     134 MB
/          70883 MB
swap        9000 MB
Drive sdb:
/home        81964 MB

One caveat tho, you have to be patient! The install takes time, and it looks like sometimes hangs, but it is still fighting down there... After all, the box has a Dual Proc @800 MHz and 1.5 GB of RAM.

For the love of Jeebus, I forgot how much noise a running PowerMac makes!

Stupid Old Hardware

Today I took about an hour to play with some old boxes that I still have lying around -more like hidden in closets- on the house, the all time beauty Quicksilver, the Powermac from halcyon (PPC) days and an ancient Celeron, or I don't know "what kind of crap CPU it has", but has 1 GB RAM, and a DVI NVIDIA video card, AKA: Zeus.

The idea was to see if they even boot, and if they do, try to test a lightweight Linux Mint XFCE (32 bits of course) on Zeus and Ubuntu Mate (PPC, of course) on the Quicksilver.

Zeus booted all-right to an Ubuntu 10.04, and the damned CD-ROM (remember those???) refused to work for quite a while, when it did, it was impossible to boot from it; go figure.
Gave it a try booting from a USB, but I had even less luck. With the Quicksilver I had no luck at all, impossible to make it boot from the CD-ROM, although, it did boot A Ok onto Tiger (remember that glorious OS?).

Total fail on this matter, but, ITOH, I don't know why I even bother, those boxes, specially Zeus, are a total a complete piece of crap, I should throw it to the garbage.
The Quicksilver is really beauty to look at, but both would make a terrible desktop experience nowadays.

Somedays you need PPC

And of course, Tiger the most beautiful GUI I've ever seeing.

Slow Saturday

Nothing much around here, getting ready for a crazy week coming up.

Tested Thor and luckily it works A Ok... After all the problems it gave me turns out that all it needed it was a PRAM reset, which, in the Quicksilver I have means only removing the internal battery for something like 10/15 minutes.
After that everything worked Ok, but honestly I don't see much use for it nowadays, specially since I moved away from iTunes to Rhythmbox.
Yes, the picture is a piece of shit.

Moving to Rhythmbox

Been pretty busy lately and without any real desire to dig out what the hell its going on with Thor, and since I used use that box for iTunes listening, been listening to my music collection with Lucid Lynx's default player, Rhythmbox for the last week or so.

Basically I'm listening to all my music files practically from scratch, re-tagging, sorting out, there are a lot of files that either I or iTunes had left aside, and that I'm actually listening for the first time.
Compared to iTunes, Rhythmbox seems less polished, but nothing to write home about it, everything you need, or at least, I need, its there and it works.

Apple-less

Well, Thor, the mighty Quicksilver PowerMac, refused to boot today... So, I'm out of Apple boxes at the moment...
Guess I'll have to go thru the whole PMU, SMC, & PRAM thing but I can't today.
Besides, the box its, to put it simply, a sound & heat monster generator; I was only using it for iTunes and iPod; but testes using the iPod with Linux and it wasn't much of a problem...

Some Perian Love

Got the Perian app up & running, got to get Thor (and its amazing and hugemoungous Cinema Display) to start playing some movies.

Back onto the PPC gang

I love Tiger, and specially love it on this monitor.
The beast might have something like six to eight years (if not more) not to mention Thor, my beloved Quicksilver; but well I'll be damned if those still two aren't performing like day one.

A happy family

A little something I took yesterday.
All the boxes happily churning together.

Transfer iTunes data from newer to older version

(Or Apple's obsession to never allow a rollback...)
I have two Apple boxes, a MBP Intel (running Snow Leopard and its ugly GUI), and an old & trusty PPC Quicksilver, running Tiger, that I love, I'm a fucking freak when it comes to iTunes Play Counts, so I was looking a way to keep the info synced between boxes.

I've done something similar in the past, and it is almost the same, but simpler.

Every copy operation has to be done with the iTunes (on both boxes) closed.
The path to all the iTunes info on both boxes has to be equal (username, paths, etc, etc)
First off, the most important thing is to make backups.
After that, the next most important thing is trasnfering the music files from the box with the newer iTunes to the other box, the best way of doing this is via Rsync.

After you done that, you are done with the iTunes on the newer box.

Now, if you try to open the old iTunes with the newer iTunes Library transfered you'll get a warning message: "iTunes Library cannot be read because it was created with a newer version on iTunes".

No problem there.

Close iTunes on the old box, and blank the file 'iTunes Library':

cat /dev/null > 'iTunes Library'

Then, open iTunes once agian, you'll see a pretty nice Aqua Progress Bar, on my Quicksilver (with a 10 MB "iTunes Music Library.xml" file) the process took about 10 minutes. When it finishes, it issues a warning, but I haven't found any problem so far.

You're not through yet, there are two more steps, that iTunes does automagically, the generation of album covers; and then the gapless playback.



On my Quicksilver (DP 800 MHz with 1.5 GB RAM) the whole thing took about 25 minutes to do everything.

SU Mystery Theater (28)

This is the PPC edition!
Installed a new Safari on Thor, boy, sure haven't used my Quicksilver in quite a while... What an amazing piece of machinery! And Tiger, for the love of Christ! From my point of view Tiger is what a OS should have as GUI, no questions asked!
Yes, the hulking beast makes more noise than a mule, but I love it.

Getting rid of the Apples

I'm in the process of selling my Apple boxes.
I have already sold Balrog, a 12" PowerBook; but now is time let Trantor and Thor go...
I was looking forward or maybe, looking for, a Compaq, but I guess I'll go for one of those new Thinkpads.

Su Mystery Theater (23)

Just installed it, no problem at all.
Go Safari.

The Mighty Mighty Thor

Behold the migthy beast!
Perfect for a classic Sunday.

The current setup

A little picture of my real desktop as it is these days.

Su Mystery Theater (22)

Installed these two today, things seem to be pretty much ok.
The new releases of iTunes looks like they have fixed the sluggishness of prior version 9, at least on my Quicksilver.

iPod erotser

The day was coming, no doubt about that... The little iPod started to belch and cough while playing some songs... Sometimes for minutes... So, in the end, I had to put it to sleep and restart it from scratch...

It was sad, it worked flawlessly since February 2006, but the day was coming.
By far the worst part of Restoring had been to pass all the music, 20 GB, to the newly restored and shiny iPod, all thru the palsy USB 1 of my Quicksilver beauty... 8 hours of grueling Progress Bar nightmare...

Let's see if the whole Restore Thing helps the little iPod a bit... Hopefully it will, because for what I've seen, a regular iPod around here costs 570 U$S for fuck's sake.

Su Mystery Theater (20)

Update time for Thor.
Everything seems to be working A Ok after the necessary reboot and crud deleting process.

SU Mystery Theater (19)

Turned on Thor today, and installed updates... So far, so good.
The huge monitor is a blessing, but the thing is slooooooow, even compared with the Thinkpad T43, which it is not a speed demon herself...