Windows Tip: Setting Up Mix and Match Default Browser and E-Mail

Here’s another Windows tip for those who want to use a different combination of default browser and e-mail client. This can be used to reset to default Windows settings of Internet Explorer and Outlook Express or to whatever applications you want instead. The point of this is to show that one can easily mix and match open and closed source software in Windows.

This will work for anything installed on your system and identified as browser and/or e-mail client. That will include the usual choices of Firefox, Opera, Thunderbird, and the default Windows programs mentioned above. You can use these same settings to revert to different defaults should you change settings you don’t like.

It also includes other less-known applications like Sylpheed. I like Sylpheed because it’s light on resources, very configurable and customizable (I use mew keybindings and have a lengthy set of filters that include a variety of colors to designate different things as well as the usual sorting of mail by category), and it functions the same way between operating systems. Its mbox import/export also means you can easily sync an account between different machines and even different operating systems. Sylpheed also works without any manual configuration of other applications like security suites; in my experience, it’s worked wonderfully with both McAffee (trial version on my AA1) and Kaspersky (which scans my mail and I’ve also used as a spam/junk filter).

For this example, we’re going to set up Sylpheed as the default e-mail client within IE8 (which remains my default browser in Windows even though I use conkeror more often now). The first setting to change is in tools-Internet options.

Select the applications tab once you open the Internet options dialog and you’ll see choices for editor, mail, news groups, etc.

Once you choose the application you want, hit Apply on the bottom. Note this should only work if you’re running the account as administrator (I had to log out, log into my administrator account, change my user setting to administrator, log back in to make my change, then go through the process again to place my account back to limited user). I know many people run as administrator which opens up the system to everything in the world. The reason you don’t want this variable to be changed by a limited user is because any exploit that can affect your browser could change app settings on the fly and compromise your system and your data. I think that’s also a good reason to not run as administrator except as needed. I know it’s not convenient, but the easier and more convenient things are for the user to change system settings the easier it is for any vulnerability to affect the whole system.

Once you have that set, you should be able to use whatever e-mail client you want within IE so that clicking on a mailto: link will open up a composer for your chosen client.

If an icon wasn’t set up in your Start Menu, you can add one this way (and it shouldn’t require administrator privileges). Right click on the task bar and select properties. You’ll get a dialog like the one below. Select the Start Menu tab and then Customize.

This will open another box allowing you to (re-)choose your default browser and e-mail client.

That will put an icon (with the “e-mail” description above it if you’re using the “big icons”) in the top part of your Start Menu. This will also cause whatever app you choose to open if you use the envelope icon on the IE icon bar (“Read Mail”).

It shouldn’t be — and it isn’t — difficult to set up whatever operating system you choose to use with whatever choice of applications you want. You don’t have to switch to Linux just to take advantage of open source software. You can configure Windows to work and look like you want it to even if you mix and match open and closed source software.

EconTalk: Digital Barbarism

Author Mark Helprin is this week’s guest on Russ Roberts’ excellent EconTalk Podcast. Helprin discusses ideas from his new book Digital Barbarism, a defense of traditional copyright law.

Helprin’s thesis is that the anti-copyright movement is an extension of the broader trend towards collectivization rather than an embrace of individual rights. Copyrights are about protecting the rights of individuals over and against the collective.

I’ve always shared the pro-copyright view and am not swayed by the vapid arguments that technology makes copyrights antiquated. As Helprin notes, it’s because of technology that copyrights were ever devised in the first place to protect the individual.

My own view has been formed around the concept that the choice of the rights-holder (whether an artist, writer, publishing house, or music company) to defend his own rights is paramount and should be respected and protected by any means necessary — including DRM, encryption measures, and civil penalties. When copyrights are viewed as traditional contract law, there are two parties rather than just the consumer. If a consumer doesn’t like the terms under which works are released, he or she can just walk away and find an alternative source under mutually consensual terms.

If you don’t like Metallica’s vocal opposition to P2P, listen to a band releasing works under liceses that allow free redistribution. If you don’t like movies being released on DVD with encryption, watch only unencrypted movies. If you don’t like proprietary software or software that costs money, use only open source software available at no charge.

Those who want to “share alike” — and I’ve licensed some of my own works under such a license, but I would never release everything under it – are always free to do so with their own content. They can do that for whatever reason they want, whether to expand an audience or because they don’t want the hassles of traditional copyright in a digital age; practical reasons often make such licenses more tenable than traditional copyrights.

Likewise, traditional copyrights and patents serve a valid need in our society. Those who choose other means to protect  their property — no matter how strict and archaic — should be respected by those who disagree with those measures. Unfortunately, such mutual respect is difficult in the digital age given the number of and doctrinaire views of Internet scofflaws.

Sayonara PulseAudio

I removed pulseaudio, which I consider proof that open source isn’t about the best ideas always floating to the top. Sometimes the worst ideas float to the top. Just like shit. I don’t think there’s really that much difference between open and closed source software because both are driven by similar pragmatism and developers try to do the best for their target user audiences; it’s not about the intentions of the developers, it still comes down to execution by the end user. What seems like a great idea can make things a hassle for users.

Even getting around it can be a hassle. Is removing pulseaudio straightforward and painless when a distro uses it by default? Of course not. Now I have to set permissions so a non-root user (ahem, that would be me) can use /dev/dsp and /dev/snd/; by default, permissions on /dev nodes are reset when the system is rebooted. I also have to let apps like mplayer know that we’re not using the default pulseaudio any longer, so I’ve set an alias to add -ao alsa to mplayer.

Not a big issue, just clumsy.

Since I’d already removed a lot of dependent packages when I removed Gnome (or a lot of it anyway) last night, there were only a couple related packages to remove with it.

The result, though, is worth it. Everything’s working (sounding) a lot better and without tracking down every fucking possible setting in those idiotic scrolling interfaces. (Some pluseaudio settings weren’t found in alsaconf. Simplification? No, aggravation.)

More tweaking and clearing out cruft today as I have time.

Adios Gnome

I went ahead and committed to some changes on my Fedora 10 installation on my AA1 this evening. Gone are a lot of Gnome things — thirty-three packages so far including metacity, cheese (POS), istanbul (I’ll figure out something else, maybe), and a whole lot of stuff that I can live without. That includes rhythmbox. I can live with the mtp-tools since either way I have much less control over the device’s (Samsung S3) directory hierarchy than in Windows.

Since gdm was among the cruft deleted, I now boot into runlevel 3; I’m still at about 100 MB of RAM at boot but I think I can get that down a bit more. As I suspected, booting into gdm really slows things down. I’m not running any legit benchmarks but the time to a login prompt is faster.

I also edited my networking to start at boot rather than in X so now I won’t lose a connection just because I’m not running X or switching window managers. That annoyed the hell out of me — start something like music streams or downloads in screen, detach to switch window managers, lose wifi, lose everything related to networking. Not that wifi has exactly proven stable under Fedora.

Speaking of window managers, ratpoison is my new default window manager. Surprised? I also added terminus fonts and other cool stuff.

I also know I have more crap to get rid of because I wasn’t too aggressive; I see a lot that can go now that I’m looking at my installed list. I really don’t think I’ll need compiz for ratpoison. I also still have lxpanel installed even though I’m very sure I’ll never set it up with ratpoison again. I also saw apps like evolution and pidgin I’m unlikely to ever use  on this.

More tomorrow if I get time.

Update 20090627

I’m still unable to run yet (lingering fatigue from the flu combined with a heat wave) so my early morning hours are filled with catching up with work. Screwing around with Fedora has been an anti-priorirty until this morning (at 4:30 no less).

I think I booted into Linux three times all week (checked last: four times – twice on Monday, once Tuesday, once this morning). Spent most of the week working within Windows playing catch-up. I never installed Firefox under XP on my AA1; I’ve been using IE8 and Opera instead. I finally installed xulrunner and conkeror, though, yesterday. May install conkeror under Fedora, too.

Here’s GNU screen running mplayer (streaming smoothjazz.com), emacs opened with probably two dozen more buffers than I’m using or paying attention to (mostly dired — need to see if I can reuse  the same buffer), w3m opened to my blog, and some chatting. This is all within ratpoison, of course. I got rid of that lxpanel thing.

I installed GraphicsMagick instead of imagemagick so my file names are automatically set and everything’s handled with simple keystrokes. I saw that GraphicsMagick did the same things as imagemagick only faster and better with fewer libraries. Not sure how true the claims are but I decided it was worth a try. Only difference I had to adjust to was invoking “gm” before imagemagick command names in my scripts and configuration files (e. g., the aliases and commands I have set up in .ratpoisonrc).

Likely to remove some Gnome bloat sooner than later, but still have some apprehension. I wanted to see where pekwm would fit in comparison to ratpoison and fluxbox. It was much closer to fluxbox so I’ll remove it.

window manager resource use
doesn't include additional/related processes
taken at fresh start
ps aux | grep [window manager name]

lucky13      0.1  0.4  10264  4172 ?        S    04:43   0:00 pekwm
lucky13      1.6  0.4  10808  5068 ?        S    04:46   0:00 fluxbox
lucky13      0.2  0.1   5476  1556 ?        S    04:47   0:00 ratpoison

NOTES
-----
pekwm with default theme
fluxbox theme "green tea" and very small menu
ratpoison with custom .ratpoisonrc

Not doing anything drastic today beyond tweaking .emacs and moving old scripts to the AA1. I’ve considered upgrading the AA1 to Windows 7 when it’s released (October 22). I’d like to see that everything’s working better under Linux than it has thus far, which is why I still have XP installed and why I’m still leaning towards Windows 7. Right now there are too many things keeping me from considering running Linux-only on this: having to boot with an SD card inserted to use the reader, crazy wireless shit that’s happened on multiple occasions now (changing SSIDs and even disabling the wireless card), etc.

One final note about the DSL hard drive PDF I’ve not been able to finish yet. I don’t know if or when I’ll get around to it between catching up from being sick to vacation to the simple fact that DSL is dead and I think there are too many better options for those who want a traditional hard drive install. I thought interest would wane since DSL’s development has come to a screeching halt (last time I checked, John Andrews had posted no updates, roadmaps, polls for what direction users wanted DSL to go, etc.), but every day I’m getting hits from DSL forum links and from Google searches related to DSL hard drive installs. So maybe I’ll finish it anyway. Even though it’s about half finished (I want to add new screenshots and other images to make it as easy as possible) I’d rather spend that time writing a guide for something under active development. Maybe I’ll post my own poll about all that and see if there’s any interest either way.

Dumb Idea: ratpoison with lxpanel

Dumb idea of the day: I set up lxpanel in ratpoison. What an eyesore.

The panel itself doesn’t use up much resources, but those silly little applets do. First to go after these screenshots was the CPU monitor one.

I’m giving up 1024×24 pixels. Guess the coolest thing is the menu works. The rest of it is kind of stupid, IMO. I just removed useless crap like the showdesktop button, task tray, etc., and it looks even more retarded since everything had to slide all the way to the left. I’ll fix that and see what I can do to make it behave better and actually serve a more useful purpose than adding a Web-2.0 shiny bar across my screen with a menu button and application icons and applets that suck up CPU cycles and clog RAM. Can this panel operate with keystrokes to get to the menu — under ratpoison? Bet not.

Anyway, I changed my .ratpoisonrc to pad the top 24 pixels for the panel (the default for the panel was 26 pixels but I reduced that by 2; I set the panel on top rather than bottom) and added an unmanage line (lxpanel’s window name is “panel”):

unmanage panel
set border 0
set padding 0 24 0 0

Then restart ratpoison (ctrl-<escape sequence>: restart) and voila, I’ve lost a few pixels for a shiny freaking panel on a cool window manager that doesn’t really need (or want) one.

UPDATED 11:34 US/Central – After removing some stuff and realizing the alpha/opacity settings in the configuration dialog for lxpanel weren’t working right, I threw caution to the wind and ignored the advice of the developers to not manually edit it. Now have a panel I might be able to live with if I really wanted one. Solid color, clock moved over (thanks to a 887 pixel <space> setting!).

I still think it’s a waste because it requires use of a mouse to do anything. Maybe I can bind its menu to something so I don’t have to use a mouse to get to it. Don’t know. Don’t care. I think something like Ion3 or dwm which have a place for collecting/tabbing window title bars makes more sense than using a panel like this in ratpoison. But if I ever use oroborus again, I’ll keep this thing in mind — probably a better (low-resource) combination than using it with OpenBox.

AA1 Wireless Problem Strikes Again

I’d written a few weeks ago that I was having wireless issues. This started under Fedora and I eventually narrowed it down from bug reports and other blogs to problems with the ath5k driver following resume from suspend (which I’d been doing repeatedly over the course of a week).

The issue wasn’t confined to Linux. When rebooting into XP, I’d continue having problems finding any SSID at all. In fact, the Windows wireless dialog hinted that I might need to enable my wireless card even though I hadn’t disabled it at all. I couldn’t find my SSID or any of the others around me.

Well, it happened again while ago. I logged out of ratpoison to test something (which resulted in losing my connection because of the BS I mentioned in the previous two entries about services being child processes of X rather than starting independently), logged back in and saw from iwconfig that my SSID had changed. I tried to correct it to no avail. In my normal user account it showed I was connected to an unencrypted SSID; as root it showed the right SSID. Then I totally lost all connections and had no wireless. Nada.

So I reset my router to see if that was the problem. Rebooted to start XP to see if that was messed up as well. It was.

What’s really weird is how I’ve been able to get wireless working again both times this has happened. Both times the problems started in Linux (never any issue in XP) and persisted when I rebooted into XP. Because my security suite tries to update, the loss of wireless really bogs everything down. Each time I’ve closed the lid, which eventually suspends to RAM. Both times when I’ve resumed, that wireless LED has been glowing.

Not sure what the problem is. Or why this “solves” it. It’s disconcerting, though, that this has happened again while using Fedora — and without suspending to RAM this time around.

I’ll search to see if I can find out more later to see if it’s something that can be resolved or if possibly there’s something wrong with my wireless card beyond the operating systems.

Fedora 10 on AA1 Update: ratpoison and screen

Been setting up ratpoison and screen in Fedora 10 this morning since I can’t run yet. Now all my apps will open full screen when I open them in other window managers. Cool!

Here are some screenshots. First up, I ran into a bit of an issue using aterm for the first time ever. Maybe need to recompile? (UPDATE: Doh! No, it’s all good. I just checked my .Xresources and commented out the geometry line. Works now.)

Another app I’ve found to be messed up is zile. I installed it yesterday and the replace-string mode isn’t there (neither are others like list-commands); M-x re[tab to complete] resulted in only one (recenter) match. No problem, I’m probably installing emacs (no X) anyway.

The terminal in these shots is xterm. The blue shit on the bottom of these shots is from the gdm theme. Yet another reason to skip that and use a proper console login.

Here’s a shot of “free -mt” (aliased) at fresh boot.  I don’t have resources trimmed yet nearly as much as I want. I can only imagine how bloated that default gdm theme is. One thing I keep noticing about default backgrounds and themes is that they’re not designed for the lowest common denominator — which really is a disservice to users of older, slower, less-able hardware whom Linux advocates have always targeted.

Hard to believe I had Gnome trimmed down to a similar level. Need to start with fewer services running! Also need to quit using Gnome apps to do little things like an Ubuntu user would; I love that message, though. Haven’t installed imagemagick yet.

Finally, here’s GNU screen in xterm in ratpoison after starting and running a bunch of other stuff.

As you can see, I’m using mksh as my shell. I was going to install pdksh again but I saw the size of the binaries. Less bloated and more functional than bash either way. Guess I’m also kind of biased because of the BSD thing. Maybe I’ll try MirOS one of these days; not sure it would run on an AA1 (MirOS uses a no SMP kernel, Atom is multi-thread) or how much hardware support it would lack (does it have ath yet?).

Have a bit of mucking around with my wrapper and other scripts since aterm’s not working in ratpoison — using mplayer in terminal to playback audio and video since that’s a bit easier on the system than totem and everything else dressed up in GTK+. Not going to start compiling stuff yet even though I want either ratmen or dmenu; I haven’t even looked to see how headers are packaged in Fedora. I’ll probably set up a text-based menu (see Oct ‘08 post “More GNU screen Tweaks”) instead before I do anything else.

UPDATE 06:16 US/Central – Installed emacs (nox) and removed zile. Already changed my scripts to use xterm so I’m probably removing aterm and libafterstep and whatever else was installed with it.

Had to manually link emacs-22.3-nox to emacs. My mplayer wrapper also now opens PLS streams in screen.

Another AA1 Update – 21 June 2009

A few post-install and mid-configure notes before I turn in. I hate Pulse Audio. I have playback working reasonably well (albeit kind of low compared to everything else); recording/capturing from microphone is a different story. I’ll mess with it tomorrow and see if I can get it working the way it was before.

I decided to see what other small window managers are available in the repositories. No jwm. I saw icewm and lxde and openbox. None of those is really my cuppa. They do have ratpoison. I didn’t install it yet. Instead, the alternative “light” window manager I installed is fluxbox.

I don’t dislike fluxbox, it just seems a bit clumsy to find an open space to click to get a menu. That’s especially true on a small display like the AA1. I may end up compiling jwm or just installing ratpoison.

One thing I dislike about some desktop-centric distros is that “important” processes are tied to X, which means restarting or losing them if you switch sessions. In Fedora, that includes the network manager applet. I had to run nm-applet in fluxbox to get my wireless connection back. I’ll see if find a way to free it from the shackles of any particular X session so my connection persists independently.

More tomorrow. Hopefully.

Re-Installed Fedora 10 on my AA1

I quickly realized that the bleeding edge isn’t the place for me, so I’m taking a step back of sorts. I’ve resintalled Fedora 10 (Gnome). I think I had more stuff working faster or without manual reconfiguration using that — most of the reconfiguration I did was to reduce services running and change apps around to reduce initial resource use and to improve performance.

I’m currently updating the system. I’ll still have to change software around as I had it before trying Debian. Fortunately it hasn’t been that long ago and I remember just about everything I did before (so I think).

Let me say this: it’s nothing against Debian. I’ve run Debian on many computers and it’s wonderful on conventional (and “classic”) hardware. The stable release just isn’t ideal for certain newer hardware; if that weren’t an issue, I’d probably be running RHEL, SLED, or CentOS on this thing (maybe some day…). I knew the risks of switching to Sid included having more things that might crash (they did: rhythmbox wasn’t the only fly in the ointment) and possibly wouldn’t work (e. g., upgrading xorg broke tapping and scrolling on the Synaptics pad). I acccepted those risks and flaws with the hope of having better support of my AA1 than Lenny provided. Maybe Squeeze would’ve been a happy middle ground. Maybe I’ll try that at some point when I have more time to play.

Not surprisingly, I’d also face many of the same issues with Fedora 11. I already had noticed my Synaptics pad didn’t tap or scroll when trying the different (Gnome, KDE, Xfce) Leonidas Live CDs. I think I could still move to Fedora 11 when more bugs like Synaptics are fixed. I’d also like to be able to install without being forced to use a particular filesystem, especially ext4 which I’m not ready to try.

I’m open to further experimentation with other distros as I have time. I considered going Ubuntu LTS but I’d rather not. I was prepared to do something more drastic (Gentoo, Lunar, etc.) just to get things set up “just so” for my funky tastes. I don’t think this is so bad. Things worked and I was draining ~200 MB at boot using Gnome in Fedora 10, which isn’t much more (20-25%) than I was using in Debian with jwm — the difference being full desktop and file system integration under Gnome.

Nothing’s really lost beyond time (which I’ve had since installing Debian thanks to the flu; I’m just about back to normal). The biggest drawback to regressing to an earlier version of Fedora like this (10) is that it has only a thirteen-month support cycle and we’re already half-way through it. I’m just tired of stuff not working correctly and/or easily, or even crashing.

I deliberated about installing Fedora 10 as a lone distro on my hard drive after realizing Fedora 11 wasn’t going to work for me (yet). Turns out I’m right back where I thought I should’ve stayed. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I installed Debian for two reasons: I wanted a stable distro with long-term support and I wanted to integrate or streamline all my disparate Linux partitions (multiple distros and a large amount of free space) after being so displeased by the questionable way PCLOS automatically set things up. Speaking of which, I let Fedora set up a /boot partition and / (LVM) this time around. I think it’s also important to note that Fedora 10 from USB correctly installed GRUB to  the correct drive (sda rather than sdb), even setting up an entry for Windows (as “unknown”) — hooray, Fedora!

I don’t have the latest version numbers of everything but I’m content that everything works well and is reasonably stable. That’s all I really wanted.