Thursday, September 20, 2007

GNU Screen -- The best thing since VNC?

I have recently found myself in a bit of a blunder. I found myself opening a VNC server (with vncserver) and then connecting to it just to open a bunch of xterm's, and this seemed wasteful to download pictures of a text-mode terminal. I also SSH in and run long-term tasks and want to disconnect--but don't want to use nohup because I might want to re-gain control of the program or just see in real-time what the output is.

Then I remembered I read the description of a software some time ago in pirut, and thought it was a great idea. This software, as I remember it, was much like what I've just found here, but it seems like this project is defunct. I know there was something which was its own daemon and allowed persistent sessions, but...

After a lot of Googling, I finally came accross GNU Screen. I find this software awesome! Basically, it's like a window manager for your Secure Shell, allowing multiple new shells to be opened and switched between, "screen splitting" so you can see two screens at once, persistence of your tasks--which was exactly what I was looking for, and other features like sharing the session between users. Now I can have my multiple terminals running on the remote machine and use them effectively and more efficiently than via VNC.

The Wikipedia article links to many good tutorials in its references section. I recommend you try a few of them, especially this one, but if you're like me--you need to know right away:

  • install: yum install screen

  • run: screen

  • disconnect: CTRL+a d

  • reconnect: screen -r -d



Disclaimer: Yes, VNC is newer than Screen. No, Screen is not convenient when you need to use GUI's since even if you get it to work, it's forwarding who X windows, which can be much too slow if you're connecting over WAN. VNC is definitely the way to go if you have GUI programs you want to use in conjunction with text-mode.

Happy screening!

Monday, September 03, 2007

Jamendo

Jamendo is an excellent program which allows artists to release musical works into the public domain under various formats. With plugins for programs like Rhythmbox, you can use the service as an Internet Radio, and if you like something you can visit the artist's site on Jamendo or get the whole album on BitTorrent. Recordings are uploaded in WAV for FLAC, and are distributed in OGG and MP3.

If you are an artist with content that you feel would should be in the public domain, sharing your original recordings is easy. More importantly, you can get feedback on your recordings from the Jamendo community, which can be exciting because all the opinions (although sometimes misguided) are impartial--which is more than you can expect of your friends :) .

Saturday, September 01, 2007

SourceForge.net User Network

Anyone can join SourceForge.net, even if you don't have a project to share. Many projects need testers, developers, documentation writers, and translators (and more). There's a long list of projects which have advertised they need assistance (http://sourceforge.net/people/). It's a great way to help out the SF.net community and gain coding experience both by examining code and by extending/adding new code.