Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Re: [BLUG] Trick for picture sets in Pictures Folder screensaver

I would agree -- I found myself going back to the plain ol' xscreensaver for the most part.
gnome-screensaver has a lot of "undocumented" knobs though. Try searching for gnome pictures folder screensaver or some such (GIYF) and I am sure you might find a way to change the destination of the pictures folder too.

I have started using XFCE of late. It's fast , responsive and yeah, it works for me.
 -- Abhishek

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 11:47 AM, Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu> wrote:
On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 04:48:05PM +0000, Mark Krenz wrote:
>   So in the Pictures directory you may have a directory for family
> pictures, one for pictures of airplanes, one for pictures of space and
> so on.  Just made all the directories mode 000 and then set the
> directory that you are in the mood for to 755.

<gnome-bashing>
While I do not doubt this is a very useful trick, in my mind this just
helps reinforce the idea that the GNOME ultra-lack of preferences does
nothing to actually increase the usability of GNOME or of Linux. It
makes me glad to use KDE, where even the "blank" screensaver has a
useful configuration option (the color to blank to).
</gnome-bashing>

I wanted to add that if you're inexperienced, playing with permissions
can create problems. (Shoot, even knowledgeable, trained professionals
sometimes seriously shoot themselves in the foot by playing with
permissions.)

It is one reason I think anyone using a primary group of 'users'
for their user community needs to rethink things. It is easier to
maintain security by using a umask of 002, using an individual
primary group, and using g+s on folders containing shared-group
content. (This is referred to as "User Private Groups (UPG)". See
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1994/03/msg00105.html for why Debian
made this the default for their distribution.)

Any solution which doesn't involve changing permissions is generally
better than one that does.

Cheers,

--
Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu> / KeyID: 8596FA8E
Fingerprint: 108C 089C EFA4 832C BF07  78C2 DE71 5433 8596 FA8E


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Re: [BLUG] Trick for picture sets in Pictures Folder screensaver

But for the record, I prefer KDE as well. :)

Barry Schatz wrote:
> I would just keep my pictures in groups elsewhere and make symlinks in
> ~/Pictures as necessary. Removing a set from the rotation is as simple
> as removing a symlink.
>
> -Barry
>
>
*SNIP*
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Re: [BLUG] Trick for picture sets in Pictures Folder screensaver

I would just keep my pictures in groups elsewhere and make symlinks in
~/Pictures as necessary. Removing a set from the rotation is as simple
as removing a symlink.

-Barry

Steven Black wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 04:48:05PM +0000, Mark Krenz wrote:
>
>> So in the Pictures directory you may have a directory for family
>> pictures, one for pictures of airplanes, one for pictures of space and
>> so on. Just made all the directories mode 000 and then set the
>> directory that you are in the mood for to 755.
>>
>
> <gnome-bashing>
> While I do not doubt this is a very useful trick, in my mind this just
> helps reinforce the idea that the GNOME ultra-lack of preferences does
> nothing to actually increase the usability of GNOME or of Linux. It
> makes me glad to use KDE, where even the "blank" screensaver has a
> useful configuration option (the color to blank to).
> </gnome-bashing>
>
> I wanted to add that if you're inexperienced, playing with permissions
> can create problems. (Shoot, even knowledgeable, trained professionals
> sometimes seriously shoot themselves in the foot by playing with
> permissions.)
>
> It is one reason I think anyone using a primary group of 'users'
> for their user community needs to rethink things. It is easier to
> maintain security by using a umask of 002, using an individual
> primary group, and using g+s on folders containing shared-group
> content. (This is referred to as "User Private Groups (UPG)". See
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1994/03/msg00105.html for why Debian
> made this the default for their distribution.)
>
> Any solution which doesn't involve changing permissions is generally
> better than one that does.
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>

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Re: [BLUG] Trick for picture sets in Pictures Folder screensaver

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 04:48:05PM +0000, Mark Krenz wrote:
> So in the Pictures directory you may have a directory for family
> pictures, one for pictures of airplanes, one for pictures of space and
> so on. Just made all the directories mode 000 and then set the
> directory that you are in the mood for to 755.

<gnome-bashing>
While I do not doubt this is a very useful trick, in my mind this just
helps reinforce the idea that the GNOME ultra-lack of preferences does
nothing to actually increase the usability of GNOME or of Linux. It
makes me glad to use KDE, where even the "blank" screensaver has a
useful configuration option (the color to blank to).
</gnome-bashing>

I wanted to add that if you're inexperienced, playing with permissions
can create problems. (Shoot, even knowledgeable, trained professionals
sometimes seriously shoot themselves in the foot by playing with
permissions.)

It is one reason I think anyone using a primary group of 'users'
for their user community needs to rethink things. It is easier to
maintain security by using a umask of 002, using an individual
primary group, and using g+s on folders containing shared-group
content. (This is referred to as "User Private Groups (UPG)". See
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1994/03/msg00105.html for why Debian
made this the default for their distribution.)

Any solution which doesn't involve changing permissions is generally
better than one that does.

Cheers,

--
Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu> / KeyID: 8596FA8E
Fingerprint: 108C 089C EFA4 832C BF07 78C2 DE71 5433 8596 FA8E

Re: [BLUG] Xen is stable

Mark Krenz wrote:
> If anyone needs a testiment that Xen is stable, here it is:
>
> # uptime
> 05:33:15 up 509 days, 7:45, 4 users, load average: 0.06, 0.23, 0.11
>
> That's the uptime for the Xen host machine, the virtual machines have
> been running for a while too, but some of them have been rebooted for
> various reasons. That's on a machine that is running about 6 virtual
> machines that are running webservers, mail servers, databases, etc. I
> also have another Xen host running about 14 VMs that has been up for 419
> days. Unfortunately I had to reboot both servers over the weekend for
> hardware upgrades.
>
>
>


In my experience, Xen is stable, but only if it gets along with its host
and guest OS. Certain combinations just do not play nicely with Xen, at
least according to my own personal experience.

When you guys create VM servers, do you separate your user data from
your OS/application data by putting these on separate (virtual) disks? I
like to do this so that my VM image is as small as possible and easy to
replicate without having to manually delete irrelevant user data, but I
know that simply cloning physical hardware into a VM is a popular
approach to bringing up VMs as well...


--
Joe Auty
NetMusician: web publishing software for musicians
http://www.netmusician.org
joe@netmusician.org
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[BLUG] Trick for picture sets in Pictures Folder screensaver

Today I wanted to add a new set of pictures to use for my Gnome
Pictures Screensaver, but I didn't want to remove the old set or move
them out of the way, so after some experimentation, I discovered that
by putting each set in its own directory in your ~/Pictures directory,
you can enable and disable a set by changing the permissions on the
other sets' directories that you don't want to mode 000 (no permissions).

So in the Pictures directory you may have a directory for family
pictures, one for pictures of airplanes, one for pictures of space and
so on. Just made all the directories mode 000 and then set the
directory that you are in the mood for to 755.

Of course if you use your Pictures directory for actual picture
storage for other things, this will make that troublesome.


--
Mark Krenz
Bloomington Linux Users Group
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/
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