A weblog of how I set up my new Dell in 217 CN

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Wed, 02 Jun 2004

Starting to play with emacs 21.3

1. First observations using the emacs on my Dell in 326 (the room formerly known as 217:-)

   It tried to load bbdb, but can't find the library. Not surprising, considering the library is at /share/elisp/packages-e21/bbdb-2.32/lisp/bbdb.elc .

   So we'll need to figure out where to put the libraries.

2. In debugging this, I noticed that the usual way of evaluating random bits of elisp-- namely, putting the expression in the *scratch* buffer and hitting C-j, doesn't work. This makes it really hard to poke around to debug stuff like this.

Tue, 01 Jun 2004

Tue Jun 1 22:05:04 2004 Upgrading to Firefox
I ran Firefox from the office and got the dreaded "no XBL bindings" message.

I installed it again at home and got the same thing.

So I decided to look it up. 5 seconds on Google produced the following info: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/ sez:

First, if you are running an old version of Firebird or Phoenix, visit
the Extensions panel in Tools, Options and disable all of your
extensions. If you cannot disable extensions, you must create a new
profile before upgrading to Firefox 0.8. If you do not do this, your
browser may not work, and you may receive messages like "Cannot create
XBL Binding for Browser" or "Cannot create Browser Instance". You must
now look for newer versions of your extensions that are described
explicitly as being compatible with Firefox 0.8. 

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/fix-extensions.html offers a detailed how-to for fixing this if you've screwed it up. Interesting how this will play out in our shared environment.

The following sequence apparently worked for me at home:

1. Disable all extensions in Firebird
2. Uninstall Firefox
3. Re-install Firefox and start it.
4. Re-install and activate extensions
5. Restart Firefox

Tue Jun 1 12:19:00 2004 Making deleted desktop items stay deleted
Colin suggests the following procedure, which seems to work:

• Move the desktop item to the Recycle bin
• From 'My Computer', navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\\Desktop and delete the item from there.

Wed, 10 Dec 2003

Wed Dec 10 10:32:06 2003 Deleted Desktop Icons reappear
Colin wrote:

> Here's what I've discovered based on my experience. While it does get
> removed from your desktop while you are logged in, it doesn't get removed
> from your Windows profile folder.

> If you look in .WIN_PROFILE/Desktop/ you should find the offending
> file/shortcut. My suggestion is to delete it there.

That is totally bizarre. It's clear that Windows saves the desktop configuration at logout. So it just doesn't do it right?

Here's what I did yesterday:

1. I created a new folder on the desktop, called "Desktop Items for Deletion".

2. I moved the 4 offending items into the new folder.

3. I logged out.

This morning I logged in again. Here's what I found:

A. The new folder was on the desk, exactly where I left it.

B. The offending items were back on the desktop.

C. The new folder was empty (!).

Is it possible that folders and ordinary files or shortcuts are treated differently?

I will clean it up in .WIN_PROFILE/Desktop/. But this is *so* strange. Of course, since I'm looking for trouble, I'm going to clean it up while windows is running, and see what havoc that causes. When that fails, I'll logout, go find a Unix book, and try it again with Windows shut down.

I certainly don't have this problem on my Dell at home.

posted at: 10:34 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 09 Dec 2003

Fri Nov 21 10:16:30 2003 Deleted Desktop Icons Reappear
Last week I deleted some items from my desktop and emptied the recycle bin. Imagine how surprised I was to see them reappear the next time I logged in! I did this twice, to make sure I wasn't hallucinating.

Now I've moved them all to a folder on the Desktop. We'll see what items reappear when next log out and log in again.

posted at: 15:31 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 21 Nov 2003

Fri Nov 21 10:16:30 2003 XFree86 titlebar lossage
So this morning I logged in to my machine, and discovered that the X server was showing all X windows under the title "Cygwin/XFree86 X", instead of "emacs@alnilam.ccs.neu.edu" or "alnilam: /home/wand" or whatever.

I couldn't even use "xtitle" (a script I wrote years ago, but which seems to work everywhere) to set the title bar correctly. It rans, but it has no effect.

Since I typically have 8-10 X Windows running at any time, this was a Real Pain (taskbar roulette, anyone?)

Exiting and restarting the X server solved the problem, but I am about at the end of my patience in dealing with XFree86. I used XWin32 from Starwin without problem for several years, and I am close to switching back. If anybody has an alternate suggestion for an X server, I'd like to hear it.

posted at: 10:20 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 06 Nov 2003

Thu Nov 6 15:52:46 2003 More progress on emacs & cut/paste

At last, I've found some reproducible behavior:

If from emacs 19.34, you repeatedly select the same region of text, and that region ends in a newline, the Windows Clipboard is unchanged the first time, but the text appears the second time.

If you do the same thing, but the region does not end in a newline, the behavior is similar, but the text appears the THIRD time.

It doesn't seem to matter whether you select it with C-k C-y, set-mark C-f .... M-w, or just mouse selection.

So the correct way to cut-n-paste a URL is to select it and hit M-w TWICE.

I determined this by using C-c on the Windows side to load the Windows Clipboard with known text before trying to pick up anything in Emacs.

I had noticed before that "the third time is the charm", so I think this behavior is consistent across sessions.

On the other hand, cut/paste from Emacs 21.3 (GNU Emacs 21.3.1 (sparc-sun-solaris2.9, X toolkit) of 2003-11-03 on denali) now seems to work exactly the way it should. This is different from what it did the last time I tried it, on Monday afternoon. (I tried it at home Mon eve, and it worked then.)

posted at: 15:53 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 03 Nov 2003

Mon Nov 3 20:31:11 2003 Cut-and-Paste: The Search Continues
When we last tuned in, our intrepid investigator had fired up an Emacs 21.2 under FreeX86 on his home computer, and discovered that cut-and-paste seemed to work fine.

Then Colin managed to build Emacs 21.3 on denali. I tried running that on Dell217, and reported that cut and paste did not seem to work.

So now, just for kicks, I tried running the denali emacs from my home machine. Guess what: cut/paste worked fine!

So it sounds like there must be something different about the X server setup on the two machines. How strange is that?

Any ideas on what I could look at to detect the difference?

Emacs versions:

"GNU Emacs 21.2.1 (i686-pc-cygwin, X toolkit)
 of 2003-01-23 on DRACO"

"GNU Emacs 21.3.1 (sparc-sun-solaris2.9, X toolkit)
 of 2003-11-03 on denali"

X server startup on my home machine:

C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\XWin.exe -multiwindow -clipboard

Mon Nov 3 11:51:14 2003 Progress on emacs cut-and-paste problem
Late last night I ran across http://pdx.freedesktop.org/Standards/clipboards-spec/clipboards.txt, which has a nice explanation of various interpretations of the ICCCM. I didn't grok the whole thing, but I ran across the following text:

The current consensus is that interpretation b) is correct. Qt 3 and
GNU Emacs 21 will use interpretation b), changing the behavior of
previous versions.

So on my home Dell, I did the following: From cygwin, I opened up an xterm (using the workaround from the preceding article), and said "emacs &". Up popped a copy of emacs 21.2, which I had sucked up from someplace or other.

And lo and behold, cut-and-paste _seemed_ to work fine. I didn't get a chance to use it intensively, but I ran through the same sequence of operations that Colin and I tried, and it worked like a charm.

So it sounds like upgrading to an emacs from the current century now offers something to make it worth the effort.

posted at: 12:00 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Mon Nov 3 11:47:44 2003 Running xterm
I found a work-around for the fact that SHELL comes up as

SHELL=C:\PROGRA~1\RATIONAL\RATION~1\NUTCROOT\mksnt\sh.exe

I simply say: xterm -e tcsh .

On the machine in 217, this has the bonus behavior of reading my regular .tcshrc, so I have most of the functionality I'm used to. I'll have to ftp my .tcshrc down to my machine at home.

posted at: 11:55 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 29 Oct 2003

Wed Oct 29 14:29:58 2003 clipboard integration non-progress
Got back to my office in 217CN, logged in (the X server startup up cleanly). Ran xemacs, got the same inconsistent behavior trying to copy from the X window to Notepad. So xemacs doesn't help on that.

However, xemacs does seem to be somewhat better in understanding modifiers on mouse buttons. button3 and M-C-button3 have observably different behavior: they pop up different context menus.

posted at: 19:09 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Wed Oct 29 13:30:28 2003 What I miss about X
I think the thing I miss most in moving from vtwm to WinXP (assuming we get past dealbreaker issues like working clipboard integration) is the ability to bring up a list of all the current windows with a single mouse click

For example, in my .vtwmrc, I have the line

Button1 = : root : f.menu "TwmWindows"

I am told that are ways of obtaining similar functionality in XP. Can anyone fill me in?

BTW, the other thing I miss is the ability to minimize a window with a single keystroke (typically a function key), no mouse required. Can I program my function keys to do something like this?

posted at: 13:33 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Wed Oct 29 11:25:36 2003 Quick Launch Toolbar Issues

MW == Me, JW == my son Josh

MW> 1.  I've somehow gotten into a state where the Quick Launch Toolbar
MW> displays itself with large icons rather than small ones.  That
MW> makes it pretty useless.  Do you have any idea how to 
MW> control this?

JW> 1) right click on empty space in toolbar. View > small icons

MW> Bleah!  How did I miss that?

****************************

MW> 2.  Do you have any experience with alternatives to the Quick Launch
MW> toolbar? 

JW> 2) I use True Launch Bar (www.truesoft.com). Costs $10 or $15, supports
JW> cascading menus, virtual folders, lots of plugins for weather, disk space,
JW> system monitor, POP3 checker, etc.

MW> Yes, I ran across this yesterday.  I tried downloading it for my
MW> office machine, but you need to be an administrator to install it :(

MW> It looks handy.  I will try it on my home machines & pester the Powers
MW> that Be if I think it's worth the effort.

Wed Oct 29 09:43:59 2003 All Machines in CCIS are not alike
So I went to log in on one of the Dells in Egan. (Because I wanted to try running xemacs over X to see if I got the same inconsistent clipboard behavior).

The good news is that my startup folder still contained exactly 1 XWin startup.

The bad news is that on Owen's machine, the X server failed to start, producing a window that said:

XWin.exe - Unable to locate component:
The application failed to start because cygcygipc-2.dll ws ot found.
Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Stranger yet: on Vassilios' machine, the X server also failed to start, but produced no error message.

I tried this both from the startup menu and from my handy shortcut for restarting the X server.

Bleah!

posted at: 09:48 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 28 Oct 2003

Tue Oct 28 09:35:14 2003 startxwin.bat: it's Baa-ack!
I removed startxwin.bat from my startup group from the Unix side, as Colin suggested earlier. This worked for a while, but as of this morning, it's back in my startup group. I haven't been in CN for a while (since last Fri or possibly last Thursday), so I don't know for sure when it reappeared.

And also, this batch file does not start up cleanly. When it runs, I get a brief cmd window that says: Access is denied: Startxwin.bat or something like that. Fooey!

posted at: 09:37 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 23 Oct 2003

Thu Oct 23 17:43:14 2003 Can't make Escher run duplex from Dell217
Looking at Printers and Faxes > XX > Printing Preferences :

when XX = renoir we get a pane that says "Print on Both Sides" and gives radio buttons for flip orientation.

when XX = escher we get no such pane.

BTW, can I arrange things to print a header page on jobs spooled through Windows? I believe the setting is on the Printer Properties > Advanced > Separator Page, which is grayed out. I'm guessing that I'd have to be an Administrator to do that. Not a biggie right now.

posted at: 17:43 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Thu Oct 23 10:49:00 2003 Where to put Temporary Internet Files?
In an attempt to cut down on the size of my .WIN_PROFILE, I moved my IE Temporary Internet Files to C:\Temp, which to my surprise seemed to work.

Unfortunately, now logging out takes forever while it says "saving your settings".

Where can I put the temporary internet files that won't screw things up either by counting against my quota or by requiring a long save/restore settings ?

posted at: 14:36 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Thu Oct 23 10:52:23 2003 Can't remove startxwin from Startup Group
My X server this morning had a serious spaz: somehow it got my Caps inverted, so that everything I typed in lower case came out in upper, and vice versa.

I shut down the X server, and then observed that in my startup group I had *two* X servers starting up: startxin.bat, which simply ran C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\startxwin.bat, and my own X Windows Startup, which ran XWin.exe -multiwindow -clipboard

I also noticed that when starting up, I'd get a brief cmd window which said "access is denied" and "startxwin.bat". I definitely *was* running startxwin.bat, because I'd get the xterm that it starts up.

I tried removing startxwin.bat, but every time I logged out and logged in again, it came back (!).

Is this startxwin.bat something that you added to the Startup group recently? I don't think it was there when we initially played with this machine.

startxwin.bat says "start XWin -multiwindow", but does not say -clipboard.

I was hoping that knowing exactly which X server I was running would help with my cut & paste problems, but these are still a problem.

posted at: 11:04 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Thu Oct 23 10:40:35 2003 Can't see cross-device links from Windows
I have a lot of stuff on /proj/wand and /scratch/wand. I've made links from my home directory to the work that is in these places, but none of these links are visible from My Documents. Nor is there any way I can see to access these directories directly.

This means that I can't use this extra (non-quota) space from the PC (say for IE cache, etc.)

This seems a relatively important thing to fix.

posted at: 10:45 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 17 Oct 2003

Fri Oct 17 21:55:30 2003 X-window/XP integration status report
This remains a big problem. I have been unable to get cut-and-paste to work consistently between X applications (especially emacs) and Windows apps. Using SSH Secure Shell, Ctrl-Ins works most of the time as a "Copy Selection", but not from emacs, which captures this as a command. Unsetting the key doesn't seem to help.

Putty CLAIMS to copy on select (see the putty FAQ, item A5.4), but does not seem to work, even from a non-emacs application. And I can't get stuff from Windows to X, either.

I tried downloading SecureCRT from VanDyke. This has a "copy on select" option under Global Options > Options > Mouse . I have been unable to find such an option in SSH Secure Shell.

Alas, although my license says "Expires: Never", I get a message saying that my license is for an earlier version of SecureCRT. Apparently licenses older than 2001 or so have now timed out because of version creep. Oh well.

I can't get PKI to work under any of these ssh clients. It used to work under the old SecureCRT. It's least annoying under Putty, because both the username and password prompts show up in the terminal window, so you don't have to mouse around: you can just type.

posted at: 22:17 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Fri Oct 17 16:07:08 2003 Can't see cross-device links
I have links in my home directory: from /home/wand/proj to /proj/wand
from /home/wand/proj2 to /proj/wand2
from /home/wand/scratch to /scratch/wand

None of these is visible from My Documents.

posted at: 16:08 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 14 Oct 2003

Tue Oct 14 16:27:35 2003 Local mirror of cygwin

The cygwin installation on my laptop is screwed up, so I decided to reinstall it. But the pipe got broken about 10 minutes into the download. When I tried to restart, I got "cannot load setup.ini from archive.progeny.com"

I recall this happening in the past.

Can anybody recommend a reliable mirror site for cygwin? Is there a local mirror? (I don't see one on mirrors.ccs.neu.edu).

posted at: 16:31 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Tue Oct 14 16:23:31 2003 Update on mouse modifiers

This appears to be strictly an emacs problem, since I can do Ctl-mouse-3 to change fonts in xterm just fine.

posted at: 16:24 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Tue Oct 14 13:04:13 2003 Shift/Control-Mouse Button in Emacs
These seem not to be working properly. They pop up the menu, but it flashes on the screen briefly, and then disappears again.

This is annoying primarily because I can't figure out how to change fonts in Emacs without using the mouse.

Pop-up menus that are attached to mouse keys without modifiers (eg Mouse-3) seem to be fine.

Also, Cut/Paste seems unhappy this morning; C/S-Ins works, but yesterday I could do it more transparently.

I suspect this is an ssh problem. I'm going to see if I can run SecureCRT and see if some of these issues go away.

posted at: 13:16 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 13 Oct 2003

Mon Oct 13 10:37:03 2003 New blog for my Dell at home

I took delivery on another Dell for my office at home. Looks like I will have trials and tribulations with this one, too.

For starts, I can't get the cpu to display anything.

So, for the benefit of my gazillions of readers out there, I'm keeping a blog for that one, too. This one, however, is not advertised on my home page. It's only for the cognoscenti :-)

posted at: 10:43 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 10 Oct 2003

Fri Oct 10 13:59:04 2003 Cut & Paste not happy

Continuing to run

C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\XWin.exe -multiwindow -clipboard

Now I can't cut & paste either from windows to unix (emacs or xterm) or vice versa.

I recall on my home machine, running Xwin32, that sometimes the clipboard would get tired and stop working. I recall that I had a technique to revive, but I've forgotten what it was.

posted at: 14:02 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Fri Oct 10 11:47:01 2003 Integrating the X clipboard with windows
Colin writes:

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear about this Mitch, the startxwin.bat file does not start X with the -clipboard option. Here's what I do to get around this.

Start up xwin with the following command

xwin -multiwindow -clipboard

and then I use the Secure Shell ssh client to connect to a remote host and have it set to tunnel X back to my computer. That seems to do the trick for me.

You should find that the scroll button on your mouse also acts as the middle button for pasting in to X applications.

posted at: 11:47 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Fri Oct 10 07:52:39 2003 Directories, RSS configured
The link to the RSS feed now seems right, but I don't read RSS. Can anybody confirm that it is doing the right thing?

posted at: 07:53 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 09 Oct 2003

Thu Oct 9 22:37:01 2003 Changed to ".blog"
Switched blosxom to look for .blog files, and added (auto-execute "\\.blog$" 'html-mode) to my .emacs, so adding blog entries automatically pops up emacs in html mode.

posted at: 23:19 | path: | permanent link to this entry

xstartwin.bat -clipboard didn't work
Still can't cut&paste between X and windows.

posted at: 22:40 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Thu Oct 9 18:06:06 2003 Need to mess with story.html
I think I'd like to fix this so that the posting time appears bf in the title, as I've been doing by hand.

Then we can delete the posted-at stuff.

Just manually switched emacs to html mode, which seems to work ok. Maybe I can avoid futzing with the directory structure...

posted at: 18:08 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Got Blosxom sort-of configured
Put in a decent head.html, so now this sucker looks like a real blog.

I'll still need to reorganize the directories and set up the cron jobs, etc.

posted at: 18:00 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Thu Oct 9 17:26:10 2003 Switched to Blosxom

I'm now generating this as a _real_ blog, using Blosxom (www.blosxom.com). They said "blogging in 20 minutes or your money back", and they were right.

Of course this looks pretty vanilla; I'll have to find some nicer themes so it will look prettier.

Also making blosxom look for .txt files is a bad idea, because then I'm typing in text mode. A better plan is to put the articles in html mode, and then put the blog in a directory separate from the articles.

posted at: 17:59 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Thu Oct 9 16:50:53 2003 My plan for organizing program libraries.
I'm keeping all the real stuff in D:\Program Files\ ; this will keep Windows installers happy and not use up my Unix quota.

At the same time, I'm keeping a directory ~/windows/Program Files/ . This will contain a directory per download; each directory will contain the web site from which the application was downloaded + a shortcut to the corresponding directory over in D: . That way in case of disaster I'll have a record of what was installed.

Of course this means that utilities I rely on, like Firebird, will be available only from this machine, and not from the lab should ever need to get at them from there. Bummer. Is there any better approach?

posted at: 17:24 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Thu Oct 9 16:48:06 2003 Can't Load Java plugin
Firebird loads just fine, but can't load Java plugin (boo-hoo!): insufficient privilege. Imported my Mozilla bookmarks just fine, though.

posted at: 17:23 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Thu Oct 9 11:56:24 2003 Urgent: How to cut & paste w/ emacs (or even xterm)??
I can't seem to get the clipboard integration to work. I can cut & paste just fine between X apps, but not between X and windows. Maybe we really need to set -clipboard??

posted at: 17:22 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Thu Oct 9 11:36:14 2003 Dealing with ssh identities

Tried importing keypairs into SSH using Settings > User Keys > Import I imported all the .pub keys from ~/.ssh and ~/.ssh2, on some got "error reading file" on import, but they looked ok when I opened them in notepad.

Tried using them, got: "Failed to read your public key file C:\Docs&Settings\wand\Application Data\SSH\UserKeys\whatever.pub"

Tried generating a keypair, called it wand-dell2 w/ empty passphrase, then uploading it to ~wand/.ssh2/authorization . That didn't seem to work.

Deleting id_dsa and id_rsa, which it complained about.

I can't seem to figure out how it works in SecureCRT. I wonder if using putty will help?

posted at: 17:22 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Thu Oct 9 11:11:13 2003 ssh keyboard settings
ssh Keyboard settings from my laptop: Backspace sends Delete, Audio Bell, Alt send escape, Preserve Alt-Gr [also: Jump Scroll, Scroll-to-clear-screen, Scroll-to-bottom-on output, scroll-to-bottom-on keypress]

Setting BS sends Delete and Alt sends Escape in SSH seems to do the trick. Maybe this should be in the default?

Still need to set up ssh identity, hopefully in a way that doesn't screw up my identity on the VanDyke client at home and on my laptop.

posted at: 17:21 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Thu Oct 9 07:36:37 2003
Question: Is there some way to see my D: drive from Unix? Ans: Colin says no, which is pretty much as it should be.

posted at: 17:20 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Wed Oct 8 19:23:29 2003
Need to set keyboard properties in SSH Secure. Don't know how to do this for the ssh inside cygwin.

posted at: 17:20 | path: | permanent link to this entry