Fried CPU

Yesterday morning I had a bit of a strange question (so I thought), although it turned out to be a good one. “Is there any way to pipe or redirect output from the console to the clipboard?” I asked my good pal jdong if there was indeed a way to do this. He quickly turned me onto this Debian page where I discovered a neat little application called xclip.

You can read the nuts and bolts of its usage on the Debian page, but it’s quite easy. I’ll use an example based on what I originally wanted it for (being able to paste file listings of various directories into a pastebin or document):

ls -al /media/storage2/Comedy/* | xclip

You can retrieve what went into the “clipboard” by running xclip -o, which will paste back into the terminal whatever you copied using the example above.

Unfortunately what it did not do was save the output to the regular “X” clipboard (where items normally go when you highlight and do a Ctrl+v or Ctrl+x in the GUI or Ctrl+Shift+c/x in the console), which is what I was expecting, but this is easily remedied. In order to do that, we must run the following:

ls -al /media/storage2/Comedy/* | xclip -selection c.
(To paste from the X clipboard it’s simply a matter of running xclip -selection o, but you can also just use Ctrl+Shift+v)

xclip supports a lot of extended features such as split clipboards (which I’m still not quite sure what those are), but I mainly wanted to use it for grabbing file listings. So all I did was make an alias by running:

alias xclip='xclip -selection c'

Now when I pipe output to xclip I can quickly switch to my web browser or document, hit Ctrl+v and my console output appears in a pastebin or whatever else i’m working on. It’s quite handy for both writing technical documents and for troubleshooting. Pastebin is the darling of IRC idlers, and this just made it easier.

I didn’t bother with aliasing “xclip -selection o” simply because I can just use Ctrl+Shift+v and paste back into the console from the X clipboard as mentioned above.

Hopefully that wasn’t too confusing. Use it a few times and it becomes a lot more intuitive. I certainly like it, especially for large outputs that would exceed the scrollback buffer (I use the Awn Terminal Applet constantly, which has a small buffer).

I just finished Emmanuel Goldstein‘s (of 2600) film Freedom Downtime about the insanity surrounding Kevin Mitnick‘s incarceration. It’s difficult for me to express my disgust with the system to begin with, especially in our post-9/11 world, but this just rammed home the point that the insanity, the ignorance, the control and the fear didn’t begin with Bush, Cheney, the neoconservatives or Osama bin Laden. The film and Mitnick’s Wikipedia page can discuss what happened to  Kevin far better than I can, including the absurd claims of corporations like Motorola, Nokia, Sun and, everyone’s favorite these days, Novell (who claimed Kevin Mitnick cost them $75,000,000), his time in solitary confinement, his years of imprisonment before trial. Go watch this film. Buy the film, buy 2600 magazine, support the EFF and do what’s right.

The terrorist mythos has overshadowed the hacker mythos of the 1990s, but it’s hasn’t replaced it. Hackers, and indeed all citizens, can be considered terrorists, held without trial and, now, held without charge indefinitely.

I have to admit that I don’t have a particular “point” to this piece. I just felt the need to bring this film to the attention of our readership. If we don’t keep fighting we won’t have anything (rights) left to fight for.

***While formatting this I found a great commentary by Keith Olbermann on YouTube, responding to the signing of the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

In a document buried deep in Microsoft’s website, detailing their relationship with Linspire in light legalese, Microsoft calls “Wine, OpenXchange, StarOffice, CrossOver Office and Mono […] product (or major component thereof) of Linspire that has the same or substantially the same features and functionality as a then-existing product (or major component thereof) of Microsoft (“Prior Product”) and that (a) has the same or substantially the same user interface, or (b) implements all or substantially all of the Application Programming Interfaces of the Prior Product.”

StarOffice is the keyword here, as it was the original name of OpenOffice.org when it was originally being developed by Sun. I used it for a short time in the late 1990s but eventually went back to Word and the other familiar Microsoft apps. So, couched in trade names and lawyer-speak, Microsoft has called OpenOffice.org a product with basically the same features as MS Office. While almost no one will ever see this document, it’s still interesting that they seem a bit more open to admitting that free software is giving them a real run for their money these days than they have been in the past.

In the same document Microsoft also discusses GPLv3 software, widely reported to have been excluded from Linspire due to their patent sell-out. “ “GPLv3 Software” means those portions of software products of Linspire, if any, that are distributed by Linspire under Version 3 or later of the GNU General Public License,” is the verbiage in the document, so who knows what that means? The small but sinister words “if any” are present, so reporting may be correct in general so far.

While Novell has told Microsoft they will release GPLv3 software in SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop whether Microsoft likes it or not, Linspire and, as far as I know, Xandros, have not had such an outbreak of cajones. To use the tired but favorite journalistic phrase, “only time will tell.”

Tom Baker, a self-described “hardcore Windows fan” and, presumably, the Fourth Doctor in the BBC’s long-running (since 1963) science fiction series “Doctor Who“, began using a LiveCD of Ubuntu GNU/Linux 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” and, of course, he liked it. The author’s ignorance of UNIX-like operating systems does show through in places but I don’t mean that as a disparaging remark at all — he made the effort. The author begins by telling us how great Windows is:

Say what you want about Microsoft, it powers the world. I can use any hardware, play any game and use nearly any software ever written. I can do it securely, and with little frustration.

I certainly disagree with this because even Vista, with its many security improvements (I’m not being facetious), retains gaping holes through which intruders can exploit your system and the prying eyes of our friends at Langley and Fort Meade can take a peek. Every piece of hardware is far from running flawlessly on Vista. Significant amounts of hardware, including printers, simply do not work with Vista. Other times, the drivers merely negatively impact the performance (in the case of video cards).

Nearly any software ever written? Not by far, lad. A quick visit to SourceForge showed that there are 152,864 projects registered, most of which are not written to run on Windows platforms. And not all of our software, whether free or “open source,” is registered as a SourceForge project. And while using Vista may not be frustrating for him, it is for me. Bugs, crashes, quirks (such as XP shares not showing up in Vista, but Vista shares working properly in XP) and all manner of “Redmondism” plague Vista, not least of which is a barely functional command line shell. Sorry, Bill, not all of us need a cute little picture and a cursor to get the job done.

Patently untrue or not, his opening comments do set the stage for his final report. He had some trouble getting onto his wireless network (secured with WEP) and had some issues with codecs and getting the proper screen resolution. I couldn’t help but thinking “why not just do a dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg?” The experience of a free, UNIX-like OS certainly does rub off on you once you get comfortable running in terminal, which is where I tend to spend most of my time these days (whether downloading with hellanzb or rtorrent or ussing irssi for IRC chat).

After he decides to install the OS, he has the following to say:

I’m writing this on my newly installed version of Ubuntu. I can honestly say it was a piece of cake getting it up and running. I had to do a few things first, like create some partition space on my hard drive to install Ubuntu on. Lucky for me, Windows Vista has a handy new “Shrink” command to shrink the size of your partition. Thanks to that, I was able to free up about 9 Gigs to devote to Ubuntu.

I can’t help but get a kick out of him extolling the virtues of Vista’s “handy new ‘Shrink’ command.” Many of us have been using gparted, whether from a GNU/Linux install or from a LiveCD, for a long, long time (or qtparted for you KDE types). He concludes by saying that he thinks it is unlikely that Ubuntu will ever replace Vista for him, but admits that he “just likes Vista, warts and all.” To each his own, as they say.

Bottom line, I was pretty heartened to see a self-described Windows zealot describe his initial (positive) reaction to Ubuntu 7.04 which, he says, “lives up to the hype.” Even though I maintain my position that UNIX-like operating systems, free though they may be, are not suitable for many end-users, I think power users and “admin-types” such as this fellow have a definite place in our community. It’s important to remember, however, that the important part of our community is not the fact that we use GNU/Linux – it’s the fact the we use free software.

You can find the full text on his blog.