Hi all, Trent here with a long-overdue update.

As those of you who have been following The Linux Critic blog for a while now probably already know, I was unemployed for a good chunk of 2009, and one of the things I did to keep myself sharp in the world of technology was this blog.

Well, I have some good news and some bad news.

The good news is, I found a job! And it’s a good one! My commute is 45 minutes each way, but it’s for a great company, and I have a lot of autonomy to figure out how to do things, which is the way I like it.

However, the bad news is, I haven’t had the time or inclination to keep up with this blog!

My good friends Joe and Patrick have been kind enough to contribute here and there over the past two months, but I have been dreadfully remiss in tackling some of the topics about which I really still want to write!

So, I want to give some assurances to those of you who have been waiting eagerly for another review, rumination, rescue, or rant (and you know who you are out there ).

One, I’m not abandoning this blog. I put a lot of work into Linux Critic over the summer and fall and I love what it has become, and I think it can become a lot more.

Two, while I won’t be posting three or four articles a week anymore like I had been, I still plan to get into a regular cycle of new posts on a variety of topics I still want to tackle.

Here are a few things I have in mind for upcoming topics if you keep an eye out:

• Ubuntu 9.10 and the upgrade process on my old laptop
• Linux Mint and my main desktop rebuild
• My ongoing search for an Amarok replacement in a world without KDE
• Linux offerings disappearing and reappearing from major PC vendors’ product lists

… and much, much more!

So for those of you still paying attention, thanks for sticking around, and keep watching, there’s more to come!

– Trent

Regular visitors to this site will know that Fluxbox is Trent’s and Patrick’s preferred window manager. I, too, am impressed with its speed and customizability, and its low overhead. Fluxbox’s biggest drawbacks are that customization is somewhat less intuitive and significantly more labor-intensive than the full-featured environments’, and that the interface as a whole is foreign and unintuitive to those whose only other computer experience has been Windows.

One challenge I faced with my laptop project was that not only did I need to make the laptops acceptably responsive, I also had to keep the learning curve as low as possible. Even with add-ons such as iDesk, the testers were less than comfortable with the Fluxbox solution. After evaluating several environments and window managers, the testers and I agreed that LXDE provided the best balance between responsiveness and usability for the non-technical user. To be sure, LXDE is nowhere near as responsive as Fluxbox, OpenBox or many of the other ultra-light managers, but it is also far more responsive than the other “tweener” window manager, XFCE In a real sense, LXDE is what XFCE aspires to be.

As with many things Linux, there is a healthy dose of good along with bad. There aren’t very many distros that use LXDE as the default interface (WattOS and Lubuntu come to mind, but neither is quite ready for prime time.) I ended up using a different distro (Linux Mint, im my particular case) and installing LXDE via apt-get. Unfortunately, putting a window manager other than the default in place means you have that much more setup to do in order to enable basic functionality.

Going under the hood

One of the most frustrating things about getting LXDE up and running is that so much of the documentation in their wiki is flat-out wrong. The startup and configuration files are not where the documentation said they would be (I don’t know what would happen if I manually created them there, but I shouldn’t have to, since I don’t know exactly what format they should have). The wiki says you should be able to look in $home_directory/.config/ or, failing that, in /usr/share/, but none of them have anything remotely resembling startup scripts. The LXDE wiki does reference an app called “lxsession-edit”, which is used to configure the interface and set up startup applications (such as network and hardware monitors.) This application has one utterly fatal flaw, however: it isn’t included in the LXDE package, and it isn’t available as a stand-alone via apt-get. This is an unacceptable shortcoming. Apparently, you have to download it directly from a developer page, and it’s still in version 0.1. Either make it part of the LXDE package or change your documentation, but you can’t write instructions for what’s not available without giving any other alternatives.

So how does one go about determining startup applications?
The autostart script is actually located in the blindingly obvious location /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart. Thanks to the extremely thorough documentation and in-line commenting (ha!), I was able to figure out that adding @application-name (for instance, @nm-applet) will launch the application on startup and leave it running. Lines can be commented out with a standard regulation octothorpe (“#” for the octothorpe-uninitiated.) What I don’t (yet) know is whether leaving the “@” off will cause the program to run and terminate on startup (for instance, if you want to reset alsaconfig.)

Desktop Dalliances

One of the primary advantages I found in LXDE is that it supports desktop icons (which is still one of the more troublesome aspects of many environments: getting drag-and-drop to the desktop and expecting a program to launch “just like that” generally still isn’t there yet.) Getting it to work right is more cumbersome than I’d like, but in my case, that’s a lesser concern. As long as I’m able to get working desktop icons for others to use, I’m in good shape.

In order to be able to launch apps from your desktop, you’ll need to drop a .desktop file in your Desktop directory (located in /home/$your_user/Desktop.) You must use the .desktop extension in order for this to work correctly. If you don’t have an existing file, you’ll need to create one. This is easily accomplished with a text editor of your choice. The name of the file does not matter, as long as it has the .desktop extension. For purposes of this writeup, we’ll assume I want an application called MyApp. I would probably name my file myapp.desktop. The contents of the file should look like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=MyApp
Exec=/path/to/application/myapp %u
Icon=/path/to/icon.png
Terminal=false
Type=application
NoDisplay=true
StartupNotify=true
MimeType=application

(Hot tip: if you’re doing this for the first time, copy the above text and paste it into a text file, then use it as a template for future .desktop entries.)
Most of the above should be self-explanatory. Encoding should be consistent with the encoding actually used, and if the app runs in a terminal, you’ll obviously want to set “Terminal=true.” The application itself resides in the “Exec” line, and the line should end with “%u“. The most frustrating part is locating the icon for your application. Note that what actually appears on the desktop is what you provide under “Name”, not the name of the desktop file. So if I were to edit myapp.desktop so “Name=Fred”, then “Fred” would show up on the desktop to launch MyApp. Dealing with non-applications (such as text documents) is much more straight-forward: merely drop them in your Desktop folder, and you’re good to go.

Conclusions

By this point, some of you must be wondering why I’m sticking with LXDE in spite of being difficult to configure. The simple answer is that based on my experiences, LXDE’s shortcomings are primarily on the configurability side; once it’s set up, usability is pretty good. For my deployment environment, usability is critical, and I can handle configuration headaches. Compared to getting Windows XP configured properly (including services), LXDE isn’t that much worse (provided you don’t mind typing.) A big part of the hassle is dealing with permissions, since you’ll need to have root privileges to edit those files not found in your /home directory. At the end of the day, functionality for the end-user is key, and LXDE delivers on that aspect quite well. If you’re in an environment in which Gnome or KDE are simply too slow and a solution like fluxbox requires too much of a learning curve (or is simply too foreign-looking), LXDE offers a good blend of responsiveness and interface familiarity such that a neophyte can dive right in.

As some of you may know, a few weeks ago I posted about my efforts to revive aging laptop hardware. While there is still a bit of work to be done, the bulk of the project is complete, and the rest is simply detail work and optimization for our particular work environment.

For those of you who don’t recall the specifics, I have been dealing with two older Gateway 1.3 GHz Pentium M laptops with 256 MB of RAM and Intel Centrino (TM) mobile technology. They’re each about 6 years old, due for replacement, and not worth further investment of money into things like more memory. (In my work environment, once a machine goes out of warranty, there is great reluctance to invest more money in that machine, they prefer purchase of a new one instead.) That Centrino technology would prove to be something of a thorn in my side, and had a direct influence on some of the decisions I made.

Fortunately, from the end-user side the requirements are fairly straight-forward. The one proprietary application we require is java-based and while it’s a memory hog, I have not encountered any compatibility issues. Additionally, we require a web browser (ideally Firefox, another memory hog) and OpenOffice.org. The biggest challenge was finding an environment which required minimal training. Most of those who will use the laptops are casual Windows users who have had little or no previous experience in a Linux environment, and I wanted to make the transition as painless as possible. Unfortunately, this meant that a certain amount of bloat and eye candy was unavoidable, if only even to make a lean and mean X environment (like Fluxbox) a little softer around the edges. In short, I had to find a way to make the kernel and windowing environment as thin as possible in order to allocate as many system resources as possible to the required applications, but at the same time, I had to make the interface at least somewhat familiar.

Distro Decisions

I received a lot of feedback regarding good, thin distros that would serve my purposes well. I gave several of them a try, and many of the others I researched on Distro Watch. There were numerous viable options there. From a performance perspective, I was very impressed with Damn Small Linux (a.k.a. “DSL”), but the wireless card driver situation was not good: they didn’t support the card natively, recommending NDISwrapper as the best solution. Ugh.

As mentioned previously, my experience with Debian was sorely disappointing, again because of the wireless card issue. After the failures of Debian and DSL, I started digging deeper before testing any more distros, because the wireless card issue (and the ease of dealing with it) was a deal-breaker. While I could certainly take the distro I want and roll my own kernel, I didn’t want to have to deal with that. As a result, I started looking much more closely at Ubuntu and its derivatives, since I had already confirmed that they had built the necessary wireless drivers into the kernel (test laptop 1 was working fine with Xubuntu and Fluxbox.)

At the end of the day, I had to make the call among vanilla Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Linux Mint and wattOS. I really, really liked what the wattOS team was doing, but there were some elements that weren’t quite ready for prime time. It really looks like a solid project, but it was also obviously still in beta (a status which hasn’t changed recently), so I (reluctantly) crossed them off the list. I can deal with lack of polish, but there were still some bugs on the installation and administrative sides (I can’t remember what they are offhand, but I remember they were somewhat annoying.) Nevertheless, if anyone is in a similar situation, do give them a look. I think they’re on to something. My ultimate decision was for Mint, on the strength of its organization and the fact that it includes some really nifty extra tools (MintUpdate and MintBackup, for instance.) I also took the plunge and replaced Slackware 12.2 with Mint on my desktop computer. I don’t regard Mint as a “compromise” in any way, and fears that it might be a bit too robust for the laptop have not come true, so far.

Next Page: Becoming environmentally-friendly

A while ago when I upgraded my distribution, several keys went wonky on me and ceased functioning according to my wishes. It was a minor inconvenience to have things like the Caps Lock key become enabled again. So I pecked around at fixing it here and there, but never really put in much thought or effort until today.

I remap my keys with the /etc/X11/xinit/.Xmodmap (aka ~/.Xmodmap) file. The problem was my .Xmodmap was borking when X started, so no remappings were taking place. (If one part of .Xmodmap fails, they all fail.) In my /var/log/Xorg.0.log I found this:


(EE) Error compiling keymap (server-0)
(EE) XKB: Couldn't compile keymap
(WW) Couldn't load XKB keymap, falling back to pre-XKB keymap


And in the output from X – apparently from the keymap compiler (xkbcomp) – were repeated warnings/errors like this:


Warning:   Duplicate shape name ""
                 Using last definition
Error:        Section defined without a name
                 Definition ignored
Warning:   Multiple doodads named ""
                 Using first definition


With a little googling I came across this thread which gave some insight, but was of little help in fixing the problem. This Arch Linux forum thread has several people using various remapping methods reporting the same error. The thread is marked “Solved,” however, the fixes suggested had no effect on my situation. Daedalus’ suggestion of using the “keyboard” driver did manage to provide me with more helpful error messages that pointed out line numbers. This indicated my Caps_Lock remapping was the culprit.

I quit searching on the error messages and began learning more about xmodmap. I didn’t read anything of much use, but I did come across some examples of xmodmap commands I had never used before. I have always used the ‘clear’ and ‘keycode’ commands to disable Caps_Lock and assign different functions to keys, like this:


clear Lock
keycode 66 = Tab


What I found was the use of the ‘remove’ and ‘keysym’ commands to do the same thing:


remove Lock = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Tab


I tried those, and voila! Problem solved.

I wish I could explain why the old method ceased to work, but I can’t. Both methods are still described in the xmodmap man page, and examples of both still exist there as well. The first thread linked above suggests broken data in keyboard-config-1.3 on X Server 1.4.2. I have keyboard-config-1.4 on X 1.4.2, however, so questions remain. Yet despite no explanation, I hope the fix alone will be helpful to others with similar problems.

Finally, here is my new .Xmodmap, which I have enhanced a bit, for those of you curious about it. Explanations for my remappings are in the comments. As for why I prefer to use the xmodmap method for keyboard mapping, there are several reasons. First, it is a single file containing all changes. Those changes universally affect all programs since it is built into the X server. That means no third-party daemon is needed. Also, .Xmodmap is really very easy to configure once you get used to the xev utility. And last, it uses the xmodmap command which I have been familiar with since I adopted Linux – because once upon a time I had to remap the buttons on my mouse in order to get “advanced functions” (read: the scroll wheel) to work. =-)

Upon reading responses to my previous post, I decided to put some of the community’s suggestions to the test and examine some of the other options out there. Of the suggestions given, I primarily focused my attention on Debian (Lenny), Damn Small Linux and the wattOS beta.  All the distros had relative advantages and disadvantages, and this provided me with an opportunity to look at some distros I otherwise might not have.

The first distro I took a serious look at was Debian (Lenny).  It seemed like the “safest” route, which should theoretically allow me to build what I need from the ground up.  I didn’t bother with a Live CD, I just pulled down an installer .iso and went from there.  The installer was pretty straightforward, and I only encountered one major issue.  Actually, this issue was more “show-stopper” than “major.”  Due to the nature of what I’m doing, I need to have wireless network access on these laptops (Gateway model 450ROG), which happen to use Intel Centrino(TM) mobile technology (specifically, the Intel Pro Wireless 2100 card).  So I hit the network portion of the install, and the installer comes back with, “you need a non-Free driver.  If you have this particular Intel driver on removable media, insert it now.”

Yay.

I locate a USB drive and the drivers, and download and extract them as per the instructions, then insert the USB drive into the laptop, tell it to continue, and… nothing.  I don’t know if the computer isn’t seeing the drive or if it isn’t seeing the driver or if it’s just having a hissy fit because the driver wasn’t personally sanctified by Richard M. Stallman.  What I do know is that the installer crapped out on me.  Fine.  I’ll just exercise my Google-fu and see what I can find out.  And lo, I discover that Debian had removed that removed that driver from the standard package in a previous bug fix (what the bug actually was, I couldn’t figure out, beyond, “I don’t think we need this any more.”  Gee, thanks.)

So I’m faced with a couple of choices: I can continue to fight with this (meaning I’d probably have to compile a new kernel with the Intel driver and then build from there), or I can move on to another distro and see if I can accomplish the same basic thing with less work.  As luck would have it, I had another damn small distro ready to test.

First and foremost, Damn Small Linux is fast. It is exactly what it claims to be: thin, lightweight and efficient.  The interface is intuitive enough for what I need, and it makes the laptop absolutely sing.  It’s not as pretty as the Gnome or LXDE environments (it uses JWM), but it certainly does what I need it to.  My hopes for DSL were quite high indeed.

Then Intel once again reared its ugly head.  I was less surprised at DSL’s lack of compatibility than I was with Debian’s, but it was annoying nevertheless.  What was surprising to  me was that the only workaround they had available for this card was ndiswrapper, and it would require a bit of legwork on my end to get it to work.  I was hoping for a simple fix, but alas, it was not to be. And this was particularly annoying because DSL was so ideal in so many other ways.

So now I was faced with the question: dare I trust the project to a distro that’s still in beta?

Right off the bat, wattOS had one major advantage over the other 2 distros I’d tried: it recognized the wireless card with no problems.  Actually, it behaved very much like many of the other Ubuntu distros and derivatives I’d tried.  The install process was easy, familiar and painless.  And I must admit, there’s something comforting about the familiar, even when you’re trying something new.

For those not familar with wattOS, the best way for me to describe it is as a “thin”, laptop-optimized version of Ubuntu which (contrary to what Distrowatch reports) uses LXDE as its default desktop environment (Distrowatch says it defaults to Openbox). By default, it includes Firefox, AbiWord, Gimp, Pidgin and a handful of others. Noticeably missing are OpenOffice.org and Thunderbird.

WattOS is still in beta, and it shows.  The login screen offers the opportunity to select a session (by hitting F1),  including LXDE, XFCE, openbox, ion3, icewm, wmaker and blackbox.  (I do find it curious that fluxbox didn’t make the cut, since it’s one of the thinnest of the thin). Unfortunately, of the listed WMs, LXDE is the only one that actually got installed.  Attempts to switch WMs failed, because the distro didn’t actually include them.  Installing the environments remedied this problem, but in my mind, that’s a fundamental shortcoming, and one I hope is resolved when they come out of beta.  It’s also still fairly thin on management tools.  While Synaptic Package Manager was included, the Gnome Update Manager was not.  That, however, was nothing apt-get couldn’t solve for me, and amazingly, it works just fine in LXDE.

So where do we stand?

As things stand right now, I’m still not sold on any one distro/desktop combination.  Damn Small Linux (with JWM) is the runaway performance winner,  but the lack of support for my wireless card makes it problematic.  Debian looks like it will be a fair amount of headache for a small gain: there are other thin distros out there that offer what Debian does, including APT, so my incentive to go that route is greatly diminished.

I love Mint’s management tools. In many ways, I consider it an improved Ubuntu.  But I also really like what wattOS is doing. They’re clearly not there yet, but they’ve shown me enough that I definitely want to spend more time with it, seeing if I can turn the beta version into what I need.  For the time being, I’m going to experiment with some of the less-common environments on wattOS and see how well that works.

At my office, we have a pair of old laptops purchased back in 2003 or 2004, which are terribly slow, woefully underpowered and horribly outdated, but which we still use periodically.  In other words, they made a perfect target for an OS makeover.

Anyone who has run Windows XP on a P4 with 256MB of RAM should be able to appreciate just how sluggish these machines are.  So with my boss’s blessing, I gathered the two machines and tried to breathe some new life into them.

Before I continue, it would probably be worth mentioning what I need these laptops to accomplish.  In a nutshell, they need to be able to run a proprietary java-based client, run Firefox and open Excel spreadsheets.  The ability to print to networked printers would be a bonus.  Finally, they are intended for a non-technical group used to working with Windows. We are not interested in any sort of in-depth training, we need an interface that is intuitive and gets people directly where they need to be.

Did I mention these machines are agonizingly slow?  I think that may have been an understatement.  Because this is an experiment, I had the luxury of being able to download and test several liveCDs for various distros, and play around with several window managers.  

Just as a point of reference, the Fedora 11 LiveCD took approximately 20 minutes to boot into a usable state (!), OpenSuSE took about 15, and Ubuntu around 10.  (All of the above had Gnome as the default window manager.)

For me, getting the first laptop done as a functioning proof of concept was a priority. With the help of some of the nifty tutorials located on this site, I ended up installing Xubuntu, then switching to Fluxbox for a window manager with idesk to handle the two desktop icons I really needed (the proprietary client and Firefox.)  While Gnome was marginally less slow than Windows XP Pro, and XFCE was tolerable, the Fluxbox solution was downright snappy.  There are still some quirks to work through, but I’m pleased with the results, and, more importantly, so is my boss.

Tinkerer that I am, though, all that meant was that I had one “production” machine, so now I have the time to experiment with making things even better, which means I’m free to try different distros and see how they stack up.  My first attempt was OpenSuSE.  Just to set the stage a bit, I cut my Linux teeth on Slackware back in the late ’90s.   After that, I got my hands on a “light” version of SuSE and decided to play with that for a bit, and found I liked it.  

But Slack remained my distro of choice.  Anyway, since I was given pretty much free rein to experiment, I decided to have a look-see.

Long story short, that didn’t work out so well.  Did I mention these laptops were excruciatingly slow?  Well, apparently YAST isn’t happy with less than 1 GB of RAM, so I went back to the drawing board.  Trent had mentioned to me that he’d heard good things about Mint, so I pulled down Mint 7 and decided to give it a look.

Next Page: Getting Minty

“Move!” the oppressive beeper-equipped geek howls in utter contempt at the perfectly inoffensive white collar worker. The worker has been given no chance to do anything, but he is already condemned of failure. The geek, clearly the master of his domain, wishes to make sure all around know who’s the boss of the computer realm in which they aimlessly wander. And all the normal users, with their completely reasonable requests and questions, are incessantly scorned by the geek’s insane derision.

The worst of the geek stereotype, and more, is ridiculed in this popular Saturday Night Live skit by Jimmy Fallon. I greatly dislike such portrayals. This is certainly an exaggeration for comedic effect, but it is funny to people because it has an air of truth to it. My problem is that the truth is not so easily discernible as appears on the surface.

I am a self-admitted geek. I wasn’t so much when I was younger, but I grew into it. I was always smart, and always hid it. It was not until I was out of college and fully immersed in the techno-geek culture through work that I really began to accept the geek mantle. At that time, in the early days of the new millennium, I began talking of the Internet to my college friends, and they would look at me with that oh-so-common look that declared, “Nerd!” I learned not to cross the Internet with the real world.

Nearly ten years later all those friends have found their places on the Internet, mainly due to Facebook. Whereas I hid from my geekdom before, now because the early majority have come around, I have no shame whatsoever in identifying myself as a geek. But despite widespread adoption, when I tell people today they usually respond reassuringly, “Oh, no you’re not.” The stereotype’s negative connotations persist.

On the surface of the stereotype lies the idea that geeks are socially inept. This might have been true once upon a time, but that is simply no longer the case. In my Computer Science class there were probably 120 graduates, and of those only 2 would I say clearly fit the “Revenge Of The Nerds” image – and they were twin brothers. The shy and introverted may gravitate to the facelessness of Internet communication, but a small percentage of the geeks in that world are anything like Hollywood’s lowest common denominator. The lack of socialization skills just isn’t there in numbers. Don’t believe me? Go to DragonCon. Geeky? Yes. Introverted? Not at all. Most people’s geek friends are normal looking, and while perhaps quiet, not anything like the image of the computer scientist circa 1980. So I can shrug off as good fun the thick-spectacled Hollywood archetype as being something with which most people can no longer identify.

Next Page: Deeper Down

You know, when I started this blog a few months ago, I figured it would be a good place for me to gather my thoughts on a subject in which I have a fair amount of interest, and serve as a kind of howto repository for myself.

I keep a lot of notes when I learn things in the Linux world, and I considered The Linux Critic blog to be an extension of that.

Sure, I felt at the time that others might get some benefit out of my howto posts, and on my other posts where I review applications, wax philosophic on the subject of open source, get snarky on aspects of technology about which I feel strongly… well, I thought that anything that fosters discussion and in some cases “says what needs to be said”, regardless of how unpopular the opinion, still furthers the cause of making things better for those of us using Linux and free and open source software going forward.

That said, I honestly didn’t expect this much traffic. I figured the only people who would pay this any attention would be me and a handful of geeky friends of mine and that’d be about it.

Well, last month I had around 9,000 unique hits on The Linux Critic, and this month I’ve had over 15,000 unique hits, and I gotta say, I didn’t think that anyone but my friends and I would be interested in reading any of this.

So for those of you who have been reading the occasional post here, following regularly, or just popping in while doing a search for how to do something, thanks!

And for those who have bothered to take the time to pound out a comment or two, thanks again! I like the comments, I love the discussion, and I’m thankful, even to those of you with whom I don’t agree. Really.

Cheers!

Over at The Complete Geek my friend Jered posted a really nice howto on remote X11 forwarding the other day.

Like many of the uses of Synergy, remote X can be extremely useful when you’re working with multiple machines, or even if you’re working with a virtual machine and need to run some of the applications on the host without constantly flipping windows back and forth. One other useful application of remote X can be if you’re using a machine low on resources, it can act as a terminal of sorts, running remote X applications from other workstations.

Jered also points out how useful it is if you’re standing with one foot in the Windows world and one foot in the Linux world, because remote X can make that easier as well.

Give it a read, it’s a great writeup. The post can be found here: Remote X11.

The primary way I have the time lately to write so much here at Linux Critic is largely due to the fact that I’m currently unemployed.

Now, I’m the kind of guy who’s normally used to having a lot of irons in the fire. I’m always tinkering with things, finding better ways of doing things, and I troubleshoot stuff that I find wrong pretty much compulsively. I normally work in IT (of course), specifically support/helpdesk. In fact, my last “real job” had me managing a helpdesk at a company that hosted hundreds of Windows Terminal Servers for thousands of end users, and I liked it a lot.

Yeah, I know, it was an almost 100% Windows shop, but for what that company does, it’s the Right Tool For The Right Job — that’s still important, remember?

Anyway, being unemployed for an extended amount of time when one is used to that kind of high pressure, fast paced work environment as the norm doesn’t exactly scratch the usual technology itch for me. That’s a big part of why I started this blog to begin with; I’m a very passionate person when it comes to technology.

As I told my wife not too long ago, not only do I like digging into tech and then writing about it here… I have to. It’s part of what I am. I MUST keep moving forward, I HAVE to keep learning more about the world around me, particularly when it comes to technology, pretty much of ANY sort. Linux and open source software is an area of enormous personal interest to me, so it’s a natural choice to scratch that itch for me.

So, with that said, I still need income.

I know, the market sucks right now, and there’s a lot of competition out there. But the only way I’ve ever gotten worthwhile jobs has been networking, and what better way to network than with a technology blog read exclusively by techies?

So if you would be willing to help a fellow techie out, I need a job. I realize that you guys are far-flung, all over the place (there was an argument that at least in part took place in what I think was Hungarian yesterday!), but if any of you know of a job that might be a good fit for a professional troubleshooter and technology expert such as myself that happens to be in the Central Minnesota area, or at least willing to let someone like me telecommute, please let me know.

My email address is Mr.Shifty@gmail.com.

I’m open to temporary positions, consulting, and permanent positions. If someone out there is actually interested in hiring me directly, send me an email and if it’s for real I’ll send you back a copy of my resume and we can talk about it.

Thanks, all!

And thanks for reading! When I started Linux Critic it was really more of a way for me to organize my thoughts on what I’ve been doing in the Linux world lately, and give me something to do… I never thought I’d be getting 12,000+ hits a month with it.

So thanks for the attention, and even more so, thanks for the comments. I love and appreciate the input! Take care!

Trent