Linux Shell Prompt Customized
Yes, I know it is not the most exciting thing in the world, but the simplest things are often the most meaningful, and for those of us who grew up before windows, or for those n00bs who are brave enough to dare travel the land of the command line, here’s a tip for you. (That was all in one sentence… and it felt good)
You can customize your prompt in order to make it more effective. My default prompt was about half a line long and didn’t really contain much useful information to me, so I changed it, including added a little color. Me? I like to see the time and my current directory, so that’s what I added using the instructions here, and even fancier color management instructions here. Simply put, I edited my .bashrc file’s prompt entry to the following. If you haven’t done this kind of edit before, first make a backup copy file.
PS1="\e[0;35m[\t]\e[m\w$ "
*UPDATE*
Ok, the above line looks pretty, but the text wrapping gets funked up. You have to put escaped opening and closing square brackets around the color code chunks. The following revised line works great.
PS1="\[\e[0;35m\][\t]\[\e[m\]\w$ "
And here’s the before and after.
Ahhh… almost zen.
Jahshaka 3.0
*UPDATE Feb 8th * It seems that there’s more life on the website. They have stated that the product has been delayed to make sure everything is working properly. Actually, they are calling it a “relaunch”. We shall see!
*UPDATE Feb 1st* The counters on Jahshaka.com are all at 0 / 0 / 0, yet no software release is to be found. There are quite a few disappointed potential users in the Facebook community, as well as some angry voices in other forums. It has not even been 24 hours yet, and people are already screaming, “SCAM!“. Well, I hope things change in the next few hours, otherwise there might be some people out there looking for their donations to be returned. Best case scenario is that this is just a PR fail.
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Previously known as Cinefx (name change probably due to the effects magazine with the same name), Jahshaka 3.0 is expected out in less than 1 week. I’m truly excited to see what this looks like. A free professional level editor/compositor for Linux?
Take a look at these screenshots.
Detach Process from Terminal Window
Running Ubuntu Linux and am starting an application process from my terminal window. The problem is, that window is then basically locked, not allowing me to execute more commands while the spawned application is running. To fix this, I found this command, where I basically add a & to the end of the line.
i.e.
~/tools/shell/mycommand &
This allows me to execute the command and gives me back access to the command prompt to execute more commands.
So the next issue I have is, if I close that terminal window, all processes that were spawned from that window are instantly killed. No warnings, pleases or thank-yous. That’s scary for those of us that don’t save often. Ah, but there are more solutions. After executing the command, as shown above, simple execute the following command, and it will separate spawned processes from that terminal window.
disown
Or, simpler yet, why not just kick the application off from in an independent process, right from the beginning, with this util-linux command.
setsid ~/tools/shell/mycommand
Icons on Ubuntu Menus
I was wondering where the pretty little icons were for my menus while using Inkscape.
This shell command (from UbuntuForums.org) brought them back.
gconftool-2 --type bool --set /desktop/gnome/interface/menus_have_icons true
From WordPress to Drupal?
WordPress WordPress WordPress… is all I’ve been thinking about for a few years now. BUT, now I’m learning how much of a pain in the @ss it is (for me) to customize the look of my site. Last night I was up till 3am researching Drupal. Looking at this list of site created on Drupal… it sounds like a rabbit hole that I think I want to jump into, starting with setting up a LAMP server at home, then heading over to this tutorial, while keeping Acquia in mind for potential support.
