I am sitting on my back porch on the most beautiful day in recent memory. Fall is finally in the air. The only weird thing is that, in this light, I can see thousands of tiny flying bugs in the air. They aren’t biting or anything, but it’s a little disturbing.

I have had a technological shift occurring in my life. I had previously been posting from my Toshiba Libretto using command-line only tools in its Debian
Linux operating system. Unfortunately during an ill advised “cheers” with my three year old son, I spilled a cup of coffee on my poor Libretto. Suffice it to say that things did not end well for the old gal.

This left me without a tinkering machine, and that meant I didn’t really feel like posting to this journal. I really got used to the command line interface and didn’t have an interest in going back to posting through a graphical user interface.

After an appropriate time of mourning for my Libretto, I started looking for a new portable command line interface. The only downside for me with the Libretto was that it would not fit in my pocket. I was looking for a pocket computer. I
started investigating “smartphones”, but I realized that none of the popular ones on the market allowed access to the command line without “jailbreaking” it or something. This led me to the Nokia N900.

So now I am posting from my N900 phone using most of the same tools I used on my old Libretto. I will be posting more on my thoughts using this new machine,
plus some of the other things going on. Or I may go another year without posting. Time will tell.

So recently I have had a ton of what look like spam users join the site. In the next few days I am going to purge all users that have not commented here in the past. If you have commented before, I will leave you on. Otherwise comment to this post today or prepare to be purged.

You have been warned.

This will be written in several parts throughout the day

March 6, 2010 – 11:53am

I am trying to prepare to bottle some beer that has been neglected in the primary fermenter for about 3 months. No visible or olfactory signs of spoilage, so I am moving forward with it. My wife is working at a craft show today, so I am taking care of the kids. Luckily the weather is nice and the kids are playing outside. But before I start on the bottling, I have to make them lunch.

March 6, 2010 – 2:00pm

Lunch went well. The kids ate outside – first picnic of the season. I am moving along on the bottling, but it will end up being an all day affair apparently. I had to dump 2 gallons of my “Abbey Experiment No. 2″ into water jugs so I had enough Belgian bottles for this batch. I’ve learned my lesson not using Belgian bottles on a highly carbonated Belgian beer – broken glass and dripping beer ensue.

March 6, 2010 – 3:45pm

I still have an hour and a half until the bottles are ready. I am starting the process now, though – sanitizing the bottling bucket, starting the yeast (I’m adding champagne yeast to this one at bottling time – It’s at 11% ABV and I want to make sure it carbonates), and cooking the priming sugar.

I listened to a really interesting piece of music posted to Facebook by Steve Layton today. Something to do with an “Improv Friday” project. I’ll have to look into it, seems pretty interesting. I also listened to my 5th in-progress Untitled Piano piece on the good sampler today (the Libretto timidity sampler is either not set up right or not really up to snuff – long piano decays never completely die out, which is really noticeable on this piece). I think I should be close to finishing it up soon. I would also like to start writing out some of the piano music from the play I wrote for in 2005 – “Square One” – and flesh out some ideas there. Hopefully by this time next year I’ll have a full album’s worth of solo piano music.

I’ve also been thinking about my journals today. I am keeping my beer bottling notes in my beer journal – a black graph paper blank book from Barnes and Noble. I have a blue one just like it that I have been keeping as a music journal since 2002. It’s not quite filled out. Since I have been keeping notes on the Libretto, though, I have not used it much. The funny thing is that the Libretto and these blank book journals are almost exactly the same size. Maybe that’s why I like the Libretto so much.

March 6, 2010 – 9:15pm

Kids are in bed, beer is bottled, wife is back home. All seems to be right with the world. Time to get some work done on the piano piece, if I don’t fall asleep first.

Written at 6:15pm on Wednesday, March 3, 2010

I’m writing this on my Libretto, sitting at the Peculiar Pub on Bleecker Street in Manhattan. I’m waiting for Jason Schoch to meet me here. We’re having dinner here then heading to the Player’s Theatre on MacDougal to see Marylin Nonken play Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories. This is the second performance we’ve seen of Feldman’s solo piano works. The last was several years ago when we saw “For Bunita Marcus” and “Piano” performed. I am excited about this performance, though, because I have actually studied the score of “Triadic Memories” – not to mention the fact that my current in-progress piano pieces are directly influenced by this piece.

It’s interesting being back here in Greenwich Village, sitting at a bar writing. I spent a lot of time in my 20s doing the same thing, except I was writing in a paper journal then, and I’m writing on this tiny computer now. The funny thing is that this computer (the Toshiba Libretto 100ct) was made at about the same time that I moved to New York and started writing at bars in the Village and Lower East Side.

In order to make it here tonight, I took NJ Transit from my home in Hazlet to work in Edison ( by the Metropark station), and after work took the train into the city. NJ Public Transportation is completely geared to getting people in and out of New York City, so in order to get from Hazlet to Edison I had to go 15 miles out of my way to Newark. Whatever. While I was on the train, though, I realized how much I miss public transportation. I used to read books on the subway to and from work when I lived in Brooklyn, and I would go through a book in a month or two. Now I never read. But on my way to work today, I started reading Charles Stross’ “Accelerando” on the Libretto (I found an electronic copy online), and it is really great. I’ve been meaning to read a Stross book for a while – I am a huge fan of his blog – but I haven’t gotten started on anything yet. I borrowed “Halting State” (another Stross book) from Erik G. a while ago, but I never cracked it open, so I returned it.

Well, Jason’s here, so time to eat!

My wife Laura is out with the girls tonight. I was extremely lucky that my youngest went to sleep in his own bed. He usually ends up sleeping in our playroom. I am hoping this is the beginning of a trend and he will soon sleep in the kids’ room every night.

I have been playing on my Libretto tonight, as one would expect. I am currently reading Introduction to Linux – A Hands on Guide while creating .wav files of my Untitled Piano pieces. That takes some time on the Libretto’s 166MHz processor. If I knew how to play midi files directly using Timidity on the command line, I would be much happier. Perhaps one day I’ll figure it out.

Holy crap – Julian, my 3 year old, just fell out of bed. Somehow he managed to fall back asleep up in the kids’ room and not demand to go down to the play room. There is hope for us yet!

I am taking a break tonight from my recent pop-centered listening phase, and I have put on Morton Feldman’s “Piano and String Quartet”. This is the piece I listened to with Jason Schoch when I first moved to Brooklyn in 1999 that made me decide to learn to write music. Beautiful, still, enchanting…slow and quiet, tense and reserved. At once relaxed and nervous.

I am sad that I have not yet had a six hour block to listen to Feldman’s String Quartet 2 in its entirety. I am lucky to have at least seen some performances of Feldman’s music, even if my wife was not entirely drawn in to the music. Hopefully I will be able to see more performances in the coming years.

In case you were wondering about my pop-centered listening phase, I am currently attempting to listen to my entire music library (or at least one song per artist) to create a playlist that will fit on my 160GB iPod. With a library of 500+GB, this is something of a challenge. I am listening in alphabetical order, and I am half way through the Cs – I just passed Charlemagne Palestine, and was stuck there for a while. But the pop artists I have listened to are drawing my attention, I guess because I usually pay so little attention to them. The ones that have made it to my highly selective frequent listening playlist are Amiee Mann, Charlotte Gainsbourg, The Butthole Surfers, Bells Of, and Servotron (listed in my collection strangely as ‘Avenue’, hence why I have already hit it on my listening project).

Well, my last wav file has been generated, so I am going to go listen to the pieces so far. Hopefully I will pick up the pace and write more than 30 minutes of music this year.

I got this little Toshiba Libretto for myself for Christmas as a tinkering project, as I’ve mentioned previously. I like to tinker with computers, and I wanted a machine that I could use to experiment with a full installation of Linux. I also wanted to restrict myself to a command line interface only to internalize the use on the console.

With all this in mind, I bought my Libretto 100ct on ebay and proceeded to install Linux. I tried a number of different things, and referred to a bunch of different websites before I got things working. I am not going to go into all of the things I tried that failed. But once I got things working, I started over again to fix a few mistakes and documented the process.

The one applications that I was not able to accurately document was ‘wppost’. wppost is a perl application for posting to WordPress blogs from the command line. Technically, I have gotten this to work (I am posting this from wppost now), but I have not accurately captured the steps to get it working. It is, in my experience, a total pain to install.

I am planning to go into some of my other software installations at a later time, but for now I wanted to at least outline the process I went through to get Debian GNU/Linux on my Libretto. There are a lot of other ways to do this, but I used what I had available. The Libretto has a lot of limitations – no bootable floppy, no CD-ROM, no USB. I ended up having to take the hard drive out and putting it into another computer to get the initial files on the machine. Currently, my only way to get files on or off is through the internet. I bought a Netgear MA401 PCMCIA wireless card to go with it, and this worked without issue luckily.

Here is the quick list of what I did to install Debian GNU/Linux on the Libretto:

1. Pre-reqs: This machine had 64MB ram, I’m not sure if you can install Debian with the standard 32 that came with the system. I know you can install Damn Small Linux with 32 MB of RAM, so that might be an option if you have a 32MB Libretto. I also used a larger HD than what came with the Libretto. I went with a 20GB because it was the smallest new HD I could find. But I think anything over 2GB should be OK as long as you don’t have a ton of documents.
2. Hard Drive Switch: I used another old machine to install the initial Linux OS. I removed the hard drive from the Libretto and installed it in the other machine. It was actually one of the easiest hard drive installs I have done – the Libretto HD comes with a little handle you can use to pull it out of it’s holding bay. I used a Compaq Presario 1640 with 32MB ram because that’s what I have available. Installing the HD was pretty easy, but YMMV.
3. Install Damn Small LinuxThe next step is to startup the other machine with a light Linux distro live CD. I used DSL-N because DSL is the first distro I got to work on this Compaq. I am using DSL-N rather than DSL mainly because the boot loader (GRUB) is a later version, and I had issues with Debian 3.1 (Sarge) and the older boot loader. I have not verified if the same issues would occur with the latest stable Debian (Lenny), but I did not want to risk it.
4. Partition the HD: Once the live CD starts up, I partitioned the HD using cfdisk in a terminal window. Here is the partition scheme I used on my 20GB drive:

   		Partition	Start		End		Size		Size		FS
   Device		Type		Cylinder	Cylinder	(MB apx)	(MB actual)	ID
   ====================================================================================================
   /dev/hda1	Primary		    1		 254		2088		2089.23		83
   /dev/hda2	Primary		  255		 508		2088		2089.23		83
   /dev/hda5	Logical		  509		1014		4160		4162.00		83
   /dev/hda6	Logical		 1015		1030		 132		 131.61		a0
   /dev/hda7	Logical		 1031		1536		4160		4162.00		83
   /dev/hda8	Logical		 1537		2416		7235		7238.25		83
   /dev/hda4	Primary		 2417		2432		 132		 131.61		82
   

   I marked the hda1 partition as the bootable partition. The “MB apx” column is what I entered in cfdisk as the partition sizes – the actual size is listed next to it. ID is what I used as the filesystem type in cfdisk for each of the partitions. The hda6 partition is my best guess at getting the Libretto Hibernate stuff to work. Philip Nienhuis has a nice analysis of the partitioning requirements for Libretto Hibernation that helped out quite a bit. Apparently the Libretto writes the contents of RAM to this portion of HD when it hibernates. I have been using the hibernation recently and haven’t seen any data loss issues, but I can’t be certain it’s right. However, I do know that hibernation is working. I will detail libretto hibernation in a later post.

5. Restart: After partitioning, I always restart the machine. I had issues one time trying to install to HD without restarting after partitioning.
6. Install OS to HD: Do a HD install of the initial operating system (DSL-N in my case) on the bootable partition (/dev/hda1). Once this is done, you need to get a copy of the latest Debian CD image onto the largest partition. As of this writing, the latest iso is available here. Download CD 1. I did this after putting the HD back in the Libretto and using a 1GB PCMCIA data card to store the data, but you could download it from the internet on the other machine and store it on the large drive. I put it on the large drive because I this is the only partition that I did not use as a mount point for the Debian system, so every other partition is going to get erased.
7. Prepare HD for Debian installation: See the Debian Install Guide for details on prepping the HD. Points of interest are Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. First, Copy vmlinuz and initrd.gz to /boot directory of installed OS:
   1. The first thing I had to do was get Internet access on the other laptop. In DSL-N, click DSLPanel and then Iwconfig.
   2. For my WEP wireless, I filled in ‘sid’ with my wireless network name, and ‘wep’ with my wep key
   3. Then I downloaded the vmlinuz and initrd.gz files with wget:
      • initrd.gz
      • vmlinuz
   4. Then I copied these to /boot/newinstall.

   Then I added the following lines to /boot/grub/menu.lst:

   		title  New Install
   		root   (hd0,0)
   		kernel /boot/newinstall/vmlinuz vga=808
   		initrd /boot/newinstall/initrd.gz
   		

   This will allow you to boot the Debian installer from an iso image on the Libretto.

8. Install HD into Libretto: At this point I shut down the other machine, removed the hard drive and installed the hard drive in the Libretto. When you start up, you should see the grub bootloader menu. Choose “New Install”, and the Debian installer should start up and guide you through the installation.
9. Perform Debian HD install: At this point you should be in the Debian installer. If you just follow the installation steps, it should be pretty self explanatory. Here are the high level steps:
   1. Choose your language. I chose English.
   2. Choose your Country.
   3. Choose Keyboard Layout
   4. Choose a hostname for your network. I chose Libretto
   5. Partition Disks: This is the fun part. You have to use Manual partitioning to keep the Libretto hibernation partition, but most of the partitioning should be done already. You need to format the partitions, though – except for the partition that contains the Debian iso image. If you format the drive that contains the iso (I used hda8), the installation will fail and you’ll have to start all over again. You should leave that partition set as “do not use”. For the other partitions, I set them all to ext2 file system format, since that’s recommended on older computers. The exceptions are the two small partitions (hda6 and hda4), which I left as-is (hibernation and swap respectively). I also set up the following mount points:

      				/dev/hda1       /
      				/dev/hda2       /var
      				/dev/hda4       none
      				/dev/hda5       /usr
      				/dev/hda7       /home
      				

      Once the partitions are set, the installer will begin installing the base system

   6. Set up Users and Passwords. I only used one non-root user.
   7. Choose Packages: At this point the Debian Installer will give you some options to choose software to install. When I first installed Debian on the Libretto, I installed the file server, web server, mail server, etc. but this really slowed down the machine (especially at startup) so I uninstalled all server tasks. Also, it should be noted that ‘Desktop environment’ will install Gnome, which will not usably run on the Libretto. However DSL-N set up their windowing environment worked great, though – I will have to try to figure out how they configured that. Anyway, I only installed the software packages ‘Laptop’ and ‘Standard system’.
   8. Install Grub: I chose yes here and installed grub.

At this point, you should be prompted to restart the machine. Once you restart, Debian GNU/Linux should be completely installed on the Libretto. I will follow up with another post on how I configured Debian to make the most from my command line only environment. I would also like to put together a third post on the weird Libretto hibernation feature – I have not seen any article that really details how to get this working. I have it working now and it really is a great feature, so I’ll share my own experiences with it.

written 1:00pm February 4, 2010

Writing on the Libretto again at lunch time. I have just about finished my first post on installing Linux on the Libretto. I should have it posted here in the next day or so. It’s looking like a 3 part series at this point:

• Part 1: Installing Debian on the Libretto
• Part 2: Configuration and Software Installation for the command line environment
• Part 3: Details on the Libretto Hibernation feature

I can’t believe that I haven’t found any detailed documentation on the Libretto’s hibernation feature and the BIOS settings. I am trying to figure it out as I go, but I still have some unanswered questions. Maybe I should find a Libretto mailing list or something.

Enough about my computer…

On Monday I took the family out to dinner at a hibachi restaurant. Everything was going great until the cook lit the grill on fire. Julian, my 3 year old son, completely freaked out. “I wanna get outta here!” was all he said. I had to sit with him in the car and eat my hibachi at home from a takeout container. Could have been worse, I guess. At least no one got hurt.

I am pretty sure my wife doesn’t read this, so I’ll say right now I have a little surprise for Valentines day. We’re having friends over that weekend, but I have a little plan for the days leading up to it. Just in case she does read this, I won’t tell what it is. Hopefully she’ll like it.

It has been almost a year since I have started on my Untitled Piano pieces. Have I mentioned that? I am about half as far along as I had hoped I would be. Maybe that means I will finish in 2011. Or maybe it will go on forever, I don’t know. I think I need to work on something else for a while, though. I need to do some improvisational recording to break things up a bit. I have been writing but not playing for too long now I think. It will probably take me a while to get my guitar chops back up to speed – my callouses are all but gone now.

Back to work now…

As you can see, I am changing the format of the dates on my journal entries. I am going to try to write here more often – now that I am able to post to WordPress from the command line, it frees me up to write my journal entries in text files and upload later. However, since my journal entries are all stored as text files on my Libretto (and checked into Subversion), I need them to conform to the way I like to keep dates in filenames.

I want to keep this short. The main reason I am writing here today is to wish my wife Laura a happy birthday. Happy Birthday, sweetie! I know I already wrote this on Facebook, but who can have too many birthday wishes? Nobody, that’s who!

I am writing this on my Toshiba Libretto in Vim (the One True Text Editor). I am working on my detailed installation notes, and will post them in the next week or so. I might post some pictures, too, but I’ll have to move over to the Mac for that. No USB means no camera downloads to the Libretto.

I have also been working on the fifth piece in my series of untitled piano works. I have been writing it in Lilypond (like all the other untitled pieces) on the Libretto, and works pretty well. I haven’t figured out a way to play midi files directly on the Debian Linux command line, though, so I have been going through the lengthy process of converting them to WAV files using Timidity. Not too bad, though.

Now I am going to experiment with the Libretto’s hibernation feature. Hopefully it won’t erase any data – wish me luck!!

Short note – I reinstalled the Debian OS on my Libretto to 1. Partition the hard drive so I can use the Libretto Hibernation Mode, and 2. to document the process to post here. The documentation went prett well, but the hibernation still does not work. The command “apm -s” gives me a scary “insert a disk” image – not sure what really happened there. It took me FOREVER to figure out how to get this command line blog posting program to work. I documented what I did, but I have a feeling I could get it to work much more easily next time. Problem is, I would have to reinstall again to test it out, unless I can figure out how to undo all the perl scripts I installed.

This is my second post from my Toshiba Libretto 100ct. I am feeling pretty empowered by this little thing, if only because I got it to work with a decent Linux distro (Debian). I have gotten it to be a functional little machine despite its 64MB of RAM. I am now able to do the following:

• Browse the web on my wireless network with a Netgear MA401 PCMCIA card using lynx, the text browser
• Post to my blog using the Linux command line program ‘wppost’
• Write music using lilypond and listen to the midi files produced using timidity
• Check my Gmail and nathanbibb.com email with mutt
• Maintain my project, work, personal, and lilypond files using my Subversion version control repositories
• Track my ‘todo’ list with Gina Trapani’s excellent todo.txt program
• Learn cool Linux command line tricks I would never have learned if I were using a graphical user interface, like the ‘screen’ command
• Annoy my wife to the point that she calls the Libretto my ‘Tiny Baby Precious’
• Post to Facebook using the ‘fbcmd’ program

I’m a little concerned that I didn’t fully document the process I used to get this machine up and running with Debian GNU/Linux while I was in the process, so it might be a little hard to get all the details right from memory. One day I might redo the whole thing just to get the steps correct. Plus, I love installing operating systems. It’s like a new beginning.

When I re-install, I might right down the steps I took to get the latest stable Debian GNU/Linux system working on the Toshiba. It definitely involves removing the hard drive and using another machine, which was a lot of fun for me. I love taking machines apart.

In other news…

There have been other things going on, of course. I have continued to work on my Untitled Piano pieces, but at a slower pace than I expected. I am planning to be my son’s cub scout den leader next year – that should be a lot of fun. I am still trying to figure out how to build a home theater PC – the combo boxee/dvr system does not seem to be ready for me yet. My wife has been making a lot of really cool hats lately – you might be able to see them soon at Andromeda’s Attic, but we’ll see. She might just keep them.

That’s all for now. I might post again in another six months. Or maybe more often, now that I can do it from the Libretto…