Episode: 275
Title: HPR0275: giver
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0275/hpr0275.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 15:24:32

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Neo's
Welcome to Hecker Public Radio.
I'm monster B and on the call is 330.
Hello.
Clot 2.
Hello.
And Peter, without the 64.
Hi.
Good night.
And today, 330 is going to tell us all about giver.
Oh boy.
What the heck is giver?
Is that like giving someone mono?
In a way, yes.
The giver is an intro land file sharing application
that it basically makes stuff like NFS and Samba
really, really, really, really retardedly easy.
What it does is it opens up a window
and all of the other computers on your network
that are running giver show up in like a buddy list.
And then you can just drag and drop files.
Just like you can even take like a whole assortment of files
that are like on a desktop or something.
Click and drag, select them and then drop them on.
So whichever user you want to give them.
And on their computer will pop up and say, hey,
so-and-so is trying to share files with you.
Do you want these?
And you just say yes or no.
If you say yes, the files start moving over.
Once they're done, on both computers,
it says that the files are sent.
If you say no, it sends a message back
to the originating user going, they don't want it.
And for someone like me that doesn't completely
understand networking, but is always trying to do things
that he has no idea what he's doing.
This is great.
It sounds great.
Yeah, it's completely written in mono
and was done by a couple of guys at Novel during brain share.
From what I'm hearing, this isn't going to replace
them like NFS and Samba.
The other system has to say yes to receive these files.
But it's not like I can just transfer files from one
computer to the other.
Is that correct?
Because you have to get up and walk
over to the other one and say yes.
If you were to get between yourself.
But let's say somehow magically you
had a nice big network at home.
And you're sharing files with the family and such.
And somehow you magically work at one of these places
that runs Linux.
And if you can get all the people on that network to run it,
all you have to do is pick up your laptop from home,
take it to work.
And then that list is populated with a whole different type
of people.
So it is auto detected.
It's like done through a Vahee or what
there's Eurocon, whatever it is.
Yeah, it actually uses Eurocon.
OK.
And it just, what it does is it looks
that because you have to have the client on all the computers.
So we're just looking for the client and hooked everybody up.
What about a Dropbox option?
I mean, not the program, but the concept of a Dropbox.
So that if I've got a coworker or a family member who's
not in front of their computer, but I do want to send them
some file, is there some isolated folder
that I could send to them so that they could still get it
when they get back or not that I'm aware of?
And what about if they want to request a file,
like if they say, oh, I need that audio file from me?
Can they go into, I mean, is there
any way for them to ping me through this?
Or they would just have to like, OK.
It's really just like a, it would be like,
if you were talking, it's really good for collaboration.
You're collaborating on a project.
And one guy is all the way down the hallway.
You don't want to, you know, you're fat like me.
You don't want to walk because you'll
start sweating on the way.
So, you know, you're in an IRC channel
or passing emails back and forth.
And, you know, you want to send a big hunk and set a file.
You're like, hey, here's all the stuff that I did before lunch.
You just want to sit it all over to him.
You can go here.
And it's just one click and drag, and they get it.
Cool.
So, this is just a, like, for a local network.
It's not for over the net.
OK.
That's where I was confused.
I was like, so you have to be on the exact same network
to do this.
Yeah.
And when Claude said something about Dropbox,
because when I started going, hey, I just found this thing.
It was wild in the IRC.
People kept going, well, OK, he's Dropbox for that.
But to do it in Dropbox, you have to go all the way out
to the web and then back into the network.
Where this is just like a straight shot across.
Yeah, that's the problem I've got with Dropbox.
Like, if you're on a limited bandwidth and limited download,
you know, a quota for the month, you're going to waste
the hell of a lot of Dropbox, I reckon.
Yeah.
So, if you're used to it, save your bandwidth.
Yeah, well, I mean, I'm comfortable just
mapping drives with NFS.
Yeah.
The only downside I see with that is if I wanted to transfer,
if I want to pull a movie off my midbox for some reason
and actually copy it over to my machine,
not just stream it off the midbox,
I would have to go to the midbox, then send it up
to my desktop machine, and then I'd have to walk up
to my desktop machine and say, yeah, OK, I want that.
Is there really no, you can configure that,
so it's automatic?
Not that I've seen, and there hasn't actually
been a whole lot of development on it since the brain share.
Like, they got it going in a couple of hours.
Yeah, just two guys sat down and started hacking at it.
So, you know, if they may do it someday, maybe,
but probably not, because I think they really
wanted to keep this as simple as possible.
Yeah, I can certainly say the need, like, probably new users
who aren't comfortable setting up Sam Burr and NFS.
Certainly, but I'm just wondering,
like, in a home environment, I don't know,
you need that security to say, yeah, I want to accept the file.
Yeah.
Because if I'm sending something to my wife and, you know,
what, she's not going to say, no, I don't want it.
So, you would think there would be something in there
that's automatic.
But, yeah, I can see people wanting to use it, certainly.
And so, I've been cheating and using it
to get files onto my server.
Because, you know, FTP is either slow
or I end up doing something that crashes halfway through.
So, I can just drag and drop them over there
and then move them around from the command line,
you know, SS states in from my desktop.
Yeah, but when I'm lame and I have X on my, on my web server.
Yeah, but then there's, so you can use them.
If you want to copy files.
I mean, yeah, okay.
It went again.
It's Lenny's offering a million ways to do the same thing.
And why is it doing something, yeah.
And as we've talked about, that's probably a good thing.
Yeah.
So, that's really all I can milk out of talking about,
and give her.
It works.
And it works reliably.
Oh, it is a pretty neat program.
I'm going to put the link in the show notes.
And there's also a little video that goes along with it.
But the link is code.google.com forward slash p forward slash giver.
And then you'll find the downloads in the video on that site.
Yeah, I've certainly got to install it and have a look at it.
So, I mean, I think that's half what I think is left for it.
I bet I'm not going to end with things just trying to do that.
Yeah.
Check out that video kind of shows you a lot about it,
how you can, you know, if you have like your music player going with a song playing,
you can actually drag that song onto your giver icon.
Is that what you do, 330, when you drop something on it?
Yeah, it looks kind of like if you had a buddy and pigeon,
except for the area that you can drag it into,
is like a half inch to an inch tall.
So, you don't actually drag it to the wrong person.
Yeah, I think people would be more comfortable, obviously,
using this than especially when they knew too many.
Yeah, that's a good thing.
So, I really see this being useful like at a business.
Yeah, the home saying I kind of an adult to be useful for me.
So, if you were to business and you had people of varying knowledge,
you could go, all right, we're going to do this from the simplest place possible,
and then just push it through to everyone.
Yeah, so I think if it's an island,
hey, that's what I really choose it for.
No, you still running crunchy on your trip, we?
Yeah, I am, actually.
So, how's that going? Still pretty good?
Yeah, and I'm still loving the crap out of it.
I still haven't sounded out my audio issue,
but I haven't tried either.
Was it doing? It's just not working?
Yeah, I just, it's just a different interface.
Yeah, because I'm used to the Genome Volume Manager applet thing.
And I'm trying to use the XFCE4 mixer.
And it's similar, but not quite the same.
So, I still can play with it.
And you'd like to talk about Terminator and your latest HPR,
the earlier one, and the more I've used that,
the more impressed I've become with it.
I don't know, for one thing, it just looks tight, yeah.
Certainly, if you spell and type like me,
I find it held a lot easier to copy and paste stuff from the Terminal,
whereas I used to run console a lot and, you know,
have them like the tabs.
And I might have, like, six tabs open,
and then I'd have to tab all the way through them
to get back to the one I wanted to copy and paste stuff into.
Whereas this, you know, you just control,
have you, they're all there open,
you can use them now, cut and paste,
paste it into the other Terminal, this stuff like that.
I even went to, well, I was going to start
went to the trouble to install it on the arch machine,
but there was no trouble with installing it on there,
because it was in Pac-Man, really close anyway.
But that was a really good phone,
though, I can just come up with it.
Oh, it's beautiful.
Plus, you were talking about the tabs,
you can also have tabs on this, too.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, you can have like, like a tab with six slices in each one,
if you want it, or even more.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, that's pretty good.
That's why it's a black box.
She's a really happy new piece.
Others say it's just a Terminator default
where you can add tabs.
Yeah, but I just like to have the terminal,
one terminal, all their split, you know,
like, I think, 330, you said nine or whatever, yeah.
Certainly nine is easy on a big monitor,
you have bloody 20, and still be able to read them,
and just have them on a separate workspace.
Yeah, no, it's a really good application.
I like it.
The more I've used it, the more impressed I've become with it.
Yeah, you can just right click, and open up,
and it's right underneath where it says split.
You know, your windows, there's an open tab button.
Oh, yeah, down there, and then look at that.
I'm just too busy splitting them, yeah.
Okay, I didn't find it until Monster Resets, I'm about it.
Yeah, you can start playing with it,
and you're like, oh, wow, I can split this up a million times,
and you stop there.
Yeah, it takes a while to get over that.
As it unfolds, shift arrow keys to move through your tabs voice.
How long have I been doing that?
Oh, for the tabs, I never tried that.
Remember we talked about the slaces before,
because you found it, the control tab.
Yeah, I'm not sure about tabs.
Yeah, following with Terminator is all the hot keys.
They must be listed some way.
Is that everyone thought to do this?
But if you guys looked in the man page
to see if the hot keys are in there.
I have.
I've never read one of them.
Yep, I see it.
Okay, yeah, I used it, because when I start up my triple E PC,
I have Terminator start up automatically,
and I used the minus M option to go full screen.
Yeah, they're all over K-binding green there.
Oh, wow, you can actually resize the actual windows
with K-binding.
Yeah, control shift, you're right.
That's going to split you in the horizontally.
Are you diversically?
That's crazy.
I'm going to have to make a cheat sheet and print it out.
With all these commands between flux box,
I mean, shortcuts between flux box and this,
I can't remember them all.
I do most things in Terminator now, just because it's already
open, and I can just split it up and do something else in it.
And because the default copy and paste,
it's just control and then shift and whatever,
I keep trying to control shift in copy and paste
in other applications, this plug and the crap out of me,
because I hit it three or four before I realize it's not
going to do anything.
OK, you're still using it on top of an X term, right?
Or using the GNOME Terminal?
I think it's the GNOME Terminal setting.
Control shift said, if you're in a terminal,
say you've got it like nine terminals open.
If you hit control shift said, that focuses on that one
and scales it up to whatever size you've got the other nine
open, that's pretty cool, too.
There's more you'll find out about this Terminator
the more impressive it gets.
The first tab or your last tab or whatever,
so this is one of the nicer man pages I've ever seen.
It's very straightforward and very well written.
If I get off, you'll know that we've got people
are locking in here.
We've got to be down the stone counter, I can hear.
So should we move on to what we're running on our
triple ease?
Sure.
We're being prompted by people in the chat from where
we're recording this live.
Yeah, it's amazing, you just start up a call
and people start listening, it's kind of crazy.
No, no, Peter, you're using the default
Jandross, right?
On your triple ease?
Yeah, well, it's not mine, it's my daughters.
And yeah, like I said, it's what she wants.
She can never get around so easy, it's really good.
It's not greasy, certainly.
I've actually ordered a few cards because she can install
another operating system on a card and leave
the Jandross operating system on there.
So I can have a play around with a few.
But no, I just wouldn't change it for her because just
watching her use it, she knows exactly what she's doing.
Go ahead, you've gotten the chat the other day
and wants to learn how to chat with you, didn't you?
Didn't she?
Yeah.
She wanted to do it all the time.
Well, you guys got her the seven inch model rate?
Yeah, just the test.
And I must admit, if I was to buy one,
I would go for a bigger one.
I guess I'd just get a little bit frustrated with the keys.
Like I've got big hands, free fat fingers.
And yeah, the keyboard's just a little bit too small
for me to be comfortable with.
But for her, it's pretty good, though.
Ah, it's the ideal.
I mean, in comparison, like ratio wise,
I would imagine that the keyboard for her fingers
is typically what an adult can, compared to a full-sized keyboard,
yet it's really good for her, I'd imagine.
Not that she's attached to her.
So much to be with him right on yours.
Do you want to hear it all?
Yeah, we could be here for an hour.
I've done that.
Now, when I first boot my knob, it boots into a KDM login.
And then, from there, I go right into fluxbox.
And the reason I'm sticking with the KDM,
because I get the nice KDE mouse cursor inside the fluxbox,
it looks pretty good.
Now, on the toolbar, I have automatically
starts up with system is KMixer, KNetwork Manager, KPower
Save, and Clipper.
It's a clipboard tool.
I don't know if you guys use that one.
I'm going to hit the file bug report on this,
because I noticed on my desktop, too,
they automatically inserted entries in there.
One of them is iPod, and the other one is Google.
I wonder if they're being paid or something
to put that in there.
Because when you clear it, it comes back later.
When you log back in.
But anyways, for my editors, I use nano and k-write.
For my terminal emulators, I use Terminator, of course.
IRC, I use Conversation.
And for the file manager, I use Doffin.
And for videos and music, I use a VLC.
And I use K, PDF, or eBooks.
So that's about it.
No, and for web browsing, I use Ice Weasel.
And that's all on top of Debian Lennie, right?
Yeah, Debian Lennie.
Yeah, I use it just like a big computer.
There's really no restriction on these things.
And so I think I've gone the exact opposite of you,
because I've got Crunchy on there, which
it's still Debian based, but it's open box.
And for the clipboard, I use it.
And this is a default.
I don't actually care that much about clipboards
to have gone looking for one.
But it's called Parselite, or Parselite, or I don't know.
I really just couldn't care a lot as long
as I can copy and paste that I don't care.
But in a terminal emulator, I use Terminator.
The X-Term is on here, but I've never even opened it.
I haven't had a need.
I use Firefox for web browsing.
FUNAR for file management.
As a text editor, I either use Mano or G at it.
For IRC, I use a RISC inside of Terminator.
For instant messaging, I use Finch inside of Terminator.
I've got some just the lighter weight office stuff
and they're like Abbey Word and GNU Merrick.
For Sound and Video, Rhythm Box is installed,
but I don't ever use it.
I end up using EmPlayer.
And that's, I'm kind of like you.
I use it just like I would at desktop.
It's just a desktop that I can pick up and go to the callacher.
And off to do other things with it.
Yeah, I pretty much went to the exact opposite way
you did and went GTK with all my apps instead of CUBE.
The reason I did that is just to try out KD4.
And I kind of just stuck with the apps.
Because on my desktop, I use all GTK apps.
And the one thing I did leave out is Mixer.
And I'm not going to talk about that
because I don't have it all sorted out yet.
I think I've got three different Mixers installed
to try to sort out input issues.
Yeah, I'm using the K Mix now, like I said,
but I think I like the GNOME one better.
Because I notice on K Mix, sometimes when I unplug my USB
headset, a K Mix will crash at me.
Ah, that's so good.
Yeah, and I have to restart it.
I don't know if that's a, that might be a fluxbox thing too.
I don't know.
It did not handle USB well.
But I need to get some more games on it staying so far.
The only games I have is two chess games.
E-Board and Dream Chess.
But I need to get some arcade games on here.
I had urban terror running on mine
when I had a Ubuntu on it.
It was pretty good.
Well, it was just enough hardware to run it
on the lowest settings.
But yeah, I had a, I've got a little external USB mouse
that you plug the little, it's wireless
or you plug the little thing inside.
But yeah, man, I could, I could have just sat down anywhere
with it down and started shooting people in the head.
I was pretty pumped about that.
And since Klausu isn't back, we can't ask him
what he's running.
He's only got something odd on his.
He's only got that bloody foot door on me.
Well, when we were at OLF, he had, he had just
least all deviant on it because it had just come out
with all the stuff he needed to the e.
And he had fluxbox on it.
But that was only because like the two or three weeks
before that, he didn't have a desk
and a top environment on it at all.
He was just running a straight command line.
And so he figured he might want to have something on there.
So while he was in his hotel room, he had so much fun.
Come, yeah.
Ideally, I reckon fluxbox is made for those little machines.
Or open box or any of those boxes.
I'm blown with that in box, yeah.
But can that crunch being go on on?
Yeah, there's a, there's a special,
there's a special question.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
I don't remember you said that.
Yeah, it's got the EPC lean kernel on it.
And it's just like having regular crunch bang,
just a smaller screen.
Yeah, well, I think when I get one of these cards,
I might have a look at the crunchy just to see how it goes.
And another thing that my daughter's using the EPC for is,
we mount the drive off the MIP box.
So she can just go up to a bedroom and play all the,
like door of the explorer and all that sort of stuff
I've taped for her now.
Nice and easy.
And it strains really well.
It plays all those sort of things, you know, really good.
And the 17 inch screen is pretty good for just laying in bed
and putting it on a window sill and just laying there
and watching it.
Yes, that's not bad.
About the only thing that, and I don't know,
because I've got the 900 megahertz solar on.
But you really can't push high death video too much.
No, but that would also be a limitation of Wi-Fi.
Well, yeah, I obviously wouldn't try to stream
by definition shares that we've recorded.
Well, no, I had both the 1080p and the 480p
of a big bug bunny on there.
Yeah.
And I just wanted to see if it would play it.
And I was getting about two frames a second
watching the 1080p, the 480p fine, but that's standard death.
Yeah.
But obviously, if you're going to do something,
then you're going to use Maming Cater or something
and re-encoded to whatever size your video display is.
Because there's no point trying to stream,
like high death movies, able to screen it's only,
I don't even know what the resolution of these things are.
It's a bit of a point that's exercise, isn't it?
Yeah.
So I know the 9-inch is 1024 by 600.
Yeah.
Yeah, no.
Yeah, it's a good little screen, certainly.
Oh, yeah.
No, I really didn't look too close at the 8.9-inch
Ohio Linux fast, but they've never seen a 7-inch.
No, all that black on both sides of the screen,
is there anything there?
Yeah, the speakers.
OK.
At the top, you've got the camera on the sides.
You've got the speakers.
But yeah, ideally, they could have made the screen
cake up just about all that.
Put the speakers down next to the touchpad on either side.
You've got a bit of real estate there.
And the camera's that sort of pinhole thing
so you could fit it in that bezel anyway.
But like I said, it's not the screen.
Even I think I've complained a few times about needing glasses.
But it's not the size of the screen that I find a problem.
It's the size of the keyboard.
It's just too small for my bat-unimble fingers.
When you said that about the speakers,
that's exactly what they did for the 8.9 inch.
Yeah, they moved underneath the laptop.
Because it's really quiet, because it's
shooting all the sound down at whatever it's sitting on.
And then it shoots out.
But I tend to have headphones plugged into mine anyway.
Well, that's what I was going to say.
My daughter usually has the old headphones plugged in anyway.
Lucky you.
I mean, I don't think you want to sit around and listen
to a 12 hour marathon at the door of the explorer.
On the map, on the map.
Well, guys, we're running out of time,
because the Linux crank is going to start five minutes.
But thanks for calling in.
Yeah, I'm fine.
Say in a few minutes.
Yeah, a few minutes.
And everyone that's listening to the pre-recorded episode,
we do this live every Saturday night about 10 p.m.
central standard time.
So thanks for listening, everyone.
Good night.
Good luck.
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