i3WM: Populate Workspace with Terminals

I recently wrote a script to populate a workspace with four terminals in i3 Window Manager, each taking up a quadrant of the screen.

Four Terminals

This script is nice because I often find myself needing multiple terminals and this saves a little bit of time by automating the process. The bash script is as follows:

#Written By Brian Winkler

#Free to use and distribute

#!/bin/bash

exec xterm &

sleep 0.3

i3-msg 'split h' &&

exec xterm &
sleep 0.3

i3-msg 'split v' &&

exec xterm &
sleep 0.3

i3-msg 'focus left' &&
i3-msg 'split v' &&
exec xterm &

exit 0

As you can see, its a simple script. I had to play around with the sleep time a bit in order to get the terminals to open in the correct configuration. '0.2' for the sleep value works about half the time, depending on the system load. I chose to go with '0.3' since it ended up being more reliable, though does has a noticeable lag.  You win some and you lose some.

To use this script, I place an executable version of the script in '/usr/local/bin' and named it 'terms'. This way, I can call this script from dmenu use it whenever I need to populate a work-space with terminals.

Well, that's all for now! I hope you find this script useful. Please free to comment or ask questions or tell me how inept I am!

Wayland on GNOME: Update 1

As it currently stands, I cannot get steam games to run under Wayland. I had to revert to the X server to play steam games.

I also cannot get VLC player to work, but I think that may be my own incompetency more than the fault of Wayland.

Otherwise, everything is still running very smoothly. I've noticed a slight increase in battery life but not enough to attempt to quantify it. Windows are still smooth but my cursor speed suddenly feels slower, though I haven't altered any settings. This just may be a perception relative to how much faster everything else is now.

That is all.

Part 2 - Poisontap: Setting up the device

This post is a continuation of my guide for setting up Poisontap. You can read more about Poisontap here and you can read my previous post regarding Poisontap here.

Part 2 will cover the set up of Poisontap on the Raspberry Pi Zero along with a short review outlining my thoughts on the program itself. This guide uses Raspbian Jessie Lite for the Pi operating system. I also utilized an USB serial cable but this can easily be worked around.

You will need:
-USB Serial Cable
-Raspberry Pi Zero
-Micro USB to Female USB 2.0 or 3.0
-Wifi Dongle

1. Preparing the Device
The biggest problem I ran into regarding getting Poisontap set up on the Pi was the lack of internet access on the device. You can purchase an adapter to be able to attach a USB Wifi dongle or Ethernet cable but the method I used was to be able to use the internet on my Arch laptop via Micro USB cable. Contact me if you want more details on this. For the purpose of this guide, I will assume you managed to connect a wifi dongle to the RPi and have internet access that way.

The first step is to enable the Ethernet on the RPi. I did this through accessing the MicroSD card on my laptop via an SD card reader.

In '/boot/config.txt', add the following line at the end of the file:

dtoverlay=dwc2

Then, in '/boot/cmdline.txt' add the following line after 'rootwait':

modules-load=dwc2,g_ether

Now, you will want to change the network settings to have the Pi act like an Ethernet connection over USB. Depending on the way you configure your internet connection on the Pi, you may want to leave this step for last, as in skip it and come back to it. DO NOT SKIP IT ENTIRELY. On the Pi, in '/etc/network/interfaces', add the following lines:

auto usb0
allow-hotplug usb0
iface usb0 inet static

     address 1.0.0.1

     netmask 0.0.0.0

2. Downloading PoisonTap

If you haven't already installed 'git' on the Pi, you will want to install it now. Then run:

git clone https://github.com/samyk/poisontap.git

Move to the downloaded directory and edit the configuration files to point at the back-end server you set up previously.

Once that's done, you'll want to add the PoisonTap script to '/etc/rc.local' on the Pi:

/bin/sh /home/pi/poisontap/pi_startup.sh &

Make sure to place this before 'exit 0'. Finally, install the following packages to allow PoisonTap to run properly and update the Pi to make sure all other packages are up to date:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get install -y isc-dhcp-server dsniff screen nodejs

And there you have it! You should now have set up PoisonTap successfully on the Raspberry Pi Zero!

3. My Thoughts

Honestly, I'm rather unimpressed with the way PoisonTap operates. It does operate as advertised but I think the buzz surrounding it made me have unrealistic expectations for it.

As soon as I plugged the device into my test machine (my personal laptop), Chromium jumped into lock-down mode, not allowing for any traffic other than HTTPS. I managed to get be able to download browser data once I used Vivaldi as the browser but I still couldn't get any of the remote features to work. I do pride myself on running a tight ship when it comes to the security of my computer and I am completely unwilling to remove settings on this machine in order get this to work. It seems counter-intuitive to me. My goal was to end up with a device that can reliably gain access to machines and I don't feel like that's what I ended up with. This may be different under Windows but I don't have access to a Windows machine so I couldn't tell you.

Overall, if I had to rate this project as a flavor of ice cream, I would go with vanilla. It's good enough as so I'm not entirely disappointed but it certainly leaves room to be more impressive. The biggest take-away from this project was getting the RPi to function as an Ethernet device, which opens the door for future exploits and projects, but if you're hoping to have this 'wild and crazy' hacking device everyone has been describing, you're looking in the wrong place.

Wayland on GNOME

I'm gonna keep this one short.

Due to the death of the Infinality patchset, I switched from Plasma 5 back to GNOME 3.22.2 before I connected Infinality's death with the general mucking up of my system. Plasma 5 along with various applications would fail, returning the message that the 'harfbuzz.so' binary could not be loaded. Once I was deep into re-configuring my system (I did a fresh install of Arch and I'm giving Butter FS a whirl) and couldn't seem to stop replacing different components of my usual set-up. This led me to replacing X11 with Wayland (since I was in the neighborhood) and I have to say, I'm rather impressed.

The first thing I noticed was an improved overall responsiveness. Animations and window movement both are much smoother; It feels less like my system is struggling to keep up with me and more like it's predicting my next move. I also lost a little less than 100MB from my system's idle RAM usage. I gained about 3 seconds in my desktop environment load time giving me an average of about 20 seconds from boot to a usable GUI.

(Related tip: If you're using GNOME shell extensions, don't use the Applications Menu or the Places Status Indicator extensions, they added a solid 10 seconds to the loading of 'gnome-session' from X on my system.)

It was enough improvement to give me the confidence to use an animated wallpaper, this one here. Its only been a few hours but I haven't noticed any decrease in performance, though it it eating up around 50MB of RAM (for a net gain of ~50MB).

An interesting change has been the touch pad. Wayland employs 'libinput' over 'synaptics' for the touch pad driver and the support for 'libinput' in desktop environments is still in the works. Currently, the two ways to configure 'libinput' are through your desktop environment settings and through the 'libinput-gestures' package, available in the AUR. I found most of the settings for 'libinput-gestures' to be touchy so I stuck with three finger swipe (left/right) to go forward and backward in my browser and four finger swipe (left/right) to step through open tabs. Generally I've found this experience to be smooth with few hang ups.

The way the cursor moves is also different. I'm not sure how to explain it or if I can even assess whether I like it better or not. Its one of those things you'll have to see for yourself.

A definite draw-back is that with GNOME, there is no scroll coasting under Wayland nor is there two finger horizontal scroll. Both of those where previously handled by synaptics and libinput is yet to implement support for them.

Overall, I'd recommend giving Wayland a shot and seeing how you fare.