bash and konsole

So I've had lots of problems using a multi-tab xterminal, for the casual user I'm sure they'd not even notice them, or think I'm silly, but when you spend all day in a shell they become less so.

History

one of the big problems I've had is with history. see when you close a shell then it writes the history. well if you have 5 tabs open each with with a super long history they'll write those histories out in the order they close in. basically what happens is all the history saves at once so one of your open shells histories will be before another's and if each has like 50 entries it can be quite a way back. In fact I'm sure I've had it happen where parts of my history was lost. So what do you do? you have to separate them per tab. One way to do this is with gnu screen. I don't like screen's history because it records the output of the terminal as well as the command, so this wasn't a good solution for me. The solution is that each tab must have its own history file. Well how do we do that? before I get to it I have another problem.

PS1, umask, and default group

I also have a need to have different settings depending on what I'm working on. If I'm working on files that need to be read and written to by my web server they need to have a different group and umask. first I solved this by su - to a different user, then I solved it by having different bashrc's but neither fully solved the history problem.

howto do it

first you have to have one konsole profile for each of the different settings you need. so I have one for web development called webdev. Then you have to add an environment variable to it I'm going to call it KONSOLE_PROFILE and set that to whatever your profile is called. Neither name really matters so long as they don't conflict with others. Then you need to code your bashrc (or other shell to work with it). I have a shortened sample bashrc that you can use in a gist

KDE 4 is finally ready for users

I just installed KDE SC 4.4 last night and I can say that I feel that it's finally general user ready. The last bug that I felt would prevent average use is now gone. What was that bug? when you pressed print screen nothing would happen. There was a workaround to make print screen work but it didn't work out of the box. I feel that there are some things that should just work and that's one of them.

I'm not sure I'm yet happy with the state of the device notifier, and automounting as the UI doesn't seem perfect yet, but it can now do all the things that are necessary.

There will always be improvements to be made, but I think that if you've been not sure about using KDE 4 go give it a try now. (I'm about to find out if I can replace vim with kate's vi bindings).

Bypassing disabled accounts with KDM

So the most common way of disabling an account in a unix system is changing the users shell in /etc/passwd to /bin/false or /sbin/nologin. However, I've discovered on Arch Linux that if I do this only shell login's are disabled, I was still able to log the user in with gui via kdm. I also tried using usermod --expiredate 1. this was not effective either however. the only way I found to lock the account from kdm login was to do a passwd -l accountname, which only locks password authentication. This means key and token authentication should still work. My real concern is that if the user was set to login without a password that it would still be bypass-able. My personal opinion is that I shouldn't have to do more than 1 thing to disable a user account in a 100% effective manner. Currently Arch Linux (and maybe more) fails at this. I'll post a fix later as I investigate further.

Bugs I filed are at kde and Arch Linux

EDIT: expire date worked... just not immediately, very odd.

EDIT: Here's a proper /etc/pam.d/kde

#%PAM-1.0
auth        required    pam_nologin.so
auth        required    pam_unix.so nullok
auth        required    pam_shells.so
auth required pam_tally.so onerr=succeedfile=/var/log/faillog
account     required    pam_access.so
account     required    pam_time.so
account     required    pam_unix.so
password    required    pam_unix.so
session     required    pam_unix.so
session     required    pam_env.so
session     required    pam_limits.so