Media player daemon: Playing music with mpd and mpc

My love for the Media player daemon is clear if you have gone through my other blog posts. I like its concept. It is simple, straightforward and does what it is supposed to do. Play music. The combination of mpd and mpc is awesome. It is akin to watching a good buddy movie. They are just so perfect together. If you are a person who would like to "see" the song list and control the music by visual controls, you are also covered. There are a plethora of clients for the mpd. In terms of simplicity an curtness, there is nothing closer to mpc. 

 This post is about the barest minimum required to start playing music without the screen filling up with the file names. Installing mpd on arch is as simple as a, b, c.... really. 

pacman -S mpc mpd 

copy /etc/mpd.conf to .config/mpd/mpd.conf Overwrite the file with the information below 

--------------------------------

# Recommended location for database 

db_file "~/.config/mpd/database" 

# Logs to systemd journal 

log_file "syslog" 

# The music directory is by default the XDG directory, uncomment to amend and choose a different directory 

# I like to symlink all my sources of music to the default Music folder. Ultimately, tell the directory where # your media is stored. 

music_directory "~/Music/music" 

# Uncomment to refresh the database whenever files in the music_directory are changed 

#auto_update "yes" 

#These are my choices for the requisite files. Al these files are required. So, if you would like to change the locations, do so. But ensure that these directories are user accessible with write permissions. 

playlist_directory "~/.config/mpd/playlists" 

pid_file "~/.config/mpd/pid" 

state_file "~/.config/mpd/state" 

sticker_file "~/.config/mpd/sticker.sql" 

#This is if you are using pulse audio. If you are using also, change accordingly audio_output { 

type "pulse" 

name "pulse audio" 

} 

----------------------------

Save the file. reboot 

Now, the first step ensure that mpd is running.

mpd 

On success, the above command will not spit out anything. Now, the daemon is running and waiting to server you music. Let us now, build a database of songs available in our directory we specified in mpd.conf. 

Now we have to populate our database. Before doing this step, I suggest you to check whether your music has good metadata related to track names, albums, etc. If not, it is always good to invest some time in editing the id3 tags of your music. This will help us in getting "that" song to play. 

Once you are sure of your metadata. Go ahead and build the database. 

mpc update 

The above command will take some time. Give it a few minutes. To know whether all the songs have been added to the database run the command below. If you see that the last song is the same when you run the command below, multiple times, then you know that the database is completely built. 

mpc listall 

Of course, your database is going to be huge. And depending on your mood, you would like to pick and choose. Let us now create a playlist based on certain criteria. You are now in that retro dance mood and would like to listen to the evergreen Jackson. There are multiple ways to search for Jackson songs in your database based on how your id3 tags are created. If you would like to add all albums with the name Jackson in your album name then you would do 

mpc searchadd album jackson 

I know, Now you want to see what is the playlist which is create by the above command, For this you would 

mpc playlist 

Now, you remembered that there are certain files with Jackson in their names but are not part of an album with jackson in them. Then to add all the songs with title containing jackson 

mpc searchadd title jackson 

Now, check your playlist again 

mpc playlist 

The nerd in you is glowing. You now have all the titles you want to play in your playlist. Hit it. 

mpc play 

Of course, you have got used to seeking music with other command line players by hitting the arrow keys. However, the command for seeking in mpc is(Again, you can map keys and what not.....) 

mpc seek +00:04:00 

The above command is for seeking the song by 04 minutes. I think the logic is clear. This works both for individual files or if you have a file with multiple songs. If you have individual songs in files then 

mpc seek +80% 

would be better. 

 In the middle of your listening pleasure, you would like to know the details of the song being played now

 mpc status  

will give you information regarding the present song and plenty other data related to the present playlist.

For seeking back change the + sign to -. An alias for all the above would be best. 

The post is not complete without gratitude to all the devs and users who make all this possible. The GNU/Linux land and the BSD universe have not stopped surprising me.

 

 PS: Just, one more thing.

 mpc searchplay title jackson

 which will create the playlist and start playing.

GPG: Encryption and digital signature for the masses

Disclaimer: This is a very serious topic. The observations made here are for a starter. Kindly refer to the man pages and other text books which specialize in guiding for advanced and high stake uses. I am not responsible for any unwanted results by following the notes below. Understand the seriousness of the job on hand and read enough. 

     The notes below are culled from the public network from various sources. Thanks to the free software foundation for the fantastic gpg tool and all the original authors of the pgp standard. GPG is really "encryption" for the masses. Kindly refer to directions from master users for creation and usage of GPG. The recommended way of creating a key pair is on a computer with

1. The operating system to be installed with images downloaded and checked for the integrity of the OS image on another computer connected to the internet.
2. Install the downloaded operating system on new vanilla hardware and the computer should not be connected to the internet even while installing the OS.
3. After installing the OS generate the keypair ensuring that the computer is in now way connected to the public network.

Even if you dont want to create the keys in the way mentioned above. It is required to know the above information.

--------------------------------

    Private key cryptography and symmetric cryptography are the same phrases. They are just a complicated way of telling that the cipher and key used for encrypting a message is the same that has to be used to decrypt the message. That is, the cipher and the key is first shipped to the recipient. Then the actual encrypted message is sent.

Public key cryptography/asymmetric cryptography:

    A mathematical process generates a pair of keys. A message encrypted by one key of this pair, can be decrypted by the other key of this pair. One key is called the public key(can be shared with the whole world) and the other is called the private key or the secret key(Not to be shared with "anybody").

How asymmetric cryptography works:

 
    Let us assume the data of individuals in the whole world is maintained in a database with their respective public key. So we pickup the name and the corresponding public key on this database(provided we know this is the person whom we want to communicate). Now

1. we create a message which is to be sent to "only" this individual.
2. we encrypt this message with the public key available in the database.
3. send the message to the individual through the public network, by means like email ....
4. The recipient will then decrypt this message with his private key
5. No individual in the world will be able to decrypt this since the message can be decrypted with its pair which was generated by the mathematical process which produced the public/private key pair

-------------------------------

Creating and managing gpg keypairs

Let us now get down to "actually" creating the key pairs. We will be using GPG(GNU Privacy Guard). Kindly refer to the man pages for further information and the public network for deeper insights. GPG is a common on all the *nix operating systems and is available for the proprietary operating systems also.

The first step is to generate a key pair. Run the following command

gpg --full-generate-key

On running the above command in a terminal you will be asked the following queries. Answer accordingly.

a. Choose the type of key: We will choose the default RSA
b. choose the bits for your key: Let us choose the longest option(We are in modern times)
c. Expiry date: I would go for an yearly update
d. Real name: Here you have an option of putting your real name(You can ofcourse not tell your real name. But, to use it in place like github etc, it is better to have your real name)
e. Email address: The same logic as above is applicable here also
f. There is a comment field: You may fill it up or recommended by many people to leave it empty

After the above step gpg asks to enter your passphrase. 

This is a very "important" step. The passphrase is intentionally called a "phrase" it is not called a password. This has to be as long as possible. It is better if it has a mixture of alphanumeric characters interspersed with special characters like @%(%$) etc. It has to be sufficiently long. This is what protects your private key. Please use a long phrase, which you can remember very easily and quickly. In fact you should be flamboyant when your are typing out your phrase. At the same time that phrase should be alien to anybody else on the planet.

Once you enter the passphrase, gpg starts the mathematical part required to generate the key pairs. Help out with sufficient entropy(randomness) by opening lot of firefox tabs, plenty of word processors and go ahead and do whatever work you want to do with your computer. This improves the entropy required to ensure the randomness of the digits generated for your key.

Once you generate the keys, the keys are stored in what is called a "keyring" Just know that the keys are safe in a box and locked by your passphrase

To print out the public key which was generated

gpg --list-key

To get the public key in a format which is accepted worldwide

gpg --export --armor dfdf@fdfd.com > dfdf_pubkey.asc

To display your public key
 

cat dfdf_pubkey.asc

Once this is generated, you can share it with the world. If your friend wants to add your public key to his keyring, then he would

gpg --import dfdf_pubkey.asc

There, now he has your public key in his keyring.


To list the private keys

gpg --list-secret-keys   

Now it is required to generate a revocation certificate. Why are we in such a hurry in creating one. Well, we should have the revocation certificate handy, if the keys have been compromised and you think that the keys can be used by others to gain access or sign documents with your keys and send it to inappropriate places. With revocation certificate you can revoke the key pairs and also tell the whole world about it so that the whole world knows that there is no relationship with your previous sets of keys. The latest version of gpg creates a revocation certificate during the key pair creation process itself, fantastic.

gpg --gen-revoke fdfd@dfdf.com > fdfd_revoke.asc

Now you will be asked for the reason. Choose the appropriate reason.

The file you created is called the ASCII armor file.

So, we have created the revocation certificate. This certificate will be used to revoke our key pairs.

gpg --import revoke.asc

Now if you run

gpg --list-key

You will get your public key information with "revoked" added

Now you can really delete your key pairs

gpg --delete-secret-keys fdfd@dfdf.com

gpg --delete-keys fdfd@dfdf.com

Now if your list your keys

gpg --list-key

The output will be empty

Let us now remove the revocation certificate also

rm fdfd_revoke.asc

-------------------------------
 

Encryption

Let us now encrypt and share some secret documents with friends on the public network

To start with you should have

1. Got the public key of your friend.
2. Import the public key into your keyring.
3. Did your homework to ensure that the public key does indeed belong to your friend.

We have done the homework and are sure thatthe public key shared by your friend is genuine. Let us now go ahead and trust the public key by signing your friends public key with your private key

gpg --sign-key friend@friendship.com

Now, to encrypt the document and ensure that the only recipient who can decrypt the document is your friend,

gpg --encrypt -r friend@friendship.com secret_document.txt

The command will output secret_document.txt.gpg which is a binary file

If you prefer the ascii armor format

gpg --encrypt --armor -r friend@friendship.com secret_document.txt

which would output secret_document.txt.asc again a binary file.

You can now send this document through any channel available on the public network and are assured that your friend with whose public key the file was encrypted can only decrypt it with his private key. From now on, if you, the author have deleted the original secret_document.txt also cannot decrypt the resultant file secret_document.txt.gpg.

To avoid this you can add yourself also as a recipient

gpg --encrypt -r friend@friendship.com -r fdfd@dfdf.com

Now, you the author with email id fdfd@dfdf.com can also decrypt the file as and when required and can safely now delete the original file

-------------------------------

Digital signature

We have all the way been talking about encrypting a document. We want to ensure that the document reaches and is ready only by the individual(s) to which it was intended. This is fine. Let us forget encryption for a moment and think of a public document. Anyone reading a public document should be ensured that this particular document is an un-altered copy authored by a particular person. The document should be able to speak about the author. That is, the document should be signed by the original author. This ensures the reader that the document is an un-altered document and is as was imagined by the author. We are talking a synonymous situation of physically signing a document. We are talking about an electronically signed document.

gpg allows us to do this. When we are signing a file we are not encrypting the file, we are just creating a binary file with contents of the signed file as well as information about our signature. The signing and verifying methodology described below makes use of the fact that the signed file has the contents of the signed file as well as the signature in one single file.

 When gpg signs a document there are two things which are ensured

1. Integrity: When the recipient checks for the signature authenticity and it matches, it also means that the signed document received is not altered in any manner

2. Authentication: Again, when the recipient checks for the signature authenticity and it matches, it also means that the document is indeed from the person who really sent the message by signing with his private key

gpg --sign document.txt

This will create document.txt.gpg, a binary file which includes the content of document.txt and the signature.

Before creating the .gpg file, you will be asked to enter the passphrase, Now, you have affixed your signature on the document. This process makes use of your private key. So, as per the pgp convention, if you encrypt with one part of the key pair, the other key pair is used to decrypt the document. Now, since you have added your signature to the document with your private key, the confirmation of ownership can be done with your public key. Since your public key is supposed to be public, anybody, with access to your public key will be able to ensure that document is created by you. However, the world can view the document by using gpg --decrypt as discussed below and view it but not ensure that the document was really signed by you and you are the creator of the document 

Now, on receipt of the file, the recipient to start with, will first check for the authenticity of the signature. This is done by

gpg --verify document.txt.gpg

The output will show the signature and will term the signature as good, if you have the public key of the sender in your keyring. So we now have attested that the file infact, is created by the creator we were expecting.

Now to proceed to view the contents of the document, let us decrypt it, ie, let us bring it back to viewable state.

gpg --decrypt document.txt.gpg >> document.txt

The above step will still re-create the original file though the authors public key is not present in the keyring. gpg will just tell that the signature cannot be verified.

I think you are used to seeing signed documents with an armor ascii format. To achieve this

gpg --sign --armor document.txt

This will generate document.txt.asc, a binary file which includes the signature in armor ascii format with the contents of the file

To verify the file and as well as decrypt

gpg --verify document.txt.asc >> document.txt

Once you trust the public key and are sure that the public key indeed belongs to the individual you know, that trust can be extended into your keyring by signing the author's public key with your private key. This can be checked in various ways. If we know the author and his online activities, we could go to the place he is most active and check for his email credentials with his pgp fingerprint on that website. Or we could go to the many pgp key servers over the public network and search for the fingerprint or the email id in the fingerprint. It should match with the copy of the public key we have. Once you are content that this is the person associated with the key, then and only then change his public key in your keyring to trusted. This will remove some warnings when you check the signature of the files from the author which talks about "...Not certified with a trusted signature...". To do that

gpg --sign-key author@creator.com

After this when you verify the signed files received from the author by

gpg --verify document.txt.gpg

you will not find any warnings

Down the line, by some means you start doubting the public key and the associated individual it is time to revoke the "trusted key" status in your keyring. Now the thing is once you create add a key in the keyring, any further edits are possible only from within the gpg command. Here we are interested in removing the trust from the public key. So you would start the gpg editor like

gpg --edit-key author@creator.com

Now you will get the gpg> prompt
Enter "help" to get all the options. Here we are interested in revoking the trust we put in the above public key
type revsig at the gpg prompt
You will be prompted for the reason, answer accordingly. Exit and save when prompted. Now, you have successfully removed/revoked the "trusted" badge from author@creator.com
 

----------------------------------

Digital signature for special case involving pure text files

 
If you are dealing only with text files. It will better if the text and the sign appear in the same file as a regular document. It is like you have a text document and you affix your signature to the end of the document. gpg provides this facility through

gpg --clearsign document.txt

will create a document.txt.asc

Now the recipient can open the file with

cat document.txt.asc

which will have the content of the document as well as the signature at the end of the document. Now, to verify the signature, the recipient would

gpg --verify document.txt.asc

Now, to get back the original document only, without the signature then the recipient would

gpg --decrypt document.txt.asc > document.txt

--------------------------------

Digital signatures for huge binary files

 
All this time we have been using gpg such that the contents of the signed file and the signature are available in the output file of the gpg command. This might not be conducive as the file sizes grow. It is better off to have the signature separate from the signed file. With this, the file and the signature are two different files. Just remember that to check the signature with the associated file both have to be in the same directory and the file names cannot be changed.

To create a signature separate from the signed document

gpg --detach-sign --armor document.txt

This will output a file document.txt.asc. (You still have your original document.txt unchanged). This file contains only the signature but is associated with the original file document.txt. This is the methodology used to share binary files and packages on the public network. You will have the package/software you would like to download and adjacent to that you will have

1. The signature (normally it will be labelled the pgp file)
2. The public key of the author

You download the above two along with the software package

1. Put all the three files in a single directory
2. Import the public key of the author
3. Sign the public key of the author with your private key after doing your homework about the authenticity of the public key
4. check the signature
5. On no warnings proceed with the installation of the package

Going "console only "on GNU/Linux

Got frustrated with the time taken for the browser to load up and then dependency trap for installing other gui applications. Add to that the nuisance of gtk and qt quirks on a 4K monitor. The feeling is share by many. But as we shall see living in this place is not easy. The major difficult piece of the puzzle is the browser. All your banking, shopping options are ruled out in the terminal. 

 

What I did here was to disable even the start of the X server. I disabled sytemd unit which is supposed to reach the graphical login target. Disabled the graphical login manager, lightdm in my case. Disabled all the cloud stuff which ubuntu GNU/Linux starts with lot of difficulty. In fact, because of this the first boot of ubuntu after install is a hit or a miss. After boot do not try to login immediately. There are plenty of things ubuntu is doing in that phase. If you try to login, it will fail. Wait for 10 minutes, approx, it might be higher so that it spews many lines of information over the login prompt, then it will allow you to login and change the default password. 

 

Disabled ssh service, because the rpi 4 is connected to a 4K monitor. Even during login, ubuntu tries to plenty of things. It will try to check for updates and provide a notification once in the motd. It will also provide information from the ubuntu motd server which canonical wants you to see. It will also spew out certain information from your computer like memory usage, load on the cpu etc. All this will take plenty of time considering the rpi 4. Find the respective scripts and disable them to speed up the time required to reach the login prompt. So, we have reached the login prompt. The fonts are so tiny, you have to squint to type any commands. First thing is to first reconfigure the fonts. Get the biggest font available while running the re configuring tool. Yes, the size can be changed, but the fonts are horrible. They are not for your daily tasks. All the fonts which you had installed in your X is now out of reach. 

 

The console well, is a console. It will display fonts which are baked into the linux kernel. If anybody knows how to change the fonts on the default console, kindly advice or drop a link. But, as of now, we have a readable console and the font size is alright. The fonts are not. We have been pampered for the variety of fonts on X. It is a requirement that we should do something about it. Step in, fbterm. As the name suggests it is a terminal emulator designed to work with a framebuffer. The biggest advantage, supports all the fonts supported on X. There goes my first gripe about the console. So, we install fbterm and start and run it at the console. The console is taken over by fbterm and again we have micro-sized fonts, but nice looking fonts taken from the X environment you had installed earlier. Let us go ahead and fix the fonts by restarting fbterm with fbterm -s 24. This was for my monitor. Try experimenting with different sizes to get the optimum size. 

 

The config file for fbterm is in .fbtermrc. Well, I already see your smiling face and I have received your gratitude and in turn it is time to congratulate you for completing the first time required for living in the console. Whatever further tools we are planning to used depends on this success. The fonts are beautiful and they are your favorite ones. They look good and it is as though you are back on your terminal emulator on X, but without all its bells and whistles(another name for bloat). You now can clearly distinguish between l and 1, 0 and O, I and L. I would like to thank all the creators of fonts which can clearly distinguish the characters of the English language. It is an artists job and the creator of any font is an artist. 

 

You opened the fbterm man page and want to edit the configuration file by reading the manual, you are out of luck. You are on the console. There are no windowing systems. What d you do, you press C-A-F2 and switch to the next virtual console and login again. Then you can switch between the virtual consoles. Your are now flabbergasted. You have started hating yourself for moving away from X. But, fritter not, there are further goodies which come with fbterm. You can create multiple windows and switch to them using shortcuts as mentioned in the fbterm man page. This will give you a method of moving between multiple windows and then moving between them. 

 

 Let us go to the next step. Now, you would like to group certain windows and recognize them for a specific task group. You have a web page related, you have a manual page related and couple of windows concerned to the programming task related to the web page and the man page. You are out of luck. You cant see all the windows at once together on one single screen. Frustration. Enter terminal multiplexer. The first name which comes to he mind is tmux, if you are a year 2000 person and screen, if you are before that. These are excellent tools and are blind faith groups unto themselves. So, if you like a tool, silently use them. Do not compare them and publish your comparisons. This is because, if you have reached a position where you compare both these tools, that means you already "prefer" one among them. This will start a war. We already have the longest running war between Vi and GNU Emacs. These are the kitchen sinks of terminal multiplexers. 

 

If you are a person believing in the *nix philosophy of "One tool that does one thing and does it best", then you have an alternate option. Many a times I had tried to pull myself together and learn tmux, but since I was using the i3 wm, I thought that it is not worth the effort. I could open as many windows and all would be started side by side preparing a huge canvas for exchanging information. I am in love with i3 wm for its simplicity and doing what it is supposed to do and doesnt do anything more. A huge shoutout to all the devs and users of this fantastic wm. Now, once again my terminal multiplexer flames were re-kindled by Mr. Bronie Robertson on his youtube channel. I like his videos. They are short and to the point with excellent examples and use case scenarios. 

 

Plentiful thanks to him for introducing me to abduco. Such a strange name. If there are explanations for the name kindly enlighten me. A session management tool with such a strange and difficult to pronounce name. However, what caught my attention was the ease with which Bronie did the session management. No obscure keystrokes to remember. Just session management and nothing else. In fact, I understood session management in that under 10 minutes video, than I had tried for a good 10 years. So, Thank you Bronie. Yes, there might be plenty other things required for complex setups, but for a desktop use and a home network user, that is exactly what the doctor would prescribe. 

 

 So, three main things which a session manager has to do. Create a session. Detach a session. Re-connect to a session. abduco does all the three with elan. All technicalities, I would redirect you to Mr. Bronie. So to create a session, let us understand what is a session. A session is a group of tasks related to one another. It is a method of grouping applications and open files related to a task on hand. Let us say the session you have created contains a compile task which will take another hour. Now, you are free to let us say, listen to some music, read a novel, well, things like that. What we now do is, detach the task on hand. And now, the compiling and all other windows are moved to the background and keep running. We will now create another session and do the relaxing stuff related to music and reading. You now want to continue listening to music and then you would like to check your online accounts like your email, your toots etc. You detach the multimedia session and start a new session with these applications. Its been an hour and you would like check on your compile session, You detach the online session and re-connect to compiling session and so on. That is session management for dummies. 

 

But in a session, if you have to have multiple windows grouped together, it is all good in an X environment. If you remember we are at a console running fbterm. We were very happy with good fonts but a bit sad about moving between windows as every window occupied the complete screen making it very difficult to share information between windows. Enter dvtm. The expansion will be dynamic virtual terminal manager. The name tells everything. It is there to manage windows. It will create, position, delete windows. It is an equivalent to i3 wm and more close to dwm wm but for terminals. When we create a new window in dvtm, we are starting a new terminal waiting for our input. dvtm does exactly what i3 does. It just arranges windows side by side in many different ways. But all your window contents are there for you to see and transfer between windows in the same screen. For our case it is a window manager for the console. 

 

I hated the console because if you wanted to refer to a man page and return back to the editor, you had to suspend the editor read up and remember the man page and then suspend the man page and bring back the editor to the foreground and dump whatever you remembered from the man page. This is no way ideal. For the optimal setup, we combine a session manager with a terminal manager and you have Window management for the console. How do we do it? Well just run both the commands in unison as so.

 

abduco -c session_name dvtm -m ^x 

 

What we are doing is asking our session manager abduco to create(-c) a new session and name that session "session-name" and the application it has to run is dvtm. The next option is for the MOD key. The default key for the MOD key is ^g. Yes, you are a bit confused here. For i3 users, the MOD key used to be a single key like the super key or the ALT key. But, these keys are not recognized by the console. So keep the default or change it to the value which I use, since x is close to the control key than the g key. Once you run this command, a session is created and control is handed over to dvtm. Now here you can start using the keybindings as suggested in the man page of dvtm. MOD-c will create a window in the tiled mode. Another MOD-c press will create another terminal window and so on. MOD-j and MOD-k will move between the windows and all windows are available in one single screen. 

 

I cannot express my joy, when I saw my console splitting into multiple windows. For everything else there is MasterCard. You did plenty of work by moving between windows and your program is now copiling. Time to relax. Detach the session by pressing MOD-\. You now land back at your console. Now run another command as so abduco -c relax dvtm -m ^x You get a fresh canvas. Create multiple windows again for playing your music with lyrics, reading a book by the next window. 

 

Enough of recreation, back to work. But, you want the music continue to play and want the book you were reading to be at the same place. Detach this session again by pressing MOD-\. Run without any arguments, abduco, will list all the live sessions. Run this command with the session name abduco -a session_name Now you are connected back to your compiling and editing session with all the windows as you left them when you detached from this session. The compiling is not complete, detach again and then re-connect to your relax session and continue reading your book. 

 

You are smiling. Your low spec PC is so responsive. But, But, We are living in a modern world and it is very difficult to survive without a pdf viewer, an image viewer, a video player, an ebook reader, a music player, a text reader(should we talk about it), web browser, a spread sheet, a document writer, a presentation tool and what not........ 

 

Let us try and resolve these applications one by one.

1. Let us start with a pdf viewer. This was rather easy. I was happy that the less command is more than capable of displaying text based pdfs. It will display pdfs with images, but the images are ignored.

2. An image viewer. For this the framebuffer image viewer, fbi is upto the task and is enough for viewing images and also includes the capability to perform a slideshow of the images supplied to the command.

3. For a Text reader/editor we are spoilt for choice and I would rather not talk about the options here. Whatever I talk about would be less.

4. If we come to the web browser, we do have choices, but none capable of handling 2 - 4GB of modern websites. We have applications for displaying true html. Blogs written with text only are a joy to read. I would recommend w3m. It also has support for images(I have not tried out this feature). If you access gopher holes or the modern avatar, the gemini space, then you are in luck and there are plenty of options. With the gopher and gemini protocol, you are at home in the console. Want to access your banking site, forget it.

5. If you are on the fediverse, there are clients for the mastodon network. There are clients for reddit.

6. For reading ebooks like epubs and mobis, I would recommend epy.

7. For searching the web we have the duckduckgo client ddgr and surfraw. Both are powerful and meet all the web searching requirements. 

8. Playing music has always been easy on the console with plenty of applications. My personal favorite is the mpd and mpc combination with ncmcpp added into the mix. 

9. For playing video, mpv is my default goto. The framebuffer device plays most of the videos thrown at it. 

This has already been a very long post. If you made it this far, then you are definitely a console junkie. If I could give you a hint of the entrance to the rabbit hole, then I would be most happy. Dont forget to buy yourself a mechanical keyboard. Thanks to all the devs and users who wrote all those wonderful applications and of course GNU/Linux. The journey with the tux and the beastie and the puffer since the year 2000 has been nothing but joy. I would like to end the post with the tagline of distrowatch. "Put the fun back into computing. Use GNU/Linux, Freebsd, Openbsd, Netbsd, Plan9, templeos, Haiku, Minix, GNU ..."

Long live the freedom software movement

There have been many examples of organizations taking up GPLd code and trying to spin a business model around it(Let us call it organization A). The catch here is that the code is available in the public under GPL. If an individual or another corporation(Let us call it organization B) sees that the offering is costly and the terms offered are too stifling they still have the access to the same code. Let us say that that A has now sweetened the deal with improvements and additions to the code base and offers that as the premium to B. Now, B has the option of taking the improved deal form A or asking for A to give out the improvements to the original code base since the original code base was GPLd. This is where A loses its head. This is where A drops its towel. This is where many organizations understand that it is not a viable model.

But there have been examples of organizations making money out of GPLd software. The important ones coming to the mind is Redhat and Suse. At a time when even redhat didnt have a commercial offering, suse had only the commercial offering. All these people started working "around" GPLd software. They did not work much "on" the GPLd software. Whatever utilities they developed to wrap around the GPLd software making the users adopt GPLd software was aimed with ease of use and technical support and customization for the clients. This worked and companies were successful with this. The object of business is profit maximization. There are plenty of strategies to do it. The problems while doing business with GPLd software is the ethical dilemmas. You want to be true to the GNU philosophy and you have to maximize shareholders profits. As you start wanting more returns from GPLd software that is where you start spiraling down. That is where you are extracting blood instead of milk from the cow's udder. Now, the money you are making is blood money.

Now comes a biggie who thinks that he knows how to make more money from GPLd software and buys the smaller and a better ethical vendor. Without even having a plan to integrate the ethics and the working of this company. The integration plan is one of the most vital thing for a successful takeover. You decide whether you want the smaller firm to continue with its ethics or completely break it down and merge with your profit making culture. There is no road in between. Many mergers and acquisitions have failed because of this. For big corporations it is better you kill it totally like google or microsoft. Take out whatever assets that can be proprietarized and throw out the GPLd ones. The problem arises when you think of proprietarizing GPLd code. There might be plenty of code written by the acquired company under GPL. But just because you wrote it, you dont own it. It is in the GNU world.

Efforts are on to kill the free software movement. Efforts are on to destroy the free software foundation. Efforts are on to kill the GPL. And this time it is a totally co-ordinated effort from all the bigs. We dont know how it is going to end. But we know for sure that the GPL document has stood its test of time. It has been framed with the core human societal values at its core. It has not been framed for profiteering. It has been framed with the basic human ethic of "sharing". They all thought that they bring down RMS they bring down GPL. They are wrong. They should have done it the other way round, then it might have worked. But, now it is not working. People are sratching their heads. All their lawyers and PRs are working overtime to malign the GPL.

So, clearly now is the time to advertise freedom software. Now is the time for all the individuals and ethical groups to spread the word of freedom software. Now is the time to share. Now is the time to side with the free software foundation and identify the blobs in the free software foundation and replace them with GPLd code since we have already lost the Linux foundation for the blobs. Now is the time to start GPLd software. Yes they are not flashy, Yes they are not easy to use. Now is the time to make them flashy. Make them more usable. Make them more known to the public. Now is the time to celebrate the contributions of one and all made to the freedom software world. Now is the time to provide due recognition to all the developers who work both for earning and for human ethics. Now is the time to spread the names across the public network. Now is the time to dig out the the name sof the contributors on which all the proprietary world of software is standing. Now is the time to tell that Macos and ios are visual shells on BSD code. Now is the time to shout that the flashy PS4s are just an interface to the awesome BSD code. Above all now is the time I request all developers developing for fun for serious ethics to please release their code under GPL and not under any other permissive licenses.

As a long time GPLd software user, I salute all the freedom software developers and thank them from the bottom of my heart for providing the world an ethical alternative.

Long live GPL. Long live RMS. Long live the sharing ethos.