…then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

I’ve been using Fedora as my main desktop OS for over a year now. It’s a very good Linux distribution, but every so often it is nice to get a change of scenery.

Also, I haven’t actually cleared out my KDE configuration files and started from scratch in over a year, which means things can get a little bit clogged up. FC6 on my desktop had been acting pretty slowly and I’m too impatient to wait for Fedora 7 to come out.

So, I’ve just migrated my desktop over to Kubuntu Feisty Fawn. Why Kubuntu? Because you can pry KDE out of my cold, dead fingers. Oh and because of this. And endless configurability. And the promise of KDE 4.

I still grudgingly am retaining a Windows dual boot system, but only just. The reinstall gave me an opportunity to nuke the disk and give Linux a lot more space than it did have.

So far, I’ve had very positive experiences with Kubuntu. Especially getting the Nvidia 3D drivers on – that was undoubtedly the easiest install of those drivers I’ve ever done. I don’t know whether it was clearing out a year’s worth of rubbish, or if it is Ubuntu, but it seems much snappier. Firefox and Thunderbird start-up times seem to have been dramatically reduced, as has boot-up (thanks to Upstart).

The funny thing is I set aside a whole weekend to get stuff migrated over and I’ve done most of it in an evening. Which involves reconfiguring stuff how I like it. Which usually takes quite a bit of time.

When Fedora 7 comes out, I’ll play around with it inside a VM and then re-asses my distro switch decision. 😉

GPLv3:

When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technical measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work’s users, your or third parties’ legal rights to forbid circumvention of technical measures.

Translation: down with the DMCA and similar.

The GPLv3 also will hopefully prevent future MS-Novell deals (and hopefully give Novell some problems too). No-one, and I mean no-one, should be able to extort FOSS users like MS and Novell are collectively doing. No I will not use Ballmer-blessed Linux.

Haven’t read the latest draft in detail, but I think I’ll be happy to offer my GPLed stuff under the new revision when it is finalised.

No disrespect to non-free software, by the way. I’m not anti-proprietary (which RMS won’t be happy to hear). I’m just against people and companies exploiting people who do choose to release Free stuff. That’s why I’m feeling pretty pro-GPLv3 right now. 🙂

Once again, I’ve managed to let my post frequency here drop really sharply, which sucks. Sorry.

I just noticed that I have an alarming number of feed subscriptions in my Google Reader. Being the curious person that I am, I want to know how this compares to other people’s number of subscriptions.

So I have 189 sites that deliver me content as it happens. If you use a feed reader, how many subscriptions do you have? Compared to you, do I subscribe to loads, a few, or what?

You probably don’t know me very well if you don’t know that I like tweaking and playing around with stuff. After having quite a while of a green-themed Linux desktop, I got bored of it and decided I wanted blue back. This time, though, I picked a different window decorator engine so my desktop feels different. Still like my window controls on the left, though. 🙂

Desktop24042007 Hosted on Zooomr

A couple of days ago, CentOS 5 came out. On my server machine (I say server, but it doesn’t do a lot at the moment, it’s not even on all the time!), I was running CentOS 4.4, and I was eager to get upgrading.

After about half a day of trying to get the DVD ISO off BitTorrent, and getting 30% of the way through, I gave up and downloaded it off an FTP mirror in a few hours. Why is it I rarely ever have good experiences with BitTorrent?

So yesterday I spent a bit of the day upgrading and migrating all the stuff on there over. First of all, though, there was a 10-year-old hard drive still in that machine, which was basically sitting there and doing nothing. I decided I would unplug it, as all it was doing was killing itself slowly and heating up the box a bit more.

» Read the rest of this post…

I’m the proud owner of a Cherry CyMotion Master Linux keyboard. It’s a great keyboard, and it has loads of extra buttons that come in really handy. Well they do, if you can install the driver software that controls them under Linux.

Clean Keyboard Hosted on Zooomr

I have a CD that came with the keyboard which includes a Fedora Core 4 RPM, a SUSE RPM and a .deb I think. Back when this machine was running FC5, the Fedora Core 4 RPM would load fine into the system and that way I could use the cool extra keys.

However, when I upgraded to Fedora Core 6, the FC4 RPM would no longer install (and it went into just a little bit of RPM hell).

It wasn’t until recently that I discovered that the source code for the key utility is actually GPL’ed and is available for download from the Cherry site (found on this page).

This basically solves the problem, as once you’ve got the source code, you can build it yourself and not depend on some dodgy semi-incompatible binary package.

» Read the rest of this post…

The KDE team have just released the final schedule for KDE 4.

I’m definitely looking forward to this one, as KDE still remains one of my favourite desktop environments. Some of the new features in KDE 4 look quite cool, but I think the best features are the new stuff they’re doing with the architecture.

It is a fairly long wait though – but at least we have a target date to look forward to!

• April 1, 2007: Subsystem Freeze
  From this date forward, no new KDE subsystem or major changes can be committed to kdelibs.
• May 1, 2007: Alpha Release + kdelibs soft API Freeze
  Alpha will be a source-only release without translations. The kdelibs API is “soft-frozen”, meaning that changes can be made but only with the consent of the core developers.
• June 1, 2007: trunk/KDE is feature frozen

  Trunk is frozen for feature commits. Internationalised string changes are allowed. A list of main modules that will be included in the final release will be made.

• June 25, 2007: Beta1
  Beta 1 is prepared and released after some initial testing. The incoming bugs will be reviewed for their severity. After this release, a new Beta version will be released every month.
• September 23, 2007: Total Release Freeze
  This is the very last date for committing anything that isn’t reviewed on the development lists.
• September 25, 2007: Release Candidate 1
  Targetted date for first release candidate. Only regressions (breakage caused by the KDE 4 port) or grave bugs can be fixed. Starting with this Release Candidate, a new Release Candidate will be put out every two weeks until the codebase is sufficiently stable and all showstopper bugs have been fixed.
• October 23, 2007: Targetted Release Date

There’s nothing that annoys me more* than Steve Ballmer spreading lies about various competing operating systems.

I’ve said before – if Linux (or any part of the average distro) infringes MS’s patents, then show us what it is and we’ll fix it.

The Show Us The Code website is a public pledge to Ballmer to do just that – show the community the supposed infringing code.

Your repeated claims that Linux violates Microsoft’s intellectual property has come to the attention of the Linux community. Not only that, but it’s been reported Microsoft has convinced businesses to pay for a Linux patent that you can’t provide.

Therefore, this website will serve as a response to this accusation, and within it, a request. The request is simple, since you, Microsoft, claim to be so sure of yourself: Show Us the Code. Show us the Code and Show Us the Patents. Lets make this crystal clear.

If Linux developers are made aware of the code and patented ideas, then the code can be omitted and Linux can re-write necessary aspects of the kernel or operating system. This is a fairly simple request and common courtesy. Why wave around lawsuit threats, threats that will cost Microsoft in a court room as well as the defendants? It lacks logic, especially when you consider that there are developers around the world who would be more than happy to work with Microsoft to resolve this issue. Don’t you owe it to your shareholders to work with others to ensure their intellectual property isn’t being violated?

He won’t do it, but we need to make sure as many people as possible realise he is talking complete rubbish.

The saddest thing about all this? It all boils down to greed.

Thanks to Inspirated for bringing this site to my attention in the first place!

* Not even my friends bugging me to keep playing the World of Warcraft trial. 😛

Just ordered a free OpenSolaris kit (just sign up, give your address and in 2-4 weeks you’ll get a nice pack full of OpenSolaris goodies, including a selection of distributions on CD).

I’m actually quite interested in the OpenSolaris project – once the OpenSolaris distributions mature a bit more, I’m actually think of trying it out as a server operating system. So far, things are early, and as yet not all of the OpenSolaris code has been opened, but Sun are doing a very good job.

In fact, Sun are just great. They’re by far the company contributing most to free software/open source projects and they just seem like a ‘good’ company (at the moment that’s true anyway). It’s nice to have a few Suns to balance out Microsoft’s behaviour and the ‘bad bits’ of other companies (*cough* Apple *cough* FairPlay). I’m not even going to talk about Novell.

There are some really killer features in the commercial Solaris product for the server space, things like Zones and DTrace. A lot of it’s been ported to Linux and BSD, but my ‘unexplored operating system’ radar is going off again. 🙂

Actually, it’s nice to use a Unix which does things differently from Linux occasionally. Not only is it fun to do some exploring, it sharpens your general Unix skills, which can only be a good thing.

In fact, I once got FreeBSD (4.x) onto the oldest computer in this house, which is an IBM-compatible PC with a 75 MHz Pentium processor and 16 MB of RAM. I actually got Apache to compile (after roughly 4 hours) and I installed PHP and MySQL too (thank goodness MySQL is a binary package or it would have been there for days!). It worked reasonably well as a web server, except for the fact that most pages incurred a 10 second delay and PHPMyAdmin would take about 20 minutes to load. 😀

I’ve since tried messing with FreeBSD (and NetBSD as well), but I always tend to get mixed up in the installation process. I guess I need some more practice.

Just installed KDE on my brand, shiny new MacBook. I got 2 GB worth of KDE goodness (the ‘everything’ torrent) from here and simply opened up the disk image and launched kde4.mpkg.

Konqueror runs and works reasonably well as a web browser – but sadly crashes when trying to use it as a file manager (and I’m not after the web browsing portion).

Installing…

Running…

And crashing… 🙂

I do have a whole host of other KDE apps on Mac OS X to play with and of course much more stuff to do natively too!

OS X is awesome. All the marketing stuff about ‘working out of the box’ is actually surprisingly true. After running the initial “I’m going to ask you millions of questions” setup assistant, you fly straight into a ready-to-run system. Maybe it’s just I’ve never had a decent Windows OEM setup before (is there such a thing?), but Apple get the OOBE right.