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.

A nice spoof of Windows Genuine Advantage:

Linux Genuine Advantageâ„¢ is an exciting and mandatory new way for you to place your computer under the remote control of an untrusted third party!

…we have created a new program available as a required free download: Linux Genuine Advantageâ„¢!

Linux Genuine Advantage.

UPDATE: don’t actually download and install the software on that site, apparently it actually works and will lock you out of logging in in 30 days.

FireBug is an awesome Firefox extension for web developers.

The FireBug developers have just put out a 1.0 release and it includes loads of cool features. There’s one that I just have to share, though, and it is awesome.

If you use inspect to select an element on the page, you can then double-click on bits of the CSS in the right hand pane, and get this, edit them in real time! That means you can literally play around with how a website looks in real time and it’s really useful when you want to make a CSS tweak to something. You just use FireBug to preview it in real time and adjust your edits to make it just right, then you can tweak the actual file. No page reloading needed (or worse Ctrl-F5 to clear the cache).

Download and install it from the official Mozilla add-ons page.

Unfortunately, my normal screencast solution isn’t compatible with the new 3D effects and all that stuff, so I had to do it the old-fashioned way this time, and point a video camera at the screen.

So this is what it looks like (YouTube embed below, so you may need to click through if you’re in a feed reader):

W00t!

I’ve been trying to replace my ageing and seriously semi-broken Compiz installation with Beryl for a while now, and I’ve finally got it working!

For those of you not in the know, Compiz is the bit of software that provide the desktop cube effects, and the transparency and wobbly windows and all of that stuff on Linux desktops. Beryl is Compiz on steroids (it was forked and is now the community version) and it features so much more than Compiz. Plus, my version of Compiz was kind of heavily broken, but that’s a story for another day.

I now have all the 3D (some ridiculously distracting) effects I could ever want, and I get even better, fully customisable transparency, bucketloads of themes – plus you can customise them and … well, if you like tweaking stuff like me, this rules.

So here’s a quick screenshot of my desktop now with a few windows open. 😛

Desktop18012007 Hosted on Zooomr

As you can see my particular theme here combines some Vista-like transparency with some glass effects, a bit of blue from my old Compiz theme and some Mac-inspired window controls to form my personal setup.

And I like it. Well, inevitably I’ll wake up tomorrow and completely change it. Tweaking your entire GUI style exactly how you want it is addictive, believe me!

It’s taken me far too long to replace the old Compiz with this, and I’ve finally done it!

If you want to download my heavily tweaked theme, you can grab a copy here (requires a recent version of the Emerald window decorator, and yes, it’s Linux/BSD only!).

It’s official – Flash Player 9 for Linux has gone gold as of today!

The Penguin.SWF blog post about it doesn’t tell you a lot more, but it’s where I heard about it. You can now download it from Adobe.

FOSSwire post on how to install it coming soon is here.

Once again, thank you Adobe for your cross-platform commitment (now we need Photoshop, heh).

I love virtual desktops. They rule – they come as standard in virtually every Linux setup and you can get third party programs for other operating systems too. Combine that with the eye candy of Compiz and you have productivity and beauty in a crisp sugar shell. Sorry about the Smarties reference.

Anyway, this is my setup for coding. When I’m happily hacking away (like I have been for the past, oh – four days non stop?) I like to have my virtual desktops like this. By the way, clicking on the screenshots will not allow you to spy on me – they will not get any bigger. Don’t even try. Sorry about the blur too. Needs must, I’m afraid.

» Read the rest of this post…

Mozilla have released Firefox 2.0.0.1, which contains some important security updates and a couple of other fixes, plus official support for Vista (it worked fine in RC1 for me anyway, but now it’s officially supported).

To upgrade, go to Help > Check for updates (running as an administrator) and restart the browser when it’s done.

This OSNews story tracks a conversation on a mailing list about the Linux kernel. Basically, some people who hack on the kernel want to place a warning in the kernel if you try and load a non-free kernel module or driver that it will not work in kernels released as of January 2008. The idea being they will release another patch by then that prevents non-free modules from loading.

I think this is a stupid idea.

First of all, this move would in theory lock out the proprietary Nvidia and ATI graphics drivers. Now I’m running the Nvidia driver for Linux as I type this. If that suddenly stops working in 2008 when I upgrade, then I won’t be able to enjoy beautiful graphics or play amazing open source games.

Also, in theory it would also block a technology called ndiswrapper, which allows you to run Windows network card drivers (usually for wireless cards) under Linux. It’s open source, but since it links with proprietary code (the Windows drivers), it would be restricted presumably.

More importantly, this makes Linux look worse as an OS to people who might consider switching, and might consider the free software/open source ideology. Their 3D graphics will never be able to work out of the box (unless they have an Intel chip) and their wireless cards are never going to work. Is this going to inspire more people to use a free platform?

No. It will alienate potential users and it will make Linux, in the eyes of the average computer user, go from almost a real alternative to being an interesting technical exercise for free software purists, and free software purists only.

To the people considering doing this – would you rather have people use a mostly free platform or use a completely proprietary platform because the 100% free one doesn’t work with their hardware and isn’t therefore useful to them? Make your choice.

I’ve made mine – if this goes through, in a year’s time I’ll be running a patched kernel with this restriction removed. Unless every single device driver goes open source within a year (which isn’t going to happen).

Thankfully, Linus is against this move and I support him on this. There are also other arguments against this – including that it violates Freedom 0, but I’ve said enough and you’ve read enough.

Up until a couple of days ago I still hadn’t tried out Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 which I downloaded a long time ago. Unfortunately, I discovered that the ethernet driver for VMware doesn’t work (and it used to in Beta 2), and so I was forced to wait until a convenient moment to install it on a physical machine (which wasn’t going to be my main desktop, funnily enough).

Windows Vista’s installer is still pathetically fussy about where it will allow you to install Vista. It requires installation to the first primary partition on a hard drive which is master.

Well, that’s really convenient, considering that my partition layout on the first hard drive on this machine was as follows:

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40060403712 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4870 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        1912    15358108+  83  Linux
/dev/hda2            1913        1988      610470   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda4            3009        4870    14956515    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5            4054        4870     6562521   83  Linux
/dev/hda6            3009        4053     8393899+  83  Linux

hda1 was my CentOS server installation, hda5 was a few gigs of data left over from somewhere else, and hda6 was my Ubuntu Dapper installation. Of course, the Windows install required the monopoly on hda1, which currently was occupied.

Well, thank goodness for the flexibility of Linux. I simply used the low level tool dd to make images of all the partitions (onto a spare 160 GB drive also in that machine), and then wiped off the disk.

One Vista install later, and the drive now had just one primary partition of rougly 17 GB with Vista on it.

I then created a partition to match the size of the CentOS install, and dd‘d the image back. After tweaking a few configuration files via the Ubuntu Live distro, I then rebooted with my GRUB bootloader CD in the drive, typed in the boot commands and CentOS booted like nothing had happened. 🙂

I then reinstalled GRUB to the hard drive (with a boot menu obviously, I don’t type boot commands every boot!) and added Vista to the list of OSs to boot.

The Ubuntu Dapper partition unfortunately would no longer fit (by about 2 GB), as Vista is now using a lot of the space, but instead I installed Edgy, and I’ll recover the important files off Dapper when I need them.

So after about half a day of partition shuffling, it now looks like:

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40060403712 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4870 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        2040    16384000    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2            2040        4870    22733220    5  Extended
/dev/hda5            2040        3952    15359384+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6            3953        3985      265041   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda7            3986        4870     7108731   83  Linux

hda1 is now Vista (NTFS), hda5 is CentOS, hda6 is Linux swap (for both) and hda7 is Ubuntu Edgy Eft.

The things I do to test Vista…