I managed to get a copy of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, and I’m installing it now so I’m going to take a look over this evening and tomorrow and probably (no guarantees) do a little review of it.
Not much for me to comment on yet, the installer is almost exactly the same as OpenSUSE 10.1 (and 10.0 before it). I’ll get back when I’m in!
Installer reckons 30 minutes to go…
Recently, I made the move from Microsoft Office Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client. Yes, I know, webmail is cool and everything (I’m on Gmail and the webmail is awesome), but I’ve always preferred a desktop email client.
My problem is/was that I use both Windows and Linux and want my client to be updated with my latest mail on both operating systems (previously I had to be in Windows to use Outlook to get my mail, which is partly why I switched). Now an IMAP server would be a great way to do this, but Gmail only offers POP access or standard webmail.
So I wanted a solution that would synchronise my profile across Windows and Linux so both clients had the same set of messages.
Mozilla list a series of solutions for doing this, but I chose the easiest and less hack-involved solution.
Basically, I have a dual boot machine with Windows and Fedora Core Linux. I have loads of partitions here and there, one of which is a FAT32 partition for easy file transfer between the two OSs. That looked like the obvious choice to do the syncing.
In theory this process should also work for Mac OS X, but since I don’t yet have a Mac or access to one, I don’t know where the Thunderbird files are stored and/or whether this works in practice (Mac users fill me in with the details and I’ll update this post – would be useful for Boot Camp’ers I’m sure!). This also assumes Thunderbird is installed in the default locations on Windows and Linux and you’re not already running some groovy multi-profile setup.
So this post is really to recap my steps so that anyone else with a similar setup can set up sync.
It’s that time again. Beginner’s Linux is back and this time I’m going to be taking a look at file permissions in Linux. In fact, the details should apply to any Unix-based system, but for simplicity I’ll use the term ‘Linux’. This is Part 1 and lays down some of the basic concepts before we put them into practice in Part 2 (coming soon).
If you don’t know anything about how the file system works (i.e. you don’t understand where / is and what the symbol ~ represents), then I’d strongly recommend checking out my guide to files and folders before coming back here for the rest. Don’t worry, it’s written in nice and friendly language as well.
There’s a short intro into Permissions there, but here we’re really going for it and by the end you should have an understanding of file permissions, how they work, how to change them and why they’re necessary.
OK, let’s jump in.
Just found this out and thought it might be useful to someone else.
If you’re running KDE and using the GTK-QT Engine to run GTK applications (e.g. Firefox) with your native KDE styles like I am, you may notice that after upgrading your software or changing your KDE colour scheme that certain bits of GTK apps suddenly turn grey.
Well, easy solution.
K Menu > Control Centre (sometimes also Personal Settings or something similar) > Appearance and Themes > Colours. Then make sure ‘Apply colours to non-KDE applications‘ is ticked. Apply and restart your GTK apps (make sure the appropriate GTK Styles and Themes settings are correct).
Colours KDE Control Centre module Hosted on ZooomrHope this helps someone!
Now I love my Xgl, Compiz and KDE combination, but a few (minor) things have been broken in KDE since Xgl and Compiz took over my machine.
One of these things is the screensaver. You can set a screensaver with KDE’s tools and manually launch it by choosing Lock Screen, but the screensaver would no longer come on by itself regardless of what settings you chose.
Well, there is a solution. Thanks to Noiesmo’s Website for the tip. It actually requires bypassing the KDE screensaver handling and use the older, but Xgl-aware xscreensaver. So the first thing you need to do is install that. Check your distribution’s software management tools and search for and install xscreensaver. A couple of commands for popular distros:
Fedora:
$ su -c "yum install xscreensaver"(K)ubuntu:
$ sudo apt-get install xscreensaver
Once that’s installed we need to make a script that starts the xscreensaver program when we log in so it can run the screensaver after the timeout. Copy and paste the following into your favourite text editor.
#!/bin/sh xscreensaver -nosplash &
Save that as ~/.kde/Autostart/xscreen.sh (you might need to show hidden folders to see .kde). Now we need to make that script executable. Browse to ~/.kde/Autostart in the file manager Konqueror and right-click your new xscreen.sh script. Choose Properties, click the Permissions tab and tick ‘is executable’ before clicking OK.
Now we need to start xscreensaver in this session, so press Alt-F2 and type xscreensaver -nosplash & and press Enter. Now press Alt-F2 again and type xscreensaver-demo and press Enter again.
Here is where you choose your screensaver, set timeout options and settings etc. Choose your desired settings and close the program.
Your screensaver should now run after the timeout you specified in xscreensaver-demo. Fixed!
Watch out for the ugly unlocking screen, though, it’s not quite as pretty as KDE’s one.
Flash Player 8 (or 9) isn’t on Linux. Well, Flash Player 9 is being built for Linux, but in the mean time we Linux faithfuls are stuck with Flash 7. Flash 7 on Linux isn’t so bad, if you discount the instability, the ugly interface…
This hack is no longer needed as Flash Player 9 for Linux (beta) is out, but I’ll keep it up here just in case…
But let’s not go there. There is a workaround to run Flash Player 8 in Linux, albeit a messy and Wine-requiring one. Plus it only works on standard PC architecture at the moment (that is almost of you, just not people running Linux on PowerPC Macs and other funky hardware). I will try and show you how to do it. First of all, an apology. I can’t remember where I found this, so I’ve got no-one to attribute this to. If you found this out first or covered this somewhere, comment here and I’ll give you a link.
This tutorial which shows you how to build a KDE application in C++ using Kdevelop and QT Designer is very good. As part of my attempt (can I emphasise attempt here) to learn not only C++, but to be good enough to build a KDE application, I tried it.
It’s very well written, but I think I strayed a little too much off the course of the tutorial and I ended up being unable to build my application. Something about some error somewhere. Still, there is source code for a version which does work, so I might take a look at that and see where I went wrong. I swear I did something wrong with the Automake Manager… Ah well, I’ll have another crack at it later and hopefully I’ll be able to build a KDE application Sometime Real Soon.
Hey, at least I’m making progress, albeit slow progress. This post comes to you courtesy of my SUSE 10.1 software development installation.
Welcome back to my Beginner’s Linux tutorial series and today I’m going back to the subject of software installation. A while ago I looked at compiling software from source, but this time I’m going to look at installing RPM packages.
Note that this tutorial is specific to distributions that use the RPM package format. That is most distributions (SUSE, Fedora, Mandriva etc.) , but there are a few very notable exceptions including Ubuntu, MEPIS and anything else Debian-based. For those distros, a completely different packaging format and set of tools is used, so I might cover that in a future tutorial.
Just before we get into things, if you’re a complete newbie, I’d recommend reading my Linux Explained tutorial at Gizbuzz and my basic introduction into files and folders here to get you started with some of the concepts (I’m jumping in quite quickly to terminal stuff, so you need a basic understanding).
Oh, and the ‘consuming packages with yum’ section is weighted towards Fedora users, but the rest is sound advice for any RPM-based distro.
» Read the rest of this post…
Freespire is the community arm of Linspire, a Linux distro that’s been in the news a few times, most famously for getting into trouble with Microsoft for it’s old name – Lindows.
As the old name suggests, Linspire and Freespire are aimed at the Windows user to make switching to Linux easy. Linspire has always been a paid-for distribution – there’s been no free to download pre-packaged version. Freespire is set to change all that, and it helpfully has a version which includes various proprietary software bits. The benefit of this is that not only do things like WMVs, MP3s and DVDs (lots of acronyms) work out of the box, but so do a larger number of bits of hardware. There are wireless card drivers, modem drivers, 3D graphics drivers and more – note that not everything is guaranteed to be there, some manufacturers are still bone idle enough to ignore Linux support.
So if you’re a someone who’s tried a Linux distro but have been put off by non-support or difficult to set up modem drivers, wireless card drivers or media support, give Linspire a try!
According to Simon Phipps, anyway. Read my full post here.
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