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.

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was the first version of Windows that I used, and I thought I might have another look at it, just for the fun and nostalgia value.

But I wasn’t going to install it on a real machine – I have setups I don’t want to lose! So VMware was launched and I had a try getting it to work on a virtual machine.
Just a word – the original machine which ran WfW 3.11 no longer has it installed; not that Microsoft would be too worried about multiple machine uses of an essentially dead product. The machine originally came with IBM PC DOS and OS/2 (neither of which now live on it either).

Initially, I was going to put PC DOS on the VM first, because Windows at this stage wasn’t really an OS in its own right, it needed DOS to run the setup. However the IBM PC DOS floppies weren’t looking too good, and the PC DOS install had a hiccup. It completed, but important stuff like himem.sys (deals with extended memory, so you can have over 640k RAM) weren’t installed, so it wasn’t much use.

So instead I downloaded FreeDOS, the free and open source DOS system, that claims pretty damn good compatibility with MS-DOS. I had to find a mirror that worked, and a version that worked, but when I did, I successfully installed FreeDOS on my 200 MB virtual hard drive.

Now, to the Windows install – with screenshots (click any one to make it bigger, thanks Zooomr)!
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Just a quick post – I’m going away for a few days sans internet access and will be back posting by Wednesday with a bit of luck.

In the meantime, be sure to check out my Writely and Mono+GWS conspiracy theory. Well, not quite, but read it anyway. It’s interesting.

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.
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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!

• Freespire Homepage
• Download Freespire

According to Simon Phipps, anyway. Read my full post here.

It’s here! Yes, it’s that elusive podcasting project I was talking about. In fact, Chris van Patten, who commented on that post – well, you could have found out by clicking his name (he put the PodDev website as his link on the comments form). Ah well, so much for the hush-up.

Anyway, the first episode of PodDev is now online! You can listen to it now on Odeo, subscribe to the feed via RSS, read the transcript (if you’re bandwidth isn’t quite broad enough or you want to read along) or subscribe via iTunes.
Listen now using this Odeo Flash player:

Thanks to my co-hosts Chris Van Patten, Jacob Peddicord and Huw Leslie (Huw will be joining us hopefully next episode, he’s on holiday at the moment). Big thanks also to Paul Colton of the Aptana project who agreed to be interviewed for PodDev’s first episode.

If you’ve listened to PodDev and like it, we’d really appreciate a link back to poddev.comitar.com. Also, we’ve got some pre-made link buttons for you, if you’re interested.

In PodDev’s maiden voyage, Jacob takes a look at whether Leopard really is a major upgrade after its showcase at the WWDC, I look at Intel’s release of FOSS graphics drivers and a take a brief dip into Java and Chris gets a three-question interview with John Biggs of CrunchGear. Also, all three of us talk to Paul about Aptana, XAMLON, AFLAX and how he came back to doing JavaScript, Java and Web 2.0 work from a lot of XAML and .NET stuff.

I really enjoyed doing this podcast and I’m looking forward to episode 2 in a couple of weeks! Digg the podcast below.

I think the video speaks for itself here.

Just finished my review of RSSOwl that I promised. It was a bit critcal – particularly of the interface, but at the moment it just doesn’t meet my needs. Still, I mentioned that, the cool features that are there and what I think the RSSOwl development team should do next.

The quest to find a better feed reader goes on, and I’ll look for my next candidate soon, which might this time be a web-based offering. Still using Google IG for now then…

I know posts look like they’ve been drying up a bit on my blog, but fear not, there is a good reason. I’ve been working on another podcasting project and that’s taken up quite a bit of my not-doing-any-other-project time (which is usually blogging). I will be back to normal posting frequency very soon.

Oh, let me guess – you want me to spill the beans about the podcasting project. You’ll see the first episode coming in the next few days, and I’m sure if you dig around you’ll be able to find it. For the rest of you, all will be revealed soon.