Great article coming up. For those of you unwilling to jump to Linux just yet (wait, I’m supposed to like all the platforms aren’t I?), there is a great tutorial at Gizbuzz explaining how to get a Windows/Apache/MySQL/PHP server up and running.

It’s from the beginner’s perspective and focuses on installing the AMP bundle XAMPP (of which Mac OS X and Linux versions are also available).

Check it out if you’re interested, oh, and digg it too.

There’s no secret that I prefer KDE over Gnome on my Linux desktop (and I did use Gnome for some time, then decided to switch back).

But I still love Firefox – it’s by far got a better rendering engine than Konqueror (KHTML might be fast but rich-text editing and good rendering is important to me) and of course I can’t live without extensions!

But Firefox is written using GTK, the graphical application toolkit mainly used for Gnome, meaning it would look out of place on KDE. But for a little piece of software called the GTK-QT-Engine. It forces GTK to be rendered in QT (KDE’s native GUI toolkit).

This was perfect for most apps, but there was a small glitch with scrollbars on Firefox that was annoying (at the top there’d be one button that worked fine; at the bottom there’d be buttons for both up and down, but only the down button worked). Well, a routine Fedora update and there’s a new option to fix that in the KDE Control Centre. Good work, people.

Found a solution for the Xgl problem where pressing Shift-Backspace caused the X server to kill itself!

Run the following from a terminal:

xmodmap -e "keycode 22 = BackSpace"

That should fix it. Thanks to the Quick and Dirty Hacks blog for pointing this out.

UPDATE: From what I can tell, looks like this is required to be entered everytime X is restarted (when you logout/login or restart the machine), so best to put the command in a startup script for your desktop so you don’t have to worry about entering it manually each time.

I’ve subscribed to some more podcasts recently, and I thought I’d share them.

Novell Open Audio

This is a fairly Linux-centric podcasts, hosted by Ted Haeger of Novell. Novell are doing some crazy and cool things for the Linux desktop, with their flagship Linux desktop OS, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, shipping soon. I have actually moved from SUSE 10.1 to Fedora Core 5 on my main machine now (still running KDE though) I still have a lot of respect for what Novell do. And it’s a good job too.

In Novell Open Audio, Ted catches up with a load of really interesting people in the free software world (usually it has some Novell connection, though) and interviews them.

Check out Novell Open Audio here.

FLOSS Weekly

This hasn’t been updated in a while (I do hope it hasn’t been given up on), but this is a podcast hosted by Leo Laporte (I can’t count how many shows he hosts now) and Chris DiBona. It’s a good listen for people interested in Free/Libre/Open Source Software (that’s where FLOSS comes from).

Check out FLOSS Weekly; the latest episode is here.

Just thought I’d say that I’ve started watching a new vodcast, CommandN.

Despite the rather Mac-centric sounding name (Command being a Macintosh-specific key on the keyboard), it’s actually fairly platform-independent from the few episodes I’ve watched (no sign of Linux, though). It focuses on the tech stories of each week and gives some good links to sites around the web. It’s not exactly ground-breaking, but it is quite good to catch up on those tech stories I’ve missed and getting some good links to sites around the web.

Watch the latest episode here.

Finally cracked this age-old problem I’ve been having. I now have the Nvidia 3D drivers installed (working at a fairly decent resolution and refresh rate)! Doesn’t sound like much, well this problem has been bugging me for ever now (almost since I started using Linux). With the 3D driver installed, I can finally enjoy the wonder that is Xgl.

So here’s how I managed it…

» Read the rest of this post…

Yesterday I decided to install SUSE 10.1 (again), but this time on my server/development computer to use as a Linux software development installation. Now I’ve done bits and pieces of Visual Basic.NET on Windows, but I never really quite got into it like PHP.

So I installed SUSE alongside Kdevelop and I’ve started messing about with C++. C++ is probably not the best language to jump right into, but considering I basically know the syntax from PHP … well, we’ll see.

So I’m trying to build a few graphical KDE applications as examples, using cplusplus.com as my guide to the basics. Wish me luck, because the C++ jungle is big. If I do successfully get a grasp, however, I’m sure knowing C++ will come in handy for whatever platform. And cross-platform is king.

Anyone know any more good C++ resources?

Find this tutorial useful?

I thought this might be worth doing: a short tutorial for Linux newbies on how to compile programs by source. Talk about jumping in at the deep end. I’ll do some easier ones as well, don’t worry. Anyway…
Generally, on non-open platforms, you never see the source code of anything (think of the source code as the ‘recipe’ for the program). Even on Linux you generally get new software packaged as shiny binary .rpm (or .deb) files.

However, on occasions you might want/need to compile a piece of software from source; sometimes your distro won’t have packaged that particular piece of software, or you need to install a new version that hasn’t been packaged yet. In this tutorial, I’m going to look at how you can compile stuff yourself (so click Read On if you’re on the front page).

» Read the rest of this post…

Yes, it’s true. As of Thursday, I did my last exam so school is now officially over and I can look forward to a good holiday with a lot of coding. But enough about that.

I finally wrote my last Vista article (Digg it) and dediced to put Windows XP back on my computer, mainly because I wanted my applications to be installed again. See, having a multi-partition setup meant that not all my applications (in fact, hardly any) are on what Windows would call the C: drive. But that’s a different story entirely.

The main website project for Hybrid is back in full-time development now, and there will be things happening very soon hopefully. Stay tune.

I think the picture explains all. Apparently this Dell laptop blew up at a conference in Japan. And you thought Dell made good laptops, didn’t you? Read more at The Inquirer and UNEASYsilence.
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