Tag Archives: Linux

KDE 4: My Desktop Just Got Cooler

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Tuesday, I decided to make the plunge and try out KDE 4.0.0 One word: amazing. So ever is my quick and unscientific review of KDE 4.0.0

Artwork
KDE 4 is a very sexy looking desktop. The panel is darker, the default wallpapers classier and artwork much more modern. The icon and widget theme Oxygen and the effects make the desktop stunningly pretty. The Oxygen window decorations don’t add much. I ended up switching to the Plastik. Also the artwork for the new KDE 4 games is simply beautiful.

Naturally artwork is a very subjective thing, but it does help with the user experience. If a user wants to look at a program, then he/she might want to work and experiment with it too. So far I am impressed by the Oxygen art team’s progress.

Stability
Older KDE 3 applications also work well. So the new KDE libraries are as stable as the KDE developers claim them to be. Unfortunately not all the KDE 4 programs are stable. I encountered a number of crashes with the new Plasma-able version of superkaramba. Other KDE 4 applications can seem a bit unstable at times too. Also interoperability between KDE 3 and KDE 4 applications is a bit weak too. The most stable apps so far the one related to systemsettings and the KDE games.

Again, since KDE 4.0.0. is a release directed towards developers and early adopters, I am not going to complain about this. I am sure other windows managers were less stable after such a massive API change. Things should get better with the next release of KDE 4. Probably by the time Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron will be out, most of these bugs will be out of the way. Remember KDE 4.0.0 is just the first version in KDE 4’s lifecycle.

Integration
One thing I love and hate about KDE is the tight integration between KDE apps. As of KDE 4.0.0 many of the integration pieces are missing. I will not harp upon my two favourite KDE applications, amarok & kontact (part of KDE-PIM). In both cases, the developers are not ready to get the code in place to deal with the new APIs, and the new features they want to add. A straight port to the new kdelibs is one thing. A new release worthy of the KDE 4 title is another.

However some necessary parts of the KDE integrated experience are not there. Example: the Regional/Language settings work… barely. Also the new kickoff menu does not always find new non-KDE programs, something the old menu did. (That might be more of a Kubuntu/Ubuntu integration issue though). Plasma whose ultimate goal is to integrate the desktop, kicker and applets with the rest of the system, has a long way to go.

…And Everything Else!
To finish off this off-the-cuff review, I want to point a few other things I noticed.

The new kickoff menu takes some getting used to. At first I frowned upon the limited space this new menu system takes up. After a few uses, it grew on me. The Favorites and Computer parts let you quickly get to a favourite application or location. The Recently Used keeps track of your recent documents and applications used. Everything is nicely compartmentalized. The regular applications menu is the part that takes use to the most. Displaying only one menu at a time gives a lot more information about each application. Only problem is when there a large number of applications in a submenu. If the KDE developers come up with a natural way of categorizing applications and keep the maximum depth of submenus to 2 then its all good. Also please, please make it possible to scroll between menus without all that clicking.

The new okular document viewer is awesome. With all the backends in place, it really does become the universal text document viewer. Excellent work. Also KDE 4.0.0 sports a new revision of the gwenview image viewing program. A few more plugins to do slight photo-editing would be nice. But I guess thats what digikam is for. Dolphin also got an update in KDE 4.0.0. Dolphin’s breadcrumb file displayer is now easily editable to let you navigate the file system path. I found this very useful to enter hidden directories without displaying all the . files.

The new konqueror is now an actually usable web browser. Kopete for KDE 4 is nice, but I miss having easy one-click access to my accounts. Now I have to click twice to do the same thing because of the whole profiles thing. KGet also shows promise to be more useful than it once was, with bittorrent integration.

Wrapping up, KDE 4.0.0 brings a lot to the table. Its a sexy-looking desktop with a lot of potential. Once all of the KDE applications get fully ported, and the few nuisances straightened out, KDE 4 will be the most fun free desktop out there. For now KDE 4.0.0 just made my desktop look and feel a lot cooler.

Review of 2007, the Promise(s) of 2008

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The year 2007 has been quite a dynamic year for me. Instead of writing a long article about each thing… cause that might take me an year to write and edit, I will just present a list of lists of things that happened.

Academics

  • Completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto at Mississauga.
  • Picked my diploma for Bachelor of Science.

Travel

  • Traveled to Italy and Poland.
  • Walked down Unter der Linden in Berlin, Germany.
  • Checked out the Tower of London, National Gallery and Museum of Natural History in London, England.
  • Saw the sights of Florence, Rome, Assisi, and bunch of the Umbria region of Italy.
  • Walked around Gdańsk, Szczecin, Poznan, Gdynia and Malbork in Poland.

Software Development

  • Increased my knowledge of information security.
  • Restarted my involvement with the justCheckers project.
  • Deepened my understanding on software libre and open source.
  • Learned Javascript, CGI-Perl and JSP.
  • Joined the Ubuntu Toronto Users group.

Business

  • Led a mock-up startup for a course.
  • Learned how to read and understand businesses.
  • Discovered the many aspects of open source businesses.
  • Read My Job Went to India, or how to stay in IT.

Art

  • Wrote six articles on quantum computing.
  • Wrote seven personal essays that form my Hacker, Gamer, Lover book.
  • Wrote and voiced in an audio documentary, Casanova.
  • Started writing a science fiction novel.

Social Activity

  • Learned of the open access movement.
  • Learned the basic ethical theories: utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, and Rousseau’s social contract.
  • Debated for network neutrality.
  • Read Stallman’s Free Software, Free Society.
  • Read about the anti-software patent efforts in the EU.

Personal

  • Went to Taize in Montreal.
  • Made a lot more friends.
  • Learned the subtle art of dating.
  • Survived the downs of 2007.
  • Got my G1 driver’s license. Again.
  • Invented task logs, an organizational tool.

Things to Do for 2008

  • Finish justCheckers.
  • Write and publish two books.
  • Get a software development related job.
  • Start a company.
  • Find a real girlfriend.
  • Learn to drive and get my full G license.
  • Learn C and C++.
  • Get involved in a major FOSS project.

Ubuntu Toronto Meeting @ the Linuxcaffe

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Today I went down to a small, cosy cafe called the Linuxcaffe on the corner of Harbord St. & Grace St. in downtown Toronto. Other than the fact, that the Linuxcaffe is way cool with organic coffee and free wireless; its also cool that the owner advocates Linux and free software. But what got me to go, was a seasonal meeting of Ubuntu Toronto.

I got to meet a number of enthusiastic Ubuntu users, and I may have helped create a new one by installing and configuring Ubuntu “Gutsy” 7.10 on a laptop. Thanks guys for the great afternoon. And even the weather cooperated by not dumping snow until much later.

Goodies for You Today!

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Good morning! So I have two goodies (one of them is not really my work but I still want to share it with you) to give today.

First thing is the release of Ubuntu 7.10. And in extension also Kubuntu 7.10, which is what I use. As I mentioned before, this is another sweet release. So get yours while its still hot!

Ubuntu Release
Kubuntu Release

Second gift is this post. Thats right, this is post number 150! I wanted to do something special to celebrate this. But yes, I had nothing interesting to report. And this release, makes the post newsworthy. Yay!

Y’ all have a great day, yah hear?

A Free Society Needs a Free Market and Free Software

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A few days ago I finished reading Richard Stallman’s “Free Software, Free Society”. The book consists of a number of interesting, well-written essays on the philosophy and history of the free software movement.

Most people heard of open source as a practical development paradigm and distribution method. Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” describes that in more detail so I will not delve much into that topic. Besides I get the impression that many people understand the goals of open source. But not so many understand the reasoning behind free software, which made open source possible.

As Richard Stallman says, free software is “free as in speech not as free beer”. The goal of free software is to bring freedom to software. The freedom of letting users and developer do whatever they want with the software, within limits. The limits being not to take away the freedoms associated with a program and its source code. Richard Stallman explains the cultural heritage benefits and freedom benefits in his book very well.

Many critics of the free software movement voice their concerns over “ownership” of and “marketability” of free software. Some even go so far to call the entire movement “communist” utopia. Me thinks these critics don’t (or don’t want to) understand either how free software works or free markets for that matter.

I will not go into details why a free market is desirable. These ideas are well documented by theorists from Adam Smith to Ludwig von Mises to Milton Friedman. For sake of argument lets assume a free market is desirable. Free markets depend on people owning “capital”. These owners exchange their “capital” with a customer for greater material wealth, which becomes more “capital”.

Free software unlike proprietary closed source software, gives “ownership” to a user. You can only own a piece of software if you have its source code, be able to modify it for a task, and distribute it to whoever you please. The only restriction is that you must not take away those freedoms. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, Abraham Lincoln once said. The free software with its “give back others freedom” clause, maintains the software’s freedom in perpetuity. Interestingly, this “give back” clause meets the most opposition.

In proprietary software, you get a license to run the program. Usually only one program on one computer by one person, and you are not allowed to give out copies of that program. And you can’t change the program because you don’t have the software. You don’t own the software.

Lets compare this to what happens in real life. You go to the store, and buy a drill. Now you own that drill. You can do whatever you want to with it. You can sell it. You can use it. You can disassemble it. You can use it to power your motorboat if you choose to. It might void your warranty. But you can be sure whatever you do with that drill, and you don’t break a law while using it; you will not have the police coming to your door.

If anything free software is far from being communistic. It gives you more ownership than the closed source software does. Free software encourages a free market, but also asks you to do so ethically. It asks for you to respect the freedoms of another person. Respecting the freedoms of another person is what a free society is about. Respecting the freedoms of a customer is what an ethical seller in a free market does. Furthermore free software with its “give back” clause promotes the idea of giving away “capital” in the form of ideas, work, code, documentation and the software itself; which gives the giver more capital. In fact it gives back more capital for everyone. Everyone wins, and everyone keeps their liberties.

Communism tramples on the freedoms of individual ownership. Free software promotes the freedoms of individual ownership.

Free software promotes ethical behaviour in programmers, cause your code is for all to see. Free software promotes ethical, sustainable entrepreneurs, who know they benefit if everyone benefits. Also often free software ability to be given away, increases a software’s exposure to potential client, better than any sale force can. Free software is also probably the only thing that lets the software market have any chance of become free of interference from corporations and governments. Only a few greedy monopolies and individuals will suffer from free software, but these people don’t care about hurting others to make a bit of cash.
A few days ago I finished reading Richard Stallman’s “Free Software, Free Society”. The book consists of a number of interesting, well-written essays on the philosophy and history of the free software movement.

Most people heard of open source as a practical development paradigm and distribution method. Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” describes that in more detail so I will not delve much into that topic. Besides I get the impression that many people understand the goals of open source. But not so many understand the reasoning behind free software, which made open source possible.

As Richard Stallman says, free software is “free as in speech not as free beer”. The goal of free software is to bring freedom to software. The freedom of letting users and developer do whatever they want with the software, within limits. The limits being not to take away the freedoms associated with a program and its source code. Richard Stallman explains the cultural heritage benefits and freedom benefits in his book very well.

Many critics of the free software movement voice their concerns over “ownership” of and “marketability” of free software. Some even go so far to call the entire movement “communist” utopia. Me thinks these critics don’t (or don’t want to) understand either how free software works or free markets for that matter.

I will not go into details why a free market is desirable. These ideas are well documented by theorists from Adam Smith to Ludwig von Mises to Milton Friedman. For sake of argument lets assume a free market is desirable. Free markets depend on people owning “capital”. These owners exchange their “capital” with a customer for greater material wealth, which becomes more “capital”.

Free software unlike proprietary closed source software, gives “ownership” to a user. You can only own a piece of software if you have its source code, be able to modify it for a task, and distribute it to whoever you please. The only restriction is that you must not take away those freedoms. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, Abraham Lincoln once said. The free software with its “give back others freedom” clause, maintains the software’s freedom in perpetuity. Interestingly, this “give back” clause meets the most opposition.

In proprietary software, you get a license to run the program. Usually only one program on one computer by one person, and you are not allowed to give out copies of that program. And you can’t change the program because you don’t have the software. You don’t own the software.

Lets compare this to what happens in real life. You go to the store, and buy a drill. Now you own that drill. You can do whatever you want to with it. You can sell it. You can use it. You can disassemble it. You can use it to power your motorboat if you choose to. It might void your warranty. But you can be sure whatever you do with that drill, and you don’t break a law while using it; you will not have the police coming to your door.

If anything free software is far from being communistic. It gives you more ownership than the closed source software does. Free software encourages a free market, but also asks you to do so ethically. It asks for you to respect the freedoms of another person. Respecting the freedoms of another person is what a free society is about. Respecting the freedoms of a customer is what an ethical seller in a free market does. Furthermore free software with its “give back” clause promotes the idea of giving away “capital” in the form of ideas, work, code, documentation and the software itself; which gives the giver more capital. In fact it gives back more capital for everyone. Everyone wins, and everyone keeps their liberties.

Communism tramples on the freedoms of individual ownership. Free software promotes the freedoms of individual ownership.

Free software promotes ethical behaviour in programmers, cause your code is for all to see. Free software promotes ethical, sustainable entrepreneurs, who know they benefit if everyone benefits. Also often free software ability to be given away, increases a software’s exposure to potential client, better than any sale force can. Free software is also probably the only thing that lets the software market have any chance of become free of interference from corporations and governments. Only a few greedy monopolies and individuals will suffer from free software, but these people don’t care about hurting others to make a bit of cash.

Free software is good for society. Its good for business. Its good for customers. Its good for developers and the future of software.

You can download a copy of Richard Stallman’s “Free Software, Free Society” here:
http://www.gnu.org/doc/book13.html

Countdown to Ubuntu 7.10

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To build up even more excitement to the release of Ubuntu 7.10, I am added this neat little countdown javascript app to the side of the blog.


Share and Enjoy!

Installing a Boxed Darwinia on Linux

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1

Today I bought a boxed copy of Darwinia from Best Buy. I was pleasantly surprised that it came with a keychain of a Darwinian and poster. Another surprise was the reduction of the price from $29.99 CAD to $9.99 CAD.

What dismayed me was that I could not run the Linux installer on the CD. Then I read on the Introversion forums that the US box distributors, did not bother adding two important files for the Linux installer. The workaround is:

  1. Install wine. [sudo aptitude install wine]
  2. Run setup.exe under wine to install the Windows version of the game. [wine /media/cdrom/setup.exe]
  3. Then run the Linux installer, but uncheck the option to copy the files from the CD. [sudo sh /path/to/darwina-installer.sh]
  4. Copy main.dat and sounds.dat from the folder where wine installed Darwinia, to the lib folder of the Linux install. [sudo cp /path/to/wine/main.dat /usr/local/games/darwinia/lib/ && sudo cp /path/to/wine/sounds.dat /usr/local/games/darwinia/lib/]
  5. Run darwinia as if nothing happened. [darwinia]

The extra steps are a nuisance, but the Linux client for Darwina works flawlessly. I tested this install process under Ubuntu Linux 7.10, but it should work under any newer Linux distro.

Settling in with the Gutsy [BETA]

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For past few days I have been beta testing Kubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. Overall, I have this beta release running on my main production system without too much breakage. By the time the real release occurs, most users will be grateful for a stable, reliable and increasingly user friendly release of Kubuntu.

Update Nightmares
Having lived through a year of Gentoo Linux and its weekly blending edge releases and updates, I feel comfortable helping out with the beta testing of the new Kubuntu. That said, beta testing is only for those that don’t get irritated at breakage. And open source software (Apologies to RMS, free software is like free speech and free markets, but open source has a nicer ring to it.) brings its own kind of beta breakage, since development happens at a much faster pace with the entire community collaborating on the same code. So the breakage and updates come fast and furious. My every computing day starts with an update. And sometimes fixing a crashed upgrade with dpkg.

The battle for Strigi continues everyday. After discovering the usefulness of desktop searching with Google Desktop, I want Strigi to work badly. However after submiting bug reports, installing updates and following a particularly cryptic lead involving pdftotext, nothing seems to work. Actually strigi is more responsive, and takes longer to eat up my processing power, in the end the daemon acts like one and possesses my processor. Only killing it, solves the problem.

Rocking with Amarok
First I used Winamp, and then I discovered Linux and XMMS. And while a soft spot for the ancient XMMS, rests in my heart, my current music player of choice is Amarok. Amarok with its iTunes layout, media library management and plugins beat the pants off all its competitors in both the open and closed source worlds. My favorite features include the seamless music player device management, the lyrics plugin, the podcast aggregator and the soundKonvertor plugin for changing my Ogg collection to MP3s that my MP3 player can handle.

The new version 1.4.7 of Amarok makes the smoothest player out there. Gone is the irritating stealing of keyboard bug that locked up my desktop. The moodbar feature now works out of the box in Ubuntu. Moodbar maps out the dynamics of the song in colours, and displays that info inside the song progress bar.

Gutsy Artwork
The Gutsy art team has added new artwork in this release. This includes a nice neutral aqua wallpaper. KDM login manager now includes a nice new theme that includes the standard user list that an unmodified KDM sports. While I personally have not gotten the theme to work (see bug), this new artwork makes Kubuntu more usable. Whoever said art is not functional, was a fool.

An OpenOffice.org Upgrade
OpenOffice version 2.3 is one of the much touted features in Kubuntu and Ubuntu. A new release of OpenOffice does not excite me much anymore. However it is an essential piece of software that I use everyday. Its nice to know that large commercial entites such as Sun Microsystems and IBM, continue to develop, improve and contribute to the entire free open source community. Its got some nice features and all the developers involved with the OpenOffice suite should be warmly applauded of their efforts.

More info on the new features in OpenOffice 2.3.

Progress in Remote Control
One of the few pieces of hardware that can work under Linux, but refuses to work under Ubuntu is my remote control. The issue was that the older version of Ubuntu were missing the kernel modules for Lirc, and hence the ability to use remotes. In Gutsy, the kernel modules are included. And with a bit of configuration, and restarting the Lirc daemon, I can get my remote to work. But the entire process is still a bit hit and miss.

Overall
The new release of Ubuntu and hence Kubuntu is working up to be a more user friendly release than Feisty. Most of the must have features are in the Ubuntu variant rather than Kubuntu itself. I believe that the uncertainty and development of KDE4 contributes to this lack of major features for the KDE side of Ubuntu. Also many of the bugs and issues I have dealt with, will disappear by the time the final release of Gutsy. The progress on even the irritating Strigi bugs promises to fix this showstopper bug. So keep your fingers crossed. This next release of Kubuntu maybe the most user friendly release yet.

Slight Delay in Review

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I regret to inform you, that the second part of the review of the Kubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” beta release will be delayed until Monday. I had a great deal of work today, and I will away tomorrow.

I started writing up the review. But I need some more time to thoroughly look at the new Amarok 1.4.7, and OpenOffice.org 2.3. Also I have not started to play around with the remote control. Finally, I need to polish the article. Heck, I’m a perfectionist.

So again, I am very sorry for the delay. I will post the article Monday evening.

Initial Impressions of Kubuntu 7.10 Gutsy [BETA]

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Yesterday, I updated my main desktop system to Kubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.
This release adds a number of exciting and useful features to Kubuntu. While not a revolutionary feature set, this new release promises to evolve Linux as a desktop OS. So, for the next few days I plan on experimenting and reviewing this new release of Kubuntu.

Before, you run off and grab the beta release, I have to warn you. Unless you don’t mind things breaking and you fixing them, DON’T use the beta release. The full release is coming out in a few days, so just wait until all the bugs are fixed.

Upgrade or Bust
I started the upgrade process by following the guide on the Kubuntu.org site. Unfortunately, the updater died as soon as it started installing packages. I recovered with a dpkg -a –configure, in the command line. Repeating the upgrade led to another updater crash. But after another recovery and some deleting of packages, I had a working system.

The upgrade process was not exactly, new user friendly. But its not something that should scare a long time Linux user familiar with the command line. Having run different Linux distros for six years, I did not have too much of a problem. Also a known bug in the hotkeys-setup script, prevented me from fully installing the official kubuntu desktop. Hopefully, both problems will get fixed soon.

As it stands, the upgrade process needs work. A clean install would of been better. But one of the nice features of Ubuntu, is upgrading without nuking your current running install.

File Management with Dolphin
One of the first things I did after upgrading, was to check my home folder. The new release used Dolphin instead of Konqueror for file management. Dolphin, the default file manager for KDE4, is one sweet program. Dolphin does file management in a simple, and clear manner. This is very much in the spirit of UNIX: a tool should do one thing, and do it well. It doesn’t try to be everything as Konqueror did. In fact, if you have to move, and sort tons of files as I do, you will want to upgrade just have this tool on by default.

Restricted Drivers Manager
The restricted drivers manager is another nice feature, that the Ubuntu devs added in the previous release of Ubuntu. Unfortunately, Kubuntu was missing a KDE frontend for this tool in Feisty Fawn 7.04. With this release, the tool works in KDE. Having this manager working in Kubuntu makes the KDE side of Ubuntu, as attractive as its GNOME cousin.

Since my nVidia drivers already work, the manager just informed me that the drivers were in use. Its nice this know. Also it helps to get the message across: free open source Linux needs free and open sourced drivers. Maybe in the future all hardware manufactures will offer free open source drivers.

Desktop Searching with Strigi
In earlier posts, I wrote about my search to replace Google Desktop search with a FOSS replacement. One of my early and most promising experiments was with Strigi. Its a nice program when it works… but this version of Strigi suffers from a bug. It basically eats up 100% CPU and refuses to actually do any work indexing. The result in my case, is that Strigi daemon borrows one of my CPU cores and takes it for an infinite spin. Good thing I have a free core to run the rest of my system. Killing the daemon every startup gets a bit irritating.

While I appreciate my CPU power being put to good use… Strigi… this is just absurd. I would prefer to run folding@home instead. Also since my version of Strigi does not want to do further indexing, its also not finding the results that I expect.

Impressions of Day One:
At least my system works without a hitch. The upgrade process was not pleasant, but at least everything works. Dolphin captured my heart, and is the best reason for the upgrade. The restricted device manager is also nice. And the utility will definitely help getting restricted, closed source drivers working on a system. Strigi is promising, but needs fixing. Badly.

To Be Continued…
Tomorrow, I will look at the new Amarok, OpenOffice.org and artwork. And I will check if my remote control works out of the box, this time.