Technology, Open Source and Shiny Things

I have recently downloaded and installed Kubuntu 9.10 and it is great! The problem I have always had KDE is that half of the applications are much better than most Windows/Mac/GNOME apps, and half of them are about 90% as good as the other platforms. Well I have used Kubuntu 9.10 for a bit now and I must say it is giving me very little to complain about. Network has a little ways to go yet. New installer bling is great! Some great new improvements to gwenview. You will also notice that unlike in my 9.04 review I didn’t have to turn compositing off to get screenshots. (Most) compositing effects now show up in screenshots! Congrats to Pinheiro for his work on icons and theming. K3B looks great now that it is integrated into KDE4 as well as the newest air desktop theme. Kopete can now integrate with Skype. Awesome

I was disappointed that they decided not to include the Arora in this version, as I think it shows a lot of promise. There is now a Firefox installer included in the menu structure. I also installed Chromium from a launchpad PPA and even though Firefox and Chromium are GTK apps they finally(Firefox especially) are more integrated with the desktop. In previous releases Firefox wouldn’t know what to open files with unless you had GTK apps installed.

Great job KDE and Kubuntu Teams!

I am a documentary junky. I also love to talk copyright. So when a film comes along that blends these two interests I get very excited. RIP! a Remix Manifesto is probably one of the most important Canadian docs I have every seen. I recommend that you see it. Good news too, the Canadian who made it is experimenting with an interesting business model. The film is under a Creative Commons(BY-NC-SA) license. Meaning as long as you tell people where you got it, and are doing so non-commercially and you release any changes under the same license, you are free to do whatever you would like with it. The creator sells the film through iTunes as well as a “Pay What You Want” through the RipRemix.com website as well as a DVD.

But I live in Canada… Media is never simple in Canada. For some reason this “Pay What You Want” digital distribution method is only for Americans. Even if it is in the iTunes Store I don’t want to have to deal with the DRM. I don’t have a DVD player or TV to watch the dvd on and I live in a rural area that is hard to get packages to. So my last resort is to get it from the Bittorrents… Perfectly legal use of bittorrent when the film is under a Creative Commons license. The problem with this is that no one gets payed. And when no one gets payed we don’t see movies as important as this ever made again.

So I wrote a letter:

I have become quite a fan of the NFB of Canada. It is doing important work. I watched RIP! a Remix Manifesto when it was in theatres. Went to see it twice. Joined the Facebook group. Was very excited to here that it would be released on a pay what you want basis. I was clearly disappointed when I was geo-blocked apon trying to do so! This is content that I am happy to pay for, that was funded by my government and that I payed to see in theatres(in Canada). I understand that there is a DVD available, but I live in a rural area and it is very difficult to have packages shipped. Why am I, as a Canadian treated like a second class citizen while the Americans get to experiment with an exciting new business model. I want to be part of that.

This movie is more, not less relevant to Canadians and they should be able to see it. If someone could clear this up for me that would be great.

I bought an MXL 990 USB mic and am very pleased to say that it sounds great! I am also glad to report that this works great on my Kubuntu box. When I bought it I was not sure if it would work on Linux but it showed up straight away. It was $100 and is worth every penny. Great sound quality. The mic even shows up as an MXL mic. Good show!

So I have upgraded my Kubuntu 9.04 box to the KDE 4.3 Beta and RCs and am really impressed with the progress that they are making.

Add: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu jaunty main to your /etc/apt/sources.list or even within KPackageKit and do an sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade.

They have made some awesome improvements to the System Settings control panel. They have made some awesome improvements to the information area of the kicker and changes the Wifi plasmoid that I don’t totally understand. The system tray is now collapsible. There is a new feature that allows you to peek into folders and displays some of the contents of the folder on the icon. There are now a lot of options for your desktop including using marble to display the moon as your desktop and stuff like that. I am glad to see that there is a constant improvement of KDE.

I worked late into the morning hours on this mock-up for a Kubuntu bootable USB Creator. There currently is one for regular Ubuntu, written mostly in python and of course in GTK+. I am gonna try to port it to Qt. Let me know if you would like to help out as my c++ is sort of like my French i.e. not good.

I run an installation of VMWare ESXi which is really a great product for server based virtualization. My only complaint is that there is no Linux admin client.  So I have to keep an XP VM around all the time to administer it.  The only reason that I bring this up is that ESXi needs a good chunk of space for its datastore.  Well you can certainly hook up a whole bunch of physical drives.  You can also set up an expensive fibre channel SAN.  Well, both solutions will work, but obviously have drawbacks.

Enter Openfiler.  Openfiler is a Linux distro based off of rPath Linux.  It offers an awesome web-front-end and supports: rsync, smb/cifs, NFS, WebDAV, FTP and iSCSI protocols.  So as we can see, this is a great way to easily set up a NAS for a media box or for your network based backup solution.  You can also tie it into directory services like Active Directory or LDAP, but I haven’t tried this.  It also has some of the easiest software RAID setup I have used.

So these sreenshots are showing some of the steps in setting up an iSCSI volume from 2 virtual hard disks on a VM and two of the partitions are in RAID-1.  This of course is not really a realistic setup and is for illustration purposes only

Openfiler is available as an ISO for installing on a beige box, as a VMWare VM as well as many other kinds of VMS

I have been running the beta and alpha of the latest release of Kubuntu for a while now, but yesterday I went scorched earth. I backed up all of my data and wiped my drive and reinstalled with the latest version.

The first thing that I noticed was that the live cd booted very quickly. My favorite addition to the installer was the new map for the time zone setting. It is a lot easier to use and better looking than the old one.

After the install, once again, faster boot times. I went all EXT4 for this install.  I am loving it so far.  Most of the improvements are to KDE 4 generally.  Things like easier installation of themes, my favourite feature missing from GNOME.  Kubuntu has also included a new package manager, KPackageKit which is much better than Adept.  At first I thought it was too simple, but it has definitely grown on me.  The most unexpected aspect of the new release is that suspend and resume work flawlessly on my Toshiba Tecra A9 laptop.  The last feature that does not work is using an external monitor.

All in all the Kubuntu and KDE team are to be commended for there work.  Awesome job guys!!!

I think that ssh is probably the most awesome thing that I have ever used on a computer. Not only does it allow you to be on another computer remotely, but if you configure it correctly it will allow you to login more securely than with a standard password. And once a computer has exchanged keys with the server you can login without a password securely. Awesome. One tool I found while learning is ssh-copy-id to get your key up to the server. One thing that wasn’t really explained well was scp, which allows you to copy over ssh.

I love KDE and am ok with OS X so I was very excited about the KDE team releasing KDE 4 on Windows and Mac. It is a technology preview so it is not ready for production.

It installs. You need about 5 packages to get up and running. I also installed Amarok 2. The first thing I noticed is that the footprint of these packages was massive. I have downloaded all of KDE for Linux before and these seem to be about 500MB. The OS X installer seems to be twice this size

After all this I tried running some applications. They pretty much all “run” but whether you can do anything with them depends. Ultimately I am excited and can’t wait until new stuff comes out.