Jim Shaver » Open Source

Kubuntu 9.10 Review

jim — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 02:11:36 +0000

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!

On RIP! a Remix Manifesto, Geo-Blocking and an Open Letter to the NFB of Canada

jim — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 01:47:19 +0000

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.

I understand why many things are geo-blocked in Canada. We are a relatively small market when compared with the States. It often takes longer to work out the deals with the rights holder because they do the higher priority countries first and so media is almost always later to show up here if at all. But when the film in question is under a creative commons license that allows me to download (legally i might add) from some dodgy bittorrent site, the artist doesn’t get paid.

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.

KDE 4.3 RC Review

jim — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 22:58:57 +0000

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.

Kubuntu 9.04 review

jim — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 16:46:59 +0000

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!!!

SSH is awesome

jim — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 21:58:22 +0000

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.

KDE 4 on OS X

jim — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 06:38:59 +0000

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.

Stylish for Firefox

jim — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 05:35:47 +0000

Greasemonkey is a firefox extension that when it first I dismissed it as a power user tool. Greasemonkey allows you to change the functionality of the browser with custom Javascript. While I consider myself a power user, I am pretty lazy when it comes to writing scripts for myself(more of a waste of time). I was wrong about it completely. The power of greasemonkey is that it can be included In other extensions. One of my favourite extensions based on Greasemonkey is Stylish which allows you to load custom CSS on popular websites that members of the community have created. This allows me to have a darker Google experience. The only thing that is annoying is that there are a lot of terrible themes.

What is New in WordPress 2.7

jim — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 06:30:24 +0000

I have struggled for a long time with blogging. Having said that, I am doing well so far. I have been using the Worpress iPhone app which I’d very simple but good.

The other thing that has helped is WordPress 2.7. The biggest thing I had trouble with was staying up to date. I would find myself in an endless circle of not updating and so not posting. It now auto updates. This also extends to plugins. Themes do not yet update automatically but I think this is coming. The new admin backend is a lot more logical. There are things in WordPress that I couldn’t figure out with the old backend. It just makes more sense.

Konversion

jim — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 06:06:23 +0000

The first time that I used Linux was mid 2006. I had heard about Linux from a couple of people but never really done much investigating myself. One day I was listening to the Maccast, one of the few podcasts out at the time, and the host had some news about the bootcamp beta. Someone had triple booted a mac with OS X, Windows and this thing called Ubuntu.

Well this got my attention I started googlingaround for this ubuntu thing and was really interested. Once I installed it I fell in love. I started learning everything that I could about Linux. Tried different distros and window managers. I tried KDE 3 but it seemed too much like windows and I could spend days configuring the thing. So I stuck with Gnome for two years.

Almost a year ago KDE 4 came out and it was a bit rough, with good reason, anyone who used it would notice the massive changes and give it some time. Well I have been using the 4.2 beta for a few months now and just upgraded to the final release. It is now my desktop of choice and moreover I see so much potential for it going forward. Truly I am a Konvert.

jQuery

jim — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:25:50 +0000

I have been starting to use jQuery for a school project. I have done some javascript a few times. Form validation and stuff like that. I liked the syntax and loose typing but it is such a massive language and programming for the web is always a moving target.

Well jQuery does a good job of abstracting all the browser stuff away and once you get everything figured out it is pretty awesome. It is not really Ajax(although it has some Ajax handling) it is more of a merger of javascript and CSS. They also have an awesome plugin community.

The biggest problem I found was that the code is so minimalistic that it is sometimes hard to figure out what is doing what.