Technology, Open Source and Shiny Things

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 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 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.

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.