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 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 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.

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.