However, there’s one thing I always thought could be drastically improved in many open source projects: The User Experience. When I ask a not-so-techinal friend why they don’t use some open source project instead of commercial one many say that “it’s because ugly”. […] Designers are scared of developers. Developers speak a foreign language, they are like aliens. Developers don’t package their source code in .zip files, instead we use some scary thing called version control.

Linux kernel: 13 million lines, over 5 patches per hour. The latest version of the Linux kernel currently consists of approximately 13 million lines of code across over 33,000 files. The rate of development peaked with version 2.6.30 last year, which saw an average of 6.40 patches per hour. The rate declined to an average of 5.30 patches per hour in version 2.6.35. Between version 2.6.30 and 2.6.35, approximately 19 percent of kernel development was done by independent contributors with no corporate affiliation.

KDE’s release notes tout the following (main) features of the 4.6 release: libplasma now does does something with QML for widgets on devices – why this is the number one feature listed on a PR release about the new release I do not know. It’s hardly sexy; the reintroduction of activities, which now includes starting and stopping applications as part of an activity. This sounds interesting – more below; optimization of Kwin.

The stories have prompted a response from Engineering Director of Ubuntu Rick Spencer. Spencer says quite clearly in his blog yesterday that “Ubuntu is not changing to a rolling release” via Ubuntu: Rolling release rumours wrong – The H Open Source: News and Features.

Enter apt-fast. apt-fast is an apt-get supplement/replacement script by Matt Parnell. Basically apt-fast does pretty much the same thing as apt-get does, except that the download part of it is handled by axel. The result being that your program installation downloads finish faster. A lot faster. Up to 26-times, according to Matt. via Speed Up Program Installs / Upgrades in Ubuntu.

I spend quite a lot of time on Super User( my{#aptureLink_qMmmNb2Xqv} rep{#aptureLink_vjHLLfl9NA} is a testament to that I guess ;) ) – both on the site as well as the mindblowingly awesome chat{#aptureLink_yMJtbXi2I1} (if you haven’t been here, you *must* drop by).

Today a user dropped by and asked a very nice question – which went like{#aptureLink_SWcGTMa5Gf} –

I have some files that have some text in the notes fields(the tab where you put notes in the properties dialog box)… so can I output those texts with using the ls command.

This is a pretty good tip. The default style irritates me to no end. Check out the full post, there are some great tips, especially if you’re new to Nautilus like me. Ever since some distros started their attempt to become more “user-friendly” and gaining the nice looks, some default features got changed. In this case, it’s the location bar. Instead of it they got some buttons that shows the location and let you navigate through the directories!

Ext2Read is a Free & Open Source Software which allows you to browse your Linux partitions in a very Windows Explorer-esque interface. Unlike other tools{#aptureLink_bvNHKIheYw} Ext2Read also supports ext4 filesystem, even if extents feature is enabled. Like the name suggests – Ext2Read can only read, not write to the partitions – so in case you are paranoid about the tool causing data corruption to your Linux partitions, you can drop those fears.

It seems Oracle is hellbent on destroying whatever good Sun had done to the Open Source Ecosystem. The latest product to get the axe seems to be none other than the Flagship Virtualization program xVM VirtualBox. [….] All tests show that VirtualBox 3.2 lacks any semblance of stability, crashing any operating system running on it randomly. VirtualBox 3.1.8, using the binary-only release for Linux, works like a charm. It is also apparent that VirtualBox 3.

If you check the latest versions of IronRuby, IronPython or the Dynamic Language Runtime you will see that Microsoft has now relicensed the code from the Microsoft Permissive License to the Apache 2 License via Microsoft Licensing Changes for IronRuby and IronPython – Miguel de Icaza.

Couple of days ago, there was a huge debate (argument ?)  between Matt Mullenweg  – developer of WordPress and Chris Pearson – developer of Thesis premium theme over twitter which then extended to Mixergy.

Crux of the argument is the disagreement amognst the two over the licensing terms. Matt believes that Thesis should adopt GPL{#aptureLink_Q1kNtLltNY} which as Wikipedia states:

The GPL is an example of a powerful copyleft license that requires derived works to be available under the same copyleft.

Chris, on the otherhand disagrees with this. The full transcript of their discussion is available on Mixergy, here are some quotes which I found interesting:

openSUSE 11.3 is based on Linux kernel 2.6.34 and has KDE Software Compilation 4.4.4 as the default desktop environment. A GNOME version is also available and it uses GNOME 2.30.1. In terms of the default applications, it comes with Thunderbird 3.0.5, Firefox 3.6.4 and OpenOffice 3.2.1 to name a few. openSUSE 11.3 also gives the user the choice of using Btrfs during installation. You can view the complete changelog here or read the release note.

A whole linux distro, Slackware based I believe, to train you in the dark arts. This distro is deliberately insecure, containing out of date packages, mis-configured apps, and loads of training material. It comes as a live dvd download, so you can run it up as and when you want to practice your skills. via Damn Vulnerable Linux. Will be interesting to check it out.

1: The pager I am always shocked at how few people actually use the Linux pager. It’s been around forever and has always served the same functionality — it offers the user multiple desktops to keep the desktop better organized. I employ the pager like this: With four workspaces, I dedicate each workspace to a different use. My layout looks like this: Desktop 1 is for networking tools.

A quickie:

I wanted to change the default application from Banshee/Totem for my media files to VLC ( since I didn’t have proprietary codecs installed, and VLC does). Searched all of YaST/Settings and couldn’t find where to change the default application.

Well it’s no secret that I’m a music fan and love to keep my music organized, and neatly tagged. ( Well, if you didn’t – now you do ). I’d posted quite sometime ago on how to keep your music well tagged and organized{#aptureLink_3xJl5k39gE}, so there’s pretty much no way that my files wouldn’t be tagged.

Of course, there exceptions here and there but majority are tagged. So I was rather surpised today when Amarok , during playback wasn’t showing any metadata. To verify – I installed id3v2, a CLI tool to view/edit ID3 tags for mp3 files using zypper and – guess what- it showed the meta data correctly.

I love MusicBrainz Picard. It keeps my music collection organized, tags and renames them{#aptureLink_0HBhpzYgM6}, and heck even fetches the cover art for (almost) all songs. Picard is just brilliant.

And the icing on the cake – its FOSS & cross platform. And it was working fine – till couple of days ago.

Seems like lot of openSUSE Gnome users don’t like the new Gnome panel, which is radically different interface from the traditional Menu bar with Applications/Places/System entries. Personally I prefer the new style, perhaps because I’m used to the openSUSE Kickoff panel, and I really dig the search feature

OK, OK You don’t exactly win anything, but just for fun – can you identify the icons ? Really, shouldn’t be that much difficult ;)

Been a while since I posted ;) For some strange reason, recently I got an urge to try out ArchLinux{#aptureLink_BWSwiwROlt}. After much deliberation finally decided to try out ArchLinux again, in VirtualBox{#aptureLink_YQu9cIpVYm}. My little install guide I compiled as I was reading through the Official ArchLinux Install Guide{#aptureLink_OrVThoOrTI} + Beginner’s Guide{#aptureLink_AMQvvRytbx}.

Please note: This is highly customized according to *my* requirements and nowhere as thorough /generalized as the official guides. Still, it might help you. Here we go –

This one seems to be a really famous problem for most folks in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. So I had it too. The problem was on the initrd file. It is a kernel related file needed for booting. So i did a simple thing. I replaced initrd.img file of my kernel version with “initrd.lz” file from the Ubuntu LiveCD and edited my grub.cfg file (equivalent of menu.lst in older Ubuntu releases), to boot using initrd.

I wasn’t aware of this tiny little thing  – the filesystem in the  file created by a Wubi install can be easily mounted as a loop device.

Nvidia Proprietary Drivers need nvidia-settings to set screen resolution and change other settings. In previous versions of Ubuntu and in other distros to make them permanent (used in every session) you click the “Save to X configuration file”. From Karmic on there is no xorg.conf by default!

As a result, nvidia-settings is not able to save the settings and every time I logged in I had  to change the resolution (Phew!!!). Then Sathya helped me. He gave me a link from Ubuntu Forums{#aptureLink_MZsWFB9Cv4}. Then I did the following to fix the problem:

As mentioned openSUSE 11.2 is now available. If you’re on previous versions of openSUSE you can do an inplace upgrade to 11.2 by using zypper.

openSUSE 11.0/openSUSE 11.1

Just change the repos to mention 11.2 instead of 11.0/11.1, as shown in the pic:

Saw this question on SuperUser : How can I add menu items to the Gnome “Applications” menu from the command line? Yet another SuperUser Q RSS Feed Notifier for Linux Seems Canonical will set limits to those who can order free CD’s via Shipit. The discs will still be made available to Local Community team members and Ubuntu contributors. And new Ubuntu users will be able to request a CD.

This is one problem that has affected me the most in my history of Linux usage, so far. Imagine, for two full years I just din’t know that the solution to this problem is so simple. Too late of me to find out. Anyway, better late than never. So the problem is, with my graphics card GeForce FX 5200, Ubuntu liveCD/post-installation boot will hang mid-way, with the boot-screen freezing or a big set of hexadecimal codes getting emitted.

This article appears too late i suppose in this site. Many know about it already. Just in case, i am posting it. So if your xserser-xorg-video-intel is not that satisfactory to you, or if it doesn’t give the right screen resolution, just use this. If available in repos use it, if not use this link. You will have to remove xserver-xorg-video-intel either manually or through package manager. Then after installation restart Xserver (Ctrl+Alt+Backspace; Enable it thus in Karmic)

In Karmic the restart Xserver shortcut is disabled by default. Enable it thus: In the menu, go to System->Preferences->Keyboard (not Keyboard Shortcuts) Go to Layouts tab, click Layout options Expand “Key sequence to kill the X server”. Check “Ctrl+Alt+Backspace” You’re Done.

Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” released, but reception hasn’t been spectacular. Poll on Ubuntu forums indicates that ~ 39% of users have had problems they could not fix{#aptureLink_w7mk4Gj53R}. Upgrading from{#aptureLink_o93sno8FFY} Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope to 9.10 Karmic Koala. Installing nVidia drivers{#aptureLink_cSXrJksL0x} (v190.42) in Ubuntu KDE 4.3.3 released{#aptureLink_oXTbIbKNeA}, brings in few bug fixes. Experiencing Sabayon 5{#aptureLink_9hqyejQU50} //personal note: must try it soon. First GNOME 3.0 development release available{#aptureLink_Dr8Kjty26c}.

So this is a short post on one pestering problem. If youre using Jaunty and find this problem then use the link that follows. When i installed Jaunty i had problems (as usual). One of them was this. First off, videos wont play in any video player. Codecs are in place, no doubt. But the player would go crashing down. Even vlc, which uses a seperate set of codecs fails :(

I was catching up on some feeds yesterday, and this piece of news caught my eye –Amarok 2.1 released{#aptureLink_chgCx0N0sk}. Being a long time Amarok fan ( heck Amarok itself was catalyst to make me use my SUSE 10.0 use full) time – I read the article with great interest.

Amarok 2 users would know that Amarok 2 series is a shadow of its old Amarok 1.4(“Amarok Classic” self) – and quite a few people still prefer Amarok classic to Amarok 2 – primararily because of Amarok’s missing support for visualizations, equalizer amongst others. I don’t use equalizers – and as for visualization – well don’t use that either.

I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird pretty extensively past few months. Even though I do have Microsoft Outlook installed on my work laptop – with the amount of mails  that I send and receive, Outlook just dies when the Inbox size shoots up and that’s an absolute killer. One of the problems with Thunderbird is that unlike Outlook, its an email-client, and not a complete PIM suite, and my work requires me to maintain an extensive calender system. But thanks to addons, you don’t have to worry about this. Let me show you how you can convert Mozilla Thunderbird to complete PIM suite.

It’s been a while since I last used Ubuntu – I have generally shunned away from Ubuntu since Fiesty – for the main reason that I’m more of KDE guy, I never really liked Gnome, and my experience with Fiesty was rather unsavoury. You might say ‘hey you want KDE try Kubuntu’ –  Kubuntu – well I won’t get started on that. I’ve been using Sabayon and was pretty darn impressed with that. With Jaunty being due for release soon, I decided to check Jaunty, even more so after Manish{#aptureLink_LdqSI5xV6h} kept raving about Jaunty’s performance{#aptureLink_LyArR3kODf}.

Ever wondered if there’s a quick and easy way to write an iso file to a CD-R/DVD-R ? Don’t want to open K3B or Brasero ? Here’s a handy way of writing the iso file.

Been a while since I’ve composed a post, work’s taken a toll on me and leave me with very little time :( 

Rather having no updates at all, decided to post some links which I found interesting and made for good read. So here we go!

I’ve jsut about had it with NetworkManager. Everytime I update my system I have to bite my nails wondering whether the update will break my wireless. I’ve posted earlier about my problems with NetworkManager and on howto fix it, there’s the best way to fix it: get rid of it.

Yeah, get rid of NetworkManager, install Wicd.

Here’s how:

Well I was browsing through some Kannada sites the other day and all I got was big blocks. Turned out that Gentoo and Sabayon didn’t have support for displaying Kannada characters, though, I had no such problems with Hindi & Bengali characters [amongst others]. Changing the Character encoding in Firefox to Auto-detect or Unicode didn’t work either. After doing a bit of searching, found the solution. So open the terminal, switch to root user and type

I updated my KDE 4 installation to KDE 4.2 couple of days ago, and everytime I restart, KDE and Akonadi would throw me an error about MySQL server not being installed. Akonadi is the suite in KDE 4.2 – and I don’t use it – and sure as hell don’t want to install a MySQL database server just for this. So I decided to get rid of Akonadi – just fire up your package manager and uninstall it.

After a long time’s search over the internet for many days I finally figured out how to do this. Many may know this already but many may not too. And since I hate to compile programs from sourceI have found here a method that involves less of actual compiling. Since am a ubuntu user I only have tried this in ubuntu and not other distros. STEPS Install these packages: compiz-bcop

After nearly a year, the fantastic guys developing KDE have released the much anticipated KDE 4.2 version. The 4.2 version comes after about a year after a (disastrous) KDE 4.0 release. Linus might’ve switched to Gnome [no link bait here, go Digg it if need the info] but I’m still hooked on to KDE and especially love the KDE 4 series. KDE 4.1.3 was pretty awesome, and I can’t wait to try out it out, but the official Sabayon repositories don’t have KDE 4.2 yet.

You can install the RC version from Naendo repo, I recommend that you wait for the packages to be available in repos.

Well I upgraded the KDE installation in my Sabayon system to KDE4 (by default, Sabayon installs KDE 3.5.10) and after logging in, and opening Firefox, the first thing I noticed was the absolutely FUGLY,  and yes I MEAN FUGLY look of Firefox. Don’t believe me? Have a look

The folks behind openSUSE have released the next version of the extremely popular (and my favorite) Linux distro – openSUSE. openSUSE 11.1 comes with KDE 4.1.3, GNOME 2.24.1, and for those who (still) don’t want to shift to KDE 4, yes openSUSE 11.1 comes with KDE 3.5.10 You can download openSUSE via HTTP, FTP or via BitTorrent, just head over here.

PeerGuardian 2, is an awesome IP filtering software. Though its FOSS, it there isn’t a Linux port of it yet. But don’t worry, if you’re using KTorrent, you can make use of PeerGuardian’s filters.  Let me show how you can do so.

Consider this: you want to be informed of the latest breaking news. Sure you can use RSS readers but you probably don’t want to open another browser window/tab for that. Kunal Gautam has come up with a script which pulls in data from a RSS feed periodically and displays the latest news. Check out here to see for the instructions and code for the script

A while ago, I’d written a post on howto mount CD images, such as .iso, .mdf files etc via the command prompt using the mount command. In the post, among the comments, Sumeet had asked if there was a way to do all of this without having to type lengthy commands. Well yes there is! And it can’t get simpler than this!

WordPress today released the first beta of WordPress 2.7 as on schedule. However the fianl release of WordPress 2.7 won’t be available on November 10, as per the schedule. As posted on the WordPress development blog Speaking of the final release, it will not be available on November 10th as originally scheduled. We are two weeks behind schedule at the moment. We need a little more time to finish the visual design, do a round of user testing against that finished design, and do a proper round of public beta testing

With just few days ago to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) ShipIt – Canonical’s service of sending Ubuntu CDs FREE of cost to your doorstop has now started accepting pre-orders for delivery requests of Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10). You can order either the Desktop edition or the server edition, and it will be delivered FREE of cost to you(yes, you don’t even have to pay for shipping). Although Canonical states delivery can take upto 10 weeks – I’ve generally received them here in India with 3 weeks.

While exploring Fedora 10 Beta, I found this neat little app called Phone Manager.

The about page of PhoneManager states

Phone Manager is a program created to allow you to control aspects of your mobile phone from your GNOME 2 desktop..

LiveCDs are a great way to try out (new) Linux distros on your system.

Unfortunately CDs get scratched pretty easily, and can turn into a coaster pretty soon.

With prices of USB pen drives at rock bottom, they’re probably the best way to try out LiveCDs. Generally its not that easy to make a bootable LiveCD using USB pen/flash drives. If you’re a Fedora lover then here’s a very easy way to create a bootable USB pen drive.

Ubuntu Counter courtesy Ubuntu Pics Kubuntu Counter courtesy Kollide

The second version of Mono, the Open Source implemention of .NET was released earlier this week. Close on the heels of this release, the folks at openSUSE have spun-off a LiveCD consisting of Mono 2.0, MonoDevelop 1.0, Banshee 1.2.1, F-Spot 0.5.0.1, GNOME Do 0.6.0, Tomboy 0.12.0,Tasque 0.1.6, Various ASP.NET Applications, Mono Debugger, and more. So if you want to dabble into Mono 2.0 without having the hassle of compiling them on your production system, just grab the Live CD.

In my stash of ebooks, quite a few of them are in chm (compiled HTML) file format. Being HTML files I though they’d open in Mozilla Firefox browser. Unfortunately that didn’t work, so I started looking for CHM viewers. I didn’t have to look far, a quick search on Google gave me couple of programs. KChmViewer: Since I’m a KDE user I tried out this application – and it works fantastic.

Hello people, This is Bharath Ram. I wanted to share with you an information I just found. This indeed solved my problem so I thought it would solve yours too. In ubuntu (and may be in other distros) every time you login you never get your drives auto mounted (don’t you?). This is a real pest especially when you would have set your wallpaper from an external drive or some other reason you want to use external drives for.

At the recently held Linux Plumbers’ Conference, 2 Linux developers,  Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok, demonstrated a Linux system booting in five seconds flat. To demonstrate this, they used an Asus EEE PC using a modified Fedora and modified Moblin. In-fact the bootup was so fast that the they actually had to hold the EEE PC, as the bootup was completed well before the projector could warm up and sync.

To achieve this, they had to look up and identify what was slowing down the system, for this they used a tool, Bootchart, by Ziga Mahkovec, which displays the order of the booting sequence, which modules are taking how much time amongst other details. 

Consider this situation. You have multiple programs installed for a particular file type. Now double clicking it opens an application, but you want it to open in another application.

For example, you want your images to open in showFoto instead of Gwenview, so how do you go about doing this? Let me show you how to do so!

Most of the how-to’s and fixes posted here, are generally my experiences and I post them on how I went about fixing it. This particular how-to was mentioned to me by my very good friend, Bharath, who had this annoying problem of the title bars of every window crashing and disappearing when Emerald is chosen as the decorator.

Generally, I’d recommend running gtk-window-decorator --replace or metacity --replace in terminal – that generally does reinitialize the window decorators. However for Bharath, this particular solution didn’t help and he kept facing the same problem

By now, you must’ve heard of Ubiquity. If not, well read on! Ubiquity is an add-on to Mozilla’s extremely popular Firefox browser. Ubiquity allows you to do things – say search for something, get the latest weather updates, book reviews, so on and so forth, just by typing the commands into the Ubiquity input box – rather than by going over to address bar, typing the URL for each individual site, etc.

The guys at Phoronix have written made an intresting article, comparing the performance of the Asus EEE-PC 901 with its Intel Atom processor Here’s some quotes from the article Late last month we published our preview of the ASUS Eee PC 901 and we shared our plans for a number of benchmarks using this netbook with Intel’s Atom processor. Following our Linux desktop encryption benchmarks of the ASUS Eee PC 901 and Intel Atom N270 CPU we have a performance comparison of Xandros, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva on this low-cost netbook PC.

The good people over at WordPress released WordPress 2.6.2 today. And unlike the previous 2.6.1 release, this release is a mandatory release, to fix a loophole which occurs if your blog has registrations open. From the horse’s mouth: If you allow open registration on your blog, you should definitely upgrade. With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password.

Dropbox – the awesome online file-storage, and syncing utility finally gets a Linux client! The developers have been promising a Linux client since day one and though it took them a while to get it – it’s finally here!

Much like most of Google’s projects Google Chrome was launched all of a sudden yesterday. Though it was “discovered” rather “accidentally” by one a Google insider hitting the send button containing the comic-book type images of Google Chrome’s workings(excuse me, a Google guy hitting the “Send” button accidentally? Yeah,right! (Santosh agrees with me too on this one). And the hype was unprecedented. Once the hype died down and everyone got to try – the impressions were rather more or less universal, mainly being

The release KDE4 brought in the new kickoff menu, the slab-style menu which was first introduced in openSUSE 10.2. The premise is simple – instead of unfolding menu after menu, the submenu opens within the menu itself. What makes the Kickoff a killer is the inclusion of search.

While I love Kickoff menu and can’t live without it, lot many people prefer the old KDE style menu.

So lets see how to get the old traditional K Menu back – it’s simple, no editing of config files required!

Plasmoids are the little widgets that have made an appearance with KDE4. Plasmoids can basically do anything – from displaying your desktop and associated wallpaper to showing your laptop’s battery level,or even display the latest comics or post a tweet to twitter. While KDE 4 comes with some plasmoids, you can add extra plasmoids which do other things – from displaying your current system status to showing your current GPU temperature. Lets see how to do so.

One of the heavily improved aspects of openSUSE 11 is the package manager and the way packages and repositories are handled. Although YaST [Yet Another Setup Tool, openSUSE’s system admin/configuration tool] is no longer the slow poke that it used to be, its still no match in terms of speed to Debian’s apt-get/Synaptic. One of the more irritating part of YaST is that it auto-refreshes the repositories every time you launch the package management tool.

It’s no secret that KDE4.0 didn’t get good reviews. Fact is it was heavily criticized, mainly for instability problems. So much so that it was argued that KDE 4.0 shouldn’t have been pushed out as a .0 release. But that was past, and today KDE 4.1 was released. Judging from the reactions, its no doubt that the KDE team has almos redeemed its mistakes of the 4.0 release. Linux.com carries a review of KDE4.

In this day modern day, most software installations can be done using repositories and package managers. However, you might face a situation of having only the source files availalble with you – you probably would want to try out bleeding edge software, which hasn’t been packaged yet, or isn’t available in the repos yet.

So if you really want to try it out, then the only way would be to download the source files and compile them.

Contrary to what most people think – Compiling from sources isn’t that complicated – the entire process takes 3 commands.

Admin’s Note: This is a guest post by Aditya. Though this post was drafted on 1st July, my work commitments and rather bad memory prevented this post being published. Due apologies.

I know that a title is a bit harsh but I am afraid it is true.

First lets get into some technical stuff.

Dream Linux is a Debian based distro(like Ubuntu) . It has both Xfce and Gnome interface. I’m reviewing the Gnome version.

The Installation

The first screen you get after booting into the CD ask you to choose the interface(Gnome or Xfce)

It also has memtest for testing memory but the CD cant be checked for defects, which is a very important feature, since the disk has to be free of defects as it is an operating system.

I choose the Gnome interface and booted. Here’s where I faced my first nightmare. The whole thing is pretty slow. Even after booting completely. I do know that a live CD is slow as it is limited by the optical drive but this was way slower than other live C.D’s.

This is a guest post by Kunal Gautam. This article is aimed at RHEL and Fedora users.

If you’ve been using Linux for a while, then you’d know how much of a pain it is to install a software which runs into dependency problems. One way of getting around this is to use a repository.

What is YUM?

YUM or Yellowdog Updater Modified is an interactive, automated update program which can be used for maintaining system using rpm. Yum is an automatic updater and package installer/remover for rpm systems. It automatically computes dependencies and figures out what things should occur to install packages.

Yum makes it easier to maintain groups of machines without having to manually update each one using rpm.

After a long, long wait for SUSE maniacs like me, its finally here: Presenting the latest version of openSUSE, openSUSE 11.0

The new version features a slick shiny new installer, updated KDE 4.0.4, GNOME 2.22, Kernel version 2.6.25. If you’re still hesitant to jump to KDE4.0, you can use KDE 3.5.9 which comes with the DVD edition. And if you’re on a low-end spec PC, then just install XFCE!

On the applications front, openSUSE 11 features Firefox 3 Beta 5 which gets auto-updated to Firefox 3.0 via online updates. Also featured is Banshee 1.0, which has been re-written to improve performance and includes many new features, like video playback, better “shuffle” playback, support for iPods, MTP devices, and mass storage player devices, and support for podcasts and better Last.fm integration.

Recently, Facebook introduced Facebook chat – which allows you to chat with your Facebook friends in realtime similar to IM, as compared to post-message-on-wall-and-wait-for-replies kinda communication that Facebook users endured so far. A slight problem would be that to use this feature, users need to be logged in and be on Facebook’s site. Not any more. eionrobb and Saturn2888 have coded a plugin for Pidgin which allows you to chat with your facebook buddies using the Facebook Chat IM service.

Mozilla has announced that the next version of Mozilla Firefox, quite possibly one of the best browser out there, Mozilla Firefox 3 will be available for download on June 17. After 34 months of being under development, 5 betas, and 3 Release Candidates, Firefox is ready for release. Firefox 3 features an extensively revamped location bar, with full search support for history URL and title descriptions, a vastly improved download manager, overhalued bookmark system with support for tags in bookmarks.

Moblin is an open source initiative bringing developers together all over the world to create rich media and internet experience based on Linux operating systems for Intel Atom processors.

Moblin event will be conducted in Hyderabad on June 26th, 2008 and in Chennai on June 27th, 2008.

Register for the event, or for the Webinar.

Enjoy a Better Web Sounds like a good deal, right? All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours – it’s that easy. We’re not asking you to swallow a sword or to balance 30 spoons on your face, although that would be kind of awesome. By the way, the official date for the launch of Firefox 3 will be posted soon – so check back!

I’d posted previously on How to install Fedora 8 on USB pen drive. Now that Fedora 9 is out, Kevin Purdy over at Lifehacker has post how-to do the same for Fedora 9. A quick excerpt: Fedora 9 Linux distribution makes putting a full-fledged desktop on a portable USB thumb drive a three-click affair. Even better, you don’t need Linux installed to create it, you can leave the data on your thumb drive untouched, and any files you create or settings you tweak remain in place the next time you boot up.

Debian and other debian-based distros like Ubuntu have, by default, has the root account disabled as a security measure.(thanks to Subbu and PICCORO for the clarification) To re-enable the root account, just open the command prompt, and type sudo passwd root You’ll get the following set of messages: sathya@sathya-laptop:~$ sudo passwd root<br /> Enter new UNIX password:<br /> Retype new UNIX password:<br /> passwd: password updated successfully<br /> sathya@sathya-laptop:~$

It’s the season of Linux distribution releases! Ubuntu was released about 3 weeks ago, and now it’s time for Fedora 9, aka “Sulphur”. So What’s new?

PackageKit

Much Like Ubuntu’s Add/Remove Programs, Fedora gets a similar one, known as “PacakgeKit”.PackageKit is a cross-distribution package management solution that has a complete yum backend. It has been designed to make installing and updating software on your computer easier, and aims to unify all the graphical package management tools used in different distributions.

GNOME Desktop 2.22 Release

As with Ubuntu 8.04, GNOME 2.22 will power Fedora 9. GNOME 2.22 features lots of new features and improvements, such as a new Nautilus that uses GVFS as its backend. GVFS makes it possible to fix shortcomings of Nautilus such as the inability to restore files from trash, pause and undo file operations, and will make it possible to escalate user privileges for certain operations using PolicyKit for authentication. It also brings a significant performance boost to many operations.

KDE Desktop 4.0.3

While hanging out in #IndiaTwits, Shyam aka codelust brought to my attention of this post in Kragen hacks Mailing list. So I’m installing an OS on my laptop, and for whatever reason, the Debian Etch install disk thought it would be a good idea to initialize the whole disk to random data *before* rather than *after* the rest of the install. Writing to the whole disk takes a long time — a few hours — and so I’m left with the Debian netinst environment to play with.

Project Neon is the codename for a nightly build service for Amarok 2. Neon is intended to be used by everyone who wants to help us find bugs, keep track of development, join development or just wants to live on the bleeding edge. It is not intended to be used instead of a stable and full featured Amarok. Packages for Amarok 2 for Kubuntu are available, and packages for openSUSE should be coming up soon.

Ever since being introduced to Twitter by Preshit, I’ve been addicted to twitter. While I prefer tweeting via IM or Twitter’s homepage, Few of you would love to use a twitter client. Here’s a list of some twitter clients for Linux

Quite a lot of people have been waiting for the latest release of Ubuntu, version 8.04 dubbed the “Hardy Heron” – primarily because it’s a LTS release. So how does the Hardy Heron stack up? I decided to jump into the Hardy Heron brigade and have a look. Is it worth the upgrade?

Read on to find out more!

System Specifications

I used my beloved Dell Inspiron 1520(Intel Core2Duo T5250 @ 1.5 Ghz, 2 GB DDR2 667 RAM, nVidia 8600m GT, Intel 3945 Pro/Wireless) for testing out the Hardy Heron.

I had a pretty bad time with Gutsy – no sound despite the sound card being detected, LCD brightness varying as if its possessed etc – these resulted with me removing Gutsy and going back to openSUSE 10.3.

Also, generally I’ve always tested the 32-bit versions of most distros. This time I decided to break the tradition and go with the 64-bit version.

Now that the first beta is out for openSUSE 11.0, you can start to dig in and really start banging on the release to catch bugs before the release candidates and final release. If you’re wondering where to start, Holger Sickenberg has put together an excellent resouce to help guide testing. Holger has compiled a list of new features in openSUSE 11.0 that it would be a good idea to test to ensure that each and every feature works as planned and is as bug-free as possible.

Last week,  the openSUSE team announced the first Beta release of openSUSE 11.0! Some of the many  enhancements and features in the new release include  the incredibly fast package management (libzypp), KDE 3.5.9 and 4.0.3, GNOME 2.22.1, a beautiful new installer, live CDs and much more.

What’s New

It’s that time of the year. Everyone’s excited and looking forward to it. Ofcourse it’s the release of the next LTS version of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 8.04, aka Hardy Heron. So what’re new features expected in Hardy Heron you ask? Well here are some of them

Unless you have been living under a stone, you should be knowing that Compiz Fusion transforms your Linux 2D desktop, with virtual desktops into a 3D one, complete with Cube plugin(amongst others) which transforms the virtual desktops into a cube.

Developer Dennis Kasprzyk has finally finished his idea to implement a cylinder deformation for the cube plugin. The result is that Cubereflex plugin has now been rename to Cubeaddon, and it comes with a new effect, “CYLINDER”. Here’s a screen shot of the plugin in action

People had been demanding for a Linux version of Adobe AIR. Now now finally, Adobe has joined Linux Foundation and has announced the pre-release alpha version of Adobe AIR for Linux. The pre-release alpha version can be downloaded from Adobe Labs. Adobe Labs also updated an alpha version of Adobe Flex Builder 3 for Linux software is also available on Adobe Labs today, which adds support for creating applications that run on Adobe AIR.

Some good news for Konqueror fans like me! Peter Penz reports that Tree View will be back in action in Konqueror for KDE 4.1! According to Peter, a complete rewrite of QT4’s Interview(a model-view-controller framework for tree structures ) was the reason for Tree View to be MIA. Although they had intended to bring it out under the KDE 4.0 release, the above mentioned rewrite meant that it had to be omitted, and will be back in action for the 4.

Korneliusz Jarzebski, the autor polishlinux has posted a neat article on visual changes in KDE 4.1. Amongst new features include an option in the taskbar to Show tasks from the current screen only, ability to resize Kickoff menu. Kwin also gains the Coverswitch effect, which is a visual effect similar to Cover Flow in Compiz Fusion and in MacOS X(and one of the neatest effects, I might add). Marble, the geography app also gains a new view & the maps can be watched using Globe, Flat and Mercator views.

Here’s a much needed feature, the next version of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 8.04 aka the Hardy Heron will finally feature a XRandR GUI. This feature has been implemented under Alpha 6. Basically this allows the user to change, amongst others, resolution, refresh rate, rotation(ie, to rotate the screen by X degrees) on-the-fly, using the RandR 1.2 extension. Previously the user would have to change the resolution via the screen resolution applet(or worse, by directly editing xorg.

Sun Microsystems is on a major Open Source Acquistion spree. First it was it’s MySQL acquisition, now it’s moved on to acquire innotek. For those who’re still wondering who or what innotek is, innotek is the developer of the hugely popular Virtualizer, VirtualBox. According to Sun’s Press Release Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced that it has entered into a stock purchase agreement to acquire innotek, the provider of the leading edge, open source virtualization software called VirtualBox.

 

Introducing Ubuntu Mobile – full Internet, no compromise

Ubuntu Mobile is an Ubuntu edition that targets an exciting new class of computers called Mobile Internet Devices.

Ubuntu Mobile, based on the world’s most popular Linux distribution, and MID hardware from OEMs and ODMs, are redefining what can be done in mobile computing.

Ubuntu Mobile, a fully open source project, gives full Internet, with no compromise. Custom options may include licensed codecs and popular third-party applications.

• Full Web 2.0/AJAX fidelity, with custom options of Adobe Flash®, Java, and more
• Outstanding media playback so you can enjoy videos, music and photos with superior quality and easy navigation
• A suite of applications that work seamlessly to meet every need of a digital parent, student or anyone who is on-the-go
• Facebook®, MySpace®, YouTube®, Dailymotion®, 3D games, GPS, maps, in short, the full Web 2.0 experience delivered into your hands as a compact and powerful device that’s easy and fun to use

The product of Canonical collaboration with Intel® and the open source community, Ubuntu Mobile is the software that makes it all possible.

andLinux is a complete Ubuntu Linux system running seamlessly in Windows 2000 based systems (2000, XP, 2003, Vista [32-bit only])   andLinux uses CoLinux as its core which is confusing for many people. CoLinux is a port of the Linux kernel to Windows. Although this technology is like VMware or Virtual PC, CoLinux differs itself by being more of a merger of Windows and the Linux kernel and not an emulated PC, making it more efficient.

For all those people who miss Amarok badly while on Windows, well fear not, your dream has come true….almost. With the release of KDE4.0 which uses Qt4 framework, which has been GPL’d and available for Windows and MacOSX, a lot of effort has been put in to port KDE4 for Windows, which allows Amarok to be run under Windows as well. At the moment, just a tech preview has been released, and you can get the steps required to install Amarok under Windows over at KDE techbase.

Yesterday, Mozilla announced that the 3rd beta of the next version of their immensely popular web browser, Mozilla Firefox would be available for download. I’d posted earlier on the impressive changes between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 Beta 2. So what does the third Beta bring? Let’s have a look.

Mozilla Developer Center reports that Firefox 3 Beta 3 is now available for download. New features and changes in this milestone include: Improved security features such as: better presentation of website identity and security including support for Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager. Improved ease of use through: easier add-on discovery and installation, improved download manager search and progress indication in the status bar, resumable downloading, full page zoom, and better integration with Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux.

Only three weeks after Alpha1, we’re glad to announce the release of openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 2. There are various exciting changes in there that we would like to have feedback on.    For more screenshots head over to the Screenshots/openSUSE 11.0 Alpha2 wiki page Changes since openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 1 KDE 4.0.1 replaced KDE 3.5.8 as default KDE GNOME 2.21.90 was integrated Continued work on the Installation workflow Live CDs for both GNOME and KDE CDs support German as an additional language DVDs have only OSS software Linux 2.

If you’ve ever followed KDE 4 development then you’ve probably heard about Marble. Marble is a virtual globe which displays the earth. So Marble can be used as a nice digital replacement for your desktop globe at home where you can look up places. But wait! There’s more to it: Actually these days Marble can also display flat maps (thanks to Carlos Licea), can show different “map themes” and can serve as a Qt4-widget as well as an application!

The alpha release of Fedora’s next version, Fedora 9 was release today The Alpha release provides the first opportunity for the wider community to become involved with the testing of Rawhide: representing a sanitised snapshot of Fedora’s development branch, which sees rapid changes and will become the next major release, it should boot on the majority of systems, providing both an opportunity to get a look at what new features will be included in the next release and also an opportunity to provide feedback and bug reports to help ensure that the next release is as good as possible.

Ubuntu Live is a vibrant and important gathering of IT professionals, government and business leaders, educators, community leaders, enterprise and business users. The conference brings together the people who deploy and manage Ubuntu in organizations, companies offering services and solutions based on Ubuntu, customers of those services, users of Ubuntu, and the folks who build Ubuntu and other key open source software. The two day event will allow participants to share their Ubuntu experiences, learn from each other, and catch up with the latest developments from Ubuntu, our partners, and the free software and open source ecosystem.

Almost everyone would be knowing about ASUS eeePC by now. For the uninitiated, The ASUS eee PC is a subnotebook. The eeePC is powered by a 900 MHz Intel Celeron-M ULV 353 processor, features 512MB of DDR2 RAM and uses Xandros as it’s OS and has an Integrated Intel GMA 900 as its graphics processor. The GMA 900 means that technically the eeePC is capable of running Compiz Fusion. So has anyone done this?

Yes! Someone has! Fred Welland, who received an ASUS eeePC for his birthday according to his blog, has gone ahead and installed Fedora 8 on his eeePC and has mentioned that Compiz and Compiz Fusion are running well on the eeePC.

Here are some excerpts from his Blog:

I got a eeePC for my birthday, in mid-November 2007. It is a wonderfull little machine, that is a nice compliment to my Dell Latitude D820 and various and sundry desktops. The top of this page will be devoted to how I installed Fedora 8 on my eeePC. The bottom part of the page relates my experience with eeePC in general.

Fedora 8 Install Goals

Being a Linux user can be really funny. You just go =)) reading few ignorant Windows users’ comments on How Linux is crap bla bla bla. Today’s source for making me laugh comes by way of Christopher Dawson’s article on ZDNet on Why Linux Will Not Displace Windows(a rather nicely written article, though). The best thing about such articles are the comments written by, let’s saw, rather “well informed” users.

Let’s take a couple of examples.

Virtualization is a concept most likely you will be familiar of.

Take an example. Consider PSCX. It’s an emulator, which allows you you to play PS2 games on a PC right? That’s basically virtualization at work. Virtualization is a fancy name for emulation. Virtualization software allows you to virtualize a machine, create a “virtual” PC – you can do anything on the virtual pc as you can do on a normal PC – Install an OS, run applications, compile applications, surf the web, the applications are limit less. So why virtualize you may ask?

Well that depends on what you want to do. If you’re a developer, wanting to test cross-platform applications(ie, applications that will run across multiple OS) virtualization provides you to do so without the hassles of actually installing the required OS.

Some terminology:

openSUSE 11 Roadmap overview Dec 6 openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 0 Jan 17 openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 1 Feb 07 openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 2 March 18 openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 3 April 17 openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1 May 2 openSUSE 11.0 Beta 2 May 13 openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3 May 29 openSUSE 11.0 Release Candidate 1 June 12 openSUSE 11.0 Goldmaster (internal) June 19 openSUSE 11.0 Public release Detailed roadmap to follow soon

With the new year beginning we kick start major development into the next version of openSUSE: openSUSE 11.0. A very early alpha version, Alpha 1, is now available for download and testing. The Beautiful New Look of the Installer Despite many other products being developed in parallel to Factory, we have seen a heavy stream of development on it, so it is really worth a try if you have time for testing.

Here’s something which made me go :o Kaj Arno: After all the industry speculation about MySQL being a “hot 2008 IPO”, this probably takes most of us by surprise — users, community members, customers, partners, and employees. And for all of these stakeholders, it may take some time to digest what this means. Depending on one’s relationship to MySQL, the immediate reaction upon hearing the news may be a mixture of various feelings, including excitement, pride, disbelief and satisfaction, but also anxiety.

PC vendor Lenovo has promised ThinkPads with pre-installed Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 for some time now. Lenovo will deliver the goods the week of Jan. 14. Lenovo will release pre-installed SLED 10 on its Intel Centrino processor-powered ThinkPad T61 and R61 14-inch-wide notebooks. In February, Lenovo’s pre-integrated Novell Linux offering will expand to include some Penryn-based ThinkPads. The ThinkPad T61 with SLED 10 Service Pack 1 will come with the Intel Core 2 Duo T7250.

While browsing through TuxMachine’s articles, I read this article. Budding people interested in creating a Distro, make sure you read this.

One of the core principles of open source development is “freedom”. As such, there are few limitations for developers and end users to take the work of others and move it into a direction they deem better. This has led to a proliferation of Linux distributions, remasters and scores of applications that sometimes are hard to distinguish from other

distributions, remasters or applications. It’s not an ideal situation but somehow quality material always seems to stick around, while the rest sinks back into oblivion.

Another core principle is perhaps “respect”. Freedom is never an absolute. You can fork a distribution or an application, but you don’t have the freedom to remove or change the underlying licenses. You respect that. Why this introduction?

The case of Ultumix

After countless days of waiting, KDE4.0, the first release of the KDE4 framework was released on Friday, January 11. Here’s an official announcement from KDE’s site: The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era. The KDE 4.

One of CHIP-India’s forum members, Sujith Poojari had posted a link to 25 Top 3D games for Linux. Some of them I’ve already played like Armagetron Advanced, BZFlag, Sauerbraten, Scorched 3D, TORCS while some others unknown to me, such as Racer(been playing it recently, good graphics! controls need refinement though), PlaneShift etc. So enjoy these games and have a blast!

Armagetron Advanced

Armagetron is a multiplayer game in 3d that attempts to emulate and expand on the lightcycle sequence from the movie Tron. It’s an old school arcade game slung into the 21st century. Highlights include a customizable playing arena, HUD, unique graphics, and AI bots. For the more advanced player there are new game modes and a wide variety of physics settings to tweak as well.

Marcus Meissner posted on the openSUSE Mailing list that SUSE Linux 10.0 has reached End of Life and will no longer be supported. From the mailing list post, Hi, With the release of an nmap bugfix on December 20 we have released the last update for SUSE Linux 10.0. It is now officially discontinued and out of support. SUSE Linux 10.0 was released begin of October 2005. Some statistics on the released patches:

With the first release of KDE4 framework, KDE 4.0 just few days away — as the above counter shows, the next few articles will have a look at some of the features new to KDE 4.0

In case you’re still wondering what the KDE4 hoopla is all about, then keep reading. KDE4 is the next-generation of the immensely popular K Desktop Environment. KDE seels to fulfill the need for a powererful yet easy to use desktop for UNIX and Linux workstations. The aim of the KDE project for the 4.0 release is to put the foundations in place for future innovations on the Free Desktop. The many newly introduced technologies incorporated in the KDE libraries will make it easier for developers to add rich functionality to their applications, combining and

connecting different components in any way they want.

KDE4 introduces and updates many of KDE’s core components, notably a port to Qt 4. It will contain a new multimedia API, called Phonon, a device integration framework called Solid and a new style guide and default icon set called Oxygen. It will also include the new desktop and panel user interface tool, called Plasma, which will have support for desktop widgets, similar to SuperKaramba or Apple’s Dashboard widgets. The port to Qt 4 will facilitate support for non-X11-based platforms, including Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. One of the overall goals of KDE 4 is to be more easily portable to different operating systems.

The Debian project is pleased to announce the second update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codename etch). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems. Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 4.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update against ftp.

The recent 10.3 version of openSUSE has a great 1-click installer. But getting those 1-click installer packages can be very hard. Fear not, Dr. Neville from our Mangalore Linux Users Group found something very useful: A search engine for openSUSE 1-click Installer search packages! This will be very useful. All Credits to Dr. Neville

Due to the licensing restrictions, like most distros, openSUSE don’t have the codecs bundled along with the installation DVD. But thanks to their 1-click installer, it isn’t hard to get the Green Chameleon to start playing all those mp3’s/videos of yours.

It involves just 2 steps!

First, get the Restricted Format 1-click installer. Here’s the links:

The Ubuntu developers are moving very quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source Community has to offer. Hardy Heron Alpha 2 is the second alpha release of Ubuntu 8.04, and with this new alpha release comes a whole host of excellent new features. Note: This is still an alpha release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be released in April 2008.

Couple of days ago, Mozilla released the second Beta for the third version of their immensely popular browser, Firefox. Now generally I stay away from beta versions of software, but when Subbu told me it’simproved a lot over the first beta, I just rushed to download it & try it out.

Let’s have a look at the new features of the Second Beta:

Contrary to what most people think, it is possible to get all those effects on their Intel based onboard graphics. Now I’ve helped a few friends to get Compiz Fusion running on their Intel cards, and I was requested by them to post this tutorial, so here it goes.

First up, download the required Compiz Fusion packages via 1-click install; Here are the links:

[

1-Click Installer for KDE]1

1-Click Installer for GNOME

1-Click Installer for Compiz Manager

We’ll have make some changes to /etc/X11/xorg.conf as well.

Wine 0.9.51 was released today, with the following main changes: A bunch of WinHelp improvements. Better Japanese font support. A ton of rpcrt4 fixes. Several Alsa capture fixes. Improved support for screen resolution changes. Lots of bug fixes. Binary packages are in the process of being built and it may take a few days for them to appear, but the source is available now. You can find out more about this release in the announcement.

In my previous post, I’d explained on how to install Compiz Fusion on Ubuntu Fiesty. This post will outline the simple steps for installing Compiz Fusion on openSUSE 10.3. This article is written from an nVidia user’s point of view.

First, you’ll have to download nVidia’s drivers. You can get it, via the 1-click install(for Legacy cards, click here). I’d recommend downloading the latest drivers from nvidia’s site and doing a manual install of the drivers.

Manual install of nVidia drivers

Pre-requisites:

• compiler gcc,
• program make and
• package kernel-source

For the uninitiated, smart is the openSUSE equivalent of apt-get found in Debian based distributions such as Ubuntu.One of the biggest problems people who are used to apt-get face in openSUSE is that apt-get and Synaptic aren’t available in openSUSE and then they have no idea as to how to install software on their openSUSE machines. For them, and for many others, smart is the ideal solution. You can isntall software using the smart command prompt(“smart install ” or via the easy to use GUI. Like apt-get, smart also can resolve dependencies automatically. Here’s an easy guide to install smart on openSUSE 10.3.

There are lots of times where you’d want to mount a CD/DVD image. Say your friend who uses his Windows box has given you a .iso file or a .mds/mdf file, created using Alcohol 120%. How would you mount them in Linux? Using the Terminal and making use of the loop device,there is no need for any external software tools and utlities. Here’s the steps: Open the Terminal/Console. Switch to root user(mounting more often than not requires root privileges, we’ll have a look as to how make media user-mountable later) by typing su root *buntu users and others distros in which the root account is disabled, can skip this step.

Part 2 deals with installation of ATi drivers and visually enhancing that ubuntu First of the Ati drivers Ati have released catalyst 7.11 for Linux. Download this from their website. Next login as root in ubuntu. Then double click the downloaded file. You will get different options here choose to run the file. The next screen asks you if you want install the drivers or if you want to generate a package.

Consider this: You’re sitting infront of your desktop, with the login screen infront of you. However, you can’t seem to recall the username/password combo. Frustrating isn’t it? Here’s an application which is a fit solution for the problem: Revelation.

Revelation is a password manager application, mainly designed for the Gnome desktop. (This doesn’t mean however that you won’t be able to used in other desktop environments such as KDE or Xfce, it’s just that you won’t be able to enjoy the full features package.) It stores all your sensitive data in an encrypted XML file, protected by AES encryption which you can access using a master password. Basically, if you decide to use this program, the master password will be the single one you’ll even have to remember from now on, for the rest of your (online) life.

Features:

Ubuntu Gutsy has been receiving a huge amount of hype and fan fare recently, and I’ve been following Gutsy closely, from Ubuntu Fridge’s 10 Rocking Features in 10 Days to fellow bloggers and Linux users posts on Gutsy. Naturally after their Feisty launch, expectations were high(from my side). Now I’m not Ubuntu’s biggest fan(I’m a SuSE fellow, Novell haters, meh!), but I appreciate what Ubuntu has been doing for newbie Linux users in general.

I was patiently waiting for the December issue of CHIP magazine and picked it up immediately when it hit the stands, ripped apart the packaging and took out the DVD(yup, that’s right CHIP this month had a bootable DVD of Ubuntu Gutsy :D ) and started about installing it. Launching into the live environment took a good 2 minutes, uncharacteristic of Ubuntu.

KDE Developer beineri writes in blog about the general confusion among people between KDE 4 and KDE 4.0. To quote him, The last feature release of KDE is just over a year old, is well maintained and gains selected features about every two to three months. Still people long for the first release starting with the number 4 often called “KDE 4” – which is wrong. Let me try to disambigue: “KDE 4” refers to the whole life-time of the KDE 4.

Though it’s been a while since Gutsy was released, I couldn’t try out for various reasons. But finally I got my hands on Gutsy DVD edition, and I sat about installing it on my Dell Inspiron. I noticed first signs of trouble when Gutsy was taking unsually long to boot up. Switching to verbose mode, I knew something wrong when I saw

hda_intel: azx_get_response timeout

Initially I thought it was a problem with the live environment, however when install was done, my fears were confirmed. Indeed, Ubuntu wasn’t able to play any sound. This was a bit surprising since openSUSE 10.3 detected all of my hardware flawlessly(even more weirder was that Kubuntu Feisty had no problems with the sound!)

A bit of Googling and I found there are few solutions to this problem, which is because of ALSA. Apparently version lower than 1.0.15 has bugs and problems especially with Intel HDA codecs. So let’s see some solutions:

Found this really easy tutorial on setting up a LAMP server at UbuntuGeek. As the Geek says,

 

In around 15 minutes, the time it takes to install Ubuntu Server Edition, you can have a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) server up and ready to go. This feature, exclusive to Ubuntu Server Edition, is available at the time of installation.

 

The LAMP option means you don’t have to install and integrate each of the four separate LAMP components, a process which can take hours and requires someone who is skilled in the installation and configuration of the individual applications. Instead, you get increased security, reduced time-to-install, and reduced risk of misconfiguration, all of which results in a lower cost of ownership.New pre-configured installation options have been added to the Ubuntu Server. Mail Server, File Server, Print Server, and Database Server options join existing LAMP and DNS options for pre-configured installations, easing the deployment of common server configurations.

Ubuntu LAMP server Install the following Versions

• Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10
• Apache 2.2.4
• Mysql 5.0.45
• PHP 5.2.3

KDE News reports that that KDE4.0 release has been pushed from mid-december to January. It seems that KDE developers want to solve couple of essential issues, among which were glitches in the visual appearance, and in Konqueror, such as before releasing. Meanwhile, the progress towards KDE 4.0 is astonishing. Most parts, such as the KDE Development Platform and a lot of applications are considered stable and well-usable. Some parts of the desktop experience do not yet meet the KDE community’s quality standards and expectations for a stable release.

It’s been a while since I’ve used openSUSE, as I was without a computer or a laptop for over 4 months. But now that I’ve got my laptop back, It’s good to be with openSUSE!

Alright so let’s have a look at how to change bootsplash screen. Note that this is written with openSUSE as the target distro, the same steps should work with all distros which have bootsplash package installed, if you don’t have it installed or are unsure if bootsplash is present, head over to http://www.bootsplash.org/ and check it out.

Boot splash screens are the screens that show up when you’re booting up or shutting down Linux. Basically while Linux boots, there are 2 modes-silent mode and verbose mode. In silent mode only the picture is shown, while in verbose mode the pictures as well as boot up messages are shown.

The bootsplash actually is a theme. The theme file(or rather theme directory) is stored in /etc/bootsplash/themes/ directory. The theme directory consist of 2 more directories: images and config. In addition to these, the theme directory optionally has animations and bootloader directories/ The directory naming convention is self-explanatory so I will not go into more details into these.

So let’s get to the action and start changing!

When I got my Dell Inspiron, the first thing that I wanted to do was install openSUSE 10.3 on it. After all openSUSE has been serving me well all these years! Because of time restrictions and office workload being too much, I couln’t do it. So when the weekend arrived, I decided to install it!

             Since I dont have an Internet connection, downloading it was out of the question, so I had grabbed a copy of last month’s Digit magazine which had a Bootable openSUSE10.3 version on it. Initially I was weary, especially with the partitioning and the bootloader settings(I’ve done this lots of times, my hesistation was because of Dell MediaDirect occupying the first partition of the HDD. But then I just threw all fear and caution out the door, inserted the DVD and booted up my laptop.

             The green “Welcome” openSUSE splash screen is just awesome and put me in the right mood. After clicking on next couple of times, I ran into trouble. The installer’s partitioning tool informed me saying the NTFS partition could not be resized, as there were inconsistencies in the filesystem and informed me to do a file system check.

In an interview with the IT news magazine, InformationWeek Linus Torvalds speaks on where Linux is heading in 2008. He says that he is very gung-ho about solid-state drives, expects progress in graphics and wireless networking, and says the operating system is strong in virtualization despite his personal lack of interest in the area.

Here’s an excerpt of the interview:

This for all those guys who don’t know which linux to try. These are the ones that had us awed at their usability and features.

Aditya’s Picks:

• Ubuntu
• Xubuntu
• Puppy

My Picks:

• openSuSE
• Kubuntu
• DreamLinux

Re-buntu:-The reviewing distro

Finally a distro that beats ubuntu. Hold your breath and witness the miracle

So which one is it? This is a distro that’s been released along with ubuntu 5.10(no it’s not Kubuntu). Though many know about it is seldom used. Ok lets cut the suspense it’s Xubuntu-7.04. No don’t close the page read the review to find out why it really beats Ubuntu.

Why the hell did I even try out Xubuntu?

Well I needed to install it on a pretty old system(Pentium-3 700Mhz and 256Mb RAM. So what better than the good old XCFE desktop. While puppy(an 90mb distro using XCFE) misbehaved on this system, Xubuntu did not. It worked like a charm although with slow startup time but still very user friendly.

Every one is trying out linux, if you don’t want to be left out read on.

This topic covers what you need to know to shift to the boon called Linux.

Firstly why do you need Linux? Linux is for geeks and their geek factor right?

Well the answer is no. Linux is for those who need a peace of mind.

Let’s take an example here.

You come home tired after a long day’s work and all you want to do is sit in front of your computer and relax but as soon as you turn it on you get a message could not find system32 and windows wont start whatever you do.

So you call your system mechanic and he will comes the next day reinstalls windows an charges you a good 500 bucks. Now your system runs fine and also faster than before and all is well again right?

Again the answer is no.

Within a month or two you will experience the same or a new problem and again its 500 bucks gone.

Now you might ask if I mean to say that Linux is problem-free. I would say no to that. At present all Operating Systems do have their own problems but in the case of Linux it is lesser and you will find more stability and configurability. If this is not compelling enough then read on and I am sure you will reconsider.

While I was having a discussion on some of the popular Linux distribution on my favorite forum, CHIP TownSquare one of the members(thanks, Aditya :D) suggested me to try out DreamLinux. And I did that, downloaded DreamLinux 2.2 Multimedia GL edition. Since I was using my office PC, I couldn’t install this on the physical HD, had to make use of VMWare.

DreamLinux is a Brazilian distro, based on Morphix, and Debian. The Brazilian connection is evident from the Live CD screen: