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So, what do you think of the Google News redesign?

You like it???  Tell me where you live so I can come hit you on the head a couple of times with a tack hammer…we’ll see if that jars anything loose.  All kidding aside (no I don’t want to hit anyone on the head with a tack hammer), there is plenty of negative feedback on the redesign.  If you’re not sure what changed, the original Google News Blog announcement is here (with screenshots) and you can also see it on your own computer (for now…they may roll it out to other countries besides the US soon so this may not work perpetually) here is how to check:

1. Login to your google account.  Go to http://google.com/news
2. Now visit this link in a new tab:  http://www.google.ca/news

The difference initially looks subtle but once you start scrolling it blares like a fog horn in your head.  I’m not the only one who thinks the redesign sucks.  The original announcement is filled with negative comments about the redesign.  Look on the right hand column of the announcement to see related posts and you’ll quickly see there are plenty of people who despise this ‘improvement’.  Even looking in the google news general forum results in the most popular threads being discussions about how bad the redesign actually is.

People have even begun to label this redesign as the “New Coke” of Google products.  I’m thinking they may be right.  Don’t remember the New Coke snafu?

How Can We Tell Google Their Redesign Sucks?

Most people have been going to the support area for Google news.  In my opinion, this is ABSOLUTELY the wrong area.  Instead, head over to the blog announcement page and you’ll see a link to the Help Center.  Once there, on the top right hand corner of the announcement is a link to comments. As of the writing of this article there were about 15 comments on this change.

It is my theory that Google is only paying attention to this comments section and not to the thousands upon thousands of posts taking place inside their support forums.  Afterall, is complaining that the redesign sucks really a support issue?  Make your voice known by visiting the Help Center and dropping a comment via the comments link there.  Clicking this link opens up a sidewiki comment system.  Make sure you are signed into your google account when leaving a comment.

So what are the problems with Google News?

Tailored News – Google said the new redesign is “tailored to your interests” aka “news for you”.  Here’s the thing…I don’t want news tailored to my interests.  I want unedited and unfiltered news.  The reason I liked Google News in the first place was because I didn’t have paid sponsors results jockying to the front of the page.  I could read liberal and conservative news side by side.  I could get one side of the story and the other side of the story.

Now, I get only the side that interests me.  This doesn’t make for a well informed, rounded individual.  In other words, I want to see EVERYTHING and decide what to read…I don’t want that taken away from me at the beginning.

Scrolling – Congratulations Google!  It now takes me 6 pages of scrolling to see the same amount of news I used to be able to read in 2.  Boy I would have loved to be a fly in the wall on the meeting where the ‘stream’ concept was discussed…a big, monsterous fly so that I could have fly puked right on whoever thought it was a good idea.

Google news is now a facebook stream of news.  I don’t want that.  If I wanted a facebook stream of news, I’d create a facebook account and friend all the news agencies out there and wait for the news to stream to me.

It now takes me three to four times longer to read news than it did in the past.  I’m also getting a poor sample of the news.  I’m missing tons of articles I got in the past and headlines don’t pop like they used to.  It’s also HARDER to read when you’re scrolling 5000 lines of text.  For this reason alone the redesign is 20lbs of crap poured into a 10lb bag.

Local News – Local news went from having its own section to having 3 headlines.  Thanks for reducing my local news Google…I really appreciate that.  Good to know that I don’t need to be reading what’s happening right outside my window.

Fast Flip Reduction – Remember when fast flip was 3-4 wide across the bottom of your google news page?  Now it’s 1 article on the small right hand column.  WORTHLESS.  And of course, there is no way to get rid of it from your google news page.

Spotlight – What the heck is this section for?  What do these articles have in them that allows them to have a spotlight shined on them?  Do publications pay Google to be included in this section?  Why can’t I remove this section if I want to?

Most Popular - These articles are the most popular according to whom?  Am I just supposed to trust Google that they are the most popular ones out there?  Do publications pay Google to be included on this section?  Why can’t I remove it?

A good article that includes many of the reasons I discussed above can be found here.

The Squeekiest Wheel?? Alternatives??

So, if we complain en masse, will Google listen?  Does the squeekiest wheel get the most oil?  I hope so.

Until then, I won’t be using Google News. A suitable and tolerable substitution can be found at Ask.com…for those of you saying “Try Bing!” I did and it sucks.  Ask.com’s News Page is simple and doesn’t require me to scroll 40 times just to read news.  Thanks for keeping it simple Ask!  You’ve got a new supporter!

What do you think of the new google news?  Please let me know with a comment below.  The redesign hasn’t been rolled out in all areas yet so you may not see it in your location…however, be warned that it is probably coming.  Hopefully, Google will realize this move is the New Coke Snafu and backtrack to their original design…not because the features they want to implement suck, but because when implementing them, they made reading the news MUCH harder than it should be.

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Google News Redesign is Horrible originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on July 14, 2010.

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Very interesting statistics that I’ve noticed since moving the site to a Linode VPS.

If you take a look at the graphic below, the spike in the middle will probably stick out quite a bit.  Oddly enough, the spike I noticed in CPU percentage used (which is regulated for VPS at Linode) also spiked up disk usage…mainly because I began to swap when cpu/ram use skyrocketed.  All of this happened with Ubuntu 10.04 installed.  CentOS was the first distro I tried but I quickly switched to Ubuntu when I spotted a really nice how-to in the Linode document library.  Oh, and please excuse my horrible gimp skills on the image below…it was a quick and dirty editing of the image:

cpu usage

After switching to Ubuntu, I began receiving alarms for my account due to the high usage of CPU and disk.  I attempted to tweak settings and configuration files for about a week and realized it just wasn’t going to work for me.  I switched to Debian Lenny and the move was a positive as is reflected in these pictures.

disk usage

I was hoping Ubuntu 10.04 would fit for me since it is a long term support (LTS) release.  CentOS is my normal server distribution of choice and I really wanted to branch out and go with something different.  I used a Linode Stackscript for WordPress for CentOS but elected for vanilla installs of Ubuntu and Debian aftwards (I didn’t like NOT knowing what was installed when I first logged in…call me a control freak).

I just found it interesting that Ubuntu 10.04 did so horribly in this instance.  After investigating, I found a couple of likely suspects:

1. Default Apache install in Ubuntu leaves a lot to be desired..even after tweaking both it and PHP for days I couldn’t get them to lay off the resources.  Even switching to mpm_worker and FastCGI did little to settle things down.
2. Ubuntu swappiness is bad…it is set at 60 (I use 10 normally) and it swapped every chance it could get…it’s set by default to swap more than it should.
3. mod_php on Ubuntu is hungry for all your cpu and ram and disk; be warned!

Debian, as the parent distribution of Ubuntu, would most likely suffer from the same problems…except it doesn’t.  Things are working great with it and I’d recommend it for any of your server needs!  Has anyone else seen this oddity with Ubuntu 10.04?  If so, please drop me a comment below.

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Interesting Statistics originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on July 13, 2010.

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Hello everyone!

You may have seen a blip swing by in posting on the site with the default WordPress posting “Hello World” displaying as a new post.  This was due to my recent migration from Site5 shared hosting to a Linode VPS.  During the switchover, the database had not been uploaded yet as I was tweaking the webserver…feedburner detected a change in the RSS when DNS switched and BOOM!  The WordPress default post popped up saying hello.  I thought I had everything planned and timed perfectly but it seems I was off because of how fast DNS switched.

I apologize if this littered your inbox or your RSS reader.  I can promise some GREAT posts coming up.  I’ve been working on a file permissions and user groups posting to help new users out.  I’ve also inherited an older laptop with a PIII that I’ll be installing Salix on soon…I’ve decided to go with LXDE version of Salix 13.  Should be quite fun to see how that performs and report about it.  I’m also investigating Linux command line downloaders that can grab files from the web for you.  So lots of stuff on the horizon.  Once again, apologies for anything odd that may have popped up.

If you’d like to know more about the migration or have Site5 shared or Linode VPS questions, please drop me a line in the comments section.

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A Blip on My Posts originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on July 8, 2010.

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Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

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My friend Og Maciel originally introduced me to Openbox a while back and I’ve been using it ever since. I love the lightweight feel, the ability to customize and the center around having NO icons on my desktop.  I don’t feel cluttered when I work! Today, we’re going to go over installing Openbox with some added tools.  This tutorial is tailored for Foresight Linux but the guide may very well serve other distros as well.

What is Openbox?

From the Openbox homepage, “Openbox is a minimalistic, highly configurable, next generation window manager with extensive standards support.”  From using it, I often think of it as fluxbox-like with the benefits of being able to dip into Gnome or KDE for the items that I want to use.  Your desktop will then run with speed and simplicity using only the elements you want to use with it.

So…Let’s get Started…

This How-To will assume that you’re running Foresight Linux, you’re logged into Gnome and that you’re familiar with conary, the package manager for Foresight.  First and foremost, install openbox:

[devnet@lostlap Desktop]$ sudo conary update openbox obmenu obconf

This installs the needed components to run Openbox on your system. Openbox is minimal by default though so if you login to the environment now for the first time, there will be no taskbars, nothing…just a large blank area for you to work with. We will need to install some extra components to give a bit more functionality. If you’d like a panel menu, I recommend using tint2. I used to use pypanel which is a small panel written in python but this panel is no longer developed.

There are other panels that are packaged with openbox in mind for Foresight; fbpanel is available, which is a very fast and functional menu bar. I like lxpanel also, which is fbpanel with some easier configuration options. For a full list, please see openbox documentation. For our purposes here, we will install tint2:

[devnet@lostlap Desktop]$ sudo conary update tint2

Now we need to copy the default configuration file for tint2 so we can build our panel to our liking.  You’ll have to create the default path for the tint2rc configuration file.  To do this and copy the config file:

[devnet@lostlap Desktop]$ mkdir -p ~/.config/tint2/ [devnet@lostlap Desktop]$ cp /etc/xdg/tint2/tint2rc ~/.config/tint2/

Now tint2 has a configuration file in place and is ready for Openbox to start.

Let the Configuration Begin!

The hard part (install) is now out of the way thanks to the conary package manager. Now we need to configure Openbox so that it’s ready for us when we log out of Gnome. The configuration files will need to be copied to /home/user/.config/openbox.  Of course, this path doesn’t exist yet so we’ll need to create it like this:

[devnet@lostlap Desktop]$ mkdir -p ~/.config/openbox/

Visiting there now will show that there aren’t any files in this directory.  The file we’ll absolutely need to place there is autostart.sh. Other files that will be in here are rc.xml which is for obconf (openbox configuration) and menu.xml (openbox menu system).  We’ll copy menu.xml from a default copy there later.  The other file should auto-create when loading for the first time (rc.xml)

The autostart.sh file is what starts all of our services and our tint2 panel we just installed as well as setup our wallpaper and other items.  Instead of going through the options you can place in here, I’m going to share my autostart.sh to get you up and running quickly.  Please note that if you chose not to install fbpanel and use the gnome-panel or other panel instead, you’ll need to comment the pypanel line below and uncomment what you’ll be using:

[devnet@lostlap Desktop]$ cat autostart.sh # This shell script is run before Openbox launches. # Environment variables set here are passed to the Openbox session. ############################################################## # Panel Section ############################################################## # pypanel, my favorite panel for openbox #(sleep 3 && pypanel) & # Use the wbar Launcher if you would like. Don't forget to install it before uncommenting # wbar & # If you're going to use the gnome-panel, put a '#' in front of fbpanel & above and uncomment the next line # gnome-panel & (sleep 3 && tint2) & ############################################################# # Gnome Integration Section ############################################################# # This section let's Gnome give us some of its desktopiness gnome-power-manager & nm-applet --sm-disable & /usr/libexec/gnome-settings-daemon & gnome-volume-manager --sm-disable & gnome-keyring-daemon & ########################################################### # Other Add-on's for Openbox ########################################################### # Make your wallpaper restore to last setting using Nitrogen. nitrogen --restore & parcellite & volumeicon & ################################# End ###################

Download my autostart.sh

To create the menu system file for openbox, we’ll copy from the default installation to our .config/openbox directory (so we can use obmenu…otherwise, that command will give us an error) so use the following command in a terminal:

[devnet@lostlap Desktop]$ cp /etc/xdg/openbox/menu.xml ~/.config/openbox/

Now you’re ready to login and reap what you have sown Logout of Gnome and change sessions in GDM to Openbox.  Notice that your tint2 panel starts up and has the gnome applications we recorded in the autostart.sh file above running and docked! You can add more options to your autostart.sh file and you can also edit tint2rc (in your /home/user/.config/tint2 directory) to store settings for your panel.

I’ve Installed and am Running, Now What?

Now you get to customize the Openbox menu with your favorite applications. Menus are activated by right clicking anywhere on the desktop. There are a few default applications…I choose obconf right away so that I can choose a theme I like and increase the text size since I’m using a high resolution. After that is done, I right click for the menu again and go to applications >> xterm. When the terminal pops up, I type obmenu. From there, I’ll be able to edit my right click menu.

Now instead of entering obmenu in a terminal each time, let’s add it to our right click options. In the obmenu window that you opened in the last paragraph, expand the Openbox 3 option. Find obconf and highlight it. Click ‘new item’ and add obmenu for a label, execute for action, and obmenu for Execute. This will add obmenu to your right click options so you don’t have to open a terminal each time to do things. You can also customize any of the items you find in applications…I put a few things I normally need such as thunderbird, firefox, gnome-terminal, etc. Feel free to add whatever you need…you can have many submenu’s . It’s setup is pretty straightforward.

Nitrogen, the wallpaper manager, requires a small tweak as well to get working. What I did was create a /home/username/Photos/Wallpaper directory and then loaded it up with my favorite desktop wallpaper. Good places to go for cool wallpapers are desktopography.com and vladstudio.com.  Next, install Nitrogen:

[devnet@lostlap Desktop]$ sudo conary update Nitrogen

After your first login, you’ll need to add a menu entry using obmenu to call the nitrogen browser. So create the menu entry and the action you call is:

nitrogen /home/username/Photos/wallpaper

Of course, replace ‘username’ with your users name.  This will allow you to open up all the wallpaper photos inside of that directory.

So What Have we Done?

Today, we’ve installed Openbox on Foresight Linux. We’ve given it a tint2 panel so we have a place to dock applications and we’ve customized the Openbox right click menu and added a wallpaper program called Nitrogen. Hopefully, this shows you the customizable features of Openbox and also shows you the speed that Openbox operates at. It’s a very minimalistic environment, yet one that can be very powerful.

Installation Notes of Interest

tint2

Tint2 is my newly crowned favorite panel for openbox.  It’s lightweight and is able to be configured in so many ways.  I added the sleep command inside my autostart.sh to make sure that the desktop is loaded before the tint2 panel tries to load…mostly, this is due to network manager wanting to animate while the panel loads.  This isn’t as much problem with tint2 as it is with pypanel (see below).

pypanel

Some things I’ve noticed when running openbox…network manager has problems with pypanel. I added the sleep command inside my autostart.sh and this is much better now…but there may be similar problems with network manager. It’s really NM searching for a network and it causes the panel to flicker a bit. Not a real show stopper.

Gnome-panel

Gnome-panel running inside openbox causes a few errors to pop up when I login. This could be due to the fact that I’ve started things in my autostart.sh out of order…I’m also not all together sure what is causing these errors. The problem seems to be with the docking area of gnome-panel as when I minimize programs they are not docked. Easily fixable, but annoying nonetheless.

Alternative Panels

There are quite a few alternative panels out there.  Fbpanel is one.  Perlpanel is another.  Fbpanel and lxpanel are available in the Foresight repositories. You can also add other launchers like wbar if you so desire.

Screenshot

Openbox on Foresight

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Installing Openbox on Foresight Linux originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on May 30, 2010.

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Television and Movies shape reality.

Just look at this medium over the past few decades and you’ll always find a TV series or movie that is a glass reflection of what is happening in the real world.  Movies and TV have the power to elicit strong emotional responses (i.e. The Notebook_or_insert_another_chick_flick_here) , invoke the ire of opposing groups (i.e. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed), and even inspire people to unite under a common goal.  Anything that powerful and influencing with the reach that moves and TV have is a force to be reckoned with.

Stagnant Development and Stagnant Thinking

When development on something stagnates and no further advancement happens, often times that technology is abandoned.  An example of this is how voice-over-IP is changing how we do phones.  With Skype, Vonage, Google Voice, asterisk, and other amazing services the consumer is innovating while phone companies flounder.  Soon in the future we will see phone companies change to become absorbed by ISPs.  The same is true of Television companies.  With the onslaught of new media on the web and the ability to stream video from point A to point B, conventional media producers are being forced to become innovative to stay relevant.  The problem is that they don’t want to innovate.  They’d rather sit back and let the old way they operate things be the ONLY way they operate things.  A prime example is NBC’s fall from grace; from first to worst with no sign of improvement.  Time and time again they prove that they don’t “get it” at all…even up to NBC CEO Jeff Zucker saying that Boxee is stealing content from Hulu when they play videos…using this logic:  Opera, Safari, Firefox, and any web browser is “stealing” content by visiting Hulu.com and playing videos…because Boxee uses Mozilla Firefox to play Hulu’s content.

When big television finally gets this…they’ll get on board and they’ll be seen less negatively and more positively.  The first Television company to  fully partner with Boxee to offer full episodes will win.  What does winning mean?  It means that the PR exposure will be such a huge shot in the arm that the company will benefit across the board.  It also means that they get rich metrics on what people are watching, how often they watch, and when they are watching…all without even needing a Nielson ratings.  The first company to do this, in my opinion, will be the company all other broadcast corporations will chase.

How Boxee Harnesses the Power of Movies and TV

Boxee tames that reality shaping force for you.  Boxee changes the way you are entertained.  By changing how something is used or consumed, you change all those the thing reaches.  Instead of TV being brought into your home…YOU are bringing TV into your home on your terms.  Studios need to know that to gain control over something you sometimes have to give up control.

Boxee crawls the web for you and brings all television it can find (think CBS, ABC, NBC, Hulu, Netflix, clicker.com, tv.com) into a single interface.  You play your show in Boxee and can even rate it and/or share it.  People can subscribe to your boxee feed and know what you rated a movie or television show and perhaps watch it themselves.  However, the real power of boxee is the single interface.  This gives people the ability to launch a single program that can find TV for them.  The entry barrier to watching TV online is thus lowered.  That means that Boxee is a POWERFUL tool for television and movies…one not being utilized by those markets.

Boxee is taking a cross platform approach to things as well…it’s freely available for Linux, Windows, and Mac platforms.  This allows Boxee to be something EVERYONE can experience.

Boxee IS changing the entire world, one television at a time.  If broadcasting corporations don’t recognize this and work with Boxee…I’m afraid they may be left out in the cold during this change.  What do you think?  Does Boxee have the power to change the world?

If you’d like to know more about getting started using Boxee, please visit

http://www.howcast.com/videos/310743-How-To-Get-Started-With-Boxee

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Boxee is Changing the World originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on May 25, 2010.

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I thought of this interesting question the other day while messing around with Slackware 9.0 which was one of the last versions of Slackware to come on a single disk. The goal was to try to take a Slackware 9.0 install to the most recent stable and it was almost accomplished. Glibc was the largest hassle…and I made it to Slackware 11.0 before something caused things to not boot at all. All things considered, I spent 3 days on trying to get Slackware 9 to current.

Slackware for those of you that don’t know, has no dependency resolving package manager. Previously, a good attempt was made with swaret and that was my first jump into package managers with dependency resolution all together when it came out…but Swaret is no longer being maintained and doesn’t really work well anymore.

Since Slackware has no real dep resolving package manager…it’s one of the last ‘true’ Unix like Linux versions out there. Back in the early to mid nineties…things were exactly like this. If you wanted to update your Linux version…you stepped through it manually and tried to get things to work. What was great about Slackware was making your own Slack packages with source…no dependency resolution but in the process of making the package you’d have all the dependencies eventually installed. In this entire process, you became VERY familiar with your system…how it booted, what run level things occurred at, how cron jobs worked, etc. You were baptized by fire so to speak…you were to sink or swim.

As I said, this got me thinking…do we rely on dependency resolving package managers TOO much? They’re cliché now of course…run of the mill. Back in the 1990’s though rpm was the only true package management system around…and rpm was never designed for internet consumption. The guys who wrote rpm had in mind CD and floppy upgrades. Fast forward to now and we have zypper, pacman, urpmi, deb, and conary…all built with online repositories in mind. Do these managers take the heavy lifting away for new users? Do they spoil them?

Do systems break less with easier resolutions due to package managers? Does it mean that the new user of today won’t be as experienced as the old user of yesterday?

I think it might.

Users in the past had to chip away and reassemble with less documentation and no package manager. This meant that the user of yesterday ripped apart systems and packages to discover how they worked and which cogs fit where.

The user of today follows step by step instructions and the software is given a sane set of defaults by most package developers when said package is installed.

Does this make for lazy users?

I don’t think users are lazy per se…but as previously stated, spoiled ones. And it’s no fault of their own…it’s the direction the software has taken us. Now the questions we need to answer are:

1. Is this direction the correct direction we should be heading?
2. Are there better approaches to package management that don’t follow the model we have currently (other than Conary)
3. Can we come up with a system that doesn’t make new users spoiled?

I think I’m of both worlds…I started off with no package manager but managed to ride the wave of Red Hat 7.2 and above followed by Mand{rake,riva} and PCLinuxOS. I’m both spoiled and unspoiled. I know what it takes to manage a system without a conventional package manager but I also know how much time it can save me to use one. I sometimes find myself wanting less though…less and more. Less time and more hands on gutting the system. I think I’m in the minority though.

How about you, as a reader of this article? Do you think new users are spoiled by conventional package management systems? Do you see solutions or have ideas we can discuss? Is this really just a process we can improve or is there any programming to be done? Please sound off in the comments section!

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Do Package Managers Spoil Us? originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on May 16, 2010.

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I was quite surprised this morning whilst reading my RSS feeds to discover that Ubuntu has named their most recent ‘lite desktop‘ Unity.  Surprised because we have our project, Unity Linux.  Strange that both our ‘lightweight distribution and desktop’ and Ubuntu’s ‘lite desktop’ should share a name together.

While I’m not really sure why no one threw up a stop to this in the Canonical brainstorming session that produced ‘Ubuntu Unity’ one can only have a laugh about this and hope we don’t get our pants sued off even though we named our distro first.

If things do get hairy, I’m sure we can change our name to ‘Unity Ubuntu’ or something similar to properly confuse everyone.

So, on behalf of all the Unity Linux developers, I’d like to thank the Academy and give a special shout out to Ubuntu for making our name known!  Thanks Mark!  Oh and good luck with that Unity thing!

* devnet removes tongue from cheek

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Ubuntu Names Their Desktop After Us? originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on May 10, 2010.

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I recently began blogging with my wife about green living including green technology.  We launched the site a couple of days ago and today was my first post on green technology:  Corky, a Battery Free Wireless Mouse.  It’s a mouse that charges up with every mechanical motion and click of the button you make.

We’re really excited to chronicle the changes we make in our lives to ‘go green’ and we’re attempting to develop a community around the site so all can benefit from shared knowledge.

Please check the site out and let me know what you think!

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Green Technology originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on April 23, 2010.

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Since my first home-built server (a PI 75Mhz behemoth) I’ve used Red Hat based distributions as my home server.  This lasted until around 2002-3 when I moved into a 4 bedroom house with 3 of my Air Force buddies and one of them wanted to learn Linux.

I knew from experience in the mid-nineties that Slackware was probably the most Unix-like distribution out there…I felt at home there quite a bit after learning the *nix ropes on Solaris 2.0.  So we configured a Slackware 8.1 dual processor tower server he was lucky enough to acquire as our home firewall-all-around-great-linux box.  He took his beginning steps there and flourished since our Air Force job already had us jumping around in a VAX/VMS mainframe.  We had many late night hacking sessions attempting to get things to work or compile there.  We also had a multi GB shared hard disk (unheard of at the time!) shared over samba.

After I got moved out, I continued to keep the Slackware box up to date.  I moved onward to Slackware 9.  Samba operated like a champ and Slackware was a great routing system and dhcp server.  Then I discovered ClarkConnect and loved the web interface.  I could do things in half the time!  I could do them over the web from work without SSH tunneling!  All this appealed to me at the time.

I continued to run ClarkConnect from that point on and have continued to all the way up to when it changed to ClearOS this past year.  Indeed, I have ClearOS now as my central server.

The only problem is that I’ve suffered 2 of the most catastrophic losses of files in my samba shares when running ClarkConnect/ClearOS…and I didn’t draw the lines together  on these separate incidents until just recently.

The first loss came when an entire samba share was completely eradicated…13GB of music was just gone.  The second loss happened just the other day when tons of scanned pictures just VANISHED into thin air.  Each time these happened, I was using ClarkConnect/ClearOS.  Each time it happened a few users reported instability in the forums of those distributions.  I am not sure how it could have happened and I was caught completely off guard on the second time…my backups were not yet configured since it was a new server.  The first time it happened…I didn’t know the value of having a good backup routine.  So each time, no backups   Lesson learned the hard way but learned nonetheless.

I recall running Slackware on my server and NEVER having the problems I have had with ClarkConnect/ClearOS.  This got me rethinking my home server design.  Servers should be the epitome of stability.  One should be able to migrate from one version of the operating system to the next with few hiccups.  When considering each of these it is very apparent that I should be running Slackware core on my main samba server.

I will be making that transition in the next week or two and moving to a Slackware core based server.  I’m not sure what to use for backups across the network (I usually mirror the drive to an NTFS drive in my Windows based multimedia server) nor backups locally to other hard drives.  If you have any suggestions, I’d really like to hear them.  Also, I’d like to know what readers consider using for a server.  Please vote for your favorite below and drop me a comment letting me know specifics and thanks for your help!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

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Rethinking Home Servers originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on April 17, 2010.

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I needed a quick way to backup my small music collection on my laptop and preserve the complete file structure and permissions.  There are a few ways to do this of course…for example, you can just copy the files using whatever file manager you happen to be using in your Linux distribution.  In some cases though, you might want your backup to take up less space than the full monty.  Especially true if you are backing up to thumb drives!

You can use the tar command to make this a snap.

Tar combines multiple files into an archive and you can use it to preserve permissions and file structure and then you can compress the archive to save space.

tar -c --recursion -p --file=backup.tar directory

The -c flag creates an archive for us.  –recursion goes through all subdirectories.  The -p flag preserves permissions on all the files.  This is handy if you have certain folders or files that you need to sticky with individual users or groups.  The –file flag is the option for outputting to a file name.  You can also add multiple directories that you’re zipping up like the following:

tar -c --recursion -p --file=backup.tar directory1 directory2 directory3

After you have the file output as backup.tar it’s time to compress it.  The most standard way to do this is to use the gzip command:

gzip backup.tar

This command will output backup.tar.gz to the current directory which will take up less space than that of a standard 1-to-1 copy.  There are many other flags and options that you can use with the tar command.  For an in depth look at those flags and options, check the tar man page by typing ‘man tar’ in a terminal or view it online here.

UPDATE:

Commenter ‘jack’ has offered a few extra flags to combine the archiving and zipping into one command:

tar -c -z --recursion -p --file=backup.tar directory1 directory2 directory3

The -z flag will gzip the archive after you’ve used tar to create it.  Substituting -j in for -z above will bzip the archive.  Thanks for the tips jack!

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Backup Directories and Subdirectories Preserving File Structure originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on April 14, 2010.

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The guys over at Unity Linux have created and developed a ‘build server’ that will allow the automation of package building in both 64bit and 32bit flavors.  All the building is done in a chroot and then the package is automatically moved into the ‘Testing’ repository.

Very interesting stuff…much like what rMake does for Conary and Foresight Linux…but applied to RPM’s instead of conary changesets.  Just the same, it’s interesting that such a small team of developers are showing their prowess in development and making strides toward building a robust developer community.

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Unity Linux Automates Build Process originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on April 12, 2010.

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There’s been a lot of confusion about exactly what Unity Linux is.

I thought I’d talk today a bit about that.   I’d like to talk a bit about what Unity uses for it’s ‘guts’.  I’d also like to dispel some myths surrounding Unity.  Lastly, I’d like to talk briefly about how Unity is doing all it can to further Open Source and Linux by contributing to projects it is involved with.  The reason I know so much about this topic is that I’m the webmaster and host for the Unity Linux Project as well as one of the documentation team members.  So, let’s take a look first at what Unity Linux is…

What is Unity Linux

Unity Linux is not a conventional distribution of Linux.  It’s a core on which developers can build their own distribution of Linux.  We’ve set out from the start to provide an excellent minimum graphical environment that gave developers “just enough graphics” for them to create something.  The smaller, the better.  We elected to go with Openbox because of it’s size and stability.  We selected using Mandriva as our base because of the number of packages they provide and the quality of those packages.  We pushed lxpanel as a minimal panel because it provides just enough functionality for distro developers to see what they’ve installed after they’ve installed it…it also is familiar to most people whereas Openbox right click menu’s may not be.  All in all, our target for the core release is developers.  We’re not designing this basic desktop to be used by end users.  We’re not trying to win any awards with our awesome minimalistic desktop skills.  Why would we do this?  To answer this, you have to take a look at our developers.

One of our developers, Kdulcimer, is the lead developer of TinyMe Linux.  A few years ago, he created a fantastic minimalistic “remaster” of PCLinuxOS.  It was wildly popular and continues to be so today.  Kdulcimer was one of the first developers that elected to go with Unity Linux for his core.  Our other developers saw what Kdulcimer did with his distro and how small he made the core.  They learned from how he did things and applied it to Unity.  Thus, Unity has a small base…as evident by both the beta releases.  Upcoming release candidates will be very much the same.

Lead developer gettinther does a good job explaining what Unity is:

One of the big issues facing small distros around is that there’s a limitation in the ability of each group to maintain a healthy up-to-date core.  Most people prefer to focus on the DE / user interface, working on the look&feel rather the the internals.  Those distros end up with stale core which in turn causes numerous “hard-to-find” issues.

Most of the distros with us existed before Unity, like Tinyme, Sam (abandoned project now), Granular, Synergy (formely eeepclos).  The idea is to create distros only insofar as “presetting desktops by people who love those desktops”.  Rather than having a “one shoe fits all”, we decided to provide a core module and look after maintaining it.  Each branch distribution joins the team and has full developer access.  For Unity to become a full fledged distro means favoring a DE over others.  By limiting the scope to the core product (we maintain the various DE too but leave the DE specific changes to the branches).  It makes it a little more difficult to install stuff but it also means that all DE are looked after.

As far as the user is concerned, it means the each branch has their word in the development of the core which ensures that the distro is well supported.  It pools the efforts of each distro who would otherwise be on their own so means a large development team and as such better packages.

So Unity Linux is a base on which to build.  A foundation for “remasters” to build from.  But what is a remaster?  What technologies does Unity use? Let’s take a look at the internals of Unity next.

Unity Linux Internals aka Guts

When we initially set out to not only have a small graphical base but also to wrap around the LiveCD project.  For those of you who don’t know what LiveCD is..you can visit the old berlios.de project page:

The project features automatic hardware detection and setup, and utilises compression technology to build a LiveCD from a partition much larger than would typically fit on a CD. (Up to 2GB for a normal 650MB CD.) When booting from this LiveCD, the data is transparently decompressed as needed. LiveCD now supports udev.

Currently,  Mandrakelinux and PCLinuxOS are supported as a host for creation of the LiveCD, i.e. we are only able to create LiveCD’s from a MDK or PCLinuxOS install. The LiveCD scripts are still beta, and bugs are being eliminated. Your help and feedback are appreciated!

The set of scripts allows a person to make a liveCD copy out of their desktop for backup purposes or as a standalone linux distribution.  When you create that new ISO or backup ISO, you have ‘remastered’ the master copy.  So the livecd scripts are really just a set of tools that allows a user to create something new or backup their existing desktop as a live CD.

The project at berlios was taken over by Didouph as lead developer just before Unity was formed.  There hadn’t been much work after Tom Kelly left the project quite a long time ago, but Didouph was optimistic.  When he joined Team Unity, he placed LiveCD development on the back burner and worked hard with the graphics team on logo development.

Later, it became apparent that in order to keep creating a great distribution that could remaster itself, we needed to make improvements to the code of LiveCD.  First off, it needed 64bit support.  Secondly, it needed better detection than what it had.  Third, it needed to have internationalization work done.  Fourth, it needed to support higher kernel versions than what it did.  All those things have been accomplished with internationalization still being worked on.

When we initially took over the ‘modernization’ of LiveCD we didn’t all flock to berlios to do so.  Work instead began when we gave a small sliver of our own SVN over to LiveCD.  It made sense geographically for our developers to have the ability to commit code in the same place instead of at a third party (berlios); the reason being, we needed many commits fast and didn’t want to wait…we were ready to move forward with it immediately.  We snagged the GPL’d LiveCD code and located it on our SVN.

Since Didouph was the maintainer of LiveCD, we felt it only natural that Unity would lend a hand to him and his project by taking over development.  An entire team working on LiveCD would mean greater output and more advancement.  Thus, Unity maintaining the LiveCD project was born.  Anyone is welcome to take the code and use it how they seem fit.  We’re working on getting LiveCD it’s own proper SVN or Git repository at a public site away from Unity Linux…if you’d like access (read only) to LiveCD SVN, drop Unity Linux a line via their contact page.

Common Myths Surrounding Unity Linux

Heard any good ones lately?  If I don’t cover the ones you’ve heard here, please leave me a comment and I’ll address yours specifically.

Myth #1 – Unity Linux is just PCLinuxOS rebranded

Most of the developers of Unity Linux were contributors to PCLinuxOS during the time that Texstar had stepped away.  As contributors, they were not part of the developer team.  They had limited access to the core, iner-workings of PCLinuxOS.  How do I know?  I was a developer…the main web developer…for PCLinuxOS and I monitored all mailing lists, all websites, and even was chief of MyPCLinuxOS.com.  There were very few people on the development team of PCLinuxOS that are now part of Unity Linux…because the PCLinuxOS development team was kept small.

When Unity Linux initially was started, the contributors and developers that were involved grabbed a ’snapshot’ of the PCLinuxOS repositories and began working on bringing packages to updated versions.  They quickly ran into trouble because PCLinuxOS used such an outdated toolchain that many new packages wouldn’t compile with it.

After some discussion, developers abandoned PCLinuxOS packages and instead worked with Mandriva packages.  This allowed Unity to move forward sans old toolchain and outdated core.  Now most of this stuff doesn’t matter to the end user…they just want a stable environment.  But the Unity Linux developers wanted to push forward with the latest kernels, the latest rpm version, and the latest smart package manager versions.  Doing so required massive leaps forward even from Mandriva.

As you can see, while Unity Linux originally started with a PCLinuxOS fork, they abandoned that fork and rebased on Mandriva.  They now stay inline with Mandriva development.  If you have Mandriva and Unity Linux questions, please stop into the Unity Linux chat channel on Freenode: #unitylinux and ask proyvind questions…as he is the Mandriva Linux representative that works with Unity Linux

Myth #2 – Unity Linux Stole mklivecd aka livecd from PCLinuxOS

This is a pretty funny one and I’ve seen quite a few references to ’stealing’  GPL code.  First things first:  You cannot ’steal’ GPL code.  It just can’t be done.  Secondly, the LiveCD project was stagnant and had a SINGLE developer working on it.  That developer joined Unity Linux and all 25+ developers there decided to help him make some progress on it.  In the meantime, they took the initiative to make improvements.  For example, they gave it 64bit compatibility.  They gave it have better detection.  They took the code and gave it better international language support.  All those things are made available for FREE to any distribution wanting to download a snapshot from SVN.

Now, if anyone has a claim to LiveCD as ‘theirs’ it would be Jaco Greefe who was the principal on the project LONG before any distributions other than Mandrake aka Mandriva even worked with it.  Texstar grabbed what Jaco’s project mklivecd and used it to create the original PCLinuxOS 2003 release.  This release was based on Mandrake 9.2 at the time and a few other Mandrake developers began to debug the script through the creation of PCLinuxOS.  Mandrake was a trademarked name, so Texstar named it PCLinuxOS.

As you can see, if any one distribution has claim to mklivecd, it would be Mandrake aka Mandriva which was where the script creators came from.  It’s also where the script was first made useable.  However, claim that Texstar made it into a nice package with PCLinuxOS…that is totally true.  What we’re doing now by developing it is making sure it continues to progress into the future with 64bit support and even when udev is dropped from Linux…no matter what, we’ll make sure it works…and hopefully it will work for more than just Mandriva derived distributions.

There have been many attempts by Unity Linux developers to get other distributions that use mklivecd involved with the development of it.  That invitation is always open to any and all distributions that use it.

Myth #3 – Unity Linux wants to steal away users from other distributions of Linux

The main reason this isn’t true is that Unity Linux targets DEVELOPERS.  We don’t target end users.  If end users like Unity, GREAT!  If not, we don’t worry about it.  Unity Linux has derivative distributions called “branches” that work to target the end user.  Unity Linux itself is targeted squarely at distribution developers and advanced users who want to be able to use the mklivecd scripts.

Myth #4 – Unity Linux DOESN’T use PCLinuxOS at all in development

This is half true.  We don’t ‘use’ PCLinuxOS to create things…we use it as a mirror synch.  Paul Grinberg, a developer on the team, has a PCLinuxOS box that he doesn’t use.  During the initial setup of Unity Linux, we based things on PCLinuxOS before purging and switching to Mandriva.  Since the developer mirror server (referred to on the mailing lists as the dev server) still ran PCLinuxOS and Unity Linux didn’t have a release yet, we saw no reason to change it.

As Unity Linux still has no stable release as of March 29, 2010, that developer mirror server still runs PCLinuxOS and pushes uploaded packages developed on a Unity Linux server to various mirrors for propagation.

In other words, the PCLinuxOS server Unity Linux uses is just a web server.  It will be replaced with Unity Linux when 2010 is released.  Until then, taking the time to wipe it out and repopulate it would throw a kink in the flow of package development so developers have put this ‘to-do’ item as something to be accomplished after stable release.

Unity Linux and Open Source

Unity Linux does a great job of contributing to projects upstream.  As an example, David Smid, a Unity Linux developer, is also a Smart Package Manager (SPM) developer.  This allows Unity the ability to test the latest and greatest SPM and get things quickly patched/fixed/redesigned.  Other projects such as mklivecd are developed openly by Unity Linux and contributors are welcome.  Unity Linux contributes bug finds to Mandriva through use of the Mandriva Cooker repository.  Unity Linux developer Paul Grinberg contributed Google Map integration for MirrorMon, which you can view on our Mirror Status Page, back upstream to the creator of MirrorMon.  Unity Linux also contributes upstream to rpm5.org.

Unity Linux also has a working partnership with Yoper Linux.  Why?  Because Yoper Linux uses many of the same core technologies (Smart, rpm5) that Unity Linux uses and because the lead developer, Tobias Gerschner, is an all around great guy .

You can see everything that Unity Linux works on by visiting our repository:  http://dev.unity-linux.org/projects/unitylinux/repository

Development is done in the open, not behind closed doors:  http://groups.google.com/group/ul-developers

Unity Linux strives with an almost rabid will to keep everything in the open for users and branch developers so that they are not left wondering what’s going on with their distribution.  The Developers continue to try and engage other distributions to work with them and will continue to do so in the future.

Closing Thoughts

Unity Linux doesn’t target the same users as your average distribution of Linux…they’re after the more savvy users out there.  The ones that want to create something and make something from the core image.  Users that like to tinker and mess and break things.

Unity got off to a rough start with much FUD slinging and accusations.  Hopefully, the actions you see that Unity has taken to keep it’s project open will show the intent of the developers…to make a great core on which others can branch from all the while remaining open and free for everyone.

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What Is Unity Linux? originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on March 29, 2010.

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Use Whatever You Want

I ran across the flash video above (note: I’m not taking content and embedding it here…you’ll need to click on the image to be taken to the author’s site) a while back and have never posted a link to it.  It’s pretty funny and if you look around on ubergeek’s site, you’ll find a couple of other interesting things like the awesome flash game “Penguin Blood Ninja Fiasco” which I think is just genius.  So give this a look-see…you won’t be sorry.  Guaranteed to brighten even the darkest open source supporter’s day.

Do you…uh…Use Linux? originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on February 19, 2010.

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This post was originally published on 13 July, 2006.  I’ve updated the original post which can be found here with current and extra information.

I have a problem with facebook, myspace, and other social networking websites out there.  The problem is when I upload my data to their webservers….I don’t own it anymore.  They do.  And they can do whatever they want with it once it is there.

With this in mind, I’d rather setup my own twitter using Status.net or my own digg using Pligg.  But I’d do it on MY OWN SERVER.  That way, any content I upload is MINE.  It doesn’t reside on some server in California or DC and get recycled to advertisements.

I like to control my own stuff.  I don’t like to be cut out of the loop.  If you’re like me, then you’ll want to host your own domain, website and webserver so that your friends/family/shrink can quickly and easily connect up to see new photos, find out the latest family developments, and understand why you wear tinfoil hats every Thursday after 4pm.

Normally, to host your own webpage you would need to spend around 7 bucks to purchase a domain.  Next you would need a hosting plan that usually runs around 3-15 dollars per month to serve up your web pages.

What most don’t realize is that you can skip these steps all together…you don’t need to get dedicated hosting (this blog is hosted on dedicated hosting…but started out in my apartment!) to serve pages up to your friends and family.  You absolutely do not need to get domain name services through a provider.  You can even host your own webserver using a dialup connection (that’s right…I said dialup) although. I don’t recommend it (but I’ve done it using 56.6kbps).

Why would you want to do this?  The answer might be to stay connected to friends and family…perhaps install a gallery so that your grandparents can see pics of your new dog/car/tinfoil hat.  Sure, you could waste my time with MyWaste..er..space and facebook and be barraged daily by advertisers and solicitors and be inundated with the minutiae of what all your friends had to eat for the day …or you could roll your own web host, install a gallery or website, and provide media to your friends and family without costing yourself a dime.  That’s right, NO COST (except time spent getting it running).  Just remember, your website might not survive a digging or slashdotting if you run it yourself.  Keep that in mind  So without more chatter, let’s get to the meat and potatoes of things:

Meat and Potatoes

If you have Cable or DSL at home (not a business account) you have something called a dynamic connection.  Dynamic connection means that it can change every once in a while.  DSL and cable ISP’s purchase blocks of IP Addresses in the dynamic range so that they can keep consumers separate from businesses.  It’s also easier for them to manage dynamic pools of people than to have to remember static connections that don’t change for everyone.

Because of this problem…an ever changing connection for you at home…web servers and websites do not do very well.  The reason for this is because when you visit a website on a dynamic connection one day, it might be different the next day.  In order for visitors of a website to find you each and every single time, you need a “domain” or web name that points back to the address (IP Address) your internet service provider changes on a whim.  You’ll also need an update service to update your website each time your ISP decides to change things on you.

Believe it or not, there are free services out there to do that for you.  You just have to be willing to do a little extra work in the beginning to set things up.  You can also do this without spending 20-40 bucks a month on DNS service.

I’ll divide this up into 2 sections.  The first will deal with Linux hosting.  The second, Windows hosting.  This is only something that I’ve found easy to do and the price is just right (it’s free).  The only thing that I recommend is a dedicated internet connection (cable, DSL) but even this is not necessary as dialup can be used.  I recommend that you use the Linux way of doing things since it is more secure and doesn’t require a restart every time you patch it.

*note: I’m assuming that you aren’t behind a firewall/proxy of any kind and that your ISP doesn’t block port 80 traffic.  If your ISP blocks port 80, see the appendix at the end of this article.

LINUX

No matter what version of Linux you run, chances are that you’ll be able to install the apache webserver.  This is good news as over half the websites of the world are run by apache. I’m not going to address the specifics of how to set up your apache…only how to get it a fixed address without buying a domain.  So, you have your html or php pages located into your webservers public directory…good…whatever application you have is installed on your server.  Now, how to resolve your IP…lets say it is…25.24.4.166 (for our example) and you want it to have a host.name.com to bind to.  Easy to resolve.  Go to http://www.no-ip.com/index.php and sign up.  You can get a site from noip that is like yourname.theirdomain.com/.net/.info.  They have cool names like sytes.net and servebeer.org…even workisboring.com.  Other services like dyndns.org also exist and provide the free service as well.

You’ll be able to choose your own top level name…for instance, Ithink.dnsiskinky.com could be your new domain name.  Next download a client from the download tab: https://www.no-ip.com/downloads.php

The linux client is a tar.gz source and is simple to install. Follow the instructions when installing.  You may have to install compilation tools (devel packages like GCC) to install the client.  You now are the proud owner of yoursite.theirsite.com and your IP will ALWAYS update (as long as noip.com is up) each time you log on/sign on/beam up or whatever it is you do.

How does this help you?  Well, if you’re like me, you have a dynamic IP address.  If you connect to the internet via cable, dialup, or dsl…you also have a dynamic IP address.  Dynamic means that it will change from time to time without warning.  So by binding yoursite.theirsite.com to your IP address…you don’t ever have to worry about what IP address you have anymore.  Instead, you’ll always be able to connect using yoursite.theirsite.com.  You can host a webserver using Apache and a virtual host in this style as well (look for another how-to on this subject later) so that everyone can visit a shiny website at yoursite.theirsite.com.

Now you can give your friends/family/dog walker/mailman the address to your new webserver…maybe it’s Ithink.dnsiskinky.com like we used in the example above.  Now when they visit that address in their web browser, your application or web page displays for them.  You also get bragging rights at being the most technical friend/relative/dog walker client/household that everyone knows.  Now let’s cover Windows.

WINDOWS

First you need a free and clear webserver since one is not included by default with windows. You can download Apache for this as well OR try the Abyss Webserver.

Interestingly enough, Abyss is also free!  I ran it while my linux machine was being worked on (bad hard disk…it was a Quantum 200MB drive from 1913…had to upgrade) and it worked just great off of Windows XP.  Download that puppy and install it.  Make sure you read all of the documentation and familiarize yourself with how Abyss does business.

The next step…getting a hostname… is even easier than the linux method because you don’t have to manually install the noip client…they have a windows installer.  Go to http://www.no-ip.com/index.php and sign up.  Choose the domain name you would like (see above examples in Linux section).  Next, download the noip client from the download tab: https://www.no-ip.com/downloads.php but this time choose the windows client.  From there, you’ll be able to install this with a simple double click.  Fill in all of your information (pretty self explanatory) and make sure that it will run with each time you sign on.  You’re set! Your IP will now resolve to the yourchoice.theirhostname.com

CONCLUSION

You don’t have to spend a dime to keep a domain bound to your IP.  This is perfect for the home user who just wants a gallery or homepage.  It’s even good for someone who has a weblog or enthusiast site.  It’s good for someone who wants to be able to find their files and music…setup Jinzora and stream all your music library to yourself anywhere you are!  Setup Amahi and have access to all the goodness it brings.

Please remember, this wouldn’t be good for a business to have.  You will probably violate your ISP’s terms and conditions for using their connection if you tried to run a business this way.

It’s always good form to put a link of the stuff you are using on your website to direct traffic back to your software provider.  When I used noip, I included a noip link on my main page and also an abyss webserver icon as well.  It’s just good form and some companies/software providers necessitate the use of their logo or a link on sites that use their software/code.  Just be a nice person and give a linkback to them.  Good luck! Have fun!

Also, please note that having hosted my own webserver for quite some time (circa 2001) I’ve found Linux and Apache as a combination to be more secure, faster, and more stable than any webserver I’ve hosted on the Windows Platform. I included information on Windows mainly to introduce you to the concept of free and open source software. If you thought getting a webserver for free was great, think about getting a whole operating system! Give it a try, you don’t even have to install it (use a Live CD).

APPENDIX

If your ISP blocks port 80 traffic, your webserver won’t work.  Before deciding that your ISP is blocking however, make sure your firewall has the appropriate rules to allow incoming traffic.  You can do a quick add to IPTABLES in the following manner:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -j DROP

If you’ve opened up the appropriate ports and things still don’t work, it will be safe to say that you’ve determined the ISP is blocking port 80.  How you can get around this conundrum is to switch the listening port on the webserver to a different one and redirect traffic there.

1. See how to do this for IIS Webservers
2. See how to do this for Apache Webservers (normally in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf but your distro may vary.)
3. See how to do this for Abyss Webservers

If you still have problems, drop me a line in the comments section.  I may not be able to answer all questions but I can most likely get you to a person/place/thing that can.  Have fun and thanks for reading!

Host Your Own Domain, Website and Webserver originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on February 13, 2010.

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As noted previously, I’ve been pretty hard pressed lately in my secular job due to migrations and other fun activities happening throughout the past few months.  I did however, get the chance to download Unity 2010 Beta 2 and give it a go.  I had some problems when booting because I was brought to a blank black screen with a mouse pointer no matter what options I passed during boot.  To get by this, I had to follow some IRC advice on #unitylinux  (thanks wile_netbook!) and change to a second tty, kill the Xserver and GDM, followed by executing do-vesa.  It’s hard to try to do it quickly though because GDM will try and restart X and switch init levels on you back to a graphical one.  To get by this, you’ll need to do the following:

Drop into a different tty.  Login as root…if you’re on the liveCD, the password is root.  Execute:

ps aux | more

Make note of the PID for X and GDM.  Write them down…replace the terms below with your PID numbers:

kill -9 PID_for_X && kill -9 PID_for_GDM && do-vesa

You now should see something other than black screen with mouse cursor.  I’m not sure how many systems this affects…but I know my Dell Latitude D630 laptop took it on the chin for this one.  Not a huge problem for a Beta…I mean, a distro can’t be all things to everyone.

Overall though, Unity 2010 Beta 2 is much more solid than Beta 1 was for me after getting by the initial X problem.  Everything works as it should as far as sound, Internet, and wireless are concerned.  I quickly removed PCmanFM and replaced it with Thunar, my file manager of choice.  I removed LXPanel and installed Tint2.  Installed Nitrogen to manage wallpaper.  Installed Parcellite to give me a clipboard,  Installed volwheel to give me a volume applet to control volume.  Installed Pragha to give myself a great music player.  Installed Irssi to allow me to get my IRC fix and put pidgin in play to IM.  I had a usable, customized desktop within about an hour.  And it’s been really solid…just as solid as my Arch Openbox desktop I run at home…which makes me feel good about this Beta.

So what else have I been working on?  I’ve been working on a large (VERY large)  tutorial on file permissions and making use of groups for file/directory access to add to the tutorials section of YALB.  This thing has been in work since last year and I’m attempting to finish it up before the months end to give a good representation of what file permissions in Linux are for and how they work with users and groups.  I’m also going to write up a tutorial on how to customize Unity 2010 Beta 2 into a lightweight Openbox desktop.  So, some good updates hovering on the horizon.  Stay tuned

Unity 2010 Beta 2 Impressions originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on January 15, 2010.

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For those of you who follow me here at Yet Another Linux Blog you might be wondering where I went the last month.  I assure you I’m still here and I still use Linux every single day.  I’m currently running both Arch Linux (32bit) and Unity Linux (64bit) on my main computer.

I’ve been working pretty hard through the holidays at my full time job where I am a server administrator for a medium sized hospital in the U.S.  Recently (in December), I moved 2000+ users from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007.  So, that’s why I’ve been pretty inactive as of late.  As you can imagine working with Microsoft technologies…I always have something to fix and things are always unstable.

I know that some of you might be saying “why not use linux pbased exchange alternatives in your enterprise?” and I’d say, why indeed.  But I inherited this beast and it’s been Exchange since Exchange came out.  Not only that, but the primary application for all departments (ERM app) runs completely on Windows and plugs into Exchange and nothing else.  Talk about vendor lock in eh?  Well, it’s a job.

I used to work with Linux when I worked for rPath but parted ways with them about a year and a half ago when I had to move away to help out after a death in the family.  I was very sad to leave but am very happy with the large pay increase that came with my current position.  However, migrations do take their toll…lots of hours worked and frustrations vented.  Now that I’m over the hump, I’ll be able to get back into a normal swing of things.

For those of you who might be Exchange administrators in your day to day work, I’ve begun blogging about my experiences and setup a community to share tips, tricks, powershell commandlets, and a place to talk shop.  I figure if I have to work with closed source at least I can open source some help.  Find my Exchange blog at http://teknologist.net

Thanks for hanging in there everyone, and sorry for the inactivity.  Now that I’ve hit 6+ years blogging (in December) here I have even more incentive to continue sharing great Linux help with everyone.  I’ve got some good tips directly in the pipeline and here’s to a great 2010!

Status Update for Devnet originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on January 5, 2010.

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Many times in my journeys of distribution hopping, I’ve run across rabid fans and communities [1]

I’ve written a guide for new users on how to understand the vitrol that rabid zealots spew in Linux communities [2]

Those problems are all very easy to see…but these articles deal with only the tangible problems in these areas.  What are the reasons these problems exist?  Is it because of one or two individuals?  Is it mob mentality?  Are people just waking up on the wrong side of the bed?  I don’t think these reasons get down to the core of what the real problem is…the hidden problem…of zealots in the Linux community.

The Hidden Problem

The hidden problem is Narcissism…people think that what they have to say about a given subject makes the most sense and is 100% correct (or at least more correct than others’ POV) and it’s one that is hard for people to talk about…because anyone that writes or blogs has to be a little bit narcissistic.  People don’t like talking about problems they’re guilty of.  I know I am guilty of it…and I’m still going to talk about it.

With social networking riding a tidal wave right now, the era of the narcissist moves on, unhindered, on the interwebs.  Subscribe to my twitter feed…what I have to says in 140 characters or less is a MUST READ!  My facebook page will keep you updated on EVERY little thing I decide to post unless you edit me out of your news feed.  Sites cater to the egocentric tendencies of anyone plugged in.  So what happens when you get a bunch of narcissists together sharing a common goal?  “My distribution is THE BEST out there and no other point of view matters!”  That’s right, you get zealotry in the purest form.

This has slowly begun leaking into Linux communities during the past few years as Linux is tried out by more and more people and becomes more available to people who aren’t technologically advanced.  Bottom line is, more people are trying Linux now than ever before.  This makes the user pool larger and more diverse.  Where there are more people though, there are more narcissists…and birds of a feather flock together.

Take narcissism with a twist of mob mentality and the powder keg in Linux communities is set to blow.  The zealots seethe and team about in forums, IRC, and on blogs across the internet looking for a place to show how right they are and how wrong the person posting information is.

Oh, I admit it…I have a narcissist streak in me…I want people to read this blog.  I want people to follow me on twitter.  I want people to pay attention to what I say…it’s part of being a blogger…but I don’t think that my distribution of choice is any better than yours.  In fact, I know it’s not.  Just like my car isn’t any better than the one you drive and my clothes are so last year and aren’t as good as yours.  I offset my narcissism with realism…I understand that what I think isn’t the only point of view out there…I don’t think I’m 100% right all the time.

I also don’t go out on the web and try to find others who think my view is the best view and then try to push my egocentric viewpoint to others.  I don’t create a community of zombie thinkers who all believe my viewpoint is the best out there.  I’m not forming any mobs for my mentality.  I’m not flocking together with birds of a feather.  I’m a part time ego-narcissist I guess.

The first step is admitting that you have a problem.  The second step is having some good old fashioned manners, respect for others, and above all…tolerance and realism.

Solution to the Problem

When you’re standing in line at a bank, would you cut in front of someone in the line?   Most likely you wouldn’t.  Personal conflict is something we as humans avoid most of the time.  So, why is it when you’re driving you don’t mind cutting someone off and do it regularly?  It’s because the personal aspect of that motion has been replaced into an impersonal one…the car becomes a protection from that personal conflict that would happen if you had done the same thing in a bank line.

To fix the problem this presents on the web and in Linux communities, think about others (not yourself) and in doing so, become less narcissistic.  Apply this thinking to commenting and blogging and facebooking and tweeting.  Imagine that you are face to face with people saying the things you’re typing.  If you wouldn’t say things like that in a face to face situation, don’t say them.  Remember that tolerance of other viewpoints makes you a better person…AND smarter.  How?  Albert Einstein is largely considered one of the smartest humans to ever walk the earth.  He often gathered with other intelligent people to debate and discuss various topics that interested him.  In doing so, he caused those he debated with “to sharpen and refine their understanding of the philosophical and scientific implications of their own theory.”  Remember that everyone does NOT have to share your viewpoint…what works for you may not work for them.

Lastly, no one cares if you sat down in your office or are eating a peanut butter sandwich.  We subscribe to feeds and twitter accounts for meat and potatoes posts…not 1 liners that tell us you’re in the bathroom of a bakery on 96th street.  So, you zealots out there…you know who you are…take this opportunity to reflect on yourself (your favorite subject) and try to replace your narcissism with realism, tolerance, and good old fashioned manners.

And no I don’t think any zealots will be converted by this post…it’s more of a rant than anything else…and rants are one of the reasons why I have a blog   Well that and because what I say is more important than anyone else and my viewpoint is 100% correct 100% of the time of course.

Zealots and Narcissism originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on December 21, 2009.

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I’ve been pretty busy lately with theme design for the Unity Linux project.  The following pages were updated:

1. Unity-Linux.org
2. Planet.Unity-Linux.org
3. A new forum theme called SMFPress @ forum.unity-linux.org

Uniformity was the key ingredient to the stylings.  I’m trying to match everything to the front page theme at the main site page.  Using the color pallete from that site, I worked on creating a theme for our forum and then gave planet unity a facelift as well.  We’ll test out the planet capability a bit longer (see how updates go) before we ultimately conclude to use it.  However, the forum and main site are finished products.

Let me know if you find any bugs or have any problems with the theme.  If all goes well I’ll start on a wiki theme for our documentation site

Unity Linux Theme Refreshes originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on November 9, 2009.

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I installed a bare bones Arch Linux system today and took a screenshot.  With no graphics utilities installed, I needed a way to convert a PNG to a GIF for a Simple Machines forum template thumbnail.  I figured I’d use a command line utility to help me and ImageMagick is installed by default on most distributions.  A quick read through the ImageMagick manpage and I found the convert command and thought I’d share it with everyone.  Use convert in the following fashion:  convert [input-options] input-file [output-options] output-file

convert SMFPress.png -channel Alpha -threshold 80% -resize 120x120 thumbnail.gif

This did a quick, same-size conversion with little loss for me to display the thumbnail online.  For more information on the options I used and other options that I didn’t use, take a peek at the ImageMagick Online Help Page for convert.

Convert PNG to GIF via Command Line originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on November 6, 2009.

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Most, if not all, top distributions of Linux ship a live CD that allows an end user to preview the operating system without installing it.

Foresight Linux is the exception.

Now, this isn’t because they don’t WANT to have a Live CD…they do.  The problem is that rPath, the creators of rBuilder Online, have discontinued the Live CD image creation type.

There was no announcement…no news posting…no clue dart thrown toward Foresight for this discontinuation.  There was only a comment on a single bug in the rPath issue tracker just this past May…Formally discontinued…which in my opinion, is a HUGE mistake as far as community goes.  Why? Because a community is a solid base on which to stand for any distribution or toolset for open source.  rPath has essentially dismissed a feature that the community would find valuable and in the process alienated anyone who finds this feature valuable or desirable.  But I’m not here to talk about whether or not people want to develop their own distributions on rBuilder Online using rPath tools nor the incentive to do so…I’m talking about Foresight. 

So, what incentive does rPath have to help Foresight by fixing it?  Not much…I’m sure there will be those that argue: “rPath has customers and their first allegiance needs to be to them” and those people would be right.  But can’t the Foresight community pick up the torch for Live CD building  on rBO and develop it as a community effort?  Can’t a license be found that it can be released under that would prevent forking?  Can’t it be modularized as a ‘plug-in’? I don’t pretend to know the answer to those questions…I just think that Foresight will continue to suffer as they have been for many, many months now with respect to not having a Live CD.

I’m sure that there will also be those out there saying “but Foresight has a bunch of Virtualized Images to choose from!! No one really cares about a Live CD!!” and I’d say you’re halfway correct.  Developers don’t really care about a Live CD…but those that Foresight attempted to attract…the end user…they DO care about having something they can ‘try before they buy’.  It is my belief that Foresight would be a crap-ton more popular if they had a Live CD.

So What Solutions Are There?

I don’t think rPath will suddenly fix the broken Live CD creation in rBO.  I don’t think they’ll release the code anytime soon (though this is more likely than a fix).  So in the meantime, what if Foresight helped out with LiveCD project that recently was taken over by Unity Linux?  Both Unity and Foresight are Red Hat like distributions and use similar file structures and OS organization.  I think that if Foresight were able to integrate LiveCD onto the distribution, a huge niche would be filled.

Where to Start?

Being involved both with Foresight Linux and Unity Linux gives me a unique perspective on what areas of collaboration could be developed.  One thing is for sure…having both distro development teams onboard would be a huge boon to LiveCD development…and Foresight could suck in SRPMs quite easily from Unity to hit the ground running right away.

I am by no means offering to be the head of this project because I can’t even begin to know where it would start or finish.  I’m just offering a workaround to a problem I’ve seen Foresight have for longer than it should have.  I know the Unity Linux guys would welcome anyone wanting to get involved with helping LiveCD development.  Would Foresight be open to this?  I can’t answer.  I hope so…Foresight needs a Live CD if it hopes to attract more people to it…and that’s something I’m keen on seeing.  Is this something you’d like to see as well?

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

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• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/25/svn-strikes-back-a-serious-vulnerability-found/
  Interesting note for SVN users/admins

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In honor of today, which is International Talk like a Pirate Day, my blog now comes in pirate flavor thanks to a very interesting plugin.

So have a look around!  Some posts are pretty silly sounding and others are downright hilarious.  And have a great day or you’ll probably have to walk the plank somewhere

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I previously wrote about a possible “rebasing” of Foresight Linux on the Fedora platform. This conjecture was a bit premature it seems as I am completely wrong on this being a possibility The best part about me being absolutely wrong on this is that there is still going to be benefits for Foresight and Fedora even without the rebase.

Foresight is toying with the idea of having a sub-project (completely separate from Foresight Linux base) that it has tentatively called ‘boots, a Fedora remix‘ (a play on Dora in Fedora for those of you with kids).

What would happen is that mirrorball, a tool from rPath that ’sucks in’ repositories, would pull in a Fedora repository into a separate Foresight repository.  From there, it is fully consumable by any product/project that is hosted on rBuilder Online from rPath.  Conary really is one of the most innovative package managers on the planet and I’ve mentioned it once or twice before (never got around to part II on one of those though).  The ability to fully suck in a RPM repository is already being done with CentOS and Scientific Linux on rBuilder Online…even Ubuntu is currently being done as well…so we have proof that it is totally possible.  Once imported, Conary takes over the management of said packages.

So what does this give Foresight?  A few things:

1. Testing of packages in 2 communities
2. Developer eyes/chatter in 2 communities
3. The ability of Foresight to cherry pick packages from a large base
4. Compare and contrast for packages from 2 different sources to track down bugs

So, as I said, I was wrong initially and I hope this clears up what Foresight plans to do.  A sub-project will be started that imports the Fedora repository changing them from (rpm to Conary) allowing Foresight to both test and cherry pick packages from a larger base hopefully freeing up a bit more time for Foresight architects.  Phew!  What a mouthful, run-on-sentence that was!

Why Conary?  How does this help Fedora?

I know some of you may be asking Why Conary?  What does it have over RPM that Foresight should suck in a repositoroy and change it to Conary packages?  The reason this is an absolute necessity is because the tools on which Foresight are built (rBuilder Online) works with Conary only…that means ISO generation and repository hosting are all mandated to be Conary based.

The other interesting part about this is that Conary blends version control with package management.  It deals with changesets as packages.  Imagine SVN…you have a local changeset that  you’re working on and the version inside the SVN repository differs from that.  You can then diff the state of your local copy to see how it differs from the remote copy.  This allows you to see the changes you’ve made and allows you to see what code may be broken.  Also, commits are numbered automagically so that you don’t have to worry about breaking things much because you can rollback to a previous known good state.

The same is true with Conary…you can rollback to previous known good states.  You can also diff each changeset locally with the remote repository.  Now imagine this with Fedora packages…if something is broken, chances are Foresight will find a fix for it much more quickly than someone in Fedora…a single command can diff the previously known good version with the broken version and find out the shortcoming.  Or perhaps a known good verion in Foresight that isn’t Fedora based might be used to diff the Fedora RPM version and find out the differences in them.  In all, it’s going to help developers track down problems faster.  This helps Fedora…they now have a small number of Foresight developers who will be working with hundreds of popular Fedora RPMs looking to see if they work or are broken.

Most of the benefit will be measurable in Foresight because they’ll be able to use just about any package Fedora creates…but the Foresight community is FULL of very capable developers…guys that really know what they’re doing.  If they can make this a collaborative effort Fedora will gain exceptionally smart developers as well…even if testing packages on a different platform, they’ll have eyeballs on these packages and if a fix is found or made for them they will definitely go upstream to Fedora.

Hopefully, this puts things right from my initial wrong.  I don’t claim to be an insider for Foresight…I just know a lot of the people involved and ask questions a lot….I also pay attention to the developer mailing list.  If you have any questions, please leave a comment and I’ll attempt to track down answers for them

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I previously blogged about how to add color to the ‘ls’ command utilizing an config file and alias.  I then stumbled across a nugget of wisdom from a Foresight Linux user on the developers mailing list who gave a handy command that remedies some problems with missing color in a terminal.

On some distributions, the system-wide /etc/DIR_COLORS* files are removed or not present.  This results in no colors being given inside of a terminal when looking for color directories and filenames.  If you find yourself in this boat, try the following command to re-populate this setting:

devnet-> cd ~/ devnet-> dircolors -p >.dircolors

This should create a default profile for colors for your session if it hasn’t been done or was accidentally removed.  For more information on the dircolors command try ‘man dircolors’.  Please also note that dircolors command uses the environmental variable LS_COLORS to set your session.

For more information on LS_COLORS and how it pertains to the terminal/shell/cli/prompt, there are a few blog posts that do an excellent job explaining here, here and here.

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• Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage | Backblaze Blog
  This is pretty interesting...I wouldn't mind doing this if I were a startup.

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• Woof the puppy linux builder
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• Make Free VoIP Calls from Google Voice - Google Voice - Lifehacker

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Foresight and Fedora (aka “boots, a fedora remix”)

Last week it was reported by LWN and a few other Linux news sites that Foresight Linux may employ a change of direction…that is, create a spinoff project that places the Conary package manager onto a Fedora Linux base. Michael Johnson, Director of Operating Systems at rPath (which maintains the Conary based package manager Foresight uses) summed up his post nicely:

“I think that Foresight needs to be based on an upstream distro that is regularly fully updated and refreshed, and that is maintained by distro specialists with experience and expertise that is just plain missing within the Foresight development community. That distro needs to be imported into a Conary repository; that will allow Foresight to continue to use Conary to manage the process of building a set of consistent modifications relative to that upstream distro, providing a true rolling release. That would allow Foresight developers to concentrate on only the problems inherent in integrating the very latest development source against a recent base that is relatively close to the basis on which the software is maintained.”

Michael also said that it made sense to do this based on Fedora because Foresight is very Fedora-like in filesystem and the way that things are setup and handled in the guts of the operating system (paraphrasing from what I remember of IRC discussion).  Also, in a comment on the LWN thread, Michael states that Foresight, if spinning off with Fedora, would still make use of “Conary, rMake, rBuilder, rBuild, and other rPath technology” and would still use Conary as its package manager which means…it wouldn’t leverage rpm and yum to keep things up to date on it.

An independent project that Foresight maintains sounds like a HUGE undertaking…(even though I’m assured repeatedly by developers from Foresight that it won’t be because it’s “automatic”).  I’ve seen automagic things in the past that won’t cause a lot of work turn out to be quite a bit of work-that-is-not-work.  I find this especially odd when the main complaint is that there aren’t enough OS specialists around…it sounds a bit too large to undertake.  This project actually sounds like it possibly would usurp Foresight Main (Foresight Proper…Foresight Linux…whatever you call it) which is based on the stable rPath Linux and not on cutting edge Fedora like the “boots remix” would be.  Therein lies the problem.  The”boots, a fedora remix” would consistently be ahead of Foresight in development if the project is started and makes progress.  Foresight will continually lag behind it.  Can a 100% guarantee be given that Foresight can snipe packages from “boots, a fedora remix” that would always work?  If not, what does Foresight gain by maintaining the project/spinoff?

I think Foresight won’t be able to maintain an independent project based on Fedora along side of the main Foresight Linux project.  Sure, they may be able to at first…but then what happens when things break?  Is one person responsible? 2? more than 2?  I think instead of having a separate project, Foresight might want to completely base off of Fedora.  This topic is extremely unpopular with Foresight developers though.

Whether or not Foresight adopts “boots a Fedora remix”  is yet to be decided.  It will be set before the Foresight Linux Council at their next meeting.  Hopefully, they take into consideration the amount of manpower a separate project like this would encompass and maybe consider the benefits of adopting Fedora completely as a base for Foresight.

On a similar note, António Meireles, a lead developer for Foresight Linux, has posted what direction he would like to see for Foresight Linux 3…the future major release for Foresight.  With improved underlying architecture that is more inline with Fedora…he may be looking along the same lines that my post here is.  Whatever the case may be, it’s obvious that Foresight is starting to show a flurry of both interest and activity which is a benefit to it.

So where does this leave Fedora?  They’ll benefit from having a lot of knowledgeable developers in Foresight and a few engineers from rPath working with a Fedora based project.  Foresight has a great upstream relationship with the projects it encompasses…like Gnome and rPath.  I would imagine this continued professionalism and cooperation will continue should Foresight base on Fedora.

ClarkConnect Becomes ClearOS

In other news, some of you may or may not know that ClarkConnect will become ClearOS and will be completely open source.  The Clear Foundation will be sponsoring the development of ClearOS which is ClarkConnect re-branded with improvements.  See the full announcement here.  Also, a Forum Announcement Here.  This brings a lot to the table including renewed commitments to documentation, community, and the operating system as a whole.  The change is set to happen in the late part of 2009.

So what does this have to do with Yet Another Linux Blog?  A few years ago, I wrote a review of ClarkConnect 3.2 for home users.  It was well received and still gets many hits even today.  Since I’ve used ClarkConnect since version 2.1 and continue to use it today for my home network…who better to take a look at how ClearOS will measure up?

With this in mind, I contacted the guys over at the Clear Foundation and they agreed to let me blog a bit about some of the changes and improvements that will be happening with ClearOS over the next few months.  So look for more exclusive information from ClearOS in the near future.  They’ve also asked if I’d be interested in helping out with some community endeavors they will have going for ClarkConnect and ClearOS users.  Exciting stuff!  ClarkConnect has really needed this shot in the arm for about the last 2 versions…they lost a couple of really good websites with FAQ’s on them.  It’ll be great to get the community involved with this fantastic Home Server distribution.

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Let’s bust some myths today because a majority of KDE 4 haters out there have the same reasons for hating it.  I’m pretty sick of seeing posts and news articles about “why I don’t like KDE 4″ and then seeing that the real reason the person is upset is because they don’t spend an extra few moments trying to figure things out…aka lazy and ignorant.

KDE 4 was NOT feature complete when it came out in the 4.0 version.  It IS feature complete (in my opinion) with the 4.2 and 4.3 versions.

Ignorant Reason #1 – I hate Dolphin and I Can’t Have Konqueror Anymore

Wrong, you can use Konqueror.  You don’t have to use Dolphin, but you’ll be missing out on a lot of useful stuff.  Tell you what, now that you know that you don’t have to use Dolphin, why not use KDE 4 and give Dolphin a try every so often…you can still use Konqueror in the meantime and now that you know you can, you don’t have to go around trumpeting that you can’t to everyone who will listen and saying what a piece of crap it is.  Forget that you’ll lose nepomuk and the semantic desktop by dismissing dolphin.  Don’t know what that is?  Let me google that for you…

I sure hope this solves many peoples beef with KDE 4 right out of the gate because this is one of the reasons I find all over the web.  I really think the problem is the lethargic attitude that prevails from die hard KDE 3 fans.  Honestly guys, give Dolphin a try…it’s really a pretty decent file manager and is light years ahead of any other DE file manager.

Ignorant Reason #2 – I Can’t Have Folders or Files on the Desktop Anymore

Wrong.  Right click on the desktop and choose “Desktop Settings”.  Select the drop down menu “Type” and select “Folder View”.  Your desktop now has folders, icons, and all other such things that you may want to clutter it with.

If you want to switch back to NOT using the folders and instead use widgets…right click on the desktop and choose “Folder View Settings” >> Select Type >> Desktop.

To top it off, if you select “Folder View”, the folders and icons act exactly like you would expect them to in KDE 3.  Not only can you select to show your desktop folders…but you can even show a folder like /home as your default desktop…show any folder you have access to, it’s up to you.  Yay right?  I give it a golf clap.  Let’s continue thinking out of the box and bust a few more myths.

Ignorant Reason #3 – I Can’t Move My Panel to the Top, Right, or Left.

Wrong.  Click the settings icon on the right hand side of your panel (it looks like a comma on the far right side of the panel).  The settings area pops open.  On that bar is something called “Screen Edge”.  Now, it seems pretty self explanatory that when you hover over the top of it, it gives you the 4 arrow icon that means you can drag and drop the panel wherever you want to…and being named “screen edge” seems to imply “which screen edge…left, right, bottom, or top…do I want this thing to appear on”.  Then again, I can see how screen edge can confuse people when you open the settings of a panel that resides on the screen edge.  Ok, maybe I can’t.  Well, at least you know you can move your panel around right?  Golf clap again?  Who plays golf anyway?

Ignorant Reason #4 – I Can’t Resize Folders and Files in Dolphin

Wrong again.  Are you sensing a pattern yet?  Open Dolphin, go to the directory where you want to increase the folder size.  Hold the control key down…now roll your mouse wheel and be amazed as the folder size increases.  Invest all your money in Yet Another Linux Blog stock and move to Nicaragua.  Golf clap on your way to expedia.com for purchasing tickets.

Ignorant Reason #5 – I Like to Use My Own Color Schemes…I Can’t Do That in KDE4.

System Settings

KDE4 absolutely allows you to create your own color schemes.  It really helps to look around inside the system settings tool.  Go to your Kmenu >> System >> System Settings.  Once there, look for Appearance.  You can also use the top search

Appearance Colors

bar to look for any term…so if you were to type “color” there, you’d see that Appearance & Display are returned.

Click on Appearance and you’re taken into a wonderful world of color and granular control of said color.  Change anything you’d like….go crazy.  I hear pink is the new green…or is it green that was the new pink?  Whatever.  The only limits are your imagination.  For those without imagination.

Ignorant Reason #6 – The Default Menu is Cludgy and Different and I Can’t Find Anything in KDE4

Now there is no right or wrong here…you could be right depending on who you talk to.  However, the nice part about KDE4 is that they include the previous menu for you.  Right click the Kmenu and choose “Switch to Classic Menu Style”.  Now your menu is the exact same as it would be in KDE 3.5.10.  Please remember that answers are out there…you just have to search for them.

Closing the Door on Myths

Hopefully, this closes the door on many misconceptions helps people who are ignorant to the leaps and bounds that KDE4 has made just in the past few months.  I’ve grown very tired of journalists and bloggers taking swipes at KDE4 and spreading misinformation about it.  If you have any questions about how to do something in KDE4, please leave a comment below and let’s work together in finding a solution.

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Heard at the water cooler recently in my almost all Windows workplace was something that took me by surprise.  We have a couple of highly trained individuals here in Networking.  We’re a Cisco shop, so if you know how confusing that can be, you know that not everyone can just jump right into one of those networks and know what they’re doing.  These individuals were having a conversation outside of my cube so I didn’t inject myself into the conversation.  But, I did ask myself, is this what Linux and Open Source is up against?  If so, we still have a long way to go.

It seems an external site was attempting VPN access into our corporate network.  The problem the external site was hitting was that they couldn’t initiate a session FROM their network…but someone from our location could initiate a connection TO their network.  They used a Linux box to provide them VPN, Firewall, and proxy services.  Now, any Linux admin worth his or her salt would have immediately known that being able to VPN back into a site but not VPN out of a site means that the firewall doesn’t have the right ports open and/or forwarded.  This should have been an easy fix…but the guys at this external location evidently didn’t posses this knowledge.

Instead of blame falling on the improper configuration, open source was blamed as a whole.  My colleagues stated that those “free tools people use never stack up to paid ones” and that “you get what you pay for…and if you don’t pay for it you don’t get it”.  So according to these guys:

• Free = poorly designed, less than good software
• Paid = better designed, wicked awesome software

Which of course, you and I know is a bunch of hooey.  And this is what some of the smartest guys I’ve had a chance to work with state about Linux and open source.  Makes me really wonder if they know their Cisco stuff is often times Linux and open source as well.  I guess maybe I should tell them sometime.  Either way, Linux still has a long way to go to garner the acceptance it should have.

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[Linux@Work linux cisco dumb experience open source ]
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