The prayers of thousands have been answered - Ubuntu now comes in a KDE edition! The folks behind the push for KDE have just released their first bunch of amalagamated bits for us folks to burn on shiny coasters. Live CDs here and Install CDs here.

You can follow the status of KUbuntu on this wiki page. As you can see, there’s still a lot to do. So step up and contribute!

Now for some personal rambling… as those of you blessed with a sharp memory for inconsequential details will recall, I’ve been going through distro pains lately. After the disaster with Gentoo, Mandrake 10.2 beta too failed to work for me. So I finally gave in and went with Ubuntu.

When I say gave in - it’s gave in to GNOME and not Ubuntu

I’ve upgraded to Hoary and have been running GNOME for some five days now. After spending some time configuring issues (mostly multimedia related) and getting to know GNOME - I am finally settling in and even beginning to like GNOME.

Did I just say that - I like GNOME?!

Anyway, so here I am - all settled and they have to come out and announce KUbuntu. How’s a guy supposed to avoid temptation!

It’s a conspiracy, I say!

BTW, I personally hate the word KUbuntu. I would much rather go with ‘Ubuntu - KDE Edition.’ What do you folks say?

There’s a nice article in Linux Journal describing Unison, my mostest favouritest file syncing utility. The article is all about the command line version but I suggest you get the GUI version. It’s a tacky GTK 1 something GUI but it’s just click - click - click and works like a charm.

Ben Maurer has been talking about making Gnome run lighter, hopefully making it a wee bit faster. His latest post has some interesting notes on why simple apps like gstreamer, clock, etc hog memory. If you are interested in contributing for the larger cause (making the world a better place, better of humanity ) , head out here and find what you can do.

Can’t tell DRI from DRM? Don’t know how Mesa relates to GLX? Help is at hand in the form of this short but excellent guide that will help make the X11 alphabet soup more palatable for everyone.

(via fooishbar)

It’s been some time since my last posting here. I’ll give you a minute to think up an excuse on my behalf. Here are some to get you started: was travelling, was working, was trapped in a Faraday cage with no radio communication with the outside world possible!

The SuSE 9.1 install on my trusty IBM Thinkpad R40 has been showing signs of aging. There has been too many rpms obtained from too many different sources, there’s been too many self-compiled installs and frankly, it’s been too long on my system now! It’s time for a change!

With those thoughts, I set about the business of updating my system. First instinct was to just go with SuSE 9.2 and enjoy the professional, polished and updated version of Linux that I’ve come to love. Unfortunately, I couldn’t catch hold of a DVD writer to burn the iso image that SuSE provides. No problems, we’ll do a network install after booting off a mini-iso.

So I head to my apartment mate’s room and demand the SuSE 9.2 CD he used not more than a week ago. ‘It’s at work,’ he said. ‘Damn!’ I said, ‘What else’ve you got?’ ‘A Gentoo Live CD,’ he said without thinking.

We looked at each other. Neither of us had so far dared to tread the path that Gentoo preaches. But he had said it now and there was no taking those words back. Gentoo it would be.

So we downloaded the install guide, yanked the wireless router off, connected the cable modem to the laptop and booted from the CD.

A brief note of congratulations is in order her for the Gentoo folks who’ve created some very excellent documentation. We followed the guide and formatted the partitions without pain. Having decided to go the Gentoo way, we decided to go the whole way and started with a stage 1 tarball. An emerge --sync followed by an emerge system and the machine was happily chugging away baking the best of open source goodness.

82 packages to go at 4 in the morning. It was time to sleep.

10:28 am. Build stopped because gcc can’t create an executable.

What the #*$@!

How the hell did it build those 50 odd packages before coming up with this error? Some googling later, I find out that my build toolchain probably broke itself in the process of building itself. Confused? Gentoo is full of circular logic fun!

Some folks opined that stage 1 installs are prone to breakages due to circular dependencies. One suggestion was to downgrade gcc and bootstrap again. Another was to go with a stage 3 install. But having come this far, I didn’t want to do a stage3! I wanted my full fix - full optimizations! Especially the -march=pentium-m part from GCC 3.4!

Then I came across this rather elaborate Stage 1 NPTL on a Stage 3 Tarball guide.

… we need to pause for a moment and think about what we’ve done. We’ve just used GCC 3.3.4 and a toolchain built with GCC 3.3.4 to compile GCC 3.4.3. Before we spend any more time building our Gentoo system we should rebuild the entire toolchain, re-compiling it so that we have GCC 3.4.3 that was built with GCC 3.4.3. … The result will be a 3.4.3 tooklit, compiled by a 3.4.3 toolkit that was built with a 3.3.4 toolkit. Clear as mud?

If that didn’t set me thinking, thoughts of having to configure udev, hotplug, powersave and everything else by myself, most certainly stopped me in my tracks! I am too lazy for all that!

Gentoo is certainly a no go. And I can’t go back to SuSE 9.2 now ‘cos I am hooked on to the idea of compiling KDE 3.4 with gcc 3.4 with -march=pentium-m! Time to consider something else.

I looked around and found that Mandrake’s upcoming 10.2 release has everything that I need: kernel 2.6.10 and gcc 3.4! So off I go to my local mirror and download and burn a mini-iso.

Boot the system and start the install. Click, click, click till I reach partitioning setup. I configure everything with the flair of a seasoned pro.

“No hdlist found”

“Damn!”

Turns out, my local mirror is half-way through a 10.2beta2 -> 10.2beta3 sync. And this Mandrake boot CD I just made won’t work with 10.2beta3 found on other mirrors. Now I won’t give in and just burn another CD from an updated mirror ‘cos I am cheap like that

So here I am. Waiting for a Mandrake 10.2 Beta 2 CD 1 iso image to download so I can extract it’s contents and install from the hard-disk.

And posting my travails from XP because there’s no Linux on my laptop any more!

No, not from us! It is from Novell for sysadmins left in the lurch after NT’s end of life announcement. Watch here.

If your DVD movie is interlaced and you find setting up deinterlacing filters in xine / totem / kaffeine / mplayer too cryptic, help is at hand!

Just use MPlayer’s pullup inverse telecine video filter:

$mplayer -vf pullup dvd://1

and enjoy the clean picture!

A computer lab for kids of ages 8-10 that runs entirely on Ubuntu? Too cool to pass!

More at Tim Riley’s blog.

(via 88 MPH)

I am sure Gaim lover Ashwin will love to hear that Gaim is slated for a major version bump, all the way to 2.0! From the CVS Changelog:

Gaim: The Pimpin’ Penguin IM Client that’s good for the soul!
version 2.0.0
New Features:

• Insane rewrite of all code dealing with buddy and account status, away messages, away states, online/offline, etc. Huge thanks to Christian, Dave West, and Daniel Atallah
• Beautiful new default sounds (Brad Turcotte)

[snip]

Inspired by Nat’s Beagle show-off parade, Andrew Overholt has made a very nice flash demo of Eclipse+Java based GNOME applications development. If this flash business keeps up, we’ll have to create a new category called screenshoots to go with screenshots!