Author: devnet

devnet has been a project manager for a Fortune 500 company, a Unix and Linux administrator, a Technical Writer, a System Analyst, and a Systems Engineer during his 20+ years working with Technology.

New Project: Unity

I’ve been working on a new project the last few days.  We’re calling it Unity.  What it will be is a new Linux distribution that takes an incremental approach to desktop Linux.  It will provide a central core and use the mklivecd scripts that PCLinuxOS uses and it will provide a base from which to build just about any desktop you want out there.

Hopefully, this building block approach will work for us.  Currently, we’re operating behind closed doors.  Soon though, we’ll have some kind of public face to this thing.  When we do, I’ll post follow-up information.

Those of you that follow me on the web know that I recently gave up control of MyPCLinuxOS, the community projects site for PCLinuxOS.  I cited personal reasons for giving this control up.  One of those personal reasons was to become involved with this new endeavor.  I hope to help make this into something great!

Self Musings

With Yet Another Linux Blog silently turning 4 years old this past December, I began to examine what I’ve posted over the years and have tried to take a step back to examine what I’ve accomplished here…first, from a design perspective.  Please understand that these links go to the internet archive so they may take a while to load:

Next, I looked at some of my most popular posts.  Most of these were written quite a while ago.  2 of them are reviews, one is an opinion piece and the last 2 are how-to’s:

And then, there are the most commented articles.  The winner here is Ubuntu articles…but that’s a dubious honor in my opinion as most of the comments weren’t particularly friendly:

  • Why Ubuntu ISN’T for New Users – Done in 2006 and why I felt at the time, Ubuntu didn’t offer new users the best out of box experience.
  • Ubuntu 5.04 Final Rating – An experiment where I took my wife and made her use Linux for a week and give each distro a rating.  Ubuntu bombed on this one.  Of course, the community came back with lots of name calling and “why didn’t you do this dummy” to help her as a new user.  To this day she despises Ubuntu for the comments left there by their community members.
  • Enlightenment e17 Review – Once again, guest editor Misunderstruck’s review of e17.  Lot’s of positive feedback and some questions.
  • Is Ubuntu CE Needed? – I questioned what the point of having a separate distro versus a Meta-Package.  If you recall the release of Ubuntu CE, you’ll remember that there was some controversy surrounding the motivation of doing this as well as a quick release of Ubuntu Satanic Edition.
  • Why Open Source Isn’t Succeeding – My take on what made open source fall short of achieving its goal…in 2004
  • Why Open Source Isn’t Succeeding, Part II – A follow up and clarification of the first article…done so boneheads that “don’t read too good” could understand “more better” what the article intended.

It’s been many years, many reviews, many editorials, and many blog revisions.  Through it all, I’ve tried to stay focused on what matters to me…sharing knowledge with others.  I don’t have any plans to stop blogging and am looking at starting another blog soon that covers Windows administration stuff as well (I work in a mixed environment of Unix/Linux/Windows now as a server admin).  I feel that even if the software isn’t free, the knowledge on how to use it should be.  Thanks for reading!

Laptop Multimedia Keys and PCLinuxOS 2009

I installed PCLinuxOS 2009 recently on a Dell D630 Latitude and was disappointed to see that I couldn’t get the hardware volume (up/down/mute) buttons didn’t work out of the box.  I thought a bit about kmilo, a program that was previously used for laptop buttons (thinkpad buttons though) and I searched around a bit inside the KDE Control Center for keyboard shortcuts to see if I could assign the keys manually.  However, I couldn’t find any volume setting inside this menu.

Then, it hit me, I had remembered seeing volume settings before…inside kmix; there is an area for assigning global shortcuts for volume and mute!  This should work for anyone running KDE 3.5.8 and above (I think).  Left click on Kmix in your tray and choose the mixer button.  From there, choose Settings >> Configure Global Shortcuts.  Now assign the volume up, down, and mute keys manually by clicking in the blank and pressing the hardware button.  This should work for a majority of people out there.  For me though, this didn’t work.  When pressing the keys, nothing happened.  I thought I was doomed.

I researched a bit more and found that installing a program called keytouch would allow me to, at the very least, program my keyboard in any way I wanted to program it.  I opened Synaptic and installed keytouch and keytouch-editor.  After install, I went to Kmenu >> System >> Configuration >> Hardware >> Keytouch.  It prompted me to choose my keyboard.  Since it didn’t have the Dell D630, I chose the closest thing which was the Dell D800.  I closed the application and now the volume buttons and mute button works!  Keytouch also has the ability to manually edit and also to import keytouch ‘schemas’ to give maximum flexibility.  Hopefully, this helps some of you out there that cannot get your multimedia keys working in PCLinuxOS and KDE to work!

PCLinuxOS 2009 Not Diggworthy

It’s really sad when the Alpha release of Ubuntu makes the front page of Digg.com for Linux/Unix… but the release, after two years of development, of PCLinuxOS 2009…a distribution that challenged Ubuntu for the #1 ranking at distrowatch in 2007-8…goes completely without being dug at all.  Well, to be fair, it was dugg by 18 people at the time of this post.  This just goes to show you, all those people that accused PCLinuxOS of “fixing” the distrowatch.com rankings last year may have been a bit paranoid and way off base.  Just the same, viral websites have an observable slant when it comes to things that are seen as cool so I really shouldn’t be suprised.  I just wish that distributions that deserve praise got it when they deserve it…and that more got it more often for what they do.

World of Goo Linux Port Available

I previously spoke about the game “World of Goo” a few months ago on Yet Another Linux Blog.  I was eagerly anticipating the release of a Linux port of the game and attempted to drum up support for the release of the game for the Linux platform.  All the efforts of bloggers everywhere has paid off.  Today, 2d Boy, the gaming studio behind “World of Goo” have released a Linux version of the game!

This game is not freeware…it is 20 dollars to purchase.  it also was one of the most pirated games of 2008 on the Windows platform.  I myself will be legally purchasing the game for Linux in a move to show the developers that free software and open source geeks aren’t just about getting all things free and also to let my money do the talking for Linux as a viable game platform.  If they took the time to make a Linux version of the game (I played the demo on Windows…it’s FANTASTIC) then I would readily buy it for 20 dollars from them.  Thanks 2d Boy!

UPDATE:  2dBoy posted a few updates to their release blog posting saying that Linux sales of the game has broken records for them and has paid for them more than other platforms.  They also state “There is a market for Linux games after all :))”

Broken Sound in Foresight Linux 2.0.?

Sound is broken in Foresight Linux 2.0.4 and above.  This is a sporadic problem…but I know that most HDA Intel Sigmatel chipsets are having this problem (like the one on my Dell D630 Latitude).  It is my understanding that this is a kernel based problem…and if it is, the last 4 released kernels onto Foresight Linux 2 stable branch have not fixed sound.

I was able to backpedal to the 2.6.27.5-3 kernel and had all of my sound problems automagically fix.  I’m not sure what the problem is, nor how to fix it…but I do know that I’m not the only one with sound problems as of late.  I also know that no one is motivated to fix things right now…as a developer in Foresight, I have heard nothing about a fix for this problem and even my own bug postings have went without comment.

I am attempting to draw attention to this through this post and also by creating a rollup bug listing for all sound related problems in Foresight Linux 2.  If you have a problem, please visit http://issues.foresightlinux.org and file an issue there and drop a comment on my roll-up issue FL-1931 letting me know you’d like to link up to it.

Until that time, I’ve enjoyed the silence for 1 1/2 months.  Some users are going on 6 months.  I hope we can fix this major problem.

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