devnet, Author at Yet Another Linux Blog

A New User Guide to Linux Communities

Featured image credit: Leonardo Leporte

Are you a new Linux user? Fantastic! Welcome to the world of freedom. Freedom of choice, freedom of expression, freedom from vendor lockin. You’ve made an excellent choice. Now that you’ve chosen, installed, and are using Linux there are a few things you should keep in mind as you learn the ropes of your new system.

1. Not all Communities are the Same

Each Linux distribution has its own distinct community with their own ideas. Think of owning a vehicle or a certain brand of appliance…along with the ownership of this comes the lifestyle that is reflected by users/owners of the product. The same is true with Linux. Each community will have a different idea on what is important. What is important to you may not be even on the radar of those users and developers of that community. Find one that suits you.

Keeping this in mind, be patient. Ask questions the smart way. Be explicit and tactful. Be precise and direct. Provide more information than you think is necessary…no one will become upset if you provide too much information but they may not answer your question if you have too little.

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Become a Featured Blog at BlogBridge.com Linux Topic Guide

Would you like to have your blog about Linux become a featured blog on the BlogBridge.com Linux Topic Guide? How about a front page link in the “Blogs I Read” column on Yet Another Linux Blog? If this piques your interest, read on.

I’ve been a BlogBridge user for quite some time since discovering it with the version 4 release. It has consistently been the best RSS feed reader I have used since that time. I accept no substitutes. They offer the BlogBridge service for free which allows you to publish feeds on BlogBridge.com publicly and share feeds/tags of posts. You can also download Topic Guides to hit the ground running with pre-populated feeds. I am an author of one of those feeds.

Previously, when I reviewed BlogBridge, I was asked to be the Linux Topic Guide at blogbridge.com. Specifics on how this works: I keep tabs on various Linux centric blogs and publish my feeds to blogbridge.com. Then, when someone installs Blogbridge, they may select the Topic Guide that I publish with pre-populated feeds of interest. If you’re a BlogBridge user, you can also track down the linux feed or visit the Linux Topic Guide page at Blogbridge.com to see what sites are featured there.

In these past few years I’ve been doing this, many Linux sites have come and gone. I’ve changed jobs, states, and distributions. Since all of these changes have taken place, I’ve missed the launch of some great Linux blogs and websites. Therefore, I’m asking you, the reader to help me find new and exciting blogs and sites that I can feature for BlogBridge.com 🙂

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The rPath Forum goes Live!

Here at rPath we use our own Mediawiki appliance for documentation (what is a software appliance?). While this is an excellent way of getting things documented quickly (as wiki’s are) it is NOT a great place for community based questions to influx nor a good place for knowledgebase questions to be stored. Often, the discussion tab on wiki’s go ignored with issue tracking systems replacing problems users have.

The problem with issue tracking systems is they have workflows of their own and often are impartial where they don’t need to be ;). Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a place where like users of software could come together to ask questions and help each other reach conclusive answers? Hence, the rPath Forum was born.

Stef created the Simple Machines Forum Appliance, which you can install and run in various formats such as VMWare, Xen, ISO, RAW, and even a LiveCD (in x86 and x86_64 bit flavors!). What a wonderful concept…to be able to quickly download and deploy a forum using nothing but a virtualized environment 🙂

As some of you know, I’ve chose Simple Machines in the past at MyPCLinuxOS and PCLinuxOS proper to power those communities. Stef and I are excited to power the rPath community with this same wonderful software.

If you are a packager, appliance developer, Foresight Linux user, or are just interested in our products and technologies such as Conary and rMake…come on over to the rPath Forum and register. Drop us a line and say hello 🙂

gmrun and openbox

My friend Og Maciel and I had a short package session today where we updated some openbox items that we use such as Nitrogen for wallpaper, pypanel, and something we didn’t package before…gmrun. Install it with:

sudo conary update gmrun

I’ve patched the default gmrunrc file so that when it executes, it places itself toward the top right hand side of the desktop. To override this, create a .gmrunrc from the default.

cp /usr/share/gmrun/gmrunrc ~/.gmrunrc

alter the left and top values to move it around on the screen. Width may also be adjusted. You can also use openbox to bind this to Alt-F2 or a key combo of your choosing. Open up ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml and add the following in the <keyboard> section:

<keybind key="A-F2"><action name="execute"><execute>gmrun</execute></action></keybind>

There are also some built in macros for using gmrun that can be found on the homepage here. it’s quite a handy tool and works quite well for openbox 😀 Screenshot showing updated nitrogen and gmrun below:

Google Reader, You Suck

UPDATE: Google Reader has changed their behavior as of late. This post no longer applies as the behavior I wanted has been integrated. Thanks for reading Google! 🙂

When I’m not using BlogBridge (that is, when I’m checking my feeds from someone elses computer) I check via Google Reader. It’s been quite nice for me to check out what’s happening in the world of Linux while away from my standard feed reading environment.

Recently though, they have changed the default behavior. Now when I want to mark an entire feed read (feeds with a large number of unread feeds), an annoying confirmation dialog box pops up and I have to confirm that I truly do want to mark all of my feeds as read (in true Microsoftian-esque style mind you).

Whoever enabled this needs to be sentenced to a life of annoying popup dialog boxes. Make their primary desktop be Vista and make them turn on the UAC and make them do their normal job. Sentence them to an entire year of stupid annoying popups. I despise popup dialogs…the demon brain children of the department of redundancy department… (a department google must now have created…and here I thought Microsoft was the only company that had one of these!) more than anything in computing.

Please google reader, take out that stupid dialog! Or at least give us a checkbox option. This type of behavior is frustrating, redundant, and lame. I cry suckage google reader >:|

Foresight KDE Alpha3

NOTE: For clarification purposes…this is not an official release. It is only accessible to developers. It is called Foresight KDE Alpha3 because it is based on the underlying architecture in Foresight Gnome alpha3 release.

For those of you with developer status or above on the Foresight Linux project, there is a KDE build available for testing (along with XFCE if you really have ambitions). Login to rBuilder Online, Click on the Foresight Linux Project, go to Manage Builds and search for Foresight Linux KDE Alpha3 and click it (DVD only). I downloaded and tested this build release to see how things are going.

Foresight KDE inherits all the goodness from the Foresight Linux project. This means the install is tar based and completes in less than 7 minutes. It also means Syslinux, Compiz Fusion, and more from the Release Notes. If you are interested in helping us develop further, please visit us in freenode #foresight-kde.

Findings

I found 3 major issues during testing. First, updateall fails with glibc errors. I worked over 6 hours on getting a solution and enlisted many in the community on helping me get past it. So far, no one has been able to provide a solution. The second issue is that pango is causing odd text to display on various applications: Pic1, Pic2. No solution to this as of the time of this writing. I’m assuming that an update to pango will cure this.

Third, gtk-qt-engine wasn’t installed by default so gtk applications looked quite nasty. A quick sudo conary update gtk-qt-engine got me rolling.

Observations

Things don’t look great. While the performance of the desktop was fine (no crashes, quite speedy) the default font/text looks horrible. The installed Theme is the default KDE one…no customization. My resolution/Monitor wasn’t detected so I was at 800×600 for resolution. Menu’s are chock full of junk (default applications) and have little organization.

Looking at this, one can tell it truly is based on an alpha release but I have to say that I’m still a bit disappointed. All of these observations were made during the last alpha release as well. At the time of that alpha release, I did not have enough Conary-foo™ (OK, so it’s not trademarked…) to make anything happen. Since I now have alpha3 up and running on my main system at home and am a bit further in my conary knowledge…you can bet I’ll be working on the aesthetics of Foresight KDE. Sure, the innards are more important than the shell…but the shell is the first thing seen by the user.

Hopefully, if there is an alpha4 (or beta1 for that matter) we’ll have the aesthetics worked out by then to give the user a pleasant “Foresight” experience.

KDE4 Status

KDE4 can be installed as well. It is still pulling in from SVN snapshots though so it is not as stable as I’d like it to be. Do this at your own risk! I do not have it permanently installed on my system. To install:

sudo conary update group-kde4=/kde.rpath.org@fl:2-kde4-devel

One of the benefits of conary is show above…installing KDE4 is as simple as one command 🙂 I like to compare that with the Ubuntu/Debian way of doing it. Since there is no sources.list, you don’t have to mess with it. Conary remembers the branch the software came from inherently so it goes to those same places for that software unless you tell it not too explicitly. Imagine that! A package manager that is smart and allows you to maintain less! It also allows you to have both KDE3 and KDE4 installed side by side…but remember, both KDE4 and this build release of Foresight KDE are not production releases so things WILL change. In other words, don’t put this on a system you intend to keep.

It is my understanding that the KDE4 branch for Foresight KDE will soon be reverting out of SVN checkout builds to push stability as application portage continues.