Misc Archives - Page 12 of 15 - Yet Another Linux Blog

Distributed Bugs-R-Us

I have a decent idea for an open source application. This could be one of the most important pieces of software to assist open source in a long time. I don’t have ideas often for software apps but when I do, normally they’re good ones.However, I don’t have the expertise to program this either. The only thing I have is an idea for bugtracker software…and it operates on the distributed journalism model of digg.

The idea was inspired by the article “10,000 bugs away from World Domination“, specifically these few words:

“My diagnosis is that the problem with Linux is that it doesn’t have anyone pushing to get the newbie bugs fixed first. At Microsoft, we had Program Managers and one of their responsibilities was to be customer advocates to prioritize the bugs for the devs to fix. In many open source groups, it sometimes appears that bugs get fixed when the dev decides to work on it, not because an important user scenario is broken. The Wi-Fi tool was broken in Gnome for any months, but the bugs just sat there languishing in the database. Microsoft or Apple would not have shipped a Wi-Fi UI that was completely broken in that way.”

The author is 100% correct. And since open source communities don’t have program managers that can focus the time needed to prioritize bug fixes, we can make the community become that program manager. Read on for specifics on how to do this.

Continue reading “Distributed Bugs-R-Us”

ITWire in Australia on the Desktop

The point of all this is that from the standpoint of a new Linux user, having a snazzy looking interface is all well and good but it means nothing if users have to revert to the command line to perform what should be simple tasks. Installing new downloaded software is one of the most common tasks performed by desktop users at home and in small offices. Until the Linux suppliers can make this task trivial, they will continue to miss out on a whole world of users beyond the command line geeks.

NOTE: I normally don’t re-publish news like many of the “blogs” you see out there but in this case the article was pretty good and hits home with a theme I’ve been stating a bit lately.

The article above was taken from ITWire…IT News in Austrailia.

This article was a good read and I believe it to be true. Until Linux can come up with ways to make the user oblivious to what is going on underneath the GUI, it won’t make inrroads to the desktop.

UPDATE: 3/2007

Penguin Pete, the not famous blogger over at penguinpetes blog flagged this post as being the main reason that he no longer posts links to my blog. Interesting in that if anyone were to read this post out of context, they might not know what I was driving at for this post. The main intention of the post is to show that new users need to first feel comfortable in their OS before they drop down and get dirty with the shell. That’s a fact jack. Nothing is going to sway that…I’ve had many users I’ve switched over DESPISE dropping to the shell and cite that as the main reason they go back to Windows. This is what I was agreeing with in this instance…that New Linux users need to be semi oblivious to what is going on underneath and not have to worry about it in their beginnings…not to ‘dumb down’ Linux or remove functionality underneath it.

The PII 350 MHz Computer Dies?!

I always hate to send hardware off to that big chipyard in the sky. However, the PII 350 MHz PC decided to give up on me. Perhaps that is why I was getting so many errors while attempting to install various distros of Linux (including those optimized for old PCs). So, for those of you that were following along with my little journey, the PII is no more…too many errors began to pop up even in steady Slackware. I made a judgement call and retired the motherboard.

In its place, I forked out 23 bucks for a PC Chips Socket A motherboard. I then slapped in a spare XP 2600 and I have the newest flavor of SimplyMEPIS and PCLinuxOS installed. It’s running like a champ and is turning out to be the best 23 bucks I’ve spent in some time. For those that want a steady board for Linux, check Newegg here.

Alas, the PII was a good board. I knew it well. So glad I didn’t have to put it down and that I could gracefully retire it on a good note. Now the slowest PC I have is the CentOS 4 gateway/firewall with a Celeron 900 (Emachines w/ a refurb Gateway mATX mobo). Works great. Sorry I couldn’t finish out all those other distros.

In the meantime, I’ve made it my mission to document some really simple things using KDE and Gnome (How-Tos) for stuff that you’d normally do in Windows. I’m attempting to track down the easiest way to setup an anonymous share using KDE and Samba (with no smb.conf or smbpasswd or smbuser alteration…no shell). Thus far this has proved quite challenging. Getting Samba to play nice without passwords and users with full write access on a share is murder. If anyone has tips or links to a great how-to, I’m all ears. Thanks for reading.

Maintenance Announcement

Yet Another Linux Blog and Yet Another Linux Forum will be going down today at approximately 5pm EST for maintenance. Since this is a major overhaul, we may be down for a couple of hours. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Old Hard Drive, Bad

I’ve had some trouble brewing at home. Had a 120 GB Share go down 2 weeks ago and I’ve had major problems trying to get my much needed data back from the drive. I lost almost everything as far as settings, passwords, games, etc. But, life goes on right? The only problem is that I’ve had to order a new drive to use for Linux since I’m using the old Linux drive for my main computer which, due to work, must run Win XP. So I’m down and out and have been for about 2 weeks now. I ordered a hard drive and it came in this past week so it shouldn’t be too much longer before I’m able to get back into things. Unfortunately, not having a working computer for about a week and not having the info I needed put me in a fix for Kapps and articles. Look for entries to resume on a more normal schedule this next week. Thanks for reading and sorry for the lack of articles.

Updates on Kapps

A thousand apologies for not updating my Kwhat? category. I’ve had to shuffle things around quite a bit here at the house (computer-wise) and am now the proud owner of a Slackware 10.X server running on a PII 350Mhz with 512MB of PC100! I had a RAM slot in my server mobo go bad so I was down for a few days while I moved motherboards from case to case. Back up now, but had to reinstall my favorite desktop distro in order to get back into the KWhat? mood.

Not to mention I’ve worked 50+ hours in the past two weeks on big projects. So, now that I have time to breath this weekend…I’ll look to finally getting into the Kswing of things. I hope to cover something I find handy like Kid3, KCheckGmail, and KLinkStatus along side of something that comes installed by default like Klipper (something that most of us see but never use even though it is a powerful little tool). So look for something to pop up this weekend and once again, sorry to those of you who were waiting for me to get my rear end in gear and publish something.

UPDATE: I’ve had some last minute contact with developers and am trying to incorporate this into the article. Please look for this to publish Wednesday or Thursday. I’ve selected Klipper as the KWhat? application we’ll be looking at.