desktop Archives - Page 5 of 16 - Yet Another Linux Blog

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!

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!

An Open Letter to Foresight Linux

Theoden is a guest blogger writing his first post for Yet Another Linux Blog. The views expressed inside this post are part of his personal experience and opinions regarding Foresight Linux. I’d like to thank him for taking the time to make Linux better with constructive criticism as well as the many bug reports and fixes he contributed to the Foresight Linux community. Click Theoden’s name above for more information on him.

I have decided – after running Foresight for two months – to no longer use Foresight Linux on my systems. Let me say however that I found the experience interesting and dare I say – challenging. Everyone in the IRC channel was great – very friendly – and most tried to be helpful.

I thought it might be helpful and instructive to provide an explanation as to why I am not going to use Foresight any longer, rather than just disappear. Hopefully, in doing so I may contribute to Foresight becoming a better distro that I might want to run in the future. So, here goes ….

Concerns With Foresight Linux

Conary: When you read about conary it all sounds very exciting and innovative with many really good features. However – when you install Foresight and actually use conary – it doesn’t take too long to realize that unless you are a developer or very involved packager – very little of conary’s goodies really touch you or help you (with the exception of rollback).

However – it’s negatives do impact you as a user:

It is very complex and difficult for the average user to understand and use with any effect
It is hard to locate individual packages and make sure you have what you need when things are failing to work right
The idea of ‘group’s puts numerous things together making it somewhat confusing to sort out when a dependency is not met for an app you really need.

Development and QA: To be very honest – the development of this distro ‘seems’ from my perspective to be done as a fun project – almost a ‘toy’ if you will – for the creator and a couple of his ‘close’ friends. Everything seems to be about advancing to the next version of things – the constant cutting edge challenge of adding in the latest or something really new – without ever really QA’ing and stablizing the existing released code. So problems users are having never really get fixed properly. And this leads to the next concern ….

JIRA: This is the issue tracker for Foresight. By and large – it appears that issues that don’t personally effect the developers are ignored. I personally have an issue in the tracker concerning sound – which has been there for over 30 days and no one has done anything with it. I finally figured out what was causing the break – but it requires the devs to fix the code. But they have not – and ignore the issue because it works fine for them. Many people have complained about sound issues – but the developers are concerned always with developing the latest code for the next cutting edge release instead of stopping to fix the broken code and solve problems. Poor QA – poor response to user problems.

Conclusion: So – Why Use Foresight? Given the above issues that concern me, I must ask the inevitable question – “Why use Foresight then?” And frankly – I can come up with no compelling reason to do so. Outside of cutting edge gnome – it offers me nothing I cannot get elsewhere – in debian or slackware or archlinux, etc. And those distros are more stable – address issues that are legitimate user concerns – work hard to QA their distros – and in general put out a more user friendly product. The truth is – it’s all linux. So what really counts then is product presentation – QA testing – responsiveness to user problems – and stability providing the ability for the users to do actual work with their linux systems without always trying figure out why something doesn’t work. These things all need real work in Foresight Linux.

The result for me then is that I have returned to Debian. I wish only the best for Foresight Linux and it’s developers and users. I hope some of the issues that have led to my decision will be addressed and that one day I might come back and give it another go. I believe there’s a lot here to like and a great deal of talent. Thank you for your patience with me.

Sincerely,

Theoden

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.

Foresight Linux and KDE 4.2

UPDATE: Foresight Linux 2.0.6 has recently updated the stable branch with python 2.6. Therefore, much of this post is not needed to get Foresight KDE 4.2 running. I’ve crossed through the portions not needed. Thanks for reading!

I’ve been working with a lot of different distributions out there the past few days and haven’t found one that I like that has KDE 4.2 packages. Experimenting further brought me back to my old friend Conary and Foresight Linux. For those of you that don’t know what Conary is, I’ve written a Part 1 (I never finished Part 2 as I changed jobs and haven’t found the motivation) on what Conary attempts to accomplish and a bit of background on how it does things.

When I think of Foresight and rPath Linux along with Conary, I come to a direct comparison to Arch Linux…because pacman is quite similar. The main difference is that Foresight does a lot more for you out of the gate than Arch does…and arch is quite a bit faster than Foresight. Still, I decided to give KDE 4.2 a go on Foresight to see how it’s been progressing.

The first thing I needed to do was to change from the 2 branch of Foresight to the 2-qa branch. The reason for this is that 2-qa houses python 2.6, which is needed for KDE 4.2. Until python 2.6 is pushed into the stable branch of Foresight, you’ll need to move your installation to the 2-qa branch. First, using your favorite text editor, edit /etc/conary/config.d/foresight file. Inside that file, you’ll see next to the line InstallLabelPath the following:

installLabelPath foresight.rpath.org@fl:2-kernel  foresight.rpath.org@fl:2 conary.rpath.com@rpl:2-qa

change this to the following:

installLabelPath foresight.rpath.org@fl:2-qa-kernel  foresight.rpath.org@fl:2-qa conary.rpath.com@rpl:2-qa

or you can substitute 2-devel there if you’d like to move to the 2-devel branch:

installLabelPath foresight.rpath.org@fl:2-devel-kernel  foresight.rpath.org@fl:2-devel conary.rpath.com@rpl:2-qa

Now, let’s migrate the system. Migration to a different branch will result in moving your system to become EXACTLY like the branch you’re migrating to. That means that any custom applications you have installed may be removed…conary will make your system become EXACTLY what 2-qa says it should. This is the reason I recommend performing these tasks with a fresh install before customizing.

Change with the following command:

sudo conary migrate group-gnome-dist=@fl:2-qa --keep-required --resolve

Don’t worry, 2-qa is not as unstable as it sounds…the most unstable branch of Foresight is 2-devel. To compare these branches to Debian, 2-qa is like testing while 2-devel is like unstable.

I installed Foresight Linux 2.0.6 Gnome using a DVD on a Dell D630 Latitude. Next, I like to uninstall the stuff that is extra in Gnome that I don’t use (you could say, I strongly do not like these):

sudo conary erase transmission f-spot evolution evolution-exchange tomboy banshee

With those packages out of the way, I did a full update.

sudo conary updateall

Some early Foresight 2.0.6 kernels cause random disconnects for my wireless chipset on the Dell Latitude D630 (Intel Pro Wireless) but after the upgrade this symptom isn’t present. The default 2.6.27.5 kernel made way for the 2.6.27.10 and it seems to work for me quite nicely. I did notice that the 2.6.27.10 kernel had some sound abnormalities for me with the Intel HDA sound card…so I rolled back to the 2.6.27.5 and things worked great. See this issue for more information on this sound issue.

Now we have a completely “useable” Gnome system on our hands…but we can’t have that unusable system now can we? (easy Gnome supporters…tis only a joke). Let us get a real desktop like openbo…er…KDE on there! Before I got too far though, I wanted to make sure I could play mp3’s and other restricted format items so I installed the codecs needed:

sudo conary update group-codecs

Once this has finished, let’s get KDE 4.2 up and running.

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

Once that command has completed, you should be able to logout and log back in to KDE 4.2. The most recent builds of KDE 4.2 include python 2.6…something that Foresight Linux has been slow on the uptake with due to conary being written in python. I’m still working on testing everything…I’m not sure how well this newest build works. Look for a status update in a few days on this…

Is Usability Really Simplicity?

What usability reasons do you have for using Gnome vs. KDE? I’m looking for usability issues here and not specific bugs that cause you to drop one on its head. Bugs can be fixed. I’m talking about hard features that lack from one environment to the other. What makes you use it in Ubuntu versus KDE? Remember, not bugs…features!

I prefer using KDE or Openbox as my main desktop when using Linux. I’ve used Gnome quite a bit too when working for rPath last year (Foresight is THE Gnome distro). Still, I prefer KDE…I really like the direction that 4.x is going also. Sure, they’re not there yet, but I trust they will be because I haven’t been let down in the past 🙂 I have a little faith (Plus I’ve run snapshots of 4.2).

The thing that boggles my mind is that everyone says Gnome is better for a Windows convert taking his/her Linux steps for the first time. I have to disagree based on the experience I’ve had with conversions of new users from Windows. I think KDE gives the best experience for a new Windows user…it’s familiar or at least feels familiar…things are in similar places to Windows.

I’d say that 80-90% of the users I convert across to using Linux prefer KDE to Gnome. I always wonder why people think Gnome is so new user friendly. Since I’ve always wondered, perhaps some Gnome users can tell me, what usability reasons do you have for using Gnome vs. KDE? I’ve often heard that Gnome has integration and simplicity as the main reason…but could I not argue the same for KDE? I’m looking for usability issues here and not specific bugs that cause you to drop one on its head. Bugs can be fixed. I’m talking about hard features that lack from one environment to the other. What makes you use it in Ubuntu versus KDE? Remember, not bugs…features! Please let me know which desktop you prefer below and don’t forget to let me know the reason in the comments section below.

[poll id=”1″]