I have been a Linux user for over 10 years. I have used it exclusively on my home systems since that time and although it was a struggle at the beginning, I haven’t had any desire to use any other operating system … until now. Recently I purchased a MacBook Pro. Principally because I like the hardware, and can put Linux on it. However, it has also given me the opportunity to use OSX. In fact I’ve been using OSX quite a lot – given I’ve paid for it, I want to really see how it works. However, in the course of using it, I’ve come across a number of features of Linux and the KDE desktop that I greatly miss. If you think I’m wrong on any of the items below, please let me know – I’d love to be able to fill in some of the gaps I’ve found. This is my list:
1. A Package Manager
Package management is a central feature of most Linux distributions. Whether it be apt, rpm, emerge, packman or the myriad of other package managers, the basic premise is the same – the ability to update every piece of software on your system More >
Recently, I wrote a post about the KDE 4.5 SC release candidate. In that post, I was a little bit critical about the discoverability of desktop activities. I wasn’t too sure of what the purpose of these were, and there was nothing in the interface for creating these activities that gave the user any hint of what they were. Whilst I stand by that criticism, I’ve found a great article that explains the purpose of desktop activities, how they work and how they may integrate into a user’s desktop. There is also a slightly older article that provides particular individual examples of how desktop activities might be used. Unfortunately the KDE userbase article on the point is deeply inadequate as an explanation of how you might use this feature.
Whilst I now understand how these features work and might be used, I still don’t understand how this might improve my workflow. It may be that because I’ve never been a big fan of desktop widgets – despite the fact that I developed one of the most popular superkaramba themes ever – liquidweather I understand that, in addition to being able to put different wallpapers and plasmoids on different activities, you can specify the activity on which More >
This is the third in a series of posts about the pre-releases of KDE SC 4.5. This one is about the first release candidate. In the previous posts about beta 1 and beta 2 I went over the new features in 4.5 – few as they are. I also pointed out that one of the focuses of this release is stability. Obviously RC 1 adds no new features, so what is there to talk about? Well, there’s more stability – since beta 2 was released, 1233 bugs have been reported and 1165 have been closed – pretty impressive.
Despite there being no new features in the RC, there is one new feature that overlooked in my previous posts. The new configuration dialog for the oxygen style. In KDE SC 4.4, this was hidden. When you set the oxygen style in the appearance configuration module, there were a few configuration options, but possibly not enough for the die-hard KDE users who like to configure every aspect of their desktop to within an inch of its life. So in this release of KDE SC, you have the ability to tweak a whole bunch of aspect of the oxygen style:
So what are these other "hidden" features More >
You maybe wondering what the latest version of Apple’s mobile OS has to do with Linux. As set out on this page, you can now connect your iPhone to your Linux box and sync music, back it up, add ringtones to it, and tether it. One thing that always is of concern when dealing with Apple is the extent to which Apple might break “unauthorised” access to “your” device with a new OS update. As an avid user of the tethering ability of the iphone with my Linux laptop, I was a little skeptical about upgrading my phone to the new “iOS” 4. Given that iOS 4 brought the iPhone on a par with technology from the mid 2000′s with multitasking and spell checking, it was an upgrade I was very keen to see on my phone.
However, I needn’t have worried. As is often the case with open source software, the developers were ahead of the game, and on the same day as iOS4 was released, the libimobiledvice developers had released a minor update to libimobiledevice for latest release. Having updated my various packages, I can happily say that internet tethering is working like a charm still, so I’m a happy More >
Having given a quick overview of the first beta of the latest KDE SC release last week, a couple of days later, beta 2 was released. So dutifully, I have updated to KDE SC 4.5 beta 2 to see what’s changed.
Stability
According to the release announcement “1459 new bugs have been reported, and 1643 bugs have been closed, so we’re witnessing a lot of stabilization activity right now”. So for those who left comments on my last post bemoaning the KDE developer’s lack of enthusiasm for bug fixing – kerblam! take that! In fact, I have indeed noticed some stability improvements myself, so the empirical evidence is backed up by the anecdotal. In beta 1, there seemed to be a reasonable amount of instability in kwin. Compositing would turn itself off rather regularly, and on the odd occasion, X itself would give up the ghost altogether. With beta 2, no such misfortunes have befallen me.
More Things I’ve Noticed
Calendar Plasmoid
There has been a nice update to the calendar plasmoid, which can be accessed by clicking on the clock on the main panel. Now this shows PIM and calendar events using Akonadi marking the relevant date in the calendar, and hovering over More >
The latest in the 4.x series of the KDE Software Compilation is due to be released in early August 2010. With the first beta of this release recently unleashed, I thought I’d download the openSuse packages and see what 4.5′s got in store for us.
So What’s New?
The Beta 1 release announcement lists only 4 major new features, which seems a little underwhelming. These are:
- A reworked notifications area;
- Window tiling;
- Webkit in konqueror;
- Stability improvements.
One of the big upgrades that was scheduled for KDE SC 4.5 was porting the PIM (ie. kmail, korganizer, kaddressbook) applications to the Akonadi framework. Unfortunately, that process won’t be completed in time for 4.5.0, and will be delayed until 4.5.1. This is a little disappointing given that Akonadi has been full of promise for quite some time, with no real user visible outcomes. It would have been nice to see what Akonadi will bring to the party. However, it’s better to wait until all the kinks are ironed out. But unfortunately, it leaves the KDE 4.5 feature cupboard a little bare.
That being said, there are a whole bunch of little improvements that I’ll talk about later on in this article.
Reworked Notifications
The notification area and system tray have been reworked More >
In the last three years, Microsoft claims to have entered into over 600 licensing agreements with companies small and large over alleged patent violations in "Linux". One consistent feature of all these agreements is that their contents are unknown. No one, other than Microsoft and the relevant "licensee", knows which parts of "Linux" violate which patents. Another consistent feature is that most of the "licensees" are small companies without the resources to take on Microsoft in a patent claim. However, there are a number of larger or more high profile companies that have also entered into such agreements, including Amazon, Novell, Xandros, Turbolinux, TomTom and most recently HTC. The whole situation is clouded in mystery under a veil of PR speak and mumbo jumbo. So what the hell is going on? What can we deduce from what we know so far?
The Who
The identity of the companies that have entered into these arrangements is an important factor to consider. Most of the companies involved are small, and presumably have small, or non-existent patent portfolios; basically companies vulnerable to attack by a company with the financial power, and massive patent portfolio, of Microsoft. These are companies that, when faced with a More >
Yet again, with Lucid Lynx, Ubuntu has shunned a much better technology for no good reason other than what appears to be NIH syndrome. Ubuntu 10.04 came out last week, and included a movie editor in the default install for the first time. The movie editor they chose: PiTiVi.
Now PiTiVi has been around for a long time, but has progressed very little. It can do very basic video manipulation. It can cut and split files, and move them round on a time line. That’s pretty much it. Furthermore, as far as I’m aware, it currently does not support the most popular HD video format used in cameras today – AVCHD. It lacks any video or audio filters, does not do transitions, nor titling. I know that Ubuntu tries to provide basic tools that will appeal to the average user – hence the replacement of GIMP with F-Spot in the default install, but in my view support for HD video formats, filters and transitions are the bare minimum features anyone looking to do video editing in the current environment would require.
Furthermore, these features are provided by kdenlive in an interface which is just as simple as PiTiVi. But under the simple More >
For a long time, using an iPhone with Linux was a complete no go. With a jailbroken phone, you could mount it over a wireless connection using fuse, and then sync music your music that way – but syncing an entire music collection via wifi? No thanks. In fact, Apple had made it so hard to access the iPhone over USB, that it took the virtualbox and VMware developers months to work out how to access the iPhone via USB on a Windows guest. So this left Linux iPhone users with the option of either jailbreaking their phone and using a kludgy wifi connection, or running iTunes via windows in a VM. However, thanks to some rather clever folk, there’s a new solution that gives you access to a whole lot of your iPhone functions on Linux “natively”.
libimobiledevice
libimobilevice is a project that’s been around since 2007. It has now reached its 1.0.0 release. From the libimobiledevice website:
libimobiledevice is a software library that talks the protocols to support iPhone®, iPod Touch® and iPad® devices on Linux. Unlike other projects, it does not depend on using any existing proprietary libraries and does not require jailbreaking. It allows other software to easily access More >
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