Saturday, 21. November 2009, 03:36:44
I'm still running KDE on the desktop, I now follow the latest branch; I still have a lot of the same complaints, but there's more good than bad, I think. I've setup a package manager on my LFS system, it's a horribly crippled dpkg setup: there's a lot of work required to get it to do anything other than track what's installed. I've finally wrapped my head around installing the modular Xorg; following the various mailing lists and just diving in has helped a lot. I've been enjoying an HTC Magic I got a few months ago, there's probably a post or two that should be written regarding that, but for now I'll just say I'm enjoying Android, and I'm not too crazy about HTC; I'd really like to get my hands on an Android device without proprietary drivers and miscellaneous chunks - maybe the next Google dev phone?
Saturday, 21. November 2009, 01:59:11
My time for testing distros is pretty limited. There was no clear choice for me, instead I was stuck deciding which features and combination of working features I found most important. A default Fedora install won out. Briefly, these are a few of the reasons:
Time - this was a major deciding factor, the hardware I'm using isn't mine and I didn't want to spend a lot of time setting it up.
Finger print reader - it's a bit of a toy and I'm aware not very secure blah blah, but after typing work passwords all day it's a nice treat.
Nouveau - the Nvidia hardware was a major reason I couldn't just copy my LFS build over and use it; nouveau was setup by default: no messing around and or dealing with proprietary drivers.
Installation from Hard Disk - this saves a lot of time - burning and installing from CD/DVD is a painful exercise, USB drives, while more flexible and quicker than CD/DVD, aren't that much better, IMO.
Taken from hdparm -t
CD: 0.5 -1.5 MB/sec (very inconsistent *shrug)
DVD: 2.15MB/sec
USB: 9.7MB/sec
HDD: 56MB/sec
Wednesday, 11. November 2009, 08:55:01
Another autumn wave of distro releases; Fedora, Ubuntu and openSUSE are on my radar.
A quick update, though. I've been running LFS (Linux From Scratch) as my primary system for nearly two years now, only using VirtualBox to load Windows 7 for work related tasks, mainly editing spreadsheets and printing them. I have kept an eye on the various distros, desperately hoping that someone would 'get it right', usually it's just a cursory boot, just long enough to get disappointed and reboot back to my LFS.
So what makes me keep looking at the Distros? Convenience.
What keeps me away from Distros? A bit harder to peg, and I'm too tired to continue this thought tonight. Anyhow, I'm sure I'll have an anecdotal reason for each distro tomorrow.
Ugh, rambling thoughts.... What's got me looking at the distros this week? Long story short: I have some hardware to play with and I'm in no mood to figure out nVidia's graphics stack, so it's a distro cage match.
Tuesday, 16. June 2009, 01:10:19
Alright, this really is just a rant/odd experience.
I recently bought an mp3 player that seemed to play tracks randomly. After fighting with id3 tags and file names for an hour or so I nearly gave up on getting the tracks to play in the proper order, but then I decided to copy and paste the tracks one at a time. Oddly enough this worked. The thought had crossed my mind that the tracks could be playing based on the order they were written to the disk, but I didn't really/seriously consider it. After cutting and pasting an album one track at a time I decided to go ahead and try to copy and paste the folder, I ended up with the wrong track order again. Time to confirm my suspicion. A quick glance at the ls man page yields 'ls -U' which matches the seemingly random track order!
Anyhow, just a random, crappy implementation! - Maybe you really do get what you pay for.
Friday, 20. March 2009, 19:44:39
Many thoughts bouncing around.
Top on the list:
Build Systems
Dependencies
Environments
Growth
Standards and their relation to growth
Standards:
Basically I think they are good, and that the onus is on the new guy to prove his worth to get accepted in the standard. That said, I'm left wondering if the environment 'read: cage' that's created based on the a standard leaves room for growth. I wonder at the time and effort that would be required to grow, and what such growth would depend on. Which leads me to...
Build Systems:
Build systems must be in place, and flexible enough that developers can experiment. They should not be overly complex, but do everything required ie. you should be able to experiment without being an expert in all areas and the system should be modifiable by the average user.
Dependencies:
Faced with maintaining, and building my system. I'm constantly reminded that I need to learn more to be qualified to do so. Sure, I can get things up and running following instructions, and I learn much in doing so. But when it comes down to it I don't learn everything I need to, and much of my time is wasted on menial tasks and repeating tasks that using a distribution would free me from doing. That said I'm again left thinking about the 'standards' a distribution chooses, or the assumptions and choices that are made based on the different environments (ie. those of users, developers, testers, clients, etc,) and, again, about growth.
Again the desire to start from scratch presents itself. But even more scratch than the time before... But, of course I don't want to give anything up in doing so! Oh, sacrifice. How distasteful.
Saturday, 3. January 2009, 20:08:12
Wow, a couple of days turned into nearly a month! Well, I haven't exactly been idle...
I've run through a number of lfs builds, installed fedora 10 and Kubuntu Jaunty, and of course, was busy with the holiday season. I'm currently in the middle of a build using the 2.6.28 kernel, and the latest xorg packages. This should be the last build for a little while while I start to sort out some package management. I was tempted to let a distro handle my system for me and try to focus on other areas, but I can't seem to let go of the control you gain with an lfs system, besides delving into package management should help shed some light on how all of this fits together.
I'm not really clear on why I have not posted, as static opera has enabled me to be with a browser as soon as X is up and running... Thanks opera team!
Tuesday, 9. December 2008, 04:46:02
Just a quick note. Ran a build on Sunday, be a day or two before I post anything. No way that I'm going to try to do this from a console, and I'm in no mood to chroot for a post.
Friday, 5. December 2008, 03:36:43
Goals:
Not too long ago I compiled a list of features that I felt were required on my desktop, It may be time to start implementing it. The dependencies and build system required to get the few programs I want has hit a critical mass. I refuse to accept the bloat! Time to focus my energy on a simple/minimalist desktop.
Other:
I have been using mpg123 - It's as simple as (1) configure, (2) make install, (3) mpg123 file.
KDE Nitpicks: (Okay this is a beta release, but the last year or so has been!)
The widget menu on the top right doesn't appear over other windows IE. It's only readable at the desktop level.
The start menu got moved... Usability people, crack some heads! While navigating the start menu if you want to click back you can't just whip the mouse to the left edge of the screen and left click, you're forced to move the mouse a number of pixels to the right before clicking.
The run dialog. Beep, beep, beep, probably enough said. This should win an award for "most diabolically annoying setting ever" - ever! Beep Beep Beep. Ugh, yes you can change the sound setting; but really, whoever the mean bastard is that set the default to beep, curse you
Konsole, I can't get the menu bar to stay away. It's set to not appear in new windows, but it does, it also reappears in new tabs.
Konqueror's quick find (forward slash). Hitting enter after a quick find does not follow links. IE. Typing '/next return' will not go to the next page.
Thursday, 4. December 2008, 05:18:56
KDE:
After putting together qt4 and kde4 I'm left wondering if all the trouble is worth it. In the grand scheme of things there are only a handful of KDE packages that I find myself using:
Konsole
Konqueror
Kontact
Amarok
and if you want to get picky:
kwin
kdm
plasma
along with a few I've surely forgotten and a handful that I don't know are working in the background.
I am a little upset by KDE's dependency on a new build system, the boost libraries, and a myriad of other software packages that are required to build, but that I often don't use.
The build system first. So far I do like it, it's just an annoyance having it thrust upon me.
The boost libraries; basically, a collection of libraries added to my system which I don't feel will have been, or will be, vetted in the same way as the standard libraries (IE. Security anyone?) There are also disk space, build time, and updating requirements, which are hard to swallow, especially, when you know that a lot of the functionality is likely to be redundant. And after building a system and trying to make sense of the different packages I really wonder if it's worth adding more code/work to my life, and realistically this would all need to be audited at some point before being deployed.
Other software packages. Okay, this is how things work, but I can still be upset by the implementation's swiss army knife approach.
Back to the list of programs. Many can quickly be replaced by other packages. The big ones are a little harder, and have kept me coming back. Kontact and Konqueror are basically the 'killer apps,' amarok was on the list until I recently found mpg123.
Wednesday, 3. December 2008, 05:30:45
KDE4, linux
Rant:
This has probably been pointed out many times, but the way people write the date shorthand should be standardized, in fact it may be, I have not looked it up. Either way, I feel the date should be written: year, month, day IE. 20081202, if only for the reason that it's sortable without any fancy ifs. I've been bothered to no end by a program at work which has the date inserted all over with no apparent pattern. I come across pages where the date is 09/21/08, and then another with 31/09/08, which isn't so bad, but what do you do when you find a page with 03/07/08. Anyhow, this is one of those situations where I feel a programmer or system designer has really dropped the ball, by either not looking at the current code base or, worse, ignoring the current convention.
It's time to start posting with some regularity.
KDE:
Where to start? For the past month or two I've run through a number of kde3 and kde4 builds. I'll have a post together later this week on my most recent build. But for now just a post to start posting.
KDE is beginning to feel like a journey; the shift away from the autotools package has basically forced to start learning to troubleshoot and use a new build system, which is not that big of a deal as I never really knew the old one! Most issues have been due the location of X on my system, or minor errors/omissions in the source files.
Today's hurdle was amarok-1.98, with another cmake related cat and mouse error:
> start code <
Scanning dependencies of target qtscript_core
make[2]: *** No rule to make target `src/scriptengine/generator/generator/generated_cpp/com_trolltech_qt_core/qtscript_QBasicTimer.cpp', needed by `src/scriptengine/generator/generator/CMakeFiles/qtscript_core.dir/generated_cpp/com_trolltech_qt_core/qtscript_QBasicTimer.o'. Stop.
make[1]: *** [src/scriptengine/generator/generator/CMakeFiles/qtscript_core.dir/all] Error 2
make: *** [all] Error 2
> end code <
This error illustrates nicely the random kind of stuff I've been faced with. The above gives me absolutely nothing to work with. I have no idea where to start, no idea. I'm usually offline when this kind of thing happens too... Anyhow, randomly I think to myself "maybe amarok needs to be built in the source directory." Turns out this is the case, my normal cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/blah ../../source/amarok-1.98 has failed to produce a fancy music manager, hopefully a known/reported issue, something I should look into.
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