Technolosity

Hi all two readers, here's my rant after a while. Sorry, it's a bit lengthy (also somewhat biased?) with no pictures. Also I'm not a good writer (writing stuff from my head (and using too many brackets (see?))).


The-first-header-for-which-I-can't-think-of-any-good-words

I've tried several Linux distros the last 5+ years but in no means I'm a Linux pro. Although I've always admired their way of doing things compared to Microsoft and Apple, I haven't exactly used the system so much till now. You could say I'm more like a Windoze expert (or more commonly nerd), since I've used it for the last 15+ years (yeah, I was a kid back then).

I was sort of forced to finally to switch over to Linux. I could say the timing couldn't have been better and I've been wanting to do so like couple of years now. The new Ubuntu/Kubuntu versions rolled out couple of months ago and the release of KDE4.1 was a while ago (I haven't really followed Linux news, so forget about correcting me). Also, lucky for me, Creative decided to Open-Source their X-Fi soundcard (which I unfortunately decided to buy back then) drivers two weeks ago and they have now at least a support for basic sound(!). Still getting the front panel fully supported is in my "gosh, I want this" list.


This is what happened

I accidentally my Windows XP installation two weeks ago. The accident was partially my fault, but it included using one of the respected name-which-I-shall-not-mention-but-you-can-ask-if-you-want anti-spyware/malware/other program, which decided to "clean" my system32 folder. Not interested of "fixing" my Windows (which would have probably cleaned my personal files on C: among other problems, application installations, tweaking etc.) I decided to switch into Linux (which I have failed many times in previous years, mainly due my hardware problems and time, plus of course, because of my stubborness).


Now this is going somewhere

So, I booted into my year-or-two-old OpenSUSE which I had on dual-boot. It was getting old and buggy, so I decided to go with 64-bit Kubuntu (I've never fancied Gnome and I'm a nerd with a desire to tweak).

Installing Kubuntu was quite easy, so not much about that. Booting up to KDE4.1 was kind of... how should I say... a shock. I always liked the minimal-yet-efficient look of KDE3.5. I could honestly say my opinion of all the KDE4 themes: ugly. They are all just color variations of the "taskbar", most have even bad colors. Also bugs (white tray icons) are apparent in the "taskbar" panel. I really hope KDE4.2 brings more power back to the user.

Most of my hardware worked out-of-the box, including webcam (well... I'll tell more after the jump), media keyboard and Wacom (remember how much time you spent installing those on Windows?). The only problem at the moment was my Creative X-Fi soundcard. That was fixed quite neatly when I discovered that Creative had open-sourced the drivers under GPL. It was just a matter of "download, extract, make install" and voilà.

The biggest thing I noticed while using 64-bit Kubuntu was the speed compared to Windows. My computer is 5+ years old with AMD 64 3000+ and 1 GB of RAM and it feels so snappy. Even the Windows XP on a dual-core accompanied with 2 GB of RAM at the work is horrendeusly slow compared to this. The GUI is responsive all the time (in Windows one frozen window freezes everything), browsing files (even on NTFS) is faster than in Windows. Windows XP took over 3 minutes to boot and load all the services and applications. Kubuntu takes about 50 seconds. Quite well for this old buddy.


Applications

Then the serious business: instant messaging clients. This has to be the worst problem in any Linux distro. Default installed client was Kopete. The UI was simply put horrible and the webcam for some reason didn't work. I've heard of aMSN to be the only viable solution for a webcam support in MSN network so I installed it. Its GUI? Seriously, how wrong someone can go the GUI? For other networks (ICQ and Yahoo!) I installed Pidgin which, as a big surprise (not really), has no webcam support. I know the developers have certain opinions about this, but I cannot see Pidgin as the main IM client if this isn't going to be dealt with.

Time for some usability enhances: Compiz-Fusion. Some people say "it's just eye-candy", but I disagree. It helps to let the user (at least me) have some feedback from the UI rather than being unintuitive static 2D image on the screen. 3D-cube helps the user to grasp the whole virtual desktop concept. Then there's zooming, window closing/opening effects etc. Also because it only requires some gfx card power, it's not slowing down the computer in any means, at least not when setting it properly.

For media playing purposes: Amarok and VLC. In Windows I've been using mainly Foobar2000 and in the past Winamp. Amarok surprised me: all this time Linux people have been using this amazing program? I admit I haven't dealt much with music managing stuff in Windows but Amarok makes it almost like fun. It also supports my media keyboard. VLC (also on Windows) is then a multi-purpose-thingamajig for videos and also streaming (you can stream your desktop to friends to show how cool nerd you are).

Downloading stuff: uTorrent on Wine (to finish my downloads from Windows time) and Ktorrent. I was able to continue my uTorrent downloads using Wine after configuring the right drives and then simply starting uTorrent. Ktorrent seems to be on the same usability level of uTorrent, so there was no transition shock.

For some reason I'm not very happy with the text editors (Kate, Kwrite, etc.). I'm used to the tabbed editors on Windows (like EditPad... well I used just that) and none of the default editors on KDE support those (as far as I know). Also something else is bothering... maybe the font? Usability? I'm not sure. And don't tell me to use vi* or anything like that.

I'm very pleased how (most of) the applications are integrated to the whole system. For example, the result of extracting files are immediatelly shown on file managers and other applications (like Gnview image viewer) with no delay. Installing stuff (plugins for example) on open programs are shown in the instant with no need to restart it.

I've adopted the "sudo apt-get/aptitude install this-and-that" quite well. At least it's faster than googling, searching, downloading, clicking[, browsing, rebooting] phases on Windows. Most applications are also in the package manager (Adept in this case).


Difficulties

To tell the truth, I also had troubles in some things (hey, first time I use Linux system more than a day). For some reason Kubuntu didn't auto-mount my old Windows drives (which include all of my media), so I had to do googling. Tweaking some things (config files, ugh) I got it working, but still was hours of work for still-a-noob like me.

Also my integrated network card's MAC-address is null by default (been years) so I had to figure out how to auto-change it on boot.

Dolphin (now the KDE default file manager) is missing some functionalities by default, like service menus (you know, "extract here" on archives for example).

I'll need time to get used to the different UI feeling, as it's... different. Besides those things, I've had some other minor problems, but nothing to make me want to go back to Windows.


My thoughts now

I'm using Opera (though minor annoyances), listening to music, downloading stuff and IM'ing just like I did on Windows. I'm beginning to utilize the virtual desktops more and more (while getting more annoyed using Windows at work) and getting used to more responsive UI and certain level of ease of use compared to Windows.

KDE as a whole has made me more interested of application development, and I sure have ideas. Although I have not much experience of programming applications (more like web programming languages) nor version-controlling besides couple of months at my work with ASP.NET (VB and C#), I'd like to get finally started. So maybe someone could give me an easy point to start (I thought of checking out KDE's Gwenview as I have ideas, but it was more challenging than I thought). Maybe some developer could take this chance to have a good future developer for their projects (or not, screw you then).


Conclusion

Yeah. I can't make conclusions. That's about it. Yoink!

---

Well this post bloated like a default Windows installation. I think I missed something I had in mind. Originally I didn't mean to write this much. Sorry

There was an article on Digg which gave me an idea to make custom User Style in Opera to resemble the girls' version of Digg.

I used basic CSS to replace some colors and a lot of CSS3 selectors to replace some texts and give happy colors for the comments. This is why this stylesheet works the best in a browser supporting CSS3.

How the heck do I use this in Opera?
I'm going to tell you how to enable this stylesheet on Opera 9.5. If someone have an idea how to enable these on any other browsers (preferably supporting CSS3), please send a comment.

1. Download digg-by-girls.css and save it to <your Opera directory>\profile\styles\user\
   
2. Open Opera and go to Digg's website
   
3. Right-click on the background, select Edit Site Preferences...
   
4. Open Display tab
   
5. Under the My Stylesheet, browse to that file you just saved.
   
6. Now refresh the page
   

And there you go! Now the only problem I had with this CSS was that this stylesheet makes your profile icon disappear on the top.

If you want to make your own version, I'll give you few tips.

Custom version
Basically you should know CSS markup, but if not, now is your time to learn.

1. Duplicate girls-by-digg.css and rename it to, for example, digg-custom.css
   
2. Restart Opera to show the new file it in the stylesheets list
   
3. Now select digg-custom.css
   
4. Note that using stylesheets this way affects all the sites you visit.
   
5. Make changes in the stylesheet and reload stylesheets (see below)
   

Make stylesheet editing faster
I myself am using a keyboard shortcut to reload edited CSS file. Without this function you'd have to restart Opera after changes, so it makes things faster.

1. Go to Preferences -> Advanced -> Shortcuts -> edit Keyboard shortcuts.
   
2. Now you can decide which keyboard shortcut you want to use to reload styles, I used ctrl-q
   
3. Quick-search for "q ctrl" and if it's used, delete it
   
4. Select application and click new and write "q ctrl" (or whatever you want)
   
5. On the action, enter "Reload stylesheets"
   
6. Now everytime you press ctrl-q, Opera reloads stylesheets from the drive, which makes stylesheet editing faster
   

That's all for today.

digg-by-girls.css

...ridiculous, really. "Ajax" is there because I copied the page from my previous thing.

Ta daa! It says bamboo.