Some great gifts

Monitor arm

For a while I’ve been contemplating purchasing an LCD monitor arm, so I decided to make it one of my christmas wishes. Long story short, the Ergotron LX Desk Mount is now in my possession. It brings many benefits, like:

• Added flexibility of monitor positioning, including rotating the monitor
• Improved ergonomics
• Freeing space on my desk (some of which was quickly occupied by my plush friends though)
• Looking good

Currently I’m not using the extender arm as you can see, but it may become useful in other surroundings in the future.

openSUSE box

Today I received my openSUSE contributor parcel. Including the openSUSE 11.1 boxset containing the printed Start-up guide, a DVD with 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the distribution, an additional CD with non-free software, a couple of laptop stickers and a limited edition openSUSE branded flashlight (batteries included! ). Also included in the parcel was the special openSUSE contributor t-shirt, with “iContribute” printed on the back.

Of course, I would have traded it all for a little higher quality openSUSE 11.1 release in a heartbeat, but it is a pleasing package nevertheless.

openSUSE 11.1 unleashed

Today openSUSE 11.1 was released to the public, so it’s time to say a few words again, already. It feels like 11.0 was released yesterday since this was an unusually short release cycle (6 months vs. the normal 7-9 months). It’s also a special release because openSUSE 11.1 is the code base for SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 (SLE), due out in the first half of 2009. It’s surely not the most polished nor least buggy openSUSE release to date, but at least it looks like we won’t see a repeat of SUSE Linux 10.1*, as some people may have feared. With some online updates 11.1 can become a very enjoyable release.

KDE

As always the impressive openSUSE KDE-team worked tirelessly to make the KDE experience extra pleasing.

KDE 4.1.3 is shipped, with everything which that entails. Additionally it’s enhanced with a lot of backported features from the upcoming KDE 4.2 – such as panel hiding, windows can cover panel, the KWin cube effect, PowerDevil power management, full featured Folder View widget, taskbar tooltips, multirow systray, possibility to hide systray icons and more. A special openSUSE feature is the hidden by default controversial desktop toolbox – the “cashew” (looks like a GNOME logo) in the top right corner.

Amarok 2.0 and early versions of KDE 4 DigiKam, KDE 4 NetworkManager applet, KDE 4 Kerry etc. are available too. As these programs progress, better versions will become available via the openSUSE Build Service repositories.

If you’re a KDE 3 user venturing into the KDE 4 world for the first time with 11.1, hopefully this post and the official KDE4 introduction page will lessen the shock for you

KDE 3.5.10 is available too, on DVD installations – at the desktop selection step, click on “Other” to select KDE3, along with Xfce, text based installation and icewm. This is the last time the KDE 3 desktop will be officially included in openSUSE media. Packages may be maintained by community members on the Build Service for future versions, who knows.

Other stuff

A lot of interesting things actually happened “around” the distro this time – not just in the technology itself.

For the first time openSUSE is built in the openSUSE Build Service for example.

The Contrib repository saw it’s humble beginnings. This repository will let non-Novell employees build and maintain official packages. For users it will mean more packages being available in a single frozen repository – instead of having to use lots of ever-changing, experimental Build Service repositories that cause conflicts and other problems – if you’re not careful.

Exciting strides have been taken in the field of software freedom. Adobe Flash, Agfa fonts etc. have been dropped from the DVD media – this means the DVD media is now redistributable and is licensed under GPLv2 – allowing commercial and non-commercial redistribution. Adobe flash-player will be pulled in as an update, if you don’t want it uninstall pullin-flash-player. Agfa fonts are replaced by Liberation Fonts.

OpenJDK and a web start plugin is installed by default instead of Sun Java, and works very well for many Java applets. A newer and even better version of OpenJDK is already available on the Build Service. Sun Java 1.5 and 1.6 is still available via the official non-oss repository if you need it.

The inclusion of SELinux should also interest a lot of people – even though it’s not very integrated, and it isn’t running by default – AppArmor is.

Have a lot of fun with openSUSE 11.1!

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* The uninitiated may not know that SUSE Linux 10.1 – which formed the base of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 – was probably the worst release of a GNU/Linux distribution in this millenium due to horribly broken package management.

KDE 4 for KDE 3 users

Since the release of KDE 4.0 11 months ago, there’s been a whole lot of heated debate going on, on blogs, mailing lists, forums, IRC and basically any other media you can imagine. The complaints seem to come in waves though – everytime there’s a KDE release or a major distribution release with KDE 4, a new wave of angry complaining people seems to appear out of the blue, putting forward the exact same complaints other people have already been presenting all over the net for months. It would actually be kind of funny to observe the phenomenon, if only they weren’t so loud and angry.

Since the release of openSUSE 11.1 with KDE 4.1.3 is imminent I thought I’d prepare a little something for the upcoming wave of frustrated people. Many other KDE4 FAQs and introductions already exist, but they’re not invented here. I’ll try to keep it short and broad, since almost all the complaints fall into three basic categories.

It’s different
Yes, KDE 4 is different from KDE 3 in many ways – this was the whole point of KDE 4 from the beginning. It was always intended to be a radical change, since it was decided that incremental improvements would only get KDE so far. This means there is a learning curve and there may be the need to reconfigure some applications from scratch.

However many applications are more or less straight ports, but some components are new and rather different, most notably the desktop and panel (KDesktop and Kicker) were replaced with Plasma, KControl has been replaced with Systemsettings and Dolphin replaces Konqueror as the default file manager.

Over time KDE 4 will become more different than KDE 3, not less, so waiting to migrate later probably won’t make it any easier.

Missing features
Yes, it’s true that KDE 4.0, 4.1 and even 4.2 doesn’t have every exact feature or configuration option that exists in KDE 3. This means you may have to adapt your workflows a little bit, but it’s very unlikely any of these missing features will be critical to doing your work if you think about it.

Nevertheless KDE 4.x already has got lots and lots of features that weren’t in KDE 3, you just have to look.

The missing features are not the result of a new philosophy for KDE, it just happens that porting everything to KDE4/Qt4 was a huge task, and some components were completely replaced and need more time to mature completely, but mid- to long term it’s for the best. If you compared KDE 4.0 with 4.2 (beta) you’d be amazed how many features and configuration options have been added in one short year.

Lack of polish
As mentioned above important components have been rewritten from scratch and even straight porting application wasn’t a walk in the park. KDE 4.1 is still just the beginning of the KDE 4 era, it will become much better in every area very fast. There’s definitely room for improvements regarding optimizations, usability and bugs in KDE 4.1. But it’s not like KDE 3 was bug free either, many KDE 4 components objectively work much better than their KDE 3 predecesssors.

This post won’t do much to alleviate the inconveniences with migration in a practical sense, but hopefully it’ll help some people migrating from KDE 3 to KDE 4 to understand what’s going on and why, and see things in a bigger perspective.

It’s also interesting that generally the most unhappy users are long time KDE 3 users – whereas users of GNOME or Microsoft Windows etc. don’t seem to have all these problems when they try KDE 4. I guess they approach KDE 4 with more of an open mind, intending to try something new and different, instead of expecting to find their former desktop environment++, maybe KDE 3 users can learn from that approach.

PS: KDE 3.5 is included in openSUSE 11.1, for the last time(!!). It’s under “Other” in the Desktop selection step of DVD installations.

Valgkamp i SSLUG

SSLUG har generalforsamling på onsdag d. 3/12. Der er ikke tilstrækkeligt opstillede kandidater til bestyrelsen til et kampvalg, men derfor bør du alligevel møde op til generalforsamlingen. På trods af det manglende kampvalg er valgkampen hård og intens. Du kan se et nyhedsindslag om Bryan “Kloeri” Østergaards effektive græsrodskampagne for formandsposten her (hvis du har Flash).

Alexander “ahf” Færøy er kommet sent ind i valgkampen, men han ligner en stærk kandidat med valgmateriale som denne plakat.

Nvidia woes

I’m not the type who needs to be on the cutting edge of 3D drivers, I usually just install the packages available for each openSUSE release and stick with those throughout the release cycle.

This time I was kind of looking forward to getting newer drivers for openSUSE 11.1 (due out on December 18), hoping that my FX5500 would then perform on par with, or perhaps even better than, the Intel 945gm on my laptop, when it comes to KDE4.

Instead, to my dismay I discovered that the FX5500 is no longer supported by the latest Nvidia drivers – which means I’m now a second class citizen in the Nvidia world, having to use an outdated, barely maintained (maybe even unmaintained?) driver. To add insult to injury I can’t get the legacy driver to compile on openSUSE 11.1 beta. I expect “they” will manage to provide a package for 11.1 final somehow. But Nvidia are surely not on the top of my list when sending out holiday greetings this year.

Right now I’m diverting as much positive energy and vibrations as I can to the Radeon, RadeonHD and Nouveau developers, and also wishing Intel would sell non-integrated graphics cards. Freedom matters.

Openjdk og netbank

Jeg er kunde i Forstædernes Bank, som bruger netbank-løsningen fra Bankernes EDB Central (BEC). Det samme gør næsten alle andre banker, med undtagelse af Danske Bank, Nordea og Jyske Bank, så vidt jeg ved.

I det store hele har det fungeret fint for mig som GNU/Linux-bruger, men det har betydet, at 1) jeg var afhængig af Sun Java, som stadig har enkelte ufri komponenter og dermed 2) jeg var afhængig af 32-bit Firefox, da Sun ikke leverer et 64-bit browser-plugin til Java.

Det er med stor glæde at jeg konstaterer, at et af problemerne er løst, siden i dag kan jeg benytte min netbank med Openjdk 1.6 på openSUSE 11.0, når jeg bruger pakkerne fra dette repository på openSUSE Build Service: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Java:/openjdk6:/Factory/openSUSE_11.0/

Sun Java er hermed fortid på mit system, da jeg ikke bruger Java i andre sammenhænge. På openSUSE 11.1 vil Openjdk i øvrigt være standard. Træerne vokser dog ikke ind i himlen, med kombinationen af 64-bit Firefox og 64-bit Openjdk segfaulter Firefox under login til netbanken. Så foreløbig må jeg stadig leve med at køre 32-bit Firefox på mit i øvrigt 64-bit system. Men andre applets – i hvert fald test-appletten på Java.com – virker, så afhængigt af hvilke Java-applets man skal bruge, kan Openjdk måske løse Java-problemet på 64-bit-systemer for mange allerede i dag.

Jeg er nysgerrig efter at høre om andres erfaringer med Openjdk. Har nogen fået det til at fungere med BEC-netbank på et rent 64-bit-system? Hvordan virker det med de andre netbank-systemer?

Yet another Open Source Days blog post

Everyone in Denmark is blogging about Open Source Days, and now I am too. Open Source Days is an annual two day conference in Copenhagen – formerly known as Linuxforum – which was held this weekend. It covers both business aspects as well as technical and community aspects of free/open source software.

First of all I’d like to congratulate the organizers and volunteers on an extremely well carried out conference. Everything was smooth, schedules were kept, no technical issues, etc., if there were ever any problems at all the organizers managed to keep them well hidden behind the scenes. However I did notice that some of the bags that were handed out had more than one copy of the same promotional material, so at least there is one little thing to improve upon

I saw a few interesting talks, but not as many as I would have liked, mainly due to duties in the SSLUG booth. I’m looking forward to watching the videos of the ones that I missed, when they become available.

SSLUG booth
In the SSLUG booth we had fun as always, among other things showing off the Fit-PC Slim, which we had borrowed from Peter Toft.

That’s my “new” FSC Lifebook E8110 on the corner of the table btw.

The SUSE perspective
Of course, some of us tend to see things in a distinct green tint…

The total absence of Novell.dk was striking. Last year they were sponsors, had a booth, the Novell user group was there. This year? No trace of them anywhere. But of course there was a strong SUSE presence nevertheless.

Most interestingly I discovered that Linuxshoppen.dk are taking orders for the MSI Wind (on the left) and the HP Mini-Note (on the right), due to become available within a few weeks with Danish keyboard and everything – both of them preloaded with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 with the GNOME desktop environment. Linuxshoppen had a couple of these on display at their booth.

Adam Jollans of IBM gave a presentation, using the IBM Open Client which he said is used every day by ~30.000 IBM employees. He said it was based on Red Hat – but I’m pretty sure it’s actually based on SLED. If I’m mistaken, at the very least it does have the (in)famous Slab menu on it.

Robin Rowe and Gabrielle Pantera gave their keynote presentation about GNU/Linux in Hollywood on openSUSE 11.0/KDE4.0. Nothing crashed, in case you’re wondering.