Ride KDE4 with openSUSE 11.0

About Six and half hours of leeching from torrent and 117.4 MB of seeding contribution for self-satisfaction, adds another distro to my wallet - the all new openSUSE 11.0 KDE4 Live CD.

Watching DragonBall on lappie and simultaneously installing openSUSE on my PC made the installation feel fast. After post installation configuration, it automatically logged me in with my username.
I was expecting to see the shiny black KDE4 panel and it turned out that openSUSE build had something else in mind.
A grey panel…err..not so attractive!

KDE4’s panel settings doesn’t have customisation for color and transparency like it did in 3.5.x series. Anyway, I thought I could figure it out somewhere in configuration files or may be live with it.
Some things I found missing during installation include setting hostname, choosing Network Type, Package selections.
After installation I also noticed that an extra user `linux` was created apart from my username.
Who asked for that? Is it a feature or did I do something during installation. ( One eyeball was watching lappie and the other was on PC - trait of suse mascot )

I decided to redo installation with careful check. This time I found that I had not unchecked the option of using same password for my username and root. Using this feature simulates ubuntu’s sudo kinda environment where you use your own password to do administrative tasks.
Even after the second installation, I find the ‘linux’ user existing on my system. So, well may be it’s not something I did and probably it’s a feature which I need to find an use for.

Moving on to KDE4 desktop now. openSUSE 11.0 ships in with KDE 4.0.4 which seems quite stable than my trunk build 4.0.7. Yes, quite stable but has issues.
The plasmoids on desktop lose their rotation when you relogin. They get realigned at their default vertical orientation.
Another issue is when I change colors in my look and feel settings and apply them, I get logged out losing all my open tasks.
openSUSE 11.0 also ships Firefox3 beta5 which hangs when your machine comes back from power save mode. Yet to test out Firefox3 Final on this.

Nevertheless, I am loving KDE4. Soon this ’shipped’ KDE will be removed and my PC should be living on KDE trunk.

Current distro profiles of my machines - openSUSE 11.0 on PC and Mandriva 2008.1 on lappie.

4 days to go…

No. It’s not the countdown for launch of my start-up, neither is countdown for start of a new TV game show.
4 days remain for the start of my semester exams and I still don’t know where my books are. (Do I have them?). “Ah, I’ll just read them from internet”, is how I try to console myself.
All these days I’ve been busy at maintaining mukt.in and tasted the pressure of lead responsibilities. Today, after lots of effort into writing our own forms, the attendee registration is up finally. (Yes, we chose not to use CMS even this time).
I would like to thank sivaji, kidfoo, deepsa, AJuOnLiNE and sanjayb for their efforts at it, while I was merely debugging stuff. (Ok, I know some names sound weird, but those are IRC handles)

I thought, “Atleast today I should sit and read something today”. I use my blackbeauty(PC) for reading for exams/e-books, coding for KDragons and on lappie its django, PHP, MySQL.
It almost skipped my mind that I had messed up my Desktop yesterday. KDE4’s plasma was crashing and I didn’t fix that yet. The problem was that widgets support isn’t really great on my build.
Here’s how my desktop looked yesterday - orkut album link
While most of the google search look-up’s and chat at #kde(freenode) suggested deleting plasma* from $KDEHOME/share/config, I figured out that moving plasma-appletsrc to something like plasma-appletsrc.old should do for me. Really no reason to delete plasmarc for my problem.

And this was not the end of issues. My downloads stopped due to insufficient disk space. What in the world could fill up my 45GB of /home?
A quick du -h showed me 31GB being consumed by .strigi folder in my home directory.
There were no options to disable strigi from my systems settings and I was not finding a clue whether this belongs to KDED services.
After lot of head scratching I found strigi-daemon running in my process table and it was eating away my resource like a glutton. (77% of CPU time!) No wonder why I felt KDE4 was being slow.
A small work around for this problem is ’sudo apt-get remove strigi-daemon’ and then delete all items from ~/.strigi/clucene
This seems to work fine, just that I don’t know the after-effects of reboot. Let’s wait and watch.

Oh by the way, would someone want to help me lose the habit of going to sleep at 5:00 am?
I’ve got exams from 18th, and all of them are at 10:00am. Time is ticking like always…

It’s Spring

Yes, it is spring now. No, I don’t mean the season but the new distribution on my lappie.

From the time I quit CSC, I’ve been using k/ubuntu for stable production work with little time for distro trials.
I picked up March and May issues of `Linux For You`and to my delight I found slackware12 and mandriva 2008.1 lying cute and cuddly in their shiny seal covers.
Then came hopping, the bully of our house a.k.a my girlfriend and snatched the slackware DVD to fulfill her new found madness - “Distro trials on Virtualbox”.

So, I spent my night yesterday installing and configuring mandriva spring. It took almost 5 hours to finish backups, installation, Look & Feel hacking, installing my requirements (apache, MySQL, Django, python, php) and a bunch other packages.
As a part of Look & Feel hacking, kiba-dock is the new app that makes it to my list; it took time to configure it not to look bloated, decide & place my launchers, refine the shadows & effects and last but not least was to suppress the black background render by using xcompmgr package.

I thought I did everything right, but no - I did screw up. I forgot to backup the database being used by my django models. No worries, it was just test database being used for my django learning.

Using debian derivatives has made me depend on deb packages. I also installed alien in case I need some packages from my backed up archives when I am away from internet.

That finished my configuration to be used for stable work. It feels good getting back to mandriva - the distro I was faithful to (mandrake 10.1 - mandriva 2006.)

hard time with hardy

My new lappie rested in its bag for some days. I had no time to use it and may be I was even waiting for my opensolaris shipment to arrive. It was my third attempt to get free opensolaris shipment from SUN. Hoping atleast the third one would come.

I tried downloading from the website, but the download breaks. One of ilughyd members, theju tried from torrent, I guess he got a bad checksum. So, all in all last, trust was on SUN to grant me an opensolaris DVD.

The wait was getting longer each day and one fine day ubuntu released 8.04 LTS version. This tempted me to try out the distro and still keep waiting for opensolaris. ubuntu studio seemed a good deal to try out. The download was another long wait.
After install affects:
1. Atheros wi-fi device was not detected.
2. Low quality sound.

Sound could be taken care of later, but lappie is really not mobile until I can go wireless. Limited by time, I left it in that state for few more days. The day I got back to it, I tried using the restricted drivers and madwifi.
Then I tried ndiswrapper deb package and used winXP drivers; no avail.
I was suggested to try compiling ndiswrapper from source rather than using packaed deb, at ‘The GNU/Linux Group‘
That attempt ended in CFLAGS error. Checked around in the internet to find lots of reports on CFLAG errors from various people trying to compile apps from source. Most of them are related to kernel 2.6.24

I was lost in thoughts on what can be done and lo - my opensolaris shipment arrived(release 1/08). Eager to get it run, I tried installing and ended up with bad/non-existing X server on the disk. I couldn’t get into GUI installation and I didnt want to spend time doing command installation and then patch my X.

It is not my natural self to upgrade / install new releases - Long lost habit. I wait for a month or two after the release and upgrade/install, only if necessary. Running low on time, I decided to pull debian4.0/kubuntu7.10 from my CD pack and get done with distro installation.
Atheros didnt work by default in it as well, but then ndiswrapper 1.51 did the job to an almost ok level. I say so because my wi-fi switch doesn’t blink, though I am able to connect to internet and it also works as toggle to switch on/off.
I’ll save the lights thingy for some other time. Got loads of other things to address on priority.

Going Virtual…

I used vmware workstation when I first started using OS on virtual platform.
Later I lost touch, and I had to get back to virtualization for testing and my abandoned LinuxFromScratch project.

I was still using vmware player with vmx machines build on vmware workstation. I longed for a change and started exploring options. Here are few things that ran in my mind since 2 days..

Virtualbox needs Qt as pre-requisite; I did not want Qt on my box.

Qemu - provides Qemu accelerator - KQemu for better performance on x86!
My PC is powered by AMD’s Sempron 2400+ and I might be happy with Qemu’s
performance. What happens when I move my virtual machines to intel box? Install KQemu!

Xen - needs the host operating system kernel to run on Xen itself.
So, probably I need to boot into the xen-mydistro-kernel (like in fedora); which I am not yet
comfortable with.

Kvm - Sun product. I was a little upset with the way things went with opensolaris and sun startup
programmes; hesitant to take a look at Kvm. May be it is a great product, may be it is not.

After hours of studying documentation for virtualization software and asking for suggestions in orkut (The GNU/Linux Group), IRC channels, I zeroed on virtualbox; finally allowed Qt on my box.

Luckily I got a deb package for feisty (saved me the hassle of building from source) and thanks to dpkg for easy installation.

Life couldn’t be much easier, I thought; this did not stand for long, I discovered that I removed myself from my secondary group by using `sudo usermod -G vboxusers`.
The brighter side of it is, I used my ubuntu recovery mode (in grub) for first time; added my name in old group lines of /etc/group and I was back in business.

Now what do I install as my new virtual OS? LFS, Zenwalk(redpill) or Mandriva2008!

Linux Not Windows? (with weird look)

I spent my day(Jan4) trying to make linux and open source reach colleges here in twin-cities (hyderabad & secunderabad) , by means of training and distributing linux distros.
Few things on my mind before I started out:
1. Free is not valued.
2. This will not be easy.

I chose junior, degree and engineering colleges for my venture, of which I covered three junior and one engineering college today.

I was under the impression that indian education system would have matured and institutions would think of more than syllabus books. Irony, I was wrong; some attitude that proves it:

1. (At one of the reputed junior colleges in twin-cities)
Front Office: Linux training! Linux is not windows? Ah, I don’t think that’s useful at all.
Me: Is it possible to meet the principal?
Front Office: He’s gone for lunch. I mean he is gone out.
Me: I just saw him walk into his office.
Front Office: (No Response)

2. (Another reputed junior college)
Vice President: Here, we teach only syllabus and repeatedly make the students read the same
thing. That is how students get good ranks in EAMCET.
(Ah, at least a frank response. I like this.)

3. (Last junior college for the day)
Principal: We are making our students revise the intermediate syllabus.
Me: Not a problem ma’am. We can have this next month if you permit.
Principal: We will do the revision till June. So come after June.

At this point, I was totally broken hearted and headed towards an engineering college here in secunderabad. I had been in contact with the Training & Placement officer of that college and also mailed her the details of training. After lot of follow-up calls from my side, and no return calls, I decided to meet her in person to discuss the training.

4. I walked in to the office and ..
ME: Hi, could I meet the T&P Officer?
STAFF: She has already left for the day.
ME: !

That’s four cases of disappointment for me in a day.
Shouldn’t I be getting a heart attack?

One of my friends has volunteered to help me find more colleges (degree & engineering) and I am yet to go on another ride on the path of open source knowledge sharing.

Will it be bumpy or smooth? Can I convince people to embrace linux and open source?
Only time can tell….