Technology

Since I’m switching many machines from Ubuntu to Debian, I was wondering if I could just keep my home partition intact and simply install Debian “over” Ubuntu, or if that would cause major problems with application configuration files etc. Here’s the good news: It’s absolutely no problem to sidegrade from Ubuntu 9.10 to Debian squeeze (testing). I chose to keep the /home partition unformatted in the installer, but formatted the / partition. When the system rebooted, I logged in and my entire desktop looked exactly the same as under Ubuntu. Even my GNOME settings were intact, down to the desktop background. ...

I used to have a mirror of all sorts of decryption tools here, but the legal situation has improved over the last few years so that this is no longer necessary. Instead, I am happy to refer you to Apprentice Alf’s blog with his decryption tools.

I’m using Windows 7 a bit more regularly for gaming purposes now, so I thought I’d start on a series of articles about Win 7 vs. KDE. I’ve given up on GNOME until 3.0 rolls around, but once that’s out, I can do three-way comparisons 🙂 Today I’d like to nitpick on something. Observe the following screenshot from the top right corner of a KDE 4.3 window using the default theme: ...

I’ve been using the new KDE 4.3 for a week now, and I think I’ll stick with it. There are still some issues to fix, but they are small things, I’m sure 4.3.1 will take care of them. The fun I’ve had so far, and this is why I’d recommend trying KDE 4.3 to any computer user, is in the subtle little helpful things KDE does: When you move a file to a folder that already contains that file, Dolphin (the file manager) will ask what to do with it. It even recognizes the file if they have different names! You can choose to skip, auto-skip, overwrite… No more manually trying to find duplicate files to interleave one directory with another. In Dolphin, clicking on the filesystem path shown on top of your file list lets you edit it and manually enter paths. Very quick. The widgets on the desktop are both silly and useful, depending on which ones you choose. I have the latest lolcats, Penny Arcade, XKCD and Nichtlustig comics on my desktop. But I also have a dictionary widget, the weather, a fuzzy clock (says “half past eleven” in so many words) and the files in my homedir. I can also add the files from my former desktop directory, and they show up in orderly fashion. Compare this to your average desktop, where there’s just clutter and no real useful features. In the worst case, I can glance at the weather and some lolcats. In the best case, I’ll quickly navigate to a file I was looking for. Dolphin as file manager is amazing. I can have OS X-style columns in the window, then split the window and have your usual detail view on the right half. I can mix and match view modes as I please and use the one that’s best for each situation. When navigating the hierarchy a lot, column view might be good, but when sorting audio files from left to right it’s better with a side-by-side detail view. Alt-F2 (this is freely configurable) brings up a quickstart dialog that is really powerful. If I enter “fire” and hit enter, firefox will launch. If I enter “22+3=” the bottom of the window will show “25”. If I enter “Ruben” and some Rubens are in my address book, one of the choices will be “Write e-mail to Ruben”. If I enter “gmail”, my Gmail opens because I visited that site in my browser once before. This is all done 100% automatically and transparently, without any configuration. I’m sure if I configured this thing, it would be even cooler. Very, very, very fast working is possible this way. Kate is a wonderful text editor, it has probably the most beautiful code folding I’ve ever seen. Choqok and other social networking tools integrate nicely with the desktop and also make use of the cool notification feature. If your machine is doing something in the background (copying a bunch of files), your screen isn’t cluttered up with useless progress dialogs. Instead, all current tasks are summarized in the lower right corner in your notification area. Once the task is finished, you will be notified. If you want to look at the progress, hover your mouse over the notification area. I have OS X’s Exposé and other window management features at my disposal, but I don’t need to use OS X for them 😛 The kickoff menu in the lower left is very convenient as well. I think you can see that I’m very happy with KDE 4.3. If some of the issues (like the WLAN network manager that can’t connect to corporate WPA2-TKIP networks) are fixed, I see no reason not to recommend this stuff. ...

If you have Ubuntu, give KDE 4.3 a try or check out some information first. I’ve followed the KDE development since version 1.0. I remember installing it in circa 1999 on a PowerPC machine with a 200 MHz 603e and 24 MB RAM, and it ran faster than the native OS I had on that box, Mac OS 7.6. When the KDE team hit version 3.0, I thought development got very slow, KDE itself slowed down as well, and things weren’t looking great all in all. Now that I’m trying KDE 4.3, I’m surprised at every corner. This thing rocks. It’s fast, it’s quite different to any other desktop, but extremely configurable. I can set this thing up to work like Mac OS X, like Windows, like a mix between the two, like none of them. I can add the latest lolcats to my desktop in a widget, with a dictionary and my home dir next to it, and they’re available at the push of a button. ...

Remember the 90s, when Microsoft had illegally established a dominant position in the browser market and the dominant browser was MSIE? You might think that was harmless, but it has caused several problems: No competition means websites were written for a specific browser instead of to a standard (that the W3C publishes) MSIE (purposefully?) broke this standard in order to make sites written for MSIE incompatible with other browsers and further strenghten Microsoft’s position MS started adding tags to MSIE that didn’t exist on any other browser. Not for the good of mankind, but to lock people onto the MS product Lack of competition meant that innovation stagnated There are plenty of security holes in MSIE, and there was little incentive for MS to fix them Ask a web developer to tell you just how broken MSIE’s HTML rendering engine is Yesterday, the Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 3.5 with many new features (mostly under the hood) and speed boosts. People have noticed this new competition and are no longer happy with an old and broken browser like MSIE 6.0, which used to be the default for many. When we look at our website stats at work, about 35% of our users use Firefox, another 35% use Safari and only 25% use Internet Explorer (either 6, 7 or 8). This is excellent news because it is living proof of competition. Competition gave us many improvements: ...

After the Norwegian ISO standards body, Standard Norge, accepted Microsoft’s MSOOXML file format even though only two of 23 members voted in favor, it became clear that some manipulation had been going on behind the scenes. Apparently, nearly 40 strong and powerful Microsoft partners had sent identical letters to Standard Norge urging them to adopt MSOOXML, and Standard Norge’s own expert committee’s strong vote against the format was simply ignored. ...

I like simple editors and use Kate a lot. It’s like Kdevelop, but without all the additional baggage. It does syntax highlighting and indentation just fine, and it has code folding and can comment and uncomment entire text blocks. If an editor has all of that, it’s already making me very happy. I was curious to see what will change with Kate in KDE 4, so I installed the KDE 4 version today on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), since it’s nicely packaged there. The screenshot above is from that version. Just wow. Text display is crisp and look at those code folding depth indicators (the gradually greener line on the side). When I took the screenshot, I was hovering my mouse over the greenest part, which highlights the block at this depth. The triangles let you fold code, of course. ...

I’ve tried the Xbox Media Center, I’ve tried hooking up a full PC to my TV, but nothing beats the tiny little Popcorn Hour A-100 I just received. It’s silent, only wants 12V of voltage, has a BitTorrent downloader built-in and can access an internal hard drive if you mount one. It plays Full HD 1080p video smooth as butter in XviD, H.264 (even in Matroska containers), WMV – whatever you toss at it. And it costs less than USD 200. ...

This is the third time that a French court had to force a PC dealer to return the money for an unwanted copy of Windows. The Slashdot article has some more information in English. The refunds were between 100 and 300 Euros, depending on version of Windows etc. Do the math. Laptops nowadays often cost under 700 Euros. Laptop makers still bundle Windows and force it down customer’s throats, but if you don’t want that software, return it! It can shave up to a quarter off the price of your laptop, as you can also get a refund for MS Works or other software that was included without asking you. You can then use some other operating system on the machine, or if you want to keep using Windows, you can use your existing license. Tying a license you’ve already bought to a specific laptop you bought it for is also not legal in many countries. If this happens to you, check what the situation is for your country and perhaps sue the company. ...