Kubuntu – A First Look

Okay, you all probably know I love PCLinuxOS. It has been, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, my primary OS.  But I’ve been looking at KDE4 for a while, and with KDE4.2.3, it looks about ready to use.  So I cast about for a good KDE4-based distro to play with.

Generally, I haven’t had much use for the *buntu family.  Every time I have tried one of them, it has left me feeling, “Ho, hum. Another average distro.”  I haven’t bothered actually installing one for years.  But Kubuntu 9.04 was highly recommended by an online friend, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

What’s Happening to PCLinuxOS?

The last few months have been … interesting.   Beginning about ten months  ago, Texstar “disappeared”.  He turned over the development of PCLOS 2008/2009 to the Ripper Gang, and didn’t say anything to the community.  A couple months ago, with 2009 almost ready to hit the streets, he popped back up, and delayed the release until he pronounced himself satisfied.

What happened?

How To Upgrade PCLinuxOS 2007 or Minime 2008

I have put together this list of (nearly) fail-proof steps from doing my own updates, as well as the experiences of others on the PCLinuxOS forums. (Especially maddogf16: thanks, guy!)  These steps have not failed yet on a clean 2007/2008 install.  If you are working from a remaster, and/or have done a lot of system tweaking, including adding/removing packages, it might screw you.  I don’t really think it will, but you need to be aware of the possibility.

… then they fight you …

I got involved in a “Happy Birthday, Linux” thread over at Civfanatics.  I had to stop myself before I got too long-winded and argumentative.  All because one of the posters asked a simple question, “why should I switch to Linux?”  I guess that made me a little extra sensitive to the subject, because I have noticed today a couple of items about switching to Linux, and MS “fighting back”.

PCLinuxOS 2009 Is Out!

PCLinux2009.1 hit the mirrors today.  (The .1 because there was a wifi bug that Tex fixed last night.) There has not yet been an official announcement.

Update: The announcement has been made!

The Ripper Gang is pleased to announce the final public ISO release of PCLinuxOS 2009.1.

This release features kernel 2.6.26.8.tex3, KDE 3.5.10, Open Office 3.0, Firefox 3.0.7, Thunderbird 2.0.0.14, Ktorrent, Frostwire, Amarok, Flash, Java JRE, Compiz-Fusion 3D and much more. We decided to use kde3-5-10 as our default desktop as the we could not achieve a similar functionality from kde4. We will however offer kde4 as an alternative desktop environment available from the repo once we stabilize it.

PCLinuxOS 2009: My Experience

Okay, technically, the 2009 iso isn’t out yet.  But the repositories have been unfrozen, and the “Big Update” was pushed to all the mirrors.  I updated a couple of weeks ago.  So how is it going?

To begin with, my first try at updating was a no-go.  It was all my fault, I admit.  I had been multi-booting, playing with other distros while I waited for 2009.  I knew I had screwed up my grub.  I had tweaked it enough to let me boot PCLOS.   I knew I had to go in and fix it before I did the update and reboot.  I knew I had to….

<sigh>

To make a long story short, I ended up reformatting my root partition, and reinstalling PCLOS-2008 MiniMe.  But from there, I re-did the Big Update, and everything was beautiful.

The “Microsoft Trained Brain Syndrome”

I ran across an article this morning, Linux Versus the Microsoft Trained Brain Syndrome.  I thought it made some very good points.

The problem is that people who have lived, worked, and played in a homogeneous Microsoft computing paradigm are lost and confused when they encounter a different paradigm. These people have only seen the flawed Microsoft ideology for how computing systems should work and so have a difficult time with more elegant systems based on Unix. They see the Linux system with its’ own paradigm and ideology and try to force it into the only paradigm they know, which is Microsoft’s. This will always cause the user problems.

Get Ready For PCLOS 2009

Much to the delight of the many users, the Ripper Gang has announced that the repositories will soon be unfrozen, and the updates for 2009 will be available.  The announcement can be seen here.  The “Big Update” is expected to take place the first weekend in February.  The new iso should be out sometime after that.

This update is a big one.  Expect to wait a couple of hours to download everything.  And, because this update includes a new kernel, it requires a reboot.  (Just about the only time you have to reboot a Linux system is when you update the kernel.)

I’ve been playing with 2009 TR5 on my laptop.  It  has been a joy to use, and I’m looking forward to running it on my main desktop.

vi – The editor of choice

This winter, my employer decided to radically change the way we support new customers.    Instead of building their telephony applications using a proprietary, in-house language, we will build them in (raw) VXML, using PHP as the ‘glue’ to put it all together.  (Of course, existing apps, whatever the language, will continue to be supported.)

This means, among other things, that an IDE, or at least an editor, must be decided on to ensure standardization throughout our development branch.  Enter Applications Engineering, my section.

Linux Isn’t Just Good Ideology — It’s Better Computing

“Windows programs love to make themselves the dominant monkey on your system, and like all dominant monkeys they fling poop: placing icons on your desktop and quick start menu, making themselves the default for whatever you want to do, and opening themselves up automatically. Load iTunes and at every startup you get hit in the face with QuickTime, a load of monkey dung in your system tray taking up resources whether you need it or (usually) not.”

John Deeth is a journalist who occasionally writes about computers. He is currently running a series about Software As A Subversive Activity.  The latest, Part 6, talks about the hows and whys that make Linux a better computing experience than Windows.

He does have one specific a little wrong, though.  When he says there are 40 known Linux viruses, vs. over 60000 Windows viruses, he is correct in fact, but doesn’t go quite deep enough.  While there are about 40 known Linux viruses, only a half-dozen have ever been found in the wild.  The remainder exist only in the lab, where they were written as proof-of-concept cases.  I would go so far as to challenge anyone to find any that are surviving/propagating in the wild, today.