Category: Blog

Talking about KDE 4.1 again

Last time I didn’t find too many positive words for KDE. Therefore I’m happy to announce that the points noted in the last article are not entirely fixed, the DE is very useable though.

Yes, what I’m trying to press out is that I’m using KDE 4.1 from Debian’s experimental repositories as my new desktop environment now. If I wouldn’t be such a klutz I could probably use the patches from OpenSUSE to fix all my outstanding problems since the oS v11 seems to have the patchpower behind it (main problem’s  still that I cannot reorder items in the panel).

I’m thorougly impressed by the FolderView plasmoid that I do not have as of yet — but the videos, screenshots and blogposts sound exactly like the thing I want (basically: an old-fashioned desktop with icons so I can drag and drop stuff onto it).

The Debian packages are a little broken, unfortunately. To get as much plasma love as possible you should apt-get source extragear-plasma and build the applets manually, otherwise you’ll have just 2-3 usable plasmoids left. Also, there seems to be an issue with moving plasmoids around on the activity-desktop-thingy.

Apart from that: I’m really looking forward to 4.1 final!

Windows Genuine Advantage Validation tool fails to install?

Well, well, well — Windows is full of shit sometimes.

So there’s this dreadful Windows Genuine Validation crap thing Microsoft pushes down your throat. Now, that’s fine as long as the crap works but sometimes it fails to install via Windows Update; consequently you can’t install any other updates at that time. Bummer.

But there’s a (relatively) easy way around it: Try to install the control (yes, it’s a dreadful ActiveX control) directly through Microsoft Genuine: On the site click “Validate Windows” and the control should install. After that you can continue to install Windows updates.

I hate it when companies try so hard to show it the evil software pirates and end up annoying the paying userbase only. Thanks a lot, Microsoft.

Spam

By now I’m used to my daily dose of comment spam. Now I’m also getting spam on my domain e-mail account. Thank god the recipient mail address is just a non-existing bouncer anyway; disabling catch-all solved the problem quite nicely.

Still, gah. GAH!

OpenSolaris 2008.05

I’m a big fan of Solaris. But maybe my expectations for OpenSolaris’ Project Indiana are too high…

My idea of Project Indiana was that the final product would be something like a Debian for Solaris. I mean… they’ve got Ian Murdock and stuff 🙂 .

So, what is good, what is bad?

Let’s sum up the good things first:

  • The driver diagnostics tool is an awesome idea. I don’t know why this isn’t part of any better live system. It shows you exactly what devices will work and where you’ll expect trouble. In my case I was a little puzzled that my cheap-ass SATA II RAID controller on my ASUS main-board worked out of the box but my PCI IDE controller didn’t/doesn’t.
  • Familiar programs, easy migration: SUN doesn’t leave you in the cold, the familiar programs of your run-of-the-mill GNOME desktop are also present in OpenSolaris. Furthermore, the GNU userland tools are available (thank goodness!) and the shell du jour is BASH 🙂 .
  • I love the way you administer and control services. svcadmin is such a powerful tool. Haven’t worked much with it since I don’t have to tinker with the configuration, though.
  • If there’s KDE, that’s a good sign. 3.5.8 could be running on my machine… but I’d have to get it through the package management first (what an ordeal!).
  • All the ZFS goodness makes my heart all warm and fuzzy. For every negative point I’ll list in a few lines… just scroll up to read about ZFS again. It makes up for so much (especially since the performance is worlds apart from ZFS on Fuse [which I love a lot!]).

The problem with OpenSolaris is that it is relatively immature. So, without further ado:

  • pkg performance is abysmal. This is my biggest complaint. I wanted to install Mplayer, which should be a rather trivial task. I ended up downloading the sourcecode and building it manually because that actually saved me time. Remember: If building the application takes longer than installing it through the package system your package system is flawed. This needs to be fixed ASAP, it’s not about the GUI or whatever, fix the CLI tool!
  • Did I mention that searching software with pkg was abysmal as well? It deserves it’s own bullet because searching is just as painful as watching the software do nothing. Why can’t I search in all repositories at once, for pete’s sake?
  • The installer took half an eternity to evaluate my disks. Maybe it doesn’t like mdraid?
  • Improve your GRUB support, SUN! I already had GRUB, I read in your documentation that you would just overwrite it without asking me for my consent… but still. Make it an option, at least. And when you detect Windows, why don’t you detect Linux? Ah wait, that’s a GRUB problem… 😉
  • I couldn’t seem to get the partition part of the installer to work properly, had to create a partition manually and overwrite it through the installer. Creating new partitions resulted in a error message.
  • What the hell? No support for NTFS by default? Are you joking? Installing some extra program from the repositories is no option for me (because it’s just a pain to use pkg).

So, overall… what’s the verdict? I love Solaris. I did before, I do now. There are flaws, that’s to be expected. I was really stunned by the repository of drivers that is shipping with OpenSolaris now. When I tested Nexenta last year many components didn’t work — now they perform flawlessly. I somehow feel I can’t always name ZFS as my favorite feature (gosh, I love ZFS, did I mention it’s the default filesystem in Solaris now?) so I’ll go with something else I found really attractive: OpenSolaris has a certain pure UNIX feel to it. With Linux you have all your kinky tools and graphical frontends to control your system, OpenSolaris – in contrast – has absolutely great CLI tools that did the job just as good (even better?). I can’t say anything about usage or administrative tasks on servers but for desktop machines the system quickly catches up to Linux. Don’t ask me what I consider a pure feeling, it’s probably something gross to you 😉 .

So… throw in improved package management and keep building packages — and you’ll have yourself a winner, SUN. But until then… I’ll stick with Linux.

Das Paradoxon

Haha

Heise hat manchmal einen ungewollt zynischen Humor. Oder ist das eher das Talent unserer Regierung?

Auf der einen Seite schlotterts in der Hose, da man ja jetzt abgehört werden könnte, andererseits beschließt man nun die BKA Gesetzesnovelle, die genau diese Mittel auch legitimiert.

Copying User profiles while in use

I know it’s not a feasable way to do it but sometimes you can’t get around to copy a user profile while it’s still locked (think: Windows locks it even after the user logs out).

To copy such a pesky profile I use Hobocopy:

hobocopy /full /y /r “%HOMEDRIVE%\%HOMEPATH%” “C:\UserProfileBackup”

The program makes use of shadow copies to perform the process so the resulting file will still be locked but at least it was copied. This becomes quite useful when used in conjunction with, for instance, the portable version of CCleaner and it’s /AUTO switch.

Wine 1.0 RC

Woot woot. Good things do happen 🙂

Now it’s time to do some regression tests. Without implying bad things here, but people should be very strict with applications before giving out platinum status.

Things like “does work perfectly fine as long as you don’t click button X” or “works perfectly fine but has some visual glitches” usually mean the application does not work perfectly fine and therefore doesn’t really deserve platinum status. Feels a bit like cheating on yourself if you give out platinum too easily. Just my two cents, though.

CoreAVC 1.7 + Mplayer

It took me about a week to sort out some issues with my setup but now CoreAVC 1.7 is running fine in my SVN version of Mplayer thanks to the revamped patches from the CoreAVC-for-Linux project (yay, no more old builds!).

Some notes:

  • If you’re using the correct-pts option in your ~/.mplayer/config you should set it to “no” to get a huge performance boost. I dearly hope this is a new thing… otherwise I’d have to redo all my benchmarks 😉 .

CoreAVC for Mplayer dead, reborn, punching bad boys to a pulp

It’s a real shame: A while ago I blogged about a very nice set of patches to make CoreAVC work on Mplayer. Now it seems that a DMCA note was filed and Google has kicked the project from it’s Code page.

Don’t fret, though! CoreCodec is a little torn apart on this issue but is apparently helping Alan, creator of this great patchset, to make the patches ready for CoreAVC 1.7 (the most recent one, you had to use 1.5.* before):

Regardless of the cause, CoreCodec and I have resolved the conflict, and CoreAVC-for-Linux should be back online soon.  In addition, the patches for 1.7.0 are ready to go, and Linux users should see a nice performance improvement on Dual-core machines (compared to 1.5.0) once it is available.

Geez people, don’t scare us like that!

Nemo

Can’t really tell how I’ve managed to overlook this great program 🙂 .

Nemo is a file manager without… well… it’s more like a calendar actually… but with files. Hard to explain but very fitting to keep track of my incredible heap of data. I’ll keep an eye on this project as it is not only written in C# (Mono) but also utilizes the capabilities of Xesam. That makes 2 great reasons to love it already 🙂 .

Ouch

It’s a good thing that people actually listen to you when asking for advice on what kind of TV they should buy. Too bad they stop listening when you start talking about upgrades to the rest of the television set stuff (like set top boxes, for instance).

So, there’s this shiny new Full HD television with 3 HDMI ports and all kinds of kinky fizzle and the picture still looks like crap. Can you guess why? Let me give you a small hint: It has something to do with the receiver just doing 1080i instead of 1080p. [Note: I’m talking about the picture on HD channels, of course!]

Just to prove that coughing up 2000 Euro for a new TV wasn’t a phenomenal waste of money (although on review, it was considering Germany’s TV shows) you just have to hook up some fairly powerful multimedia overlord computer to that thing and play .hack//G.U. Trilogy, it’ll get you a nice “Wow” moment 🙂 .

Of course you could also spend additional 600 bucks and get a PS3 and GTA IV to celebrate your unending stream of funds. That way you can also assure that I’ll always be Johnny on the spot to fix stuff at your place. Ah, but make sure you’ve got enough potato chips and soda 😉 .

New hardware just keeps rolling in

I’ve been in love with the SATA cradle from the moment I saw it. Too bad that darn thing costs half a fortune when importing it from Japan. Sharkoon obviously saw the potential of the device as well and made a similar device available in Europe — USB only.

QuickPort Pro

What a bummer. But finally the QuickPort Pro comes to the rescue and brings eSATA goodness to us poor, poor European pigs. Amazon Germany sells the QuickPort Pro for 36 Euro per unit. Quite a pricetag but worth the money if you work with many harddisks. Mine’s ariving tomorrow, together with a new pair of disks 🙂 .