musings of a KDE hacker chick

New blog

2006-09-10T11:11:00.000+12:00

Hi guys! I've now moved my blog back to http://www.canllaith.org thanks to Rainer Endres, who now provides my hosting.

entrenched

2006-07-17T20:30:00.000+12:00

I've found some time this week to go through KDE mailing lists and start looking at my next KDE related project to embark apon. I think I'll ~~torment~~ grace the wonderful KDE marketing people with my presence and work on something promotional again. Wade has tossed a very interesting idea my way that I'll soon have some progress on.

Work has been hectic but fulfilling. The last few days I've been setting up bind9 to provide internal DNS for a customer and wrestling with the firewall changes required for it to actually work. Rarely a day goes past at the moment where I don't learn something new. The people I work with are fun and interesting and it's generally been great, even if I don't have nearly enough time for OSS these days.

I do however have a decent income, which means I should be able to make it to aKademy this year. I'm very excited about the prospect - it will be my first aKademy as I missed the last two for varying reasons.

After slacking off for a couple of months I'm going to be pretty busy with SSC (TUX & Linux Journal) again. There is a bit of writing work coming my way from a variety of locations and almost all of it promotes OSS in some way. TUX are currently looking at putting out a very interesting issue that I'll be blogging about closer to the date it's released.

As usual, I've been taking a lot of photographs. This is the wall of shiny I put in at work the other day:

Pretty, aren't they? If they weren't so noisy I'd want a set for home...

Upheaval

2006-06-05T22:39:00.000+12:00

Wow, what a month!

I've had a lot of changes in my life lately. I found that freelance writing was too unpredictable, and started looking for full-time work. I'm now working full time at Catalyst IT (http://catalyst.net.nz/) as a Systems Administrator, mostly working with Debian and Solaris. They're a great crowd and I'm really enjoying it there so far. The other sysadmins are all friendly and interesting and I think I'm going to really like it. I apparently shouldn't have too much trouble getting time off for aKademy. W00t!

I'm still going to be doing a little bit of writing for TUX and others, although probably not as much as I have been.

I've also moved to a new apartment in the Wellington CBD. It's literally 20 metres from work, and at most 10 minutes walk away from just about anywhere in Wellington City. I'm completely in love with the new place - the bathtub is *huge* and the kitchen fantastic. I now probably don't have enough time to cook anymore, but I like to stand in my new kitchen and admire it anyway.

I say 'I've' but I probably should say 'We've'. My (relatively new) partner Oliver has been amazingly supportive and just downright wonderful especially considering I've been swinging between stressed and annoyingly chipper about exciting new developments on about a 10 minute cycle all month. He is teh awesome.

I've barely had enough time to even look at my KDE mailbox in the last couple of weeks but in the lull before the storm I was working on some very interesting new developments with aaron and wade that hoepfully I will be able to put some more time into soon. There is some very energetic talent in marketing in KDE these days.

I really need to stop procrastinating by cleaning the house, gossiping on IRC and writing this and get back to finishing an article that was due 2 days ago. Hopefully Clee is now happy that there has been blogging.

ciao!

** QOTD: "So that's what a server looks like? They're really not all that big for all the fuss, are they!"

Try KDE - Give it a whirl!

2006-04-14T12:07:00.000+12:00

Over the last few days I've been working on the beginning of a webpage for kde-promo. For a lot of people, their first attempt at trying out KDE can be problematic. Even with today's user-friendly distributions, installing Linux can be difficult. Perhaps you already have Windows installed and you don't want to do anything that could possibly damage data on your disk. Maybe you just don't want to have to go to that much effort when you're not sure if you'll want to keep Linux on your computer. Try KDE is an attempt to lower the barrier to entry by collating a list of information about methods of trying a KDE desktop and applications easily.

The page is linked to from http://www.kde.org under 'Inform' with other resources explaining what KDE is. I really recommend those who are keen on evangelising KDE-on-Linux to your friends, family and workmates to make use of this resource. Showing someone how to run a SuSE vmware player image with KDE is a safe and fun way for them to experience KDE without needing to commit to an install of Linux or BSD.

You'll notice that the page is only listing a few resources right now. This is where the community comes in. If you have a favourite KDE live cd, Klik bundle, VMware player image, or you know where to get flash or avi demo material that would be appropriate for this page please don't hesitate to email me at jhall (at) kde.org. Your input will be what makes this page a relevant, up to the moment resource, and we can't do it without you.

Aspire

2006-04-11T08:54:00.000+12:00

Sadly the night before last my much beloved Dell laptop broke yet another thing, and I made the decision to replace him a little earlier than I'd been planning. I went down to the local Dick Smith Electronics store and about 15 minutes later walked out with an Acer Aspire 3620. These laptops are crazy cheap for the specs, and I was sort of thinking it was likely to be hell getting Linux working on it. I mean, it's no IBM Thinkpad.

http://global.acer.com/products/notebook/as3620.htm

Since I already had a nicely set up Ubuntu install on the 60GB disk that was in my Dell and the Acer had only come with a 40GB disk, I thought I'd just swap them over then reconfigure the Ubuntu install for the Acer's hardware. Probably with a few kernel recompiles in between, to get ACPI working sanely. Given a slice of the provided 256MB is taken up by the graphics card I also got another 512MB memory module for it and installed that.

I pop the 60GB disk in and then boot up the Ubuntu default breezy kernel. I grab a friend's xorg.conf who has a different model Acer with the same video card and screen resolution. After warnings from him that it took him quite a bit of fiddling around to get X to use 1280x800 screen resolution due to a bios bug in his model Acer, I typed 'startx' and wondered how bad the result was going to be.

My new Acer loaded up KDE at 1280x800 and gently played the KDE startup chime. In disbelief I check the battery monitor. Hrm, that looks pretty accurate. The screen resolution is fine. Sound works. Wireless isn't working yet - I'm using a Lucent wavelan pcmcia card until I get the onboard working. The Intel graphics card gets hardware accelleration in X11. Touchpad buttons all work, including scrolling.

After some discussion with my friend again (Thanks heaps xyzzy, you are the awesomeness) cpu frequency scaling was set up and works nicely.

I've ended up using ndiswrapper for the onboard wireless. There is an experimental bcm43xx driver for this chipset, but it's quite new and didn't work terribly well for me. I had to patch my kernel and recompile, and then use a specialised tool to extract some firmware files from the Windows driver. I managed to get the driver working, but the wireless was pretty flakey, dropping out on me all the time. Oh well, ndiswrapper works for the moment and I can have another go at the open source driver another time.

UPDATE: Suspend-to-ram works flawlessly. w00t Ubuntu!

I'm using swsup2, it's very very fast for software suspend and it was already set up on my previous install. For those who want a really cheap machine that is reasonably Linux compatible, I'd sincerely recommend this one. It's not perfect and you'll need to use ndiswrapper or patch and recompile the kernel to get wireless working but it's a heck of a laptop for under $1000 NZD.

New blog!

2006-04-05T16:19:00.000+12:00

It's been a long time since I last wrote a blog entry, and it seems I can't quite put my hands on my old blog software at the moment, as I've sort of semi-but-not-quite moved house and no longer dating the same person and all that jazz. Rather than leave it still more months before I get back to blogging I decided to utilise my previously unused blogspot account as an interim blog. This means I can have comments! Yay blogspot!

I've gotten back into KDE related work this week by starting to work on a small project for kde-promo. It's a resource for new users who are wanting to try out KDE without needing to modify their current working setup. I'll be gathering together links to download Vmware player images, live cds, Klik application bundles and other methods of trying out KDE. I'm in the process of creating a Kubuntu Breezy Vmware player image with KDE 3.5, to complement the SuSE one available. I also would like to list some NX or similar servers where people can get trial logins. If anyone knows of such a thing, please contact me at jhall (at) kde.org

I've been doing a lot of writing for TUX magazine, quite a bit of it about KDE. It's a lot of fun and it keeps me busy researching all sorts of interesting software. I'm mostly pleased with the great opportunity it gives me to promote KDE and get paid at the same time. Hopefully next month I'll have a KDE related article published in Linux Journal as well, so keep an eye out for it =)

I've had a lot of concerned people contacting me asking what happened to This Month in SVN. Don't worry - it's coming back just as soon as KDE4 development starts to show features that are interesting and accessible to end users. I'm really looking forward to being able to be part of this release cycle, with the opportunity to radically redefine what KDE is to us and how we express that. Aren't you?