Linux – Kasperian Moving Parts

Desktop, KDE, KPilot, Linux, Open Source

Goodbye, for now at least, Linux Desktop

Sunday November 13, 2011

I’ve been an Open Source developer and hacker for a loooooong, long time. It has become far more than a part of what I do. It has become part of who I am. At first, it was mostly about the freedom to run what I want, where I want, how I want. Desktop Linux has always been exciting to me for that reason. But then it grew beyond that and enabled me to contribute back. Open Source allowed me to teach myself new programming languages. It allowed me to make friends literally all over the world. It became the thing that I enjoyed doing most, technically, especially since my daytime jobs didn’t let me do the kind of programming and Read more…

Apples, Linux

Logitech Marble Mouse and “auto-scrolling” in OS X

Monday August 23, 2010

I love my Logitech Marble Mouse. It’s seriously the best mouse I’ve ever owned. And it works really nicely in Linux, especially thanks to this excellent Ubuntu wiki page. And, reportedly, it works really nicely in Windows too, with Logitech’s mouse config software (which does me absolutely no good being that I refuse to run Windows). But I could not get auto-scrolling (where you hold down one of the smaller buttons and move the marble to scroll) to work in OS X. I almost broke down and bought a new Kensington trackball mouse like the Kensington K72337US Orbit Trackball with Scroll Ring for PC or Mac, Kensington Expert Mouse Optical USB Trackball for PC or Mac (this one still really Read more…

Apples, Linux

VLC patch for hfsplus partitions, yay!

Monday January 11, 2010

I have a 13″ MacBook Pro that I use for my personal and non-work shtuff. I resized OS X down, installed Linux (Kubuntu), and set up a shared partition so that I can keep files there that I want to access from both OS X and Linux. Things like my music and video collection, Snooker torrents, VMware virtual machines, etc. It appears that there are basically 4 decent options for a shared filesystem between OS X and Linux, but IMHO only 2 of them are worth trying and only 1 of them seems to actually work almost perfectly: The venerable FAT32 filesystem. Yes, it works. No, it doesn’t work like you’d want a UNIX filesystem to work. You can’t store Read more…

Apples, Desktop, KDE, Linux

Having spent a few days with his MacBook Pro…

Saturday November 14, 2009

I recently blogged about Desktop Linux possibly having some core/fundamental problems that might be keeping it from enjoying mainstream adoption and 3rd party developer attention as compared to, say, OS X. To my immediate defense, I’ll say that it was actually more of a brain dump and rant (True Story!) than a well-thought-out dissertation on all of the issues at hand. The impetus in this case was: Frustration with a particular admittedly proprietary application that didn’t use to have any problems in Ubuntu 8.10, and since then has been nothing but trouble for me and roughly 90,000 other people. You may say that it’s unfair to fly off the handle at one proprietary application having problems and condemn all of Desktop Read more…

Apples, Desktop, Linux

Why Isn’t Desktop Linux “There” Yet?

Tuesday November 10, 2009

It’s a shame that my first blog post in months is something so antithetical to my normal posts as this, but 1) I haven’t blogged in forever (darned Twitter/Identi.ca/Facebook!!!) and 2) I just bought a MacBook Pro and am really happy with it thus far. So bear with me. Or don’t. I don’t care. If you’re in the mood for a good rant or are bored beyond belief or want to hear about how to get Ubuntu Karmic installed on a MacBook Pro (system 5,5), stick around. Otherwise, I’ll understand. So, I’ve realized that I need to buy a personal laptop for a while now but have been putting it off because it’s expensive and a big ordeal. I don’t do Read more…

Linux

Screencasting in Linux!

Wednesday February 11, 2009

I’m excited. I love learning stuff, I really do. I just did a 12-minute screencast for work, and I think I’ve finally figured out how to get everything to fit together nicely. I’d never done a screencast before–not on any platform–but being that I needed to showcase some development work that I’ve done for the next release of VMware Workstation/Player, and being that I’m working from home for the time being, I needed to get this all working in Linux, and as I said, I think I’ve finally figured it out, woot! For starters, I used qt-recordMyDesktop to capture the full-screen (1600×1200 resolution) video. I wanted to use it to also capture the audio portion of the screencast at the Read more…

KDE, Linux

OpenSUSE 11.1 and nVidia == AWESOME!!

Monday December 22, 2008

Stark contrast to my last post, I know, but I felt it was only fair to blog about the wonders of OpenSUSE 11.1, even/especially with my little nVidia chip. First off, I still think there’s something wonky going on with X and/or nVidia’s driver in taking so long to start that kdm ends up giving up and committing hari kari, but my little workaround in extending ServerAttempts and ServerTimeout in kdmrc seems to be at least good enough to keep me from committing hari kari myself. And quite honestly, that’s about as much time as I want to spend on debugging it. =:/ But I updated to the KDE 4.2 beta2 packages again today and am absolutely loving OpenSUSE 11.1. Read more…

KDE, Linux

OpenSUSE 11.1 and nVidia?

So, first off, OpenSUSE 11.1 has to be the sweetest, best put together distro, like ever. Really amazing, quality stuff. The new installer has some excellent improvements, and package management has never felt zippier (zyppier??) However, there are a few problems that I’ve hit that I’m still trying to figure out after 2 days of fun and frolic. First off, I have a laptop (meaning I cant change the video card) with an nVidia chipset (meaning I’d like to change the video card). So while OpenSUSE 11.1 works really nicely with the open source “nv” video driver, it can’t do any compositing, 3d, OpenGL, etc., etc. (meaning no wobbley windows or cube goodness or translucency or… you get the idea…). Read more…

Linux

bbkeys 0.9.1 released (5 years later…)

Sunday December 21, 2008

I installed OpenSUSE 11.1 yesterday and there’s some… challenges… that have kept me busy for the last 2 days. But I’ll cover those in a different post… Most relevant to the title is this: OpenSUSE 11.1 doesn’t come with blackbox or bbkeys, so I set about compiling them myself and hit some problems. Blackbox, of course, compiled and installed just fine from source. Bbkeys (which depends on Blackbox and its libbt.pc) did not fare so well. For starters, there are some includes missing that newer versions of gcc fail on. Luckily, Art Haas and Egon Braun both sent me in a patch (that I regretably have been sitting on for… a long time…) that addresses this. So I submitted it Read more…

Desktop, KDE, Linux

Replace Laptop Video Card? Replace Laptop? Give Up Hope?

Sunday October 12, 2008

I just read Alexander Dymo (adymo)’s blog post “KDE4 performance on NVidia 8600GT: problem solved by bying ATI” and am quite sad because I’m pretty sure that it’s impossible to rip out the nVidia Quadro NVS 140M that’s crammed into the motherboard on my laptop and replace it with an ATI (or Intel?) chip. I know I blogged recently about how zippy KDE 4.2/trunk was after the latest nVidia driver update, but it only takes running for about a day solid until the performance on this laptop becomes unbearable again. And I’m not even using Firefox–thinking that Opera would fare better being Qt4 and all. Also making me sad is the fact that all 5 of the things Alexander mentioned Read more…