Uber Geeky!

I’ve been gradually catching up with a lot of the rants on the net with respect to KDE3.5 vs. KDE4. Some less sane than others. I came to the debate quite late it seems, and it’s something I’m not pleased with even having to care about to tell the truth. Suddenly now I find my self having to understand the developers philosophies and getting to know some of the more vocal egos on both sides of the fence. After grasping a better idea of what’s happened, I don’t think I’ll ever be completely sold on KDE4. But after reading some more compassionate words on the topic today, I think I’ve finally come to terms with the situation.

In the KDE developers defence, I don’t think it’s possible for complete overhauls of software to ever be embraced whole heartedly by the userbase. Particularly not right away. I will continue to resent the fact that Kubuntu took up KDE4 so soon. I liked KDE3.5 because it was a work of art, but also because it was fully functional and intuitive for anyone who is used to MS Windows. At that time I couldn’t understand why Ubuntu picked Gnome for the flagship considering KDE3.5 was so much more suited winning over the users afflicted by Bug #1. My first impression when KDE4.1 was thrust upon me was of some retarded mutant desktop environment from a future that I don’t care to participate in. KDE4 turned my entire desktop experience inside out!

I’m not going to pretend that I’m not a stubborn person. I like to work in a particular way which I’ve refined over years, dating back to MS DOS and Windows 3.1. I switched to Linux because some of the more restrictive and intrusive features in Windows Vista had well and truly crossed the line as far as I was concerned. I wanted to get back to a basic desktop without all the useless eye-candy. KDE3.5 was the best fit for me at the time.

I’m quite busy as well. I soon learnt with Linux distro’s, every time there is a distribution upgrade to postpone it for at least a month and ensure I dedicate a couple days after it to get myself settled back in. With KDE4 it was more like a couple of weeks of pointless frustration. Wrestling with KDE4 just proved to be too much hassle for me at work and I’ve now fully switched over to Gnome. I found it easier to customise to my liking than KDE4. At home I’m still on KDE4.2 because it doesn’t matter so much if I’m spending 6 hours trying to figure out how to customise the desktop theme in vein, and I still hold out for a glimmer of hope that the developers may resolve some of my issues with it.

KDE4 is not easy or intuitive to use. I don’t like this widget based desktop paradigm and I don’t understand how it’s useful in anyway. Most of the time my desktop is hidden by windows anyway. I have to wonder if KDE4 was ever designed for using or if it’s just for looking at. KDE4 is a contradiction in my eyes. To be a desktop environment which gets in the way of letting users do what they want, yet to do so in the name of flexibility is bizarre. It makes me anxious and I don’t like it.

I still see KDE4 as the lavalamp of the desktop environment world. It chews a lot of power and looks pretty, but it’s not all that useful. You also have to be careful about touching it because you might get burnt. I have a feeling it’s the new development philosophy that’s flawed, but I can’t quite put my finger on what that flaw is as yet. I think I’ve reached a turning point in my thinking about KDE4 now though, and I find my self walking peacefully in the opposite direction.

So it seems that laptop prices have fallen dramatically at the low end of the market, though the industry doesn’t seem to have reported this, it’s certainly a fact that a quick search for new laptop prices will quickly confirm. There are two major factors at play other than the global economic situation. The first is an attempt to compete with with netbooks. As many have pointed out already, you’re average Joe isn’t going to spend $3000 on a laptop when they can get a netbook for $500. People don’t know too much about features and specs, they are just numbers, much like the price.

Laptop purchasers know about convenience and certainly they know about budget, especially in these tight economic times. Laptops are more expensive for two reasons, they are smaller/more portable, and their components cost marginally more to manufacture (compared with a desktop of the same specs). Joe Consumer doesn’t understand/care about the second factor enough to convince them to pay 6 times the price. Ironically, once the prices became comparable, the main reason my folks wanted to go for the laptop over the netbook option I gave them was due to the larger size of the unit.

Since purchasing the cheapest new laptop I could find for AU$600, I’ve seen machines with better specs going for about the same price. I’ve also seen that exact laptop drop about $100 in 2 weeks (certainly due low demand). But why such low demand for low end laptops? Well the reason is that Vista sucks so bad it’s not funny. You can’t produce a really cheap laptop these days, because it must be able to run Vista! Customer dissatisfaction and return rates must be going through the roof for these guys.

Microsoft paniced when they realised that they had missed the netbook market completely, so they smashed out a netbook version of XP despite previous efforts to stick to their dead-horse-flogging “Vista is our one and only OS product now” guns. So in the process they have doomed the laptop market for all those hardware vendors trying to sell low end laptops and locked into volume licence agreements with Microsoft. I expect it’s having a ripple effect to the high end of the laptop market and even into the desktop market as well.

So yeah, I’m putting it out there. I’m going to state matter of factly that Microsoft has done a champion effort of destroying the laptop market by only allowing netbooks to bundle with XP.

On a side note, when I got the laptop for my mum I tried to install XP on there as a fall back plan. It took hours of installing updates and experimenting with different drivers. Eventually I reached the conclusion that the correct hard disk controller drivers did not exist, the hardware manufacturers did not support the laptop. So after spending hours and consuming about 500MB of my download quota I gave up and went back to Ubuntu. Ubuntu sure did use up a comparible amout of download quota performing the initial updates, but every device (and I mean everything) worked as intended. No user interation required other than clicking ‘ok’ buttons in the GUI. I was especially impressed that the USB wireless broadband modem was detected instantly and connected to the internet. I was sure that was going to be a problem but Ubuntu pleasently surprised me with the hardware support this time. Those guys at Canonical have really got themselves a pollished product. Shame that Gnome vs. KDE competeing for who sucks worse, but that’s another topic.

Since I’m always keeping an eye out for good deals on Netbooks, I stumbled upon this great little budget Toshiba laptop. It’s a Toshiba Satellite Pro L300 (PSLB9A-02L001). Not exactly what I’m looking for, but I decided to order one for my folks. For just $600, you can’t really go wrong. Here’s the specs…

• Mobile Intel® Celeron® M 585 Processor (2.16GHz, 667MHz FSB, 1MB L2 cache)
• Mobile Intel® GL40 Express Chipset
• Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium 32bit SP1(OEM)
• Hard Drive: 160GB 5400rpm 2.5″ SATA
• RAM: 1GB DDR2 667 expandable to 2GB# (one slot used, one slot free)
• Video 15.4″ Widescreen XGA TFT Active Matrix 200NIT (1280×800) resolution
• Video Card Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator GL40
• DVD SuperMulti Dual / Double Layer (DVD±R±RW,DVD±R(DL) DVD-RAM) Read: CD-ROM(24x), DVD-ROM(8x) Write: CD-R 24x, CD-RW 4x
• 10/100Mbps LAN
• Integrated Atheros 802.11 b/g WLAN
• Express card slot, RGB, 3 x USB 2.0, Headphone & microphone port, Bridge media Reader/Writer slot (SD, MMC, Memory Stick/Memory Stick Pro), Integrated microphone
• Integrated Web Camera
• Intel® High Definition Audio Sound
• 6 cell Lithium-Ion battery (up to 3 hours)
• Dimensions 362mm(W) x 267mm(D) x 33/37.7mm(H)
• Weight 2.6kg

The processor and video card are lame I know, but considering Mum is currently using an 8 year old PC with Windows 98 on it, I don’t think she’s going to notice. Still, this thing is badly under spec’d for running Vista. All the reviews I’ve read indicate this thing is going to be pretty hit and miss as far as getting a fully functional distro installed without too much bother, so it’s getting delivered here and I’m preparing to have some geeky fun with it. I’m also getting an additional 1GB of RAM delivered, so plan B is to just revert to Vista and surgically remove the guff to get some reasonable performance out of it before handing it over. Having successfully avoided ever touching Vista thus far, I’m actually curious to give plan B a go.

The main reason I still bought it despite the bad Linux reviews was some guys down in Melbourne who offer support services over the phone for this model and have listed “Linux Compatibility” as “Excellent”. My plan is to install the latest Ubuntu and then what ever doesn’t work, I’ll contact them and ask them to book me some time for a phone support call to sort out the rest. I’m happy to pay $40 for 1/2 hour of support, that’s more than reasonable if it saves me half a day.

What really bugs me is that I’m still sponsoring Microsoft out of all of this. I’m still indirectly paying for the crappy OEM Vista which is no doubt the main reason these laptops are now so drastically reduced in price. There is no refund available to me if I don’t want to use it. Hell, apparently I can’t even downgrade to Windows XP. Microsoft was advertising that as an option, but apparently it only applies under very strict circumstances. So this poor laptop has to suffer Vista on the consumer electronics market and hence it’s doomed to perform horrendously. Ok, I’m making a few assumptions based on very little at this stage (considering it hasn’t even been delivered yet). I certainly smell a follow up post or two.

Forget my post about running VPNC from the G1 terminal. Wmealing has just released the Android package that does it all in GUI form. Grab the get-a-robot-vpnc package now.

Not much to add, except “oh the awesome!”. Here’s a little screen shot of the add connection GUI…

If you have trouble figuring out what to enter into those fields, check out my old get-a-robot-vpnc post for some hints.

This morning I checked my phone only to find a message about updates downloaded and ready to install. That’s an odd thing, since I’ve got modded firmware that should have disabled such behaviour to prevent conflicts. I was a bit worried, but an ADP G1 wielding colleague pointed me to this notice… http://andblogs.net/2009/07/otas-in-jfv1-51/

I followed JF’s 2nd and 3rd suggestion and so far so good. Here’s the exact steps I took to disable the update.

1. Download and extract JFv1.51 ADP firmware and copy build.prop to the sdcard. Or use this build.prop (freshly extracted for your convenience).
2. Mount /system on the G1 as read/write. Two simplest ways to do this is either install “DroidSans Tweak Tools” or run “mount -o rw,remount -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system” in a terminal.
3. Replace build.prop and make the permissions the same as the old one with something like:

   $ su

   # mv /system/build.prop build.prop.bak

   # cp /sdcard/build.prop /system

   # chmod 644 /system/build.prop

4. Find the update in the /cache directory and “chmod 000″ it…

   

5. Now I actually clicked on the “restart and install” option on the update dialog. The phone rebooted, and the update failed. I rebooted with Home+Back and haven’t had the update prompt as yet.

So far so good. One odd thing I noticed is the update is gone from the /cache directory.

The Cyrket website is an “Android Application Browser” for the desktop. Makes it much easier to search for applications and works especially well in conjunction with “Barcode Scanner” app installed on the handset.

Now why didn’t Google just do that in the first place?

Looks like some Italians figured out a way to access paid applications on the Android Market. Check out this English translation which contains a link to the MarketEnabler app they wrote. I’ve tested it out and it stills work quite well.

Just a quick follow up. The plans to maintain my KDE3 addiction worked, but it wasn’t a smooth ride. I don’t recommend it for anyone who isn’t keen to tinker. During the KDE3 installation some packages wanted to overwrite KDE4 files, which caused all sorts of issues with my package manager. I had to use dpkg to force a couple packages to install before I could remove the KDE4 ones and then re-installed the KDE3 ones just to be sure. I ended up culling a fair few of the default KDE4 packages to make sure I didn’t have any more problems like this. I can still login to KDE4, but some of the nicer stuff like Compiz is gone.

I had issues with Compiz in particular, there are problems with the latest nVidia drivers. The latest Compiz has a workaround for this, but it’s not available for the KDE3 version. I found the simplest solution was just to switch back to the 177 driver version and then it was all good.

So yeah, I recommend just switch to Gnome, or try KDE4 on Jaunty and enable the folder view desktop. It seems like pointless overhead to me, the folder view is just a full screen widget. Note also that it doesn’t span screens, so if you have a dual screen setup and you want some icons spattered on the second screen you’re out of luck. KDE3’s days are numbered so eventually I’ll have to face reality and move on. I’ve prolonged it for about another year now I reckon, but eventually I’m going to have to face the music.

I wanted to post this sooner, but the recent Word Press update broke my WYSIWYG. Luckily it was just a javascript conflict with one of my plugins, some people had much worse issues with the update. Still it’s embarrassing since I was just bragging to my mate the other day about how fantastic this application is, particularly the update management. Bloody updates, they are the bane of my life!

While searching around to find out why-oh-why I’m not allowed to have files on my Desktop in KDE4 (and hopefully how to re-enable it), I found this… http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/05/no-more-desktop-icons-in-41.html

This looks to me like the root of the problem. This KDE developer, in all his infinite wisdom, just simply ripped out the code that supports file icons on the desktop. Apparently it just doesn’t look nice to him or something. Too bad if you don’t like the whole widget based desktop experience, this guy has just forced us to either take it up or switch to Gnome. Suffice to say, when I read his article I was fairly taken aback by the action.

In all fairness though, he doesn’t see it the way I do. Yes, this post was originally fueled by rage. I quickly changed my initially confrontational title of this post to something a little nicer. Aaron’s intention appears to be to create a more flexible experience for the user (by culling features?!?). My tinfoil hat keeps telling me it’s really just a Microsoft conspiracy (joking of course).

One of my machines was recently updated to KDE4 via the Kubuntu Intrepid distro upgrade. I’ve been using it everyday, but I haven’t been liking it. The version that came with Kubuntu Intrepid is not nearly mature enough. Personally, I love KDE3 and I’d like to stick with it as long as possible. I don’t need the new Plasma features and many old features seem to have been dropped. Thankfully, I found this… https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Kde3/Jaunty which should allow me to keep my systems up to date without having to touch KDE4. I’ll try the process out tomorrow on my work Kubuntu 8.04 machine.

Update:

You can re-enable the normal desktop behaviour in Jaunty simply from a desktop right click menu. But not Intrepid. In Intrepid you could try editing $HOME/.kde/share/config/plasma-appletsrc replacing plugin=desktop with plugin=folderview, but that didn’t work for me.

Another Update:

You can’t drag and drop your icons on to multiple screens. It only works on the primary because it’s still some kind of crappy complete waste of resources full screen widget.

I’m currently trying to find a fanless AGP video card with dual monitor support for Ubuntu. My existing one is a bit temperamental and I’ve never been able to get dual monitors working properly with Ubuntu. Looks like it’s got to be either ATI or nVidia. I’ve always owned nVidia cards in the past and I’ve been reasonably happy with them, although there do seem to be some minor annoyances when using Compiz, and since the drivers are all closed source, long term support isn’t highly likely. The other problem is that nVidia don’t make AGP anymore so I have to find a supplier with some old stock or check out eBay if worse comes to worse.

Just about all the old ATI cards appear to have fans. I really don’t want a fan because they tend to break or get really noisy, particularly in the rather humid climate where I live. The Matrox cards look like exactly what I want, slow and reliable, but I don’t really trust their Linux support.

After a bit of searching looks like there are still a few vendors stocking generic models with vNidia GeForce 5xxx-6xxx chipsets and no fans. As for the ATI, looks like I can probably get the Radeon 9600 Pro, then try to clock it down so I can unplug the fan. I haven’t had any luck finding too many fanless ATI cards, which is a shame because they will have better Linux support in the long term thanks to their open source drivers.

This is for my home workstation, it’s only got about a year left in it before I seriously consider getting a new one. After that however I intend to use it as a home server. It’s got masses of RAM and other decent components, but like the AGP bus, all now obsolete. I can’t reuse anything other than maybe a couple of it’s SATA hard drives. I’ll probably replace the PSU and fans to quieten it down a little and boost it’s life span, then put CentOS on it just for something different.

Just a cheap video card is all I’m looking for. I’d like something that’s going to last a few years at least. I’m not sure if the motherboard will boot without a video card, I’ll have to check that out. Need to do a little more research. Perhaps I’ll get adventurous and go with the Radeon clocking option.