Trying out KDE4.1

KDE4.1 Desktop

In the past I have been somewhat of a Gnome fanboy, so it was with some level of trepidation today that I tried KDE4.1 and I have to say that I have been pleasantly surprised.

While it does not feel as polished as Gnome it features lots of interesting new features and many powerful applications; I am growing particularly fond of amarok as it has the best iPod support of any media player I have used and allows a lot more flexibility. While not nearly as powerful as compiz the comositing support in kwin allows some neat effects and feels faster (it might just be my imagination). I also like the power of dolphin as a file manager, it has a lot more options than nautilus.

To add KDE4.1 to an existing openSUSE 11.0 install via one-click you only need to click this button:

Learning OpenGL

I have found a great site with some useful OpenGL video tutorials:

http://www.videotutorialsrock.com/

OpenGL is the graphics layer which is used in games such as Doom and Quake. It allows you to create 3d effects and do other useful stuff.

about go-oo

go-oo

If anyone has noticed that OpenOffice.org starts quicker on openSUSE than most other distros that is because they use go-oo, a specialised version of the program which is funded by Novell which includes a lot of interesting features. Go-oo is not really a fork of OpenOffice.org as most of the features are available in standard OpenOffice.org but it is just not built with them by default and while it has accepted some patches these are available to OpenOffice.org upstream.

Go-oo feels more polished than OpenOffice.org as it’s icons better fit into openSUSE’s color scheme. It also adds some amazing transitions to Impress and adds support for some other file formats such as Works, SVG and word perfect.

OpenGL Transitions in impress

Why people don’t like Novell

Recently people have been been criticizing Novell for their deal with Microsoft and mono, I feel they do not see the benefits to the community which these bring.

The deal with Microsoft seems to be win-win for the community in my opinion; Microsoft have pledged to add full Open Document Format to office, this means that in the future OpenOffice.org users will be able to freely share files with office users instead of using Office’s awful proprietary format. Many people have suggested that Office’s ODF support will be extremely poor; I believe this is unlikely as ODF is a standard meant to be implemented (unlike OOXML), it is less than a tenth of the size and with Novel’s help if Microsoft are even slightly serious about implementing the standard all the need to do is put in a tiny bit of work to get very high fidelity support. Microsoft are also recommending SLED (possibly the worst thing they could do for it PR wise), meaning that enterprises can deploy it whilst being supported. They have also said they won’t sue the users of Novel Linux over patents (in a decidedly patronizing manor, but then they are Microsoft) that can’t be a bad thing.

And what will Novel do in return? They will make Linux run better within Microsoft’s virtual machine technology and help make Windows server run better under Xen. Either way this means more Linux (virtual) servers used within enterprise. They will also make their identity management solutions work better with active directory, this will mean that it is easier to deploy Linux within within Windows networks once again meaning more Linux within enterprise. And all of this code is open so any other distro can use the knowledge.

Novel have also been critisised by many over Mono. While many assume that mono is some how not open source this is definetly not the case, you can download the code today from mono-project.com if you want (the fsf even started a similar project called gnudotnet first). Many people also think that it is just a way of porting Windows programs, it is not; it allows developers to use the C# language which they may already be familiar with if they have programmed on Windows (nothing wrong with converting Windows programmers to Linux). While some argue that the Microsoft implementation will always be slightly newer so mono won’t be able to attract developers they are forgetting how awesome Linux is, HAL and the massive amount of libraries available make Linux the much better development platform. While people use submarine patents as a reason not to use mono that same reason is being used against ogg; patents are a tool of extortion, we should not let the fear of them make us loose valuable code.

A PhD in horribleness

Dr Horribles's sing-along blog

Dr Horrible’s sing-along blog; a new short released online seems to be popular on planet gnome (a release of tomboy was even named after it), considering this I was surprised to see that it was only downloadable via iTunes (though you could watch it online). I though that this would be an excellent opportunity to try the recently released Wine 1.0. I have previously attempted to run several games and iTunes in previous versions of wine with mixed levels of sucess; I found that while most older games (AOE 2 and AOE 1) ran almost perfectly, newer application seemed to be possible to get running but didn’t work for me.

Wine 1.0 is an amazing step forward in functionality, all I needed to do as install Wine from the repos with YaST or the command

su -c ‘zypper in wine’

then I could run the 32bit Windows installer (http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/) just as I would on Windows (except it took less than a tenth of the time) then I then I had a working copy of iTunes.

iTunes main window

It was nearly fully functional, it allows you to play music and use the online store; however there were a few small problems:

• It runs much slower than a native application; this is most notable when scrolling.
• Unless you launch winecfg and set it to disallow the window manager to control wine windows some buttons won’t work.
• It causes to screen to do black for a few seconds when starting.
• It is a bit prone to crashing.

Overall great job to the Wine developers and keep up the good work. When I had installed iTunes I discovered that the download was only available in the USA. I still feel that Banshee is a much better music player than iTunes but it is nice to know that Linux users now have another option.

Package management with zypper

While openSUSE using YaST for graphical packagement it also has an excelent commandline tool called zypper which has similar functionality to Ubuntu’s apt-get but some extra tools which can be really usefull.

To launch zypper in shell mode (all future commands will be passed to zypper as options, so instead of typing zypper in you only need to type in):

zypper shell

or

zypper sh

zypper shell

Some basic tips for using zypper:

• To search for programs use search or se
• To install programs use install or in
• To remove programs use remove or rm
• To refresh repos use refresh
• To specify the type use -t <type> (e.g. pattern )
• Use + or - on the end of an install or remove to do 2 actions in one action (e.g. in emacs -vim to simultaneously install emacs and remove vim)
• Use source-install or si to install the source of a package and all build dependencies (si -d for build dependencies only or si -D for source only)
• To list any updates use list-updates or lu and update or up to install them
• Use exit to leave the shell

For more help on the zypper command use:

man zypper

or look here:

http://en.opensuse.org/Zypper/Usage

Pulseaudio sound issues

Pulseaudio, the new sound server introduced in openSUSE 11.0, Ubuntu and other newer Linux distos is a great step foward in terms of functionality but sadly as it is reletively new and untested it intreduces some issues:

• If a sound is playing when you hibernate or suspend it will crash pulseaudio; you won’t get any more sound untill you restart.
• Any application which uses sound will need to be restarted after you suspend or hibernate.
• VLC’s sound output is broken.
• It messes with system sounds.

Unlike Ubuntu openSUSE can correctly cope with flash’s sound output.

To remove all pulseaudio related packages you can use the command (this is probably only worth it if you use suspend/hibernate or VLC):

su -c ‘zypper rm pulseaudio-utils pulseaudio-utils pulseaudio-utils libpulse0 libpulse0-32bit libpulse0 alsa-plugins-pulse libflashsupport’

Setting up wireless with ndiswrapper

To enable wireless on the Dell Inspiron 1501 and other laptops using Broadcom drivers ndiswapper is needed to use the Windows drivers for the card as no documentation for the card is provided stopping people from writing open drivers. There is an open source Linux driver which loads proprietary firmware but this is much less efficent than the ndiswrapper method so I do not recommend this method. This tutorial will work for both 64bit openSUSE and 32bit.

In order to install ndiswrapper you first need a root terminal, you can get this by opening a terminal and typing in su. You will need an Internet connection for this tutorial so try connecting to your router via an Ethernet cable.

Then to download and install the packages type this in:

zypper in ndiswrapper ndiswrapper-kmp-default

You then need to download the the Windows driver the unzip it (this should take about 3 minutes).

cd /tmp
wget ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R151517.EXE

unzip R151517.EXE

Now move the drivers into a hidden folder in you home directory:

mv DRIVER ~/.drivers
cd ~/drivers

You can now install the drivers with ndiswrapper:

ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
ndiswrapper -ma
ndiswrapper -mi

Now blacklist the broken drivers installed by default:

echo blacklist ssb >> /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper
echo blacklist b43 >> /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper

Once you reboot you will be able to connect to your wireless network. If this does not work please comment and I will try to help figure it out.

Installing openSUSE

I have just made a little presentation detailing how to do a basic install of openSUSE. The process is very simple anyway but this just outlines the steps.

Click to watch resentation

Compiz with the ATI driver

In order to get accelerated graphics required for compiz on a Dell Inspiron 1501 or most other ATI cards you need to install the propitiatory fglrx driver.

To do this thanks to one-click install you just need to click this button and it will automatically add ATI’s repository and install the driver:

After that has finished and you have restarted the driver should be working and you should be able to enable to run compiz, to test if it working run the command glxgears in the terminal; you should see this if it is working:

glxgears

If not you may need to run ATI’s config tool manually, to do that type this into a terminal

su -c ‘aticonfig –initial’

then log out and in again. To enable compiz you can use the desktop effects tool (in control panel):

Desktop effects dialog

All you need to do is tick ‘Enable desktop effects’ and compiz will be launched and added to startup. You can customize the effects from here but if you want more power you Compiz Config Settings Manager from applications.