…is a Linux-based IM client for Windows Live. It’s a very nice little app that allows me to connect to Windows Live, formerly known as MSN, without having to use Windows. Or allowed, because it’s broke. Right now it crashes every time I try to start it.
Some time ago, I made the upgrade to KDE 4.2 from 3.5. It was made available in Debian’s Unstable branch so I figured “why not?”
Why not, indeed?
Well, for starters, I can’t figure out how to make it react to audio CDs in the CD drive. KDE 3.5 offered a dialog where I could choose what to do with the damned thing. With this one, it’s beyond me; nothing happens. I’ve toyed around in the Settings, but to no avail. I’ve googled around. I can’t make it work.
Just now, I received an email with a MS word attachment, a .doc file. KMail offered Kate as the default choice, a bloody text editor, but the thing is that not too long ago, KMail knew that OpenOffice works for anything with that suffix, and furthermore, KDE knows, from what I can see in the File Associations settings, that OpenOffice is the right application to use. But it doesn’t. It won’t.
The refurbished Kicker menu gets stuck on the desktop after I click it, until I click on it somewhere near the Search edit box. On my laptop, the task bar (or whatever they want to call it, these days, never remembers how wide it should be if I use the laptop on an external screen (with a different resolution) in addition to the built-in one. For some reason, something switched the sound settings on the Audigy card to the Digital output after I upgraded to a 2.6.29 kernel, without telling me, so I went through hell to get my sound back, before I discovered the switch (that, by the way, is not available on every mixer there is) that needed a click.
Or all those settings that used to require a root password, to change how KDM behaves. Or whatever. Lots of things have gone wrong with the KDE upgrade and I don’t know how to fix them, not without some surfing on the net, and I can’t be bothered. I think of myself as a power user, I have used computers in various forms since the late seventies and Unix in a number of incarnations through the years, but surely it shouldn’t be like this?
And no, I don’t want to switch to Gnome because I hate it, I think it treats me lika an idiot, but maybe I need to? What say you? I don’t want to spend all my free time on the bloody Internets, trying to find the answers to each and every little problem there is.
…does KDE 4.2 remind you of Vista?
Turns out I was too optimistic. wicd and the little adjusting I did does not deliver a working Internet, not every time. Today, no matter how I tried, I couldn’t connect (beyond the router, to which I can always connect) until I changed the laptop IP from dynamic to static, and the DHCP client from automatic to dhclient. All of a sudden, I was back surfing!
Only, just now, when I booted up the laptop again, I couldn’t connect beyond the router (which connected fast enough), not until I changed the IP back to dynamic… This is seriously weird and I can’t explain it. I wonder if it’s got something to do with my router, an instruction that is lost on the way, DNS services that aren’t updates… something?!?
WiFi on Linux is NOT easy.
Following the unfortunate events surrounding my presentation at XML Prague (a fabulous event, by the way; you should have been there), I now run Debian GNU/Linux as my primary OS on my work laptop. There is a Windows XP partition, so far, but my plan is to use Xen and virtualisation, and run the Windows operating systems as Xen domains.
The laptop installation that failed contained my first attempts at virtualisation, by the way. Microsoft’s Virtual PC ran Windows 2003 Server and Cassis, the Document Management System that I’m part of developing at Condesign Operations Support, and was connected to my XP installation through a loopback adapter. In theory, this is a very nice setup since it is possible to simply run a complete image of an OS and the server setup as part of a demonstration and then reset it to its pre-demo state for the next show. In practice, however, Virtual PC does not deliver. The hardware it emulates is very limited and everything it does is rather slow. It was enough to wet my appetite, however (together with my friend Niklas’ obsession with Xen), so I decided to do it right, now that I had to wipe the old drive anyway.
My Debian installation does not yet run a Xen kernel, but I’ll keep you posted.
Had some time to kill today, so I surfed the net, reading about my new GPS. Turns out that TomTom uses a 2.6 Linux kernel to run their hardware. It’s modified, of course, but it’s still a Linux kernel.
Why is it that there isn’t a Linux version of the software required to connect it to a computer, then? Why is Linux acceptable in the GPS but not outside it?
Bought a TomTom 730T GPS device today. Very cool. Lots of well-considered features, great design, just what I wanted. I’m really looking forward to driving around for a bit tomorrow.
But then, I tried to install the TomTom Home 2 software on my Debian (Sid) Linux box, using wine. Didn’t work. I spent an hour trying to get around the error message (a rather crypic message involving some file from Visual C++) but couldn’t make it work.
Yes, TomTom, I do use a Windows box, too, at work, but I was hoping for you to return the favour (I bought your product, after all, didn’t I?) by supplying me with software for the operating system of my choice. It shouldn’t be that hard to do; after all, you did come around to recompile your software for the Mac.
Aren’t more people using Linux these days than Mac?
Recently, I bought a new computer. It’s the modern kind, with a dual-core, 64-bit, processor, an Nvidia graphics card, a huge SATA drive, and everything else I could think of when placing the order. And of course, I installed the amd64 Debian GNU/Linux distribution, envisioning fast and trouble-free computing using my favourite Linux distribution.
Well, so I thought. Then I started putting all those small support programs in place, from Flash to Skype, and realised that none of them would install. See, they are 32-bit, made for 32-bit operating systems, and there are no 64-bit versions for Linux available.
Why is this?
Mind you, it is possible to run most of these in “32-bit mode”, using 32-bit libraries, but you also need a steady supply of Aspirins and such, because it takes a lot of extra work, tinkering, and cursing.
If a piece of software was truly open source and free, as in “free speech” (as opposed to “free beer”), someone would immediately rectify this by compiling a 64-bit binary for others to use. And if that binary had problems, someone else would come along and fix that, often in a matter of days, not to mention adding features and fixing bugs in the original.
As many Linux users will testify, this works extremely well. Me, I’ve been using open source for years now, professionally and privately, and have experienced significantly less downtime than many of my colleagues and friends stuck with commercial software, often from that large Redmond manufacturer, in spite of the fact that my Linux variant is Debian’s development branch, codenamed Sid (named after the kid from Toy Story who liked to break toys).
Yet the makers of those small bits and pieces of software that many of us rely on, software that some insist are “free”, will not provide the large 64-bit Linux user base with 64-bit binaries, or make available the source code so others can provide us with that service.
Why? And what’s free about these programs, anyway, when you can’t do what you want to with them?
Version 9.0 of my favourite XSL IDE, Oxygen, was released yesterday. Of course, I downloaded and installed it as soon as I could, having waited for an upgrade since 8.2 came out, some six months ago. I’ve written about Oxygen before; it’s the first decent XSL IDE available for Linux, and the more I’ve used it, the more I’ve come to depend on it. See, what I especially like is the fact that I no longer need Microsoft Windows to do my XML/XSL work. Oxygen works very well in Debian/GNU Linux.
And now, it looks like I can finally re-evaluate my XML editor needs, too. So far, I’ve run XMetaL in wine, which kind of works except that right-clicking the workspace still crashes the program (but that’s fairly OK since I seldom need to right-click anything while writing). As most things in wine, it’s beta quality, no more.
Now, however, Oxygen 9.0 comes with a semi-WYSIWYG view, with CSS formatting and start- and end tag symbols, making it the first real alternative to running Windows software in wine. It is reasonably fast, too, from what I’ve seen so far, and certainly more stable than anything run in wine. You do need an official Sun Java JRE, though; it will complain if you use some of the Java replacements available for Linux, and it doesn’t work with the GNU libgcj Java Virtual Machine.
I’ll give it a more thorough test run within the next week or so, but I’m hoping that it can deliver what it promises.
I’ve spent the last few days tinkering with an XMetaL authoring environment for a client. The XMetaL version is the latest, 5.0, which is actually a lot of fun, but unfortunately it means that I’ve been forced back to Windows. What’s worse, it also means that I’m forced to develop in Microsoft’s exceedingly bloated Visual Studio .Net, surely a punishment for a previous life.
It’s beyond me to understand why JustSystems, the Japanese company that bought XMetaL from Blast Radius, insists on this dependency.
An XMetaL developer doesn’t need all the bells, whistles, and bugs that is Visual Studio, he needs a reasonably flexible scripting environment, easy access to modifying CSS stylesheets, writing (XML-based) toolbars and customizations, as well as the occasional form or dialog.
The thing is, different developers have different preferences. While I do believe that there are people that actually like Visual Studio .Net, not all of us do. Maybe we prefer other languages, or maybe we believe that forcing us to use the same tool for everything just isn’t the right way to go. After all, even if you own an 18-wheel truck, you don’t use it to drive to the supermarket to buy groceries. You use a car or a bus or a bike. Something that doesn’t get in the way.
Because that’s what Visual Studio does. It gets in the way, and more so when all you want to do is to tweak a CSS stylesheet. And I haven’t even mentioned how hard it has become to change the DTD and then recompile it and import it into your project.
And I won’t, because my blood pressure is important to me.
So while XMetaL in its latest reincarnation is very nice, I still consider version 3.1 to be superior for a number of reasons, of which one important one (to me) is that I can run it in and wine and Linux.