Linuxtechie's Blog

Why I Switched to KDE

I've been to the edge — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:42:29 +0000

I have always been a Gnome person. I’ve tried KDE every once in a while but I never really liked it. It seemed it was always either features that were missing that Gnome had or things didn’t work right where they worked fine in Gnome. I could never get used to it and I would always find myself back in Gnome.

Recently though, the timing was just right. I used to be a big fan of Unity, but I was very put off by the version that is in Ubuntu 11.10. I liked the version in 11.04 much better. Not to mention it was much stabler. The version in 11.10 was very unstable for me and I did not like some of the new functionality. I quickly became very unhappy with Unity. I realized that I wasn’t as big of a fan of Unity as I thought. I didn’t want to use Unity anymore I got so frustrated with it. So I started looking at my options.

I decided I would try KDE yet again. Not only did KDE look absolutely beautiful, but all of the features that were missing for me had been implemented and all of the deal breaking bugs had been fixed after many years. So I tried to give KDE a genuine shot. It was a bit awkward getting used to the way KDE does things. But I fell in love with it after just a few days and haven’t looked back. KDE seems very refreshing and freeing compared to Gnome. I can customize every little bit to my likings. Now I look back and Gnome seems very restrictive to me.

tl;dr: Got tired of Unity and tried KDE again. Fell in love with it and never looked back.

2010 in review

I've been to the edge — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 08:26:07 +0000

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 33,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 3 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 51 posts. There were 3 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 128kb.

The busiest day of the year was January 4th with 156 views. The most popular post that day was Getting Intel ICH8 Family (rev 03) Sound Card to Work in Gutsy.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were ubuntuforums.org, forum.ubuntu-fr.org, linux.org.ru, linuxquestions.org, and forum.ubuntu.pl.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for epic fail, sed replace word, ubuntu scroll lock, gstreamer midi, and qgtkstyle ubuntu.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Getting Intel ICH8 Family (rev 03) Sound Card to Work in Gutsy October 2007
89 comments

Making Intel Wireless 3945ABG Work Better on Ubuntu Hardy April 2008
47 comments

Using sed to replace words in a file February 2008
7 comments

How To: Ubuntu MIDI Playback with Audacious January 2008
16 comments

Getting Scroll Lock to Work in Ubuntu April 2008
14 comments

On Unity

I've been to the edge — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 02:52:38 +0000

With the recent announcement of Ubuntu 11.04 shipping Unity instead of Gnome Shell by default, there has been a lot of backlash. I’m talking about all the knee-jerk reactions such as “I DON’T LIKE THE DIRECTION UBUNTU IS HEADED TIME TO SWITCH TO GENTOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!11″. It’s funny how people can react like this over an Ubuntu release that hasn’t even been released yet. Unity has been made the default interface on the netbook edition, but what needs to be understood is that it is kind of a “1.0 release” sort of thing. In the same way that the first release of KDE 4 was rough around the edges, Unity is rough around the edges. It is definitely not perfect. Even I have some complaints about it, but for the love of sanity, try it for more than ten seconds and make your decision based on actual experience and not nonsense. Also realize that the Unity that will ship with 11.04 will be much different from the current version. The developers are going to get a lot of feedback during this release cycle and will improve upon it.

Transitions can sometimes be a bit uncomfortable. We’ve been though this many times before. As I mentioned before, when KDE 4 was initially released there were many, many complaints. Now all I hear is how nice KDE 4 is. When PulseAudio was released it caused a lot of problems for people. Over time though it has greatly improved and I would even dare to say that it now works for most people most of the time. When Ubuntu first released Notify-OSD, there was a lot of outcry about that but died down after a while. Maybe because people become used to it or *gasp* prefer it to the old notification-daemon. Unity will follow in a similar fashion. Transitions can be bumpy but everything turns out OK in the end.

Some other things to consider:

Gnome Shell will still be in the repositories and easily installable.
Gnome 2.x will still be in the repositories.
Unity is not replacing Gnome 3

Give Unity a chance before writing it off and don’t spread FUD.

Irony

I've been to the edge — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 21:44:46 +0000

With the introduction of the new theme for Ubuntu 10.04 there has been much controversy over the placement of the window management buttons. A lot of people (or perhaps a small but very loud group of people) have complained about how the positioning on the left is bad. The thing is another major OS places its window management buttons on the left; OS X. I’m positive that Apple put a lot of usability research into the placement of those buttons. There’s no way the developers just arbitrarily placed the buttons on the left. But that’s besides the point of this post. What I find kind of ironic amongst all of the complaining is the most downloaded theme on gnome-look.org is this theme. And guess where the buttons are placed. That’s right, on the left. If buttons on the left are so bad, why do so many people want them? Just sayin’.

File Roller is Terribly Inefficient

I've been to the edge — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:03:05 +0000

The Gnome archive manager, File Roller, is terribly inefficient in the way it handles archive extraction and creation. I just happened to have Htop running while I was extracting a large gziped tar archive which was on my external hard drive with File Roller when I saw what File Roller was actually doing. First off, File Roller is pretty simple in the way it works. It’s just a GUI wrapper for the command line tools like tar, gzip, etc. So here is what File Roller does when you extract something. It copies the whole archive to a temporary directory in ~/.cache/.fr-xxxx. Then it extracts it in the temporary directory and then copies the extracted files to the location you’re extracting them to. ARRRRRGGGHH! What is this I don’t even

Now if that archive happens to be sitting on an external drive and you’re extracting it to the same directory or to another directory on the same external drive you can see just how terribly inefficient this is. It has to copy the archive to your home directory then extract it, then copy it back to the external drive! This is such a waste of time, it makes it take twice as long since it has to make unnecessary copies to temporary locations. Like I said before, File Roller is simply a GUI wrapper for command line tools which is what makes me even more frustrated with this. Tar supports extracting to alternate locations with the -C option. So why the hell is File Roller making unnecessary, time-wasting copies to temporary locations!? I can accomplish the same thing in less time and more efficiently than File Roller with something like this

tar -xzvf file.tar.gz -C /path/to/destination

Another reason this is so bad is that if you happen to be running low on disk space in your home directory and you try to extract an archive that is on an external drive and the archive is larger than your free space you won’t be able to because it will complain about the lack of disk space even though you may have more than enough free space on the external drive.

Finally, it does something just as pointless when creating archives too. I had a 2.3GB file on my desktop that I wanted to compress with lzma. Guess what File Roller did. Yep, copied the whole 2.3GB file to a temporary directory, compressed it, then copied back to my desktop.

I see no logical reason File Roller needs to be making these unnecessary copies to temporary locations. If anyone has a good reason why it does this please enlighten me.

/rant

IPtables Tarpit Support in Karmic

I've been to the edge — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:01:18 +0000

Edit: If you’re using Ubuntu 10.04 or higher this is no longer needed. The xtables-addons in the repositories compiles just fine.

IPtables has a nifty feature called Tarpit. In terms of IPtables a tarpit

“captures and holds incoming TCP connections using no local per-connection resources. Connections are accepted, but immediately switched to the persist state (0 byte window), in which the remote side stops sending data and asks to continue every 60-240 seconds. Attempts to close the connection are ignored, forcing the remote side to time out the connection in 12-24 minutes.” source

This basically means that it will be impossible for the person initiating the connection to close it until it times out, wasting their resources. Great for those pesky spammers that won’t leave your server alone. However, this feature is not considered stable so it is not included in the standard version of IPtables and therefore, Ubuntu does not have this functionality. However, Karmic offers a simple way to install it.

Karmic has a package in the repos called “netfilter-extensions-source” which contains the source to the Tarpit module as well as some other additions to IPtables, however according to upstream this package is deprecated. It’s also broken. So the package we need to use is called “xtables-addons-source”. However that’s also broken in Karmic. Fun fun. So we’ll need to steal the version from Lucid.

wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/x/xtables-addons/xtables-addons-source_1.21-1_all.deb
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/x/xtables-addons/xtables-addons-common_1.21-1_i386.deb
# For 64bit:
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/x/xtables-addons/xtables-addons-common_1.21-1_amd64.deb

Now install them. If you’re doing this on a server I recommend using the command line version of gdebi since it will help with dependencies. We’ll also need Quilt so that it can apply some patches when it gets compiled.

sudo apt-get install gdebi-core quilt
sudo gdebi xtables-addons-source_1.21-1_all.deb
sudo gdebi xtables-addons-common_1.21-1_i386.deb
# 64bit:
sudo gdebi xtables-addons-common_1.21-1_amd64.deb

Now just run the following command to compile and install it

sudo module-assistant --verbose --text-mode auto-install xtables-addons

Say yes to any additional packages it wants to install and then it will automatically compile it, package it into a deb and install it.

Now you can create some rules using the Tarpit module.

sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp -dport 80 -j TARPIT

This will create a tarpit on port 80. Heads up if you’re actually running something on that port as it will become inaccessible.

Or perhaps you want to target a specific IP

sudo iptables -A INPUT -s x.x.x.x -p tcp -j TARPIT

Where x.x.x.x is the IP address.

These are only a couple basic examples. There’s a lot more things you can do with IPtables and Tarpitting which are beyond the scope of this post but a quick Googling will reveal a lot of good info on IPtables. For a basic intro to IPtables I recommend reading this.

Update: If you get a kernel update that bumps the ABI (e.g. 2.6.31-15-generic to 2.6.31-16-generic) then you will have to rebuild the xtables package after rebooting into the new kernel. To do this just rerun the module-assistant command

sudo module-assistant --verbose --text-mode auto-install xtables-addons

Actually I’ve found out this is better since you can recompile it before rebooting thus eliminating any period of time without a firewall.

sudo module-assistant --verbose --text-mode -l  auto-install xtables-addons

Replace with the new kernel such as “2.6.31-17-generic”

So Much Potential

I've been to the edge — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 03:21:46 +0000

I was doing some thinking and I realized there’s a few pieces of technology in Linux that have so much potential but are extremely under-utilized.

PolicyKit

PolicyKit is an awesome piece of software. It allows for a finer grained permission system. Instead of launching an entire application as root, you can elevate your privileges in a seamless manner. However, PolicyKit is so under used. For example, when Gnome deprecated gnome-vfs and moved to gio/gvfs, Nautilus supposedly got a framework in place that would allow PolicyKit integration. So if you needed root permissions to makes changes to the file system you would be able to basically click a button and elevate your privileges through PolicyKit. Synaptic could also benefit from some PolicyKit integration. Why isn’t PolicyKit used more?

Tracker

Tracker is a great metadata indexer that crawls your files system and indexes metadata from files. Instead of only searching by file name, you can use Tracker to search ID3 tags or search for text in a OpenOffice or Word document. The problem is, no one has integrated this great search functionality into applications. Once again, there’s an opportunity for some integration with Nautilus. If Nautilus could use Tracker as a backend for searching and have the ability to add tags to files, it would really add some great functionality.

There’s so much potential here. It’s a shame it’s not being used.

Iomega Prestige HDD and Karmic

I've been to the edge — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:32:18 +0000

Just a little heads up. If you have an Iomega Prestige USB hard drive and you use suspend a lot and you are planning to upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 or already have, there’s an annoying bug that makes the drive go in to an unresponsive state until power cycled. The symptoms include

Takes a long time to actually suspend, waiting at a blank screen
Drive doesn’t automatically power off like it should when it detects the computer has been suspended
Drive is no longer visible to the system after resuming, even after unplugging it and plugging it back in
Must be power cycled before it functions properly again

Here’s the bug report

Update: HP LaserJet p1505 on Ubuntu

I've been to the edge — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:17:37 +0000

I am happy to announce that the HP LaserJet p1505 printer works out of the box on Ubuntu 9.10. No more hacking around that was required for Ubuntu 9.04. If you followed my other post to compile the drivers and you are going to upgrade to Karmic it would be best to uninstall the compiled version of foo2zjs. Hopefully you’ve kept the source directory around. If so all you need to do is “cd” into the directory and run

sudo make uninstall

Then you can upgrade and then reinstall the Ubuntu foo2zjs package

sudo apt-get install foo2zjs

When you plug the printer in system-config-printer may prompt you if you want to install a plugin for the printer. Accept and follow the instructions. Afterwards you will probably need to open hp-toolbox and click the “download firmware” button in the main window. Afterwards the printer should be working. That said, after I upgraded and plugged in the printer it “just worked” and I didn’t have to do any of that stuff. As much as I was disappointed that this printer didn’t work in Jaunty, I am equally happy that it is working perfectly in Karmic.

HP LaserJet p1505 on Ubuntu

I've been to the edge — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:04:04 +0000

Update: See here if you’re using Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic)

Recently an HP LaserJet p1505 printer came into my possession and I was eager to set it up with Ubuntu. Unfortunately, (and disappointingly so considering how well other HP printers that I have work ) this printer does not work out of the box. There seems to be a number of factors in play as well. For one thing, this printer requires firmware to be loaded. That seems to spell trouble all by itself. Another thing is that if you try to install this printer though hp-toolbox, it will offer to automatically download and install a plugin that is required for the printer. If you try to do it this way, it will appear to have successfully downloaded and installed it. However this is not the case. It doesn’t do anything at all. Some have reported success by running

sudo hp-setup

manually. For me, this did actually successfully download and install the plugin. However, the printer was still not working. Here is what I had to do to get this printer working. If you’re having trouble with this printer, this may be worth a try.

If you haven’t already, install hp-toolbox

sudo apt-get install hp-gui

Remove the foo2zjs if it happens to be installed

sudo apt-get remove --purge foo2zjs

Make sure to delete the printer from System → Administration → Printing if you’ve already tried adding it.

We’re going to need build-essential for this. So install the build-essential package

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Now get the source for foo2zjs

wget -O foo2zjs.tar.gz http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/foo2zjs.tar.gz

Unpack it and enter the directory

tar -xzvf foo2zjs.tar.gz
cd foo2zjs

Now to compile it. Just run

make

After it’s done compiling, we need to download the firmware. So run

./getweb P1505

Now to install everything. Run

sudo make install
sudo make install-hotplug

And finally to restart CUPS

sudo make cups

Now you can add the printer with System → Administration → Printing. Be sure to select the Foomatic/foo2xqx driver. The printer should now be working. The only quirk that seems to be present is that hp-toolbox thinks there is some kind of error with the printer that says “service request please correct the problem and try again.” Yet there’s nothing wrong with the printer.

Resources:

http://foo2xqx.rkkda.com/

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hal-cups-utils/+bug/289410