Headers Already Sent

Just got SVN / Trac setup on my VPS primarily to support development for portfolioexecutive.com.

I’ve succeeded in doing this myself before, but I remember the process to be a bit of a nightmare. Yesterday I dropped a line to the support guys at futurehosting.biz and they set it all up for me within 24 hours.

It’s always worth paying a little extra; managed hosting is only more expensive if you don’t value your time. Giving the task to an expert has saved me a night of hell and I’m virtually guarateed it’ll do what it says on the tin!

Last night I realised that KDE 4.0 was out so I thought I’d give it a shot. As with everything on Ubuntu installation was a few clicks and I was up and running within a minute or two. Visually I think it looks great and I like the new start menu. I didn’t achieve all of the eye candy that other screenshots have demonstrated - I think they rely on Compiz and as I’ve got a crappy ATI card turning that on means that apps like Google Earth stop working.

Despite it’s prettiness this version is still in its infancy and barely usable, even options like adding/resizing the taskbar aren’t available yet. Version 4.1 comes out in June / July and promises some pretty big updates that will make switching worth while. Things are really improving in the world of desktop Linux which is great to see!

Well I finally did it: I ditched my Gentoo installation. Many reasons for this but I think the main one is that I don’t have enough time to maintain it. I could never get acpi/bluetooth working quite right (amongst other things), my sound broke a few days ago somehow and I didn’t want to take another weekend out to fix it, plus I was a little sick of being scared to update. I wanted an installation I could update in seconds, not hours… one that just worked and one that most definitely was not a mac. For the learning experience Gentoo was something else and it’ll always have a place in my nerdy little heart. For old systems I’ll look to it again, but for the new hardware compiling everything really isn’t needed.

Out with the old and in with the new. When thinking about what to upgrade to the choice was obvious. Ubuntu has gained a massive following over the past few years so I just had to give it a shot to see what all the fuss was about.

Wireless Just works!

I’m very impressed. Installation was a breeze and took very little time. Installing the ATI graphics driver was a piece of cake and I was reconfigured and back up and running with most of my software in about 6 hours with everything working smoothly. I tried gnome for a while but quickly realised that I still don’t like it - although it does look nicer than I remember - so I enabled kubuntu-desktop in synaptic and bang! I had KDE.

Restricted Driver Manager

I’m not going to say anything else other than it’s good and if you’re looking to change from Windows, or maybe even Gentoo, then look no further. You can grab it here.

Borrrrrrrring. Sat here… upgrading Gentoo. What a fun filled night / morning it’s been. For my own reference and for anyone that wants to know, this is how I keep Gentoo up to date.

• emerge –sync //sync local tree with server
• emerge portage //if portage update available
• emerge -uavDN world //–update, –ask, –verbose, –deep, –newuse
• etc-update //carefully update config files in /etc
• glsa-check –list //list security updates
• glsa-check -f all //apply updates

If gentoo-sources have been downloaded in the update then I’ll upgrade to the latest kernel like so:

• cd /usr/src; unlink linux; ln -s linux-2.6.2*/ linux; cd linux
• make menuconfig
• make clean && make && make modules_install
• mount /boot && make install
• Add a new entry in /boot/grub/grub.conf to point to the new kernel
• Test Kernel / get angry with broken configuration / repeat above.

It’s just so easy. And so simple. I don’t see why most people don’t run linux.