Three apps that make KDE 4 rock!

So, readers of my previous post will know that the other day I installed Slackware 13.1 with KDE 4.4.3, and as I am fairly new to KDE this has given me a chance to try out some of the great apps it has to offer.  And after a couple of days of exploring, I have discovered 3 apps which are completely new to me, and have changed my KDE experience completely.  So, in case you (like I was) are unaware of these apps, I thought I’d share them with my readers so here goes:

1. KNetWalk

This game is addictive as anything, and more fun than any pre-installed game I’ve had on my system before .  In the game, you are given a server, some terminals and some bits of wire.  The objective is to rotate the server/wire/terminals so all of the wire, and all of the terminals are connected to the server.  Left clicking on a square will rotate it anti-clockwise, right clicking rotates clockwise, and middle clicking locks it in position if you are sure it is correct.  Check out the KDE Games Center for some more information .

2. KTeaTime

Yep, thats right, KDE can even help you brew a cup of tea.  KTeaTime, is a timer for steeping tea, you tell it what kind of tea you are brewing, and it will tell you when it is ready.  Its simple, but very handy and its made my tea taste nicer .  You can find some more information in the KDE documentation.

3. amor

Ok, maybe it hasn’t changed my KDE experience completely.  But it has made it a bit more fun.  Having a lively tux animation hovering around my screen .

So thats it, the three KDE apps that are really impressing me at the moment, and I hope you enjoy them as well, because I don’t think its the big, shiny apps that make a system rock, its the little ones that pass time, make you smile, and make your tea taste nicer .

Hello Slackware :D!

So, A couple of months ago version 13.1 of Slackware – the oldest surviving linux distribution – was released.  And as my lappy has been giving me a bit of trouble recently.  I’ve decided to give it a try.

I spent this morning installing it, and I have to say, it was simpler than I expected, but it took me a couple of hours and compared with Ubuntu installs nowadays, it could have been easier.  fdisk gave me a bit of trouble, probably because I’ve become so used to the more user friendly alternative – gparted.  But once partitioning was out of the way it went rather smoothly , and I was impressed at the speed of the package installation.

I now have Slackware, KDE, and my GPU driver up and running, which in my opinion is not bad for a days work .  Now I just have the tricky task of getting my wireless card working .

Anyway, first impressions are excellent, I’m looking forward to enjoying it further, and I would definately recommend this slick distribution to anyone with some free time and some linux knowledge.

My plan is to keep slack as my primary distribution until the beta of Ubuntu 10.10 is available next month, after that I will focus on testing *buntu for the release in October .

EDIT: I have now got my wireless up and running, and have finally realised that the reason ifconfig was not working, was because /sbin wasn’t included in my $PATH.  Silly me.

Operation Cleansweep

About a month ago now, during the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Brussels, Jono Bacon announced “operation cleansweep“.  This huge project, aims to have all of the (nearly 2000) bugs with patches (listed on Launchpad) reviewed and cleared up.

The operation is being spearheaded by the Reviewers Team, a team of bug squashers, dedicated to sorting out the many bugs with patches which require reviewing and ultimately uploading to help include the fantastic operating system that is ubuntu .  A target has been set of 15 patches per day, and in order for the ubuntu community and the Reviewers Team to pull this off before the next Ubuntu release (10 October 2010) then we will be working incredibly hard on this, and you can help too.  For a guide on reviewing patches go to the Review Guide, but this isn’t the only way you can help.  By spreading the word about this awesome undertaking by the Reviewers Team, by blogging, tweeting or whatever, you are making a contribution.  You might also consider placing this cool countdown bar, by inserting the following code into your website.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://daniel.holba.ch/review/gadget.js"></script>

KDE Desktop

Many of you will have realised by now that I like to share screen-shots/screen-casts of my desktops, and as I have already blogged my gnome desktop, it is only right, that I share my KDE desktop with you all as well.

All you KDE users out there will notice that I have actually changed very little, and I have left pretty much everything to the defaults, but I like I said – I felt the need to blog it anyway .  The only changes I did make were adding a weather applet, a comic applet (showing xkcd) and a calculator.

I think I am falling for KDE again…

Since Lucid’s release, I have been meaning to check out what’s new in Kubuntu. So yesterday, I installed the kubuntu-desktop package, and this afternoon I loaded up KDE…

…and I fell in love with it.

It is so much better than I remember it :/, and I loved it then.

So what happens now i’m not sure. Do I continue using KDE? Or do I go back to my sweet gnome desktop?

Because I really cannot decide which is my favourite…

Ubuntu 10.04 Final Release!

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx is finally here!   And after a bit of grub trouble, and a lot of work by the release team re-spinning the ISOs, it is available for download on the Ubuntu website, as well as the websites of official derivatives such as Edubuntu and Kubuntu.  A guide explaining the upgrading process can be found here.

I am very excited about this release for a number of reasons, partly of course, because its an LTS (long term support) release, but mainly because of all the awesome new features that are included (not to mention the cool new themes!).  Ubuntu has come a very, very long way since the last LTS release (8.04), but don’t just take my word for it!  Here is the feature page for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and Here is the feature page for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS – see what I mean?

And it isn’t just Ubuntu that I am excited about – I am pretty confident that this is the best Edubuntu release so far.  Check out this long list of new features and then look me in the eye and tell me you aren’t excited!  Community-wise Edubuntu is doing great at the moment also.  There is more and more contributors joining the project, and more and more people are showing interest.

The time of the Heron is over, the age of Lynx upon us, and as the 10.10 developmental cycle kicks off with UDS in a few weeks, the Meerkat will be welcomed into our community as well.

Latest Edubuntu Install

I’ve pretty much moved full time from Ubuntu to Edubuntu now, and earlier this morning I realised that I haven’t blogged my new desktop!

With my latest install “Aurelia-edu” (see previous post) I wanted something that still looked cool, but didn’t look too dark and depressing.  So I downloaded an awesome orange wallpaper, and went with that.  I’m using ambiance, the same theme as my Ubuntu desktop but I think it works better with my orange desktop personally.

I chose not to install cairo-dock on “Aurelia-edu” because I am really starting to like the default gnome layout with the top panel and bottom panel, and I didn’t want to waste time finding a cairo theme that worked with my unusual orange wallpaper.

I also included the notifications in the screenie, I still don’t like them, the way they are organised and stuff, but I do think they look cool, so I won’t worry about them for now.

Machine Naming Meme

Ok, i’m a bit late to join in this meme started by czajkowski about how people name their machines, but I thought i’d post about it anyway .

With a nerd score of 95, I think i’m a certified geek, and I am proud to admit, that I name my computers.

A lot of people (including me) use characters and places from films, TV shows, books, but more recently I have used names of cars.

I have a book full of classic cars, and when I was installing arch a couple of months ago on an old lappy and it asked me for a new host name, I thought about it for a few minutes and the book was just there on my desk, so I thought i’d have a skim through, I opened it on the page of the Chevrolet “Stingray“, so I went with that .  Then on my newer “main” laptop I went with “Aurelia” (after the Lancia Aurelia), and imaginatively “Aurelia-edu” for my edubuntu install…

So, there we have it – the un-interesting history of my hostnames .

PoliTweet – Twitter analysis script

In the UK it is 2.5 weeks until our next general election, and all of our politicians our campaigning hard.  But whats unique about this election is that they all seem tweeting.  There is also alot of tweeting going on by the general public about the election, so I thought it would be interesting to analyse the tweets.  Analyzing how many people are talking about the election, and what the politicians are talking about.

Yesterday, I decided to set to work on a script to perform such analysis.  Using bash (as I thought it would be easiest) I spent yesterday afternoon creating a simple script, and hacking away at it till it worked.  Using wget to download the rss of a timeline, sed to make it more human readable, and grep to check for tags and patterns, it can search the public timeline for certain phrases (which doesn’t work very well) or you can edit it to search user timelines, or to compare user timelines.


TIME=`date -u`
wget --output-document=timeline.txt http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.rss
STATUSES=`cat -n timeline.txt | grep description`
echo $STATUSES > statuses.txt
sed -i 's/description//g' statuses.txt
sed -i 's/\/description//g' statuses.txt
TWEETS=`grep -i -E -c '' statuses.txt`
echo "$TIME: $TWEETS tweets (out of 20).." >> data.txt
rm timeline.txt
rm statuses.txt


That is the important snippet of code which downloads and analyses the timeline. It downloads the public_timeline (last 20 tweets worldwide), echo’s the rss of the timeline to a file, but all the lines excpept the statuses are ‘forgotten’. It then goes on to clean up the statuses further, removing the description tag. The grep command searches for your phrase and prints the number of lines it is found on – as there is one tweet per line, the number of lines is equal to the number of tweets. That snippet is very editable if you want to change the timeline (you could even change it to analyze a blog feed), the phrase or the output method for the data (at the moment it is echo’d to data.txt) to something more graphical such as zenity.

When you download the timelines of anyone, public or user, it only contains the most recent 20 tweets. Which is why the original, intended use of the script doesnt work very well, even when included in a big loop downloading the timeline 50 times (1000 tweets) I only found a few results even for trending topics.

I hope you find it useful and interesting to hack/run. Please note than it can be used for any rss feed, not just twitter, and that there is a limit to the times you can download the feed, so if you run it too much, it will stop working for a day or so. I’m not sure the exact amount or the exact suspend-time, but i’m pretty sure its something like that.

Edubuntu/Ubuntu Collaborative BugDay

Next week, on Tuesday 6th April, I am helping organize a collaborative bugday between the Edubuntu and Ubuntu bugsquad.

The idea is that with the Ubuntu bugsquad helping, we can help sort out the 300 open, 262 unassigned bugs that are currently listed in the Education packages.

Some of the bug reports date back to gutsy and still haven’t been seen to, so if you can make it, it would be great if you could help out.  The Edubuntu developers cant be expected to find bugs that need fixing amongst some of the pre-historic bugs that are recorded at http://tinyurl.com/EduBugs .

Please try and spread the word about this .  Its an exciting thing to be a part of, as 2 of Ubuntu’s bugsquads, come together to squash as many bugs as possible before the Lucid final release.

If you want more information, you can email me at bencrisford(at)googlemail(dot)com or find me on IRC – bencrisford on irc.freenode.net.

Ben