TLLTS TV Coming Soon?

When The Linux Link website was started back in 2001 (at least, according to the Wayback machine) they were planning on doing a magazine or newsletter, but that never really picked up. In 2003, they started doing TLLTS, and just recently finished their 100th episode. Now, what’s next? According to Pat…

Another cool export script is converting your video to theora. This will come in handy as I plan to record some videos of upcoming TLLTS episodes. Why video tape TLLTS episodes? Stay tuned for an announcement in the near future!

I hope you only release them in theora

NewsForge: “KDE 4 promises radical changes to the free desktop”

I just came across this article on NewsForge about KDE 4, the next generation of KDE.

As the dust settles from aKademy 2005, the annual KDE conference, it’s a good time to take a look at what the KDE developers are working on. Though KDE 3.5 isn’t even out yet, developers are already working on KDE 4. Plenty of work has already gone into porting existing code to Qt4, the GUI toolkit upon which KDE is based, and KDE developers are working on projects that could radically change how the world’s most popular free desktop looks and works.

KDE 3.5 is due out in late October. The 3.5 release will give KDE users and developers a mature, stable, and integrated desktop platform with a wide range of applications.

Its developers see KDE 4 as a chance to experiment and introduce new concepts and applications that do more than build on the strength of KDE’s existing architecture. Just as KDE 3 brought major transformations in that architecture, developers are looking to KDE 4 to transform the desktop experience and enable a surge in third-party application development. With a KDE 4 release not likely to happen for at least another year, the developers have plenty of time to experiment.

I now firmly believe that KDE 4 (Plasma) will be the “vista killer”. If they can match OS X’s speed and simplicity with Linux’s ‘Linuxness’, then people would probably start using it. Why? They don’t have to shell out money for overpriced Macs, don’t have to pay for an operating system, and will probably be able to use it on a computer they already own, or a low-end new one.

I can imagine computer manufacturers giving you the option of Linux preinstalled with a reduced price in the not too distant future (HP is going to start doing that soon with Ubuntu). If you can give them the same computer for $100 less (or however much Windows costs for new PCs), they’d be stupid not to do it. And once computer manufacturers start doing that and Linux has a respectable market share, more and more apps will be ported and it will be Bill’s downfall.

Check out the article, it’s a good read.

Oh, and here’s a comic.

TLLTS, Episode 100!

If you have any free time tomorrow night between 8:30 and 10, come check out The Linux Link Tech Show’s 100th Episode! If you like Linux you’ll love it. If you have listened to it pre-recorded before but not live, then you should listen to it live. It’s real nice to have IRC to see what other people are saying in real time. They’ve been doing this since 2003, and currently are the longest running Linux show (I think even the longest running live tech show, but don’t quote me on that) and they’re doing their 100th episode. And from what I heard, they have a good lineup (and Jon may pop on again )

Listen to the show on Binrev or Sysop using a media player like XMMS or Kaffeine, and be sure to follow along in the IRC. Fire up your favorite IRC client (I use Gaim, but most people like XChat) and join the server thelinuxlink.net, channel #techshow

I should be on IRC tomorrow, my username will be ‘justin’ (duh)

Congrats to Dann, Allan, Pat, and Linc. This is a real accomplishment.

TLLTS Episode 99, Check It Out

I just finished listening to episode 99 of TLLTS on my iPod today. Normally, I try to listen live as much as I can (which usually means I listen live about 3/5 of the time). It just so happened that I couldn’t listen last night, but I wish I could have.

I found out (before I heard the show) that Jon Watson came on unexpectedly. I listened and, sure enough, they started calling him on skype at what seemed like a random point in the show (since there’s not live chat to go along with it). Checking out the chatlog afterwords, this is what was in there:

21:12  21:13  jon, via skype?
21:13  RIGHT NOW?
21:13  Sure
21:13  Sure
21:13  hold on

And like that, he was on. Pretty cool that they are so flexible (hey, there were no planned guests anyway).

You Say You Want Linspire?

Are you one of those people that has wanted to try out Linspire but didn’t want to spend $50 on it? Well, for the next few days, you’re in luck. Linspire is giving away a coupon code to get a free digital download of Linspire Five-O, but it will only work until September 6th.

To get it, go to this page and hit the “Apply Coupon” button. Enter the term “freespire’ and click update to make sure if it worked, then click continue and proceed with the checkout.

Linspire Announcement
Freespire (now “Squiggle”) Temporary Page

5 Reason NOT To Use Linux

I came across this funny article today on digg. I like it, and would like to quote some of it here.

Reason number two: Linux is a pain to set up

It’s true. After all, with modern Linuxes like Xandros Desktop or SimplyMEPIS, you need to put in a CD or DVD, press the enter button, give your computer a name, and enter a password for the administrator account.

Gosh, that’s hard.

On the other hand, with Windows, all you have to do is put in a CD or DVD, do all the above, and then immediately download all the available patches. After all, Symantec has found that an unpatched Windows PC connected to the Internet will last only a few hours before being compromised.

Unpatched Linux systems? Oh, they last months, but what’s the fun of that?

But he didn’t even mention that with Windows, you almost always need to hunt down drivers for your sound, your video, your printer, your modem, and once I even needed a USB driver. A USB DRIVER!

He also didn’t mention that Windows installation is more complex and almost always takes longer.

He also didn’t mention that when you patch your Windows system, you install a couple and reboot. Install a couple and reboot… once you’ve done that a few times, you need to install SP2 which would take way too long to get over Dial-up connections, and probably longer to install (at least 1.5 hours)

Linux-Watch Article

Linux 2.6.13 Released

Linus Torvalds has released the 2.6.13 Kernel. From the KernelTrap.org mailing list:

Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.13 Linux kernel. “The most painful part of 2.6.13 is likely to be the fact that we made x86 use the generic PCI bus setup code for assigning unassigned resources,” Linus began. “That uncovered rather a lot of nasty small details, but should also mean that a lot of laptops in particular should be able to discover PCI devices behind bridges that the BIOS hasn’t set up.” He went on to note, “we’ve hopefully fixed up all the problems that the longish -rc series showed, and it shouldn’t be that painful, but if you have device problems, please make a report that at a minimum contains the unified diff of the output of ‘lspci -vvx’ running on 2.6.12 vs 2.6.13. That might give us some clues.“

KernelTrap.org Announcement
Kernel.org

Kanotix First Impressions: uhh…

OK, I’ve been having some Kanotix problems. I was able to install it fine and it booted up fine, but the problems started when I tried to upgrade it.

I did an “apt-get dist-upgrade” (yes, while in KDE). It had to download a little more than 500 packages, downloading took about 8 minutes.

Then while it was installing, it asked me weather to use XFree86 or X.org. Knowing that X.org was better, I selected that. I got an error message that it was unable to infer the “keyboard/lang” layout from the old XFree config file, but I didn’t think that there would be problems…

One reboot later, I was in text mode. I logged in and issued the command “startx” only to be greeted by “xinit: server error”, and I couldn’t figure out why it couldn’t. I messed around with the config file, unable to get it working.

Following Pat’s suggestion on the TLLTS IRC chat (scroll down to 20:38), I ran “xorgconfig” to try to generate a new config file. I am a good 98% sure that all of the settings I made were correct, but Xorg just didn’t want to start…

Sooo… I re-installed Kanotix a few days after doing all this, but this time I was going to switch to init 3 before doing the upgrade… still no go. I was still faced with the same problem.

But… after logging into root and running “Xorg”, I was able to successfully start the X server, but I don’t know how to start KDE after that, and I can’t run it as a normal user.

So that’s where I’m at with Kanotix right now. I may be forced to use XFree, but I hope not. (If anyone can help, please do!)

But besides that, I still have a few bones to pick with Kanotix. Upon Live CD boot, everything is gorgeous. But when I wanted to install it, I couldn’t find a program to do that anywhere. I had to Google it (which meant configuring ndiswrapper). I’ll admit that it was easy to find out on the web, but it should be much more intuitive. Mepis had an icon on the desktop to do that…

Anyway, you have to run “kanotix-installer” as root to get it installed. The installer itself needs work, too. It’s not Xdialog, but it looks pretty similar.

But after looking at the files on the CD, I found some things that would have made the distro easier to use. For example, in the same directory as the installer script, I found a script called “kanotix-ndiswrapper” which can setup Ndiswrapper to work with your wireless card if you have the .inf and .sys file.

But otherwise, it looked good. I wish I could use it with X.org.

Vista, Opening Doors for Desktop Linux

Could the release of Windows Vista possibly lead the way to Linux Desktop Dominance? I came across this article today on Slashdot, and they seem to think so.

From the article:

As the time gets closer and closer to the public debut of Vista the operating system seems to be constantly losing the luster which was associated with Longhorn. It seems that this new version was originally planned to be a large step forward from XP but as we learn more about it and Microsoft’s plans for the future, the changes are constantly being scaled back from what was originally promised. Whether it’s the lack of a new file system or the “Monad” scripting shell, the absence of innovation in this operating system is giving it a black eye, no matter how nice the GUI is or how much Internet Explorer 7 resembles FireFox.

If this was not enough to turn people off from Vista, there are the hardware requirements. Though the exact minimum system requirements have not yet been made clear, it has been stated that a “Vista Ready” system will have 512 megabytes or more of RAM, a dedicated graphics card with DirectX 9.0 support, and a will be “modern” Intel Pentium or AMD Athlon-based PC. An older system or one with integrated graphics will be able to run Vista but will probably have to do so in more of a legacy mode, without full use of the new Aero graphics package. Speculation is rampant about what the CPU requirement will be for optimum use, but consumers may need as fast a 3.0 GHz Intel P4, or the equivalent.

Article
Slashdot Page

SUSE Has Got it Goin On!

As some of you have heard, Suse recently released SuSE 10.0 beta 3. OSdir has some cool screenshots of it, and I have to say that SuSE is lookin awesome – an easy, intuitive graphical installer, a great theme, and just tiny little enhancements that make it one awesome OS.

OSdir Screenshots