My wife got me a Chinese calligraphy set for the holidays, so I’m teaching myself shodo and sumi-e ink painting. It’s a lot more diffult than it seems, I’m finding. None of my efforts thus far are worth scanning and displaying, but hopefully I’ll be able to put something up soon. I certainly have used up a lot of paper so far…
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Doug
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Doug
Mission accomplished, sort of. My dad now has a functioning Linux installation, running KDE, but not as I had originally planned. When I arrived at my parent’s house, I learned that he hadn’t yet purchased a hub. The new Dell system he bought had a 10/100 3Com NIC in it, that only supports RJ-45. The other network cards in his systems were combo cards, also supporting BNC connections, which is what he’d been running for the last few years. He was under the impression that he could network his two Windows ME systems by connecting them with a regular RJ-45 twisted pair cable, directly between the two cards, which of course you can’t do. Even if this had been a workable scheme, it would have precluded networking the Linux file server I was going to build for him. I was mildly annoyed.
The other problem was Windows ME. Turns out his main system had one large partition, and Partion Magic doesn’t yet support Windows ME. Now, there are other utilities that will repartition drives, which also claim to be able to handle Windows ME, but I haven’t used any of them, and experimenting on Dad’s new system didn’t seem to be the place to start learning about them. Finally, it turned out that the P-133 that he wanted set up as a file server only had a 1.5Gb drive, which struck me as being a bit tight for use as a file server.
So, with Dad resolving to go buy a small hub the next morning, I decided the best way to proceed would be to set up the P-133 as a Linux workstation, which would allow him to get some hands-on experience using Linux in a friendly environment (i.e. KDE, and to use Windows ME’s ability to share a modem to provide access to the Internet for his entire small network. Since ME was already set up on both his Dell systems, all that remained was to configure the Linux box.
As a newbie, Mandrake is probably the best distribution for him, but since I didn’t have a copy laying around, I went with Redhat 7. I’ve had some issues upgrading 6.2 boxes to 7.0, but all my clean 7.0 installs have gone well. Unfortunately, the P-133 was using an old 2Mb Matrox Milleneum card, of a variety apparently made specifically for Gateway. Redhat’s graphical installer churned along just fine until it probed the video card, and then died. A text-based install, however, did the trick quite nicely, and in about 45 minutes (while I ate a huge Christmas dinner), we had a bootable custom Redhat 7 install.
The rest of the visit was spent configuring and tweaking the Linux system, giving Dad a brief tour of Linux, and getting the rest of the networking, including the Windows ME modem sharing set up. A couple of warnings in case you find yourself having to deal with ME: the “Home Networking Wizard” doesn’t work for shit. While it will set up basic networking and share directories and printers, it doesn’t seem to do a good job setting up for modem sharing. I ended up manually specifying the DNS and gateway settings for the other ME system, which worked. It seems to me that there’s little point in having a wizard to automate tasks if you have to end up doing much of it manually anyway.
The ultimate insult, however, was that ME refuses to allow you to format a bootable floppy disk. Gone is the option to make a disk bootable when formatting from Windows Explorer. Nor can you bring up a DOS shell and use the /s switch with the format command. Rather, Windows ME forces you to go through Control Panel and create a “Windows Startup Disk.” While I can understand Microsoft’s desire to “simplify” the operating system for the average user, the removal of tools that IT-types have relied on for years seems to be a bad, bad move. If I wanted an operating system that had no useable command line, I’d go buy one that’s well designed…and get a Mac.
After all is said and done, though, my dad has a functioning Linux workstation to play with. What’s more, I’m still using KDE and really beginning to like it. Hands down, Konqueror is the most useful Linux web browser available today. It’s stable, fast, renders HTML well, and in general, does what a browser should. It’s also a darn good file manager. Nautilus looks likely to be even better, but Konqueror implements a respectable subset of the Nautilus feature set and works on all distros without a hairy build scheme.
I still like the minimalism of Blackbox, but I have to admit I’m getting used to the polished feel of KDE and the nice integration between applications. I can still run my favorite Gnome apps, and in fact am using Evolution as my mail client, since KMail still leaves a lot to be desired. As a desktop environment, KDE 2.0.1 seems to be the most polished and complete feeling of everything that’s available.
I do have some minor gritches, though, such a KMail. Other parts of the environment don’t seem to be finished yet, either, which can be a jarring experience when so much of the rest of it runs so smoothly. KDE’s Control Center, for example, does a very nice job of allowing you to customize the environment, in most cases. However, some of the “look and feel” pieces don’t seem to quite work as expected, yet, and some functions seem to have the UI in place but don’t do anything. KWord and the other KOffice apps seem solid, but importing MS Office documents is still questionable in some cases.
All in all, KDE 2.0.1 is certainly on par with the combination of Helix Gnome, Sawfish, and Mozilla. Each environment provides a solid desktop foundation, and each has it’s own strengths. Both, however, have some weak spots that could become significant issues depending on how you work. What’s clear, however, is that the Linux desktop environment has come a long way in the past year. I can’t recommend Linux as a desktop environment for everyone yet, and I’m not convinced it ever will, or should be. If you’re even marginally technically inclined, however, or you work with Linux everyday, the current desktop environments for Linux are very usuable and functional.
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Doug
Here’s to Happy Holidays for all, no matter what variety you celebrate. Eat hearty, be of good cheer, and spend the day in the company of loved ones.
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Doug
Some more information regarding potential vulnerabilities in SSH and SSL. Again, a fairly technical article, but important information. It appears that the were some inaccuracies in the first article, which are addressed here, but there are potential security issues nonetheless.
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Doug
In the tradition of geeks everywhere, I’ll be spending some time over the holidays helping out family with computer stuff. Specifcally, my dad r3ecently purchased a new Dell system, and he wants some things done to it and his home network. I’ve been yammering at him about Linux for over a year now, and he’s said he’s ready to try dual-booting it. So, I’ll be configuring a Linux workstation setup for him, along with setting up a small file/print server using Linux as well.
Now, Dad is the one responsible for getting me into computers, but these days, he’s not all that hot on learning new stuff. So, I want to try and give him a Linux setup that allows him to do his usual stuff without too much learning curve. Clearly, my standard of Blackbox with GNOME isn’t going to cut it for him - his a Windows ME type these days. So, I’m spending some time using the latest release of KDE for a few days to learn the ins and outs and see if it’ll be an adequate solution for him.
Thus far, the experiment has gone pretty well. Installation was no problem; after downloading the approriate packages from the KDE site, a simple “rpm -i *.rpm” installed everything. I restarted gdm, and “KDE Session” became available from the session menu. Once I logged in, I was greated by an attractive KDE splash screen that proceeded through a variety of startup tasks, not dissimalar to the GNOME startup.
The KDE 2.0.1 desktop is certainly attractive, and an improvement over KDE 1. If you’re a Windows or a Mac user, KDE 2 will seem like pretty familiar territory. The appropriate desktop icons are available, and creating a new one is as simple as draggin and dropping a file from the file manager to the desktop, or right clicking on the dektop to bring up a context menu. There’s a start button, a panel similar to the GNOME panel or the Windows taks bar, which also acts a lot like the Mac “belt.” You can even have your application menus appear in a menu at the top of the screen for a very Mac-like UI.
The Konquerer browser/file manager seems quite robust and useful. In file manager mode, it acts a great deal like Explorer or Finder, and includes built-in viewers for a variety of MIME types. I particularly like the built-in support for browsing SMB shares, which allows “Network Neighborhood” like functionality. In browser mode it seems to render HTML very quickly and attractively. I’ve only encountered one site that it had any problems with so far, and that site uses some nasty ASP code that’s given me trouble in Mozilla and Netscape Navigator as well.
I’ll continue this evaluation as I experiment more. For myself, KDE may be a bit overkill, as I like the lightweight minimalism of Blackbox. However, for my dad and my wife, or anyone else making the transition from Windows or the Mac to Linux, KDE is looking like a strong contender for a robust desktop environment.
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Doug
Why, oh why, in this age of technological marvels, does virtually every word processing program default to non-collated printing when printing multiple copies of a document? They’re all capable of printing collated copies, it just isn’t the default. I certainly can’t think of many instances when I’d specifically want non-collated copies over collated copies. Perhaps instead of shoving tons of marginally useful features into their products, office suite vendors should perhaps focus on cleaning up little nagging interface annoyances like this…
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Doug
Much to my surprise, my Blackbox style Zen is in the “Top Five” at bb.themes.org.
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Doug
A very troubling article from SecurityPortal concerning the development of software that allows “man-in-the-middle” attacks of SSL & SSH. Someone succussfully using this software could theoretically intercept sensitive, secure information from a user utilizing one of these previously thought secure encryption methods, and then use it to break in to a server or steal data. This is an excellent technical article, and one you should be aware of if you use these protocols at all (and most of us do, if for nothing else than online banking and shopping).
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Doug
Having been burnt twice by the whole stock option thing, and having had to go job hunting twice in the last year, I can certainly sympathize with the people in this Wired article. Employers, it’s time to catch a clue - the stock option cha-cha isn’t going to work anymore. You’re also going to have trouble getting people to work those 80 hour weeks. Here’s an idea: spend some time actually developing a realistic business plan!
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Doug
