…and so ends my 10 month long temporary employment at Novell. My leaving is bitter-sweet. I will miss my coworkers deeply. Brad, Kyle, Mikey, and Steve-o where some of the greatest people to work with. My leaving is very abrupt, and rather selfish, but as a temp working in a department that may not exist in 2 months, I feel very little remorse toward abandoning a company that cared so little about my effort. I do however feel a great deal of sorrow leaving such great people behind.
KDE 4 has been released, and it is very very pretty. However it isn’t stable or all that complete (insert Vista joke here). The new icon set is very attractive, and the rounded window edges for about all windows give a clean and completed feel to the desktop. As much as I LOVE gnome, and respect all the work being put into it, it looks like I might be switching desktop environments in the near future.
Here are some screens:
Logout window
Widget tool in upper left of screen
Rounded corners are a nice touch, and a visual for disc space remaining.
Applet tool for removable media
Dolphin file manager with column view like Mac OSX
Right-click menu
Dolphin file manager with split view showing /media/NONAME, and / directories.
You can install kde4 in Ubuntu 7.10 in these 5 steps:
Thanks to tombuntu for the installation instructions.
I’ve backed up my system in preparation for blasting it all away and starting over from scratch. I’ll be installing several Linux distributions as a personal experiment, so I figure I’ll share my experience. I’m going to try a few popular distributions: Fedora 8, OpenSuse 10.3, Sabayon 3.5, and Ubuntu 7.10. I’ll rate them on a scale from 1 to 10 on ease of installation, partitioning, and the overall amount of time it takes to install. I’ve built a machine that is fairly Linux friendly because I use FOSS (free and open source software) everyday. The machine’s specs are:
Mainboard: ASUS M2N-E
CPU: Athlon 64 X2 5000+ 3.2Ghz
RAM: 4GB DDR2 804Mhz
GPU: Nvidia 8500 GT
HDD: Western Digital 200GB SATA 3gb/s
I’ll be using the x64 editions of these distros, so if you are using a 32-bit install your experience by differ. You can get each distro for yourself using the following links:
Partitioning: 4/5 Kept getting strange errors, wouldn’t delete ext2 partitions. Nice graphical interface.
Installation time: 3/5 1 point deducted for being a huge install, and the end result is a rather bloated Linux install. (Not that that is a terrible thing.) Took about 25 minutes.
Ubuntu:
Ease of installation: 5/5 Just run the install program in the live CD like Sabayon.
Partitioning: 3/5 No errors, some confusion when setting mount points, in a way more text based.
Installation time: 5/5 Fast install! Only took about 10 minutes.
Fedora:
Ease of installation: 5/5 Boots to an installer that looks very much like the default gnome UI for fedora. Very intuitive and clean.
Partitioning: 4/5 Same disc druid as Sabayon.
Installation time: 1/5 Took about an hour. Installs all RPM packages one at a time, very time consuming. RPM would not my my first choice for a package manager.
OpenSUSE:
Ease of installation: 5/5 Very similar to Fedora’s installer.
Partitioning: 2/5 “Uhh… What do I do here?” Not fun.
Installation time: 2/5 A little faster than Fedora.
The winner: Sabayon by a landslide. It was a much easier process from putting the DVD in to booting the distro for the first time. Albeit a slower process it was actually the most intuitive and attractive install media I have used. None of my hardware wasn’t recognized by any of the installs. If you’re looking to build a new Linux box, this is a pretty sweet system.
If you haven’t used Sabayon before, or haven’t heard of it, I suggest you check it out. It’s package manager, ‘portato’ is a little intimidating at first, but it’s easy to learn. If it wasn’t for debian packages being so popular, I would switch from Ubuntu. I guess it would just take more effort to switch than I would like to put out. 
Not that I really care who is winning or losing, I find it interesting to see a product from a company I dislike (toshiba) flop. When deciding to buy a new HD player, take the following into consideration. This is how a handful of major studios stand as of today.
Blu-ray
Sony - Blu-ray
Warner - Blu-ray
New Line - Blu-ray
Buena Vista - Blu-ray
20th Century Fox - Blu-ray
Lionsgate - Blu-ray
MGM - Blu-ray
Miramax - Blu-ray
Both/Impartial
Paramount - Contract with HD-DVD expires shortly, rumored to be going blu-ray
Universal - both/not going exclusively HD-DVD
HD-DVD
Weinstien Co - HD-DVD
Focus Features - HD-DVD
If I was in the market for an HD player my choice would be obvious. And it would play games. Nice one Sony.
I was at Wal-Mart last night and I saw an odd looking couple pushing a cart full of corn oil.. Like 25+ gallons of corn oil. And atop this oil they had probably 50 or so bananas. They were shifty, very quiet, and looked very much like they were suffering from malnutrition… I don’t think much of it until I am checking out, and they are in line in front of me.. and thats all they have… Corn oil and bananas… They pay, pull their cart forward and gather their things. Then the dude does what I was hoping they weren’t doing. He peels open a banana and takes a bite. Next thing I know they are just stuffing their mouths with bananas and chugging corn oil! Seriously, WTF? Is this some whack cult fixation on only eating products that are or were yellow? Why don’t they have twinkies in that case? Some crazy diet? I fear I may never know. If anyone reading this can inform me just what this banana-corn-oil-eating cult madness is, I would very much appreciate it.
I installed Vista Business edition on my machine 2 days ago… So far I have had 2 reboots without my asking, while I was in the middle of work. 150+ “Cancel or Allow”s.. 2 blue screens, 6 incompatible applications, and an update configuration that took nearly 35 minutes on a system with dual 3.2Ghz CPUs and 4GB RAM. This is a real flop. Very pretty, but there is very little that should take my machine 35 minutes to do. There is just too much down time in this OS for me to consider it a viable option for my everyday geeking… Back to Ubuntu.
Me: “Novell Services, this is Troy, may I have your name please?”
Cu:”19003982397″
Me:”How can I help you?”
cu:”19003982397″
Me:”How may I help you sir?”
Cu:”Long distance. 19003982397″
Me:”I’m not sure what you mean. Are you trying to call Novell?”
Cu:”19003982397, dial it. Now.”
Me:”I’m sorry sir I can not dial that number for you.”
Cu:”Fuck you then, ain’t this a call-up sex talk number?”
Me:”No sir, it is not.”
Cu: *click*
