KDE 4.3.0 Caizen Released

Today the KDE community announced the released of their 4.3.0 desktop environment, codenamed Caizen.

If you don’t know KDE you should give it a peek because, either you like the philosophy behind or not, the project is important and daring.

As I mentioned before KDE is a desktop environment. It’s commonly related to the Kubuntu official derivation of Ubuntu Linux and other Linux distributions in general, but the environment can be installed also on Windows and Mac.

The main purpose of the KDE community is that of providing a strongly integrated, easy to use and stunningly stylish desktop. This is pursued not just by a pure aesthetic work but by a strong effort to propose and follow a their own concept of human-machine interface. The stress is always on the integration of the applications with the desktop composed of a stylish layout and sleek objects seen as track leading to simplicity and tidiness. The desktop is completely composed by widgets which float over the surface like objects on a table. Unlike a table however you can’t just drop a file onto the surface, the way you would with any other desktop environment, but you must place them inside a dedicated desktop widget. This can be frustrating at the beginning but after a while you will likely find the desktop widget easy to use, intuitive and helpful in driving you to keep your monitor free from the mess.

A strong asset of KDE is that it’s built on Qt libraries which is an extremely powerful and modern UI and application framework (probably the best). For this reason all a series of features, like graphics, graphical effects, etc.. are comparable to those found on Mac OSX and far better than those implemented in Vista, with the surplus of working smoothly even on my 4 years old average end laptop.

Unfortunately but physiological given the youth and ambition of the project, KDE suffered of many bugs during its life. However the community behind KDE is strong and the bug solving process did not lag behind. With the 4.3.0 version they claim the “community fixed over 10,000 bugs and implemented almost 2,000 feature requests in the last 6 months“.

Check all the freshly implemented features of KDE 4.3.0 Caizen here.

How to upgrade ALSA – The Easy Way

I got recently pissed off by a major defect occurred to my system. All of a sudden the headphones just stopped working. Actually their behaviour is quite weird: once I plug the headphones the sound is fed for about one sec and then it just die. This is one of those bugs which make you willing to swear as they affect one basic feature you may or may not want to part from.

I already tried to follow some advices dug out from some forums and went rotten (lame of me I admit it). I basically tried to remove all ALSA packages to reinstall them from scratch, and this caused a system crash and, God knows why, the X user settings to be wiped off.

After reinstalling Ubuntu Intrepid I tried another approach to simply upgrade ALSA in the hope of solving my problem. Well, this hasn’t but maybe you can find anyway interesting this simple method to upgrade ALSA to the latest version.

This Soundcheck guy made a script to easily retrive and install the latest ALSA driver. The script and discussion are located in this thread on Ununtu forums but I will report the instructions here for convenience.

First, let’s introduce ALSA by reading a brief description directly from the website of the project.

The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) provides audio and MIDI functionality to the Linux operating system. ALSA has the following significant features:

* Efficient support for all types of audio interfaces, from consumer sound cards to professional multichannel audio interfaces.
* Fully modularized sound drivers.
* SMP and thread-safe design.
* User space library (alsa-lib) to simplify application programming and provide higher level functionality.
* Support for the older Open Sound System (OSS) API, providing binary compatibility for most OSS programs.

Now let’s go on with the instruction to upgrade the driver to the latest version.

Important Note: please before updating ALSA consider the reason you’re doing it it’s important, make a beckup of your files (you never know) and read carefully the thread I mentioned above. The script author says that he wrote it to be as fail safe as possible but given that it will affect low level packages please be sure you know you’re doing it at your own risk.

1. First you must download the script which can be found somewhere at the bottom of the thread or here. Note that you must register to Ubuntu forums to download the script.
2. Save the script in your /home or wherever you like and untar it either with File Roller or Ark, or with tar xvf AlsaUpgrade-1.0.x-rev-1.16.tar from a terminal
3. If you haven’t done yet, open a terminal and move to the script location with cd [download directory]
4. Type sudo ./AlsaUpgrade-1.0.x-rev-1.16.sh
5. On the first run the script will present all the options you can select when running it for actually doing its job.
6. To download, compile and install the packages on a single pass type sudo ./AlsaUpgrade-1.0.x-rev-1.16.sh -di Note: -di is the option to do so but there are many more to suit your needs
7. Wait for a fifteen minutes and then reboot
8. Have fun with your freshly updated ALSA driver

How I messed up my laptop with Kubuntu 8.10 KDE 4.2

I’m a Linux user since Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbons”, then we can say I’m quite a freshman.

I took the decision to migrate my XP laptop to Linux mostly because I wanted to sail new waters after being a MS user since MS-DOS 5.0.

Until now I must say that my experience was pretty positive. I had no major problems switching to a new system. I found substitutes for most of the software I was used to and for those few I didn’t find an alternative, I relied on VirtualBox OSE and my old XP home edition. I was quite impressed by the stability and safety of the system. My laptop and me experienced a new speed we weren’t accustomed to. The only thing made me a bit crazy was the impossibility to run the composite manager with application based on OpenGL or which worked with video rendering (basically Google Earth and VLC for watching videos). I understood that this was because of my ATI video card yet I was disappointed by the fact that the situation remained always the same either with Hardy and lately with Intrepid.

With the advent of the 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” release I decided to try again something new and switched to the Kubuntu fork. At the beginning I felt both dizzy and bewildered by the KDE4 environment. It took me some times to get somewhat accustomed to the new desktop manager which sets a complete new concept of user interface. The learning curve wasn’t so flat but I judged the worth the effort. On the other face of the coin the stability of the system was terrible. Panels got messed up once in a while causing me to swear first and sweat after to get everything in place. Contextual menu were sometimes weird (I couldn’t open a pdf from the web on the fly but was forced to download and open it after), the ark tool won’t compress -it didn’t see them- some kind of files (like pdf) and folders, trying to erase a file caused the system to drain an insane amount of resources without apparent reason (but pressing shift+canc didn’t), etc… With KDE4.2 version things im proved quite much and this was a great relief. However something dark was coming…

Out of the blue the headphones just stopped working. The weird was that by inserting the jack I got the feed for about one sec and then all went silent. After searching forums I did understand that the problem was probably related to ALSA and they advised to uninstall it and recompile. You know how it is when you happen to have an uncommon problem; the resources are few and often contrasting. As I said I’m a freshman and what is worse, a freshman without the time and will to learn bash and compiling and stuff the way I used to enjoy with MS-DOS when I was a teen. So I did what I usually do when I don’t know where to slam my head against what in Linux. I opened Adept and looked for ALSA related package. And I had the great idea to uninstall one package (probably libasound-2, or alsa-base). The computer crashed and I was forced to restart. Guess what it happened when I tried to access to my user session again? See below…

Then I got scared. The computer was full of documents, all expendable except the fact I had a big bunch of new pictures of my son I didn’t backuped. I was cold sweating and already thinking of my wife chasing me down like Sauron with the Fellowship of the Ring, except I wasn’t likely to make it… I accessed my user from console to try to backup the pictures directory by cp-ing it to the external drive. But I could find the external drive in the /media directory and all my attempts to mount it were a failure. At this point I booted from the live cd and managed to have access to the folder and copy it to a safe location. At least I managed to sleep that night…

The day after (which is two days ago) I wiped the hard disk and installed Ubuntu 8.10 which is now running onto my laptop. I enjoy a immediate feel of improved stability and boosted speed. However the headphones problem keeps on haunting me!

I’ve grown loving Linux but there are things that really piss me off. I worship over all the concept of ergonomics and elegance in all human manufactured products, so also for what concerns software. In their way the distros I used are ergonomic and elegant but there are a few things I can’t stand. Installing new software is a completely insane process. Left behind the add/remove tool, all what remains is chaos. Sometimes you just download a software from a website, double click and it installs and goes into the right place of the menu (Truecryp on Ubuntu). Sometimes you download it and then you must go and search for instructions to install it, copy&paste those on the terminal and that’s it (Google Earth) but then how you uninstall it?? Sometimes you must add the repositories and, if you’re lucky, the software get installed without issues and goes in the right menu place. Some other times you must mess with bash to copy files to some root place with sudo etc… As far as I’m concerned this is something crazy and one of the things which keeps new user at bay from say Ubuntu. Nowadays many people are willing and able to search the internet for open source alternative software, but how many of them can or want to the same to learn how to install it? Again, let’s be frank, apart from the add/remove and, in a shorter range, synaptic, tool it needs a super user to install software on Ubuntu.

Anyway I could stand all this installation matter and bound to let’s time be my teacher. The headphones trouble is though something completely unacceptable. We’re speaking of a pretty basic function and a priority one. I will probably take my time and try some solution in a protected environment like VirtualBox but again this takes time and to me it’s really a pain in the rear to waste a lot of time trying to solve this headphones related issue!

I won’t surely go back to Windows, but I’m looking forward an iMac as my next computer.

Verical Scrolling on (K)Ubuntu touchpads updated to 8.10

Not so many days ago my good friend Carlo posted a column on his blog court of misanthropy with the instructions to enable the Mac flavored vertical finger scrolling on Ubuntu and Kubuntu laptops. You can find my plug of his article here.

Anyway since the updated Xorg 7.4 running onto the freshly delivered 8.10 Intrepid Ibex version of the Ubuntu and Kubuntu distros those “old” instructions aren’t valid anymore.

But Carlo’s a smart guy and has already provided a new procedure which he tested and should therefore run smoothly on your laptops.

As far as Carlo’s concerned it seems that the problem is the enabling of SHMConfing within an untrusted environment which is share among different users. It follows that the safest way to enable the two-fingers scrolling is use an XML file for the Hardware Abstraction Layer with the setting for this function.

The file must contain the following code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="input.x11_driver" contains="synaptics">
    <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">On</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton2" type="string">3</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton3" type="string">2</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.VertTwoFingerScroll" type="string">1</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.HorizTwoFingerScroll" type="string">1</merge>
  </match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

And it must be saved as:

/etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-synaptics-options.fdi

If you’re no Linux overlord just follow these plug ‘n’play instructions:

1- Download this file already cooked by Carlo and save it in your home folder (i.e. /home/TheOneElectronic)

2- Open up the console, check you’re in your /home and type:

sudo cp 11-synaptics-options.fdi /etc/hal/fdi/policy/

3- Restart the computer (it’s not enough to restart X)

The two-finger scrolling should now be working

Further option: how to enable (Q)GSynaptics e SHMConfig

If you happen to be the only user of your pc you could anyway enabling GSynaptics (QSynaptics for KDE) you must create the file /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi containing the following code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
 <deviceinfo version="0.2">
 <device>
 <match key="input.x11_driver" string="synaptics">
 <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">True</merge>
 </match>
 </device>
 </deviceinfo>

And here’s the simplified version:

1- download this file already prepared for you and put it in your /home

2- Open up the console, check you’re in your /home and type:

sudo cp shmconfig.fdi /etc/hal/fdi/policy/

3- Restart the computer

4- search and install (Q)GSynaptics with Synaptic or Adept

That’s all folks!