Review: KDE 4.6

A couple days ago, KDE 4.6 was released for the world to enjoy. It boasts myriad bug fixes, new features for applications like Dolphin and Marble (among others), a revamped Activities feature, and better integration of GTK+ applications. I've come to enjoy testing new KDE 4 releases because it gets noticeably better with each release (or so I would hope), as opposed to GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, and other DEs which don't change much between "point" releases (i.e. X.Y ("X point Y")).
That said, it's not available for Linux Mint 9 "Isadora", and I don't plan on upgrading that until the next LTS release (Linux Mint 13 "M[...]a") unless some radical change (that I don't like) makes me switch distributions (but given the lead developer Clement Lefebvre's recent statements on the matter, that is highly unlikely). Right now, it's only (in terms of Ubuntu-based distributions) available in Ubuntu/Kubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" and Linux Mint 10 "Julia" through a backport PPA. As I had a Linux Mint 10 "Julia" GNOME live USB handy, I used that to do testing; I will say that this method may have been the cause of many of the problems that you will read about shortly. Follow the jump to see how it went.

Review: Sabayon 5.5 KDE

Main Screen

If you are a regular reader of this blog, Sabayon needs no introduction. Suffice it to say that version 5.5 has been released, and as has become tradition for me (so to speak), I am testing the KDE version of this new release.
It seems like there aren't really a whole lot of new heavily-advertised features in this release; it mostly consists of bugfixes. Let's see how true that turns out.
I tested this as a live USB made with UnetBootin. I did not test the installation.
Follow the jump to see how this version of Sabayon stacks up in terms of making Gentoo friendly (or, at least, friendlier) to newbies.

Featured Comments: Week of 2011 January 23

There was only one post this week that garnered comments, so I'll post all of those.

Preview: Bodhi Linux 0.1.4 Beta

An anonymous reader had this to say: "-v.nice review,prof P -that cluttered dock You mention, also come on other distros -it's easily sent to the bottom of the deep blue sea,
if you chose to do so & you end up with a non-cartoonish desktop -just right click/properties... cheers".
Bodhi Linux creator Jeff91 had this to say: "Just a comment about the bar at the bottom - the last screen in the setup wizard entitled "quick launch" lets you choose what applications to include on that bar at the bottom. To display all of them as you have in those screenshots means that you checked off all the items. Oh also - the Enlightenment screenshot module is in the Bodhi repo. sudo apt-get install screenshot Cheers, ~Jeff Hoogland".
Also, in related news, the Enlightenment libraries (though not the WM itself) have reached a stable release. Furthermore, Bodhi Linux itself has gone from beta status to having a release candidate (RC). Wow!

Thanks to all those who commented this week. Once again, as I am back in school now, I won't be able to post as frequently. In any case, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

Second Semester Starting Soon

Well, I had a nice, long winter break by virtue of the fact that this time I chose to stay home during MIT's winter session. That's come to an end, and I'll be heading back tomorrow.
I'm glad that I've been able to write as much stuff here as I did over the last month and a half. Unfortunately, that's probably going to end for a while, as classes start next Tuesday (and this semester will be a little more stressful than the last due to the introduction of grades (as opposed to pass/no record for first-semester freshmen)). I'll try to have something here at least once a week (it'll probably be a little more), but in any case, don't expect much more than that.
Thanks to all the readers who have read and commented on these posts and subscribed. Please do continue!

Preview: Bodhi Linux 0.1.4 Beta

Main Screen + Main E17 Menu

I've been reading a lot of good things about Bodhi Linux recently. It's a young (just a few months old) Ubuntu-based distribution that exclusively uses the Enlightenment E17 WM. (The name is appropriate because Prince Siddartha (later to be known as the Buddha) achieved enlightenment under a bodhi tree.) I've used GNOME, KDE, Openbox, and a bit of LXDE, Xfce, and Fluxbox, but I've never used Enlightenment before, so this is a totally new experience to me. Plus, not only is Bodhi Linux in beta at version 0.1.4, even Enlightenment itself, after over a decade of development, is still in beta at version 0.17 (hence E17); the release of E17 after E16 (Enlightenment 0.16) was a huge deal for its users. It's a good thing that it's built on a familiar Ubuntu base, or else I'd be totally lost. I made a live USB of this with UnetBootin and went on my way, so follow the jump to see how this experience goes.

A Response to a Tiger Mother

There's been a lot of controversy about Amy Chua's memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother surrounding her harsh and very strict parenting methods. Even more controversy was created when excerpts from the book appeared as a condensed Wall Street Journal article.
Amy Chua has said in the book (and this part also appears in the WSJ article as well as, from which I am taking these points, Wikipedia's article on her and the book) that her daughters were not allowed sleepovers or playdates, parts in the school play (or complaining about that), grades lower than an A, TV or computer games, their own extracurricular activities, anything less than the top spot in every class, and instruments other than the piano and violin (or complaining about playing the piano or violin). This is also not an exhaustive list by any means.
However, there are a couple things that could potentially cool the flames slightly. First, Amy Chua has said that this is a memoir, not a manual/how-to guide. This is evident because later on in the book, she somewhat (but certainly not fully) backs off from her very strict methods and comes to terms with the fact that she does not have 100% control over her children and their activities. (Full disclosure: I have read neither the book nor the full article. The most I've read consists of a couple long passages from the book and article quoted in other writers' articles.) This ties in with the fact that the WSJ article solely focuses on her strict methods and totally leaves out the part about her "coming-of-age" as a parent. Through these qualifications, the book becomes a good deal more reasonable than it is initially made to be.
With all these things in mind, as a second-semester freshman undergraduate student, I would like to share my response to these things, so follow the jump to read on. I apologize if this doesn't sound like a formal article; it's more of a jumbled collection of thoughts that appear in my head as I see each point regarding her book.

Security Developments after the Moscow Attacks

Today, a terrorist blew up a section of the international arrival area of one of Moscow's airports. Around 35 people died with scores more injured. The particular section of the arrival area where the explosion occurred was low on security guards but filled with travelers moving from place to place; also, the explosive device was hidden in a suitcase. This is a terrible tragedy, and we should make sure that something like this doesn't happen again.
Now, I don't know what threat detection machines were in place in the airport, but it evidently wasn't sufficient to stop the attack from happening. But do we really need more annoying (and legally questionable) gizmos and procedures at every point?
I think not, because no matter what new deterrents and checks are put in place, determined terrorists will try their utmost to get around them. So what we really need is better and more effective intelligence-gathering as well as security guards who will look for suspicious activity and behavior (as opposed to just suspicious objects (which, of course, should still be searched)). It seems like after every tragedy regarding national security comes a disproportionately stronger response that also comes with a (often unnecessary) tightening of people's civil liberties and civil rights. So for once, after a national security tragedy, can we stay sane?
Speaking of which, the USA PATRIOT Act, which was supposed to expire at the end of this year, lives another year, for senators and representatives have passed a bill that also happens to have a provision for extending that Act's length by a year. Why do we need that law again? All I can do is sigh and shake my head.

Featured Comments: Week of 2011 January 16

There were a few posts that garnered a handful of comments, so I'll try to post most of them.

On Megabytes and Mebibytes

Reader T_Beermonster said, "how did you create your 900MiB partition and did you put a filesystem on it? Firstly you probably didn't actually get a 900MiB partition because most tools by default end up rounding to "cylinders" and giving you a bit less. Most linux filesystems by default are set up to reserve 5% of space for the root user - so that makes available space 855MiB as a user. depending what sort of jiggery-pokery is used to make the iso into a bootable USB a couple of MiB may not be enough room for manoeuvre. It could even be something as simple as a script expecting a partition size of 1GiB or greater and just not completing," later adding, "You could try using tune2fs to get rid of the 5% reservation of space - the partition is effectively going to be used as read-only anyway. tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdg1 replace sdg with your usb device and use su or sudo as you prefer. That will give you an extra 45MiB to play with on a 900MiB partition. Which may be just enough - I should really go and look at the sizes of the mint iso's. I doubt the journal is taking up much room but you may want to consider going for an unjournaled fs on that partition given the read-only nature. The tune2fs trick is worth remembering in general anyway, particularly if you have a separate / and /home. /home doesn't need to reserve any space for the superuser and 5% of a 1TiB partition is 51.2GiB that would otherwise be sitting unavailable."

Review: Trisquel 4.0.1 LTS "Taranis"

Reader jai ho had this, among other things, to say: "I have tried Trisquel 4.0 and instead of going with gnome i have tried the LXDE version of Trisquel...The LXDE version uses Midori if i remember correctly...And is using gnash and the yuoutube video played correctly and all the flash adverts worked correctly... the only issue with gnash is with that i was not able to play facebook flash games ... i tried streaming music also and it worked correctly in some sites and not in other... i am really impressed with the Trisquel in short..."

Revisited: 3 Newbie-Friendly KDE Distributions

Reader Debianero suggested, "You've forget Debian6 with KDE4 (look for the CD image ending in -kde-CD-1.iso). The release will be around Feb, 5-6."
Commenter Sylvain said, "Which edition of Mandriva Linux do you use ? One, Free or powerpack ? For Pardus, why not using the latest version ?"

That's all for this past week. At the end of this coming week, I'll be going back to college for my second semester, meaning there'll be quite a bit less activity here. That said, I will try to have one post out every week. Remember, if you like the material, please continue subscribing and commenting!

Review: Pardus 2011

Installation DVD Boot Menu

Wow, what timing! Just yesterday I took another look at Pardus 2009.2 "Geronticus Eremita", and today Pardus 2011 is out! Incidentally, I previewed a beta release of Pardus 2011 to disappointing results. However, a few months before that, I did declare Pardus 2009.2 the winner of a 5-way comparison test, so I figure it's only fair to give Pardus another shot now that the newest official release is out in the wild.
For those who don't know, Pardus is a distribution developed primarily by scientific and military organizations in Turkey for their use, but is also reasonably popular among the general Linux-using populace in Turkey and abroad. It's not derived from any other distribution, and it uses KDE as the desktop base aiming to be newbie-friendly.
Unfortunately, given Pardus's failure to load on a MultiSystem-created multiboot live USB yesterday, I didn't do that today. Instead, I tested the installation procedure and installed system in VirtualBox on a Linux Mint 10 "Julia" GNOME live USB. I allocated 1 GB of RAM to the guest OS as always.
With all that, follow the jump to see what the newest iteration of this Anatolian leopard is like.

Revisited: 3 Newbie-Friendly KDE Distributions

A few months ago, I did a comparison test between 5 KDE distributions that aim to be friendly to newbies. These distributions were PC-BSD 8.1 "Hubble" (which is technically a distribution of BSD, not Linux), PCLinuxOS 2010.07 KDE, openSUSE 11.3 KDE, Sabayon 5.3 KDE, and Pardus 2009.2 "Geronticus Eremita" (live CD). (I also tested Chakra Alpha 5 "Panora", but that wasn't compared to the others due to its pre-release nature.) I did all these tests on my old Sony VAIO desktop. I intended to make live USBs out of all of these using UnetBootin, but only Sabayon and (surprisingly, given its origin and its developers' previous statements about using UnetBootin in this particular case) PCLinuxOS cooperated. The others required that I make a live USB using the "dd" command, which wipes all existing data off the flash drive and writes the ISO file onto the USB with a primitive filesystem type that can't coexist with other partitions. This didn't look good for me, because I didn't want to keep erasing and rewriting data on the flash drive. Thus, I tested all these distributions in VirtualBox. The downsides to this were that as my old computer only had 1 GB of RAM, I could only allocate 448 MB of RAM to the guest OSs, which in some cases was clearly too little, and that I couldn't in some cases properly test things like hardware detection and installation of programs in this limited virtual environment.
Then, a couple weeks ago, I found a program called MultiSystem, which I wrote about promptly. This program allows writing a live multiboot setup to a USB drive partition without destroying other partitions. Plus, it supports distributions like Mandriva (which I tested shortly after the original comparison), openSUSE, and Pardus which otherwise require the "dd" command. (Unfortunately, it doesn't support either PC-BSD or Chakra, the latter of which is surprising in its omission considering that distributions like Arch, ArchBang, and CTKArchLive are all supported.) Clearly, this was what I needed. Now I could go back and test Mandriva, openSUSE, and Pardus as live USB systems with direct access to all my computer's hardware without issue. And that's exactly what I've done and that's the subject of today's post.
Please note that I'm not including any screenshots with this post because the relevant screenshots have already been put up in the previous comparison. Next, I'm not actually comparing these distributions to one another, as that's already been done — I'm just seeing if each one on its own will cooperate with my computer's hardware. Also, I realize that because I'm testing these on a much better computer than before (and I'm using Mandriva 2010.2 instead of version 2010.1 that was previously tested), the methodologies may turn out different results than before. With all that in mind, follow the jump to see how each one fares.