Place of Stuff

I’m not going to do an in depth post on this, mainly because there are already loads of them out there and there will continue to be reviews beyond October.  Just thought you may be interested to know my thoughts on the new desktop OS.  Firstly, in line with XP and Vista there will be various versions of Microsoft Windows 7 – do not get the Home version!!  Home versions are always massively crippled and you’ll spend time hating the system.  I also believe that the Home version is best used on netbook, not on a desktop or laptop.

So, having a spare hard drive, I installed the system on my Dell Latitude D600.  Yep, I accept that this is an older machine, but shouldn’t that mean it would be more supported?  Only outside of Redmond it appears.  The only way to get Windows to recognise and use the sound and video cards was to get the XP and Windows 2000 drivers and install them using the compatibility function.  By the way, the compatibility function worked very very well.  However, in the sense of supported hardware, Linux wins hands down.  The only piece of hardware that is usually not supported out of the box is my wireless card.  Under Windows 7 almost all of the hardware was unsupported – including my ethernet card! Continue reading ‘I Installed Windows 7’ »

Because I hold you all in such high regard (*pause, gesture, sincere forehead*) I’m going to come clean about a few things.  Things you need to know about. (*pause, gesture, furrowed brow*).  Some of these things you will have noticed immediately, others you may not have (*look around, meeting everyone’s eye, sincere half-smile*).

My all-knowing dashboard kindly informed me that WordPress 2.7.1 was out and that I had to upgrade.  No problemo, thought I, piece of cake.  The 5 minute install and upgrade instructions are very clear and a complete idiot can follow them and do it all.  Right?  Guys?  Yeah, I got distracted.  Only for a second but it was enough.  I was ssh-ing and moving stuff with panache and then I realised, I had cunningly managed to overwrite the wp-content folder with a fresh one.  This is the folder that contains the theme (and any changes) and all the plugins.  So yeah, I am a true genius.

So there you are, a cautionary tale and all that.  Fortunately, it gave me the opportunity to make a few changes here.  Much of this is in the background, I was able to take out a bunch of plugins that no longer work and update a few others.  I also enabled IntenseDebate and it imported everything very quickly indeed this time – it will only really matter to you if you comment on other blogs that also use it.  SpamKarma2 has been sadly discontinued, so I have gone with the default Akismet.  There are a few other bits of functionality that I’m missing, but I’ll get that sorted.

Finally, and most obviously, you’ll see that I have a smallish (200×200) AdSense ad.  This is not my new money making scheme.  After seeing one of Dominic’s latest posts, I became curious as to what I would see on my own site.  You will, hilariously, see lots of ads for psychics and other snake-oil salesmen.  Here’s the deal, click the ads or don’t – this really is up to you.  I have a day job and everything and it pays well enough that I only need one paying job.  On the other hand, if you do click the ads and go through to these places, you will be making a psychic donate to an openly skeptical site.  As I said, the choice is entirely yours, there are no tip jar or donate buttons here and this was simply to see what comes up.

There may well be other changes and tweaks coming up, but these are the most obvious.

As predicted by me old mucker Mr Corey, I am letting you know that I have now installed WordPress.org 2.7 – this is a major milestone and gives an entirely new look to the dashboard.  Get it here and learn about the install here and the upgrade here.  WordPress.com users were upgraded a few days ago.  Learn more here: http://wordpress.org/development/2008/12/coltrane/

I discovered this via an LXer newsfeed on Linuxquestions.org. Most Linux users should know about the Wine project and about the Cedega project and even about CrossOver Office – the aim of these programs is to run Windows programs, games and office type programs easily on Linux. There are problems with each program – Wine can be difficult to get working well (often needing tweaks even to just install it), Cedega took Wine and turned it into a “pay for” program and gave nothing back to Wine and Crossover Office is another program you have to pay for, though they do give their programming back to the Wine project. If you just want to play games, until now, Cedega is the one you had to go for. And if you wanted to pretty much guarantee that you could play games and run office programs, you had to buy both Cedega and CrossOver office. And finally, if you have a lot of time on your hands and don’t want to pay money for a product, you could spend time with the original Wine.

That is, until now. PlayOnLinux is a Wine frontend created with Bash and Python. This means that it is runnable on any recent (or up to date) Linux distro. It provides pre-scripted installs for many Windows programs and Windows games. In fact, I installed LucasArts‘ Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast with it and it plays flawlessly and installs in the quickest time ever. I chose this game for two reasons: the first is that I know it installs with both vanilla Wine and with Cedega. The second reason is that it’s a lot of fun to play

From the Presentation page:

PlayOnLinux is a piece of sofware which allow you to install and use easily numerous games and softwares designed to run with Microsoft®’s Windows®.
Indeed, currently, still few games are compatible with GNU/Linux, and it could be a factor preventing from migrate to this system. PlayOnLinux brings an accessible and efficient solution to this problem, cost-free and rescpetful of the free softwares.
Get rid of Windows®’ constraints! But continue to play!

There really isn’t a lot to say about this program.  If you need a way to run Windows games or programs, don’t want to spend money and don’t want to have to spend time tweaking and configuring, then this is a program to add to your toolbox.  It is pretty much only limited by Wine’s limitations.  It allows you to run multiple versions of Wine, to install programs with only a few clicks and, because it’s distro independent, to carry your configuration settings to any PC you have Linux installed on.

The program is at version 3.0.1 at this time of writing and is already very polished.  Currently, only documentation for developers is provided, though user documentation is coming, they also provide distro specific packages and installations.  Help is provided through their forums, though I would be very surprised if a wiki isn’t produced at some time.  The program has it’s own IRC client so you can help and be helped without using your browser.  As it’s open source and cost free, installation
is very pain free and you are welcome to help it progress by either testing and bug reporting or by creating plugin scripts or by checking the code and suggesting improvements.

As any reader of this blog will know, I am a big fan of installing from source. My OS of choice, Slackware, makes this very easy and doesn’t break anything if you do this. I am, though, well aware that this isn’t for everyone – in fact, I break my own rule if it’s convenient.

Slackware packages end in .tgz, which can be confusing since that is also the way that normal tar balls can end. The usual way to install these is to type (as root) installpkg <packagename>.tgz and let the dialogue run. This then expands the archived install files into the correct places on your system. Removing or upgrading packages is equally as easy, simply exchange the installpkg for removepkg or upgradepkg. This method is inbuilt to Slackware and is the most basic way of installing Slackware packages. You could also use pkgtool which gives an ncurses frontend to a number of Slackware commands.

If you like automated downloads, you could use Swaret, Slapt-Get or Slackpkg, each of which will download the install files to your system and install them for you. These three methods are very much automated, though, and this can mean that things will break and you won’t immediately know why. Use them at your own risk, though I have only ever broken my system through my own stupidity.

Building your own packages is pretty much the best way to go. There will be no dependency checking, which could be a downside, but on the other hand you know what is in the package because you put it there. There are 3 basic ways to do this which require more or less technical ability. Slackbuilds.org is a site which is a mix of a how to and downloads. Slackbuilds are created in clean environments and are available either as a plain package download or as a set of scripts for you to run to create your own. Rworkman and Alien Bob are both active there and have been known to be extremely helpful over on the official Slackware forum.

Checkinstall substitutes itself for the make install step in a normal source build. It creates a Slackware package as the final step which can then be installed using installpkg as normal. The downside of this method is that it creates an extra step in the install process. The last update on the homepage is from August 2007, this could mean that no changes have been required or that the project is discontinued – I don’t know and don’t wish to speculate further!

Finally, src2pkg is created and maintained by Gilbert Ashley, who posts on LQ as Gnashley. Gnashley posts updates to the program on LQ and is available to answer questions and give support on the tool (as well as anything else Slack and Linux related). This tool, to me, is the easiest to use. All you need to do, once you’ve installed it, is run src2pkg <packagename.tar.gz/bz> and let it do it’s thing. At the end of the run you are presented with a .tgz file in your /tmp directory. /usr/doc/src2pkg-x.x has more information on the tool and ways you can use it.

Now to answer the question that has probably been on your mind: why do this at all since Slackware is so good at using source installs? Good question. Well, for starters, Slackware tends to have relatively very few 3rd party applications prepackaged and sometimes it is far more convenient to not install from source. Additionally, you may have a core of apps that you want to install immediately after you install Slackware and this makes life easier for you. Alternatively, you may want to enable someone else to install an app and this will make it easier.

Please note, none of the above 3 methods have any dependency checking. You will still need to make sure you have all that you need before installing.  Aside from that, though, installation of 3rd party programs is that bit easier.

Windows users have long had the very well known apps MS Money and Quicken to enable them to manage their finances. Both have been around for a number of years and are mature products in software terms. Those of us running Linux, however, have our own options. If you really need either of the 2 Windows applications, Crossover Office by CodeWeavers can be of great help.

But we don’t want to do that now, do we? As Linux users, we much prefer to use native apps because of their stability, the fact that we can be sure that we can use all the features and because we like to support free and open source projects. There are several options available to us, GnuCash and KMyMoney are the more popular ones (MoneyDance is also available, but you have to buy it to use it beyond a free trial). Because I’m a KDE user, I will be going with KMyMoney and because I’m a Slacker I’ll be installing it from source.

As usual, I will be talking us through installing any dependencies and using copious screenshots where applicable. And, as usual, we will see that installing from source is not scary and is quite easy. This will all start after the jump.

Step 1, obviously, is to download KMyMoney itself. There is a download link on the site’s homepage which takes us to the download files. You can follow the link I have provided, but I would strongly recommend going via the site itself – at this time of writing, the current version is 0.8.8, but by the time you come to do this, it could well be at a different version or different location.

Step 2 is to check the mandatory requirements for installation. For versions above 0.7 you need KDE 3.2 or above. I have KDE 3.5.7 so I’m covered. Qt is also a requirement, it is required for KDE so KDE users are fully covered. If you do not run KDE on your system, you will need to install the kde-libs file and other base files. And of course, qt. If you already run other KDE programs you should be nicely covered.

Open a terminal and cd to the location you downloaded the installation files to. If you prefer to work in the GUI for these things, open your file browser and extract the files as you would normally. Since I am working in a terminal, I type tar jxvf kmymoney2-0.8.8.tar.bz2. There is good reason for this – the archive is in bzip2 format rather than the usual tar.gz format. The slower extraction route is to use bunzip2 to reduce the file to a tar file and then untar it, but the method I listed does it all in one. You should now have a folder called kmymoney2-x.x.x (where x.x.x is the version number). Now cd into the new folder.

As ever, the two most important files to read are the INSTALL and README files as they will tell us whether we need to pass any arguments to the install process or if we need any extra dependencies. The INSTALL file is the generic one, which suggests to me that we can just run the standard ./configure, make and make install process but I will be reading the README file to confirm this.

The README is very detailed and gives us a table to look at for when we are planning our installation. Unfortunately, the README file seems to have been frozen at or about Slackware 9.0 and so is incorrect. Prior to Slackware 12.0, the KDE files were stored in /opt/kde, but are now stored in /usr. No big deal, if you are using Slackware 9.0 – 11.0 use the instructions in the README file, if you are on 12.0 follow mine (for this step).

Type in, as your normal user account NOT as root: ./configure --prefix=/usr (using the prefix tells the installer where KDE can be found. It may not be necessary as the installer will probably look there anyway, but do it). Let it run and then check the bottom of the output for any errors – as ever, this will also tell you if there were unfound dependencies.

At the end of all that, I received the following message:

Configure results:
------------------------------------------
Memory leak check support: no

KBanking support: no
You are missing the KBanking headers and libraries
The HBCI support won't be compiled.

OFX plugin: no
You are missing the libofx headers and libraries
The OFX plugin won't be compiled.

OFX direct connect: disabled

CPPUNIT support: no
You are missing the CPPUNIT headers and libraries
The unit test framework support won't be compiled.
This is not relevant for the usage of the application.
Unit tests are only required by the developers.
------------------------------------------

Good - your configure finished. Start make now

So I know it went well. The support sections that I am missing are unimportant to me as I neither need them or will want to use them – read the site to find out more.

Next step, still in my normal user account, is to run make. This will take a little longer, so feel free to make a drink, walk the dog, go relieve yourself or whatever. Once that is complete, switch to the root account and run make install:

either
su
<enter root password>
make install
exit
or
su -c "make install"
<enter root password> – it’s entirely up to you.

Once this is all done successfully, you will now have KMyMoney installed and available in your menu – for me it’s under Office. Open it and you will see this (click all thumbnails to see full size):

Enter your personal details to start the setup process

Select your base/home currency (this can be changed later if needs be)

What’s new in this release

Additionally, the KDE Handbook now has a section for KMyMoney which can talk you through the sections. If you use internet banking, download statements in .qif (Quicken) format and you can then import the files to your template and use them. You can also export KMyMoney files to Quicken format.

Enjoy but remember, this program can only show you your current financial status, keeping your head above water is entirely up to you!