Place of Stuff

I have a Twitter address.  But I really disliked having to either open a new tab to view comments and replies or having to keep returning to the site to see what’s going on.  And I won’t be going into the various merits or demerits of Twitter as a site or function.  There are plenty of sites that are happy to do that for me.  So, being the kind of guy I am, I went hunting for a Twitter client so I didn’t have to use the browser.

There are a number of clients out there, so there’s no shortage whatsoever.  Unfortunately, most are written for Mac or for Windows and I run Linux.  So using my brain I went hunting on the web for a client that I could run.  I was running Spaz, but it became unhappy when I upgraded my distro and started running KDE4 – it just sits in the system tray and won’t actually do anything useful.  More on that later.

So, after the jump, I’ll run down the ones I tested and the one I’m on now.  Incidentally, some of my results are skewed by the fact that I believe KDE to be messing me around – some apps run once and then never again.  I am well aware that this is not the fault of the app itself, so I will not refer to the running (or otherwise) nature of the app.  Also, big thanks to the nice people at Adobe.  Many of the apps tested run on Adobe AIR (get it here).  If you remember Klik, Adobe Air is kinda like that but easier to use.  The BBC iPlayer Desktop app runs through AIR which allows it to be cross-platform.  Jump coming up now…

Continue reading ‘Various Twitter Clients’ »

HP Mini Mi Netbook

Netbooks are pretty much this year’s thing.  I have seen a few people using them on the train and they look very useful and handy.  Particularly if you want to knock up a spreadsheet or document while you’re on the train.  They run a customised version of Windows XP, Windows Vista or a Linux distro which are designed to give you easy access to your applications without having to go through multi-layered start menus.  In all, they are useful and usable.

So do I want one?  Well, yes.  Mainly because I don’t have one.  In the UK, they are available for around £250 (~ $370 or 280 euros (according to XE)) and are about 1KG in weight.  They are very very portable and are really useful for office apps or web browsing/email.  They fit in a category between a laptop and a PDA.

In the UK, they are available from HP, IBM and from Acer.  They are all lightweight, stylish, handy and useful for the quick jobs you need to do whether on the way to/from work (if you use the train or plane) or before a meeting.  They are also very handy for people who can’t carry a full sized notebook.  They are designed for use outside the office.  And I want one.

So, if any company that makes these things would like to send me on to use and review, feel absolutely free.  I will happily accept it and review it and put it up on this site.  Linux distro for preference please.

I have seen a variety of stories around the web extolling the virtues of the new browser from Google: Google Chrome.  At the moment, it is still a beta available only for Windows and Mac, but it seems to be an, erm, internet browser I suppose.

To be perfectly honest and frank, I find it incredibly difficult to get excited about a web browser.  To me, the browser is a tool, not a way of life.  For comparison, go now and find a carpenter – I’ll wait.  Got one?  Good.  Now explain to your carpenter that there is a new hammer available.  Gauge the carpenter’s reaction.  Now contrast and compare with all the hoopla over Google’s offering.  Now decide who the hammer should be used on.

Gosh, I sound grumpy, don’t I?  The fact is that Chrome looks like a decent offering.  It has tabbed browsing, which we all should now expect.  It has a way to import your bookmarks from your existing browsers, again, we should all expect that.  It displays pages from the internet.  The best thing, in my opinion, is that it is very minimal and there is little that is not functional about it:

Chrome tab and menu bar - click for full pic

As you can see, it has a very clean look.  Unless Google decide to add masses of bolt ons, it should be a very useful browser indeed.  But they didn’t release it for Linux.  The bastards.  Many of Google’s apps have Linux counterparts – Picasa being one of them.  Now these aren’t direct ports, they usually have Wine embedded in them to make them work.  But not Chrome – Chrome can be beta tested by Windows and Mac users, but not Linux users.  This seems a little unfair to me.  After all, it is arguable that the only reason Internet Explorer was forced to improve and to offer tabbed browsing was down to the success of the Mozilla and Firefox browsers.  Even now, does anyone really care at all about Safari?

Luckily, innovation and awkwardness come naturally to the plucky programmers with an interest in Linux.  CodeWeavers have, again, stepped up to the mark.  With Crossover Chromium available for free (as in no cost) they have enabled us to use Chrome via the CodeWeavers Wine implementation.  Which means that I am able to download it and show you this (click the pic for full size):

Chrome on Debian Linux

In an ideal world, there would be no need for Wine, Cedega, Play on Linux or CodeWeavers to exist.  In an ideal world all apps would be available for all platforms.  In this world, though, they are needed and gratefully so.  It is the work of CodeWeavers and Wine that helps to break down the final barriers for a lot of people – those people who really need to run Microsoft applications but who want to also run Linux.

Anyway, to step down off my soapbox, Chrome (in it’s beta state) looks to be a useful addition to the current crop of browsers available.  It is one in a line of Google applications, along with GMail, Calendar, Talk, Docs, Video and the rest.

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.

For all of my love of control and the other great stuff that comes with my usual distro, I also like to try out new things and see what’s going on elsewhere. To that end I decided to give Kubuntu a go. And I have been pleasantly surprised.

Firstly, the install itself. When you first boot up the build disk you are given several options, the one to use the disk as a live disk is still there, but you can choose to install directly from boot (as with other distros), I chose that and it went very quickly, as you would expect. I won’t go through the steps here as there were only a small number. Kubuntu installs a limited number of apps on first install, leaving you to use them or add to them as you wish.

All of my hardware was detected and installed, even my wireless card, with no tweaking from me. On first boot you are presented with an empty KDE 3.5.9 desktop – the trash icon is down by the clock. Very clean, very attractive. All the apps (where possible) are KDE apps – Kopete for IM, Konqueror for browsing, digiKam for photo management and so on. Oddly, the office suite is OpenOffice.org rather than KOffice – probably because OO.o is the most well known. Loooking through Adept (rather than Synaptic) you can also choose to install Firefox 3 instead of (or as well as) Firefox 2.0.0.14. The software is new enough without being totally bleeding edge and seems very stable.

As I’m a laptop user, I have the suspend/hibernate options available and so far have briefly tested suspend. It works absolutely fine with no tweaking – though it should be said that I am on a Thinkpad R40 which is old enough that it should work: there are no brand new bits of kit to get used to. I suspended for a few seconds and it came back with only one problem: randomly keys repeat even though I only press quickly. This may not be down to Kubuntu, though I haven’t seen it in either Debian or Slackware. Small gripe number 2: my wireless card had to be removed and reseated as hibernation disabled it. It’s PCMCIA though, so a matter of a second to get it redetected. Otherwise, suspend seems to work well and with minimal problems. To compare with a well known OS, I have known of Windows laptops to also have great issues with suspend and hibernate, so it shouldn’t be taken as a showstopper or that Kubuntu is left wanting.

For those of us who find sick pleasure in having to search for solutions to things that you would expect to work well, Kubuntu comes up trumps. I wanted to test playback of commercial DVDs and so assumed that they would work out of the box. Not so. Because of legal limitations on libdvdcss in various countries, you need to install that seperately. This is a 2 step process as I have learned: first you install the Medibuntu repositories. Medibuntu stands for “Multimedia, Entertainment & Distractions In Ubuntu” and provides for all the codecs you need to play various multimedia files but are restricted from doing so in various countries. This will give you win32 codecs and libdvdcss – among others. The latest version of libdvdcss is 1.2.9 and does not work. Instead, you need 1.2.5 and everything works fine. Unfortunately, when Kaffeine loads up it tries to find this itself and looks to http://kubuntu.org/packages which doesn’t have the required files. Hopefully this will be fixed in future releases because it gave me a frustrating time. Instead you should run /usr/lib/kaffeine/install-codecs and, after accepting the legal warning, it installs the older version and gets things running.

(click for better quality)

In previous versions of Kubuntu, I have fallen foul of the root user/password restriction. Some programs require root rather than sudo access. So far, this hasn’t been an issue. Frankly 8.04 seems, within the first 24 hours of usage, to be the first version I could envisage keeping on my system for more than few days. It seems stable and doesn’t have any long term quirks that would prompt me to remove it.

A good first system for the average computer user and a decent system for someone who doesn’t want to have to delve too deeply into the inner workings of the OS.

Download the current version here. Get the KDE 4 Remix version here.