How to install KDE 4.0 in OpenSUSE 10.3 - 1-Click install

Thursday, March 20, 2008

The future of package manager.

I truly believe that dpkg ( Debian/Ubuntu) and rpm ( Red Hat/OpenSUSE/PCLinuxOS) are all dated package managers which have not evolved enough with time. Not to undermine any of the two -- they have been performing well since ages and have given us some excellent distributions.
However, like everything, technology also ages; enters the newer breed like emerge(gentoo/Sabayon), pacman (Arch/Frugalware), PBI(PC-BSD) and conary(Foresight/r-path).

Unfortunately Gentoo development team has gone crazy and are busy in doing everything but development. Check out a small review of the other three by lazytechguy.

Of the three mentioned Conary seems to be the most technically advanced. I came across an interview with the developer of Foresight Linux and was impressed by the description of Conary by the dev. Check out some of the fine points.

1. Foresight Linux seems to have an interesting release cycle, can you explain it in-depth?
   - Our package manager, Conary, follows many of the principles found in version control systems. Not only does it maintain the source of our packages in the same place as the binaries created, but there are branches. So we have development, QA, and release branches. We are able to do our development on the development branch, without affecting our users. We then promote packages to our QA branch, and test them as a group. The entire operating system is defined in a group, and the packages are built together for optimal compatibility. We test the group of packages together, as a whole, when the QA cycle is complete the entire group is promoted to the release label for user consumption.
   NOTE: Foresight is the first distribution to make a release immediately after a GNOME release.
2. When did you come to realize that Foresight Linux was needed?
   - Well mostly frustration with existing distros. At the time I was working for a large enterprise where we managed a very large scale linux infrastructure. We struggled with maintenance and deployment issues, as well as the “we have to customize red hat mentality”. I always hated rpm spec files, and hated that our environment was never easily reproducable. Using Conary, I was able to very quickly build a distro that was made up of what I defined as of proper desktop OS using the latest GNOME.
   NOTE: Foresight follows a rolling release so we need not wait for 6 months to get a new package as in Ubuntu or one year in case of Red Hat
3. How does Conary differ to other popular package management systems (such as dkpg, Portage, and Yum) and why is it a better method of doing things?
   - Whew… where to start Conary does so much more than legacy packaging systems such as apt(dpkg) and yum(rpm). Conary melds version control concepts into package management. Not only on the build/packaging side of things, but even for system maintenance. Conary stores sources with the binaries, in the same package, supports branching, merging, etc. On the flip side of that, Conary does some other very nice things. For example, every operation is a transaction. So you can actually rollback your last update or even all the way back to when the system was installed. And, these rollbacks contain local changes that get merged. Also being transactional, Conary breaks updates into smaller “jobs”. These jobs are dep complete, so if at anytime an update fails Conary will rollback to the previous job leaving your system dep complete and fully functional. Conary also breaks packages down into manageable components, :runtime, :lib, :devel, :devellib, :doc, etc. So unlike other packaging systems, where you might have 2 packages, firefox and firefox-devel, Conary would have one package with the devel headers split into firefox:devel. This is a great thing, you no longer end up installing -devel packages from random repos in your sources.list just because it looks like a newer version. The devel headers are just part of the same package, you just don’t have to have them installed. These components combined with rich dependancy information really shines.
   NOTE: This means that even if we subscribe to dev repository we will be shielded from a development version of an application.

All the above statements( except for my comments in form of NOTE) are copied verbatim from fscking.com.
Enjoy the full article there.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

ATI/NVIDIA Driver install in PCLInuxOS 2008

PCLinuxOS 2008 Minime is a boon for so-called advanced users, who like to keep their system free of flab.
It comes with a minimal set of applications and an amazing artwork.
This ultra small release also comes with a few good utilities including an easy setup for ATI/NVIDIA drivers.
Check out the images below and see for yourself how easy is it to install NVIDIA driver.

The Utilities Folder


The Video Installation Tool



Click the NVIDIA Tab


Click the "Install Driver" Button


NVIDIA Driver installation in Progress


At the End, the installer gives an option to restart X Server ( I missed taking a screenshot of that), and on X restart, the correct NVIDIA drivers are installed and used. I think PCLinuxOS 2008 has made ATI/NVIDIA drivers install very easy, however it is still not as easy as the Restricted Drivers Manager of Ubuntu, which not only correctly auto-detects the driver for the card but also gives a pop-up to install it, making the user aware that there is a better driver for his hardware.
Nevertheless, this is a very good attempt by PCLOS devs.

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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

How to install KDE 4.0 in OpenSUSE 10.3 - 1-Click install

I saw this excellent tutorial on ubuntu-tutorials about steps to install KDE4.0 in ubuntu. Its easy, actually fairly easy.
However, it involves use of command line, vim and warns to remove any previous installation of KDE 4.0.
Basically the steps are

1. Remove any previous KDe 4.0 install
   
sudo aptitude remove kdelibs5 kde4base-data kde4libs-data

   
2. edit the /etc/apt/sources.list
   
sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list

   and append this line
   
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu gutsy main
3. Finally install the KDE 4.0 packages by these two commands
   
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install kde4-core

so a total of 3 steps involving command line.
Hey why am I mentioning command line this often ? This is Linux and command line is an integral part of it, specially for installing packages ;right ?
Well !! its partially right, true that command line is integral to Linux, however, for trivial tasks like installing KDE 4.0 its not required, provided the distribution you choose is OpenSUSE 10.3.

Lets check the OpenSUSE KDE4 webpage for the steps required to install KDE 4.0.
Bingo !! OpenSUSE guys have integrated KDE4 install with their famed 1-Click install service and now KDE4 could be installed just by clicking this single icon .

Just a minute, what about any previous installation of KDE 4.0. Intrestingly, you are lucky if you already have a KDE4 version installed, as all you need to do is open YAST GUI and update all pacakges. All the KDE4 packages will be updated to the latest version.
OpenSUSE has truly eliminated command line from KDE4 install and I love mouse clicks.

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Monday, January 14, 2008

KDE4 System Settings

In KDE4 they have changed the KControlCenter and named it System Settings.
I found it to be easy to navigate and very intuitive. Lets start the visual review.
The start page looks very similar to KControl of KDE3.


Lets start with Look and Feel section.

1. Appearance :: Configure Theme, Colors, Style
   
   
2. Desktop: Configure Cool desktop Effects and Screen Saver
   
   
3. Notification : System Notifications and Bell
   
   
4. Splash Screen
   
   
5. Window Behavior : Titlebar Actions, Windows Actions, Focus, Moving Actions etc.
   

Second Section is the personal Settings

1. About Me. Configure user details
   
   
2. Accessibility. Improve accessibility for differently abled people
   
   
3. Default Application
   
   
4. Regional and Language Settings
   

Going over to Network and Connectivity Section

1. Network Settings: Set Connection preferences, proxy etc.
   
   
2. Setting for Samba Client (Not Server) Windows Share
   
   

KDE4 System Setting also provide some Computer Administration settings

1. Date & Time
   
   
2. Display Settings
   
   
3. Font Installer
   
   
4. Joystick configuration
   
   
5. Keyboard & Mouse Settings
   
   
6. Sound Settings
   

These are normal settings. The Settings manager considers some more settings are part of Advanced Settings

1. File Associations
   
   
2. Input Actions
   
   
3. KDE Resources
   
   
4. KDE Wallet
   
   
5. Service Manager
   
   
6. Session Manager
   
   
7. Solid Configuration
   
   and
   
8. Samba Configuration. I do not have Samba installed so got this message
   

All in all, I can say that KDE4 System Settings provide and exhaustive interface for almost full system settings.
I liked the new and crisp interface, please do share with me how you liked this screenshot tour.

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Friday, January 11, 2008

KDE 4.0 Final packages released.

I have installed KDE 4 on OpenSUSE 10.3, you may read the detail in my previous Article. Today morning, I fired up YAST and found that there was an update available. The KDE4 packages now have version 4.0.X instead of the previous 3.97.X. If its available in YAST that means that KDE team has released the KDE 4.0 final source and OpenSUSE team is quick enough to package them.

I found the package kdebase4 having a version number 4.0-1.3 against the previous 3.97.2-4.5. Same goes for most of KDE 4 packages.
Now I am here in India and its already January 11, 2008, however, in NewYork it will still take more than 4 hours before the clock ticks 0:00.
A strange thing I noticed is that the following KDE PIM packages are marked to be deleted. ::

1. libkdepim4
2. libakonadi1
3. kdepim4
4. kdepim4-wizards
5. kde4-korn
6. kde4-korganizer
7. kde4-knotes
8. kde4-knode
9. kde4-kmail
10. kde4-kaddressbook
11. kde4-kakregator and
12. akonadi.
    

At the same time "oxygen icon theme scalable" package was marked to be installed.
Looks like the KDE4 PIM is still not stable so KDE devs have removed them from the official release.
I had to come to office so could not install and check the packages, surely this will be the first thing to do when I get back home.

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Disable Touchpad while writing

I code a lot and also write some blogs, during writing sometimes my thumb or palm touches the touchpad and results in mouse pointer moving to another window or at a different place within the same window. While coding in "vi" editor in konsole, sometimes I have even accidentally closed the konsole terminal resulting in me loosing all the unsaved work.

Now I do not want to permanently disable the touchpad of my Laptop, but was looking to find a solution where I can disable and enable it at will. I found a great article on gentoo wiki where they use ksynaptics or gsynaptics to accomplish this.
I followed their manual config and found it to be much simpler and easier than the GUI versions.

1. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Add the Option "SHMConfig" "on" to the Section "InputDevice" where the driver is "synaptics".
   The entry would now read something like ::
   
Section "InputDevice"
Driver "synaptics"
Identifier "TouchPad"
Option "SendCoreEvents"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mouse0"
Option "Protocol" "event"
Option "SHMConfig" "on"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "on"
EndSection

   
   
2. Thats it !! Config has been done. Now we just need to make use of the syndaemon utility to disable touchpad while typing.
   If I want to disable touchpad for 1 second after the last keystroke then I would type
   
$syndaemon -i 1.0 -t -d

   If we see the man page of syndaemon, then we can see that "-i" governs that seconds to wait after the last key press before enabling the touchpad; "-d" makes syndaemon start as a daemon, we can close the terminal and still syndaemon will run; "-t" indicates to only diable tapping ( the accidental touch) and not mouse movements.

Job accomplished.

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Thursday, January 10, 2008

Installing Banshee - Gnome Music player

Banshee is a music management and playback application for GNOME. Over the course of the year a variety of high quality, highly polished, and all around “swell” Mono GNOME Desktop applications have been popping up. As with many of these apps, Banshee has a beautiful user interface and is well architected.

It features

1. Import Music
2. Organize Music
   
3. Play & Share
4. Rip CDs
5. Sync with IPod and most popular Music devices
   
6. Play Last.fm playlists
7. Play podcasts

The latest version ( 0.13.2) got released on January 8, 2008 and I was pleased to see the packages in Arch Linux. A simple pacman -S banshee revealed the fo;;owing packages will be installed.
pacman -S banshee
resolving dependencies... done.
looking for inter-conflicts... done.

Targets: libgdiplus-1.2.6-1 mono-1.2.6-1 gtk-sharp-2-2.10.2-1
libgnomecups-0.2.2-4 libgnomeprint-2.18.2-1
libgnomeprintui-2.18.1-1 gtkhtml-3.16.2-1 gnome-sharp-2.16.0-2
sqlite3-3.5.4-1 gstreamer0.10-faac-0.10.5-1
gstreamer0.10-faad-0.10.5-1 pmount-0.9.13-4 sg3_utils-1.25-1
libipoddevice-0.5.3-1 ipod-sharp-0.6.3-1 libnjb-2.2.5-3
njb-sharp-0.3.0-1 banshee-0.13.1-2

Interesting to note is that banshee comes default with ipod-sharp, the C# library for syncing with IPod. However, Banshee does not currently support IPod Touch or the IPhone. Also the latest version of Banshee supports PodSleuth, which replaces libipoddevices. However, Arch linux still does not have packages for PodSleuth and still use libipoddevices, I am sure this will soon change.

Banshee requires HAL and Dbus to be started before starting banshee.
I have just installed it and started using it for playing music from my hard disk.
Will try bnashee soon to sync my IPod Video.





Well if doing pacman -S banshee is difficult for some people, then they can install latest banshee with a click of mouse on OpenSUSE 10.3.
Aaron Bockover, the developer of banshee, got a comment saying that

dude a release blog without a 1-click link is like coffee without caffeine
So Aaron has promptly released the 1-Click install package for OpenSUSE 10.3.
Just click the following icon and let YAST do the work for you.