nixternal

It doesn’t get said enough I feel. Everyone is always busy working their fingers to the bone to bring us all a better desktop experience. Or people are busy learning their new system with the dreams and the passions of eventually becoming a developer. So what doesn’t get said enough?

THANK YOU!

I want to say thank you to everyone who is involved with every process imaginable in bringing all of us the greatest operating systems and software applications known to man. So thank you to all of the developers, documentors, volunteers on any level, and most importantly the users. A lot of users get addicted and feel that they are to new to be important, let me be the first to say you are way more valuable than you could ever imagine. It is your new views that helps developers create a better application, a more user-friendly application. Don’t ever think you are to new, or are a newbie, and can’t do something. You obviously made a wise decision switching to free software, so I know you have it in you to do whatever it is you want. Everyone of you are a very important aspect of our community, a community that Ubuntu was built around. So thanks for all of the fish, and I look forward to sharing a lot more fish with everyone in the future!

NOW LET’S GET THE GIBBON ROCKIN!

I was messing with Distrowatch today before class and decided to see how everyone was doing at different time frames. Then something hit me, within the last 7 days there has been a very close call be Ubuntu (#1) and PCLinuxOS (#2). What I thought was Kool was the fact that there is a KDE distribution up there kicking stones with Ubuntu.

I think the reason for PCLinuxOS’s popularity lies within all of the non-free multimedia codes install by default. It may look like Windows 95 out of the box, but people are downloading it and using it like mad. I have noticed a few people using it at our LUG events. They all said the same thing, they didn’t have to worry about !Restricted Formats, it had Beryl out of the box, and of course it is a combination of KDE and Debian I may not agree with the entire PCLinuxOS gig, but I have to give it to them for drawing in many new KDE users. Now maybe these new KDE users will decide that they want to live FREE, enjoy the color purple, and love being chased around by someone from the down-undah with a long pointy stick

I have been a Yakuake user and fan for as long as I can remember. Seeing as I use the terminal roughly 75% of the time while using my computer, tabbing back and forth between either Yakuake tabs or Konsole tabs gets to be tedious after a while. Well, Sho_ and gang over at KDE have totally kicked arse with a new 2.8 Beta release. The new one still has all of the tabs, however each tab can have as many split windows as your eyes can handle. For an idea of what this looks like, take a look at the image below (click for larger image).

If you are using Kubuntu, building this package is a breeze. Save the package into a separate directory (~/downloads is what I use) and issue the following commands in the terminal (Konsole):
cd ~/downloads #change to the directory you downloaded it to
tar -xvjf yakuake-2.8-beta1.tar.bz2
cd yakuake-2.8-beta1
./configure && make && sudo make install
NOTE: If the package does not configure properly, then you may need to install kdelibs-dev from the repositories.

To run it, simply go to KMenu->System->Yakuake.

Anyone in the USA with a spare video card that will work in an Apple G4, please email me if you would like to sell or give it away. I am willing to pay of course, however I don’t want to pay a lot, as I only really need it to load Ubuntu onto it and run it as a server. Thanks in advance.