nixternal

What a groovy week, no matter how busy it was! Yesterday I found out that among 3 other people, I am now an official member of the KDE e.V.. Thanks everyone for the support and the votes, as well as a congratulations to Gary Greene, Paul Adams, and Alexis Menard. I am honored to be a part of the wonderful KDE community and look forward to many, many, years of working together to make KDE the best!

On top of this news, I found out this morning that I have been approved as an Ubuntu Core Developer. This means that I now get to upload to the Main repositories, hopefully providing our current Kubuntu core developers a little relieve during the Intrepid cycle and in the future. I took the long and lazy route to core developer by taking my sweet arse time and just enjoying everyone in the community and enjoying the work that I have done. I look forward to the many, many, years of Kubuntu development.

With this news, I have to give a big thank you to Jonathan Riddell, Sarah Hobbs, Scott Kitterman, Lydia Pintscher, Celeste Lyn Paul, Anne-Marie Mahfouf, Wendy Van Craen, Tom Albers, Rafael Fernández López, Guillermo Antonio Amaral Bastidas, and the entire KDE and Ubuntu communities, THANK YOU!

OK, here is the scoop. We have one appliance that gets a custom partitioning via kickstart and a bit of Python love. Once the partition is complete, we install the base packages and then our appliance package. During the installation of the appliance package, it reads in the size of the multiple partitions it has available and their sizes. This all works like a charm. Side note, our Kickstart scripts are being run through Anaconda from CentOS.

As it stands, when the partitions are created, there is 5% by default that is utilized with every partition for super user access. This way here, it saves you from running out of space and being unable to access the drive. This is great on directories such as /boot, /var, /, /home, and etc. But when we partition our 750GB drives, we want a large growing space that doesn’t need this 5% reserved blocks percentage. Typically when you use mke2fs to create the partitions, outside of Kickstart and Anaconda, you would pass the -m flag with 0 (zero) as the variable. This would get rid of any reserved space, therefor allowing you to utilize the entire space. With the default 5% on 4×750GB hard drives, we lose a total of 150GB of space. That is a lot of space to lose, especially when our appliances main duty is storage.

I know we could add a %post section to our Kickstart scripts, call tune2fs -m 0 /partition/location, and then reinstall our appliance package so it can read the new drive partitioning, but is there any other way to do this? Someone said to use mke2fs.conf for this, however Kickstart and Anaconda documentation is far from good when it comes to tricky configurations, and it seems nobody else in the world is doing this. Does anyone know how to go about using the /etc/mke2fs.conf with Kickstart so I can have the drives partitioned with the -m 0 flag from the get go?

/me wishes we used Debian/Ubuntu with FAI!

I have been getting IMs lately from people I have no clue who they are because they use nicks that I haven’t ever seen before. I use Bitlbee for instant messaging and for those of you who do not know what that is, it is a gateway for IM protocols for IRC clients. I use Irssi as my IRC client which is nothing more than text, no funky pictures, silly emoticons, and such. So when someone, who is not in my list, IMs me, I can’t respond without adding them to my list, and if I do not know who you are, you will not get added to my list. So, if you could when you IM me, let me know who you are and what you want and I will go ahead and add you to my list just as soon as I can.

Thanks!

Big Bang
I recently started working for a local company here in Chicago called Cleversafe. It is a company that specializes in distributed storage solutions. And the best part about this, it is an Open Source company! Want to view their open source community, check out Cleversafe.org. I am the new Linux Packaging and Development Engineer. What exactly does this mean? It means I will be packaging up their application for various platforms as well as maintaining the appliance we create. The current appliance is built off of the CentOS 5 platform, but who knows what the future will bring, as I am eying Ubuntu/Debian as well as Foresight. Other stuff that I will work on in the future is the Open Source Community. After 2 days, I am in love with the place. Everyone is super cool, and it is just like every open source community I have worked with, so diverse with people from all over the world nestled into a very nice office space in the West Loop Gate area of Chicago.

Evolution
Oddly enough, being an open source company, they currently utilize Microsoft Exchange Server. The nice thing is, I don’t have to use any Microsoft products! That’s right! And their Exchange Server doesn’t even support IMAP or POP3, OWA only. KMail will not work with this setup, Thunderbird sucked just as bad, but Evolution, I am impressed. So you LUG Radio folks and your KDE PIM bashing, I will have to join you a little here. It took me a few minutes to figure everything out configuration wise, but as it stands, I have my Inbox, Personal Folders, and even Company Calendars. I have 2 minor annoyances thus far though, 1) Evolution wants to lock up every now and then, and 2) None of the alerts work from the Company Calendar. For 1) I may be the problem behind this, so I will have to test later tomorrow. For 2) I could very well be missing something, so if you use Evolution in a similar environment and have your alerts working with an Exchange Calendar, fill me in. The last time I used Evolution was way back in those Ximian days, and have since been using Mutt and lately KMail. Kontact is without a doubt the greatest in certain areas, and of course the areas I used it with (POP3). I have to admit though, Evolution is kicking ass with Exchange.

Religion
Free software is my religion, and with the new job, I get to exercise my religion on a daily basis and get paid finally So for those doubters out there, free software can pay, and pay well I might add. If free software is where you want to make a living, don’t give up! I spent about 14 years volunteering in the free software world always wanting that free software job. Well, I never gave up and now I have it. The only downfall, my time with Ubuntu and Kubuntu may be limited a bit. Looks like the weekends will be for Kubuntu and KDE, and as soon as I am settled into the new job a bit more, then I can start devoting time in the evenings.

So, if I am a little slow in responding, now you know. I know all of you in my previous KDE 4 posts keep asking questions and wanting this or that packaged, and as soon as I get some time, maybe this weekend, I will work on getting you what you want, unless of course someone beats me to it.

Oh, with the new job came a new work laptop, a Dell Latitude D830 which is a Core 2 Duo with the Nvidia Quadro NVS 135M. Thus far, using the binary Nvidia drivers, it is working well. I wish it were the Intel X3100, but since it is a freeby I will not argue And my lord is this thing heavy. 15.4″ widescreen that does like 1680×1050, insane! For those of you who may have been looking at this lappy, let me just say with Hardy (Kubuntu and Ubuntu), everything works out of the box, this include Wifi (Intel 4965 AG/AGN) and the Bluetooth! Rock on. Oh, and Kubuntu is getting just under 5 hours of battery time. Finally a lappy for me that works well with Guidance

YES! It took me long enough with all of the work that was going on at the same time, but I would like to present you the ability to test out KDE 4.1 Beta 1 in Kubuntu Hardy right now! It seems we have worked out a majority of the quirks, but I can’t promise you that you may not get an overwrite issue with dpkg just yet. I do think we got them all covered, but you may have something nobody else does, so we didn’t catch it. We have been testing these packages since Saturday/Sunday and I have updated them as people reported issues.

To top it off, I have also included the KDE 4 PIM packages that contain applications such as Kontact, KMail, KOrganizer, Akregator, and more! The package name to get all of that is kdepim-kde4.

So, to install and test these new packages, please add the following to your Kubuntu Hardy /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu hardy main

Once you have done that and you already have a previous KDE 4 version installed, type the following in Konsole:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Otherwise type the following:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install kubuntu-kde4-desktop

Note you may need to install kdebase-runtime-data-common in order to get Application directory icons under the Kickoff menu.

To install the KDE 4 PIM packages, type the following in Konsole:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install kdepim-kde4

I would recommend that you backup your ~/.kde4 directory if there is anything that you might need, and then delete the ~/.kde4 directory to limit any quirks you may receive. After you have done this, update away, reboot for good measure, select KDE 4 from KDM, and enjoy!

I ask that you join us in #kubuntu-kde4 on IRC (Freenode) to discuss any issues that you may have. We can all work together to see if the issue we are seeing is a packaging/Kubuntu only/KDE 4.1 Beta 1 only issue and if not, file some reports on bugs.kde.org.

Thanks everyone for your patience! I will continue to work on the extragear packages and roll them out within the next day or so. Those should be fairly easy

Have fun!

Hey everyone, I accidentally told a couple of people showing up for the meeting scheduled for June 5, 2008 at 01:00 UTC that it was tomorrow. I was wrong and I apologize. The meeting is in 1 hour and 20 minutes, so make sure you show up. I will try and ping you all on IRC in the next few minutes.

#ubuntu-meeting at 01:00 UTC June 5th, 2008

That is 6PM in California, 7PM in the mountains, 8PM in Chicago, 9PM in New York, 10PM somewhere out in the Atlantic, 11PM somewhere further in the Atlantic, 1….bah, you get the idea