facti.net

Tried out KDE 4.3.2 on the latest Ubuntu, and what occurs to me is "wow - that's bad".  After the 4.0 release fiasco I thought they could only go uphill, so I was quite disappointed with the latest version. KDE has really gone downhill from 3.5.x.  I think it should be seen as an example of how not to do things. It seems to have focused on eye candy at the expense of usability.

From a user perspective the ideal desktop should let you just get things done.  A good desktop should let you configure things whichever way you like and then be 'invisible'.  Unfortunately KDE does neither.  It now constantly gets in the way.  It hinders rather than facilitates:

• It is difficult to hunt through the menus to find the right application
• It is not intuitive to configure
• You cannot get rid of the foolish cashew without recompiling things

 Sad.  I cannot recommend the latest KDE.

Ubuntu 9.10 has come out and is getting installed on one of my systems.   So far the installation has gone well.  The new home encryption stuff is very nicely automated, at least when using the alternate CD.

Custom Steps

Install using Synaptic package manager

Make sure to use the "Mark packages by task" option in the Edit menu when applicable (e.g. if installing MythTV etc).  It will save a lot of time.

Updated the weatherfacti module to work with Drupal 6.14.  Note that the registration with weather.com is no longer optional.  The source for the module that works with Drupal 6.x should be attached to this post.

The conversion was not quite as simple as expected due to some red herrings. Make sure that if installing for the first time on Ubuntu that you have php5-curl installed (apt-get install php5-curl) in addition to the LAMP stack.  

There is a good video tutorial on porting modules available here.  It makes use of the coder module which seems quite good, although perhaps a bit pedantic on white-space warnings.  The tutorial on writing a drupal 6 module is also useful and is available here.  The module from the tutorial does work in spite of some of the comments folks left there.

There is a bug in ubuntu 9.04 (and perhaps other versions) when gdm is disabled that makes it difficult to administer the system.  When gdm is disabled (useful when using a headless server, or a virtual server) the policy kit does not allow an admin user to perform admin commands.   Sudo still works, but using the GUI tools fails.

 The answer based on googling seems to be to modify the /etc/PolicyKit/PolicyKit.conf file and have a new line added: <return result="yes"/> near the end of the stanza.  However, this allows any user to then make changes, so be careful!  A better short-term solution is to modify the <match user="root"> line to match the admin account one wants to use.

there seems to have been a change in the firefox command line that results in the following error:

 Error: Failed to send command: 500 command not parseable

The -remote option no longer works (at least in the current version of Ubuntu).  This has implications for applications that launch the browser with the '-remote' option (such as the current version of NetBeans, v6.7.1).  Googling did not reveal the easy answer yet, so hopefully this will make it into the collective internet conciousness.  The fix is to simply remove the -remote option and pass the URL as the only parameter.

For Netbeans this means changing the  Arguments configuration from this

-remote "openURL({URL})"

to this

 "{URL}"