My first experiments with Gentoo started about four years ago when I was working in a video store, which also had a couple of computers running Slackware to provide internet access for visitors. One evening I got bored and together with my friend Boris we decided to try to install Gentoo on one of them. It didn’t go without a problem, but with the help of great Gentoo community and documentation we were successful. In fact, I loved what I saw so much that soon after I bought a new computer with AMD Athlon 64 3000+ I installed Gentoo on it. It was by far the best 64-bit Linux distribution and operating system in general (Windows XP x64 was and still is a big disappointment). Now, after four years, I’m still a happy Gentoo user. I’m also running it on my laptop.

And today the people working hard on Gentoo Linux announced the release of version 2006.1 of my favourite Linux distribution. The default compiler is now GCC 4.1, GNU C library is upgraded to version 2.4 and there are many improvements in the start-up scripts. There are also now separate profiles optimized for desktops and servers. Gentoo Linux installer now also supports installations without internet connection and is easier to use. For more details check out the Gentoo Linux 2006.1 press release. In case you decide to give it a try, you can download Gentoo from a mirror or using BitTorrent. If you like all the power and all the control over it, you will not be disappointed.

Tags: gentoo, linux, distribution, distributions, free software, open source, os, operating system, operating systems

I’m about one day too late with this, but anyway. Happy birthday Linux! It was 25 August 1991 when Linus Torvalds, a student from Finland, announced his small hobby project: making a free operating system similar to minix. And today, 15 years later, the Linux kernel is far from being just a hobby. In fact, together with the free software movement, initiated by Richard Stallman, it started a small revolution in the world of software and computing. Today GNU/Linux is one of the fastest developing platforms and a lot of innovation is happening here. Just one of the latest, more visible, things is a great looking 3D desktop that works nicely together with touch-screens. Can’t wait to see what Linux kernel and other open source projects will bring to the world in the years that are coming.

Tags: linux, kernel, birthday, anniversary, free software, os, operating system, operating systems, linus torvalds, richard stallman

Up until today our Solar system had 9 planets. From this day forward it only has 8. No, one of them didn’t get destroyed by some Death star or something. What happened was that stronomers at International Astronomical Union (IAU) General Assembly 2006 redefined the term planet. So the new definition is this:

A planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

The consequence of this is that Pluto doesn’t qualify as a planet any more and now belongs to a new group called dwarf planets, which are defined as (pay attention to points (c) and (d)):

A dwarf planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.

And then we have a third group:

All other objects except satellites orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as Small Solar-System Bodies.

So there you have it. Some books will have to be rewritten, people will have to learn some new facts, and celestial bodies still don’t care about any of this

Tags: astronomy, space, planet, planets, solar system, iau, science

After a couple of weeks of travelling across the Atlantic ocean the book C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 was finally delivered into my hands this morning. Quite a nice timing actually. Today the first development snapshot of KDE4 was released. KDE 4 will be based on Qt 4.2, so this book will also be of great benefit for learning programming for KDE 4. Another nice thing is that authors of the book have added a short chapter about embedded programming with Qtopia (a special version of Qt for embedded devices). This is nice because more and more mobile phones and devices are nowadays running on Linux. A couple of days ago Trolltech introduced the world’s first fully open and programmable mobile development device Qtopia Greenphone. It attracted a lot of interest from developers all over the world. So I guess it will only be beneficial in the future to also have some knowledge about programming in Qtopia. Now I only have to read and learn. When I finish (won’t be that soon) I will write a review of the book.

Tags: book, books, c++, programming, development, gui, trolltech, qt, kde, qtopia, greenphone

While I was reading SUSE Linux Rants blog by Scott Morris (the guy who wrote the free book The Easiest Linux Guide You’ll Ever Read) I’ve come across his post What does Linux and frappr have in common? It turns out that if you are contributing to Linux (by translating, programming, testing, bug reporting, promoting or something similar) you can put yourself on the frappr map and win one of these cool prizes:

• 3x HP laptops loaded with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (value: $1999)
• 6x EVOLT cameras (value: $800)
• 20x 2 GB iPod Nanos (value: $200)

Don’t miss this great chance and put yourself on the Linux map. You only have time until 14 November. You snooze, you lose

Tags: linux, deal, deals, open source, free software, operating system, operating systems, prize, prizes, frappr

A new crop circle has appeared in an oat field near Amity, Oregon, where it was completely invisible from the road but unmistakable from the sky. This time the message from the aliens is quite clear. It could be understood as: “We use Firefox web browser” or “Earthlings, use Firefox web browser.” Since many of us are intelligent enough to know how Firefox is great, we already use it

Of course it should be clear that the crop circle is not from aliens. It was made by 12 people from the Linux Users Group at the Oregon State University who like Firefox a lot. They have documented the whole process. The photos are already available and we can expect videos soon.

Tags: firefox, crop circle, crop circles, web browser, web browsers, fun, funny, entertainment

When I started my career (if you can call it so) as a blogger, my first publishing system of choice was Google’s Blogger. I was happy with it until I published two parts of a very successful article titled JLP’s KDE 3.5 Previews. The story even made it to Slashdot and then the problems started. Blogger, at that time, didn’t have any anti comments spam system in place. All you could do is turn off comments completely. After all the spamming at that time I started to look for alternatives. I’ve checked out many of them and in the end I was by far the most impressed with Wordpress. Very powerful, flexible and lots of great looking themes and plug-ins.

Why am I telling you this? Well, after a promising start, the developers of Blogger more or less stopped working on it. No interesting new features, no new themes and people that stayed with Blogger had to wait quite a long time until they got a half decent anti-spam system. But it finally looks like that the developers are waking up from their sleep as they have just released a new (beta) version of Blogger. There are now new templates, more options to customise your template, support for more writers, more control over who can view posts, more feed options and the publishing is now instant (no more of the stupid “Republish entire blog” thing ). You can read some more in the Blogger new features tour and on the Google Operating System blog.

Will all this make me switch back to Blogger? Off course not. Wordpress is still a whole lot better. I highly recommend it if you are a more serious blogger and have access to a server that runs or can run Wordpress. But these, long overdue, enhancements to Blogger are sure welcome for people who are using it, or for those who are thinking about starting blogging and are looking for a good service. Let’s just hope Google continues working on it more actively in the future.

Tags: blogger, google, blogging, blog, blogs, wordpress, internet

To get the notification about the latest news from European Space Agency I’ve been subscribed to several of their mailing lists. I was extremely happy a couple of days ago when I found out that ESA has added RSS feeds to their web portal. So now I can finally use my favourite feed reader, Akregator, to follow news more conveniently. If you are using Firefox web browser, you can also subscribe to news, simply by adding the feed link as a new live bookmark. Besides feeds for top news, there are also feeds available for specific programmes/projects and for national news. For more information see the list of RSS feeds from ESA.

Tags: esa, european space agency, rss, feed, feeds, news, space, astronautics

This morning I finally got all the components I ordered to repair and upgrade my sister’s computer. It didn’t go without problems though. For starters, I had to wait a week longer until all the components got to the store. It looks like the demand for AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core processors is very high. Especially because they now have highly reduced prices. And even when the delivery man was finally at the door step, the problems were not over. When I wanted to pay him for the package, he told me that I have two packages. As it turned out they were identical. I had to call the computer store mimovrste.com and ask them what is going on. They simply made a mistake and instead of sending me only one package they sent two of them. When all was cleared up and I had all the needed components in my hand, I could start to assemble the computer. It took me about three hours to set everything up. And this part did go without any problem. My sister took some photos of the process, so I guess they will soon end up on her Flickr account. All I had to do after starting up Linux (she uses Mandriva 2006) is to install the kernel with SMP support enabled (kernel-smp-2.6.12.24mdk in this case) and reinstall nVidia driver afterwards. The speed-up compared to the old AMD Athlon 1200MHz and 512 MiB of memory (now 1 GiB) is quite big. Especially noticeable when working and rendering in Blender.

Tags: hardware, processor, processors, cpus, cpu, amd, athlon 64 x2, dual core

A couple of hours ago Harish Kukeja submitted quite a lot of new source code for Physiks into SVN repository at KDE. The basic features of the physics simulation framework should mostly be functional now and I’ll have to take some time later to take a look at the new code more closely. Probably I will also have to brush up my knowledge of the C++ that is related to this code. If I’ll have enough free time, I may try to write some simple Qt application to test the current state of physics engine and see how it feels using it. Maybe I could also start working on a web page for the project. It would also be nice to come up with an icon that represents something (someone) that immediately makes you think about physics. But first I have to catch Harish on Jabber so we discuss about this idea.

Tags: physics, engine, simulation, simulations, education, kde, linux, soc, summer of code, programming

Although VIA was the first company (as far as I know) to claim that their drivers for graphic cards are open source, these claims were questioned several times and many still believe that they are far from open source. Anyway, today we were blessed with news that could indicate things in the graphic drivers world are finally moving into the right direction that will benefit people. Intel has just announced they are releasing free and open source drivers for their 965 Express Chipset family graphics controller. The drivers support 2D and 3D and are only the beginning. All future development of the drivers will be done openly and in close cooperation with X.org and Mesa communities. To read more about this visit the newly created website Linux Graphics Drivers from Intel. Now we can only hope that AMD (which is the new owner of ATI), nVidia and other companies follow this noble example. There are already some rumors (read the last paragraph) that AMD will follow a similar path with ATI drivers.

Tags: hardware, graphics, drivers, driver, graphic cards, open source, free software, linux, intel, via, amd, ati

A few minutes ago I committed a fix for a little cosmetic bug in KMix, that irritated me a bit every time I opened the mixer window. If you had relative volume values enabled and the volume was at 100% then the number 100 in the QLabel was cut of a bit at the end. I first tried with altering the code which used the function boundingRect from QFontMetrics and functions to get width, margin and other properties from QLabel. I didn’t succeed with these so I simply removed the entire QFontMetrics voodoo and used a nice function sizeHint like this:
QLabel *number = new QLabel( "100", this );
number->setMinimumWidth( number->sizeHint().width() );

The function sizeHint, gets just the right size for the widget so that it fits its content and now all looks just fine. In addition to this I also made the frame of the label thinner by one pixel and I think it looks a bit nicer now. You can see the old mixer window on the left and the new one on the right:

Tags: kde, programming, qt, desktop, desktop environment, open source, free software, linux

In just a short few minutes European astronaut Thomas Reiter from ESA will start his EVA outside of International Space Station. EVA stands for Extra-vehicular activity, or if you like it, a spacewalk. Together with a fellow astronaut Jeff Williams from NASA, Thomas will be out in cold space for six and a half hours. Among other things they will install some equipment to prepare ISS for future assembly work. Editors from the Columbus Control Centre in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, will be posting about this adventure in the EVA blog.

Update: Some photos from the spacewalk are now available in the NASA’s International Space Station gallery.

Tags: iss, international space station, esa, nasa, astronautics, space

A new version of the most popular desktop environment for Linux is out. KDE 3.5.4 is here and in addition to a lot of bug fixes and updated translations there are also some small enhancements. Removable devices are handled better, KHTML engine for rendering web pages is much improved and Konsole and Kate are faster now. For all the details about KDE 3.5.4, including the instructions for downloading, check out the release announcement. AMD Turion 64 in my laptop with Gentoo Linux is already compiling the new version. My desktop computer will have to wait a bit longer, until I get the new AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core, which will make compilation a lot faster.

Tags: kde, desktop, desktop environment, open source, free software, linux

There is a new free book available for all of you who have decided to make the first step of breaking free from the world of Windows and to try Linux. The author, Scott Morris, starts describing the book like this:

After several months of writing and revising, I have made available the Easiest Linux Guide You’ll Ever Read. It is a 160-page book geared towards people who are competent with using Windows, who have never attempted to use Linux but are interested in giving it a try.

The book will help prevent you from getting lost in the new world of Linux, help with understanding the concept of freedom behind Linux and show you some of the many advantages it has to offer. No more excuses, download the book and try Linux.

Tags: linux, book, books, open source, free software, operating system, operating systems