This year will be my first time attending aKademy conference, a meeting of KDE users, developers and contributors. Akademy 2007 will take place in Glasgow, Scotland from 30th June to 7th July 2007.

Air plane tickets for me and my sister have just been booked, thanks to Jure Koren, who helped with his credit card (I don’t have any of my own yet). We’ve already arranged for accommodation in Glasgow Euro Hostel about two weeks ago. So everything is ready for the departure. Well almost, I still need to buy a power socket adapter.

Big thanks also go to LUGOS who will be paying for my plane ticket and the room. Without them this trip wouldn’t be possible, or it would be very hard. Can’t wait to meet you at aKademy 2007!

P.S. If you’re coming don’t forget to add yourself to the list of aKademy 2007 attendees.

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland

Yesterday I attended the fourth and the final part of a free Plone workshop that was organised by Kiberpipa (Cyberpipe) multimedia centre here in Ljubljana. My main motivation for taking part in this workshop was LUGOS. You see, the web page of our Slovenian Linux user group is running on Plone. So I thought it would be a good idea to learn Plone to also be able to help in this department.

Each part was about two hours long and during the entire workshop we’ve learned the basics about Plone. First about Zope application framework and server and how Plone is a product that uses it. Then we took a look at the main parts of a Plone-based portal. We also installed Plone on Linux machines there (it was very easy: unpack, run installation, start the server). After that we learned how to add various types of content and how to organise it. We also found out about packages that add functionality to default Plone, these packages are called Plone products. Portlets were introduced and techniques to modify the layout and looks of the Plone portal were presented. At the end even concepts like states, transitions, workflow, roles, groups and security couldn’t escape from us.

All in all it was a very nice workshop and I think I’ve learned a lot of useful stuff about Plone. It has also surprised me to see how many sites use Plone. I visit some of them (like Trolltech, The Free Software Foundation, Open4Business) more or less frequently and I didn’t even know that Plone is behind them. A special thanks to our mentor Rok Gerbas who has done a great job introducing us to the powerful Plone content management system.

Tags: plone, zope, cms, content management system, internet, web, web design, open source, free software, python, kiberpipa, cyberpipe

Last weekend (on Saturday, 17th of May 2007 to be exact) I’ve officially become a member of Linux User Group of Slovenia (LUGOS for short). I must say it was about time as I do quite a lot of work for Linux, like translating software, testing, bug reporting, spreading the word about it and helping new users. So joining my local Linux user group was only natural. This happened while I was attending the 11^th meeting of LUGOS. It was my first LUGOS meeting and I must say it was quite fun. We talked about accomplishments in the past year and made some plans for this one. During the meeting we had some nice snack and after it we also had a cake. The first event that LUGOS is preparing for 2007 will be dedicated to all people who are interested in translating and localising free and open source software into Slovenian language. People who will come will be able to see how our work looks like, see some presentations and take part in workshops. Currently the planned date is 21^st of April. I hope to see many people, I’m sure it will be fun. Oh and by the way, this year LUGOS is celebrating its 10^th anniversary, so: Happy anniversary LUGOS!

Tags: linux, lug, lugos, slovenia, translation, events

Today I just replaced the old graphics card Leadtek WinFast A400 TDH (nVidia GeForce 6800 chip, NV40) with the new one, Club 3D 7600GS (nVidia GeForce 7600 chip, G73). The main reason (or excuse :)) was that the the fan on the old graphics card was extremely noisy and irritating. And it doesn’t hurt to have a more powerful graphics card so that Beryl, also known as the Windows Vista Aero killer, runs faster and smoother.

When looking for a new video card I decided it should not be too expensive, I expected it to fall into the range of 100€ to 150€. Another limitation was that I needed an AGP card, and not PCI Express, since AGP is what the motherboard supports. So in the end I was comparing nVidia 7600 GS cards to ATI/AMD Radeon X1650 Pro cards. After looking at some comparisons (here, here and here) I could see that they are very close, but on average nVidia 7600 GS has a slight advantage and nVidia was also cheaper. Another reason I liked nVidia 7600 GS more is that I’m quite disappointed with current ATI/AMD drivers for Linux. Never had any problems with nVidia drivers, which I can’t say for ATI/AMD drivers. So nVidia 7600 GS it was. More specifically, a Club 3D 7600GS.

The Club 3D 7600GS card, which costed 130€ (including shipping), came in a very nice black box. In the box you can find video converter cable, a quick installation guide and a CD with manuals and drivers. No Linux or BSD drivers are included. Come on, Club 3D, there is plenty of space left on the CD to include them. The card itself is a lot lighter than the heavy Leadtek WinFast A400 (which has a huge heat sink). Installation was easy. I just had to pull out the old card, insert the new one and it was all working just fine, since the nVidia Linux drivers (1.0-8774) were already installed on Mandriva Linux 2007.

I’m happy so far. The installation was very easy, the card works and the computer is quiet again. Now I’ll upgrade the drivers, do some more testing and maybe write something more about that later. As for the old card, which is still fast enough, I’ll try to replace the fan on it and put it back into good use. My cousin has an even older and slower graphics card (ATI Radeon 9000) and he is looking for an upgrade.

Tags: hardware, graphics, video, graphics card, video card, nvidia, geforce, ati, amd, radeon, linux

Winter has really been boring this year. No snow at all and not even that cold. Definitely not what it should be like here in Bohinj at this time of the year. Really bad for business at our ski centres Vogel and Kobla. Until the day before yesterday, when it finally started snowing. Some real winter at last. I hope it keeps snowing for a longer time.

Here’s the view from our balcony

On a weather related note, we had quite a few power outages yesterday and today. A very long time since the last one. Because of this my Gentoo Linux powered home server was off-line several times for a few of minutes. When it went off-line for the first time it had a couple of hours more than 81 days of uptime. I’m quite sure this is its highest uptime. I guess I’ll have to buy myself an uninterrupted power supply (UPS) unit some day. Until that day comes, don’t be surprised if this blog isn’t accessible at some moments.

Tags: winter, weather, bohinj, slovenia, uptime

Ever since 1^st January 2007 our new national currency here in Slovenia is the all mighty Euro (€), which is the official currency for most of the countries in the European Union. For the last two weeks we could still pay with our old and trusty currency – the Slovenian tolar (SIT). But from this day forward the transitional days are over and the Euro is the only currency left. Each country has their own design of one side of the coins. Here are the images and descriptions of Slovenian Euro coins.

I myself and most of the people didn’t have any problems with the change. I guess we are all used to changing our national currency. It has happened a couple of times in our recent history. Hopefully, Euro is here to stay for a long time. Plenty of time to loose my first Euro coin and find one

Oh and by the way, the translations and source code for KDE desktop and KOffice are already updated. You can expect the new Euro ready versions to be released in just a few days.

Tags: slovenia, euro, tolar, money, europe, kde, koffice

A few minutes ago a postman brought me a package. This time it wasn’t as unexpected as the last time and I immediately knew that it should be a free retail box of openSUSE 10.2 Linux distribution (you can buy it for around €45/$60). And sure it was. In case you don’t know yet, Novell sends you a free retail box of the latest version of openSUSE Linux, if you help with beta testing and report bugs you find into their Bugzilla database. I guess that you get a free box even if you only report a bug or two. So make sure you don’t miss this opportunity when the work on the next version of openSUSE starts.

Some of the highlights of the new version 10.2 include the new Kickoff menu for the KDE desktop. A lot of usability research went into this one and I liked it a lot. There are also a lot of improvements in power management features. A new software management tool has been added to make software management easy for people who don’t need advanced features. They also didn’t forget about desktop eyecandy so they have now integrated Compiz and Xgl, which enable 3D desktop effects that take advantage of hardware accelerated OpenGL. You can also install Beryl which makes Aero technology in Windows Vista look just plain old and boring. Not to mention 3D desktop on Linux works faster at the same time and even works well on older hardware.

The openSUSE 10.2 box came just in time for Christmas holidays. So I will give it away as a Christmas present to my cousin Gašper. His family is still running version 10.1 so I think this, together with the upgrade work, will be a perfect gift for this holiday season.

Tags: linux, suse, opensuse, novell, os, operating systems, distributions, free software, open source, desktop

About 11 years ago we were using OS/2 Warp as our main operating system on our first family PC. I was 15 years old back then and it is only natural I liked playing games a lot. By far the largest chunk of my computer time was spent playing a 4X (explore, expand, exploit and exterminate) strategy game Galactic Civilizations developed by Stardock. I just loved researching new technologies, using planet resources to build fleets of spaceships and conquering more planets.

After a year or so we had to switch to Windows and since I couldn’t live without a healthy dose of 4X I had to find a game similar to GalCiv. Luckily I found the game of Stars! which was developed by Jeff McBride and Jeff Johnson who were at the time employed at Microsoft (at least something good came from them :)). Even today I think Stars! is the best 4X game ever. Very complex and deep and a lot of fun. Later I also played Galactic Civilizations for Windows, but that didn’t last long since I started to switch to Linux and I spent less of my free time on games and more on other things.

Let’s fast forward to present. I’m a full time Linux user now and some time ago I was in a little bit of a nostalgic mood. So I started looking for free and open source Linux games similar to Stars! and Galactic Civilizations. I found a project called FreeStars, but its website didn’t show much promise, especially since it stated that it doesn’t yet compile on Linux. So the search continued and I came across a project named Thousand Parsec. The website was looking very nice, there was a lot of information, and there were screen shots of working clients.

Thousand Parsec project doesn’t try to be just a clone of Stars!. They are creating a general framework for making 4X space empire building games, that can be very long, have a huge universe and can be played online. Although the game is not yet at the same level as Stars!, I see a lot of potential in it. Noticing that there is a C++ protocol library (libtpproto-cpp) available, I’ve decided that I could also help with the development. But more details about this later…

Anyway, if you are like me and love playing games like Stars!, Galactic Civilizations, VGA Planets and Master of Orion, then be sure to check out the Thousand Parsec project. A major new version 0.2.0 of Python/wxWidgets based client has just been released and in addition to Linux it also works on Mac OS X and Windows.

Tags: games, 4x, strategy, turn-based, strategies, tbs, stars!, galactic civilizations, vga planets, master of orion, linux, mac os x, windows

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

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

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

If you are a regular reader of this blog, then you have probably noticed that I have changed the graphical theme for it. The blog is powered by the flexible WordPress publishing system and there are many themes that users have designed for it. While upgrading to WordPress 2.0.4 I have decided it would be about time to switch from the default theme to something else. The theme I’m currently using is called WP-Andreas09. It was designed by Andreas Viklund and ported to WordPress by Ainslie Johnson.

Off course I didn’t leave the theme untouched and did some tweaking to it. I’ve enlarged the font size to make it easier to read and got rid of boxes around entries under Categories and Archives sections in the left sidebar. In my opinion links to RSS feeds are quite important, so I moved the Subscribe section from the bottom of the left sidebar to the top of the right sidebar. What I also like about this theme is that separate pages are listed in the toolbar at the top. Another nice addition are links to the last five articles published, that you can find in the right sidebar. These could be useful to people who come to the specific article after using a search engine. With this theme comments are also enabled for each page.

All in all I think the new theme is an improvement over the default one. It looks nicer and it functions better. I hope you like it as much as I do. If you find any error because of the switch, I would be more then glad to hear about it.

Tags: blog, blogs, blogging, wordpress, theme, themes

This is the question I’ve been pondering for the last couple of hours after my sister’s computer broke down and we decided to buy some upgrades. I’ve concentrated on the comparison of AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4200+ and Intel Core 2 Duo E6300. In almost every test I’ve seen Intel is faster. In some tests the gap between them is quite wide. So, if I would be buying a new computer instead of upgrading and if the budget was not so limited, Intel Core 2 Duo would be a clear choice. But unfortunately, I still have some components, like the AGP graphics card, which wouldn’t fit into motherboards for the Core 2 Duo processor. While the new motherboards for AMD with AM2 socket also don’t seem to support AGP, Athlon 64 X2 is also available for Socket 939 and a lot of the motherboards with S939 do support AGP graphic cards and DDR1 memory. In addition to my compatibility requirements the Core 2 Duo E6300 is quite a bit more expensive then Athlon 64 X2 4200+ here in Slovenia and there are also problems with availability of Core 2 Duo CPUs. Motherboards for Intel are also more expensive. So in my case I had to choose AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+. I’ve already ordered it from mimovrste.com and it will cost me 183 €.

Tags: hardware, cpu, cpus, processor, processors, amd, intel, core 2 duo, athlon 64 x2

Hentzenwerke is a family-run publishing company which provides great books about Linux operating system, OpenOffice.org office suite and Visual FoxPro. Currently Whil Hentzen is writing a book about a live Linux distribution, called Knoppix. The book, Knoppix Explained, is going to be published sometime in October 2006. I’m very honoured to be selected as one of the reviewers of the manuscript. It is the first time I’m doing a job like this. Maybe it is a bit similar to beta testing software, and I have a lot of experience with this. With the help of my sister I’ll try to provide as much feedback as possible and help make the book a pleasant read. The first two chapters have just arrived, so I’d better get reading.

Tags: book, books, linux, knoppix, distribution, distributions, open source, free software

When my sister tried to turn on her computer, named Tsiolkovsky, the day before yesterday, it beeped like crazy, indicating that there is something wrong with the graphics card. Later it turned out that the graphics card was perfectly OK. It was the motherboard, the Abit KT7A. After about five and a half years of service some of the capacitors on it blew up and started leaking. We could try to find out some used replacement motherboard, but we decided that this would be just the right excuse to buy some new components to upgrade my computer called Enterprise and move the existing components from Enterprise to Tsiokovsky. Since the old SDR memory modules would only collect dust, I donated them to my cousin Matej. After the upgrade from 256 MiB of memory to 768 his SUSE Linux feels a lot faster.

Now I have to decide which processor to buy. Intel Core 2 Duo just came out and it looks like they have finally managed to create an architecture that outperforms AMD Athlon 64 (quite a bit actually) and doesn’t suck as much electrical power as the Pentium 4 does. AMD is also reacting to all this by reducing prices of their processors. I only have to wait until Intel Core 2 Duo comes to Slovenia and prices for AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core CPUs drop. Maybe it will be worth to buy Intel again. My last CPU from them was the 450 MHz Pentium II.

Tags: hardware, motherboard, cpu, processor, amd, intel