Indigo Jo Blogs

A few weeks ago (with birthday money from my mum & dad) I bought Matthias Kalle Dalheimer’s book, “Programming with Qt” (published by O’Reilly) - Qt is a graphical user interface toolkit mostly used on Linux but you can also get it for Windoze, Mac and embedded systems also. It presents an extremely steep learning curve, and in the first chapter of ‘serious’ programming basically expects you to go off and learn whole areas of Qt programming by yourself. I ended up just looking at the answers, although perhaps if I’d had more time I’d have been able to work it out by myself. Continue reading →

I’m really happy (so far) with College Linux. I spent two hours last night downloading Dropline GNOME, but it’s really worth it. It’s probably the best version of GNOME out there, even better than ULB on SUSE although that’s pretty good (better than SuSE’s supplied version and certainly better than Ximian’s). The installation for CL leaves a lot to be desired, however; I can install Linux easily because I had installed SUSE’s Linux first. I then replaced that with FreeBSD and then that with College Linux. The biggest problem for new Linux users is partitioning, and that’s something SuSE is really good at. We need a good, easy-to-use open-source partitioner - fast.

There’s only a few small problems; although speedtouchconf (to get my Alcatel DSL modem going) works, it doesn’t appear to set it up to connect on boot, nor give any way of doing this. And the lousy Alcatel driver is the main reason I wanted to get off SuSE - it is so unreliable, it often needs to be re-started as root, sometimes you need to reboot the machine even after that, and other times the machine crashes while loading the driver during boot-up. The Papillault driver is much more reliable. I should tell CL about this issue I suppose.

I’ve decided to take BSD off my machine. The CD downloads are basically a demo, to get the full OS you’re supposed to get the 4-CD pack from FreeBSD Mall or some other company. GNOME didn’t work properly and the fonts were up the spout as well, at least as soon as you try to move beyond plain old Helvetica and Times. So I installed the College Linux CD-R I’d had sitting round on the shelf for weeks.

The installation was weird, very old fashioned. You use ‘cfdisk’ to partition the hard drive, which I wasn’t used to although I’ve used ‘fdisk’ with BSD. With their installer all it takes is one wrong button and it goes wrong; CTRL-C during the installation sends you to the shell prompt! Also there’s no package options - it seems to install everything on the CD. Even FreeBSD’s installer allows you to choose what to install. But the OS works, at least - I’m using it to type this. It’s based on Slackware which I’ve heard is a very stable system and good for development and for finding one’s way around Linux.

I’ve had a pretty nasty cold the last few days which has meant that I haven’t felt up to typing (and, by extension, blogging). Insha Allah I should feel better in a day or so.

While it’s still the 11th, I thought I should say something about the MS “100% Inspiration” tour which I mentioned earlier in the blog. They did a lecture followed by a lab session, but the lecture was basically a sales pitch rather than a recruitment session. I don’t think I’d work for Microsoft anyway unless I was really desperate, but it was disappointing. I’m not convinced that all these new frameworks they are bringing in will be of benefit to the customer rather than the programmer, once he’s paid through the nose for the programming tools. For one thing, they are compiled to “byte code”, which may be a cut above interpreting a script, but it’s still interpreted. And the guy had a very strong accent (Scottish or perhaps Northern Irish) and talked fast, which I could understand, but a lot of the audience probably couldn’t. Something they should think about when they are choosing their salesmen.

Finally got KDE 3.2 up and running! I had to de-install the KDE SuSE desktop in order to get the 3.2 base RPM to install, and in order to keep the help system I then had to install the Apache web server! Luckily that only took up 2Mb of disk space though. Getting the RPMs to install was still a nightmare and I had to do it on a —force basis, but it got done. Haven’t tested it fully yet as I’m just about to go to bed. Oh, my BSD broke down again. More later insha Allah.

At my University (Kingston, in Surrey) Microsoft is going to be stopping on its “Inspirational Tour” next week - 11th Feb 2004! That’s next Wednesday! That means we can all go along and ask them some pertinent questions.

Like:

(1) When are they going to put out a decent operating system? (2) Given that Windoze XP has been such a disaster, how can we trust Longhorn if and when it comes out? (3) Why don’t they move over to a Unix-type operating system, as Apple has done so successfully?

I’m sure most of you reading this by now will have received at least one copy of this MyDoom virus. I get several of these files landing in my inbox every day, and I never know which is MyDoom and which isn’t. A lot of them pretend to be from Microsoft technical support and promising upgrades, etc. Continue reading →

As it turns out it didn’t mess up my whole laptop, and all I had to do was re-save my system settings and BSD works again (I haven’t tried Windoze 2000 for some time). Restarting took a little longer - perhaps because of the unjournalled file-system - but it worked, ma sha Allah.