Recently I upgraded my KDE version 4.2 to the 4.3 and I’ve been using it for a few days now. As said before I don’t mind using betas and do some testing, but as with everything there is an exception, in my case it was KDE, I used the first KDE4 betas and come back to 3.5 then used the 4.1 when it was stable, then 4.2 and tried the beta 4.3… once again came back to the 4.2, now that is stable I’m using version 4.3, and for the first time in KDE4 I can say it’s stable. In my opinion KDE4 was released way to early, and although usable it was needing serious work around it. I’m a Linux user with several years of experience and didn’t have much trouble using it, but for instance my wife would go crazy, so till KDE4.3 she was using KDE3.5.
What changed in this last version of KDE that made me upgrade all my machines to KDE4.3?
The KDE community has fixed over 10,000 bugs.
Implemented almost 2,000 feature requests in the last 6 months.
Close to 63,000 changes were checked in by a little under 700 contributors.
If you want to read more about it just check this link.
All this made KDE4.3 more user friendly, more reliable, more polished and prettier.
So, what more can I say about it? JUST INSTALL IT AND GIVE A TRY you won’t be disappointed.
In conclusion is there innovation or just patching in KDE 4.3? Definitely both, there’s hundreds of new features and even more bug fixes. Both are equally important and KDE really need this ultimate push to be the ultimate Desktop Manger.
Cheers and see you next time
Pedro Oliveira
ps – bellow there are the install instructions and a vid of kde4.3 in action.
If you need help to install it just check the install instructions (from www.kde.org):
Debian KDE 4.3.0 packages are available in the unstable repository.
Fedora
Rawhide development repository, however the packages there may depend on other Rawhide packages and are therefore not suitable for installation on previous releases.
Please refer to README to more information.
For Mandriva Cooker ( development ) users, 4.3.0 is will be available at cooker repositories.
openSUSE packages are available for openSUSE 11.1 (one-click install), for openSUSE 11.0 (one-click install) and for openSUSE 10.3 (one-click install) and openSUSE Factory (one-click install). A KDE Four Live CD with these packages is also available.
Magic Linux KDE 4.3.0 packages are available for Magic Linux 2.5. See the release notes for detailed information and the FTP tree for packages.
From sometime now I’ve been working on debugging software, I don’ mind using betas (with all the inherent pain), as a matter of fact I like it a lot. But recently I had a problem with my MERLIN U740 PCMCIA card (it’s a 3G modem). This card emulates two USB ports and in one there’s the modem. This as been working for year without problems but since the kernel 2.6.24 it stopped working in x86_64. I didn’t care that much as i was working out of the country and didn’t use the card. But now I need to use it so I posted a bug report in OpenSuSE (the distro i use) and I’ve been testing their output on this bug. Finally its solved in the kernel 2.6.31 (from the release candidate 3) and it will be included in the main stream OpenSuSE distribution 11.2 (it’s already included in the factory version).
So in the end i can say I’m pretty happy with Linux support, and this kind of support is available to open source distros, not only to enterprise level distributions such as SLES or RHE. Just keep on filling those bugs reports when you find one.
Cheers,
Pedro Oliveira
QOS – “Quality of service” – what a fancy name for somethings that will allow you to manage the available bandwidth for your servers/pcs/equipments. Usually setting up QOS is not “so fancy” to setup and manage. At work I had to setup a QOS for a custumer and didn’t want to be writing rules on my own so I searched a bit and found MasterShaper.
You can read more about it here.
Lets imagine that you want to allow p2p on your network but you don’t want to waste all your bandwidth on that kind of traffic, after all you still need bandwidth for your VOIP, http, and mail traffic.
To setup this I’ll be using CentOS and Mastershaper.
After installing a VMware virtual machine with CentOS (default install with 2 network cards), I’ve setup apache, this time I didn’t use virtualhosts or any other extras as I just wanted to create a single purpose system.
To start I’ve concufigured 2 network interfaces (internal/external)
eth0 192.168.251.249 (external)
eth1 192.168.252.249 (internal)
After downloading MasterShaper decompress it to:
/var/www/html
Install pear and pear modules as described in MasterShapper docs.
And finally create the mysql database to support the installation.
I won’t get into install details (just follow the documentation), but in the end you be able to define schedulers, hosts and services with higher or lower priority and in the end you’ll also be able to monitor all this in a pretty web interface with some graphics.
Just don’t forget to install mysql support in php, and pear, you’ll also have to configure sudo but in the end just read the documentation in mastershaper it’s very good.
I’m a Linux journal subscriber for some time now, usually I enjoy reading Linux/Technology stuff on my free time but I also like to keep up to date. Well all this for what? Just to tell you guys that the 2 latest LinuxJournal(s) are…GREAT.
Last month issue there were great articles about mobile Linux/Android and this month even better, how to use ksplice for apply kernel patches or do kernel updates without rebooting (and i know there are a few of us out there that will love this feature), an excellence article about downgrading root permissions and finally an article about Real time Linux kernel (rt-linux), among many others.
This may seam a bit of publicity, and of course I could easily find all this info on the net, but the fact is that I got it on my mail, resumed and clean. I had already read extensively about this matters (especially for rt-Linux). But I really enjoyed those articles.
