Late last year I transitioned from Gentoo Linux to Kubuntu on my laptops(yes, I still prefer Gentoo on my servers). However, at least on one my my laptops, I have been very disappointed in the latest release of Kubuntu. It hangs...Can you believe it, it actually hangs the computer! It requires a hard reboot! Even on the Live CD!

To be fair, however, it works like an absolute charm on my IBM (Lenovo?)Thinkpad. In that sense, I am very pleased with it so far.

It is hard for me to believe that nobody else has experienced this on an Averatec PC. Okay, so its a couple of years old, and has some perhaps funky hardware, but still. The laptop is the one used by my wife and kids, and is an Averatec 3200 series. 3210 I believe(the sticker has worn off so I can read it...).

I upgraded to "dapper" yesterday on the Averatec, and it started to hang. I tried to do some things and was unsuccessful. So I downloaded the Live CD and this morning popped in to see how it would work. And the Live CD actually hung! I cannot believe it. Sigh. I am almost tempted to go back to Gentoo....

Okay, off to Kubuntu.org and other places to see if there is any info on it......so much for upgrading plone today....

UPDATE: I kinda figured out what the problem is. The linux kernel that comes with Dapper doesn't like the networking hardware on the Averatec. By booting with an older kernel, zero problems whatsoever. Need to try and identify this problem so I can report it....At least my wife will be able to use her pc....

Early this month I posted Disappointing Dapper and the problems I had upgrading my wife's PC to the dapper release of Kubuntu. I had a update comment on it that the problems was with the kernel.

Not surprisingly, a couple of days ago, the kernel included with Dapper was upgraded, and now there are zero problems. The usb printer works, the camera works, sound works, and I am on the latest version of KDE. Ah, happiness.

Kubuntu, just in case you're interested, is a version of Ubuntu but tweaked to provide KDE as opposed to Ubuntu's GNOME. Of course, KDE or GNOME is a personal preference for the desktop environment, and with linux their are a multitude of other choices. I just happen to prefer KDE, though I have many friends and acquaintances that prefer GNOME. REALNeo used Ubuntu on the PCs provided to East Cleveland.

Some recent open source news.

KDE 3.5.5 Released

KDE 3.5.5 was released yesterday. I saw the news after I had already updated my desktop! ^_^;

According an article on Linux.com, there were more than 1200 updates. See the changelog for details on some of those changes.

To be honest though I haven't really noticed much difference at this point.

I am running edgy which is why I automatically got KDE 3.5.5, but if you are running Dapper it is available per this announcement.

Eudora Bird?

Qualcomm announced that Eudora is going Open Source. Specifically, the next version of Eudora will be based on Mozilla Thunderbird. While this is great news, I think, for Thunderbird and Open Source, I am not sure what it means for Eudora. Does anybody use Eudora anymore?

NTT Data Releases Text Search Software for PostgreSQL

From Japan, NTT Data has released Ludia, a text search engine for PostgreSQL. Ludia is released under the LGPL and is available via Sourceforge.jp. NTT Data is one of the "big 5" of NTT; NTT East, NTT West, NTT Communications, NTT Docomo and NTT Data. Of course, there are 300 companies that have NTT in the company name.

Edgy

I updated my laptop to the bleeding edge of Kubuntu. It has a new boot up system which seems to be vastly faster than the traditional sysinit that has served for Linux for so long. I haven't actually timed it or anything, but it really seems fast. But that also may have to do that with the exception of my home directory, I did a complete re-install and don't have a bunch of servers(apache, mysql, etc) starting up anymore.

One Laptop Per Child

According to the TheRegister, Libya has signed up for the One Laptop Per Child program, joining Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, and Thailand. Supposedly this new order has put the program over the minimum orders of 5 million for moving to actual production. Production looks to start next year.

Something for MTB?

Saw this thing over at Linux Devices.com. To purchase the box, costs $2000 apparently, but you can download the ISO image for free. Wonder if MTB could use it. Probably not, but a thought anyway.

Linux Journal has released its annual Editor's Choice 2006 for Open Source software. Linux distribution of choice? Ubuntu. Desktop? KDE. Open Office, Thunderbird, Firefox and more. Check it out.

KOffice 1.6.1 has been released officially for Kubuntu. Here is the announcement. 1.6.1 is mostly an upgrade release to address bug fixes.

KOffice is a comprehensive office suite for the K Desktop Environment and includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, software as well as others.

Ever here of Last.fm? I have. In fact, I set up an account on it back in 2004, and then promptly forgot about it until whenever I re-installed Amarok, my music player of choice. Even so, though, I don't think I actually every logged into the site other than to confirm my user name and password.

Well, with my recent fixation on Identity 2.0, OpenID and Microid in particular, I took a renewed interest in Last.fm when I saw this post that suggested that Last.fm now supports microids. I created a microid which I then pasted into my last.fm profile. I was able to verify it using my claimid account. (Claimid is a separate post altogether I think). Even so, I wasn't really paying attention to last.fm itself.

And boy, what was I thinking?

I eventually did start poking around the site. One of the first things I noticed was the ability to include your most recently listened tracks on my website. If you see the the following image on the left in the About This Blog box, that's what it is - the import of my most recently tracks as reported by Last.fm

I had never thought about it much, but all this time Amarok has been submitting the music to which I have been listening to last.fm. So while the play list is kind of a neat, gee-whiz that's cool type of thing, what turns out ot have been really cool about last.fm is the streaming radio capability. I wasn't aware of this until I noticed in poking around to setup my playlist import, that they actually have a dedicated player.

Whereas Amarok is for playing music files on my system, the last.fm player allows you to listen to streamed music. As is it seems is true with all 2.0 things, you can tag music allowing you to pick a radio, i.e. a stream, based on those tags. So for, example, I picked my "personal radio" which streams music similar to what I have been playing on Amarok. As I was listening, I all of sudden got Spits(spelling?), a Japanese band coming across my player;

They picked up the Japan side due to the one or two Japanse music cd's I have encoded to my system. Last.fm took the Japanese music that Amarok had been submitting and picked a couple of Japanese songs to stream to me. I knew of Spits but don't think I had ever listened to them before this. Struck me as a great way to find new music which I would like since they are picking songs based on what I have, whether I tagged a song as a "loved" song, or not, etc.

What I really found I am enjoying is finding the oldies but goodies, more than the new ones. Over the years I have had lots of music most of which has bitten the dust. Most recently, all but one or two of my CDs bit the dust in our move from Okinawa. (Errors on the back up dvd....sigh). So finding Led Zepplin, Pat Metheny, Pink Floyd, Van Morrison , The Doors, ad nauseum is great. Takes me back, plus I get the music I want to listen to. In fact, it has gotten to the point where I have actually taken out the headphones I bought for skype, and I feel like a teenager in his room with the headphones on ignoring/unable-to-hear Mom calling from downstairs. Ah, the joy.

Not suprisingly, the music isn't always something you like so the player has a skip button as well as a "ban list". I would assume that once you start "banning" things the selection of music streamed gets better. Or one would hope anyway. I have not really banned anyone yet, since I am still enjoying it all.

Some other advantages to last.fm. The site is bilingual; www.last.fm and jp.last.fm. This may be in part due to the fact that Joi Itoh is a board director, but regardless it is really handy for English/Japanese speaker such as myself. (I notice they are hiring with a focus on some other languages, but for now it seems that it appears only English and Japanese). So you can see my user pate in Japanese or English, but the music tracks and info is based of the same data.

Couple of other things I noticed is that there are groups, say Pink Floyd Fans. You can have friends, which can recommend music tracks to you, or you to them. And they track where you are so you have neighbors. One handy feature of location tracking is that you can go to an events page that lists all the concerts in your area. Or at least the one's that last.fm knows about.

Most of you have probably noticed, but Firefox 2.0.0.6 was released yesterday. I am assuming that it fixes this but I actually haven't read the change log.

Firefox 2.0.0.6 Release Notes

Fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.6

Actually, it looks like this version was released on the 30th. However, it wasn't available on Kubuntu until yesterday.

Okay, so you all know I use Plone but I have recently been studying Django. So what's that get me? Well, can you Grok this(of course, Grokthis.net hosts one of my servers):

Grok is the new pythonic way to build zope3 application. Repoze provides Zope, Plone and grok in a more pythonic way, i.e, in eggs. And deliverance does just that, delivers the themes for your spam, ham and eggs..

Get that?

Me either.

Django

Okay, so it all started with wanting to rebuild my planets. I had been using PlanetPlanet but the configuration line was all from the command prompt. Which I normally have no objections too, but it got a little tiring and so I gave in and wanted a GUI. I ended up choosing Feedjack as the software to power my planets (Planet NEO, Neohawk IT, Planet Ohio Japan(aggregator for Japanese language blogs), and Planet Uchina(aggregator for Okinawa related blogs and news)). That transition didn't originally go as smoothly as I would have liked as there were a few things about django that I didn't understand.

But as I got into it, I started really like the potential of Django. I even transitioned my Neohawk.Info site to Django and added a django-based blog where I have been posting occasionally. However, this was also partially motivated by the fact that I have a business opportunity to build a couple of sites, and both Plone and Drupal would absolutely be overkill. They are small sites that won't require much updating, with minimal requirements for forms, etc. After going through the process of building Neohawk.Info as a django site, I began to dig more into django and the best way to implement what I want for that particular job.

Of course, I am also smack dab in the middle of working on a Plone site for a customer, and watching all the Plone news as well. Particularly, the Plone Conference 2007 which took place on 10/10 through 10/12. Reading the various blogs and reports on it, I somehow became aware of Grok.

Grok

I had actually heard of it before, but never took a look at it. So I finally did and it is pretty damn cool. I downloaded it and installed on my laptop.

Grok basically lets you take advantage of the zope platform in a new way. With django, you would start a new project(website, for example, with localhost# python django-admin.py startproject projectname. Not suprisingly, in the case of Grok you would do thus: grokproject projectname. See the similarities? I do. The difference is that in the case of django, after you create your models, views, etc. and run manage.py, django creates the database using mysql, postgresql, or sqlite. In the case of Grok, you get zope and the zodb. It uses Zope Page Templates which means all the beauty (and the beast) of TAL attributes, etc.