Yahoo yet again is shutting down some of its useful products and services, leaving onlookers puzzled.

This technology from DTS will impress anyone. Keep an ear out for it.

Many of you know that the founder of SolusOS, Ikey Doherty; has pledged his resources and talent to bring us the next Reglue desktop solution.  In a good year, Reglue will place 400 computers.  Those computers will need to have a solid, supported and easy-to-use Linux distribution powering them.

Our last distro was an Ubuntu 10.04 respin that housed the educational apps and games that make the reglue respin unique.  In that support for that LTS is now gone, we've had to move on to find another long term solution for Reglue.

This wasn't an easy decision to make.

Reglue is challenged in many areas.  Besides the financial struggles we face, there just isn't a lot of time to spend adding and removing individual apps and games on each computer.  Many days, I am the only one working.  When those machines hit my workbench, I need a one-stop solution.

Get it on the bench, get it working, and get it in the Ready Stack.  SolusOS is my solution.

Just to give you a peek behind the curtain, there were some in the organization that balked at my choice.  Given the recent turmoil in The  Linuxsphere, the question was asked pointedly:

Is a small developer choice going to last for us?

It's an honest question.

The recent news that Fuduntu was going to be folding their tent in September took many of us by
surprise.  For reasons that the lead developer states, he just cannot maintain Fuduntu.  I don't know if Andrew has any idea of just how popular his distro is, and in the end, it really doesn't matter.  If the toolchain and resources you use to build your product goes away.....

Then you go away too.  Or find another way to build your product.  Quoted from the above-linked source:

"However, as time has gone by, support for GTK2 has decreased dramatically. With this, apps using GTK2 have been moved to GTK3 and old versions are no longer being maintained for either bugs or security flaws.In addition to this, the move of the Linux world to systemd has caused a problem for Fuduntu as it has become a required thing for many programs, but we do not use it. Together with the GTK issue, Fuduntu has reached an impasse. To move forward would take quite a bit of time and manpower, neither of which can be supported."

So with Gnome 2 in it's death throes and GTK3 being the new standard foisted upon the Gnome sector of the Linuxsphere we need to work with, there are serious questions about the direction of a usable Gnome Desktop.  Gnome 3 has left a sour taste in the mouths of many of its users, so projects like Fuduntu remained steadfast in their Gnome 2 use.

SolusOS, seeing the writing on the wall, not only began building their distro with GTK3, they got tired of the upstream battles with Debian and moved to rebuild SolusOS from the ground up, using the PiSi package management system.  I am not inferring that the 1.X release was unstable...I'm speaking of the stratosphere that supported it.  Not only will it be more stable than the 1.X solutions, it will, in almost every way, behave and appear just like the Gnome 2 desktop many of us still use.

But, but Ken..., can a one man show meet the obligations of not only Reglue, but of their userbase in general?  If Fuduntu folded, what are the chances that Ikey will one day decide it's just not worth it?

I thought long and hard about this.  If I did not know the developer as well as I do, I would say without reservation....

No.  We would go with a more mainstream solution.

But, I have come to trust Ikey Doherty.  Ikey knows full well how many people are counting on him and Ikey and me have already had this conversation.  So yes...I do trust Ikey Doherty to not only deliver a superior, innovative product.  I also trust him to be there in the next 5 to 10 years, depending on his health, which at this time is excellent.

Of course, we have looked at other alternatives and while the new SolusOS Reglue respin is in the cooker, we are using Edubuntu.  Unity is not my first choice for a DE but it offers the closest solution for us until we get our own respin.

In the mix also are Fedora and OpenSuse.  OpenSuse gave us fits with the particular graphics card we put in our computers, the Nvidia Gforce 9800GT.  Fedora is a work in progress but eventually, we will drop these distros in favor of the SolusOS effort.

My sincerest thanks to Ikey Doherty  and Justin Krehel for their hard work and dedication.  And as promised, we will be publishing an introduction to Justin in the next few days.  Justin works way too hard to be kept in the background.

We hope to bring him the attention he deserves.  He would be much happier working in the background but we at Reglue just aren't going to let that happen.

All-righty Then.....

If your company mistrusts the security of the cloud, it might want to take a look at what The Company is doing. “The Company” is a term that insiders have long used to refer to the CIA. Is there any organization that takes security more seriously? Perhaps, but probably not within the Fortune 500. And [...]

Netflix, the popular video-streaming service that takes up a third of all Internet traffic during peak traffic hours, isn’t just the single largest Internet traffic service. Netflix, without doubt, is also the largest pure cloud service. The biggest cloud app of all: Netflix. More >

This has absolutely nothing to do with Linux, Open Source or any other topic we usually cover here.  It's just something that I was talking about on G+ and wanted to share with my friends.


This is fun.  Hang out with me for a few minutes here.

I have mentioned before, I was in a rock band (what we called ourselves anyway) during high school and I played keyboards.  I had a small Vox Jaguar organ that was built from a Heathkit via radio shack.  I was pretty much just a chord player that added some dimension to our sound...never much for solos or the like.

But one guy who I admired for his keyboard skills was Booker T. Jones, better known as Booker T from Booker T and The MG's.  Among others, they had a hit in the late 60's...a song from the soundtrack of the movie, Hang 'Em High.

Hang 'Em High not only hit the top 10 charts, the style of play fairly well established the masterful use of The Leslie Horn speaker in rock and roll.  Booker T. showed everyone how to deploy the Leslie Horn for the most dramatic outcome possible.

My little band didn't do this song, but I practiced it and practiced it until I had it down, beat for beat.  It was just something I wanted to learn and I did.

So fast forward to 1979.  I was a young Staff Sergeant stationed in Bamberg Germany and I was on my first tour in Europe.  Hanging around the Rec Center on Saturday, I found myself listening to a bunch of guys on stage, practicing but mostly just jamming and getting to know each other's playing styles.  But their music wasn't what caught my attention.

It was the Hammond B3 organ sitting unused in the corner. It was hooked into a Kustom 150 amp with twin Leslie Horn speakers.  I couldn't help myself.  I introduced myself and was soon behind this magnificent cornerstone of rock and roll.  I had only dreamed of sitting behind a Hammond B3. but there I was.

To make a long story just a bit more tolerable, we ended up entering a talent contest and our entry was of course, the only song I could play proficiently and actually sound good.  We took first place in the local contest and placed second in the USAREUR finals.

It was my moment in the sun....A standing ovation.  We brought down the house and for just a few moments in time, I was a keyboard player in a real rock and roll band.

I was such a fraud....it was the only song I knew how to play, but no one ever knew...well, besides my old band buddy +Kirk Ellsworth .

Here's the real thing,  and the REAL way a Leslie horn should be used....slightly at first and building to a huge crescendo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80k4qakPrqA


If you would like to know what a Leslie Horn is and what it does, here is a good short clip of the Leslie in action.  It is usually cased in a speaker housing so you really never see the mechanics of it.

Leslie 122 during Santana - Everybody's Everything

When (not if) Michael Dell gains total control of his company with no worries about shareholders, he needs to seriously consider another move into retail.

Microsoft still has the chance to ditch Windows 8 and return to its tried-and-true operating system. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like that will happen.

The allegations that Samsung hired people to post negative comments about HTC brings attention to the flaws of online review systems.

Maybe the company should look in the mirror before it goes calling Google's Android a "mess" and Apple's iOS "boring."

Google Glass will ruin what remains of meaningful social interaction and for that reason (and more) I hope it fails.

Android fragmentation will wreck Android for smartphones and tablets just as much as Windows fragmentation ruined Windows for the PC. Why Windows fragmentation will blow Windows to smithereens (cough) More >

I've spent a lot of time in conversation with various people about the State of Desktop Linux.  While I have my own ideas as to how we (could have) gained a larger market share on the Desktop, my firm belief is that, at this time.....

Anything we do from now on will be too little, too late.

That ship has sailed, it's water under the bridge, however you wish to express it.

Linux, as we know it, is not going to ever become a major player in the Desktop market.

I've made peace with that.  Since 2005, I've chewed my lip over how this can change, but the fact is, there are simply too many people not willing to do the things necessary to make it a reality.  Whether you believe it or not, whether you like it or not...

The absence of A Linux Product that's visible in the consumer market has been our greatest failure.  Now, I will be the first one to admit, I never saw this coming.  Linux is a player on the desktop, or laptop; as you prefer.  It's just not called Linux...

It's called Chromebook.  It's called Android.

Pick all the nits you want, argue that it's only the kernel and not the system.  The fact remains that Linux has found a place in the consumer market.

it's just not the way many of us would have liked it to come about.

Some will blame the fragmentation of the Linuxsphere.  Some will say that too many choices have diluted the product and confused the customer.  I'm not going to disagree with that theory.  Friend and colleague Dietrich Schmitz argues that point strongly.

So if we are to embrace that particular theory, what is to be done?

Let's fragment it some more.

I'm not being flippant.  I mean it and I fully support it.  If the damage is already done, as we watch our train picking up speed without us on it, then I will argue:

Fragment away...what's the downside?

Well, that's just what SolusOS creator Ikey Doherty has done.  But he hasn't simply used another major distro as a base. He's tore the whole thing down and started from the beginning.

The way he thinks it should be done.  A pure fresh start from top to bottom, bottom to top.

Doherty isn't some hack that's taken the remastersys ax and chopped up a distro to claim as his own.  Ikey is a brilliant distro developer and he's had a nagging, almost compulsive belief that his Linux creation could be better.  Constant upstream battles with both Gnome and Debian have brought Ikey to the point where he spends more time patching and shoe-horning than he has in creating.

His Solution?

It's easy PiSi.

Let me turn this over to Ikey Doherty....he makes it abundantly clear about why this change, and why he's doing it now.  Ikey knows there is dissension in the ranks, but he believes his vision for what SolusOS can be, is the best of all choices.

Why Pisi and Why Independence?

SolusOS has always strived to provide the utmost stability to its user base. In a turbulent Linux ecosystem where desktops change almost daily it seems, stability and longevity become core concerns.
Another one of our core aims we developed with Eveline (SolusOS 1) was modern user space software, such as Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, etc. However, the man hours that went into maintaining the repository were not justified for a 'derivative'
Derivatives (in this case, of Debian) typically provide the user with a custom distribution of their parent distribution. Invariably a repository does not exist, or a small PPA is provided in the case of Ubuntu. In our case, we have over 7k packages in the Eveline repository, and it's become very much apparent that keeping our changes in sync with upstream changes is literally an uphill battle.
So with all that in mind, we realized our core issue within SolusOS was the package management system. Our single biggest task was maintaining a repository, and doing so with the .deb package format made it a rather mundane experience attempting to keep our system in sync with Debian.
For a long time I've been a lover of PiSi. It's an incredibly powerful, yet simple, package manager, originally created by Pardus Linux. With simplified package creation, powerful dependency resolution, roll back of operations, delta packages, a powerful configuration system (COMAR) plus many more features, its an awesome piece of kit. The challenge was to make it fit in with SolusOS.
So, we opted originally to mold Debian to PiSi. This turned out to be an impossible task, with many packages relying on other Debian specific packages, patches and makefiles to even configure, the situation became impossible. We were no longer using either the parent distribution or the package manager to their full extent or showing them justice.
The logical step would have been to re-base on another parent distribution. However the same issue cropped up time and time again, sending us in circles. We could not make our goals and wants merge with any other project. There was no other choice.
A Distro Is Born
After many hundreds of hours I successfully built a new base system from scratch. This was no simple feat, as to run Python (required for PiSi) and D-BUS (for Comar), you need the majority of the base system in place already. Many failed attempts at bootstrapping the GNU toolchain (compiler/glibc/etc) eventually proved fruitful. I had a system I could replicate with 100% accuracy and chroot into.
Then we tried the insane. Let's make PiSi work with this. And we did :) We've spent a long time now preparing package after package, buildsystem after buildsystem. And now it all works. With an independently booting image, utilizing its own init, kernel and ramfs, we had a base. Everything in the core structure has been tested time and time again, leading up till now. We have something that is truly unique. This is not another derivative of an upstream distribution, nor is it a fork of anything currently existing. The entire distribution has been put together by hand, with our own packages sourced from the original codebases, with a vanilla policy not allowing us to clutter up our packages with items we deem not necessary (Hey, it worked for Slackware ;))
So, we have a fully networked desktop-enabled system now. Amazingly 3D acceleration still performs well under Qemu, we have a very solid and stable codebase and are adding packages daily. With over 700 commits to our source repository in less than 2 weeks, there is no worry about missing packages or a lack of stability. We have a vision and direction that's kept us unique from the birth of SolusOS 1 up till now, and with our own base and packages, we'll be able to show the world what the original vision was all that time ago. Change is coming, and its name is SolusOS. We're ready, are you? :)
So, there it is.  While Ikey won't speculate on when SolusOS 2.0 will be ready for prime time, he does plan to release a beta in the near future.  Will Ikey be able to stay the course?  Can a "one man show" stand the test of time?
Actually, SolusOS isn't a one-man-show.  Tech guru Justin Krehel  has been working on SolusOS for quite a while now.  With the gaining popularity of SolusOS, it was only a matter of time before Justin became more widely known as a key contributor to the project.  Stay tuned in the next two weeks.  We plan to do a feature on Justin.
He is quite brilliant and I think you'll appreciate knowing who he is and what he does.
All-Righty Then.....

To be open with you...from a numbers standpoint, 2012 and part of 2013 wasn't our best year.  I went over the numbers last week and the tally was dismal.

52 computers placed in a 14 month period.

There was a time when I did that in 3 months.



But a protracted illness and recovery from the treatment of that illness acted as a boat anchor.  Physically, there just wasn't much I could do.  For a big part of that period, it was all I could do to get up and go to the bathroom.

Fortunately, that is past and it's time to get back to work.  I've been putting in strong half or 3/4 days at the shop.  Our installs have picked up and aside from the facility looking like a bomb went off inside...things are looking good.

Recently, we were donated a number of great laptops.  Ranging from Dell Latitude D620's to Lenovo T-61's and a slew of later Toshiba Satellites, we can get some serious work done now.

Problem is, a lot of them were donated without adapters or RAM.  I have the adapters covered...we had enough money to buy those, but that left us without the means to get the RAM we need.

It ranges from SODIMM PC2 3200 up to DDR2 667's.  Ideally, we would like to obtain 2 gig sticks, especially in the PC2 4200 variety, but we can work with 1 gig sticks as well.  The majority of laptops we need to put out run on the latter-mentioned RAM.

As well, our trusty shop vac, kindly donated by our good friend Gavin, finally bit the dust...er, so to speak.  We are in need of a new one pretty soon.  You should see the dust that gets blown out of some of these donated computers.

A lot of people who read this blog are Tech Honchos at their company. So basically, I'm asking if our great supporters can go through their stash and see if they have any of this RAM.  We're kind of at a dead end until we can get memory into these computers.

Oh, I do want to give special mention to someone who has helped us greatly through the years.  Andy Krell who is the Tech Guru at nFUSION here in Austin has time after time, stepped up to help us when we needed it.  Andy has probably done as much or more for us than any one person should.  Andy, thanks a bunch buddy.  Those T-61's have all found homes, short of one of them and that one will go out this Saturday.

The shop vac isn't a critical thing....I'm a big boy and I can operate a broom and a dustpan, I am licensed for those appliances.  Just don't trust me with power tools and no one gets hurt.

If you are in a postion to help us get this Spring Surge started, contact me via email, helios at fixedbylinux dott komm

Again, thanks to everyone who has allowed me to work at my dream job.  I don't think I would ever be happy doing anything else.

All-Righty Then

Well, not really love...

To say that I coexist with Chrome is more accurate.  Two months ago, I absolutely despised Chrome.  It was a white-hot hatred that transcended the Mortal Plane.  I'm sure such powerful emotions were the trigger to some short bursts of telekinesis around me. 

I've been a Firefox user since the beginning.  I watched as Netscape was publicly executed by Microsoft years ago, and swore I would never again use IE.  Of course, that was only a precursor to my migration to Linux as my one and only OS.

The addons and extensions for Firefox sealed the deal.  Suddenly with a flick of my wrist, I could move the browser page forward or back, up or down.  I could right click and be presented with a multitude of choices to do stuff.  I could change the way Firefox looked, acted and responded.  

It was love at first byte.

Fast forward to this year...Just a few months into the Adobe decision that they would discontinue Linux support...

Roughly the same time frame that Oracle took over Java.

Suddenly, My Firefox Browser began to show wobbly legs and a weak back.    Flash was crashing every time I tried to take a video to full screen, websites like Pogo.com insisted that I needed an updated version of Java...even though I had the latest release from my repositories...

Even manual installation of the very latest via tar.gz didn't satisfy many of the "requirements" for Java.

And yeah...I'm sure there will be comments..."well, it works fine for me..."

Great, then I guess it doesn't suck to be you.

Help forums that span many of the major distros are full of these particular complaints.

And for seemingly no reason, in the middle of any given task, Firefox just poofed out of existence on my monitor.

"Would you like to send a crash report" it asked?

"Uh, you mean like the four dozen I've already sent today?  No thanks."
 
I installed Chrome like I was writing a eulogy.  In comparison, it was much like dancing with a corpse.  Stiff and unyielding, rigor that had set in deeply.  It insisted that the tabs reside on top of my URL bar....

No option for change. 

Some of the cool and nifty addons that were masterpieces in Firefox are akin to a six year old's scrawl in Chrome.  Mouse gestures refuse to work as advertised.   It refused to give me a dedicated search box like the Google Toolbar and my Gmail checker rarely announced new email in anything approaching a timely fashion.

But...It remained in the back of my mind that as Google goes....

So goes the Internet.  

Like it or not, Google is our Internet Overlord.  In many cases, they dictate what we see, hear and experience on the Internet. And in the past, they have intervened for the everyday computer user, protesting outrageous controls and censorship. Living a Google-free existence online is like taking a shower with your clothes on.  At first, I was fairly disgusted with myself for capitulating so quickly to them.  Like a caged animal, I looked feverishly for a way out.

There is no way out.  They have their hook in me.  My work and personal life lives in Googleland, in email and documents.  Our company calendar keeps track of Director's meetings and functions...it keeps me on track regardless of where I am.  Important documents are stored there...part of our three tier backup plan.

I have gotten used to what I consider to be an absence of features in Chrome.  I waste an entire tab on search results instead of being able to use a search box.  The jammed-together tabs and URL bar are an annoyance I live with. I must exert myself greatly to move the cursor to the slide bar to navigate my web pages.....

because it's 2013.  We have two rovers on Mars and Cancer is becoming a maintenance disease.  Information that was formally available to a given few is now open to anyone with access to a computer and internet.  But yet, after all of these accomplishments...

mouse gestures in Chrome still suck.

I'm  seeing a world where Google is not only our vehicle to travel the Information Highway...they may or may not be our toll gates as well.  I've come to live with that.

Because in the end...what good is a browser if it can't do its job?  Eventually, Firefox fails me shortly after a fresh install and I end up installing Chrome anyway.  I no longer include Firefox on Reglue computers.

I haven't learned to love Chrome...but only to coexist with it.  It's the best option available to me at this time.

And Flash, as evil as it is.....

Still works with Chrome.

All-Righty Then...






  

Sometimes you just want a quick and easy way of downloading  large files.  If you’re like me, you want this with as little of a memory footprint as possible.  Aria2 gives me this ability.  When downloading a torrent for a recent Linux release, I was able to do this with only 5MB of memory being used.  No other download programs can give me this.

What’s nice about aria2 is that you can download the same file from multiple sources (mirrors) and cut your download times with each source.  You can also open multiple pipes to the same download which shortens the time as well.  Let’s take a quick look at what aria2 can do for your downloads.

Downloading with Aria2

For this test I used KDE4 iso’s from OpenSuse.  First, I established a baseline using wget:

wget http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/opensuse/distribution/12.3-RC2/iso/openSUSE-12.3-KDE-Live-Build0094-x86_64.iso

This took 15 minutes 47 seconds to complete.  The file size is 941MB.  My Internet connection at home has a max download of 10MB and upload of 1MB.

Using aria2, the same file took 10 minutes 32 seconds to complete.  Here is the command I used for this:

aria2c -x2 http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/opensuse/distribution/12.3-RC2/iso/openSUSE-12.3-KDE-Live-Build0094-x86_64.iso

The -x2 in the above command pipelines the download of the ISO into 2 separate threads.  This speeds things up considerably.  Be wary of using too many threads though because many websites out there will throttle you down in speed should you open more than 3-4 threads.

Aria2 supports more protocols than you can shake a stick at including magnet links, bittorrent, metalink and even ftp.  There are many command line flags and options you can use and you can even call aria2 using JSON-RPC and XML-RPC through the web.  All together, aria2 is scalable, flexible and lightweight…there isn’t much it cannot do.  If you’re looking for a lightweight download utility, aria2 has you covered.
ch_fluidH = 1; ch_nump = "3"; ch_client = "devnet"; ch_width = 550; ch_height = "auto"; ch_type = "mpu"; ch_sid = "Chitika Default"; ch_color_site_link = "0000CC"; ch_color_title = "0000CC"; ch_color_border = "FFFFFF"; ch_color_text = "000000"; ch_color_bg = "FFFFFF";

Lightweight Command Line Downloading with Aria2 originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on 3 March, 2013.

There is a lot that goes into making any active organization work.

Reglue is no different.  From picking up and diagnosing donated computers to taking care of vehicles, coordinating volunteers and making sure computers get into the hands that need them, sometimes the little things can slip below the horizon.

Little things like getting some signage for the building.

While HeliOS still operates as the Free Software educational branch of our effort, Reglue now carries the main load.  But you wouldn't know it by looking at our building.


Nowhere can you see anything that lets you know that you are at Reglue.

As of last week anyway.

Jeff Walsh is a Senior Technology Security Specialist with AT&T and a Dad to two young boys, Jake - 10 and Ryan - 8.  Jeff grew up with a father that taught him the importance of working with his hands.  He would spend hours with his dad, learning about the mechanics of electrical work, fixing and painting things, figuring out how things work, and more importantly, why they don't.....

Things that can create a lifetime of security,

Jeff is passing along the same knowledge and work ethic to his boys, knowing that in an uncertain economy, having mechanical and maintenance skills can make you a survivor.

Now in contrast, you have guys like me.  I thought a Carpenter was one member of a singing duo.  To me, electrical work and AC theory is voodoo, black magic that dwells behind plugin wall sockets.

Tesla wasn't a genius, he was a wizard.

I'm the guy that cuts a board three times just to find out it's still too short.  I'm the guy that Googles "Please-come-help-me-fix-the-thing-I-was-trying-to-fix-and-screwed-it-up-so-bad-I'll-pay-you-money-to-fix-it."

Yeah, I'm that guy.

So a while back, Jeff Walsh emailed me and asked if he could be of assistance.  Knowing we would need some kind of signage for Reglue, Jeff offered to make the vinyl application for our front door.

One of those little things we tend to put off until the big things are finished.

The big things seemingly are never finished, so the little things just get pushed farther down the list until you forget about them completely.

Jeff asked me to send him graphics and the wording for the door sign and he would send me the finished product when it was done.

And no...Jeff doesn't do this for a living...it's just one of those things he learned to do as a son sitting on the knee of his Dad.  To Jeff, making vinyl appliques is just a hobby, to Reglue, it was a couple hundred bucks that we didn't have for a door sign.

Once they arrived, we had the task of getting the vinyl applied.  Easy enough, right? 

No....remember, I'm that guy.  I couldn't apply vinyl lettering and graphics ever...I'm lucky to get the box open without cutting myself.

After waiting three weeks for a guy to come out from Austin and put the sign on the door, I got tired of calls not being returned and approached a local guy.  Jayson Ballard has been a volunteer for our program for a couple of years.  He told me that his mom had experience doing this sort of work so they came by the next day and between the two of them, they got the job done perfectly.

So yeah...the big things?  It feels good to accomplish them, but the little things...the things that snap you wide awake at 2 AM...the little things that fester in your mind like a sore.

It's those little things that are important.  But more important are the people that come together to make them happen.

All-Righty Then...
       

 

Looks like Sony has gone from prosecuting pirates to becoming one.  Only days after the PS4 announcement too.

Over at the KDE Blog, Jonathan Riddell explains that Sony is using a KDE icon in violation of the LGPL3 license under which it is released:

“Nowhere on their website terms of use does it list the LGPL 3 licence it may be copied under (It does say “Any unauthorised use or copying of site content, or use of site content which breaches these Terms (or their spirit) may violate trade mark, copyright and other proprietary rights, and have civil and criminal consequences” although it also says “You must seek and obtain the written consent the operator of this site before creating any link to this site” so I don’t give that page any legal credit.)”

The page in question is a ‘Choose your Vaio‘ webpage on the Sony UK site.

What does one do in cases like this?  It seems that legal action would be a waste of time and money…hopefully, Sony takes note of this and corrects the issue.  They’ve been heavily invested in Linux and Open Source for many years now with their platforms and I’d like to think they’d have learned from their rootkit debacle that you should act quickly to fix things before they blow up on the internet.

Sony Violates the LGPL3 and Steals KDE Icon originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on 22 February, 2013.

Sometimes I read comic books.  I would hope that some of you do as well.  I collected the paper version of comic books when I was a kid (Mostly Superman and Spiderman) and I’ve graduated up to the digital version now.  Comic books in digital format usually use the .cbz or .cbr file extension.  To read these in Windows or on my Linux desktop (I was running XFCE for the year or so) I had to use a specialized application…a comic reader…to do this.

The program I used in Linux was called Comix and it did a great job when I used XFCE.  I know you can also use Evince and I’m sure it does every bit a good job as Comix does.  Both are GTK applications though.  Since I now use KDE 4 on my primary workstation, I wanted to see if there was a Qt application that I could use and I was very disappointed when I didn’t find any.  So, there I was with comics in my Home Directory collecting dust with nothing preferable (read: Qt based) to open them up to read them.  I double clicked on one of them in frustration….and I was surprised when it opened right up.

Okular, the do-it-all reader for KDE4 opens up every comic book I throw at it.  I was saved…rather, my comic collection was saved.  Very handy that the KDE4 devs put in such a great tool to open so many formats.  So if you’re looking for something that can handle your comic collection, look no further than Okular which comes preinstalled with most KDE4 based distributions.

Okular with PDF

Comic Books, Linux and KDE 4 originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on 25 January, 2013.

Reglue (formally The HeliOS Project) will be having an organizational day on the 9th of February, from 9 AM until everyone gets tired and wants to go home.  We'll be concentrating on tearing older machines down for parts and getting them ready for recycle as well as prepping suitable machines for deployment.  We'll probably only have enough room for about 10 people to work comfortably so this won't be a full-blown affair like Linux Against Poverty.

Thanks for passing this on.  If you are interested in helping, email me - helios@fixedbylinux.com or go to reglue.org and hit the contact us tab at the top of the page.

Hope to see you there.