liquidcable.com

Check out Jonathan Richey’s new resume.  He is just passed the Texas Bar exam and is currently looking for employment anywere in Texas.

I get asked “what software do you use for…” alot, so here is a list of software I recommended for the Windows (XP/Vista) user.

• Firefox - web browsing (replaces Windows Internet Explorer)
• Thunderbird - e-mail client
• Lightning - calander
• OpenOffice - office suite (replaces Microsoft Office)
• AVG - anti-virus (free for personal use)
• VLC - media player (plays DVD also)
• Miro - podcast media player
• CDBurnerXP - CD/DVD burner
• AnyDVD - DVD ripper (not free)
• Synctoy2 - backup files
• Itunes - music collection organizer
• Picasa - photo/media organizer
• 7Zip - file compression and decompression
• Filezilla - FTP client
• Notepad++ - plain text editor (replaces notepad)

All are free for personal use except AnyDVD, and many are opensource.  Lifehacker is a great resource for good software.

A few resources about your local candidates :
http://mk.thevoterguide.org
http://www.factcheck.org
Both are nonpartisan.

I now have a Vista machine on my network, and after a few weeks of using and configuring it I have to stay something about it. Vista sucks.

KDE 4.0 sucked. KDE 4.1 is what KDE 4.0 should have been, it’s actually usable (for a linux guy). It is still not ready for everyday use, if you want stability or usability. There are still some problems (many of these are not directly the short comings of KDE but of other apps/programs that exhibit a problem under KDE 4), with the most important being stability and speed.

Problems

• Dolphin crashes, alog - Konqueror (web) does not render many pages correctly (www.digg.com)
• still missing features available in 3.5 series
• several minor theme/widgets problems (nothing major) - no printer manager in the control panel
• can’t mount network shares from file manager (dolphin)
• after 8 years of using kde, they still can’t do this, Windows has does this (they call it mapping) for at least 10 years now **WTF**

Problems (3rd party)

• very bad 2D performance using an Nvidia card with the Nvidia dirver (can be better with latest driver from nvidia and several xorg.conf and command line tweaks)
• Firefox 3 tads look very bad using when using the gtk-qt-engine-kde4 theme (work around using Kde4 + Firefox3 theme)

Good features

• looks good, mostly
• Dolphin is usable (very good start, still needs some major usability work and more features)
• Oxygen style is better than before, still needs tweaking
• Ozone is a better window theme than the previous Oxygen window theme, be sure to install gtk-qt-engine-kde4, as it can make your gtk based applications look like QT4 apps

Conclusions

KDE 4.1 should have been KDE 4.0 RC1. KDE 4.0 should have been KDE 4.0 Alpha 1. KDE 4.1 is not stable, and is not usable as a primary desktop. I hope that KDE 4.2 solves these problems, but we will have to wait until 2009 to find out. It looks like the developers have stop listening to the regular users.

Bottom Line

Normal user need to wait for KDE 4.2. Tech users can use KDE 4.1. KDE developers need to realize that Linux is much more popular now, and new releases to desktop environments can not come out with less features, in-stability, and more bugs then previous versions. KDE 2 was released in 2001, when Linux was almost exclusively used by tech people. Now normal “Joe Blow” people are using Linux, and they will not tolerate suck crap. More to come.

References and Links

http://techbase.kde.org/User:Lemma/KDE4-NVIDIA
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=115916
http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/07/30/install-kde-41-in-ubuntu-and-make-gtk-applications-look-good/
http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-To-Install-KDE-4-1-On-Ubuntu-8-04-91034.shtml

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This is Heath Holcomb’s website/blog. I’m a married father of two girls, an electronics engineer, electronics hobbiest, and a Linux geek. I graduated from Texas A&M University at College Station with a bachelors of science in Engineering Technology (electronics track).

I currently work for Otis Instruments as the Engineering Director. It’s a small company producing gas detection systems for oil/gas drill sites and processing plants. I’m the engineering director, primary design engineer (hardware side), and IT guy.  My current Linux distro of choice is Ubuntu; recently switched from Gentoo.

Here are some of my profiles at various websites.
Linkedin | Digg | Facebook | Ubuntu | Gentoo | OSnews.com | Wikipedia

My family website bulah.com.
My job at Otis Instruments.
My resume