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The follow up to this is, if you get a denial the First thing you should think is, perhaps one of the labels is WRONG.

If you have been following discussions on LQ, then you might have seen this thread where the original poster was Patrick himself. He basically asked for opinion about the future of -Current for this development cycle which will end up with Slackware 14.1 in the end. Although things has been working pretty well in -Current as of now (at least in most systems looking at the comments there), but there are some considerations by Patrick in three parts of the system: kernel, GCC, and XOrg. They are critical components for most Linux distributions.

My first Linux distro was openSUSE, and things sort of worked well for some five years. Then, come version 12, everything went downhill, the sort of push an old lady downhill kind of thing. The last two editions of this distro failed to satisfy the geek in me. Which means, grab your forks and knives, because it's openSUSE 12.3 review time! I will show you if and how openSUSE 12.3 can redeem itself. Naturally, we will go with the KDE desktop, because Gnome is not an option anymore. My test box will be the same T61 laptop, featuring two SSD for local storage, 2GB RAM, and a simple, generic Intel graphics card. And so we commence.

On Sunday, April 14, the Fuduntu team held a public meeting on IRC. Many things were discussed, including some issues that have major implications for both the team and community. Among the things discussed were introduction of team members, status of various teams, and the future of Fuduntu. The biggest topic discussed was the future of Fuduntu. The team has been striving to bring a stable system to the community and we believe we’ve been able to do that. One of the key aspects of that was using GNOME 2. 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.

Problem I’ve arrived at the point that I’m fed up with the passwords. I can’t memorize them all so I usually write them in an exercise book that I keep at home. But what if I need something from it at my workplace? On the other hand, this booklet is already full (with other pieces of info too), so when I need a password from it, I need to search it for minutes… Damn. It would be so nice if I had all this information in a file on my machine but in a secure way.

Solution The ideal solution is a password manager. But which one to choose? There are a lot. Since I also use Windows from time to time, I needed a cross-platform solution. First I thought of using a command line manager but finally I decided to use a graphical one; after all it looks nicer and easier to use (and I didn’t want to learn new command line options that I forget if I don’t use it for a few weeks…). This is how I got to KeePassX, which perfectly fulfills my needs. It’s also in the Ubuntu repos.

Over the last few days I was wondering what is a “lightweight” desktop. And I must say I couldn’t come up with an answer to that question. I was considering various things like “being memory efficient” which I discarded for obvious reasons. First of all it’s difficult to measure memory usage correctly (I haven’t seen anyone, who provides numbers, doing it correctly, this includes especially Phoronix). And then it’s comparing mostly apples to oranges. Loading a high-resolution wallpaper might make all the difference in the memory usage. Also if desktop environment Foo provides features which are not provided by Bar it’s obvious that Foo uses more memory. But still it’s apples vs oranges. It’s not a comparison on memory, it’s a comparison of features. And of course one might consider the Time-memory-tradeoff.

It's Hack Week 9 at SUSE, and I'm working on a cracking project this time around. I've codenamed it 'KLyDE', for K Lightweight Desktop Environment, and it's an effort to point KDE at the lightweight desktop market. Surely some mistake, you say? KDE and lightweight kan't fit in the same sentence. I think they can.

The openSUSE GNOME Team is proud to present you the GNOME 3.8 for openSUSE 12.3 – Repository. You have eagerly been waiting for it, maybe you even dared to install the test repositories published during the last few days… if you happen to be amongst the ones that reported issues with it, then ALL THANKS go to you!

Today, we’ve made the difficult decision to change the direction of our distro. While Cinnamon is a great user interface and we’ve had a lot of fun implementing it, it’s become too much a burden to maintain/update going forward. We’d like to remain faithful and compatible to our parent distro, Arch Linux, and further support of Cinnamon would strain that by causing incompatibilities/hacks in the entirety of the Gnome packageset. It is almost impossible to maintain software developed by Linux Mint in a rolling release as we are. They’re 1 year behind with upstream code. Arch Linux is going to have soon Gnome 3.8 and Cinnamon is not compatible with it. The Cinnamon team still have to migrate some of their tools to fully work with Gnome 3.6.

I have been writing regular updates to the Alien’s ARM page on this blog which can be found in the top of left sidebar. Readers of this blog who only visit the blog’s front page, will probably not have noticed, so I decided to write a more visible status update on the main page.

Nautilus has undergone massive changes in recent versions and it is going to be a challenge figuring out a few things. The following long winded article would be useful in figuring out various "Hidden" functionalities of Nautilus. But before doing anything, do Configure Community Repositories openSUSE 12.3

I manage the crunchtools lab and the infrastructure for this blog similar to a development data center. I have a rigorous weekly checklist, which includes applying operating system patches as they are available. Most of my infrastructure is built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but I run this blog on Linode which doesn’t have an image for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They have the ability to create a custom image, but I have continued to use the CentOS build, partially to better understand the differences from a hands on perspective.

A Spanish association representing open-source software users has filed a complaint against Microsoft Corp to the European Commission, in a new challenge to the Windows developer following a hefty fine earlier this month.

I have spent several months searching for a Linux Distro that meets my requirements. My trusty Acer Aspire One Netbook is equipped with 2 GB ram and a 160GB HDD and has served me well since its purchase in 2010 for $279 US. The changes to Ubuntu Unity and Gnome3 set me into motion in search of a replacement Distro. Last year I tried many Distros looking yet something was missing. I didn't realize what it was until I tried Fuduntu in its 2013.1 version released in January.

I gave a presentation at Libreplanet this weekend on the topic of Secure Boot and Restricted Boot. There's a copy of the video here - it should be up on the conference site at some point. It turned out to be excellent timing, in that a group in Spain filed a complaint with the European Commission this morning arguing that Microsoft's imposition of Secure Boot on the x86 client PC market is anticompetitive. I suspect that this is unlikely to succeed (the Commission has already stated that the current implementation appears to conform to EU law), and I fear that it's going to make it harder to fight the real battle we face.

I recently installed NetBSD on my RaspberryPi. Although not all the hardware is fully supported, enough is there to make it a usable system. It's nice to have my RPi provide the same system experience (configuration, organization, etc.) as other NetBSD machines I maintain. A big "Thank you!" to the developers that made this possible. One concern I have, however, is that the boot drive is an SD card. Solid state cards have limited write cycles and I worry that, since most Unix systems assume a mechanical drive which allow essentially infinite writes, my SD card will not last very long. To measure this, I monitored the disk writes using 'iostat' and was disappointed in how many writes were occurring on an otherwise idle system.

My point is you can’t force people to contribute to projects they don’t want to contribute to, so the idea of every distro being dropped to help support Ubuntu isn’t going to happen. There’s no boss here who can control the whole FOSS development resource like a big company. You just need to put this idea out of your mind. Accept it can’t happen. There is however more to discuss than just “can we coerce people to work together?”. The following is just my opinion and I’m certainly open minded enough to change if people bring forward new points, so lets investigate some of the gripes people have with fragmentation.

I'm among the first to admit that when I find a Linux distribution that I like, it takes a lot for me to be impressed with any of the alternatives. I've looked into countless distros, such as Arch, Fedora and Linux Mint, among others. Yet at the end of the day, I kept finding myself coming back to Ubuntu. And in many ways, I find this comical since I was one of the early naysayers about their use of Unity and other controversial decisions. But something happened over time – I found myself growing comfortable with the way Ubuntu does things. With my busy schedule, a distro that "just works" appeals to me.

The big news here is the removal of MySQL in favor of MariaDB. This shouldn't really be a surprise on any level. The poll on LQ showed a large majority of our users were in favor of the change.

Here are some SlackBuild scripts to build and install the MATE desktop environment on Slackware. Currently, they build and install MATE 1.5 which is the development branch of the upcoming 1.6 release, due at the end of March or early April, 2013.