Posted by George Wright
Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:46:00 GMT
LinuxWorld is looming ever nearer.. under a week now until it starts! I’ve managed to get at least one other KDE developer to come - Ivor Hewitt - to whom I am eternally grateful for taking time off to help out. We have quite a nice set up too - Torsten Rahn has kindly supplied us with two KDE floor posters and I’ve got a Kubuntu floor poster courtesy of Jonathan Riddell. We will also have 20 of the KDE 10th Anniversary t-shirts to give away for free and another 200 KDE pins to sell. Not only that, but Canonical have kindly stepped in and said that we can borrow a machine from them for the duration of LWCE. It looks like LWCE this year is going to be the best yet!
In other news, Cambridge is getting hectic. Work is starting to stack up and 9am lectures are getting more cumbersome by the day. I’ve decided to rearrange the furniture layout in my room to give myself more usable floor space and I appear to be fanboying a maths student in my college. Hrmm.
The computer science stuff is still fairly elementary. We’re doing functional programming in ML and it’s not so bad. It gets a lot harder though so I’m not complaining! Physics is still very easy as we’re only doing special relativity which seems to be fairly easy, but again, the pace picks up later apparently. Oh well - it was my decision to come here to study!
Posted in KDE, Cambridge | 1 comment
Posted by George Wright
Tue, 26 Sep 2006 21:47:00 GMT
The last day of aKademy for me - so it was rather uneventful. After sleeping the night on the bunk on top of Chris because of the bed cock-up the night before, we realised that we had overslept and that the cleaners were coming round to kick us out. I must say that I’m not disappointed to see the back of the accommodation.. I caught several illnesses and got very little sleep during aKademy this year.
Upon arriving at Trinity College Dublin, I just wandered around aimlessly for a while and then ended up in a pub eating lunch with Rich Moore and Richard Dale. Afterwards, it was unfortunately time for me to leave and get to the airport.
When people intend to leave, here’s some advice. There are buses that go to the airport from the bus station near the hostel, but they take a long time to get there and aren’t very comfortable. On the other hand, if you get to the road with huuuugggeee spike in it, there’s an “Aircoach” which will take you directly to the airport and it’s nice and comfortable. It took about 30-40 minutes in the middle of heavy traffic on Tuesday and cost me 7 EUR, as opposed to the 5 EUR the bus would have charged. I think the extra 2 EUR was worth it.
Finally, I’d like to thank Marcus for doing a great job with aKademy this year. There were relatively few mess ups and those that did happen weren’t his fault so much kudos to Marcus.
Posted in KDE | 3 comments
Posted by George Wright
Mon, 25 Sep 2006 22:22:00 GMT
Day 2 of aKademy - the first day where no talks were scheduled. The joy of getting up at 10 instead of 8! The eV meeting happened today, but I didn’t attend as I’m not a member. Spent most of the time in the hacking room fiddling with Debian Sarge - on which I managed to get wifi to work. Thankfully it’s a fairly normal ACX100 chipset which appears to work quite well. Being able to remotely fiddle using ssh is a lot easier than trying to type on the keyboard that’s built in.
In the evening was the Google reception at Google Ireland. It was actually quite fun. On the way I talked to Rob Taylor who shares my weird obsessions with installing Linux on embedded things, and was very interested in the hardware on my phone (it’s an HTC Universal). I’ll probably be seeing more of him in the future as he’s based up in Cambridge (along with Rob McQueen and the rest of the Cambridge Debian/Ubuntu massive). Win.
The Google reception was rather fun. They had nice little sandwiches and various snacks to eat, but the major fun was obviously the large ice cream freezer they had full of snack size Ben & Jerry’s tubs. Hooray for ice cream when you have a sore throat! They held a raffle to give away an iPod, a laptop bag and a hoodie, none of which I won. I also heard amusing stories all evening about various members of staff at my future College from Rob McQueen.
Afterwards, we (mainly GB people with a few other KDE people tagging along) ended up in a fairly small and random pub. The highlight of the evening was obviously when one of us (no names..) got completely and utterly drunk. We have video evidence. Note: if you can’t sing, please don’t. It’s embarrassing, but you will realise this when you see our videos. :)
After the pub, we decided to eat and ended up at a fast food pizza place somewhere in Dublin. I had a milkshake which required you to suck your eyeballs out of their sockets in order to try and get it up the straw - yes, it was that thick. Afterwards, there was much amusement at the hostel as Chris Howells and I discovered that our room had been double booked and that some fairly random strangers were sleeping in our beds and that our magnetic swipe card keys no longer worked. We were angry. Luckily they managed to give us new beds so it wasn’t a problem, just a fairly large inconvenience at 2am.
Posted in KDE | no comments
Posted by George Wright
Sun, 24 Sep 2006 20:20:00 GMT
Day 2 of akademy - things were smoother. I didn’t really pay much attention in the talks but instead decided to hack on embedded Debian and try to bootstrap Debian ARM on my phone. It was… interesting, to say the least.
Sarge appears to be hideously out of date (or the mirror I was using was out of date, but it was ftp.debian.org which would suggest this was the master mirror..). In any case, I managed to get it to boot fine after lots of fighting, but getting kdrive on there was slightly more difficult. I haven’t yet managed it, and I have decided that sarge is way too out of date anyway, so I’ll rebootstrap with Etch. More details to follow when I get somewhere…
In other news, Jessica Hall has decided that she has an irresistible urge to touch my hair. She will be duly punished.
Posted in KDE | 1 comment
Posted by George Wright
Sat, 23 Sep 2006 21:06:00 GMT
I arrived in Dublin last night, but because my flight was delayed by about 40 minutes (which is about the same as the duration of the flight…) I didn’t meet the KDE people at the airport I was supposed to meet. Thankfully, Chris Howells turned up about 20 minutes after I did, so we managed to get lost together.
The hostel is nowhere near as good as the accommodation we had last year, but it’s better than the hostel was in Ludwigsburg - so it’s not too bad.
So far there has been one talk - the keynote by Aaron Seigo. Charismatic as usual, he played really bad music whilst showing a slideshow of KDE developers’ photos. Luckily he only found one photo of me.
Trinity College Dublin seems to be a fairly nice place. There’s wireless access throughout the campus (it seems) and the we seem to be getting around 2Mbit/s of bandwidth. NX is rather speedy to my home ADSL line (which is on a 1Mbit upload). However, there is an issue with the network such that I keep getting my ssh connections reset randomly, which NX doesn’t like too much.
Lunch, however, was more of a disaster. I tried to hotswap the main battery in my ThinkPad (I have two batteries), and it managed to corrupt all the filesystems. After 4 hours of fighting I managed to get it back together though - without resorting to reinstalling Kubuntu.
Posted in KDE | 4 comments
Posted by George Wright
Mon, 11 Sep 2006 22:44:00 GMT
This year LWCE is slightly later - it’s on October 25th and 26th in Olympia 2 (as usual). However, so far nobody has actually put themselves down as a firm exhibitor to help out at the KDE booth. Last year only Ivor Hewitt and I pitched up to help so ideally I’d like to be able to get more people this year.
For those who don’t know what it is, we basically sit in a (rather nice) booth all day on the 25th and 26th and show off how pretty and functional KDE is to various attendees and hopefully increase the awareness of KDE in the corporate market. Last year we gave away a couple of hundred flyers and many, many Kubuntu CDs.
This year I’ve managed to get in contact with Canonical (those lovely people who do Ubuntu) and they’ve kindly offered to lend us a display machine with an LCD monitor for demo purposes. We have to pick it up from their South Kensington office but that shouldn’t be a problem.
I’m also going to place an order with the MWG to try and get things to sell there - mainly Konqis and shirts of various types. Booth gear I will pick up from Jonathan at aKademy in Ireland.
There’s an organisation page at the KDE UK wiki and if people who are likely to come could please add their names to the wiki I’d be very, very grateful.
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Posted by George Wright
Wed, 23 Aug 2006 21:57:00 GMT
Today I put the finishing touches to QtNX. It now has a nice little logging window and different authentication public keys can be used now. The statusbar now gives meaningful information and a message box comes up if ssh is requesting permission to proceed (for connecting to previously-unconnected hosts).
The Key Dialogue
There are a few glitches though. It appears that it doesn’t like to connect to various versions of NX - 2.0.0 appears to be particularly troublesome at the moment. I intend to install NX 2.0.0 on a machine somewhere at some point, but if someone was willing to give me access to a machine running 2.0.0 or a Windows NX server I’d be very grateful.
The Log Window
There are various other bits and pieces that haven’t been implemented due to lack of knowledge about how it works. These are basically limited to printer support, Windows server support and VNC server support. Sound does work, which surprised me as I didn’t go out of my way to get it to work - it seems it’s forwarded automatically!
The Statusbar
The suspend/resume session support appears to be a little iffy at the moment, but I hope to stabilise that. It works quite well, but I’d like it to be a little more robust. Perhaps this is a problem with the NX server as well as I used to have trouble suspending and resuming sessions in the binary client supplied by NoMachine as well.
In any case, here’s a nice little screenshot of the whole of QtNX working as it should:
QtNX in all its glory
I also urge as many people as possible to test this and send me feedback to the usual email address. Ideally I’d like a log from ssh (what’s dumped to stdout, or the really nice and new log window) and any other information you deem relevant (like what doesn’t work). It can be obtained from the usual place. I’ll blog with some intructions on how to install it on Dapper soon (as I’ve just transitioned all my boxes from Gentoo to Dapper - a blog detailing my experiences will appear some day…).
Posted in KDE | 33 comments
