Last week, I bought a new laptop. It’s a great machine and I was able to get Kubuntu running on it with nearly zero hitches in the time it took me to ride the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I may be the first person ever to install Linux on a subway train—I’m not sure. I figured that since this new machine was fully pumped and equipped with a graphics card, I’d keep a small windows partition for the occasional video game quickie.

It’s been about a week and yesterday, in a fit of boredom, I decided to futz with Windows, which is something I usually loath doing. I booted into that nasty soup of unneeded and bloated programs and started uninstalling all the stupid free shit that came with my default install. It’s amazing to see the first boot difference between a fresh Kubuntu install and my fresh from the factory Windows install. Kubuntu is blazing while XP, on a dual processor with a gig of RAM and a 128 meg Nvidia card is slow as fuck, bogged down by a ridiculous mess of programs all set to run automatically. Nearly all of these programs are crap to me. You’d think they’d want to show off how fast their machines are by not crippling them at boot. I just don’t get it.

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I was checking out an article about various keyboard shortcuts with KDE and I was blown away by a feature in Konqueror. When viewing a web page in Konqueror, holding down CTRL highlights every link on the page with a letter or number that you type in and hit enter to navigate without having to use a mouse. I don’t know how long I’ve wished for something like this. I hate having to use a mouse and especially with a laptop, it’s a really big bitch.

Unfortunately, I’m addicted to the various extensions that I depend on with Firefox and I just can’t switch over to Konqueror. So, I immediately started scouring through available Firefox extensions on mozilla.org and after a good long while (Mozilla’s extension organization sucks), I finally found the equivalent. NumberFox does the exact same thing. Using only numbers to tag links, the font is a little too small and there’s no options to change anything, but it does the job. On a web page, hitting ALT-w activates NumberFox for both Windows and Linux (APPLE-e on Mac) and you’re off, leaving that mouse in the dust. I find that some links and some pages do not respond to the extension&8212;links in Flash are obviously a no-go, but I find that it works in 95% of the pages I’ve tried so far.

Ever since I saw my first screenshot of what using a compositing manager can do to your desktop, I’ve been itching to try my hand at it. With my recent upgrade to Kubuntu Dapper Beta, along with my trusty NVidia card, I now had nothing but procrastination holding me back. Naturally, this means I’ve been sitting on this project for way to long, but today I sucked it in, strapped myself to my PC, bit the leather and gave it a go.

I figured it would be a big hassle, but following this guide found on the (K)Ubuntu forums, I was up and running composite windows in about five minutes. Everything looks good and stable. It’s fucking sweet! I now have configurable glass-like window translucency, drop-shadows and a really nice fade-in/out effect that a screenshot obviously cannot do justice.

I still have a good amount of tweaking to find that nice middle ground between sweet-ass eye-candy and usability, but one thing I realize right away is the need for a suitably cooler desktop wallpaper. Something heavy on the year 2535, I think—another project for me to procrastinate on.

Now with all this graphical sweetness all up in my display, all I have left to do is try my hand at setting up and running XGL and Compiz.

Liron-Freaking-Fishypants-WTF-OMFG-Tocker aka Cheeseball Deluxe in response to my post on moving to Kubuntu Dapper Beta asks:

Ever since I had been trying out all sorts of “community” versions of Mandrake/Mandriva, I’ve stopped being an early-adopter. I’ve never had any pleasant experieces with pre-release versions of operating systems, since I have a low level of tolerance and most of the stuff I use my computer for on a daily basis is “mission critical” (read: “work”). However, I’ve been looking for a reason to move away from Mandriva for a short time, as I personally don’t feel the evolution taking place. Being a simple end-user and not a programmer, if I don’t see or feel this evolution it’s a bad, bad sign. More people are moving away from Mandriva as we speak.

My question is this: Would you recommend Kubuntu over other linux os’? If so, why? Do you believe it’s more capable than other distros you have used? If so, in which ways?

I’d definitely recommend Kubuntu over other Linux-based OS—but I’d take it with a grain of salt. My experience in home use has always primarily been Debian-based OS. Since you use Mandriva, like me, you are used to having access to repositories and using apt-get and whatnot. I like it. I prefer it. I’m very inclined to stay in that sandbox.

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A few nights ago, I upgraded to the latest Dapper beta for Kubuntu. After a failed attempt last week at doing a dist-upgrade to Flight 6 that caused all kinds of catastrophic errors and having to wipe and reinstall Breezy 5.10 (thankfully I had the presence of mind to make a backup of my home folder), I decided to just do a clean install from CD. I already had pretty much everything backed up and there was really nothing to lose and hey, it’s Beta, right?

While I realize that I spoiled my geeky Xmas morning delight of being able to upgrade to Dapper final on June 1st, fuck it. I’ve always hated waiting for goodies and shee-it, the move was totally worth my while. Dapper is hot.

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Yesterday, I was given a free CD of the band, “Velvet Revolver“. Pansy-ass cock-rock is absolutely not my thing, but I figured I’d listen to it just for kicks. As I was peeling off the plastic wrapping, I noticed that SONY/BMG was the publisher of the album. Antennas fully perked, I checked out the fine print and sure enough, I had one of those completely fucked up, root-kit installing, DRM-up-the-wazoo CDs of doom and destruction.

Now, since I run Linux, I’m immune to the evil these CDs inflict. On the flip side, I may be immune, but it doesn’t really matter since the CD won’t even play on my computer since I don’t use Windows or Mac which work with DRM. As a result, this CD went straight to the fucking trash bin. No way am I going to sell it or even give it away. It’s fucking poison and the only reason I’m not rip-shit mad about it is that I got it for free and I could give a rat’s ass about the band.

Call me crazy but I’m sure as fuck not going accept or pay money for a CD that will infect my computer with DRM enforcing software and leave a back-door that can open me up for a viral infection and compromise my personal data just to listen to a fucking music album. Furthermore, I’m not going to use an OS who’s terms of use stipulate that in order to use my computer, my rights go out the window and I have to drop panties and bend over my keyboard and self-sodomize myself with my mouse in order to appease the corporate gods because while I may have purchased my computer, the operating system and the CD, they own my soul and have patents on my DNA and therefore all rights and ownerships are forfeit.

Fuck that shit with a rusty screwdriver.

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It’s very frustrating when I can’t get a program from my Linux distro’s repositories. Ubuntu and Kubuntu share the same repos and while there’s a huge array of applications available there, not everything makes it and I’m forced to choose between going without or slogging through compiling the application from source which is something I can do, but I’m totally uncomfortable with. Using apt-get with the correct repositories is safe, fun and leaves me slightly giddy at the sheer glut of shit I can access for free. Compiling from source, meddling with dependencies and running the risk of breaking something, while a really good feeling when all goes well, more often than not drives me up the wall. Maybe in a few more years I’ll scoff at the challenges of wrangling source tarballs, but until then, I’ll take the repos, please.

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I’m just on a role with the KDE worship. To think, a mere few days ago, I peevishly looked down on all things K. I keep finding more and more bad-ass apps and features that makes me wonder if this website is going to transform into a repository for drooling desktop worship. I’ve gotta reign the geek shit in, I know. But, since I’ve already started this post, allow me to indulge in a bit more of the antisocial software fetish.

My latest object of amorous sheep-humping enthusiasm is amaroK, a media player for KDE that comes pre-installed in Kubuntu. An all-in-one player and music library manager, amaroK is definitely the best I’ve ever used. Using MySQL to manage a database of my music collection, it fetches album covers, artist biographies from Wikipedia and discographies as well as lyrics. It does an excellent job of creating dynamic playlists by analyzing the music I listen to the most. You can’t help but be happy with the damn thing. Another plus is that amaroK works with the Last.fm service, letting me post my listening habits to my profile page as well as any other place I should choose. Case in point, notice the “Recent Music” section I’ve added to the sidebar of this page. As I listen to a song, amaroK updates Last.fm, which in turn updates this list on my website. Kinda cool.

Should I be in a statistical mood, amaroK gives me loads of summaries. What I listen to, like the best and might like. Songs are rated and scored depending not only on how often I play a song, but also how much of the track I listen to. A song I listen to in entirety gets a much higher scoring than a tune I skip after thirty seconds of play. I can also check Last.fm for even more charts and displays showing the history of self-inflicted my ear damage and the fact that I have a serious problem with Death Metal. I’m so deaf, but very happy.

What with my recent switch to KDE and Kubuntu, I’ve been playing around with the host of new programs available at my beck and apt-get. True I could easily have run many, if not all the KDE oriented programs I wanted under Gnome, but since I was all up in that Gnome-ness, I never really bothered even looking.

Out of all these new applications, one that has immediately become one of my all-time favorites is Akregator, the RSS feed aggregator for KDE.

Akregator is hands down the best damn RSS app I’ve ever used. For the past couple of years, I’ve been eschewing desktop programs for the Firefox extension Sage due in main part to the fact that none of the apps I ever tried out had usefulness that warranted running a separate program to browse feeds. Sage was simple, light and worked well at what it was supposed to do. It also worked from within Firefox. The downside was that Sage did not automatically fetch feeds. I had to manually check them, which I didn’t like. If I have to manually check, I almost might as well just visit the site.

Akregator sits in my task bar and I’ve set it up to check all my forty of fifty feeds every three minutes. Feeds can be prioritized, and customized with special notifications, archiving—all kinds of wacky, mind-bending shit. It’s just about everything I’ve ever wanted in an RSS aggregator.

If you can manage running it, get it. When you do, you can subscribe to this site’s RSS feed and die happy.

A couple nights ago, on a whim coupled with a deep whiff or two of paint thinner (figuratively), I wiped my trusty and much-loved Ubuntu installation (after properly backing up my shit, of course—what kind of midget-humping idiot do you take me for?) and tried a fresh install of Kubuntu.

I’ve always been a user of the Gnome desktop and while I’ve flirted with others like XFCE, Fluxbox and KDE, I’ve stuck to it, mainly because it worked and I was used to it and rather lazy. Gnome’s been good to me. So, why the switch? Honestly, I’ve no real excuse aside from a constant need to tweak shit, an overwhelming feeling of boredom and a desire to peel myself away from my PlayStation for more than five minutes.

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