KDE CD

Last weekend I spent a couple days doing the usual marathon of beating my brains out against the wall of debian-cd, and got the following image added to the weekly full CD builds:

http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/i386/iso-cd/debian-testing-i386-kde-CD-binary-1.iso

(Also for other arches of course.) This is a CD that will install KDE instead of the Gnome desktop that comes in the other etch install media. You can get the same effect without this special CD, if you have a good internet connection, by booting a current daily of the installer as follows:

install tasks=kde-desktop

The kde-desktop task may not be as complete and well-rounded as the gnome-desktop task has become thanks to stratus's work, but it should be at least a good basic KDE desktop.

PS, it's entirely a cooincidence that I happen to be announcing this from Germany. :-)

Posted
missing the deep of the night

Ever since I got back from Germany I've had some screwy and wrong sleep habits, that seem to involve going to bed before midnight, and waking up about 8-9 hours later, around 7 or 8 am.

Partly because I was sick, but I'm not that sick anymore and it's persisting.

This is so deeply wrong.

discussion

Posted
on blog comments

I have the following problems with blog comments:

  • The interfaces are all different, and all suck (unlike my blog posting interface, which works exactly as I wrote it to).
  • The markup is all different and all sucks (unlike the one I use for my blog, which I carefully chose).
  • Once I type my entry into the void of a blog's comment box, it's no longer mine, it's not well associated with me, my name is not provably on it (openid helps with this one), it's not archived somewhere I control.
  • People posting comments to my blog don't help spread links to my blog the way that people blogging about my blog do.
  • There's generally no rss feed to follow comments; if there is, it's too annoying to subscribe to it.
  • Since comment systems are a nasty little appendix on the side of blogging, no neat new tech that's developed based on blogging is likely to improve them.

So if I have something important to say, I'm likely to blog it even if I do post it as a comment too.

Compare and contrast with email..

Posted
virtual postcard

I finally took some time to play with Google Earth, and came up with this view:

This is a pretty fair approximation of my favorite view ever out of an outhouse door. The outhouse is on Angel Island, in the bay offshore of San Fransisco.

Posted
can't read?

cantread.png

I guess I can't read, after all. I'm been deluding myself all these years.

Instead of insulting your prospective users like this, might I suggest using OpenID?

discussion

Posted
attention stalkers

You may find grep useful, although I don't have gps position tracking on it right now.

Posted
new tech for xmas

Rather than hardware, I got some software for Christmas this year. Actually, I've had the software for a while, but lacked the time to learn how to use it, so I took the time today.

First was xen, which is great -- now I have many additional systems on my network, all without messing around with hardware. I'd tried to set up xen before and gave it up as needing too much work at the time, and while some of my systems, including kite, run as xen instances on systems adminned by others, I didn't feel I understood it well. Debian's xen support still has a few rough edges; I ran into issues with running out of loop devices, and was suprised that bridged networking wasn't set up by default. I also filed a lot of bugs on xen-tools (sorry Steve). But overall it wasn't particularly hard to get working, and I feel I understand it reasonably well now.

I even figured out how to get pygrub fixed and working, which is spiffy -- one of my issues with xen has always been that the choice of kernel is left up to the dom0 admin, and it's good to know that pygrub lets domU provide its own kernel.

Next up was SE Linux, which is another piece of tech I've had a general understanding of for a long time, but never deployed. Now that I can dedicate a system to playing with it, thanks to xen, there was no reason not to try it out, and while there are still rather too many manual steps, the instructions are clear and easy to follow, and the result seems to work ok.

discussion

Posted