How to turn a Linux distribution LiveCD into a LiveUSB

LiveCDs these days provide the simplest way to test a Linux distribution. Pop in the CD, reboot and then watch the distro’s default desktop unfold before you. With flash drives being relatively cheap these days, booting your favorite Linux distribution for a clean install from a USB seems to be an interesting option. And that is possible with one tool even if you’re distribution doesn’t already offer LiveUSB images for download – UNetbootin.

The main reason I looked for a tool like UNetbootin was because my CD drive seems jammed at the moment (fortunately there’s no disc inside). November promises releases from the top Linux distributions and I was looking for a quick, cheap way to boot distros and test them one after the other. Being in the ‘distrohopping’ mood, wasting CDs seems like a bad idea and I don’t have any rewritables with me at the moment.

So step in UNetbootin. What does it do then? With a simple user interface, it allows you to choose the Distribution and version number from a drop-down menu, specify the ISO, add any extra tweaks (optional, mainly for experienced users), choose your USB drive and bang – just burn. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? It is.

Add to this, you can run it on Windows and Linux, so if you’re stuck on Windows and you need a quick LiveUSB fix then UNetbootin will do the job for you. Just download and install the executable setup, run the program and you’re good to go. Linux users will need to make the file executable, with a simple chmod +x ./unetbootin-linux from the terminal or changing the permissions via your desktop environment’s file Properties dialogue. UNetbootin is built using C++ and the Qt4 toolkit so in my opinion it should be possible to compile it on Mac OS X as well.

Visit the homepage here for detailed instructions on making a LiveUSB for the distribution of your choice. There are screenshots that should make things clear about the process. You can even convert bootable CDs like Parted Magic to the USB and deploy it.

I’ll conclude this one, with a reminder that a lot of distributions these days do provide LiveUSB images that are ready to download. One good indication would be to check the latest version of your distribution that UNetbootin supports. If its a little old, like Arch Linux for example, then it is an indication that there may already be an official LiveUSB version available. Unfortunately, it was only after I downloaded the Kubuntu 9.10 x86_64 ISO did I realize my CD drive is somewhat busted. That’s a side issue that I’ll sort out later anyway.

I’m planning to begin this month’s (possible) slew of reviews and they’ll probably be the first ones on this version of the blog.  I’ll be trying a different approach to reviewing while keeping the length minimum. First up will be Kubuntu, as I’ve missed KDE for too long now. Until then, see you soon.

Filed under: Linux , LiveCD, LiveUSB, UNetbootin

Why desktop market share shouldn’t be Linux’s priority

During the time in which I’ve followed Linux development and its various distributions, every year I come across several articles on “Why 200X will be the year of the Linux Desktop“. Every time I read those posts, I have just one reply in mind – “It’s not going to happen”. And every time someone mentions this in the comments of those posts, a flame war breaks out. I’ve never spoken on this topic before so I thought I’d give it a go right now.

Let’s forget the statistics for now. We all know Microsoft has the largest market share, followed by Apple. Let’s just leave it at that. They both have their shortcomings in different areas and so does Linux. It’s up to us, as the Linux community to work on our own. Linux has a very firm stronghold in the server market, so I’m not going to go into details about that. Red Hat and Novell are pretty dominant in that area, so kudos to the two of them .

The Linux kernel now has its latest stable version in the 2.6.31.x series at the time of writing. Some might argue it has become bloated and far from the minimalistic ideals people had in mind for it. But with technology progressing and the need for drivers and to satisfy the enthusiasm of some innovative minds, the kernel now has improved driver support and advanced features for basic end-users and enthusiasts alike. This is important for the desktop because contrary to what some think, the desktop isn’t really going to die.

The desktop is going to improve and transform over time and that situation isn’t likely to change. Microsoft have just recently come out with Windows 7 and Apple had last released Snow Leopard. Both of them will capture their respective markets and will succeed. We’ll have bigger screens, smaller screens and multiple screens, but the base of the software we run on it will be pretty much the same.

The community needs to get behind the big projects like KDE and GNOME now, more than ever before. KDE is slowly coming out of its cocoon as the KDE 4 series matures, while GNOME is in the process of bringing the upcoming GNOME 3 series into mainstream. We have to stop directing rants at MS and get to brainstorming for these free desktop environment giants. Bug reports need to keep coming and feedback should flow in.

Users need to be the priority, because users have needs and as a community we need to fulfill them. Documentation needs to be given a lot more attention and made more prominently friendly and visible so as to minimize frustration and trolling in forums. Distribution websites, I think, could also do with sprucing up. It is as the saying goes, “the first impression is the last impression”. Get the screenshots of the desktop visible on the page and then let users decide what they want to do. After all, possibly the most important philosophy behind Linux today, is freedom.

There have been long discussions on release cycles of distributions and desktop environments. Whatever is decided, the priority should be to have the user end up with something usable and within his/her niche. If he/she needs something stable for the long-term for example, then the distribution with that philosophy simply needs to continue working in that direction. If distributions feel that the lack of proprietary driver support is something they can’t fix without the help of the original proprietary developers, then pressure needs to be applied on the hardware companies to get what is required.

When it comes to legacy hardware, Linux has been a major boon for most users who rely on old machines to get things done. That shouldn’t be forgotten and is something that could be better integrated and focused on to give a finished product for legacy systems. Even with Windows 7, Microsoft hasn’t ignored legacy software and provides an emulation layer for software compatible with Windows XP and prior. While Linux doesn’t have that to worry about, we’ve just got to keep the old PCs alive while we know how to.

I understand that some purists and users alike may not appreciate something like Windows support on Linux. I have seen a minority of people even criticize a project as long in the running as WINE, and I find it a bit strange. We’ve got to try and put those notions aside and at least acknowledge that a team of developers with a goal in mind are working really hard to satisfy a niche of users. Remember, even OS X has made progress in supporting Windows, if not natively, but through means like Boot Camp.

If there’s any market that needs to draw concern, it is the markets that we’ve not tapped strongly into. Gaming for example, is something that applying pressure again, is going to go a long way in developing Linux into a suitable platform. I know a lot of work has gone into WINE integration in Ubuntu, but I’d like to see what Mark Shuttleworth can do to attract the gaming industry to tap into Linux. We may see increased collaboration and the community will buzz with purpose and excitement. I know the industry works fast these days, and deadlines are to be met, clients are required to be satisfied, but the areas of the industry that focus on research should not be ignored. Nepomuk, the Semantic Desktop for KDE started off as a research project at university level, if I recall correctly. But the KDE team worked on it and integrated it well into the desktop environment and now we’re looking at a new way to collect and store (meta) data. If we had something similar in gaming, well… who knows?

If you look at the progress on the mobile platform, Linux is pretty strong there already. The Android is being touted by some as a potentially huge breakthrough in mobile technology and I think the free software base, resulting in a reduced price is the reason it is going to become more consumer-friendly. Something I don’t see given much coverage outside Planet KDE, is the fact that the Qt framework is making a lot of ground on the Symbian platform giving developers yet another option to developing applications. At some point for example, we could harness Qt’s native libraries on a single mobile platform to have applications we’d normally write in Java to work quickly and efficiently on the phone. We could of course, still support Java, but then we don’t have to use it.

The main purpose behind the title of this post is to remind us all why we love Linux in the first place. It is because we enjoy being part of the free software and open source community, more than anything else. We’ve got to believe we’re good enough to compete no matter what the trolls and critics think. While it would be quite something if Free Software dominated the desktop market, it isn’t the end of the world if you stop and look at where this community’s spider-like legs have stretched into.

On that note, I’d just like to say I’m looking forward to his month’s plethora of distribution releases by the big guns to see them take a step in the direction of satisfying users. Signing off.

Filed under: Linux , Desktop, Free Software, Future of Linux, Linux, Market Share, Open Source, Year of the Linux Desktop

So you want to know how important KDE 4 is?

I’ve followed and written about the development of the KDE 4.0 project on the old version of this blog. Until now however, I’ve never addressed the criticism that some sections of the Linux community have heaped on it. So I’ll just start with this post in the blogosphere that caught my eye.

I wonder if KDE 4 has hurt the KDE project?

No, as has been said by others countless of times before, it hasn’t. It’s as they say – no pain, no gain. If you want your project to become a long-term success you have to take risks, and the KDE development team should be lauded even now for their early release of KDE 4.0 with a warning that it was meant for experimental and development purposes to provide a platform for developing Qt4 applications and take the KDE project in a new direction. GNOME clearly aren’t in the spotlight yet, because they’re not rewriting the desktop from the ground up (or atleast judging by the GNOME 3.0 shell reviews I’ve read, they aren’t). Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here.

Just by taking a look at a list of distributions out there, the major distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian all use GNOME as their desktop environment of choice, and there are not really any major distributions with commercial backing that use KDE as their primary desktop.

openSUSE is a major distribution with commercial backing from Novell that uses KDE as their primary desktop environment. The same can be said about Mandriva. Slackware is the Godfather of Linux distributions and while they aren’t commercially backed, they use KDE by default.

The major problems with KDE 4 in its current state is its patchy development, performance, and reliabilty — something corporations do not want attached to their software.

The state of KDE development is far from what’s been mentioned here. You have monthly releases which cater to patches to the desktop. The same frequency isn’t sported by GNOME. Indirectly if you consider security, KDE is reacting faster than GNOME, but that again is subject to what vulnerabilities if any, have been found. KDE suffered with the early poor performance on NVIDIA systems, but if you look back at it now, NVIDIA responded reasonably quick to the pressure from the community considering this is a new, heavily experimental open source project we were dealing with at the time.

KDE’s development seems to be all over the place, without much order or quality controls. It is claimed as a work-in-progress. I know from experience people want software that is complete, something that is stable enough for them to rely on for their work.

Again, this work-in-progress statement is a bit overused. I thought even with the openSUSE 11 KDE 4 release, KDE 4.0.2 was reasonably stable if not perfectly usable. In fact, it was so minimal you could compare it to GNOME if you wanted. But we’re down to KDE 4.3 right now with 4.4 coming in February, 2010. Slackware considered 4.2.4 to be stable and useable enough so you can imagine how rock solid their next release could be. I’d go as far as saying KDE 4 will be as rock solid as 3.5 by then.

I believe that KDE 4 development has come too slow, and for an impation community that expects development to move at a pace that can compete with proprietary competitors with similar or better quality, KDE 4 is really not up to quota.

Isn’t this what the Linux community was crying for? “Slow down, KDE we can’t keep up with your use of ARGB and your rapidly evolving system tray?” GNOME in my opinion, does a good job of releasing few features now and then through their development cycle and I believe that suits them considering how mature the GNOME 2.x series is now. But we’re talking about KDE 4 here and at it’s point three release (KDE 4.3) more than a year on, we have an amazing development team thats created a desktop for the future that is likely at some point soon to put Free Software more prominently on the map.

KDE’s patchy development leads to little oversight on how the many features and eye-candy effect performance.

Turn the desktop effects off if eye-candy is not your thing. If you use Compiz Fusion or actually like desktop effects then you should be admiring KDE’s efforts to incorporate these features natively, which GNOME simply integrates into its environment. The jury is still out on GNOME 3.0 and its direction on this.

Many people, including many who commented on the original post, have complained that the desktop environment seems too slow, and forces them to buy new hardware. Of course, this does not go over well with a community known for using old, outdated hardware to run their Linux systems.

Honestly, I’ve seen this kind of comment on how KDE 4 is slow on hardware right now rubbished off on the Ubuntu forums so often, its not funny.  If you think questions that require reading the wiki or something are annoying to them, you can add this hardware criticism to their list of statements that are annoying. If you honestly think its slow for some reason, get another distro, go lightweight and get over yourself.

Of course, this does not go over well with a community known for using old, outdated hardware to run their Linux systems.

Just as an addon, if you manage your installation well then like me, you can run KDE 4 even on 256MB RAM. It’s not that hard if you choose your distribution’s packages wisely.

Connected to the patchy development and random inclusion of new features has led to the mass number of bugs hindering the software from reaching its full potential as a desktop contender.

Why not contribute to some of the KDE bug days instead of whining like an old granny? Random inclusion of new features? If you’re referring to something like the next-generation of Semantics in Nepomuk, improved multimedia integration through Phonon and a new way of looking at the desktop through Plasma as randomly included features, then you’re saying the KDE 4 developers are retards. Take a second to look at the number of bugs that were fixed for the KDE 4.3 release alone. I’ve seen charts on Planet KDE by developers now and then showing how the number of contributors and bug-fixers is only going up these days. KDE 4 has brought new life to the project and nothing else.

People care about the work they do on their computers, and having that at risk is certainly not in the interest of both companies or mainstream users. Perhaps this is the reason that KDE 4 has failed to make an impact on the major distributions and unseat the much-criticized GNOME desktop environment from being the most popular desktop?

Sure they care. But that didn’t stop openSUSE, commercially backed and community driven from releasing KDE 4.0.2 in the openSUSE 11 release with KDE 3 as the alternative, now did it? Patches and bugfixes were released and the only thing keeping it from being a long-term option was the lack of features. But backports were made to fix bugs, so it didn’t end up being messy before 11.1. When Debian comes out with their release of KDE 4 through Debian Squeeze a good while from now, I’d like to see you talk about KDE in the same way then.

From my observations of the software, the number of features and eye-candy is truly amazing. However, I find that in many cases that some of the features do not contribute to the usefulness of the software and are poorly implemented.

I’m not going to question what GNOME does or what they plan to do. That would just be plain fanboyism. So I’ll remind you of Nepomuk, Phonon and Plasma to name just a few of the pillars of KDE 4.  Some of the features don’t contribute to the usefulness of the software? KDE has always been highly integrated with its applications with Qt being the common link. The same can be said about KDE 4 as it matures. With every release of Qt 4.x we’re seeing enhancements being added to improve the KDE 4 experience, be it performance, bling or features. Why, with Qt 4.6 we’re going to get a glimpse of Kinetic and I’m sure KDE and Qt applications will take advantage of the potential of Kinetic in animation, soon enough.

The overall look of the system is nowhere as clean as it was in the earlier versions, and instead today it is a translucent mess. Also, much of the artwork is starting to take the look of KDE 3, a bit “cartooney,” with exceptionally large icons and images that look as if they were placed together in a matter of a few minutes, without much concern for whether or not the system would look better as a whole — that may be harsh, but I see the seeds of what could become a giant mess for the KDE project.

Wow, you must really hate KDE.  I wonder how much time you spend on GNOME-Look trying to get rid of the defaults. Exceptionally large icons? Have you ever heard of SVG being employed so extensively in a desktop environment? It’s what lets you make your icons and widgets however big you want, so really, stop crying. And please do think twice, when you call the wallpapers “cartooney”. I mean if you don’t like a couple of pretty flowers or some nice landscapes, it doesn’t mean they’re “cartooney”.  Nuno and the Oxygen team have done a fine job making KDE look fantastic and they deserve better than that.

Just by taking a look at the major KDE applications such as Konqueror, KMail, and KOffice, they are in not as mature as their mainstream counterparts, or for that matter the other competitors in the Linux arena.

I’m only going to agree with you on KOffice here. Building an office suite from scratch is as hard as building a desktop environment from scratch, and add to the fact you’re naturally going to have less personnel behind it. But Konqueror and KMail are very much part of the mainstream of KDE development and most of the bug fixes in the monthly point releases end up fixing bugs in KHTML rendering and KMail crashes. So they get a lot of attention and are far from ignored.

GNOME Office is not even close in comparison to OpenOffice or IBM’s Lotus Symphony, and the Epiphany web browser is not complete enough to compete with Firefox.

I don’t want to resort to bashing GNOME. But sounds like you’re just going against your own cause.

Surely distributions could work on implementing better software into their version of KDE 4. Applications seem to be a sticking point, and the fact that many major applications are rarely written specifically for the KDE desktop is not a good sign for the acceptance of the system by developers — a potential problem for them in the future.

Pardus is a fine example against this point. Take a look at how they’ve developed their own installer, own package management interface, own control panel and more tools of their own, all in Qt4 to complement their distribution. In my opinion, as KDE 4 matures further, they only stand to gain popularity.

So, how important is KDE 4? To the KDE project, it is absolutely crucial.

It is important, yes. But I don’t think there’s any cause for worry if you look at KDE’s work with the right mindset. Remember, Vista was criticized heavily and now with Windows 7 on the horizon, things seem rosy (or so people think) with Microsoft’s operating systems again. Naturally, the future of any project and the direction it takes is vital for a team of developers, no matter how big they may be.

I hate to say it, but it looks as if KDE 4 has become KDE’s “Vista.” The KDE reputation has been tainted with a divided community, mediocre products, and a seeming lack of solid direction.

You’ve just contradicted yourself, you know? Vista no matter, what people think of it, is the product of a commercial giant like Microsoft and obviously required a lot of manpower and investment to make it what it is. The fact that you compare KDE to Vista in that sense, is itself a compliment to KDE, considering the lack of such commercial backing and the considerably smaller size of the development crew behind it. I’ve already covered why clearly KDE 4 isn’t a mediocre product before and so to the fact that it clearly doesn’t lack solid direction.

I can only hope KDE becomes stable at some point in the near future, perhaps by choosing to make their “4.5″ release their stable release fit for refinement and development, much like with KDE 3.5. Perhaps creating that stable environment for people to improve upon could lead to the creation of a new, thriving community, one just as influential as the one when KDE 3.5 was around. Otherwise, they may lose the market they have fought so hard to gain.

KDE 4 hardly has anything left to prove, and you only have to be a part of the current KDE community to know that there is only a small section of users, who depending on the lifecycle of the distribution they use, are waiting a little longer with KDE 3.5 before plunging into the now mainstream KDE 4. They’re just playing it safe, which is fine if it suits them.

I must conclude by emphasizing that I have no disrespect intended to the author of that blog post, I just feel that some of the criticism KDE has received is unwarranted and out of line.

Filed under: Linux , KDE 4

Speed up YouTube, Facebook and more Flash Videos in your Browser

I just had my internet connection bumped from 256K to 512K with unlimited monthly bandwidth and I’ve started tinkering around to squeeze every bit of juice out of it. Now bandwidth these days isn’t cheap so you’ve got to compromise on speed significantly if you want to remain with unlimited bandwidth. That said, I only had to pay a small one-time fee to get the bump from my ISP.

One of the first things I did was to check my new download speed. With about 60 kB/s it seemed alright and I began to wonder how close I was to streaming YouTube videos. Turns out I was still some way off. Intermittent lags for buffering were still present and somehow there didn’t seem to be anything much different.

So I tried tweaking Opera 10 (my primary browser) to increase the number of connections via “about:config”. Enter “about:config” without quotes in your address bar and press enter. Once you’re there, enter connections in the quick find box. Under the Performance box that shows up there is a field titled “Max Connections Server”. Change it to 32 or 64 and you should see some difference in browsing. That’s of course, if you’re using Opera. For Firefox users, I’d recommend trying a guide like this one that is based on some old Firefox tweaks right from the early days of the browser.

Now that you’ve got your browser open to more connections its time to install a small application to take advantage of your net connection – SpeedBit Video Accelerator. SVA, as I’ll refer to it in the rest of the post, is available for Windows for free with the option of premium features via a commercial version. It’s also available on the Mac, but on a 15-day trial after which its commercial, sadly. Assuming your on Windows you’d want to go for the Free version before considering the commecial one which offers support for HD videos above 200 KBps. The free version is fine if you just want to benefit from YouTube, Metacafe, Facebook and other sites with Flash video.

SVA is very simple to use. Just download the setup (around 4 MB) from this page and install it. Once you’re done it should initialize on its own after the setup or you can click on the newly created shortcut on your desktop or Start Menu. Try loading a video on YouTube and see if the “Now Accelerating” notification pops up near your taskbar. That should indicate that SVA is trying to perform its tricks.

If you’re satisfied with the improvement and want to keep using this software, then might I suggest making a small change in the settings. Right click the system tray icon and click on Settings. Uncheck the second option under General Settings that says “Show Now Accelerating message”. That should let you run your YouTube videos without any annoying pop-up notification to come in your way. If you want to disable viewing the system tray icon as well you can do that by checking the third option under General Settings to “Hide Tray Icon”.

What SVA basically does is it allows multiple connections for buffering the video and gives it a higher priority, resulting in faster streaming. Also you might notice, that just as you might come to the point where you have to start buffering again, SVA gives you a bit of a boost and ensures continuity of the video. This was true even on my previous 256K connection but somehow there was still intermittent lag for buffering. With my 512K connection however, I can finally get streaming YouTube videos with maybe one moment of lag at the beginning of the video, at which point I pause and give the buffering process a head start.

In the background of this post, I’m also giving another old SpeedBit product, Download Accelerator Plus a try by downloading the latest version of VLC. It seems to be hitting 60 KB/s consistently which is great. I’m not sure if I’ll stick to it. It’s been more than three years since I last used it and it seems fine right now.

Anyway, I hope you benefit from SVA and enhance your video browsing experience. Just remember though, the faster connection you have, the more you’re likely to gain from it. Until my next post then, have a good weekend.

Filed under: Windows , Facebook, Firefox, Flash, Opera, YouTube

Minimalism with my Nokia E51: Why I don’t need an iPhone or BlackBerry

So this is my first non Linux-related post on this blog. I depend heavily on my mobile phone for productivity, time management and web connectivity. For me talking on the phone is just an alternative use of the device itself although over time that could probably change.

One of many things I’ve learned from Linux is adopting minimalism. A simple approach to getting work done. Minimalism in interfaces is always important when it comes to reaching out to the user, be it on the desktop or the handheld. GNOME offers a minimalistic approach to things and that is one of the reasons why Ubuntu is quite a popular Linux distribution. Some users I understand, state Ubuntu’s simplicity as one of the factors that won them over.

Drifting back to handhelds, I’ve applied minimalism to the way I use my phone and I’ve realized that its about as feature-rich as something like say the Blackberry, when it comes to meeting my needs. I’m not suggesting my requirements are the same as everyone’s, no. But I happen to own a Nokia E51 and I think that it is reasonably at par with the iPhone and the Blackberry with the addition of a few third party applications, in providing me with a productive and enjoyable mobile experience.

So I’ll just go over the features I require and how my good old E51 meets them quite effectively.

Camera - Was never a priority at the time of purchase, so it didn’t bother me that there was no flash along with it. The BlackBerry, as I recall offered a 1.3MP camera more than a year ago, and now its just bumped up to 2.0MP. Which is hardly spectacular. So I just lack a built-in camera flash then. No biggie.

Media Player - Nokia provides its own Music Player and Real Player for my basic multimedia needs. It does fine for basic mp3 playback and video codecs for .avi and others. The screen factor is ultimately a personal choice so my 320×240 suits me just fine.

Instant Messaging – This is where the Symbian platform, more than Nokia itself, comes in. Nimbuzz manages my Facebook, Skype, Yahoo, GTalk and MSN protocol usage. From what I’ve seen the BlackBerry doesn’t manage the former two and both the Berry and the iPhone can manage it with 3rd party applications. So that’s pretty much the same with me.

Web Browsing – Nokia’s default browser is alright. I prefer Opera Mini though, the killer feature for me is simply hotkey support to enable me to navigate faster. With Opera Mini 5 in beta phase  development at the moment, a quick spin of this latest development version showed that there is promise in this release. If you do give it a try and you happen to use Opera on your desktop, you’ll be more than happy to see the direction they’re taking with the mobile browser.

Email – This is an interesting one. Now I’m not a businessman nor am I currently employed. As a student, my email requirement is simple – Gmail via IMAP.  Basically, I need to be able to do the basics – reading, sending, deleting, etc so it doesn’t seem like a mammoth task. The Gmail mobile application fits the bill as it pretty much replicates Gmail’s functionality and even supports hotkeys which is a priority for me, be it on the mobile or PC.

Maps – Again, its another Google product, Google Maps, that does the job well enough. There are new features released now and then – Latitude, for instance, though basic navigation and directions seem to be covered and that itself is sufficient.

Personal Information Management (PIM) – This is a term that I used so often when reviewing KDE releases and now I’ll use it here to sum up the functionality of the calendar, organizer, notes and to-dos provided in the E51. Dedicated keys help immensely so even if you do have to make a few touches on the iPhone to access PIM tools, then the E51 isn’t too different. Functionality-wise, with the recent addition of Google Calendar and Mail support via Exchange using Google Sync, Symbian and the iPhone benefit from using web services again.

Office – QuickOffice is provided by default and a free upgrade to the latest version which supports Office 2007 file viewing is also available. Adobe Reader Lite is present for viewing PDF files so as far as viewing office files is concerned, the essentials are in place. A simple file manager is present as well for accessing documents so there’s no need for thumbnails or anything fancy.

Web 2.0 – Facebook Chat as I mentioned was covered by Nimbuzz. I update my Twitter feed via Opera Mini. There is a YouTube application for Symbian, and I can sometimes have videos linked via Opera Mini to stream in Real Player, which is neat. Mobbler is a fine Last.fm scrobbler and works well with Nokia’s Music Player.

Wi-Fi – This is the most important feature of the E51 in my opinion (again it was at the time of purchase). In fact I didn’t even have wireless access for a long time and it was only a few months ago that I setup a wireless home network (not much of a network if its just the phone and the PC but hey, I like using the terminology). So with wi-fi I can actually use most of the features I’ve described above to their full potential.

Ergonomics – This is one I am surprised to find myself writing about. I’ve realized that I end up doing a lot of things with one hand quickly, so an iPhone would be a bit different in this case. Using BlackBerry might not let me face that issue, but hey I don’t want to get one anyway. Other than that the E51 is pretty small and sleek and thanks to personal care it shines even a year after its purchase. A friend of mine was nervous holding it the first time I got it, the polish seemed to make it look delicate to him. A year on, he still glanced at it nervously once when I showed it to him.

Just looking at this iPhone feature list provided by Apple, there is little that my E51 can’t do:

• Compass – I don’t think I’d use it even if I owned an iPhone. With life moving so fast and commuting via train to college and stuff, there’s hardly any requirement for direction at the moment.
• Landscape Keyboard - Well, I don’t have QWERTY keys anyway, but my friends don’t realize when I’m chatting with them from Nimbuzz or the PC. It’s true.
• Accessibility - Not required personally, so nothing further on that one.
• Stocks - Again, something that I don’t use but if I had to there’s probably an application out there for Symbian or even Java that I could use.

Now at the end of it all, you’d question why on Earth would I go on in detail about my phone when I could just quietly buy an iPhone or something. Well, firstly, you’d have to gift it to me or win a lottery or go the old fashioned “beg-borrow-steal” way and produce one for me. In the event that you can’t do so, don’t fret. My E51 is rock solid, and at Rs. 10,000 (roughly $215 USD) it is well worth the money.

A strange observation I’ve made is that a lot of people don’t tend to utilize something like an iPhone or BlackBerry to its full potential. It’s strange indeed. There are several possibilities with the iPhone as far as 3rd party applications go, I believe. Symbian isn’t far behind, even on my phone, which is running v3 FP1. There is, you could argue, a slight aesthetic drawback to using multiple 3rd-party applications. You miss the feeling of uniformity in your applications. But this is minor and is likely to be present only when you use less native S60 applications. Undoubtedly, though I tend to receive a good speed gain, even at the cost of uniformity.

I think that should cover what I had in mind right now. Until my next experiment, see you when I see you.

Filed under: Mobile , BlackBerry, iPhone, Mobile, Nokia, Nokia E51, Symbian

Return Of The Illuminary

Well, I’m back.

You can stop groaning now. Seriously.

I don’t know why I keep shifting Blogging platforms. I always found some flaw or the other but I’m back to where it all began in 2006 here on WordPress.com.

“2006, you say? Where are all the posts then?”

Deleted, I’m afraid. Just my early followings of KDE 4.0 development and maybe a bit more. As of this rambling, the latest version of KDE is 4.3.1. And its one hell of a release I’ve got to say. Though I do think 4.4 will definitely beat the socks off the 4.3 series. Not much of a series though, when you end up with four ‘point’ bug-fix releases, but yeah you know what I mean. Usually by the fourth point release, you end up with a very stable final release in that series.

Speaking of which, Slackware has finally come out with a KDE 4 release and the old grand-daddy of Linux sports a shiny vanilla KDE 4.2.4. Really nice to see. A friend of mine downloaded the DVD for me, but his house is under renovation and he’s elsewhere right now, so I can’t really pick up the DVD from him for a while. I’ll wait though.

So what’s my current setup like right now? Arch Linux provides me with a solid bleeding edge base to my system. But above that, of all things… its GNOME. Now I’ve never hated GNOME, its just that I never appreciated its comparitive simplicity till now. I’ve also got it running Compiz Fusion quite smoothly which incidentally is smoother than KWin’s Effects in KDE 4.3.

Being busy with engineering it becomes difficult for me to test distros with fresh installs on my Linux partition. The last one I did was Kubuntu Karmic Alpha 6. It looks good so far, though I’m looking forward to the first Kubuntu LTS or Long Term Support Release which sports KDE 4. Now that should be quite something, with KDE 4.4, a feature rich Amarok 2.3+ and more stable KDE 4 ports for the good old applications. An excellent prospect.

I think I’ll leave it here for now. I might actually mix things up this time in future posts and write more about stuff outside Linux. Don’t be surprised if I document some stuff on Windows.  Yeah, castigate me all you want, my fellow Free Software fans. But that would contradict your own cause of pushing for ‘freedom’, which in my case, is just simply freedom of speech.

Oh and that hit counter saying 12k+ hits is actually a reflection of the old posts on this blog. Yes, people actually came here commented and got on with their lives. There were some really controversial posts that sparked of a decent racket here, especially on PCLinuxOS. Sometimes when you say what you think, without worrying about the reception you get… well, you get a very loud response. Its true.

So until whenever Linux fans and random readers, take it easy.

Filed under: Random