Extension 437

Penguin Day in San Francisco

Penguin Day, which Marnie and I attended in March of this year, is coming to San Francisco.

How not to update Xandros Desktop

I chose Xandros Desktop 2.0, Open Circulation Edition as my Linux distribution to replace Windows XP because it is aimed at the non-technical user. That means that it is one of the distributions that I would recommend to a small nonprofit organization.

I like Xandros Desktop a lot. It is extremely easy to access Windows file and print shares. It supports dual monitors (I use a second monitor with my laptop), which is nice. It supports almost all the hardware on my laptop.

But it doesn't include all the software I wanted. I was after two packages in particular: KGPG and Kifi. KGPG is a graphic user interface to GPG, the Gnu Privacy Guard, which I use to interpret PGP signatures. Kifi is a graphic user interface to control wireless cards.

Xandros is a commercial distribution based on the free open source Debian. The way to install and upgrade software in Debian is with the package manager named apt. For example, if I want to install KGPG, I would enter at a command prompt: apt-get install kgpg. Because this package wasn't in the Xandros collection, I decided to add the general Debian package repositories to the source list for apt. That's where things got a little funny.

Upgrading my Xandrox installation (apt-get upgrade) from the new package list resulted in the custom Xandros implementation of KDE being overwritten by a new version of KDE (3.3). Lots of things changed and now my laptop is running the bastard child of Xandros and Debian. Kind of funny.

It's working OK for me, but I wouldn't recommend this experiment to anyone else.

When your mail disappears

If the prefs.js file in Mozilla becomes corrupted, all the program's settings may be lost. Including where all that nice email is located. One possible cause of corruption of this file: unexpected power loss. The solution is to restore from a backup prefs.js file. A backup is made each time Mozilla starts up...or shuts down, something like that. So the prefs.bak file may be of some use.

KDE Menu Edit no-no

This is the first post in a new category: "Linux switch". About a week ago I started using Linux instead of Windows. More on that later. This category is to drop things that I learn into. Maybe they'll end up in a TechSoup story later. Maybe not.

One learning for today: KDE comes with a menu editor that lets one rearrage items on the KDE menu (equivalent to the Windows Start button). Very nice. But be warned. If you delete a folder in the menu, it will disappear...along with any program shortcuts it contained. :-(

Update: Kappfinder is a utility that can look for applications that do not have a shortcut in the KDE menu, and allows one to add them back. Nice.