Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Okay -- a follow up on my previous post about KDE 4's apparent memory leak. Despite following the steps I listed I found I was still prone to creeping molasses. Here's what I ended up doing, which seems to have helped. First, uninstalled all of the widget libraries I could locate (relax -- I reinstalled them). Then I went in and basically re-installed KDE 4, using Synaptic. I'll note for the record I don't have a lot of love for the newest release of Adept; it's a sorry downgrade of the version that came with KDE 3. Next I installed OpenBox , which is an alternative window manager. Once completed, I had the option, when logging in, of starting my session with KDE / OpenBox. This substitutes the OpenBox window manager for Kwin , the default KDE window manager, while retaining the KDE look and feel. Compared to Kwin, OpenBox is a light weight . I confess, I can see no discernible difference between the two once I've logged in -- other than the fact tha...

For the last month or so my Kubuntu Linux box has been plagued by a particular problem: after running for a little while it would gradually become more and more unresponsive, to the point of unusability. I'm running Jaunty Jackalope on a pretty quick Intel chip, with 2 GB of memory. I've got a 256 MB NVidia video card to boot -- one previously purchased by youngest son (the gamer). I'd walk away from my desktop and find when I came back it was stuck in molasses. Clicking on a button would do .... nothing. I'd have to hold the mouse button down and wait.  And wait.  And wait . Usually I've found this sort of weirdness can be explained by overheating, but that didn't seem to be the case here. Couple that with the fact that I didn't see the problem when running another window manager and signs pointed to an issue with KDE 4. After suffering through this for a while, I discussed the situation with clever youngest son ( now a freshman computer science / inf...

Despite the vague sense of dis-ease that accompanied my Kubuntu upgrade from Hardy Heron (8.04) to Jaunty Jackalope (9.04), I had, after my earlier struggles with the death of Kaudiocreator and general crapping up of Adept, finally gotten to the point where the system was behaving more or less as I expected. All was right in the land of the penguin. Until 3 days ago. A while ago, a co-worker had turned me on to the virtues of CVS -- Concurrent Versions System, a revision control system . I now use it for a variety of things: several writing projects and websites. I know it sounds dorky, but I swear it's not. I went to update the local CVS repository on one of the several XP boxes scattered around the house. I use Tortoise CVS, where the sound of breaking glass means a bad thing has happened. It sounded like I fell through a freaking window. The CVS server on the upgraded Kubuntu box is now busted to all bloody hell. The files in the repository are all apparently safe and sound but...

Okay, after a week two weeks of dealing with the Jaunty Jackalope upgrade, I'm here to pronounce Audex a worthy successor to Kaudiocreator. I used to rip a lot of CDs, in the past primarily wih Kaudiocreator- (Kaudiocreater was an app that ran under KDE 3.5). After the upgrade to KDE 4.2 , it (along with several other apps) disappeared. I was aghast. I loved Kaudiocreator: it was, in my opinion, one of the best Linux rippers out there. Then it disappeared! I found Audex while googling at work ( during lunch! I swear! ) which promised to be more or less a replacement. I installed with a mixture of skepticism and apprehension, but quickly became a fan. Like Kaudiocreator, Audex has a clean simple mostly intuitive interface, which integrates well with KDE 4. It doesn't have its predecessor's annoying habit of failing to encode a CD if the tag editor doesn't like the genre/label pulled down by the CDDB lookup. One can set multiple encoding profiles using Ogg, MP3, Flac,...

Finally got up the nerve to upgrade my Kubuntu version of Ubuntu 8.04 ( Hardy Heron ) to 9.04 ( Jaunty Jackalope ). When 8.04/Hardy Heron launched, you could install it with either KDE 4 or KDE 3.5. At the time 8.04 was released, KDE 4 was (in the opinion of some) not quite ready for PrimeTime. I did an install of KDE 4 and decided to go back to 3.5. Since then, I've put off doing any upgrades. When Jaunty Jackalope was released, I read the reviews and didn't see anything that made it an extremely compelling upgrade: faster booting (I never thought it was all that slow), a new packages manager (I liked Adept), and other improvements that didn't seem all that compelling. Still, my curiosity got the best of me. At last I mustered my courage. If you are using Ubuntu or one of its derivatives you know this: you pretty much need to have broadband to take advantage of the myriad package management features. Now that that fact is out of the way... Upgrading is fairly simply, a...

The latest Linux Ubuntu release from Canonical, 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) , is now loosed on the internets. I'm running Kubuntu (KDE) 8.04 (Hardy Heron) right now on my main desktop computer and love it. I'm trying to decide: upgrade? The Jackalope promises faster boot times, a new package management system, an updated kernel, and KDE 4. The upgrade will probably take an hour and be relatively painless, unlike the agony soon to be experienced by all those poor chumps out there waiting to upgrade Windows 7 beta to the Release Candidate. Decisions, decisions. If none of this makes a lick of sense, don't worry: tomorrow I'll be writing about my garden.