Well what can I say... I am amazed that this company managed to scoop second in the Linux Format Awards for hosting providers! Their service is absolutely terrible, they have a poorly set out automated cancellation system and take out the money they are supposed to be refunding on the day they confirm the cancellation! Then won't even tell me when they intend to refund the money for the account, for which they did absolutely nothing.
I am glad I cancelled this account, as with service like this I do not think that this would have been a productive business relationship. If anyone has any recommendations for reasonable hosting providers please let me know. I just want root and will either build a 2U box, or rent one. All I really require from the company is a reasonable price, good transit links and the ability to tell me the truth/do what they say they will. Is this really too much to ask?
It obviously is for 1&1.
I have been playing with the new media:/ kioslave in KDE 3.4, and once you get it working it is really cool! I took a shot of the konqueror window after it detected my old 128 MB memory stick, and an audio CD I inserted. It does take a little effort to get it working right now, I had to emerge hal, dbus and pmount (ebuild from
this bug). After rebuilding kdebase-kioslaves, starting hald and dbus and logging back in it worked like a charm.
We have also noticed a few possible issues with migration of older KDE profiles to 3.4 - the konqueror sidebar has become corrupted in some instances (kioslaves) showing the old devices kioslave without the new ones that replace it. Not sure if other people have had this problem or not.
Well after much messing about, and some pretty poor after sales service I have cancelled my root server order with 1&1. The rumours were true - different members of staff quote much different time scales from days to weeks, and frankly the person I spoke to on the phone was quite rude. I had already waited nearly two weeks and was led to believe they were able to deploy servers within a week when I first ordered.
So back to looking at dedicated server options with root, preferably using Gentoo Linux with reasonable bandwidth allowances in the UK... I am playing with the idea of building a 2U solution myself and colocating! I have made plenty of server systems already, just no rackmount systems yet. 1U seems pretty difficult, but 2U looks fairly simple. Whilst I am building it I will also get time to think about where I colocate too.
I have been testing KDE 3.4 on the amd64 platform since beta 1 was released, and started work several weeks ago on testing and keywording the split ebuilds shortly after rc1 was released. It has been a lot of work, with more than 300 ebuilds marked I think. Overall there have been very few issues with it, and I really do think it is a big improvement. I have included a screenshot I took a couple of days ago showing my KDE 3.4 rc1 desktop.
The only crasher I have discovered is kasteroids - it segfaults on any key press. I have made a patch that works for me, and have put it in our bugzilla and upstreams awaiting review. I have marked all kde-meta dependencies apart from kasteroids and kdegames-meta as ~amd64 in time for release day. Hopefully kasteroids will be ready soon after as it seems a fairly simple bug.
So please test out KDE 3.4 on amd64, give me some feedback and most important of all enjoy it! A big thanks goes out to Dan Armak too for all the work he has put into making the split ebuilds happen.
Well, I went to the Gentoo UK 2005 conference yesterday. I think in all there were somewhere between 35 to 40 attendees (although I admit to not performing a head count), and that included a good mix of developers and interested users. Unfortunately we got a little lost when we got into Manchester trying to find the venue and so missed the first talk on
manchesterwireless.net, but caught the rest of them.
I saw some interesting talks given by some of the other UK Gentoo developers. I was very interested in the talk given by Rob Holland (tigger^) on code auditing and automation, and his use of doxygen to accomplish this. The Flash Linux talk given by Gareth Bult of
Flash Linux was informative. I didn't necessarily agree with the choice of window manager, but it is a great way to give people a taste of Gentoo without the repartitioning. The possibility of creating custom flash linux environments for students for example, with all the tools and data they need would be very useful. I even ordered a 1 GB USB2 flash drive to play with when I got home.
Daniel Drake (dsd) gave an enlightening talk on his views of the kernel, why monolithic kernels are better and also a little about the user relations project he is involved in. Tom Martin (slarti) managed to impress the audience with a demonstration of zsh. Personally I wasn't that taken with tetris, but thought some of the other features such as context sensitive file completions, command argument completion and the menus for the completions were very useful. It was also great to see Tom make good use of
LaTeX Beamer - I use it myself for all my presentations and think it is very powerful.
It was great to meet (and almost meet) many of the developers and users at the conference. Unfortunately I had to rush off at the end, so couldn't stay around and chat more. With this, and FOSDEM two weeks ago, I have learnt a lot of new things about Gentoo and met lots of interesting people. It is alway nice to be able to put a few faces to names too.
Ordered a dedicated root server II from 1&1 last night, and was pretty excited to be getting a new server. Their site was pretty vague about how long it takes them to set up the server so I gave it a while. I phoned them up today and waited for over 15 minutes to talk to someone who was quite rude when he anwered! Apparently it takes five working days, although I fail to understand why they cannot be upfront and put this on their web site. He didn't even pause to think about it!
When I asked him if I received an email to notify me that the server had been set up he promptly replied no, and said I had to just keep checking my control panel randomly! I found this quite hard to swallow. They do have a 60 day money back guarantee, and from the poor start they got off to I may need it. I will remain patient and keep an open mind, but if they charge for the waiting time I will not be happy.
If I ever get the server it should be a positive step forward though. I intend to install Gentoo onto it once I get access of course. It is a P4 2.4 GHz I think, with 1 GB of RAM and an 80 GB hard drive. They also bundle 100 GB of transfer with that, but I fear at the price of poor customer service. Time will tell, but first impressions are not very good at all.
Got my copy of Linux Format (issue 65) in the post this morning. Looking through the Linux Format Awards section I saw that Gentoo had scooped the best distro award and the best support resource for the forums! I thought that was a pretty amazing result. It also did well in the best free software project of the year. There were also some other greats amongst the winners too such as Unreal Tournament 2004 (with native amd64 port) and nVidia for best hardware support - again great amd64 drivers!
After some pointers from tove to documentation
here I got gpg-agent set up and working. I have only tried using the Qt pinentry client so command line may still present some challenges - but it does seem to work well in the KDE environment. It should really help in completing the ~amd64 keywording of all those KDE split ebuilds! Some day they will all need stabilising too...
It is a very sad day for Europe today - I just read that the software patent directive was forced through as an A item today. I think that after all the objections made about this move by software developers, businesses and even several countries it shows me that democracy in Europe is all but dead. The European Parliament actually asked for the process to be restarted twice!
I feel very, very disappointed, and hold little hope of the directive being rejected by the European parliament in its second reading. I don't think any good will come of this for anyone but the large corporations.
I have been using the monolithic KDE 3.4 beta ebuilds for quite a while now, and really like them. For the stuff I use I haven't found any problems either. The time has come to make a start on keywording the new split KDE ebuilds though, as they are certainly the best direction to go in the long run. The main problem is that there are just so many of them! I got kde-base/kdebase-meta-3.4-rc1 and all of its dependencies done today, but it is very time consuming...
What can I say - FOSDEM was great! It was really good to meet up with some of the other developers from Gentoo, as well as listen to some of the amazing talks and buy a little merchandise. I have never managed to make it to a large conference before, so it was quite an experience being there.
I travelled down on the Eurostar with Louise, my fiancee. She had a nice enough time, despite not being very interested in computers. It was bitterly cold though, and I am afraid that Brussels is very expensive with little to see or do there. Luckily the conference had lots going off, and so more than compensated. I had quite a list of talks I wanted to go to anyway - starting with Richard Stallman's.
Overall the talks were very good. I especially enjoyed Alan Cox's talk about maintaining a stable kernel. He offered an amazingly cadid look into how he tries to maintain a stable kernel and some of the problems he faces. I also discovered some previously hidden features of KDevelop I had not seen before - as well as realising what a versatile programming environment it offers.
It was great to actually meet so many other developers in person, and we thoroughky enjoyed the developer meal on Saturday evening. I swapped GPG key signatures with quite a large number of the developers there - it will take me forever to sign and upload them all though. If anyone would like to see any of the photos I took then I have uploaded them to my
gallery - I will add more of the images as I get time to scan them in.
