I find the product to be fairly robust and the developer has been pretty darned responsive - I had enough issues with 11.04 that I went back to Debian, but I digress;-)
synaptic is still my go-to gooey package manager. Functionally I don't think synaptic is any better than muon and I'm not sure whether it's my own prejudices or the GUI really could use a little help, but I find muon a bit more difficult to use than synaptic. IMO GUI design is an art form anyway - and not a skill that all developers possess;-)
I have no problem running GTK+ apps in KDE but know a few people who do - I've never been one of those "pure KDE" people.
I think muon's a great effort - and kudos to the developer, who's pretty quick to answer questions.
I have a problem with cloud sites that advertise encryption simply because you don't have control of the key - or of who has it. There's no doubt in my mind that all of these services can decrypt your files for you if you lose your key.
I personally just encrypt my own stuff and stick it in a folder in my gmail account.
I prefer people with a bit stronger moral compass, myself. People who believe the end justifies the means brought us among other things, the Patriot Act and waterboarding. IM frequently less than HO if you do a bad thing for a good reason you're still doing a bad thing.
Don't know anyone else who's had this problem but on the 64-bit upgrade X started throwing errors about a missing session - then you clicked "okay" and KDE started normally.
Solution was in this thread - all I had to do was select KDE as a session once.
Also, my panel lost transparency although compositing was enabled. Changing the panel theme and then changing it back solved that.
On the 32-bit netbook which has just about all unnecessary stuff turned off including akonadi KDE's memory footprint went from ~180mb to ~170mb at idle. I use compiz instead of kwin on both machines, though.
I got hit by this yesterday. Friend of mine picked up some malware on his PC that posted to his wall and sent messages to everybody on his friends list with a link to Yet More Malware. Since I was on his friends list FB forced me to change my password and certify that I'd changed my email password and scanned my PC for viruses - I only access FB with a Linux box but scanned it anyway just for fun;-)
All was good until I got to the facial recognition thing. They sent me pictures of a buncha people I'd never seen - since you can tag any photo with any name I got three pictures of people I'd never seen before - at least they'll let you opt out and do CAPTCHA as the facial recognition thing was an epic fail for me.
IME compiz is more stable, more configurable and has a smaller memory footprint than kwin plus I get to use my favorite emerald theme.
I was a diehard GNOME user for years and KDE hasn't got it completely right yet - for instance I think kate is just awful and prefer gedit for a gooey text editor. I've tried learning to like kate but so far haven't been successful.
But - I do like that KDE seems to have the integration that GNOME lacks for the most part.
Buying 1,000 desktops should give you a lot of leverage.
In my experience buying 1,000 desktops gives you *no* leverage with the top three hardware vendors.
I just bought a million bucks worth of machines from Dell a few months ago. Dell's annual sales for the year ending January 2010 was 52.9 billion dollars, so my little million-dollar purchase was less than 0.00002% of their annual sales.
...and was actually discussing the switch from Windows to Linux with couple friends of mine from the IA shop. I'm in charge of desktop PC support for this 3,300-user agency.
I'd like to preface things by saying that I use Linux exclusively at home and have for several years. No dual boot, no wine and no running Windows in a VM. I could do my whole job from within Linux if Firefox supported reading encrypted mail in Outlook Web Access and if there was something available for Linux that'd allow me to read Visio drawings in their native format.
Software costs are inconsequential so we'll ignore that argument for the time being. The biggest expense in an IT budget isn't software or hardware, it's people - and although things would settle down after a year or two the cost of migration is the showstopper here, not the cost of sustainment.
I've heard different stories about what caused the USB ban but for me the short version is that somewhere in DoD some sysadmin should have been fired. I can't say for sure what happened but at least two Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) policies were violated - autorun wasn't disabled on the workstations and apparently workstation virus scanners weren't configured properly, so to minimize the threat DoD bans USB storage devices rather than fire the nitwit who wasn't doing his job.
Windows as a vector? Out of 3,300 users we had eight (yes, eight) security incidents in the last twelve months where a PC was infected by a hostile application - the reason I know this is I had to put that damn metric in a Powerpoint slide recently. Eight out of better than three thousand is a pretty good average, but the PCs still run like crap;-)
They've authorized turning USB storage back on, but only for approved devices that will be encrypted and centrally managed - and USB storage will be enabled by device rather than by user. Unauthorized devices still won't work. We've decided that since folks have been working without thumb drives for two years we're gonna continue to let them work that way - we've got the infrastructure in place to authorize thumb drives by hardware signature but we don't plan to issue any to end users at this point.
DoD information security policies aren't written by Microsoft - Microsoft wouldn't hire anybody that stupid. Case in point - DISA mandates that LAN and WLAN interfaces on a machine can't be active at the same time but outside of creating separate hardware profiles for wired and wireless Windows doesn't support this configuration - and simply disabling network bridging doesn't satisfy the requirement. If you ask DISA how to implement this requirement they can't tell you. I can tell you there's a neat little application called Wireless AutoSwitch that'll do the job and it's dirt cheap, though.
Did a bit of math here and at 36-bit color a raw image would be a bit more than 535mb.
I don't think the technology is available yet to process an image that large into a jpeg or copy a raw image to a storage device quickly enough to use this in most camera applications - and definitely not in your point and shoot;-)
Re:not quite yet for kubuntu...
on
KDE 4.5 Released
·
· Score: 1
Yeah - my bad. I had beta ppa enabled on both machines but backports was only enabled on the 64-bit box.
I think I'm the typical techy user. During the day I'll use xterm , open office, firefox and gxine. And maybe one or 2 other apps. Can someone explain to me why I need a huge resource hungry window manager, sorry - desktop enviroment - like KDE running as my machine? This is a genuine question, not an anti KDE troll. I simply don't get it.
I made the switch from GNOME to KDE about a year ago and had the same question but managed to answer it for myself.
On my 32-bit netbook I've slimmed KDE down considerably and my machine uses ~180mb of RAM at idle. That's about 30mb more than LXDE or XFCE and I have desktop effects enabled. I use compiz instead of kwin because of its smaller footprint and increased functionality - so my netbook has my favorite emerald wallpaper and a proper desktop cube - and still uses only ~180mb of memory. For me the increased functionality is well worth the additional 30mb of RAM or so that KDE uses and to be honest this thing never pages to disk anyway - so all it costs me is a couple extra seconds booting the machine.
I'm running KDE 4.5 RC2 on the netbook and just upgraded my 64-bit desktop to KDE 4.5 final.
I work for an agency under Department of Defense. We just received about $300k worth of fake Cisco stuff. Fortunately the problem was discovered before my podmate certified the vendor's invoice.
Vendor didn't get paid and contracting is still working the issue.
...I can't bring myself to believe that you have 15 years of experience in the IT industry and don't know the real value of these "certificates". They exist solely to help HR tick off the appropriate box on an application.
Not entirely. If everything else is equal the guy with the cert gets the job. I understand that all the cert does is show you can attend a boot camp but it does bring a measurable skill set with it. For instance if you've got an MS Exchange cert and I'm looking for an Exchange administrator the cert will definitely help you get the job.
However, if you put yourself out there as a certified Exchange admin and you can't do the job I'd be considerably more inclined to fire you than try to train you.
I still put my MCSE (even though it's an NT 4.0 MCSE), MCP+I and A+ on resumes mainly because it gets my resume past the first cut - which in my industry is done by a machine.
...we showed up with a pair of satellite dishes but all our network connections are wired. Additionally, we didn't feel we could or should rely on local ISPs for communications since we need those communications to be reliable and secure and sending a buncha people down there with no way to talk across the pond to home station didn't seem like the smartest move I've heard of.
So now the ISPs want the NGOs to shut off all the expensive hardware folks shipped down there and use local resources?
In the interest of full disclosure we do work for a GO, just not the one in Haiti.
OK, so you're managing the risk by disabling all functionality - and how long did it take you to set that up?
Not long. The switch ports just get put in learning mode for a day and then got locked down - the USB storage restriction is a simple group policy object which could be reversed in less than a minute if we felt the need.
People learn fairly quickly to use the network to move files rather than using a thumb drive and there's really no business requirement to allow untrusted storage devices inside the security enclave.
When my better-than-80-year old mother-in-law's hard drive died for the second time we got her an iMac. She gets her mail, surfs the web and doesn't call me for support at all.
That Access database could be changed to use linked tables. The back-end could be free open source software (MySQL or other). This is a very reliable setup.
I've never seen an Access database with that many users using Access tables that didn't crash and burn on a regular basis.
True there isn't a good front-end replacement. Something like that is too much headache to work on for free.
One reason why I'm trying to pitch the whole Access thing and move it to SQL is there is no good frontend replacement - when I get done with the whole project hopefully I can remove MS Access from the desktop load - at least that's my goal. The application costs more to support than it brings to the table.
Out of a bit better than 3,100 users last month I had eight (yes, eight) IA incidents and only six of them were virus infections. USB storage is disabled by group policy and network port security keeps someone from jacking in an untrusted system.
Well, that's an oversimplification - you could clone the MAC address of a trusted system and jack in but you'd only be able to plug into the jack assigned to *that* machine.
Risk management wouldn't mean I got to open the firewalls and shut off the virus scanners - that'd be the same as leaving the bank vault open because nobody in town owned a gun. Defense in depth would still be required.
I run Linux excusively at home but work in a Windows shop - at home I still run a virus scanner just to make sure I don't become a vector for malware targeting Windows machines.
So - at least from my perspective the risk management overhead really doesn't change much.
...software costs are so low that for me they're not even on the radar. For me the biggest factor in TCO is people costs, not hardware or software.
In the quantities I procure what used to be called the MS Desktop Pro license (a copy of the current desktop OS, copy of the current version of MS Office Professional Plus and Windows server and Exchange CALs) costs me ~$200 per year per workstation - chickenfeed, really.
A call to the helpdesk costs about $25, a deskside visit costs about twice that but since it isn't my field I'm not gonna address application development costs, even if I did think our developers were smart enough to code in something other than Windows. Hell, they can't even figure out how to make existing applications compatible with IE8.
But I digress - support types generally have little love for software developers and vice versa;-)
Anyway, over the long term open source software would probably save money but in the short- and medium-term (let's say three years) migration costs would be ridiculously expensive - sticker shock alone keeps it out of the budget.
Part of the up side is I'd be able to extend PC and server lifecycles for a year or so since Linux generally requires less hardware than Windows, but as mentioned earlier OO Spreadsheet is not an acceptable replacement for MS Excel for power users and there is no direct migration between MS Access and OO Database - the only way you can get them to play nice with each other is through an ODBC connector.
I've got one 500-user Access database (yeah, the person who thought that up should be fired but it happened before I hired in) that simply can't be migrated to OO - right now I'm trying to get it migrated to either SQL or Oracle.
Slashdot Mirror
I find the product to be fairly robust and the developer has been pretty darned responsive - I had enough issues with 11.04 that I went back to Debian, but I digress ;-)
synaptic is still my go-to gooey package manager. Functionally I don't think synaptic is any better than muon and I'm not sure whether it's my own prejudices or the GUI really could use a little help, but I find muon a bit more difficult to use than synaptic. IMO GUI design is an art form anyway - and not a skill that all developers possess ;-)
I have no problem running GTK+ apps in KDE but know a few people who do - I've never been one of those "pure KDE" people.
I think muon's a great effort - and kudos to the developer, who's pretty quick to answer questions.
I have a problem with cloud sites that advertise encryption simply because you don't have control of the key - or of who has it. There's no doubt in my mind that all of these services can decrypt your files for you if you lose your key.
I personally just encrypt my own stuff and stick it in a folder in my gmail account.
No, thanks.
I prefer people with a bit stronger moral compass, myself. People who believe the end justifies the means brought us among other things, the Patriot Act and waterboarding. IM frequently less than HO if you do a bad thing for a good reason you're still doing a bad thing.
write test on the same netbook:
wizard@wizard-netbook:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/output.img bs=8k count=256k && sudo rm /tmp/output.img
262144+0 records in
262144+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 19.916 s, 108 MB/s
wizard@wizard-netbook:~$
...30MB/s is about the fastest I've seen from a laptop drive, and that was when it was completely new so every write was a sequential write.
Then you'll like this. This was just run off my Atom 270 netbook (HP Mini 110c) with a 500gb Samsung drive and Kubuntu 10.10 -
wizard@wizard-netbook:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda /dev/sda: ;-)
[sudo] password for wizard:
Timing cached reads: 1228 MB in 2.00 seconds = 613.74 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 312 MB in 3.01 seconds = 103.70 MB/sec
wizard@wizard-netbook:~$
Don't know anyone else who's had this problem but on the 64-bit upgrade X started throwing errors about a missing session - then you clicked "okay" and KDE started normally.
Solution was in this thread - all I had to do was select KDE as a session once.
http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=91936
Also, my panel lost transparency although compositing was enabled. Changing the panel theme and then changing it back solved that.
On the 32-bit netbook which has just about all unnecessary stuff turned off including akonadi KDE's memory footprint went from ~180mb to ~170mb at idle. I use compiz instead of kwin on both machines, though.
I got hit by this yesterday. Friend of mine picked up some malware on his PC that posted to his wall and sent messages to everybody on his friends list with a link to Yet More Malware. Since I was on his friends list FB forced me to change my password and certify that I'd changed my email password and scanned my PC for viruses - I only access FB with a Linux box but scanned it anyway just for fun ;-)
All was good until I got to the facial recognition thing. They sent me pictures of a buncha people I'd never seen - since you can tag any photo with any name I got three pictures of people I'd never seen before - at least they'll let you opt out and do CAPTCHA as the facial recognition thing was an epic fail for me.
Launch nuclear deterrent!
-Operation denied, are you root?
SUDO LAUNCH NUCLEAR DETERRENT!!!
-SUDO: command not found
help SUDO
-bash: help: no help topics match `SUDO'. Try `help help' or `man -k SUDO' or `info SUDO'.
help help
-help: help [-dms] [pattern ...]
Display information about builtin commands.
Displays brief summaries of builtin commands. If PATTERN is specified, gives detai...
Then all you see is a blinding white flash. ;-)
compiz works just fine under KDE4.
IME compiz is more stable, more configurable and has a smaller memory footprint than kwin plus I get to use my favorite emerald theme.
I was a diehard GNOME user for years and KDE hasn't got it completely right yet - for instance I think kate is just awful and prefer gedit for a gooey text editor. I've tried learning to like kate but so far haven't been successful.
But - I do like that KDE seems to have the integration that GNOME lacks for the most part.
Buying 1,000 desktops should give you a lot of leverage.
In my experience buying 1,000 desktops gives you *no* leverage with the top three hardware vendors.
I just bought a million bucks worth of machines from Dell a few months ago. Dell's annual sales for the year ending January 2010 was 52.9 billion dollars, so my little million-dollar purchase was less than 0.00002% of their annual sales.
That's not a whole lot of leverage.
sorry, couldn't resist. ;-)
...and was actually discussing the switch from Windows to Linux with couple friends of mine from the IA shop. I'm in charge of desktop PC support for this 3,300-user agency.
I'd like to preface things by saying that I use Linux exclusively at home and have for several years. No dual boot, no wine and no running Windows in a VM. I could do my whole job from within Linux if Firefox supported reading encrypted mail in Outlook Web Access and if there was something available for Linux that'd allow me to read Visio drawings in their native format.
Software costs are inconsequential so we'll ignore that argument for the time being. The biggest expense in an IT budget isn't software or hardware, it's people - and although things would settle down after a year or two the cost of migration is the showstopper here, not the cost of sustainment.
I've heard different stories about what caused the USB ban but for me the short version is that somewhere in DoD some sysadmin should have been fired. I can't say for sure what happened but at least two Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) policies were violated - autorun wasn't disabled on the workstations and apparently workstation virus scanners weren't configured properly, so to minimize the threat DoD bans USB storage devices rather than fire the nitwit who wasn't doing his job.
Windows as a vector? Out of 3,300 users we had eight (yes, eight) security incidents in the last twelve months where a PC was infected by a hostile application - the reason I know this is I had to put that damn metric in a Powerpoint slide recently. Eight out of better than three thousand is a pretty good average, but the PCs still run like crap ;-)
They've authorized turning USB storage back on, but only for approved devices that will be encrypted and centrally managed - and USB storage will be enabled by device rather than by user. Unauthorized devices still won't work. We've decided that since folks have been working without thumb drives for two years we're gonna continue to let them work that way - we've got the infrastructure in place to authorize thumb drives by hardware signature but we don't plan to issue any to end users at this point.
DoD information security policies aren't written by Microsoft - Microsoft wouldn't hire anybody that stupid. Case in point - DISA mandates that LAN and WLAN interfaces on a machine can't be active at the same time but outside of creating separate hardware profiles for wired and wireless Windows doesn't support this configuration - and simply disabling network bridging doesn't satisfy the requirement. If you ask DISA how to implement this requirement they can't tell you. I can tell you there's a neat little application called Wireless AutoSwitch that'll do the job and it's dirt cheap, though.
But I digress.
I stand corrected. Thanks for keeping me straight ;-)
Did a bit of math here and at 36-bit color a raw image would be a bit more than 535mb.
I don't think the technology is available yet to process an image that large into a jpeg or copy a raw image to a storage device quickly enough to use this in most camera applications - and definitely not in your point and shoot ;-)
Yeah - my bad. I had beta ppa enabled on both machines but backports was only enabled on the 64-bit box.
cheers -
I think I'm the typical techy user. During the day I'll use xterm , open office, firefox and gxine. And maybe one or 2 other apps.
Can someone explain to me why I need a huge resource hungry window manager, sorry - desktop enviroment - like KDE running as my machine? This is a genuine question, not an anti KDE troll. I simply don't get it.
I made the switch from GNOME to KDE about a year ago and had the same question but managed to answer it for myself.
On my 32-bit netbook I've slimmed KDE down considerably and my machine uses ~180mb of RAM at idle. That's about 30mb more than LXDE or XFCE and I have desktop effects enabled. I use compiz instead of kwin because of its smaller footprint and increased functionality - so my netbook has my favorite emerald wallpaper and a proper desktop cube - and still uses only ~180mb of memory. For me the increased functionality is well worth the additional 30mb of RAM or so that KDE uses and to be honest this thing never pages to disk anyway - so all it costs me is a couple extra seconds booting the machine.
I'm running KDE 4.5 RC2 on the netbook and just upgraded my 64-bit desktop to KDE 4.5 final.
The 64-bit binaries have been released, the 32-bit haven't yet - at least not on the beta ppa.
I upgraded my 64-bit machine over FreeNX this morning and it appears to work fine.
Yeah, using a zero-fill utility isn't low level formatting.
The meaning hasn't changed, the term is used incorrectly - especially when referring to flash media, which IIRC doesn't have a stepper motor ;-)
I work for an agency under Department of Defense. We just received about $300k worth of fake Cisco stuff. Fortunately the problem was discovered before my podmate certified the vendor's invoice.
Vendor didn't get paid and contracting is still working the issue.
Not entirely. If everything else is equal the guy with the cert gets the job. I understand that all the cert does is show you can attend a boot camp but it does bring a measurable skill set with it. For instance if you've got an MS Exchange cert and I'm looking for an Exchange administrator the cert will definitely help you get the job.
However, if you put yourself out there as a certified Exchange admin and you can't do the job I'd be considerably more inclined to fire you than try to train you.
I still put my MCSE (even though it's an NT 4.0 MCSE), MCP+I and A+ on resumes mainly because it gets my resume past the first cut - which in my industry is done by a machine.
...we showed up with a pair of satellite dishes but all our network connections are wired. Additionally, we didn't feel we could or should rely on local ISPs for communications since we need those communications to be reliable and secure and sending a buncha people down there with no way to talk across the pond to home station didn't seem like the smartest move I've heard of.
So now the ISPs want the NGOs to shut off all the expensive hardware folks shipped down there and use local resources?
In the interest of full disclosure we do work for a GO, just not the one in Haiti.
OK, so you're managing the risk by disabling all functionality - and how long did it take you to set that up?
Not long. The switch ports just get put in learning mode for a day and then got locked down - the USB storage restriction is a simple group policy object which could be reversed in less than a minute if we felt the need.
People learn fairly quickly to use the network to move files rather than using a thumb drive and there's really no business requirement to allow untrusted storage devices inside the security enclave.
When my better-than-80-year old mother-in-law's hard drive died for the second time we got her an iMac. She gets her mail, surfs the web and doesn't call me for support at all.
That Access database could be changed to use linked tables. The back-end could be free open source software (MySQL or other). This is a very reliable setup.
I've never seen an Access database with that many users using Access tables that didn't crash and burn on a regular basis.
True there isn't a good front-end replacement. Something like that is too much headache to work on for free.
One reason why I'm trying to pitch the whole Access thing and move it to SQL is there is no good frontend replacement - when I get done with the whole project hopefully I can remove MS Access from the desktop load - at least that's my goal. The application costs more to support than it brings to the table.
Out of a bit better than 3,100 users last month I had eight (yes, eight) IA incidents and only six of them were virus infections. USB storage is disabled by group policy and network port security keeps someone from jacking in an untrusted system.
Well, that's an oversimplification - you could clone the MAC address of a trusted system and jack in but you'd only be able to plug into the jack assigned to *that* machine.
Risk management wouldn't mean I got to open the firewalls and shut off the virus scanners - that'd be the same as leaving the bank vault open because nobody in town owned a gun. Defense in depth would still be required.
I run Linux excusively at home but work in a Windows shop - at home I still run a virus scanner just to make sure I don't become a vector for malware targeting Windows machines.
So - at least from my perspective the risk management overhead really doesn't change much.
cheers -
...software costs are so low that for me they're not even on the radar. For me the biggest factor in TCO is people costs, not hardware or software.
In the quantities I procure what used to be called the MS Desktop Pro license (a copy of the current desktop OS, copy of the current version of MS Office Professional Plus and Windows server and Exchange CALs) costs me ~$200 per year per workstation - chickenfeed, really.
A call to the helpdesk costs about $25, a deskside visit costs about twice that but since it isn't my field I'm not gonna address application development costs, even if I did think our developers were smart enough to code in something other than Windows. Hell, they can't even figure out how to make existing applications compatible with IE8.
But I digress - support types generally have little love for software developers and vice versa ;-)
Anyway, over the long term open source software would probably save money but in the short- and medium-term (let's say three years) migration costs would be ridiculously expensive - sticker shock alone keeps it out of the budget.
Part of the up side is I'd be able to extend PC and server lifecycles for a year or so since Linux generally requires less hardware than Windows, but as mentioned earlier OO Spreadsheet is not an acceptable replacement for MS Excel for power users and there is no direct migration between MS Access and OO Database - the only way you can get them to play nice with each other is through an ODBC connector.
I've got one 500-user Access database (yeah, the person who thought that up should be fired but it happened before I hired in) that simply can't be migrated to OO - right now I'm trying to get it migrated to either SQL or Oracle.