Andy Kemp

Yesterday I went through the process of upgrading my blog from Subtext 1.9 to version 2.0. and after upgrading and after much persuading (I really had to have my arm twisted) I uploaded a new skin too that Si Philp has been working on.

Although I am running with the new skin it is still being developed so sometimes things might work and other times things might not! but the content is still there regardless!

In the mean time if there is anything wrong with the skin, or things you my think would be good to have on there please feel free to comment on the new skin.

Thanks

I've been running my blog on subtext for almost a year now. Well it has been almost 18 months but I scrubbed the DB and started a fresh and aimed it more at techie stuff.

Something I also looked at previously was Community Server There are several versions but the version I have gone for to use is Express: http://communityserver.com/products/express/

it does have some restrictions but I cannot see my community server getting heavily used just now any way!

the install was relatively painless and I have it running in the same database as my subtext blog.

The next question is, is what to put on it?

At present there is nothing on there but I hope to put something on there soon. it also has a Wiki so I could perhaps start putting more on my how to's and things on there....

The new community can be accessed at: http://cs.kemponline.co.uk.

Since I have been using open source on my personal laptop I found myself using CDBurnerXP more and more to burn my CD's and DVD's.

I was using the software that came pre-installed (Sonic) but I found that this neat tool was better, and didn't crash as much as Sonic did.

The software can be downloaded from: http://cdburnerxp.se and it is only a 3mb install file, so it is quite a small utility too.

The beauty of it is that you can create as well as burn ISO images, convert nrg and bin files and do much more. I would recommend going to the site and having a look for yourself and downloading it.

Recently I have discovered that its license even enable you to use it within your business.

I recently installed kubuntu 8.10 onto my laptop, I did have ubuntu running with the GNOME desktop however there was a new KDE desktop available KDE 4.1.3 (I think) and I have to say I did like the look of it to a certain extent. I liked the 3D cylinder affect that you get when you change from one desktop to another. with ubuntu GNOME and KDE 3 you got a cube effect which is pretty cool but the cylinder just finished it off.

The build I found so far hasn't been the most stable of operating systems but I do not know if that is because of the build or because of the end user (me) as I am very new to Linux.

When I first tried the to install the desktop effects known as compiz I hadn't configured my graphics card properly and it just crashed the system each time and I ended up re-installing it! It turns out that these effects only really work on certain makes of graphic cards. in my laptop I have an Nvidia card and it works (once you got the driver installed) and on the desktop I tried it on I had an ATI card in it.

I haven't tried it on a PC/Laptop with an integrated Intel card yet but I guess that will be something I will try soon.

The install of kubuntu is very very straight forward it can be done from a live cd that you can download here

The installation might be simple but then getting apps installed is another question! I finally have learnt the basic commands such as sudo apt-get install etc.... and I have learnt how to update the system.

a lot of applications are jsut a simple command line install such as Thunderbird and Mozilla:

sudo apt-get install thunderbird and sudo apt-get install firefox

however I found in order to run these I needed to run a sudo apt-get update to download a list of packages available to install. Once you have that you can also run the sudo apt-get upgrade command and that will update the system from the downloaded updates.

As much as I do like this desktop I think that KDE 3 does run a bit more smoothly than KDE 4 and the menu's on KDE 3 are a bit more friendly I think.

But I have to say I am enjoying playing around with it.

I have also managed to get connected to my companies VPN using the Cisco client.

Watch out for some more posts on it soon :)