Skype has hit 100 million users and has now added new services to it’s product. I figured this would be a good time to recommend the Linux version of Skype.

Fortunately for Skype they released several Linux versions (for Suse, Debian, Mandrake, Fedora Core, and two binary packages) publicly. If they hadn’t they would have seen competition from an open-source copycat group in no time so it was just good business sense that they developed their product for us penguins.

If you’re not familiar, Skype is a program that turns your computer into a phone. It costs money to call out of the internet and to a real phone, but it’s free to call other Skype users (because it doesn’t go through any Skype server). Since Linux is a network powerhouse it’s only fitting to do one more task with your Linux system.

You can install Skype (and start making free calls) with the following packages:

Skype for Mandrake
Skype for Debian, Ubuntu, Xandros, Mepis
Skype for Fedora Core 3
Skype for Suse 9 and newer
Dynamic Binary
Dynamic Binary with QT

The Consumer Linux Blog asks whether a group of programmers can be trusted to sell Linux well. The temptation is for those who understand things like command line interfaces and compiling to accept those as fundamental parts of a Linux user’s experience. It seems like this kind of thinking could keep Linux as a minority OS forever.

For Linux to grow it’ll need to become approachable and friendly. Luckily, it’s well on it’s way.

As of KDE 3.4 there’s a new feature where windows can have transparency and shadows. It’s way to computing-heavy for my laptop but it was cool enough to try out for a few minutes just the same. I’ll post an article in a while about how to get the transparency extension working with KDE 3.4.

The reason KDE can do this transparency stuff is because of great new advancements in the X11 renderer. X11 can make shadows and make things transparent but can also mutate windows and do all of the wacky visual effects that OS X is proud of.

Here are some screenshots that display the power of the new X11. These are using some still-experimental X11 programs, but we’re bound to get the full extent of this technology soon.

Part of creating this website meant that I needed to understand more about writing, specifically writing on websites. A tool that I’ve been using daily since I discovered it is Akregator.

RSS feeds are useful for checking Slashdot, your friend’s personal website, Gmail, and now a host of news services. While some new browsers (like Firefox) are beginning to offer RSS support, it can be handy to use a tool that understands how to organize and combine all your feeds into one.

Akregator is an aggregator for Linux. It’s specifically designed for KDE (it’s part of the kde package as of 3.4.0) but it’ll run in any desktop environment (as long as the required KDE dependencies are installed). It’s not perfect yet but it’s a great tool for reading your favorite syndication feeds - like the one here at Distro Jockey.

If you want to get started with RSS or Akregator, hook yourself up to the Distro Jockey RSS Feed.

I’ve been writing on this website for two months now and I’ve had a ball. I’ve had the chance to start getting serious about using Linux and writing about the stuff I run into. I’m becoming a better writer and I’m learning to enjoy the research much quicker than I imagined.

I started out this website with the single idea that Linux is Hard and not many websites were willing to acknowledge that fact. I figured I’d stand out from the crowd because of some radical new perspective. Well, I was silly to imagine that I was the first to talk about how difficult Linux is (everyone knows it’s hard). Also, after two months I’m showing up well under the terms Gentoo, Xauthority, and Suse 9.3 - but the phrase (even in quotes) “Linux is Hard” shows me nowhere to be seen.

So this website is now “Distro Jockey”. Nothing has changed except the name is now much more indicative of the website content. This site is all about trying new things with GNU/Linux and having lots of fun with it. The fact is that many thousands of people have worked hard to create a lot of software and nobody has tried it all yet.

So as I change my tune I invite you all, once again, to get your hands dirty and install some new OS. Yes, Linux is hard, but there’s nothing to lose.

xmms-kde is an applet that runs in the KDE taskbar and allows you to control XMMS through some small buttons and volume sliders. It’s handy if you want to run XMMS out of sight but have a need to change the volume or switch songs often.

If you run XMMS and KDE regularly, xmms-kde is essential.

Xanadb.com has a short post about trying out Ubuntu’s LiveCD on a 7-year-old Compaq laptop. Even three-year-old Compaqs are good for little more than paperweights so I was surprised to read that Ubuntu worked perfectly with all the hardware and even ran the PCMCIA wireless card (NetGear MA401) without a problem.

Score one more for Ubuntu being the distribution of choice for beginners. I feel so out of the loop that I don’t have it installed on anything yet.

In case you haven’t heard there’s a new Firefox for Linux released. This is, like the last two, largely a security patch that applies to Firefox and Mozilla (especially the parts of Mozilla that were introduced from Firefox).

You can find it at GetFirefox if you’re currently using a Linux browser, otherwise you can find it here:
All Platforms Firefox Release

There are several ways to run Dreamweaver on Linux: you can use Wine and run the executable directly (or run it in CrossOver Office), use a virtualization tool like VMWare or the Xen Hypervisor to run Windows on Linux, or try to hack the Mac OSX release to work on your Yellow Dog Linux system.

Despite these possibilities, I recommend scrapping Dreamweaver altogether. There are tools designed natively for Linux that can do the job you’re trying to do and then some. Dreamweaver is actually two tools in one and it’s only sorta good at either task.

This is the real strength of Dreamweaver. Those who have worked extensively with Dreamweaver know how it handles layouts. It’s excellent at tables, excellent at image maps, acceptable at CSS (but not at creating CSS), lousy at proper placement and DIV floating.

I’ve used Dreamweaver to make many layouts and I found it clumsy at times but acceptable overall.

For this task I’d recommend using Nvu. It’s uses Gecko (the rendering engine for Firefox, Netscape, and Mozilla) and is far more standards-compliant than DW.

This is where Dreamweaver falls behind the needs of it’s users. It has many ‘behaviors’ and built-in snippets of code but it doesn’t let programmers do their business with ease. Particularly with transferring files and managing versions it hasn’t updated it’s site checkout policy in four years. While the entire open source community is addressing the needs of multiple-developer applications Dreamweaver is an underpowered ftp client at best.

For this task I’d recommend Quanta Plus. It doesn’t bother with a local copy of files so there is less to be worried about when editing. It stores the project file and everything but the current cache of your opened files directly on the server. Despite excellent transfer and site management capabilities, it’s greatest feature would have to be it’s editor.
Quanta uses an embedded form of Kate (KDE Advanced Text Editor) to edit code and it has more features that most coders would know to hope for.
Some of Kate’s features include:

• Collapsible Code Trees.
  This means that any time you have opening and closing brackets or braces in your code that are on different lines Kate will allow you to click a small icon next to the opening character’s line and collapse the whole block of code from your view. 20K PHP includes suddenly become very easy.
• Colorized Code
  Dreamweaver does a decent job coloring the code as you type it in code view, but it doesn’t support the number of syntaces or support them as well as Kate.
• Speed
  Dreamweaver has some latency between editing and updating and can have a VERY difficult time with files over 70K in size. Kate has no such problems. Based on the very best that KDE developers have to offer it provides power and functionality combined with well-engineered programming as only an open source application can offer.

So make the move, find a whole fleet of applications ready to pick up where Dreamweaver left off. And for you Photoshop users, don’t forget to get Photoshop on Linux in a similar way.

Finally, we’ve got ourselves a free Suse 9.3 download. Novell has released a LiveDVD (like a LiveCD but… well, y’know) of their Suse 9.3 Professional. This Suse download is released for the purpose of allowing users to become acquainted with Suse 9.3 without installing to their hard disk or purchasing a license.

You can try out this Suse 9.3 LiveDVD by downloading it from a Novell mirror near you:
Suse Professional Download Mirrors
If you can’t find the LiveDVD available on the first couple mirrors you try, here’s one that’s sure to work:
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/live-dvd-9.3/

I’ll have a review posted as soon as I can finish downloading the thing. If anyone sees a torrent available, let me know so I can post it.

Related Previous Posts:
Suse 9.3 torrent is fake
Suse 9.3 release details
Suse 9.3 expected

I recently came across some cool software called Gphoto. It’s a manager for transferring and handling pictures from digital cameras on Linux. As far as I can tell it’s the primary Linux solution for this task. I was waiting for some free time to install it and write about my experience (while transferring my latest stock of pictures from my camera) but that didn’t work out so well.

I installed it painlessly but it froze my system when I ran it. I hadn’t experienced that even once with my new Gentoo installation so I didn’t believe at first that it had really halted my entire computer. I’m officially recommending that you do not install the latest version of Gphoto. Maybe wait a month and see what they’ve got.

I recently attempted a world update on my Gentoo system. This involves checking every program you’ve installed for a potential new release and installing it if available. There’s a way to do this quickly and painlessly with Gentoo (praise the Lord for Portage):
# emerge -pu world

Portage (Gentoo’s package manager) tells you whether a package is already installed, missing, needs to be upgraded, or is blocked by another package. The natural understanding of dependencies is wonderful and has helped me a number of times.

When I last attempted a world update I was told that SysVinit was blocking a program I was trying to install. Not knowing quite what it was I figured I’d trade it for the new program. As soon as I completed the update I had lost the following commands:
# reboot
# shutdown
# restart
and I realized that I’d never learned an alternative way to shutdown my computer.

Moral of the story: Portage is great, SysVinit is necessary, you should install Gentoo.

I just stumbled across this torrent that appears to be for Suse 9.3. It must be a sign of many Suse lovers getting anxious that there’s already buzz about this version and it hasn’t even been released yet.

I haven’t actually downloaded the torrent that’s linked above but it appears to be the 9.2.1 ‘pre’ release of 9.3 even though it claims to be the actual Suse 9.3 professional. I don’t know what licensing the folks at Novell plan to have for their 9.3 release but it should be worthwhile no matter what.

If you’re interested there’s a complete rundown of the specs for Suse 9.3 for you to check out. I’m personally most looking forward to the Xen Hypervisor being included. I like to fancy myself a distro-jockey (I spend more time installing GNU/Linux OSes than using them) and Xen is an emulator that should help me do just that.

I’m not sure what it is exactly that’s making me write in praise of Suse in the middle of running Gentoo, but I think it’s worth doing. Suse 9.2 was the OS that I ran most recently and despite horrible support for the IPW2200BG it was a pretty good system.

Suse is an excellent entry-level distribution for linux beginners. It holds your hand through installation and configuration and, because Novel owns Suse, it has top of the line software. It integrates some things into Linux before anyone else does. For Suse 9.3 I’ll be excited to try out the Xen Hypervisor (a computer emulator) which they are packaging with the 9.3 release.

If you don’t have Suse 9.2 yet, you can find it here (it’s free):
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.2/iso/SUSE-Linux-9.2-FTP-DVD.iso

Just south of me in Orego Stuart McKim attended a game night were everybody used Linux. They used LiveCDs that have gaming as their primary focus. He writes:

I tried out three different iso’s: LLGP, GamesKnoppix, and a Morphix games disk, but found that LLGP, which is short for Linux Live Gaming Project, was the only reliable one.

This is an awesome idea. Because LiveCDs don’t affect the computer and don’t require installation, you can host a LAN party and nobody has to think about installations or viruses. I’ve got some 500MHz machines sitting around that I might use to this end. Stuard wrote that they played a lot of Armegatron (and awesome tron-based game) and I think a LAN party could have a lot of fun with that.

Of Ubuntu Linux and NetBSD, Danger wrote: “I’m sad to report that neither one was of any use for playing songs and movies, but hopefully I’ll come across a LiveCD that can do that soon.”

Help is here, in the form of DyneBolic Linux (http://www.dynebolic.org). DyneBolic is a LiveCD-only distro that’s oriented toward audio-visual use. It comes with media players, editing software and netcasting software. Because it’s oriented toward A-V work, it’s light in other areas, e.g., it comes with AbiWord instead of OpenOffice, though it has a surprisingly robust games suite.

Using Window Maker as its default windows manager, DyneBolic is designed to be usable on older machines. It cannot (at the version I have) be installed to hard drive, but it offers an option called nesting, wherein part of it is copied to a “nest” on a pre-existing partition, thus allowing the user to boot from CD, then eject the CD, freeing it for other uses.

Cheers,
Gary