Nikita Youshchenko: Trinity project: KDE3 alive?
Trinity project in an attempt to keep KDE3 desktop compatible with ongoing changes elsewhere, and to some extent to fix bugs and add features into KDE3. It is for those us long-time KDE users who is upset by the way that KDE has chosen for KDE4.
Unfortunately Trinity project looks small and underpowered, so it s future is unclear.
Did not try it yet. There are debs, although some people think that it is hard to deal with those, because of KDE3 package namespace now used by KDE4, and also because of binary compatibility issues within Trinity.
Why I don t like KDE4? Because I have no interest in eye candy, but due to heavy use of thin clients with apps running on remote server I do care about desktop resource consumption. A medium-class server (2 dual-core 2 GHz cpus, 16G ram) perfectly hosts 50 KDE3 sessions, served over vnc. Anything near to that with KDE4? I m not aware of any good-working kde4-over-vnc-over-network configuration, even for a single user over unloaded network. Looks like within KDE4, even with all effects turned off, every tiny operation results into near-fullscreen update.
Spice is promising but requires per-session VMs which is a serious drawback when number of users is high.
The family of 
Last year I shared my 
This shows the market did indeed bounce off the oversold lows nicely
on a few occassions in 2009 and 2010 --- but also continued to slide after
hitting the condition. Nothing is foolproof, and certainly nothing as simple
as this is, so buyer beware. But it may prove useful in conjunction
with other tools.
The code for the script is
Let's say you set up a machine using an encrypted disk with LUKS (debian-installer's partman makes this wonderfully easy!). You choose an initial passphrase, get the machine working, and it's working great. Then, you need to restart it, and realize that (for whatever reason) you've forgotten or lost the passphrase for the volume. oops! (i'm sure this has never happened to you -- let's just pretend it's your less-fortunate friend). If your system is still running, and you have superuser access to it, you can actually set a new passphrase for the LUKS volume using information that the dm-crypt kernel module has about the in-use mapping. In my examples, i'll imagine that the source volume is /dev/XXX2 and the exported cleartext volume is known by the device-mapper as XXX2_crypt In the bigger picture, this should serve as a reminder that even though your disk is encrypted, if someone gets live access to the superuser account on a system with the encryption keys loaded, your data is no longer secret. Before you do any tweaking, you might want to back up your LUKS header, just in case: 
The button is not exactly very appealing, and takes quite a lot of horizontal space on the tab bar. But with a few lines of CSS, this can fortunately be changed. Edit the 
Not for the first time, I ve seen the suggestion in the echo chamber that Mono packages should be moved from Debian into the non-free repository, which is not formally part of Debian. The reason, as it so often is, is patents specifically this time, the searing risk posed to Debian and its users that Mono s packaging does not (and technically could not without forking from upstream) provide base class libraries which implement only the content of ECMA-335 4th Edition. As I understand it, this implies three things about the suggestion/demand: firstly, that the individual in question believes that Mono end users are at risk from patent litigation from Microsoft Corp because Mono s implementation of Microsoft.NET beyond the content of ECMA 334/335 infringes on Microsoft patents; secondly, that the Microsoft Community Promise which promises not to assert legal claims over third party implementations of ECMA-335 4th Edition (and ECMA-334 4th Edition which defines the C# language) would render a pure ECMA-only runtime safe if it existed (which it does not); thirdly that without the protection offered by the Microsoft Community Promise, the source code licenses of Mono are irrelevant the patent risk renders the software non-Free.
It appears, unfortunately, that the community of Free Software Advocates don t actually understand what Free Software actually IS. That explains an awful lot, but should surprise nobody. So here s a lesson on what, exactly, is being advocated for.
The Free Software Foundation defines four Software Freedoms these are the minimum criteria required for something to be considered Free Software by the FSF:
As some of my readers may now, I'm a regular user of public transport.
Even though I'm living in an area (far suburbs of Paris) where the use
of cars for nearly everything is common, I managed up to now to not
use my car for my daily commute.
I was using the public bus line of our town, that starts close from
our house and ends up at the local train station where I can commute
to U line of Paris transport system (then C line, then another bus
ride). You can compare this complicated 1h30 travel to the 35 minutes
drive I would have if I was using my car.
I *was*. I'll stop from tomorrow. The reason is simple: my U train
start hour is 6h57. The bus formerly started at 6h36, then reached the
train station at 6h51, which was a quite good commute. That made me
leave our house at about 6h25, considering a 10min walk from the house
to the bus stop. That's 32 minutes for....3 kilometers. Already needs
some motivation, right?
This changed today (with minimal notice). To catch the same train, I
should have a bus at 6h31, thus leave 5 minutes earlier, so *nearly 40
minutes before the train schedule*.
Considering that driving from our place to the train station is about
12 minutes, the deal is now made. I'll stop being the only non captive person
using the bus in our neighbourhood (all others are people who can't
use a car). So much for environment, etc.
This is an 'interesting' way to understand why it is so easy to
discourage proper use of public transport and minimize the impact on
environment. A small change can lead to such effects.
Of course, as you may expect, I won't stop there. Letters to the
(public-funded) bus company and people in charge of public transport
in our city (the bus line deficit is funded by the city), will follow
very soon.
Tehre are indeed many other reasons why people don't use our local
buses that much. One being that, even though there are 2 trains every
15 minutes leaving the station (U and N lines), both alternated with a
7.5 minutes interval....there is only one bus every 15 minutes....on
each bus line. Sometimes, even, you don't know why, there's a 23
minutes gap. Imagine waiting for your bus for more than 20 minutes at
night in winter...when you're about 2-3 kilometers away from your home...
Sure, that would need a lot of funding to have a really convenient
system. But how about spending the billions of euros spent in
super-highways, toll tunnels, etc., in public transport
infrastructure? Funding my local bus line to have 2 buses every 15
minutes at peak hours would cost about the price of 100m of a 3-lane
highway, for one year. Make the deal.
(All that will indeed reinforce my backup system : run from my house to
the train station, for 3km and 15 minutes...which involves another run
at the end of my train ride, for 4km and 20 minutes. That, however,
involves some "logistics" organization to be sure that I don't spend
the day working in my stinking running suit. That also means up to
56km run every week, which I can't always do, particularly if I plan a
race for the next week-end!)
Another side effect: I will have less time for Debian as my bus
commutes were used for hacking, while it will be much more difficult
when driving my car to the train station, isn't it?
Once again, a polemic regarding how to properly integrate the Ruby language and libraries with the Debian distribution has been ignited. Similar arguments were presented in 
