KDE Components: Folder View

Currently, the most talked about and criticized development project is the 4^th major version released by the KDE team – KDE4. It is an ambitious open-source project which focuses on providing a new and unique desktop experience combined with fun.

Though KDE4 omits features of its previous versions; it is much more powerful and has more potential than critics have expressed. After their challenging comments, I felt compelled to scrutinize some aspects of the same. On that note, as part of my blog; I've listed my findings on FolderView component.

· Inability to see long file names (since most songs, videos, C++/C/Python files in my hdd have long names).

· Easy navigation (through key board) to the desired files in the FolderView Widget when number of files goes beyond a single snapshot view.

· Inability to control the opacity of the Widget.

· Expand/Collapse feature to keep the Widget minimized on the Desktop to save space and view them when wanted.

· Having different types of view options (Detailed, List, Icon) would be nicer.

· A built in search to find the files within the Widget when the number of files goes way beyond the view.

· Option to adjust opacity on certain part of the container (I can make it look solid on the Title bar and transparent for the rest so that I don't have to strain my eyes to look the folder name on the title bar through the wallpaper).

Conclusion
Overall; I like the FolderView widget and the idea of Icon-less desktop through sets of plasmoids. Kudos to the KDE development team for the component - a must have widget in the default collection.

This project is evolving and the future looks promising. But as most visions go, this too will take its own course and its evolution will happen eventually. Now that the basic desktop is ready, the developers will be focusing on each part of the DE and iron out the issues in the forth coming releases. My suggestion is to keep patience and support the team for its astonishing and monumental effort.

Please watch the below event web cast to know the vision and the road map of KDE project from its lead developer.

KDE 4.0 Release Event Video - Aaron Seigo
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6642148224800885420

Fixing NTFS Mount Error in GNU/Linux

One of the common problem you might encounter while using a external hard drive (or partition) formatted with NTFS (since you multi boot or you want to use the external device with windows and gnu/linux) is that - it fails to mount occasionally giving the below error.

$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0)
Failed to mount '/dev/disk/by-uuid/FE5C75355C74E9B3': Operation not supported
Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use

The reason is because you might have probably unplugged the device directly from windows instead of going through 'Safely Remove Hardware' option and hence the NTFS log is not marked unused.

There is a tool to fix it.

sudo ntfsfix /dev/drive_name

If you receive "ntfsfix: command not found" error message, then probably the ntfs utilities are not installed in your distribution (I have figured out that the utility to manipulate nfts is installed in openSUSE by default, but not in Ubuntu 8.04). In that case, you'll need to issue the following before ntfsfix command.

sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs

Which will install the ntfs tools. Once you've installed it, you can issue ntfsfix command. If you are not sure about the drive name, please use the below command to find the drive name.

sudo fdisk -l

If you are using 80Gig external USB Storage, then you will find the below in your command output:

Disk /dev/sdb: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x3347a943

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 9729 78148161 7 HPFS/NTFS

which is of course your NTFS USB drive. now you can issue the command as below.

sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdb1

Have a good day.

Online Repository [Ubuntu] in DVDs

Whenever I think about installing Ubuntu (or any distribution for that matter) for friends who doesn't have high speed internet connection (yeah, there are people who exists these days without high band width internet connection), one thing always holds me back resulting on either picking up their system to my home for performing the complete installation or abandoning installing GNU/Linux in their systems.

It's about the additional repositories that I require in order to complete the installation (complete in the sense - Restricted drivers, restricted codecs, etc). I was hunting for repository download options for a long before I end up these articles:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=352460

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=3060394&postcount=49

However, though having 2Mbps internet connection which is capable of downloading at the rate of 250KB/ps, I still end up with Server Time Out due to the size of repository (the main repository is close to 10GiB in size). While this annoyed me to greater extend, I came across the following tool which was said to give answer to my problem.

http://aptoncd.sourceforge.net/

While this utility works better than the repository download, the problem with this utility is that it's not meant to take the entire repository to the local hard drive. Until yesterday I was left with frustrations and then I came across the below FTP link to ubuntu repositories. It's an FTP with the entire repository downloaded, split and made as separate ISO dvds (5 in total). Though I am not sure about the availability of repository collection for other distributions (RedHat, Novell, openSUSE, etc), use the below link in order to start downloading the ISO DVds of Ubuntu online repository.

ftp://tuma.ui.edu/pub/­ubuntu-repository/gutsy/

I will let you know about the reliability of these DVDs (correctness) in days since I am going to a friends' place and then possibly to another friends' office for Ubuntu installation for which I have planned to use the repository dvds.

Leave comment if something didn't work during installations. Though I haven't checked it yet, I believe that vlc is not there in that pack. You may have to download .deb files of vlc and related libdvdcss* files along with the repo backups. Let me know your experience with the DVDs. Also, you can contribute the collection by providing .deb files which are not in their list.

Note: I have learned that the FTP I have specified above is part of Ubuntu community project in Indonesia (I thought it's Thailand btw), thanks tempeman for letting me know about it.

Fixing no GUI display in Visual Paradigm 3.1 on GNU/Linux with Composite Enabled

Visual Paradigm gives a blank screen (though the UI components works even the dialog is plain gray with no controls displayed) running in Gutsy (GNU/Linux in general) while Composite is turned on (Compiz-Fusion/XGL). It’s been discovered the reason for this is that the version of java jre shipped with VP-UML has this issue but if you replace it with the jre packaged with java 6 everything works fine.

Do the following to solve this issue.

Open the terminal and move to /opt/VP_Suite3.1
Issue sudo mv jre /opt/VP_Suite3.1/tmp

Once this is completed, issue the following command.

sudo cp –r /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre /opt/VP_Suite3.1

After taking a while it should be copied to the Visual Paradigm suite folder. Now close the terminal and fire the Visual Paradigm software, your Visual Paradigm should be running without any problem.

Note: The –r in cp command is to copy the folders’ contents recursively. If any of those paths didn’t work find out the path of them in your system and issue commands according to that.

Adios Amigos.

References
Click here for forum help regarding this issue