Last month, Feisty (Ubuntu 6.10) reached end of life. This means that support is no longer offered, updates are no longer being released and, much to my surprise, the repositories are gone. Well, not gone, but moved.

I'm just keeping track of some of the differences between kde and gnome in this blog. This will change over time. I realize that you can use a kde application in gnome and vice versa. Still...

*Default torrent client in KDE, ktorrent, is much more advanced than the default torrent in Gnome (transmission).

*No main system settings spot in Gnome.

*Amarok cannot organize podcasts by date, but rhythmbox can. Also, Amarok does not delete podcast entries.

Seems makedvd is also missing from the Ubuntu package. I still recommend downloading the full deb from http://tovid.wikia.com/wiki/Installing_tovid/Ubuntu.

After using tovid to create a video, I would normally use todisc to create the DVD file structure, but ever since my installation of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy, I kept getting this error:

sox soxio: Failed reading `-': unknown file type `raw'

Sox is a utility used to process audio. The default Hardy installation of tovid doesn't install some necessary libraries and dependencies by default. Use the command:

sudo apt-get install libsox-fmt-all

Ubuntu 8.04 provides many free tools that makes a web developer's job very easy and the tools we use better and moe secure.

First, BlueFish is a very good source editor. It has all the expected features and is very fast. Quanta is a good KDE equivalent, but so far, I believe BlueFish is faster and a bit better.

Second, virtualization is highly supported. Why is this important??

I decided to start over with my home computer. I backed up my home drive, then wiped my system drive and reinstalled. Oops...I forgot to backup mysql.

Gnome vs KDE

I decided to go back to Ubuntu at home. I was having a tough time deciding which version of Ubuntu I wanted to use when I realized I can just use Ubuntu at home and Kubuntu at work. I had originally installed Ubuntu with Windows and have done quite a bit of work on Ubuntu experimenting and installing from source, so I felt like I needed a clean system.

One of the many things I love about Linux, and Ubuntu in particular is the ability to install pretty much everything you need from the package repositories, including all the development tools you could ever need.

With other operating systems, you have to purchase or download the software, then install it. Updates are made easy as the updater checks for updates for all software installed via the repositories, vs other operating systems who only update their own. Do you ever need to go outside the repositories? I rarely do (maybe once or twice out of hundreds of installs).

Creating DVDs using mostly any playable file (.avi, .mpg, etc.) is very easy in Linux and, in my opinion, is easiest using the command line.

First, you'll need to install the tovid suite of tools. Tovid contains everything you need to convert a video to DVD format and to burn that video.

If you're interested in installing KDE4 on Kubuntu to try it out like their website suggests, don't. It sucks right now.

So when you remove the package they tell you to install, it doesn't remove all of the KDE4 packages. So you'll have two versions of konqueror along with other applications. Don't get me wrong, I love KDE and Linux, it just seems like KDE4 isn't mature enough yet.

BOINC is an open source program based at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. BOINC is a software platform for Linux for volunteer computing and desktop Grid computing.