The Linux Experiment

What does KDE offer for instant communication with your co-workers and friends? Kopete steps up to be your all-in-one IM solution.

Kopete

Kopete provides a KDE integrated instant messaging experience that aims at reducing the number of other instant messaging clients you need to run simultaneously in order to stay in touch with your friends. Rather than running a client for Yahoo Messenger, Facebook chat and Windows Live Messenger, you can instead fire up Kopete, add all of your accounts and take advantage of a single unified interface for all of them. This drastically reduces the on-screen clutter.

Kopete supports a lot of different networks!

The process by which you actually configure all of these accounts is also very straight forward. In fact the first time you start Kopete up (and every time thereafter that you wish to add a new account) you get this nice little interface that helps walk you through the process.

Adding a new account

Once through that easy process you are taken to the main Kopete interface screen where it allows you to view your online friends and, of course, chat with them.

Main contacts screen

Not that it should come as any surprise to anyone familiar with KDE but Kopete also supports quite a bit of customization. You can adjust any of the standard settings that you would expect (i.e. auto-away time out, ‘now playing…’ song statuses, etc.) as well as the general look and feel of your conversations.

With this much customization you’re sure to find something that works for you

While I don’t have much bad to say about Kopete I should point out a couple of its more obvious deficiencies. For one Kopete has no Skype support. Skype is fast becoming one of the most popular instant messaging platforms and its absence is a bit disappointing.

Secondly Kopete varies from being just an acceptable, somewhat decent instant messaging client to being a great instant messaging client, all dependant on which IM network you are using. What I mean by this is basically that Kopete is designed to be a very generic IM client  in order to support as many networks as possible, and that’s fine. However because of this design choice it rarely excels at being the best IM client for networks which handle more than just simple text messages. There are many times when the official client for a given IM network will support many more features than Kopete.

Neither of these should deter you from using Kopete (or at least giving it a try). Like all of the other applications I’ve written about in this series, Kopete offers a KDE feeling and integration to your day-to-day applications and for some people that could be far more worth while than having 100% of all features.

Update: as pointed out in the comments this application is actually now known by the name KDE Telepathy. Sorry for the confusion.

More in this series

• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part I: Rekonq
• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part II: Kontact
• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part III: KTorrent
• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part IV: Amarok

Ready to rock out with KDE’s premier music management application? Let’s rediscover our music with Amarok.

Amarok

I have to start by first admitting that I’ve actually run Amarok once or twice in the past, but sadly could never really figure it out. This always bothered me because people who can figure it out seem to love it. So I made it my mission this time around to really dig into the application to see what all the noise was about (poor pun intended).

Rediscover Your Music

Starting with the navigation pane on the left hand side of the screen I drilled down into my Local Music collection. For the purposes of testing I just threw two albums in my Music folder.

The navigation panel

Double clicking Local Music opens up a view into your Music folder that lets you play songs or search through your artists and albums.

Local media list

When you play a song the main portion in the center of the application changes to give you a ton of information about that track.

Automatically pulls lyrics and other information from the web

This is actually a pretty neat feature but also has the downside that its not always correct. For instance when I started playing the above song by the 90s band Fuel I ended up getting shown the following Wikipedia page about fuel (i.e. an energy source) and not the correct page about the band.

I don’t think that’s right…

Placing a CD in the computer caused it to appear under Local Media (although under a different section). Importing tracks was very straight forward; simply right-click on the CD and choose Copy to Collection -> Local Collection. You then get to pick your encoding options (which you can deeply customize to fit your needs).

Pick your encoding format and go

For Internet media Amarok comes loaded with a number of sources including a number of streaming radio stations, Jamendo, Last.fm, Librivox.org, Magnatune.com, Amazon’s MP3 store and a podcast directory. Like most other media, Amarok also tries to display relevant information about what you’re listening to.

Internet Radio on Amarok

There are loads of other features in Amarok, from its excellent playlist support to loads of expandable plugins, but writing about all of them would take all day. Instead I will wrap up here with a few final thoughts.

Is Amarok the best media manager ever made? To some maybe, but I still find its interface a bit too clunky for my liking. I also noticed that it tended to take up quite a bit of RAM (~220MB currently) which puts it on the beefier side of the media manager resource usage spectrum. The amount of information that it presents about what you’re currently listening to is impressive, but often times when I’m listening to music I’m doing so as a background activity. I don’t foresee a situation where I would be actively watching Amarok in order to benefit from its full potential as a way to ‘rediscover my music’. Still, for at least its deep integration within the KDE desktop, I say give it a try and see if it works for you.

More in this series

• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part I: Rekonq
• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part II: Kontact
• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part III: KTorrent

Welcome to another edition of The apps of KDE 4.10. This time around I’m going to be touching on the KDE BitTorrent client KTorrent.

KTorrent

KTorrent represents KDE’s take on what a BitTorrent client should be. It presents a relatively standard interface that reminds me a lot of other fully featured BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent and Deluge.

The main KTorrent interface

Being a KDE application it is also one of the more fully customizable BitTorrent clients out there, although not to the scale of some of the advanced menus seen in Vuze. It allows you to customize various options including things like encryption, queuing options and bandwidth usage. It also benefits from using a bunch of shared KDE libraries. When I checked its memory usage it was sitting at a respectable 16MB which makes it not the leanest client but certainly not the heaviest either.

Settings menu

Similar to Deluge, KTorrent supports a wide array of plugins which allows you to really tailor the program to your needs. In my testing I didn’t notice a way to browse for new plugins from within the application but I’m sure there are ways to add them elsewhere.

Plugins

I have to admit that I actually went into this article expecting to have a lot more to say about this application but the bottom line is this: it does exactly what you expect. If you need to download torrent files then KTorrent might be for you – and not just if you’re running KDE either. Perhaps its because KTorrent covers the bases so well but I actually can’t think of anything that I dislike about it. It’s a solid application that serves a single purpose and what’s not to love about that?

More in this series

• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part I: Rekonq
• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part II: Kontact

Continuing on where I left off last time I decided my next order of business would be to set up my e-mail accounts and calendar. KDE provides a number of different, more or less single purpose applications to handle all of your personal information management. For example e-mail is handled by KMail, RSS feeds are pulled in via Akregator, calendars are maintained through KOrganizer, etc. Each of these applications could easily be reviewed on their own, however there is yet another application provided in KDE, Kontact, that unifies all of these distinct programs into one. For the purposes of this article I will be treating all of these as part of Kontact as a whole but will still try and focus on each individual component where needed.

Kontact

The first time you start Kontact

The first time you start Kontact it automatically starts an “Account Assistant” wizard that walks you through setting up your e-mail accounts. This brings me to the first embedded application: KMail.

KMail

The first item below summary on the left hand side of Kontact is Mail which makes it, in my opinion, the showcase application for Kontact.

Kontact’s sidebar

Mail is actually powered by the KMail application which at this point is very mature and fully featured.  Setting up an e-mail account is relatively straightforward although I do take issue with some of the default settings. While some are personal preference, for example I prefer to start my e-mail reply above the quote instead of below it, others are just plain strange. For instance by default KMail won’t display HTML e-mails, only plain text e-mails, supposedly in the name of security. Insecure or not I think consensus says HTML is the way forward.

“No HTML for you!”

Following in the standard KDE tradition KMail is crammed full of customization and configuration possibilities. For instance you remember that reply above/below the quote thing I mentioned above? In most other e-mail clients this is a simple combobox or switch, in KMail however you can configure everything from the location of the quote to the position of the cursor.

Composer Settings

KMail also takes spam filtering and anti-virus to a whole new level. You have your choice from any compatible installed spam or anti-virus applications (i.e. SpamAssassin, ClamAV etc.). This gives you some flexibility if you find one works better for you than another.

A typical view of KMail

Finally, on the security front, KMail integrates with the KDE Wallet system to securely store your account passwords and also supports OpenPGP and S/MIME e-mail encryption and signing.

KAddressBook

Next up is Contacts, this time powered by KAddressBook.

Contacts can store a lot of detail

This is a pretty straightforward application and so I don’t have much to say about it other than it allows you to store a lot of information about a given person (from regular details like e-mail and websites to location and OpenPGP keys). It even generates a fancy little QR code for your contacts.

An example contact

KOrganizer

For Calendar/To-do List/Journal functionality Kontact makes use of the KOrganizer application. Like KAddressBook this program functions exactly as expected which is not a bad thing. You can create events, send e-mail invitations and get alerts. It supports multiple calendars and is very functional.

Look! A calendar!

The journal feature is kind of neat but I’m not sure who would actually make use of it on a regular basis. Perhaps I’m not the target market for it.

Dear diary…

Akregator

If your thing is RSS feeds look no further than Akregator. I personally don’t normally use RSS feeds all that much but I know those that do are very addicted to it. Add to that the recent shutdown of Google Reader and this might just be your cup of tea.

Showing some feeds

As RSS readers go this one is also full of options. You can even configure a sharing service, such as Twitter or Identi.ca, if you happen to stumble across an article that you wish to spread.

Popup Notes

Last on the list is Popup Notes powered by KNotes. This is basically a sticky note application that lets you jot down little random thoughts or reminders. There isn’t a whole lot to this one.

Take a note

Conclusion

So how does Kontact stand up at the end of the day? I like it. It does an effective job at unifying all of the different features you may need without making you feel like you need to pay attention to any one of them. In my use case I mainly stick to e-mail and calendar but in my limited time playing around with Kontact I have very few complaints.

Is it better than the alternatives like Thunderbird or Evolution? In some ways absolutely, in others there is still some work to be done. Outside of mail, calendar and RSS feeds the remaining functionality feels a bit lackluster or, at worst, simply there to round off some feature list bullet point. Thankfully this is something that could be easily remedied with a bit more attention and polish.

Give Kontact a try and let me know what you think in the comments.

More in this series

• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part I: Rekonq
  

It’s been a while since I’ve used KDE, however with the recent rapid (and not always welcome) changes going on in the other two main desktop environments (GNOME 3 and Unity) and the, in my opinion, feature stagnation of environments like Xfce and LXDE I decided to give KDE another shot.

My goal this time is to write up a series of quick reviews of KDE as presented as an overall user experience. That means I will try and stick to the default applications for getting my work done. Obviously depending on the distribution you choose you may have a different set of default KDE applications, and that’s fine. So before you ask, no I won’t be doing another write up for KDE distribution X just because you think its ‘way better for including A instead of B’. I’m also going to try and not cover what I consider more trivial things (i.e. the installer/installation process) and instead focus on what counts when it comes to using an operating system day-to-day.

Rekonq

The default web browser in the distribution I chose is not Konqueror but rather its WebKit cousin Rekonq. Where Konqueror uses KHTML by default and WebKit as an option, Rekonq sticks to the more conventional rendering engine used by Safari and Chrome.

This is not Rekonq, it is Konqueror

Rekonq is a very minimalistic looking browser to the point where I often thought I accidentally started up Chrome instead.

This is Rekonq

From my time using it, Rekonq seems to be a capable browser although it is certainly not the speediest, nor does it sport any features that I couldn’t find elsewhere. One thing it does do very nicely is with its integration into the rest of the KDE desktop. This means that the first time you visit YouTube or some other Flash website you get a nice little prompt in the system tray alerting you of the option to install new plugins. If you choose to install the plugin then a little window appears telling you what it is downloading and installing for you, completely automatically. No need to visit a vendor’s website or go plugin hunting online.

Like most other KDE applications Rekonq also allows for quite a bit of customization, although I found its menus to be very straightforward and not nearly as intimidating as some other applications.

The settings menu

I did notice a couple of strange things while working with Rekonq that I should probably mention. First off while typing into a WordPress edit window none of the shortcut keys (i.e. Ctrl+B = bold) seemed to work. I also found that I couldn’t perform a Shift+Arrow Key selection of the text, instead having to use Ctrl+Shift+Arrow Key which highlights an entire word at a time. At this time I’m not sure what other websites may suffer from similar irregularities so while Rekonq is a fine browser in its own right, you may want to keep another one around just in case.

Browsing the best website on the net

While I haven’t found any real show-stoppers with Rekonq, I still can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something. I don’t know how to describe it other than I think I would feel safer using a more mainstream web browser like Firefox, Chrome or even Opera. But like any software, your experience may vary and I would certainly never recommend against trying Rekonq (or even Konqueror). Who knows, you may find out that it is your new favorite web browser.

My laptop’s graphics card has never had the best support on linux and has now approached the point in its life where even ATI has stopped supporting it with new driver releases. On one hand I’m thankful that the open source driver performs well enough that I can continue to use this hardware, on the other though it does result in some downright awful power management. With the default settings my graphics card runs extremely hot and requires the fan to be on constantly. Luckily there is a quick way to fix this and tell the open source driver to run my card in a low power state at all times.

1. Start a root terminal (or use sudo for everything)
2. Set the card to use the power profile (assuming your computer uses card0)
   

   echo profile > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method

3. Set the power profile to “low” setting
   

   echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile

You can check what the current setting is by running the following command:

cat /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile

I would also highly recommend rebooting and then checking the setting again. I found that on my laptop the setting was being reset everytime the computer turned on. If this happens to you try my work around – simply edit /etc/rc.local and add the line in step 3 before the return 0. My file looks like:

#!/bin/sh -e

echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile

exit 0

I’ve had a few nasty experiences this week with Linux and figured I’d vent here. Unlike my previous efforts with Linux From Scratch and Gentoo, my complaints this time around are related to upgrading Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04: Save yourself the trouble

At this point the current Ubuntu LTS release (12.04) is my preferred distribution to work with: it has become widespread enough that troubleshooting and previous solutions online are easy to locate. In a professional capacity, I also maintain systems that are still on 8.04 LTS (supported until April 2013, so we have to be pretty aggressive about replacing them) or 10.04 LTS (good until April 2015).

I attempted to complete two upgrades from the 10.04 release this week to 12.04 – one 10.04 LTS “desktop” installation, and one 10.04 LTS headless server installation. Both were virtual machines running under VMWare ESXi, but neither had given me any trouble during normal use.

Canonical’s updater process (the wrapper around dist-upgrade) appears to be pretty slick; it gives you appropriate warnings, attempts to start a SSH daemon as a fallback mechanism and starts on its merry way to download the necessary packages to bring your system completely up to date. On my 10.04 desktop VM, the installer fell apart completely during the package replacement/removal/installation sequence. I was left with two nasty message boxes: one advising that my system was now in a broken state, and another that completely contained rectangular, unprintable characters.

To put it bluntly, I was not amused, but it wasn’t a critical system and I was content to replace it with a fresh 12.04 installation rather than waste additional time troubleshooting with apt or dpkg. Strike one for the upgrader.

At least the server came back up!

Next on the upgrade schedule was the 12.04 server VM. Install, package replacement and reboot went fine, but I had several custom PPAs installed to support development of XenonMKV (Github page) – specifically ppa:krull/deadsnakes to add Python 2.7 to Ubuntu 10.04.

Python 2.7 still worked when the server came back up, and all my usual tools of choice like SABnzbd+, SickBeard and CouchPotato were still functional.

For some reason, though, I’d gotten it into my head this evening to check out Mezzanine as a potential WordPress replacement. Mezzanine uses Django, a Python Web framework, and the list of supported features is pretty encompassing.

Sidebar: Django and mod_wsgi – complicated enough?

One of the most irritating things from a system administration point of view is getting Web applications to run in a standard server environment – typically a Linux base system and Apache or nginx to serve content. I suppose I’ve been spoiled with how easy it is to get PHP-based sites up and running these days in that configuration by adding an Apache module through apt. A lot of new Web app frameworks come with their own small webservers for development and testing, but generally their creators recommend that when you’re ready to put your site live, that the product run under a well-known Web or application server.

The Django folks recommend using mod_wsgi in their documentation, which in and of itself really just says “RTFM for mod_wsgi and then you’ll have a much better idea of how to do this.” I had to go poking around on Google for the installation article since there are some broken links, but okay, it’s an Apache module with a small bit of configuration (even though a simple walkthrough in the Django documentation would go a long way to making deployment easier.) This is where I ran into my dependency/PPA problem on Ubuntu 10.04.

I’ve suppose I’ve screwed the pooch…

Running the suggested command, I tried: sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-wsgi and got the following

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libapache2-mod-wsgi : Depends: libpython2.7 (>= 2.7) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.


Backtracking, I then found out why the library wasn’t going to get installed:


The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libpython2.7 : Depends: python2.7 (= 2.7.3-0ubuntu3.1) but 2.7.3-2+lucid1 is to be installed


Aha! The Python installation from the PPA for Lucid – 10.04 – was installed and acting as the 2.7 package. Since the newly-upgraded Ubuntu 12.04 uses Python 2.7 as a dependency for a good portion of the default applications, I couldn’t just purge or uninstall it, and my attempts to force a reinstallation all ended in:


Reinstallation of python2.7 is not possible, since it cannot be downloaded.


Rebuild?

At this point it looks like I’ll have to rebuild the server VM as well, but if any readers have any bright ideas on fixing this dependency hell – please comment with your suggestions!

A couple new Listener Feedback podcast episodes have been released in case you missed them:

• Episode 16: Kellee Maize – Integration (Hip-hop, Rap, Dubstep)
• Episode 17: Listener Feedback – Reunion Tour (Talk, Piano)
• Episode 18: The Easton Ellises – EP: One + Dance It, Dance All and Ersatz (Dance, Rock)
• Episode 19: Sunwill – Coming EP + Wonder Doll and The Highlights (Electropop)
• Episode 20: The Ease Down – Shapeshifter (Piano, Pop)

So grab the MP3 or Ogg version of this Creative Commons podcast and enjoy!

As of version 12.10, Ubuntu has upgraded the version of X.org they include to the latest and unfortunately it is no longer compatible with the official ATI Catalyst drivers for some cards, specifically the HD2xxx, 3xxx and 4xxx models. The open source driver is the only officially supported alternative and, while it is fine for most uses, it doesn’t support the advanced power settings that the ATI driver does. This means that on my laptop in particular the fan runs constantly as it tries to cool down the overheating card.

So… no Ubuntu 12.10+ then?

Thankfully someone has created a PPA that successfully downgrades the version of X.org to the maximum supported version for the official ATI driver. This step is obviously quite drastic and should not be used on production systems. However from the limited time that I have been running it things seem pretty stable. The PPA (and instructions) can be found at this link: AMD Catalyst Legacy

These days you really need a strong, unique password for almost everything you do online. To make matters even worse for the average user, security nuts will tell you that you actually need a different password for essentially every account you hold. Why? Consider the following scenario:

Little Timmy signs up for Facebook using his super secret password @wesomeS@auce3!. This password is so strong and good that even he can hardly remember it. Then he wants a Twitter account so he goes and signs up there using the same password. Some time passes and Timmy’s Twitter account is hacked. Using his associated e-mail address they try the same e-mail and password on Facebook (because it is a popular website that most people belong to) and lo and behold they have access. Little Timmy’s virtual life falls apart around him.

Think I’m being paranoid? Take a look at these examples and adjust your tin foil hat accordingly.

What to do?

So what can you do about it? Well for one don’t use the password above because now it is all over the internet. For two use strong unique passwords for each website you care about. What do I mean by that? Well in the above example Timmy clearly cared about both Facebook and Twitter so he should have used different passwords for each. That way when his hypothetical Twitter account became hacked the attackers couldn’t use the same password to gain access to his Facebook account. That said it is always good to have a throw away password or two to use on those one-off websites that you will either never visit again or don’t care if they get compromised. Third either remember all of these unique passwords in your super genius conehead sized brain or use a password safe to make it easy on yourself.

Password Safes

A password safe is essentially a program that allows you to maintain a number of different passwords while only having to remember one. Essentially you enter a master password into the program and this acts as your key to unlock all of your others passwords. That way you (technically) only have to remember one password at a time (the master password) and you only have one password to change on a regular basis (although you should obviously refresh your other passwords every so often as well). A number of these programs exists (such as LastPass, etc.) but personally I prefer KeePass.

KeePass

KeePass comes in two flavours: version 1.x (which is technically now legacy) and version 2.x (which is current). Beyond feature set the biggest difference is that version 2.x requires the .NET Framework (or Mono) and version 1.x doesn’t. For the purposes of this post I’ll be focusing on version 2.x.

KeePass has a number of great features that make it indispensable in my day-to-day computing life. While the full feature list is actually quite long I’ll just list the most useful or important ones here:

• Open source which means that the source code has been looked at and checked over for any sort of backdoor or other nonsense that a potentially evil author would code into it. This is very important when you’re considering placing all of your password eggs in one proverbial basket.
• When you create a new password entry you can store any sort of arbitrary information along with it:
  

  New Password Entry

• All of your passwords are stored completely encrypted including all comments, website URLs and user names. This is incredibly convenient because it allows you to safely do things like create an entry containing you credit card information. Never again will you have to hunt down your wallet to make that spur of the moment online purchase!
• It is portable – you can run it straight off of a USB stick, no installation required!
• Rule based, strong password generator. Having a long, strong, password is very important but remembering one is very hard. Instead why not have KeePass generate a per-website, completely random, strong password for you? Using a website that for some reason doesn’t like special characters or only allows up to a 12 character password? No problem just change the rule set you use when you generate that particular password.
  

  Password Generator

  Here are some examples of random passwords I just generated now:

  

  Lots of random passwords!

• Cross-platform – KeePass has implementations on almost every platform. Version 1.x runs on Windows, Mac and Linux (via KeePassX). Version 2.x runs on Windows, Mac and Linux (using Microsoft’s .NET or the open source Mono). There are even versions of it for Android, iPhone and others.
• Auto-type – this is by far the best feature. Even if you, for some reason, didn’t want to use any other feature that KeePass has to offer, its Auto-type functionality alone is worth the install. Essentially you tell KeePass what window to look for (for instance Firefox browsing my bank’s website) and how it should type things for you (usually user name, tab, password, enter). Then you set up some key combination you want to use (like Ctrl + Alt + A) and KeePass does all of the typing for you. Now when I want to enter one of those crazy strong and super random passwords I don’t have to type it out or even copy and paste. I simply click my mouse in the user name field and press Ctrl + Alt + A. The genius of this is that it can work for all accounts on your computer not just website ones – for instance I use it at work to keep track of my passwords for our internal programs.

WHO IS PAYING YOU?

All of this praise may make it seem like I’m getting paid to write this article but that isn’t the case (not that I would turn the money down mind you *hint hint*…). KeePass is just one of those programs I use daily that does so many things right I can’t help but like it. So in conclusion give it, or a similar password store, a try and make your online presence more resilient to password hacking. Let me know which password safes you think are awesome.

This post originally appeared on my personal website here.