Software

KDE officially turned 15 years old today. I remember first using it in late 1998 with the release of 1.0 and it really has come a long way since then.

I wanted to take a moment to congratulate KDE and thank all the people who have contributed their time and code to help shape it into what it is today. If anyone is interested, you can read the original announcement from 1996 that was posted on Usenet.

I've been playing around with dvtm (dynamic virtual terminal manager), a tiling window manager for the console, since I initially read about it on K.Mandla's blog earlier in the month.

It was quickly added to my list of indispensable tools as I have been using it non-stop from both the console and within screen so I thought figured it could use yet another plug just in case someone missed it the first time around.

I was browsing Slashdot earlier today and came across an article regarding Mozilla's forced acceptance of a non-free EULA via a dialog box that restricts you from using the software until you agree to their terms.

I started complaining about this a few months ago when it initially happened to me after compiling the first release candidate of Firefox 3 and unfortunately only a few people seemed to care.

I first found out about Laconica, the AGPL micro-blogging system created by Evan Prodromou, when I discovered identi.ca about a day or so after it was opened to the public.

I considered installing it, but I held off for a bit until I learned more about it and its development.

While browsing through my favorite news sites today I discovered that the nightly builds of Firefox now include native support for Theora and Vorbis (which includes support for the HTML5 media elements).

It is really great to see that they are taking the initiative add this along with their other changes slated for version 3.1. If anything else it will at least help show users that there are formats available for them to use which are not proprietary.

I thought I would make a quick post on this since some people might be interested to know that first version of GNU IceCat 3, the GNU version of the Firefox browser, was released today.

If you are interesed you can also read the release discussion on the bug-gnuzilla mailing list.

I am compiling it right now and it will soon be replacing Firefox 3 has my default browser.

The latest version of the Phoronix Test Suite, an open source benchmarking tool, was released today and I figured that I would download it and give it a try.

The Phoronix Test Suite is packed with 57 tests that have been grouped into 26 suites which range from audio-encoding to gaming performance. The suite is quite easy to use although you should make sure you have a few gigabytes of hard drive space free because it will need to download over 2GB if you want to run all of the tests.

I decided to upgrade my copy of Firefox 3 Beta5 to the recent Release Candidate today and was greeted with something quite unexpected.

Instead of my browser window opening as it was supposed to do I was given a End-User Software License Agreement (EULA) screen which would not let me use Firefox until I agreed with the terms and conditions.

I would have to say that my new favorite tool has to be SSHFS.

I stumbled across it earlier this week and it has quickly become an essential part of my daily routine. It uses FUSE, a user space file system framework, to log into a SSH server and mount the directory locally.

It gets the job done and is extremely easy to use, just issue the following commands:

Dana has announced the release of Openbox 3.4.7-pre2 for testing purposes.
There are a lot of excellent changes for 3.4.7, all of which can be viewed in the CHANGELOG file should you desire to see what they are.

I will be upgrading to it in the next few minutes to help do my part and it would be great if we can get others to do the same.