* Posts by A.Lizard

24 publicly visible posts • joined 17 May 2007

Project Banana ripens into a pre-alpha for KDE Linux, and you can test it

A.Lizard

Re: Neon isn't meant to be anyone's daily driver.

I used Kubuntu before neon for 10+ y..switched to neon because Kubuntu requires snap.

Only problem I had with neon - updates keep wiping out my user customizations, 1/2 hr to put it all back. This happened twice in one day.

So i had chatGPT write plasma backup and restore scripts for me.

Have you had thus problem and if yes, how do you deal with it?

A.Lizard

Re: Really old man?

KDE Linux will continue to support build from source. I can deal with rare source builds in exchange for a totally reliable daily driver.

For me, Linux is how I get my work done (IoT hardware(, not a hobby

A.Lizard

Some people really hate gnome' and cf xfce. For people like me, a full featured window manager alternative to gnome is necessary.

If plasma didn't exist, i'd probably run OSX.

I saw a 2006 version of my desktop recently based on KDE 3.1...

Almost identical to my plasma 6 setup.

A.Lizard

KDE Linux? Yes!

I switched from Kubuntu to KDE neon because mandatory snap and neon changed from single dev support to KDE team support.

Latest plasma rolling release, great ui, but updates keep breaking user settings.

So i had chatGPT create plasma backup & restore scripts...

Now, I discover neon down to single dev, KDE team on KDE Linux.

Thought about switch to immutable, flatpak + AppImage app install, dumping apt*. Had trouble wrapping my head around changes.

Looking forward to KDE Linux - stable.

The ability to instantly roll back broken os changes is cool.

I've thought for years that the apt approach to incrementally managed dependencies is silly given the fact that the constraints that made them wise no longer apply. .. bandwidth and mass storage now cheap.

So why not package apps and all dependencies together?

For me, Linux is a daily driver, nit a hobby, so changes a net gain for me.

The 12 KB that Windows just can't seem to quit

A.Lizard

Google search

There was a program called Google Desktop for.Linux that brought the old school Boolean search of the.original Google to searching hard drives. It,wss abandoned by Google 10+ u ago and can't be installed on modern Linux systems.

Ubuntu has a mass storage search called Ballo. It's a CPU hungry monstrosity that finds everything except the files one actually wants.

I spent a day working with Claude AI to update 32 bit Google Desktop for Linux to work with current Ubuntu. Another day finding out how to disable Baloo. (Deleting bricks the desktop)

On a 256 G laptop, I use 1.1 G for search index.

I find anything I want in 110 milliseconds.

Some modern programs are bloatware where programmers were so bent on adding features to 'improve' functionally that they lost track of the original purpose.

For info on fixing search on Linux, OSX, Windows - https://alizardx.substack.com

A.Lizard

Google search

Remember the original Google search?

Drop.in a fee keywords separated by Boolean AND OR NOY operators, you got answers?

Has it improved?

There was a hard drive search program called Google

How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

A.Lizard

You got 3 0 to work? One of my übergeek friends tried it. He had a lot to say about it. Obscene and profane things

I waited for 3.1

98SE first with good USB support

Bill Gates unearths Microsoft's ancient code like a proud nerd dad

A.Lizard

Re: The Moral of the Story

Not mentioned - personal connections of Bill Gates, his mom was on the same board of directors of a charitable NGO as the wife of a C-level suit at IBM...

A.Lizard

Re: "Bill is clearly very good at programming"

Recent study says 60% of modern Open Source code.copied from other programs... e.h. copy-paste via Stack Overflow.

Worked with chatGPT as a coding assistant?

If the kind of strict interpretation of IP.law were in fashion, the software industry would grind to a sudden halt.

As Elon Musk makes thousands of federal workers jobless, tycoon pushes for $56B Tesla pay deal

A.Lizard

Re: In a nod to the past...

If I was given a Tesla i'd use it as a trade in for a PHEV built by an actual car manufacturer, big 3, Japan, South Korea

Some workers already let AI do the thinking for them, Microsoft researchers find

A.Lizard

Re: ChatGPT/copilot failure rate 100%

I have the only working installed copy of Google Desktop for Linux. Old school pre-AI Google Boolean keyword search.

I asked ChatGPT to.update the.only Linux version I.could find 2008 32bit ''.

Several hours of feeding error messages back to chatGPT, Google: searching info.

64 bit 'deb

Works great.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

A.Lizard

Re: Anyone else remember KDE4?

KDE 4.1 was extremely good

A.Lizard

Re: Oops, update failed!

My desktop search engine is an updated 32 bit Google Desktop for Linux.Supports old school Boolean AND OR NOT. google doesn't support.

Got Claude AI help.

A.Lizard

Re: I agree with the majority of the article...

Find influencers walking kids through deactivating parental spyware. They already have the hacker mindset.

They can walk kids through liinux.Parents can *TRT* to install windows spyware on kids' computers

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

A.Lizard

Wrapping ai in a useless front end

When you give coding instructions to.an ai, you can compare the output of the ai v expected / intended and fix interactively, google search error messages, etc. If ai is heading down a rabbit hole based on bad initial instructions or.doing what you asked for, not what you meant, it's on you to stop.this and tell ai to do something else.

"This machine has no brain, use your own"

With this front end, start with WTF did this turn my natural language instructions into?

Blood money is fine with us, says GitLab: Vetting non-evil customers is 'time consuming, potentially distracting'

A.Lizard

Is there ethical employment at tech giants?

Boffin suggests Trappist monk approach for Spectre-Meltdown-grade processor flaws, other security holes: Don't say anything public – zip it

A.Lizard

Should this guy be teaching?

Dust off that old Pentium, Linux fans: It's Elive

A.Lizard

Re: we're not making the OS any faster but taking everything modern and paring it down

replaced your HD with an SSD yet? that's the speed increase you've been looking for.

Researchers say they've cracked the secret of the Sony Pictures hack

A.Lizard

remember speculation

that Sony was an insider job and other than statements from the corp & politicians, I don't remember this was ever definitive disproven.

Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

A.Lizard

Karmic? Got it, works great with minor issues.

I'm running Kubuntu Karmic, and I upgraded in place from Kubuntu Jaunty, I did not do a fresh install.

Seems to work better with ATI drivers, I've got the proprietary driver working for the first time since I bought this A780GM integrated motherboard. Nice to see the good old spinning cube desktop change running here again.

I'm happier with it than I was with Jaunty.

Minor rough edges. Workarounds mentioned not guaranteed to work for everyone.

1. USB ports after hub not recognized. Workaround - unplug, replug, enjoy your peripherals.

2. Suspend (pm-suspend - mine is set up with uswsusp) only works when you push power button, not from keyboard. Since it works on wake-on-LAN, it would be nice to see it fixed, but I'm in no hurry. However, if you want this to work consistently, you need to find a place to put (as root) ethtool -s eth0 wol g - best way to do that is to add it as a pm-suspend quirk so it'll get run during machine shutdown.

3. Sun Virtualbox does not print from WinXP with Kubuntu Karmic host. Presumably, you've already enabled yourself as a member of the vboxusers group. Add yourself to the lp group as well.

4. Network management applet still does not work properly. This may be because I manually edited a few files to deal with the same problem in Jaunty.

5. Proprietary driver manager (access via Hardware Drivers from menu) does nothing when you click activate button. Workaround - install envy-ng from repository and run it, if it won't run from the menus, use sudo envyng-t from terminal to run in text mode ... and it's easy once you do this.

Presumably, people who adopt Karmic a few weeks from now will find all or most of these problems solved out of the box.

No horror story, no drama. Just another routine upgrade that leaves things running better and looking cooler. Oddly enough, I'd been having serious trouble with Debian since Squeeze (DRIVERS!!!), I did a fresh install to Kubuntu Jaunty a few weeks ago in the hopes that Kubuntu would deal with driver issues better. It does.

Lenny might be late

A.Lizard

so what?

Premature OS releases usually are embarrassments for the groups that release them. Remember Vista? It isn't just MS. I actually tried OpenSUSE/KDE4 just after it escaped. Luckily, a guest VM is easy to blow away.

Props to the Debian dev team for having sense enough to wait until they get it right.

How to escape the clutches of world+dog's VMware fetish

A.Lizard

I'm running the free Linux version of VMware Server

on this Debian box. I've got a Windows 98SE guest session running reliably and stably in the window behind this one running my Eudora mail client. I've got Ubuntu running in a second guest session. I can run applications on the same filespace from three different OSs. (at the same time if I'm careful) It would be interesting to run OSX as well, but the fact that it isn't available is Apple's fault, not theirs. But it would be nice to be able to run applications without particular regard to what OS it runs on if Apple ever decides to join the real world.

The VMware stuff works on the desktop. My experiment with virtualbox was less successful, and since Xen doesn't support guest/host clipboard, it's useless for a desktop, so I haven't tried it. I wouldn't be surprised if they can execute the more radical ideas described in the article.

It looks like the company made a bad deal with respect to acquisition, but that happens, and sooner or later, that company is going to become a lot less profitable with a board run by EMC suits that presumably really doesn't understand what they're making or marketing. That's necessarily their problem, and a warning for technology entrepreneurs.

But I'm happy in the meantime, and will wait with interest to see what they'll do next.

Microsoft satisfaction rates slip

A.Lizard

they managed as much as 70?

They need to work a lot harder at marketing Vista.

If their claims of success were accurate, given that the average user home machine is probably a couple of years behind current entry level, they'd probably be lucky to manage a 50, given the complaint's I'm hearing all over the place about how much fun it is on current-generation workstations.

Former Grateful Dead muso sues YouTube

A.Lizard

as a member of the 60s generation

hopefully, younger people have more sense than to make heroes of their musicians as we did with ours.

I'll just say that two members of the Grateful Dead are now members of the Bohemian Club in California. The average member is a white, male corporate Fortune 1000 CEO, and I suspect their meetings are kept secret from the public for good reason.

While I'm not sure about Jerry Garcia, the enthusiasm with which the rest of Dead sold out is appalling, though their waiting until they could get the best possible price does suggest that they have far more sense than those "dirty hippies" were reputed to have.

Today's story is just another example of the Dead going from countercultural icons to eager embrace of the worst of the corporate values their music was created to attack.