The dock works as a dock should: it’s at the bottom of your screen and it shown applications that you can open, or have open. The settings for the dock can be changed by right cliking on the most left icon (summon Gnome Do). There you can change settings like auto hide and whether you want a Mac like zoom in the dock. Adding applications is easy: just drag an icon from the Gnome menu to the dock.

The good thing is that Gnome Do hasn’t lost it’s command line. When you press the keyboard shortcut (Super-Space) or select the “Summon Gnome Do” icon the dock changes into a typing area as you know it from Gnome Do.

To install just update your Software Sources with the following:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-testers/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-testers/ubuntu intrepid main

If you have Gnome Do already installed then you’ll get an update notification pretty soon. If you hot not then you should do the following:

sudo apt-get install gnome-do

To enable the dock you have to select the Docky theme in the appearance preferences.

If you are never satisfied with the amount of settings they are offered: You can find Gnome-Do in the Gnome Configuration Editor at the following path:

/apps/gnome-do/preferences

In the Docky folder you can edit some settings like the IconSize, the monitor where it’s shown and the SummonTime.

I’ve installed the Kubuntu Jaunty Jackalope alpha 3 on my normal laptop, I didn’t try anything like VirtualBox since I wanted to see how it performs compared to my normal Intrepid install. So I downloaded the iso, burned the CD, shrank my 8.10 system partition and installed 9.04-3.

Installation
The partition shrinking and installation ran as smooth as possible: No reboots required until the install is complete and no useless questions. Resizing the partition took a while, but after that the installer finished within 15 minutes. I was rather surprised that I had so little problems since it’s an alpha release, maybe that’s because the installer is not under development yet.

First impression
Booting 9.04 is fast. I’ve used the new ext4 filesystem and that’s worth it: My full startup from power on until password entry is about 40 seconds, from there until the KDE desktop is working is about 20 seconds. For comparison: my current 8.10 Gnome takes 60 seconds until password entry and then 40 seconds until a working Gnome desktop. That’s a good start for the rabbit.

The KDE 4.2 is now a release candidate, but I think it still requies quite some work. Although I must admit that my knowledge of KDE is limited, maybe some of the stuff I found is normal in KDE.

First of all my laptop screen is 1366 pixels wide and that’s too much for KDM. The screen where it requests the password leaves a space on the left and right of the monitor where is shows garbage, the middle 1024 (I guess) pixels are rendered correctly. I’ve seen this problem before: KDE 4 doesn’t like widescreen resolutions.

Visuals
After logging in it uses the full width of the screen and I was confronted with the beautiful KDE4 plasma desktop. A small glitch: the KDE panel was too small for the screen, but that was easily fixed. The screenshot shows the desktop after I played around with it for a while. I really like it, the plasmoids work smoothly and integrate with the desktop instead of, like screenlets and Google gadgets, which are windows. The design can be easily adapted to your wishes, but the default design is already very good.

The panel takes a bit getting used to when you get here from Gnome. It behaves like a crossing between the Windows taskbar and a Gnome panel. It has a Vista start menu like feature in the lower left corner, the windows list in the middle and the notification tray and clock on the right. When you right click the panel you can configure the height and width, and some other settings. Here also: everything looks nice and smooth.

Then I opened my first window. How can they deliver such a beautiful desktop with such a horrible windows and widget (or style in KDE speak) manager? The windows don’t fit in the slick and smooth plasma desktop at all. They stand out like somebody drew a stick figure on the Nachtwacht. I tried other styles and window decorators, but they never fit within the plasma desktop.

So I started looking for a style that did fit in, kde-looks should provide a solution there, shouldn’t it? Indeed there are some quite good looking styles and decorators there. So I downloaded , but how to get this into KDE? There is no “Get” or “Import” button with the styles and windows. Which is strange since there is one for colors, plasma styles, etc. Google helped: you need to build them! I won’t bother you with the trouble I had getting the QtCurve style to build, but it takes some skill and time. The result was disappointing. It looks like the KDE 4 desktop still needs to update their style and windows rendering since the current one limits designers way too much. Even Gnome offer more (!)

Functional
The desktop feels good, everything responds well and most of the buttons are in logical places. The working and categorization of the KDE menu takes some getting used to, but I guess that’s just time. One thing that does annoy me is that there a so many ways of configuring stuff and there are so many configurations that it hard to find what you need. For example: Konqueror downloads to the Documents folder by default. I don’t like that, I prefer a separate Downloads folder. So I set of to change that. There are a lot of configuration entries in the Konqueror menu, and each display a load of options, but mine wasn’t there.

There more in that direction: how do I switch off the tap-click of my touchpad? I really had to search to switch of the system sounds, and when I found them I had to switch them off for each action one by one. Why does KWallet ask me for my password each time I login? These are not essential things, but they shouldn’t be present in an OS in 2009.

Kubuntu comes with OpenOffice 3 comes pre-installed and works as expected, so do the address book and the organizer. Gimp is not there since it’s very Gnome. Amarok showed some problems, or: it’s not there. That’s an alpha bug, I guess. The pre-installed applications offer sufficient functionality to start working without immediately starting Adept. When you need to install anything, Adept helps you and finishes the installation nicely: I installed Skype and that didn’t give any problems.

What I found surprising is that I couldn’t find Firefox in Adept. Actually I expected it to be pre-installed, but when it wasn’t I expected it to be easily installable. I hope this is an alpha bug because Konqueror is nice, but I can’t live without FIrefox.

Overall the KDE 4.2 and the underlying Kubuntu is working nicely. There are very little bugs and nearly everything runs smooth and with problems. Of course there are things that require some attention: changing the icon set doesn’t work and scrolling is sometimes a bit jumpy. Although these don’t break the usability of the system. It’s stable, fast and modern.

Conclusion
Aside from the usual alpha problems the Kubuntu 9.04 alpha 3 is pretty good. I might even become a KDE fan when they fix the visual problems with the styles and windows. The best feature so far is the speed of the system, it boots faster and feels much more responsive then 8.10. I’m looking forward to the release.

To my surprise the setup failed at the very first step. I checked the iPhone’s bluetooth capabilities by finding the bluetooth address:

hcitool scan

And looking up the capabilities:

sdptool browse <address> | grep Networking

To my surprise the iPhone doesn’t support a dailup connection through bluetooth. Isn’t it rather strange that Apple sells us a phone that doesn’t allow us to share it’s network with the rest of the world? I would assume the TelCos wouldn’t mind, actually I’m surprised they even accepted it.

Apple has been down this road before, the whole Mac OS 9 and earlier was closed to the outside world. You’d have to buy Apple stuff to make it work. Mac OS X improved that a lot, and the hardware support also improved: USB, standard VGA. It’s strange to see that Apple is going back to the more closed approach now. The iPod was still a bit open; you can upload songs from Linux, but the iPhone can’t even be used without iTunes.

Watch it Apple, you won’t be able to hold this so much longer. There will be competition at some point, and then people will start to make different choices. So far you’ve been the best in what you’re doing, but you’re not the only one.

I hope Apple will start seeing that competition is not bad, but that they should learn from them.

But.

Why did Apple try so hard to make it impossible to use such a nice device without using other Apple products? First of all in the Netherlands you can only buy it  with T-Mobile. Since I’m a corporate phone user, I can chose between Vodafone. The solution is to buy a phone in Italy or Poland and insert a Vodafone SIM card. That works, but it’s annoying.

When I received the phone, I wanted to use it immediately. But you have to unlock the thing with iTunes. There is NO alternative. This means that you have to run either Mac OS X or Windows to even be able to use the iPhone. I don’t have that at work. I’ve tried to install iTunes in VirtualBox, but VB still has some problems with USB devices. Which is stupid, but not the point right now. So after trying to get it to work for an hour I gave up and asked a colleague if I could use his Mac to unlock the phone.

Ok, I’ve got a working phone. Nice, nice, nice. Good GUI, nice apps, GPS works great, wireless up and running in 10 seconds. For at least an hour I’ve been pinching, dragging, configuring and being happy.

Then I found out that the 3G network didn’t work. I only solved that when I got home. After some Google activity it appears that some iPhone vendors use the ‘Enterprise capabilities’ to lock the phone to their network. So, not SIMlock, but only the network capabilities. I had to download a configuration application to create a configuration profile that I has to mail to myself to install it on the iPhone.

Now it’s working and of course I’m happy and droowling but there is a weird aftertaste. Why did Apple take this approach? Do they think they won’t make enough money otherwise, or is it their idea of controling the quality of service to their customers? I don’t get it. Most people won’t care at all, they are running windows and don’t think about this. I do care, and I think Apple should care.

How is it possible that you are advised to run 1 Oracle  WebLogic Portal instance on 1 CPU? I know portal is not comparable to PHP, but a factor 1:1000 is a bit to much for my liking. And Oracle is not alone in this: IBM, SAP, all of these are slow and slower. And it’s weird since we (the IT boys and girls) have fixed this a long time ago.

There is a beautiful concept called HTML caching. Yes, I know: that’s not nice, architectural incorrect, not flexible enough. Indeed, heavily personalised pages might not be the primary candidates for full page caching, but most of the websites out there still use a fairly static homepage. Cache that page!

At Componence we’ve (finally) delivered a standard caching solution to put in front of Oracle WebLogic Portal (or BEA Weblogic Portal and the result is shocking. The performance improvement is upwards of 1:20. Give it a try: http://www.wk-vet.fr. Yes, that’s portal, and it’s dynamic.

Dear enterprise architects, please stop being such principle asses and apply the most common fixes to your performance problems.

I think the current desktop is either application- (Windows, Gnome) or document- (Mac OS X) oriented. But why? I don’t use my computer to open applications or create documents, I like to get a task done. I’d like an interface that is task oriented!

Task oriented design is a well known approach for interaction designers but somehow this never entered the desktop metaphor. The desktop is still mostly aimed at starting applications and handling files. Which is nice and important, but very inefficient. I think the desktop should be able to do those tasks for me. Gnome DO is quite good at finding the application I want to open, and Nautilus is quite good at organising files.

An idea would be to give the user the possibility to create tasks for itself. For example: I want to create a project plan, instead of: open OO Writer, select the project plan template and start writing. I hear you say: “You can use the templates for that!”. Indeed, I could, but then the flow would be: go to a folder where I want to create the plan, right click, find the template I want, create the file, name it, open it. Not efficient.

I’ve written a doc a while ago about a webbased task oriented desktop. Maybe I should expand that into something that fits on the desktop. Next holiday I’m going to work on that…

[Update]

• http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/932/
• http://gabriel.hurley.googlepages.com/userinterface
• http://www.qdh.org.uk/wordpress/?p=244

If Ubuntu is serious about the #1 bug, start thinking about this first: what software stack do you need to be a competitor to M$? That will include business software, quite a lot I think.

In every business you have to make decisions. Usually between money and something. Money and quality, money and people, money and … Whatever. Of course money is an important driver for your business, but there are other drivers. I think the most important one is: keep your business alive. That means: LEARN!

If you don’t learn as an entrepreneur you’ll never run a successful business. Learn from your successes, mistakes, competition, employees, friends, it doesn’t really matter: you have to watch and learn. The funny thing is I’ve had a couple of employers and they all tend to forget instead of learn. It’s probably easier to push a mistake away instead of writing it down at the top of your list of things to improve. “Human nature”?

Frustrating, but I still don’t want to be an entrepreneur. Let other people show that they can make something work. I’ll help them, and keep reminding them to learn.

The first was as easy as it gets: editing word documents. It seems that the word documents that OpenOffice delivers have a quite bad layout. Especially the content index is lousy. I must say I’m annoyed by this, I really try to use FOS for everything, but in my job I encounter a lot of MS Word documents. I need to be able to create and edit them.

The second was: we (Componence) switched to Exchange 2007. Ah well, that’s really old, so I guess Evolution supports that. It doesn’t. F*ck! It will be supported in the next release of Gnome, if they (Novell) are able to resolve some licence problems.

The third is that I’d like to be able to use an extra monitor on my laptop. I’ve been using the external monitor as a mirror for ages now, but a real spanning desktop would be nice. It turns out that this is really simple. Why didn’t anyone try to implement that in a way that doesn’t require any config file changing? This is way too simple, and possible for nearly a year already!

The last point made me find a weird thing in Compiz: it can’t handle a viewport larger then 2048 wide or 2048 high. Ehm?

The word file and exchange crap made me install Windows in a Virtual box. I have this open constantly and I spend a lot of my time working in Windows again. I hate it!