Kubuntu Active and the Vivaldi Tablet

Posted on Monday, March 26, 2012 | | In , ,


I've been following some of the news on the new Vivaldi (formerly Spark) tablet, and I want one.  The Vivaldi 7" tablet is priced at about $US265 (€200). The first wave of preorders is closed, but I've put my name on the list to be notified when they're available in my area.  I'm gonna start tucking some money away for it, too.

In the meantime, I've looked at the videos of Plasma Active in action, and I think it looks very nice.  Though I don't have a touchscreen on my laptop, I'm installing Kubuntu Active in a virtual machine to play with it a little bit.


This is a document being written on Kubuntu-Active 12.04 in a virtual environment. I'm having some difficulty with the interface -- it took me about twenty minutes to figure out how to get Words to run. The spreadsheet program is in the preset default app list, but searching for Words came up empty several times before deciding, oh yes, there is a program called Words that you can run: here! As I'm running Active on a laptop, having the on-screen keyboard pop up is kind of annoying, but that's just because I have a real keyboard here. On the Vivaldi itself I'd need it.

Sliding out the left-hand panel and clicking on the How to Use Plasma Active results in my browser being opened to a 404 page. The help link subsequently disappears from the suggestions.

Adding apps to the activity desktop shows only the generic gear icon, not the customised app icon.  The application name is displayed beneath the icon, but why not have the app's own icon display?  I could get rid of the text beneath the icon entirely and neaten up my desktop a bit.  I tried to post the screenshot I took, but Blogger and/or Kubuntu Active seem to have decided I'm not allowed to upload screenshots today. :/


VirtualBox makes it more difficult to grab the top bar and drag it down, resulting in me saying, "C'mere.  No, come here!" a lot.  Hoping the actual tablet is less fussy.


More to come later.

VirtualBox tour: Debian Squeeze 6.0.4

Posted on Wednesday, March 21, 2012 | | In , ,

I decided to try installing Debian Squeeze (6.0.4) in a VirtualBox this afternoon.  After hearing Fab from Linux Outlaws talk happily about Debian, I thought I'd give it a shot.  Things did not go well.

Debian and I do not get along.  I guess I'm too used to Ubuntu's user-friendly style (and perhaps too brain-tired at the moment) to deal with bull like 'you are not in the sudoers file.  This incident will be reported.' I've set up Mepis, which is built, I think, on Debian, but managed to set it up so I didn't get scolded by my own *expletive deleted* machine.  Also, Gnome 2 is HIDEOUS.  As in, 'Oh $deity, my eyes!' I'd forgotten how brain-tearingly ugly it is.

Casualties: a few hours' download time during install.  Got the hard drive space back when I deleted the thing.

Poop on you, Debian. XP

Random Logout

Posted on Tuesday, March 20, 2012 | | In , , , , , , ,

I was in the middle of a pleasant session of Dwarf Fortress on the laptop when Kubuntu suddenly logged me out.  This the first time this has happened to me, but the internet seems to think it's common with Kubuntu 11.04.  I wasn't doing anything odd - setting up a new stockpile in the hopes that my dwarves would perhaps actually encrust some of the new nifty-neato gold furniture I've been having them make for the Grand High Poobah dining room deep down in the fort.  The key combos were nothing I haven't done a million times.  Yes, I've been sitting here playing for ... about two hours ... but that's actually a fairly short time in comparison to other sessions.  Ahem.

It's just as well for the moment, as it's getting on to bed time for me anyhow.  Maybe Kubuntu just wanted me to get to bed on time tonight.  Maybe X is a poopy piece of software (I've had issues with the laptop lid opening returning the system to active state from a sleeping state, requiring me to kill Xorg from TTY).  But I only lost about half a season, I think.  Thank Armok for seasonal autosaves.

Maybe it's time to do that cdrom upgrade to Oneiric now...

Setting Favourites in Rekonq v.0.7.0

Posted on Monday, March 05, 2012 | | In ,

I finally decided to slap a few favourite pages in Rekonq this morning and found myself stymied until I found this page:  How to set a favorite in Rekonq

Apparently Rekonq won't set your site as a favourite unless it's 1) open in the same tab as the Favourites window and 2) completely loaded.  You should see a little bar under the URL with a button offering to add the page to your favourites.  It seems to help to turn off the default setting of 'open new pages in new tabs', which I like, but which makes it hard to actually open a new page in the existing window.

Thanks to woodsmoke for this tip.