I love easiness!

Today at the uni (my beloved MIT – Milan institute of technology) a friend of mine that have recently bought an Asus eeePC 701 (Xandros version) told me he can no more stand linux since now that is used to OS X’s easiness all linux’s problems are too annoying! Hearing this really surprised me since my friend, before moving to Mac, was one of the greatest GNU/Linux’s supporter I’ve ever met!

You know… when you get used to the fact that everything works fast without problems it’s quite hard to “come back”. Just an example… yesterday I saw a poor linux user working for about half an our on his ubuntu trying to get connected to uni’s wifi… with no success! For me it is just a matter of opening the MacBook and it automatically get connected to uni’s wifi!

Mac’s easiness has no price! 

Kubuntu… not so bad!

I have never had a good relation with kubuntu (and ubuntu too…) for reason that I’m not going to discuss here, but yesterday, having to fix an old laptop for my cousin (that has never used Linux), I decided to give it a chance!

It impressed me! It fixed a malfunctioning HD and it installed perfectly on a pretty old (2.8 GHz P4) laptop of a “never heard brand”! I used the default installation (formatting the HD with ext3)… in 30 minutes everything was finished! All hardware recognized and correctly installed (and the machine, that previously mounted Windows, seems to be reborn faster and lighter).

Adept, the packet manager, is also quite impressive… very easy to use. I just plugged in the ethernet cable to connect to the web… updated all packages pressing few buttons and installed extra software with the same easiness!

So… I’m still preferring my beloved Slackware but I must admit that kubuntu is a pretty nice choice for quick jobs and for people who are new to GNU\Linux!

KDE 4 on Slackware 12.0

Yesterday I decided to install the new KDE 4 on my Slackware 12 so I started looking around for a repository with the packages (since on the official one there’s no trace). After a little search on google i found out this:

http://kde4.rlworkman.net

The repository seemed having all the packages I needed so I began the download (there’s no index so it’s impossible to use softwares such swaret or slapt-get). After saving all the packages into a folder and running an “installpkg *” command I logged out and tried to lunch the new kde. Unfortunately an error occurred… was impossible to execute kdestartupconfig4 due to the fact that was missing GLIBCXX 3.4.6 (this was pretty wired since GLIBCXX library is inside the libstdc++ package which is installed in my system). 

In the end, after long thinking, I found out how to solve the problem… It was necessary to install also the packages gcc-4.2.3-i486-1 and gcc-g++-4.2.3-i486-1. After this everything worked well!

I hope you’ll enjoy the new kde!