Canllaith.org

Things I already knew: Microsoft _really_ suck.

I decided while off work sick and a bit bored that I’d take a look at a demo of Microsoft Office 2007. I’d heard lots of things about it, and figured it would be interesting to see if there were any revolutionary new ideas in it.

I had already mentioned I was sick, and therefore not thinking clearly, right?

The Microsoft website provided me with a time limited demo of Office ‘Home and Student’ (I only really wanted to poke at Word and Excel). Apparently these demonstration versions of office are ‘fully functional’ but are time limited to 60 days. That seemed pretty reasonable to me - even the cheapest copy of Office is about $500 NZD, I can imagine people wanting to give it a good long test before investing in it.

After taking 20 minutes to download, Office took about half an hour to install on my Vaio laptop. The Core Solo chip is designed for long battery life and not power, but that still seemed excessive to me. Of course, the Vaio was being tormented with Vista at the time so it wasn’t running at it’s best. That’s another blog post in itself.

Finally, it was installed. I opened up Word with some anticipation but was immediately struck with how slow and cumbersome it felt. Unfortunately, I can’t really report on any of it’s actual features as Microsoft’s idea of a ‘fully functional trial’ is to grey out the ‘new’ and ’save’ options in the file menu. Yup, they’d disabled the ability to create or save documents. At all.

I figured after going to all that effort to download and install Office, I might as well have a bit of a play in the blank document pane that’s presented when you first open Word. Except it seems that was functionality denied a demonstration version as well - the program informed me that I could not make any edits as the selection was locked.

Time to download: 20 minutes
Time to install: 30 minutes
Time used: 2 minutes
Time waiting for the uninstaller to finish: 20 minutes

I’ve really wanted to start getting into looking at KDE4 and finding places I can be of use, but I didn’t want to be running a broken development environment on my laptop. So, I started looking around for a desktop machine that would have good compile times, and not take up too much space.

Creative Commons licensed imaged used from tachikoma’s photostream

applepenguin is a base model Mac Mini. He’s a Core Duo 1300 1.66Ghz with 512MB of memory and a 60GB disk. It’s running Debian testing, and is currently busily compiling KDE. Qt only took 13 minutes, so I figure this is going to be so much less painful than on my tiny laptop. It’s so small that it fits inside the monitor stand of my desktop computer and makes very little noise. I’m extremely pleased with it, even though it took a little longer than I expected to get Debian onto it. The process went something like this:

• Install updates from Apple onto the preloaded OSX, since this included a mac mini firmware update that was required to get this working.
• Delete half the crap that’s on a stock OSX install. Who needs 2GB of printer drivers?
• Use Apple’s beta bootcamp tool to resize the OSX partition - leaving a little under 30GB for OSX, and 30GB for Debian.
• Install http://refit.sourceforge.net/, which provides an extremely attractive looking bootloader for EFI based machines including the intel mac mini
• Select the rEFIt Partition Tool option from the newly installed bootloader for it to do some MBR magic
• Boot from Debian CD
• Install Debian. Ignore wailing about bootloader. Also ignore wailing about lack of swap partition, since there was no way I was going to allow Debian to touch the partition table to create one
• Install and configure Lilo, using the instructions at http://bin-false.org/?p=17
• Reboot, and be astonished that it actually works
• Realise you somehow ended up with Debian Sid, and have all kinds of shenanigans trying to revert to Lenny.

I don’t really know what I’ll use the OSX it came with for, unless perhaps to play with Qt4 KDE on mac and to troubleshoot any hardware problems I might have since understandably the Apple retailers I bought it from would not be thrilled with supporting issues that came up while it was running Linux. Now I just need to figure out why kdebase is complaining that I don’t have libkio when it’s Right. There.

It’s also going to be handy to use for article writing and things that require me to mangle, break, and otherwise do unpleasant things to my system. Huzzah!

Today there was a very regrettable incident on the #kde IRC channel. Not many people were around and the channel moved on, oblivious to what went on before.

Those of us who did notice, ensured the issue was dealt with - but it still left a nasty taste in our mouths.

#kde is one of the community faces of KDE. It should be an inclusive and welcoming place where people can be assured of a safe environment. Hate speech and other offensive behaviour will not be tolerated, and not only will it get you ejected from the channel but reported to freenode staff.

Please help us make #kde the warm community it should be by ensuring your behaviour is appropriate for the environment.