Canllaith.org

In a recent mini-article I wrote about my impressions of Kubuntu Gutsy, I mentioned that it was disappointing that Kubuntu did not support Cisco LEAP wireless authentication as I’m stuck with using it for work. Is Cisco LEAP actually relevant to most of the world? Of course not. Sadly I can’t change our infrastructure though so without this support, no wifi for me.

One of the developers contacted me on IRC after reading the article and pointed out that Kubuntu Gutsy does indeed have Cisco LEAP support, and mentioned how to get to it. He also mentioned it would be interesting for someone to actually test it since almost no-one ever uses this dreadful backwards protocol.

It’s taken me a while to get my Kubuntu laptop into the office to check it out, but the LEAP support is indeed there, works great, and I’m sitting on it now to post this entry. Thanks Kubuntu!

The development team have my apologies for not looking into the matter further.

KDE 4

Originally uploaded by canllaith

I’ve been crazy busy with so many writing projects the last few days. I’ve got a review of the Eee to complete and some articles on KDE4, as well as (hopefully) some more Eee content. Almost all paying work, so hooray for that.

I thought I’d take a moment out to flick a screenshot of the current state of KDE4. It’s very attractive although there are still a lot of rough edges visible. Now I’ve finally managed to master the cmake build process I might even manage to write some docs. Possibly even finish the half draft of the first KDE4 focused ‘This Month in SVN’ I have lurking around. Sleep is not all that necessary, right?

I do have a panel, but for some reason it’s vampirish and did not show up in the photograph. I’m going to blame Aaron for that.

Yesterday I managed to get my hands on the new Asus EeePC. I’m saving an in depth review for another time and place, but really this little guy is just too awesome to not talk about.

It’s a 7″ ultraportable with wireless, webcam, and a flash-based hard disk that runs a modified Xandros Linux. While the UI is heavily customised, it includes a lot of KDE applications.

I’m sitting at the moment in a server room waiting for a colleague to finish up, typing this on the EeePC using a HSDPA USB modem. It’s small, light, amazingly portable, and incredibly well put together. Despite being so small the keyboard feels pretty nice, and the wireless range is really strong. It’s also amazingly cheap at $600 NZD.

Did I mention it’s very small? The looming blackness behind it in the photograph is my small handbag. It actually fits inside the handbag, albeit with a little bit of Eee poking out the top.

I’m really sold on this little guy. If I didn’t already have an ultraportable notebook I would see myself taking it *everywhere*. As it is, I’m almost disappointed these weren’t around when I bought my VAIO TX - I’d have saved myself a lot of cash, and while this is certainly nowhere near as powerful or featurepacked as my VAIO, for writing work, it probably would do.

It’s great to see really excellent consumer products based on Linux, especially using KDE applications. I wish something like this was available a couple of years ago when I was looking for a cheap. light notebook to run Linux on and found nothing.

I think Asus called it the ‘eee’ because they somehow knew that was the noise I was going to make while jumping up and down and pointing at the box in the store.