November 18, 2009 by Kulbir Saini on ATI, Fedora, Hardware, HowTo, Linux, News

News : Fedora 12 : Constantine Released [All you need to know]

Much awaited Fedora 12 : Constantine has been released and is available now! This post is more of a collection of things you need to know before you go all the way to download Fedora 12 and install or upgrade.

FAQs

Q. What is Fedora?
A. The Fedora Project page describes it in a short and nice way!

Q. I want to know everything about Fedora 12. Where do I find it?
A. You are probably asking for Fedora 12 Release Notes.

Q. Will it work on my machine?
A. What do you have? A server/desktop/laptop/netbook/xo/some-alien-hardware! It’ll work if your machine satisfies the hardware requirements.

Q. I have been using Fedora since long. What are the new features in Fedora 12?
A. Please browse Fedora 12 : Constantine Feature List page.

Q. Ok. I am convinced. From where can I download Fedora 12?
A. Nice! Please visit Download Page for download options. Checkout torrents or select mirror from Fedora mirrors.

Q. No. I don’t want that regular DVD. Do you have something different to offer?
A. Yup! Spins community is doing a wonderful job! Chose one from KDE, LXDE, XFCE, BrOffice, FEL, Games and Edu spins.

Q. I have downloaded the Fedora ISO. How do I install it?
A. There are different ways in which you can install Fedora on your system.

If you don’t have CD/DVD drive, you can follow How To: Install Fedora without CD or DVD.
You can install Fedora using a USB drive. Checkout LiveUSB creator.
You can follow the traditional way. Install using CD/DVD.

Q. I already have Fedora installed on my system. Should I upgrade or re-install?
A. Browse Upgrading Your Current System page and find out yourself.

Q. I think I want to upgrade my Fedora 11 system to Fedora 12. How do I do it using Yum?
A. Learn how to do it from the Yum Guru himself Yum upgrading to fedora 12 from fedora 11 or browse this page on Fedora Docs.

Q. I have ATI graphics card. How do I install Catalyst Display Drivers?
A. Follow How To: Install ATI Catalyst (fglrx) Drivers.

Q. Hey, I am stuck! I need some help. Where should I ask?
A. There are different ways like Real Time Support via IRC, mailing lists, forums etc. in which you can get help on topics related to Fedora. Browse Get Help page to checkout different methods.

Q. I like this Fedora thing. Can I help?
A. There are several ways in which you can help Fedora Project. The simplest way is to help others! Other methods can be ‘Write Documentation’, ‘Design for Fedora’, ‘Spread the Word’ or ‘Write Code’ 🙂 Checkout Join Fedora page.

You can join us for best MB5-845 exam and MB6-295 solutions. Our MB7-232 contains all those materials you want to pass for real 70-290 and 70-177 exam.

November 26, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Fedora, News

Info: Fedora 10 – Cambridge Released

Fedora 10 aka Cambridge is available now.

Get your copy of Fedora 10 now.

Well, if normal Fedora, doesn’t suite you, checkout the Fedora 10 spins and get whichever suits you 🙂

Also for KDE fans, there is a special corner.

After you finished downloading, burn the ISO and check the completely detailed Fedora 10 Installation Guide. Or if you want to upgrade from existing Fedora version to Fedora 10, check the upgrade guide.

Want to read whats new and what is there inside Fedora 10, checkout the release notes in your language.

In case your CD/DVD drive is burnt 😛 , or you don’t have immediate access to optical media, check How to install Fedora 10 without CD/DVD.

Still stuck somewhere, there are a lot of ways to get help. Proceed with whatever way suites you 🙂

November 21, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Email Client, Linux, News, Open Source

Info: Spicebird Beta 0.7 Final Released

Reporting from Spicebird blog,

Spicebird is a collaboration client that provides integrated access to email, contacts, calendaring and instant messaging in a single application. It provides easy access to various web services while retaining all the advantages of a desktop application. The application is based on projects like Thunderbird, Lightning and Telepathy and adds more functionality and integration among its components.

This release of Spicebird adds the following functionality:

Chat with friends on services like Yahoo, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ and Jabber
Add iGoogle Gadgets to Spicebird
Disable the applications that are unused
Access Google calendar
Experimental support for managing blogs
Available in more than 10 languages
Basic set of add-ons
Import data from Thunderbird, Outlook and Outlook Express

For a detailed description of this release, see the release notes.

Get Spicebird!

See how to install Spicebird on Linux. I’ll review the latest release very soon 🙂

November 11, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Email Client, Google, Linux, News

Info: Spicebird 0.7 Pre with Awesome Features

Spicebird is

your one platform for many collaboration needs. It provides e-mail, calendaring and instant messaging with intuitive integration and unlimited extensibility.

Spicebird beta 0.7 pre release is out now and can be downloaded in 10 languages from the i10n nightly build archive. For the latest nightly build of English version, check this English nightly build archive.

Some of the new features in version 0.7 are

Google Applets in Home Tab
- You can add Google applets in the Home tab. For example: On home tab, click Add Applet -> Google Applet. Add a url to Google applet (e.g. Google Map Search). And you’ll have a nice Google map on your home page 🙂
- Or add date & time applet ( this url )
- Or from the thousands of applets available from Google 🙂

Auto Update Feature
- Spicebird now checks for updates automatically 🙂

Its way faster than the previous version. Thats my personal opinion. I was using Spicebird beta 0.4 since more than 6 months.

Check the official release announcement for more details.

How to install Spicebird for test usage

Download

Get the latest version of Spicebird from nighty build archive.

Extract and Move

Extract the Spicebird archive file as

[root@localhost ~]# tar -xjf spicebird-beta-0.7pre.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2 [ENTER]

Move the extracted directory to /opt/

[root@localhost ~]# mv spicebird-beta /opt/ [ENTER]

Create shortcut on Panel

Right click on Gnome panel and click “Add to Panel”

Click on “Custom Application Launcher”

Fill in appropriate details as shown in the following image

Choose an icon for Spicebird by clicking the “No Icon” button on the top left corner.

Click Ok. And you are done. Now click the new icon that has just appeared on the panel. Rest of the configuration like account creation and settings is exactly same as Thunderbird or Evolution or any other mail client.

Reference : Spicebird Official Website

January 14, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Bug, Fedora, Graphics, KDE, Kopete, Screenshot

Review: KDE4 – Is it worth upgrading?

KDE4 was released on Jan 11, 2008. I noticed the rpms for Fedora on rpmfind.net on Jan 13. It was a big trouble to get packages one by one keeping in mind the dependencies. I tried Yum with rpmfind repo but it didn’t work out. Then I used the server where my domain is hosted. I have 15GB bandwidth per month and the download speed on the server is awesome (average 400kbps). So, I just ftp to rpmfind.net and downloaded all the rpms on the server hosting my site. And then I downloaded the packages from my domain to my local machine ( No effort for searching now and I can do parallel downloading now). So, lets see how to install KDE4 on Fedora.

Step 1:

Get the KDE4 rpms from rpmfind.net . Here is the list of all the kde4 rpms that you need to download from rpmfind.net.

Step 2:

Enable the fedora development repository. In '/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-development.repo' file check if enabled is equal to 1 for development repo. If its zero, then change it to 1.

Step 3:

Use yum to install the kde rpms that you have downloaded.

[root@bordeaux KDE4_RPMS]# yum install *.rpm [Enter]  (do as root)

Note: After the KDE4 rpms are up in the fedora repos, then you can skip the step 1 and directly install kde by issuing the command

[root@bordeaux saini]# yum install kde* [Enter] (do as root)

My Experience

I was expecting a lot from KDE4. But a lot of things went wrong. When I logged into KDE4 for the first time, everything was looking awesome and very sharp. But then I faced the first crash while editing the settings for a widget and I realized that its not possible to have a crash free KDE application. After upgrade ( which cost me around 1GB of downloading via yum) and spending a lot of time manually downloading the packages, all I got was a desktop environment which will crash frequently to remind that you just wasted 1GB of bandwidth.

After upgrading, Kopete stopped working due to some conflict in ssl libraries, xchat is also not working due to some other library conflicts, dolphin the new file manager for KDE doesn’t even start and flush all kind of errors and faults when launched from command line. After the first crash the panel disappeared and I couldn’t get it back. Launching kicker returns the kde3 panel.

KDE4 is awesome when you just sit back and look at it. But when you want to work with some apps, its miserable. One of my friend had this status message on gtalk ‘ KDE4 : KDE3.5.8 :: Vista : XP ‘. KDE4 is as good as Vista when it comes to looks but its equally bad as Vista as compared to XP when it comes to work with it.

Conclusion: Don’t upgrade to KDE4 and wait till May, 2008 when KDE4 will be shipped with Fedora 9. I hope that KDE4 will not crash frequently when it’ll be embedded natively.

Here are some screen shots if you wanna have a look 🙂