After a little bit of pressure from the people responding to my previous post (My search for the best KDE Linux distribution), I have finally given in and tried out Chakra. The Chakra Project starts with Arch Linux as a base but, instead of forcing you to build your own distro piece of piece, Chakra comes more or less pre-packaged.
Installation
The installation was one of the best I’ve ever seen.
Recently I have been messing around with the Glade interface designer, a rapid application development tool that allows you to create full GTK+ user interfaces very easily. The neat thing about this tool is that it saves the GUI as an XML document, which is then hooked into your code through various language specific ‘sketchers’. These sketchers read in the XML and generate the corresponding ‘native’ code interfaces – often at runtime.
When Ubuntu 10.04 was released it represented the most modern incarnation of Canonical’s premier Linux desktop distribution. However not all things were better in this release. For myself I immediately noticed a problem while trying to install the gnustep-devel development libraries for GNUstep and Objective-C. I was greeted with this oh so lovely error message:
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming.
As some of you already know, I am a big fan of the KDE desktop environment (or KDE Workspaces or whatever they’re calling it these days). In my search to reach Linux KDE perfection I have tested out a number of different distributions. First there was Fedora, which I happily ran throughout the length of the experiment. Once that was finished I attempted to install and try both Kubuntu and openSUSE.
I have been meaning to write up a short post about this for a while, but thanks to the start of a new school term I have been a bit busy.
If you have seen the security news in the last month or so you will know that RSA-768, a 768bit or 232 decimal digit asymmetric key, has been broken (factored). This has important security repercussions for all of us because it is these public key algorithms like RSA, or ElGamal, that guard our online transactions, and e-mail conversations.
I honestly don’t remember how I came across this awesome project but I am certainly glad I did! XMLVM is a software toolchain which is designed to take cross-compilation to a whole new level. Rather than just offer OS portability, XMLVM is able to actually offer OS, hardware and programming language portability.
Here’s how it works: you write a program in a programming language of your choice, say .NET. Once compiled you send it through the first step of XMLVM which analyzes the produced CIL and creates an XML document out of it.
That’s right an update to your favourite hash verification program! 😛
This update includes a few new features that some of you might find useful. It also includes help documentation which walks you through how to use it!
New Features
Menu strip for even easier use Export features allows you to automatically write all of the hashes to a single file About dialog that provides information about the program Help documentation Requirements:
Some of you may remember an old Windows program of mine called Hash Verifier. It was a graphical utility that allowed people to generate hashes of their files, and then compare those to known hashes, ensuring that their files had not been corrupted. Well in recent months my foray into the world of Linux has finally taken me into the realm of programming on that platform. Being primarily a .NET developer on Windows I have found the Mono project on Linux to be an absolute breath of fresh air.
Over at The Linux Experiment we have decided to shake things up a little bit by forcing a change of desktop environments on everyone. Whatever we have been using thus far as to go for at least two weeks. If you care to follow along you can start by reading about how my transition from KDE to GNOME went below.
Check it out here: The road to GNOME
