The “bleeding edge” dilemma

The urge to run the latest trunk of KDE is too great ! but the fact that the trunk is not the most stable keeps a lot of us away from it. Our Friends over at project neon have done a great job trying to address the same issue.
But the problem is slightly bigger than this, imagine a scenario where you are working on two projects and for one piece of code to run you need to uninstall a few installed packages this breaks another piece of software that you need for another project.

Or another scenario would be , you are about to install an experimental piece of software. Do you leave your system in an inconsistent state if that experimental software doesn’t work ? Do you take a back-up ? or do you try to pull off a complex trick of lots of Alternate environments ?

The most embarrassing situation is when you go to your local Free Software User’s Group / LUG to give a talk about how great your OS and its applications are , and just when you are about to speak the app you were showcasing crashes , Damn !
How do you ensure that your apps don’t crash while giving the demo and also maintain your latest unstable hack to your favorite software without both getting into each others way ?

What is the solution to all of the above problems ?
I propose using Boot environments, on Open Indiana a.k.a Oi (Solaris) ( I have started to love this Distro , but my first love is always belenix.org )
Now supposing you have a clean install of you create a snapshot

$zfs create snapshot mydistro@firstInstall 

and now make this snapshot bootable

$beadm create -e mydistro@firstinstall FirstInstall 

Now go ahead and bork up your system
You may want to come back to the borked system again later, so you create a new snapshot and make it bootable.

$zfs create snapshot mydistro@borked
$beadm create -e mydistro@borked Borked 

now you want to boot into the borked Boot Environment next time.

$beadm activate Borked 

reboot, and in the OI grub you will find FirstInstall and Borked entries, select the one you want and continue working. FirstInstall lands you up
in the system before you borked it up. Enjoy hacking

more info about boot environments and beadm
That’s all for now! Give OI a try , you may switch over
Until next time !
Kunal

First step to getting KDE on OpenIndiana : Boot OpenIndiana ;)

OpenIndiana is a project created from the ashes of OpenSolaris. When oracle decided to close the development of OpenSolaris, some brave folks forked the kernel and put together a user-space to form OpenIndiana (OI), Its a great distro ! Above all its got software innovations (ZFS , dtrace, crossbow etc) which the linux userland can just dream of (Though systemTap , btrfs are quite commendable as well.)

OK , so i have this great new distro and i love KDE so i want to see if my favorite softwares (Kate , amarok, digikam) work on OI or not. And sure they do ! (/me feels good here ) the KDE – Solaris team has already created a repo with the latest KDE 4.6 packages. So , now i am convinced that i must start using OI. So i dump the dd image onto a USB stick and connect it to my laptop (a Dell Studio 1450). Now the fun stuff starts OI doesn’t boot !!!!

After reading countless blogposts and consulting people on IRC (DrLou on #openindiana apparently had the same problem as me , and we sat together for 3 days (with breaks ofcourse trying out everything that we could find) . In the mean time i had posted my problem to the OI discuss mailing list as well. Finally after a 2 day wait , i got replies from the OI gurus on the discuss mailing list. The message from Garrett D’Amore was particularly useful , he suggested me to add the -k option to the kernel line in grub and boot , this would fire up the In-Kernel Debugger the KMDB when i pressed “F1-A” during the boot process. But alas ! this didn’t work either Now i was desperately in need of some new ideas. Garrett’s post hinted me to check out more OI kernel flags. As it turned out, in an obscure wiki entry in BigAdmin (the solaris admin wiki) there was a mention of the flag “-B acpi-user-options=2″ i appended the kernel line with this option and presto ! OI booted !. Now this was after 3 days of “beating around the bush” debugging and it felt great . So, i headed over to #openindiana and told DrLou about my findings , and after a few tries even his laptop booted !! Yay ! (Supposedly this acpi bug comes to haunt users of solaris , from time to time )

Now all that i had to do is to create a new beadm ( look up the solaris man pages , you will be amazed !) and add the bionicmutton repo to OI and that’s it, i have KDE 4.6 on OpenIndiana. OI Looks and Feels much better now

This blog post is to document two things:
1. ” -B acpi-user-options=2″ might get OI to boot on your machine.
2. Never give up any problem , if you are facing it , you can be pretty sure someone else is facing it too ! stick to the problem and solve it.
(And after you solve it , in the Spirit of Good Will , share it with others by documenting it in your blog/wiki)

KDE solaris needs a lot of polish and could do with some more contributors. So if you have some spare time , drop by at #kde-solaris , #openindiana , #illumos on freenode.

That’s all for now ,
Until next time
Kunal

I am going to conf.kde.in . You Should Too !

KDE india Community is Organizing its first conference at Bangalore and I am thrilled to be a part of the organizing committee. I am going to the Konf ( As i would like to call it, lovingly  ) that’s no news, i love KDE ! but this blog post is for the vast majority of my friends who have no idea what KDE is , and what it means to be a part of.

Read On , to  know more about what to expect at the Konf , and why you just have to be there !

1. Artists :

KDE is a *HUGE* project and we have brilliant artists in our KDE art team. Seen our shiny new poster or the stunning artwork on the website ?  Those are Courtesy Eugene Trounev, be there to talk to him personally ! He is also giving a talk about “Graphics & Open Source: Survival guide” . You don’t have to be a software guru to attend this talk, just bring the artist in you

2. Photographer :

As a photographer you try to capture all the moments you cherish ! You almost definitely use a photo-management application like Adobe Lightroom or the likes. But my fellow developer Aditya Bhatt will introduce you to “digiKam: Professional Photo Management” a *Free* photo management app that you just have to know about ! If you are excited about “automatic lens correction”, “Online sharing Integration” in lightroom, digikam had it for a very looooong time ! Be there to know more about it !

3. Person Managing a large diverse workforce (a.k.a Manager):

Before i start off on this point , let me put you in perspective. KDE is a project which has, as far as i know, thousands of active contributors, so it is very very big ! Now, I introduce our community ninja (a.k.a community manager, formally) Lydia Pintscher. She directly interacts with all of the thousands of the contributors , when required , and is very good at managing people. So , i am sure you can definitely learn a thing or two from her ! Plus have a lot of fun at the conference !

4. Gamer

You are an avid gamer , right ! Ever wondered what goes underneath your shiny new game that makes it tick ? Be there to attend the talk “Glue games with Gluon” Shantanu . I am sure , your time will be very well invested ! not spent

5. Programmer / Technology Enthusiast :

You my friend are in for a treat ! Frankly this blog post will be an injustice to all the amazing tech talks lined up. Just head over to http://kde.in/conf/talks/ to treat yourself !

6. User :

You guys are very important part of the community ! we the KDE community are always open to new ideas and criticism / suggestions.  Please do drop by and bring in your friends too ! Your visit would definitely be fruitful . We also have loads of Hands-on Sessions , please bring in your laptops if possible

7. School Kids / College Students :

Guys and Gals , you just have to be there ! Heard of Google Summer of Code ? Google Code-In ? We have a LOT of ex-GSoC ers attending the Konf , come and meet them personally ! Also get to know about the project that interests you ( a must for GSoC & GCI ) and there is no better way than to get introduced by the people who actually develop for the project !

If you have queries about the event , post a meesage to conf@kde.in or Just register ! at  http://kde.in/conf/register/

NOTE : Use the below discount codes, don’t forget to bring your college IDs  :)

• Student discount: KDEIN_DIS_STU
• Teacher discount: KDEIN_DIS_TCR

That’s all for now ! and See you at the Conf.

–cheers

Kunal Ghosh