Lately I was trying to achieve a more unified login experience on my pc. I was thinking that a change of the background of both the KDM Login screen and of the Splash screen that follows would do the trick. In the process I learned a few more things that I decided to share with all the co-n00bs out there.

Let me point out here that to gain a more unified experience from boot until your desktop is loaded, you can also modify the GRUB screen and the OS Loading screen (many distros have started using Plymouth for this), but that depends on your version of GRUB and the Distribution  you use. You will be better off asking for help on your distros’ forums. Below I will only present some of the changes that can be done to KDE 4.4.

Before you Start:

• To accomplish the changes described here you need to open the directory as root. The easiest way is to that is to run “sudo dolphin” in a terminal to open Dolphin as root user, however be careful not to make any other changes that you will regret.

• If you want to keep the default folders in case you wish to go back to the default settings, you can always backup them or check the following tip.

• You can copy the original folder to another location before making any changes. Rename it as you wish, go ahead with the modifications, and then compress the folder to create a themename.tar.gz file. Then you can  install the themes through System Settings.
  For KDM go to System Settings>Advance Tab>Login Manager>Theme
  For  Ksplash go to System Settings> Appearance>Splash Screen
  You can even share these tar files with friends, just make sure to include the wallpaper of their resolution or tell them to change it after.

KDE Display Manager:
The files of the default KDE SC 4.4 KDM are located in this folder:

/usr/share/kde4/apps/kdm/themes/ethais

Files of themes installed later by a user are located at:

/home/USERNAME OF USER/.kde/share/apps/kdm/themes

You can switch any icon  here with one of your choice. You can even mix and match with icons from other themes, which you can download from kde-look.org. Have in mind that you need to name the new icon file to be exactly like the one your replacing.

I like this login so I did not change anything. I only replaced the background to match my desktop. To do this, go to the wallpapers folder and replace the file that corresponds to your resolution, always keeping the same name.

If you feel more adventurous you can open up the ethais.xml file with a text editor and play around with the configuration. Am not that demanding, I just found the theme that I liked and played around with the pictures I wanted to add. But it doesn’t look that complicated if you are into this kind of stuff!

KSplash Screen:

You can find the files here:
/usr/share/kde4/apps/ksplash/Themes/Default

Files of themes installed later by a user are located at:

/home/USERNAME OF USER/.kde/share/apps/ksplash/themes

Again you can mix and match. You can get more splash screens here. The rule remains: when replacing, keep the same filenames of the original files.

I went ahead and replaced the background file in the folder of my resolution with the one of my choice. In addition, I am using Chakra, so I wanted to replace the last icon displaying the KDE logo (icon 5 in the pic), with the Chakra logo.  The icons can be found in the 1600×1200 folder. I found the logo and the anim file in Chakra’s splash screen. However, the KDE icon is much larger, so I had to make some minor changes in the description.txt file, which is in the same folder, for everything to look as I wanted. The description.txt is quite simple and self-explanatory so you can easily manipulate it. Just some numbers that configurate the position of the icons and the time they appear.

KSplasherX:

To my great joy, while searching a bit around to write this article I discovered KSplasherX. It comes with a friendly wizard and 6 easy steps to help you create your own unique Splash Screen. It even generates the animated icons for you! It may be kind of out-dated and has some limited features, but I tested it on my KDE 4.4 system and it works just fine. It saves the result to a .tar.gz file which you can use for installing the new splash screen. You can find information on how to install KSplasherX in the README after you extract the source file. I just hope it is still an active project!

It would be so nice to have an application similar to KSplasherX for creating and editing KDM Themes! If you know one please leave a comment below!

The Final Result:

Well, after all these, this is what I get on my pc:

For those that use a browser without HTML5 support, you can watch the video here.

Here is what NicolaosX1 wrote:

“If you have problems in understanding the substance of Free Software, read the following dialogue between Socrates and Antiphon (Xenophon, Memoires A, 6).

ANTIPHON: I believe that you are a fair man. I do not consider you wise, though. I even think that you know this yourself, since you do not receive any money for your teaching. Your clothes, however, or your house, or any other of your possessions, which you think that may be of value, you would not give it for free or for a lower price than what it’s worth. It is, thus, obvious that if you consider your teaching of value, you should have been receiving some money. You might therefore be fair, because you do not deceive anybody out of greed, but you cannot be wise because you know things with no value.

SOCRATES: Antiphon, I find selling one’s beauty or wisdom a foul deed. Because, if one sells his beauty to whoever wants it, then we call him a prostitute, but if one meets somebody who is beautiful in body and soul and befriends him, then we call him a wise man. This is exactly what happens with wisdom. The ones selling it to those who want it are called Sophists*. Whoever, though, understands that somebody is clever and teaches him something good and makes him a friend, we believe that he is a good and virtuous citizen.

The same way, then, that somebody is pleased to have a good horse or a dog (tangible goods), so am I, and much more, when I have good friends and if I know something good I teach and I recommend it to others, which I think will benefit when it comes to virtue. And I study together with my friends the treasures written in the books of the old wise men and if we find something good we say it and we consider it to be a big profit if we become friends through this.

*Socrates, greatly averse to the Sophists who were paid for the classes they gave mainly to young rich Athenians, compares them to prostitutes (of knowledge).”

After discovering this article I really wanted to write a post here expanding my thoughts on it and how they relate with Free Software. I decided to just express some initial points of concern I have instead, leaving it open for discussion. Here’s what’s troubling me:

1. In general I don’t like taking words of great people out of context, nor misusing them just to make a point. I only use this quote here, with respective differences taken into consideration and respecting the analogy, to trigger a conversation. I already feel awkward, but I felt this was something worth sharing.
2. I am aware that FLOSS has other “rules” and “freedoms” to define itself and I have in mind that the quoted text is far from expressing the Free Software ideology. However I agree with the initial writer. For me, the idea behind  Socrates’ words  in a way demonstrates the substance of Free Software, and the “sharing knowledge” concept is one of the reasons that drove me into this community in the first place.

How do you feel about this? Does it represent the essence behind FLOSS to you? And in what perspective? Please leave your comments below, always remembering to keep a contributing spirit.



The left circle shows the Preview Mode Button. We will expand on this option below.

On the right is the Information Panel, which in addition to showing info about the file (type, size, modified etc.),  will allow you to preview the majority of files (Text, Image, PDF, Open Document). This happens after you select a file or hover your mouse over it.

What’s more, the Information Panel enables playback of Video and Music files. A small media player will appear, with just a play/stop button and a bar, but it’s more than enough.

You can also add an extra information popup window that shows a preview and some information  about a file when you hover your mouse  over it. You can see it in the screenshot above and the ones following below. It displays similar information with the information panel.

In Dolphin go to Settings> Configure Dolphin> General. In the Behavior Tab enable “Show tooltips” like below:

How to show previews as icons:

Despite all these,  it isn’t possible for Dolphin to show the various files as thumbnails instead of icons as you browse the filesystem . For this to work, you must undergo the procedure described below:

For starters,  you need to select the Preview mode button in Dolphin, as shown in the screenshot at the beginning.

Now lets open Settings > Configure Dolphin.

Then go to General > Preview Tab.

Image, Txt and PDF files are supported by default.  You can also select previews for other file types and directories as well. Just click on the ones you wish.

Text Files

Supported but not enabled by default, this is what you should see if you enable preview:

Image Files (ie .png, .jpg)

By default enabled, you will be able to see thumbnails of the image files instead of the usual icons.

PDF files

This is supported but not enabled by default. In the Preview Tab select Postscript, PDF and DVI files to enable it. I think that this preview requires Okular to be installed to work.

Open Document files (ie .odt, .ods)

You will need to download the OpenDocument Thumbnail plugin.

Depending on your distribution, this package might not be in the repositories and you will have to compile it from source. Information on how to install the package can be found in the readme file after you extract the .tar.gz file. It’s quite easy!

After installing this package, just go back to Dolphin configuration and now you will have the ODF (OpenDocument Format) files selection. Here is what you get after enabling it:

Audio Files (ie. .flac, .mp3)

AudioThumbs allows Dolphin to preview cover arts embedded in audio file tags as thumbnails. Unfortunately it doesn’t support .ogg files currently. You can add images to your audio files, using Kid3. Thank you David for this tip.

Video files (ie .ogv, .avi)

This time we will need MplayerThumbs, it of course needs Mplayer installed to work.

Once again, depending on your distribution you will probably find this package in the repo’s, under a similar name. If not, information on how to install it can be found in the readme and install files after you download and extract the source package. You can run mplayerthumbsconfig to check that Mplayer is the selected backend.

As above, a new option will now be available in the Preview Tab in Dolphin Settings>General. Select Video Files (Mplayer thumbs) to enable it.

The preview of video files is rather slow on my PC, but it’s a very old one, so am guessing it runs smoother on newer systems.

Update: As suggested by MirzaD in a comment below, using kffmpegthumbnailer instead of mplayerthumbs will probably give you a better overall experience. According to it’s developer, it’s designed to be as fast and lightweight as possible.

I have tested this on my Chakra system, it should also work in other distributions that come with KDE SC 4.3  and above. What is your experience after enabling all these? Feedback and suggestions are welcomed!

I recently developed an SMS (Short Message Service) daemon for a project at work. The daemon is using the SMPP protocol to send messages. To save time (and money) I used an Open Source SMPP library (from Logica) instead of implementing the protocol myself. I tested it on a dummy SMPP server and everything worked just fine but when I tried it on the real server the daemon started behaving unexpectedly. After spending some time troubleshooting I figured it out. The problem was that the SMPP Server of my provider was sending multiform packages in some cases. The problematic package was send only when the daemon exceeded the maximum number of SMS per second. The submit response that the server was sending did not have a message Id (the field was missing), while it was suppose to respond with a blank message Id in case of an error, as the SMPP specifications require. The SMPP library was handling it transparently by reporting the error back to the server.

I contacted my provider to report the bug but unfortunately they could do nothing about it. Not soon enough at least. So it was up to me to fix the problem. Luckily the particular library is very well written so I was able to modify it  in order to handle the malformed package.

But what would happen if I did not have access to the source code? I would be stuck. Clearly the problem was not with the library and the vendor would have refused to make any changes as the library did not have any problems. Even if the vendor agreed to make the changes it would have been at a very high price. My provider would not fix the problem for years to come and changing my provider is not an option.

The bottom line is that FLOSS is not about cheap software. It’s about control. If you have the source code then you are in control of the situation, although good support from the vendor is always welcomed. Cheap price comes with the openest/freedom, since you are not restricted to pay support to a particular vendor if you are not happy with him.

P.S. : Some claim that Free Software is not the American way. They say it might hurt big software companies or prevent small ones from success. If the American way is the way of the American Revolution, then it’s about people seeking their freedom. Tolerating the artificial restriction of your freedom from someone who’s only purpose is making profit, is not the American way. Having this in mind, FOSS is as American as Software gets.

Update: The method still works on KDE SC 4.4

Konsole is the X terminal emulator of KDE. I find having the terminal out of my way, but always open and easy to reach out to, very convenient. It also looks cool. With KDE SC 4.3 you can easily achieve this with a few clicks without the need of any additional software.

Here is how to do it:

1> Open up a Konsole window.

2> Move the window at the position on the Desktop where you want it to appear. I like having it at the top left corner of my screen.

3> Right click on the Konsole window and deselect “Show menu bar”

4> Right click again on the window and click “Edit Current Profile”

• In the Tabs Tab select “Show Tab Bar when needed” under Tab Bar Display
• In the Appearance Tab select the colors of your choice and then hit “Edit” on the right. Move the “background transparency” bar to 100%. You can also create a new custom scheme and set your preferred fonts here.
• In the Scrolling Tab under Scroll Bar options, click on Hidden.
• In the Advanced Tab you can change the settings for the cursor to match your needs.
• Hit OK when you are done.

5> Right click on the Konsole’s window title bar and select Advanced >  Special Application settings

a) Go to the Geometry Tab

• Click Position and Force. The numbers shown here are the coordinates of the window. If you placed the Konsole window at step 2 correctly, then you don’t need to change anything here. For top left corner “0,0” should be entered.
• Click on Desktop and Force. Then choose on which desktops you would like to embed the terminal to. All Desktops selected for me here.

b) Go to the Preferences Tab and enable and force these options:

• Keep below
• No border
• Skip taskbar (for Konsole not to be shown on your taskbar)
• Skip pager (for Konsole not to show an icon in the Pager widget)

c) Hit OK when your done.

6> We are almost done here, we now only need to make Konsole automatically load when logging in.

• Open System Settings
• Click on the Advanced Tab and select Autostart.
• Click on Add Program on the right and locate Konsole (it’s under System) or just type “konsole” in the space there and hit Enter.
• Hit OK (probably twice) and close the System Settings window.

7> We are done! You can restart your PC to check if all went as planned.

Voila the result on my Desktop:

Keep in mind:

- Alt+F3 will bring up the menu for right clicking on the title bar of the Konsole’s window.

- Right clicking on the Desktop area where the Konsole lies will not present the Desktop menu but the menu for right clicking in the terminal.

- An option to hide the Konsole Window when hitting Alt+Tab doesn’t seem to exist. If you have a workaround on this do tell.

- Whats more, the Konsole will disappear when  “Show desktop” is attempted.

- If you have  “restore session” enabled in System Settings>Advanced Tab>Session manager, you need to exclude the konsole from restoring, or it will (sometimes) run two instances of the Konsole when you restart KDE. (thnx to truzicic for this tip!)

I had heard abοut ArchLinux back from the early days that I started experimenting with GNU/Linux distributions. It caught my attention for two main reasons:

1. The mentality of Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) and lightweight.
2. It’s a rolling distro, which means you don’t need to upgrade every now and then to newer versions to keep up to date. Just update your way into everything new out there.

To be honest, I had attempted installing ArchLinux on an old  laptop back then, but I failed miserably in completing the task. Same disappointing results on Virtualbox on my desktop PC. Although Arch has extremely thorough documentation available, I was stuck somewhere between manually setting up the system files and installing and configuring a working desktop environment. As an newbie I couldn’t handle the pressure, so I gave up. But not for long.

To my great pleasure, I recently stumbled upon the Chakra Project. Chakra is as the title suggests, a brand new distribution which  is based on Arch Linux and KDE 4, but it comes extra with its own tweaked package set of KDE called KDEmod and some very handy tools.

I was extremely happy to see that it features a graphical installer, and the fact that it supports automatic hardware configuration made it irresistible. I just had to download and see with my one eyes. It was about time I get rid of that Windows XP dual boot  with Ubuntu after all.

In my joy I forgot to mention that Chakra is currently only at Alpha 4 level, with the Beta release following soon. It was normal to expect some bugs and troubleshoots.

The Pros:

• ArchLinux: Arch just feels great and runs smoothly. The two reasons I mentioned in the beginning of the post apply here.

• Pacman: Arch’s Package Manager is a solid application that delivers. A simple yet feature-filled  tool for managing your packages through the Konsole. I am not a terminal fan boy but I easily found my way around to do things.

• KDE 4.3: In my humble opinion it’s on the right track. I was very frustrated with 4.1 and it was one of the reasons I had switched to Gnome. It’s clear now that with the upcoming KDE SC 4.4, the K Desktop Environment will earn much of it’s old prestige back. In addition, it feels much lighter on resources now compared to where I left it. Although this could very well be  due to Arch and/or the various modifications of the Chakra Project team (if it is, the difference is remarkable), it is possible that all that bug fixing and code shining from KDE developers produced results.

• KDEmod: Tweaking KDE for Arch optimization. “ArchLinux is a small distribution and the developers are on more important missions to maintain and improve it, so KDEmod was born to provide a fully modular installation of KDE with nearly all the features and bling some bigger distributions provide with it – and partly even more bleeding-edge features”. My first impression of KDEmod is only positive, having in mind it’s still a work in progress.

• AUR: “The ArchLinux User-community Repository is a community driven repository for Arch users. It contains package descriptions that allow you to compile a package from source and then install it via Pacman.” Compiling made easy with the KISS way.

• Support: I feel obligated to repeat here the extensive documentation on the ArchLinux site. What’s more, when a problem occurred with Partition Manager, I posted a request in the forums. Not only I got a respond in the same day to my problem, but the package responsible for the solution was already in the repositories for me to upgrade to. Problem’s gone! Great job by the community there!

l

The To Dos:

• GRUB:  Installing bootloader version 0.97 from the Chakra installer, wiped out all my other booting options. Ubuntu wasn’t discovered and I had to manually edit the GRUB menu.lst file to enable booting to it. Furthermore, my partition table got a bit mixed up and I had to undergo a small process through fdisk to repair it. Works still needs to be done here I assume, since automation is desired, users shouldn’t have to get into this  kind of trouble.

• Shaman: It’s “a complete frontend to libalpm/pacman and ABS written in Qt4”. I tried adding and removing software with it, attempted some updates and applied some settings. Shaman is far from ready. It kind of reminded me of Kpackagekit when it first made it into Kubuntu. It crashed on various occasions. I can read in the forums that this is to the knowledge of the developers at Chakra-Project and are currently working on improving it. A package managing application needs above all to be stable and reliable.

In conclusion:

If you are a new GNU/Linux user,  I wouldn’t for now advice using this Alpha 4 release by no means as your main operating system. But if you know your way around and/or belong to the adventurous type, I believe Chakra worths taking it for a spin.

I quote again from the Chakra webpage:

“If you are not the “pragmatic one” and don’t want to learn and take full control over your computer but rather use a “point and click” system, you may go better by using one of the many other distributions for now, although they will not give you the clarity, power and simplicity of Arch Linux.”

Keep up the very good work done here Chakra Team, I personally appreciate the effort put into this and I will most certainly be here for the 1st official release.

New distros seem to pop-up every day in the GNU/Linux world. The majority of them try to be as FREE as possible, however when attempting to install a distribution on a new PC of a common next door user, you will probably find (I sure did) that you can’t avoid falling into these two proprietary sins:

1- Adobe Flash Player:

Let’s say that you install a new distro on a friend’s PC. You got it all setup and ready to use in no time and left his/her house feeling all proud and smiling, letting them enjoy the new experience. You will most likely get a call in a minute or two from a familiar voice asking you why he/she can’t view videos on websites like Youtube. Also, lots of websites depending on Flash Player will not be showing up properly or as designed to.

If you look for a free alternative software, you will soon end up installing GNASH, the GNU Flash movie player, which is quite an impressive try by the team over at GNU. This replacement application does the job quite good I must confess. Still, it won’t be long until problems start to occur: many sites will not support it, multimedia will not be playing correctly or crashing, you will be asked to install the Adobe Flash player or upgrade to the newest version of it. The average user will quite soon get annoyed and start complaining.

HTML 5 was introduced recently and video support without the need of any software is a very important step on the road to stop depending on Adobe and the Flash Player, at least not for viewing videos that is. This is a big step forward and it would be nice to see websites, especially the ones that are related to FREE software, starting to take advantage of all the new features.

2 – Graphic Drivers

Nvidia and AMD are doing a relatively good job with their Linux drivers and support. I am sorry to say, that despite the voices and the pressure from the community , these drivers stay proprietary.

Using the nvidia driver myself, I came across some bits of troubles: suspending might not work, flickering might occur, refresh rate issues, maybe some incompatibilities with compiz etc. Despite these, all in all the feeling is good. According to the notification I get to install them on Ubuntu 9.10: “This proprietary driver is required to fully utilise the 3D potential of NVIDIA graphics cards, as well as provide 2D acceleration of newer cards. If you wish to enable desktop effects, this driver is required. If this driver is not enabled, you will not be able to enable desktop effects and will not be able to run software that requires 3D acceleration, such as some games.”

As far as I know, the biggest equivalent to these proprietary drivers is the work of the team behind the nouveau project. I had given a chance to this attempt in the past, but I was disappointed. From what I read it has progressed, the 2D acceleration of the project is improving, but 3D acceleration is currently only suggested for testers.

I had never owned an AMD card, so there is little I can comment on here, however according to the FAQ on the official website:

“Q4: Is complete driver source code available?
A4: Some of the technologies supported in our driver are protected by non-disclosure agreements with third parties, so we cannot legally release the complete source code to our driver. It is NOT open source. We do, however, include source code for the control panel and certain other public segments. We also actively assist developers in the Open Source community with their work, so if you absolutely require an open source driver for your graphics card, we can recommend using drivers from the DRI project, Utah-GLX project, or others.”

If you are in an experimental mood, you can check the links given above for more. If you do or you have some further knowledge of them, please post a comment below letting us know about your impressions and thoughts.

I feel obligated to mention here the attempt made by The Open Graphics Project, which is developing graphics cards with Free-licensed specifications and Free Software drivers. I can only hope that this kind of work continues to exist and improve, producing the best of results.

Why do I bother writing about this?

I belong to the FLOSS community for a year and a half now, and I try to keep as FREE as possible. As most of people introduced to free software, I too came across various troubleshoots after I made the switch to GNU/Linux.

I tended to restart the system to my Windows partition on a daily basis, in order to complete a desired task. Soon I discovered Wine, which does an excellent job running all those Windows applications that you haven’t yet discovered an alternative for. Then I went on to using virtual machines like VMware and VirtualBox for the programs that wouldn’t run as intended on Wine.

Searching around the web, posting on forums, reading and learning,  I have gradually managed to replace most of the applications I use with free equivalents, which nowadays even do the job I want better than the ones I previously used.  As a result, I rarely have to use the methods mentioned above.

These two applications, Adobe Flash Player and the Graphic Drivers, are the only ones that I haven’t been able to be replace with something free yet. On the positive side, it’s nice to see that the companies behind the programs try to maintain a GNU/Linux version of their software and have it up to date. However they are still not free, and if you care about the ideology behind all these, am sure it’s bugging you too. Am waiting to see this coming to an end soon. Since the companies don’t seem to be persuaded to free the code and the software itself, I can only hope the teams behind the equivalent applications manage to get them to a fully working state as soon as possible.

Many might get the idea that I am writing this post to complain. On the contrary, I am stressing out that the FLOSS community has come a long way in the short time that I consider myself a member. Being completely FREE is a dream not that far away.

Depending on your needs, you might want to refer to some additional applications here, please keep in mind that this post is about the everyday user. If you still have something to add, feel free to leave a comment below.

I had first tried Puppy Linux when it was at version 4.2 and I was very drawn to it. Version 4.3 was recently announced to my great pleasure. It is based on the 2.6.30.5 Linux kernel and is advertised as “a superb, compact, super-fast and free operating system”. I gave it a go to check this for myself.

Below I describe a step by step, including screenshots, full installation of Puppy Linux 4.3 from a CD ,on an internal hard disk.

Booting from the Live CD

Obviously you first have to download the .iso file (105mb) from the site, and then burn it to a CD. Booting from the CD will get you to the initial boot screen, wait 5 seconds and then you get to choose your keyboard layout, local settings and time zone.

1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

Then you get to setup the X server, monitor and video settings.

6. 7.

8.

If all goes well you will then enter Puppy and you can start the installation process. Since you are using a Live CD, you can of course give it a try before that and check that all will work as intended on your pc!

Starting the installation process

9. 10.

11. 12.

If you have already partitioned your hard disk, then you can proceed to step no 21 after step 12.
If not, you will have to start GParted and setup the partitions as I did. I created a 512mb partition used as swap space, and a 4.5gb one to use for the PuppyLinux OS.

Using GParted to prepare the Hard Disk

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

Installing

After closing Gparted the installer will automatically start again and you can continue with the installation.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

Setting up GRUB

Between these steps sometimes you may have to wait a minute or two so be patient and all will continue as planned.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

36.

Rebooting into Puppy

After installing GRUB the installation is almost finish. All you have to do is reboot into your newly installed PuppyLinux system. Don’t forget to remove the Live CD from the CD ROM drive when it automatically ejects.

Once you reboot, you may have to enter the settings from steps 3 to 8 again, but thats the last time you will be asked to.

37. 38.

39. 40.

Welcome to Puppy Linux 4.3! You are good to go now! After playing with it for some days I actually feel that my old laptop is resurrected. I hope you too enjoy the experience!

For those that might have trouble with getting online, I added  a quick tutorial on how to setup the internet connection.

Setting up the connection to the internet

Here I present the method used for the Wireless Internet. The method is the same (much simpler) if you want to setup an ethernet connection.

41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

At this point, after you scan for and select the network you would like to connect to, you must select the encryption that it uses (Open, WEP, WPA, WPA2 etc.). Click on the corresponding button, then enter the key required, and remember to save the profile. After that you can use it to connect to the internet.

46. 47.

48. 49.

If all went well, you should be able to use Seamonkey and browse the web!

I hope you find the guide useful and practical!

If you have any questions, troubleshoots or feel that I left something out, don’t hesitate to place your comment here.

Red Hat

1. Truth Happens

2. Inevitable

3. Choice

Linux

1. Imagine

2. Not just about the code

3. What does it mean to be free?

4. Warning

IBM

1. Prodigy

2. Shake up the world

3. Linux is working

Open Source

1. We are here

Ubuntu

1. Matrix runs on Windows XP (by CollegeHumor)

Well I hope I haven’t forgot anything since there are some very good ones out there.

Do you have any other favourites that I left out?

This can be done by creating a separate partition on the initial installation called /home. The /home folder is where the GNU/Linux Operating Systems keep the data of the user, the configuration files of the applications installed and much more. A /home partition also gives you the opportunity to share the same /home folder between two GNU/Linux installations on the same computer, this meaning sharing the same settings for the same applications.

If you haven’t created a /home partition when installing your OS, you can do it even after installation. This is not my topic here though, googling it will present you lots of how-tos.

I decided to put the /home partition to the test. So I checked what happens to it and it’s data when switching trough distros. I chose the distros based on my knowledge of them but most importantly to cover miscellaneous  based systems. I followed this order:

Ubuntu 9.04 (Debian)> Sabayon 4.1 (Gentoo)> Fedora 11 (Red Hat)> Ubuntu 9.04

Ubuntu

I started by creating a /home partition on a clean install of Ubuntu 9.04. For this test I did the following:

• Saved some files on my desktop, in the pictures and documents folder of the /home folder
• Installed Firefox, added addons and themes, and changed random settings
• Installed Thunderbird, added 2-3 accounts, downloaded my emails, saved some of them in local folders
• Installed Pidgin, added my MSN account, added some emoticons and changed some settings

Sabayon

I then installed Sabayon 4.1. During the installation, when setting the partition I previously used for /home in Ubuntu as /home for Sabayon, I was asked whether to keep my data, and I answered yes. However when inside Sabayon after the installation finished, I realised that it had placed my Ubuntu /home folder in a new folder named username.backup.0 , inside the new /home folder, keeping all my data and files safe but not used.

I tried to replace the application folders manually to check if I could restore my previous settings. You  must run at least 1 time the program you want it’s settings to restore, before moving on to replace the files. This will create the settings folder in your current OS so you can replace it afterwards. It’s not necessary to do anything after running the program, just click cancel if asked and exit.

Starting from Firefox, I replaced the .mozilla folder inside the /home folder with the one in username.backup.0 (remember that “.folders” are hidden by default in GNU/Linux, click on View>Show hidden files or press Ctrl-H). I was asked what to do with the files and folders already existing, I selected merge all and replace all. It worked! Running Firefox after, all my add-ons were back. I only had to manually enable the theme, but it was present too.

Thunderbird was a bit trickier. In Ubuntu the folder is called .mozilla-thunderbird, while in Sabayon .thunderbird. In the .thunderbird folder a subfolder with a name of the type rzwyc9rt.default existed. I found a similar one in .mozilla-thunderbird. I went ahead and replaced the contents of the 2nd into the 1st (remember to merge and replace all). I kept the .ini and appreg files. and ran Thunderbird again. As a result, I had my old settings back, my local folders and my emails were there!

On I went to do the same with Pidgin and it was must simpler here. Just have in mind that the folder for Pidgin is named .purple in both distros. I merged and replaced. Ran Pidgin after this and I had my account, settings, old statuses and smileys back.

This can be done for any application you like, just as long you find the folder where it stores it’s data in /home. What’s more, the same method can be used if you want to transfer your settings for certain applications from one PC running GNU/Linux to another.

Fedora 11

I then installed Fedora 11 and undertook the same procedure. Have in mind that I never deleted the .username.backup.0 folder, but kept it inside the /home partition among with the /home folder that Sabayon created.

Fedora never asked to keep my settings during the initial installation, I just mounted the /home partition without formatting it and installed. After reboot, I was asked for a login username. I used the same as on the previous distros, and because of that the system found my /home folder and asked me to import everything. That’s cool! I wonder what would happen if I didn’t use the same username though. Probably a backup folder like Sabayon?

After logging in I had another positive surprise: the system had kept my settings for the wireless-LAN and automatically connected!

My Home folder was kept untouched, so was the username.backup.0 one. All my files, music and pictures present. Firefox was OK with all add-ons. Same with Thunderbird. The only problem was that because Fedora 11 uses new beta releases, some add-ons weren’t supported, but thats expected. Changing to the edition of the application you used before should do the trick. In Pidgin too, everything was working as it was supposed to.

Back to Ubuntu 9.04

Finally, if I could go back to Ubuntu and have the same system I used at the beginning, this test would be a success. And it was! Everything worked just perfect! It was like I had never switched through the distros above. Sabayon played some tricks on me, but since it never deleted my files I guess I can live with the bit of extra work of manually replacing the folders for the applications I want.

To Sum Up:

If you usually format your PC, use a dual boot, or like to change distros a /home partition would save you lots of time. Setting up applications is the only thing that takes some of my time after a clean install. The /home partition enables me to save that time. It also saves me time from writing down all the add-ons, passwords and extras for my applications to remember to install them again after the format (it’s pathetic, but this is what I did so far!). But now having all these in mind, reinstalling and switching distributions couldn’t be faster.

It is my belief that the developers of the GNU/Linux Operating Systems should try and make the switch through various distributions as compatible and easy as possible. This is very important in the free software community. Not to be locked in one distro.

If you tried switching to an unmentioned distribution, I would like to hear and learn more on the experiences and troubleshoots of it.