A nice interview about the future of copyright – in German..

Again I found a nice article in the “Sueddeutsche Zeitung”: In an interview a German lawyer explains what he thinks is going to become reality in the next years. The title is “Freibier-Mentalität ist kein Maßstab” (A “Free beer” state of mind is not the measure), and why “Abmahnungen” or the current copyright don’t really have a future. Especially interesting are his comments on “Open Culture”.

A great Article on how social networks change us…

A brilliant article (“Hoefische Gesellschaft”) from the German newspaper “Die Zeit” can be found here.

OpenVPN 2.1 rc20 is out

For those who haven’t noticed yet: A new release candidate of OpenVPN 2.1 is out. Its number is 20, the changes are mostly bug fixes. Here is the download.

Pidgin with Facebook Chat

There are some extensions/plugins available, that enable Pidgin to work together with Facebook chat. I am still trying, but this seems to work. Here is the Suse repo (thanks to Justin Haygood) , and on the project’s page you’ll find source, binaries and debian
Next thing I’ll try is skype for pidgin… wait…. does this make sense?

Kontact Journals: KDE’s Blog Engine

Again I found something I really like. Kontact can handle a blog as an ordinary calendar, well in fact as a “journal”. Of course this is not as powerful as Kblogger or other tools, but just the right size for a convenient blog entry through the day. Got a link via E-Mail (K-Mail) or a RSS-News via Akregator that you want to post?

Just add a Blog Ressource to your Journal (either in Kontact or on the KDE-Ressources Tab of Kcontrol), enter your credentials and start blogging. You can even manage and edit your old entries, kategories and more.

I will surely blog more on this, but up to now I am still testing the software. This is running on Suse 11.0 with KDE 4.3.2. At first glance I see that buttons for images and hyperlinks are missing… but the tool works on three machines now…

Change Wine language from command line

Since I am working for German and English Newspapers alike, I often need to do screen shots of programs in different languages. On Linux no problem, but on some Windows systems maybe even a violation of licence or law… So for MS screenshots I tried the new Wine version 1.0 on Linux – that seems to run great – if you’re not a gamer. You call the program simply with the language code you need:

LANG=en_US wine .wine/drive_c/Programme/xca/xca.exe

for example starts Xca in English, while:

LANG=de_DE wine .wine/drive_c/Programme/xca/xca.exe

enables you to make German screenshots. Great. This works also with Japanese, Chinese or whatever language available.

Ubuntu dist-upgrade 6.06->8.10 (continued…)

Hi, last year I upgraded my desktop Ubuntu remotely from 6.06 to 7.10 and then to 8.04. Now the next step is coming: An update from ubuntu Hardy (8.04) to 8.10.

According to Ubuntugeek, that should work with the GUI, and I am connected via Nomachine – doing the stuff remotely. I am tense .

Kblogger of KDE4 – a cool Blog Manager

The developers of Kblogger have done their homework. And they did it quite well. The small blogging tool has changed to a cool blog management suite, supports multiple accounts, categories, offline editing of older posts and simultaneous uploads. But a little work is left to do for them.

I’m still checking various things, like the still missing file upload amd the deleting of blog entries… , but my first impression is good. However, the error messages could be a little more precise or present at all.
With wrong authentication data, the tool simply crashes – no error.

That makes it try and error sometimes…

Yast and KDE 4.2 : Segfault because of QT solved

Recently, I tried again KDE’s newest version, 4.2.1 and to my great surprise I found it very stable, at least compared to its predecessors.
After two weeks of trying, all my desktop systems have been updated and make Windows admins admire 3D-effects, wobbling windows and more. I never was fond of such graphical gadgets, but I like it. Let’s see how long.
Nevertheless, one sad thing that came along with recent Qt versions was an error message of Suse’s Yast package management tool – and the refusal to start:

YaST got signal 11 at YCP file /usr/share/YaST2/clients/inst_packages.ycp:36 /sbin/yast2: line 421: 4076 Segmentation fault $ybindir/y2base $module “$@” “$SELECTED_GUI” $Y2_GEOMETRY $Y2UI_ARGS

Obviously, some segfault prevented the Yast module from starting. For some time, switching the GUI to GTK mode in one of the sysconfig files did the trick, but I prefer the Qt look.
Luckily, I found the right help in the opensuse forums: Just install the Yast meta package from here (for opensuse 11.0), and Yasts Look and feel is as before. Needless to say: This is an error that is not to be found on Debian.

Markus Feilner’s 2nd Book available – again, it’s in English, and on Scalix Groupware

Markus Feilner has published his newest book: This time, he took a deep look into Scalix Groupware.

This software is in parts open source, and is one of the few mail and groupware servers that can serve the needs of fortune 500 companies. This is not and it never was the realm of Microsoft, this is where Unix and Linux became big. This is about high-availability, stability, scalability and quality. Thousands of users on one server, automatic replication and high-end-clustering. Furthermore, Scalix is said to have better Outlook support than Exchange itself – if you want to get the full picture, have a free look at it here.