KDE For Windows – An Overview

<a class="zem_slink freebase/en/kde" title="KDE" rel="homepage" href="http://www.kde.org/">KDE is turning out to be a fabulous Desktop. The latest version – KDE 4.4.0 aka Caikaku is choke full of features which gives the term &#8221;Desktop <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/usability" title="Usability" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability">usability&#8221; a new meaning all together. What makes KDE all the more appealing is the plethora of well designed <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/application_software" title="Application software" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_software">applications that come bundled with it.

XDMCP protocol – What and How

Okay, I will talk about XDMCP today. First we will see what is xdmcp protocol.

There is a nice article on what is XDM is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_display_manager" target="_blank">here

In very simple words, this a protocol to get the X Windows login to a remote system. The client sends the request to the server and server completes the requests. For this the server allows the clients to connect to XDMCP port. There are various ways the XDMCP works most common being indirect, direct and query. So basically if you are using a XDMCP clinet you will get the feeling of using the server directly with the GUI and all. (It is very similar to VNC but not same as VNC, see <a href="http://msmvps.com/blogs/rexiology/archive/2006/12/19/windows-x-client-server-to-connect-linux-server-xdmcp-and-vnc-approaches.aspx" target="_blank">here for the differences in ssh, vnc and XDMCP.)

How to Install KDE in Windows]

For over a decade, <a class="zem_slink freebase/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000000021de6" title="KDE" rel="homepage" href="http://www.kde.org/">KDE has supplied Linux and <a class="zem_slink freebase/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000003e17c" title="Unix" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix">Unix users with a graphical <a class="zem_slink freebase/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000007eda2" title="Desktop environment" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_environment">desktop environment and a suite of useful <a class="zem_slink freebase/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000000254091" title="Application software" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_software">applications. It has become one of the most popular desktop environments and is the default on many <a class="zem_slink freebase/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000000024e02" title="Linux distribution" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution">Linux distributions. With the coming of KDE 4, developers promised native KDE applications running on <a class="zem_slink freebase/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000000025fe8" title="Windows" rel="homepage" href="http://www.microsoft.com/WINDOWS">Windows. While the current release is still not ready for production, as of KDE 4.3.3, it is coming closer and worth trying. What follows is a brief guide to getting KDE running on Windows.

Fedora 12 Released

Fedora 12, the latest version of the popular open-source operating systems for desktops and servers, has been released: &#8221;The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced the availability of Fedora 12, the latest version of its free, open-source operating system distribution…..

powertwitter for firefox- twitter with new look

<a title="Power Twitter" href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9591" target="_blank">Power Twitter is a addon for firefox that gives twitter a new look with a lot of features. Here is the list of features:

Power <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/twitter" title="Twitter" rel="homepage" href="http://twitter.com">Twitter adds features to the Twitter <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/user_interface" title="User interface" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_interface">Web interface including:

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Fedora 11 - Mount options for vfat and other volumes for automount.

I have been searching to look for how to change the default umask and dmask for the auto-mounted directories. I searched all the google and bing pages that I could, but to no avail. But I found some interesting info though.

Fedora now uses DeviceKit for managing the disks and Devicekit calls udev for actually mounting and unmounting the disks. The operation is controlled by policykit to determine who can do what?

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Some bashrc shorcuts for faster and profiecient directory browsing.

Here are some of the funtions that I have in my bashrc to make my life simple. They are not written by me but mostly taken from other places, but modified by me to some extent to suit my needs. If you know the original creator of these, let me know so I can add the attribution for the same.

This one is very useful.

.. (){
local arg=${1:-1};
local dir=&#8221;&#8221;
while [ $arg -gt 0 ]; do
dir=&#8221;../$dir&#8221;
arg=$(($arg – 1));
done
cd $dir >&/dev/null
}

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