Osugi Sakae

Oops

I just found this post in the drafts section and realized that even though I wrote it well over a year ago, I never posted it. Rather than leave it again, I am going to post it now and complete it with screenshots in the near future.

This post is a bit out of date because I am talking about MS WinXP and KDE 3.5.x even though MS Windows Vista has been out for a couple of years (and MS Windows 7 is currently RTM) and KDE is up to 4.3. However, I am still using KDE 3.5 and much of the MS Windows-using world decided to stay with MS WinXP, so this article is not as out of date as it may seem.

Also, I believe (but could be wrong, I admit) that the situation has not changed much with current MS Windows releases — they still don’t come with much useful software; the end user still has to purchase or otherwise acquire and install their day-to-day software on their own.

Further, most of the KDE software mentioned in this article is still in use in KDE 4.3, although possibly in slightly modified form.

More Observations on KDE & WinXP

This is the third in a series of articles chronicling my switch from KDE to WinXP at work. If you haven’t already, please read the first and second articles.

There was not a whole lot of good software included with WinXP. Almost none. There is no good text editor – just Wordpad and Notepad. No good image manipulation program. MS Paint is the graphics equivalent of Notepad. For someone used to Linux, such skimpy software offerings are strange. KDE comes with an impressive amount of software. MS WinXP doesn’t.

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Quick note: PCLinuxOS and tiny fonts in Skype. You may already know that you have to use qtconfig to set the font size for QT apps, including Skype. But the problem is that with the current PCLinuxOS, there are actually 2 qtconfig apps — one for QT3 and one for QT4. The one you want is for QT4 and it is not in your $PATH. So, in a konsole type:


/usr/lib/qt4/bin/qtconfig


this will open up the QT4 qtconfig. Set the font to something bigger and don’t forget to save your changes. Next time you open Skype, you should have bigger fonts.

If you don’t have the file listed above, you might need to install the package qt4-qtconfig.

Hope this helps.

I switched from Gentoo to Kubuntu a month or two ago and while it was generally OK, there were several things I didn’t like about Kubuntu. I was a hardcore Gentoo user for many years and a KDE user even longer, so there are some features I just have to have. Like all of the functions for KRename, for example. Gentoo has them but I could not find any way to get all of them in Kubuntu. Long story short, yesterday I installed PCLinuxOS.

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Wow. Linux is really moving up in the world. I just read a fair review of a Linux distro in the mainstream press.

Think on that for a moment. A fair review. Not a FUD-fest. Where lots of non-techie people are going to read it.

This is very good. I believe most Linux distros are fully capable of holding their own against MS Windows in a fair comparison. Maybe not winning every time, but that is just reality. Fair comparisons have been pretty rare in the mainstream press, unfortunately.

Who knows, maybe they still will be rare in the future and today’s was just a fluke. Possible, but I don’t think so.

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