I’ve just been reading a presentation by Matt Webb called From Pixels to Plastic. Really inspirational ideas about how we could get the products we want doing the things we want them to, drawing from various ideas such as desktop widgets, and applying them to more physical items such as washing machines. Along with some other stuff. He praises the idea of very small development teams as being more flexible, so definitely channelling Agile/XP etc in some of his thinking. Well worth a read.
Monthly Archive for March, 2007
The K2 theme is one of the more popular WordPress themes, and I’ve used it in various guises on several different blogs. However recently it has been causing issues with its own Sidebar modules, giving quite random behaviour, some will work, some don’t work at all, and some when placed in the middle of the sidebar will wipe out working ones under it. So it is about time I got it sorted out. Some investigation on the K2 Forums suggested that the latest builds has fixed this, so I decided to try it out.
This was the process I used to fix it:
- I downloaded the latest nightly build of K2. The one that worked for me was revision 323. Once they release their next full version, I would suggest using that instead (I was on 0.95rc1, which I had installed after 0.91 to try and fix the sidebars issue).
- I changed the theme on my blog to the default one for now. I’ve had issues in the past with making changes with K2 live, so better to be safe than sorry.
- I unzipped the K2 files, then logged onto my server. I renamed the directory with the existing version of K2 to K2old. There are a couple of reasons for this, one of which is that if things go wrong, or I just don’t like the new version, I can change back to the old version in a click. Both version will be selectable in the themes section of Wordpress once I’m done now. I copied the new version over, and went into k2/images/ to chmod to 777 the headers directory. This allows you to upload new header images for K2 within the admin interface. If you have any old images in the previous version of the theme, now is the time to copy them over as well. This was the other reason for not deleting the old version.
- I could now go to K2 Sidebar Modules, add new modules, and they show up fine on the site.
Job done!
So today is probably my first really negative day of using Ubuntu. I was trying to add in a second hard drive, and it just isn’t an easy process. I’ve found some links along the way that have helped me get some of the way along, and I’ve learnt more about disk systems and using fdisk, but I can’t escape the feeling that I should have had a nice graphical interface to do it all for me.
What annoys me also is that if I had been installing from scratch, the install routine would have sorted most of my problems, I’ve always found that Linux installers are often pretty good at figuring out what you need, dealing with alternate boots and the like, and then sorting them out for you. I was hoping for the same hand-holding, and didn’t get it. In Windows, for a change, it is something that is relatively plug-and-play these days, 2000/XP will generally pick up a new drive, and help you out. If Ubuntu is going to compete, I think disk management and wireless are areas it is going to have to improve in.
EDIT: Okay, I’ve sorted it now. I was following the instructions at Two Ells, which was by far the best guide to the whole process. It didn’t all quite work for me, what I had to do was create an extended partion in fdisk first, then add logical partions within that which could be formatted (rather than formatting the extended partition, formatted those, and added them seperately to fstab. Happier, but still a little frustrated.
As a relative newcomer to using Linux, I’d never really known why I should use Gnome over KDE, or vice-versa. I’ve had a few different distributions installed in the past (Suse, Red Hat, Knoppix) and have just gone with what they’ve installed as default. However recently I had found that several apps I had wished to use ran under KDE. So I decided it was time for a change.
I found a nice little guide at The How-to Geek, which told me everything I needed to make the change, which installs Kubuntu (KDE for Ubuntu). All you really need to know, unsurprisingly is:
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
It is quite a long install, and you will be given the option to choose whether you want to set Gnome or KDE as the default. Having tried them both now, KDE seems to have some more apps (Kflickr was one I really needed for uploading the large numbers of pictures I take to Flickr, and under Gnome I had been doing this by hand for a little while), and also wins on the look and feel front for me.
Not very hard to change at all, I have found my way around quite quickly. If you make the change and have been using Gnome for a while, it is worth looking through the new apps you now have installed, and also comparing old apps you’ve been using to see if there is a KDE version that might now suit you better.
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