No, thanks.

I prefer people with a bit stronger moral compass, myself. People who believe the end justifies the means brought us among other things, the Patriot Act and waterboarding. IM frequently less than HO if you do a bad thing for a good reason you're still doing a bad thing.

write test on the same netbook:

wizard@wizard-netbook:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/output.img bs=8k count=256k && sudo rm /tmp/output.img
262144+0 records in
262144+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 19.916 s, 108 MB/s
wizard@wizard-netbook:~$

Then you'll like this. This was just run off my Atom 270 netbook (HP Mini 110c) with a 500gb Samsung drive and Kubuntu 10.10 -

wizard@wizard-netbook:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda
[sudo] password for wizard: /dev/sda:
  Timing cached reads: 1228 MB in 2.00 seconds = 613.74 MB/sec
  Timing buffered disk reads: 312 MB in 3.01 seconds = 103.70 MB/sec
wizard@wizard-netbook:~$ ;-)

Don't know anyone else who's had this problem but on the 64-bit upgrade X started throwing errors about a missing session - then you clicked "okay" and KDE started normally.

Solution was in this thread - all I had to do was select KDE as a session once.

http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=91936

Also, my panel lost transparency although compositing was enabled. Changing the panel theme and then changing it back solved that.

On the 32-bit netbook which has just about all unnecessary stuff turned off including akonadi KDE's memory footprint went from ~180mb to ~170mb at idle. I use compiz instead of kwin on both machines, though.

I got hit by this yesterday. Friend of mine picked up some malware on his PC that posted to his wall and sent messages to everybody on his friends list with a link to Yet More Malware. Since I was on his friends list FB forced me to change my password and certify that I'd changed my email password and scanned my PC for viruses - I only access FB with a Linux box but scanned it anyway just for fun ;-)

All was good until I got to the facial recognition thing. They sent me pictures of a buncha people I'd never seen - since you can tag any photo with any name I got three pictures of people I'd never seen before - at least they'll let you opt out and do CAPTCHA as the facial recognition thing was an epic fail for me.

Launch nuclear deterrent!

-Operation denied, are you root?

SUDO LAUNCH NUCLEAR DETERRENT!!!

-SUDO: command not found

help SUDO

-bash: help: no help topics match `SUDO'. Try `help help' or `man -k SUDO' or `info SUDO'.

help help

-help: help [-dms] [pattern ...]
        Display information about builtin commands.

        Displays brief summaries of builtin commands. If PATTERN is specified, gives detai...

Then all you see is a blinding white flash. ;-)

compiz works just fine under KDE4.

IME compiz is more stable, more configurable and has a smaller memory footprint than kwin plus I get to use my favorite emerald theme.

I was a diehard GNOME user for years and KDE hasn't got it completely right yet - for instance I think kate is just awful and prefer gedit for a gooey text editor. I've tried learning to like kate but so far haven't been successful.

But - I do like that KDE seems to have the integration that GNOME lacks for the most part.

In my experience buying 1,000 desktops gives you *no* leverage with the top three hardware vendors.

I just bought a million bucks worth of machines from Dell a few months ago. Dell's annual sales for the year ending January 2010 was 52.9 billion dollars, so my little million-dollar purchase was less than 0.00002% of their annual sales.

That's not a whole lot of leverage.

sorry, couldn't resist. ;-)

...and was actually discussing the switch from Windows to Linux with couple friends of mine from the IA shop. I'm in charge of desktop PC support for this 3,300-user agency.

I'd like to preface things by saying that I use Linux exclusively at home and have for several years. No dual boot, no wine and no running Windows in a VM. I could do my whole job from within Linux if Firefox supported reading encrypted mail in Outlook Web Access and if there was something available for Linux that'd allow me to read Visio drawings in their native format.

Software costs are inconsequential so we'll ignore that argument for the time being. The biggest expense in an IT budget isn't software or hardware, it's people - and although things would settle down after a year or two the cost of migration is the showstopper here, not the cost of sustainment.

I've heard different stories about what caused the USB ban but for me the short version is that somewhere in DoD some sysadmin should have been fired. I can't say for sure what happened but at least two Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) policies were violated - autorun wasn't disabled on the workstations and apparently workstation virus scanners weren't configured properly, so to minimize the threat DoD bans USB storage devices rather than fire the nitwit who wasn't doing his job.

Windows as a vector? Out of 3,300 users we had eight (yes, eight) security incidents in the last twelve months where a PC was infected by a hostile application - the reason I know this is I had to put that damn metric in a Powerpoint slide recently. Eight out of better than three thousand is a pretty good average, but the PCs still run like crap ;-)

They've authorized turning USB storage back on, but only for approved devices that will be encrypted and centrally managed - and USB storage will be enabled by device rather than by user. Unauthorized devices still won't work. We've decided that since folks have been working without thumb drives for two years we're gonna continue to let them work that way - we've got the infrastructure in place to authorize thumb drives by hardware signature but we don't plan to issue any to end users at this point.

DoD information security policies aren't written by Microsoft - Microsoft wouldn't hire anybody that stupid. Case in point - DISA mandates that LAN and WLAN interfaces on a machine can't be active at the same time but outside of creating separate hardware profiles for wired and wireless Windows doesn't support this configuration - and simply disabling network bridging doesn't satisfy the requirement. If you ask DISA how to implement this requirement they can't tell you. I can tell you there's a neat little application called Wireless AutoSwitch that'll do the job and it's dirt cheap, though.

But I digress.

I stand corrected. Thanks for keeping me straight ;-)

Did a bit of math here and at 36-bit color a raw image would be a bit more than 535mb.

I don't think the technology is available yet to process an image that large into a jpeg or copy a raw image to a storage device quickly enough to use this in most camera applications - and definitely not in your point and shoot ;-)

Yeah - my bad. I had beta ppa enabled on both machines but backports was only enabled on the 64-bit box.

cheers -

I made the switch from GNOME to KDE about a year ago and had the same question but managed to answer it for myself.

On my 32-bit netbook I've slimmed KDE down considerably and my machine uses ~180mb of RAM at idle. That's about 30mb more than LXDE or XFCE and I have desktop effects enabled. I use compiz instead of kwin because of its smaller footprint and increased functionality - so my netbook has my favorite emerald wallpaper and a proper desktop cube - and still uses only ~180mb of memory. For me the increased functionality is well worth the additional 30mb of RAM or so that KDE uses and to be honest this thing never pages to disk anyway - so all it costs me is a couple extra seconds booting the machine.

I'm running KDE 4.5 RC2 on the netbook and just upgraded my 64-bit desktop to KDE 4.5 final.