Plone is a content management framework built on top of Zope. It is the most popular application using Zope. Plone continued to use Zope 2, and did not migrate to the Zope 3 application server as the migration cost was considered too high. The Zope community also realised that it was better to enhance Zope 2 with the new component architecture features, which were the core of the Zope 3 architecture.

This has enabled projects to enhance their applications without having to redesign or rewrite the whole system. As a result, Plone 4 finally uses the current release of Zope, and also uses Python 2.6 instead of Python 2.4. The Plone community has also made it relatively easy to migrate from Plone 3 to Plone 4, despite the major changes in it.

However, the focus of this article is how to get going if you were starting afresh with Plone 4.

Installation

A major concern with a complex application built on top of many components is to ensure that all the pieces fit, and work well. An upgrade in one component may break the system. Hence, it is best to work with a known set of versions.

The installation technique used by Plone is the Zope Buildout, which uses a list of specified Python egg versions to build and install a local Plone environment. It builds a Python 2.6 environment by default, so as not to depend on the distribution to provide a supported version.

You will need to download the current release of Plone’s unified installer, which is version 4.1 at the time of writing. You will find the installation instructions in README.txt, but the simplest option is to run the following command:

sudo ./install.sh standalone

You will find the installation in /usr/local/Plone, with the sub-directories buildout-cache, Plone-docs, Python-2.6 and zinstance. The role of the first three directories is pretty clear. This leaves zinstance, which must then contain the Zope instance of the Plone application.

The installer also creates a plone user account, which will be used to run the Plone server.

First steps

You will be working in /usr/local/Plone/zinstance to run Plone-related commands and to alter Plone configuration files. Start the Plone server with the following command:

sudo u=plone bin/plonectl start

You can now browse the site at http://localhost:8080/. The startup page offers you a button to create a Plone site (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Plone after a fresh installation

Once you have done that, you will want to create one or more users of the site. You need to select the Site Setup option from the upper right corner, which will give you the option of Users and Groups.

You may create a user named Writer, who will be adding content to the site. This user need not be a member of any of the suggested groups. However, you will want to add the role of a Contributor in addition to the role of Member.

Plone organises content in Folders, much like the desktop paradigm. Hence, as an administrator, create the folder, Articles. You can do this on the home page using the Add New... option. The newly created folder will be shown, and its state would be Private, which you should change to Published.

Now sign in as the user Writer. You will notice that the options available to this user are fewer. You can add a page in the Articles folder tab. You may enter the content using a visual editor. If you like writing HTML code by hand, you have the option to do so as well!

Create your first article. Its state will be private, and you will notice that you may submit the article for publication — but cannot publish it. Submit it, and the state changes from Private to Pending Review
(Figure 2).

Figure 2: A page after submitting for publication

Publishing can be done by a user with the role of Reviewer. The administrator has all the privileges, so at present you may use the administrator account to publish the article.

Clicking on Articles will display items within the folder. This is normally not very attractive. Hence, you may choose the Display option to “Select a content item as default view”. Try it and see the difference.

Model-based content

A great capability of Plone has been to easily manage content objects based on schema definitions, and not just HTML pages. Archetypes has been the framework for this task. Further, ArchGenXML converts your schema in UML to working Python code for Plone. See ArchGenXML Getting Started guide to get an idea of the possibilities.

However, the future seems to belong to another package — Dexterity. It is an example of an enhancement in Plone, which has leveraged Zope 3 technologies. For me, the most interesting part was that it uses the grok framework behind the scenes. So, you get a CMS that is extensible by a model-driven system. The possibilities are immense. Grok, incidentally, is functionally analogous to Rails or Django.

Currently, Plone does not include Dexterity in the core, so you will need to install it. Modifications to the buildout configurations can be confusing in the beginning. In the zinstance directory, you will find a number of cfg files.

The key file is buildout.cfg. You need to tell buildout about a suitable set of versions needed for Dexterity. You can find the latest set at here. You should change the extends section of buildout.cfg to look like what is shown below:

extends =
    base.cfg
    versions.cfg

http://good-py.appspot.com/release/dexterity/2.0-next

You will also need to include the egg for Dexterity in your Plone instance. The eggs section in your buildout.cfg will look like what follows:

eggs =
    Plone
    Pillow
    lxml
    plone.app.dexterity

You should stop Plone and run buildout. If all is well, then start Plone:

sudo u=plone bin/plonectl stop
sudo bin/buildout
sudo u=plone bin/plonectl start

Sign in as the administrator. From the Site Setup page, choose Addons. You should see the option, “Dexterity Content Types — Plone Integration 1.0rc1″.

Activate it. The Site Setup should now include the option “Dexterity Content Types”. Selecting it will allow you to create a new content type. Create a new type called Resume. Now edit it to add fields, e.g., Title — a text line, i.e., a string; Birthdate — date/time; Mugshot—image; Experience –Rich text field; etc.

You can select the settings option of each field to change some of the attributes, like Required. In particular, you have to use the field name Title, as it is needed by Dexterity. In the mandatory field, Title, that you have created, you want the content to be the person’s name. Hence, it is better to change the label to an appropriate description. So, replace the default label Title by Name.

Select the behaviour option and disable “Dublin core
metadata” to ensure that it does not show the additional fields Title and Summary.

You should now create another folder, Authors, from the home page. You may notice that there is now an additional content type, Resume. For the Authors, in Add new, choose Restrictions and allow only content of the type Resumeto be added. Now, if you add a Resume, you will get a form. Once the form is filled and published, all users will see a pretty decent HTML page for it (Figure 3).

Figure 3: A page with a Dexterity type content

Capabilities like customising CSS and themes for a great-looking site are obviously possible. In case you need proof, have a look at the University of Washington site.

Plone 4 with Dexterity enhancements based on grok makes it an even more exciting framework. It should definitely be an option considered by anyone looking at a new content management framework.

According to Wikipedia: “Virtualisation, in computing, is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as a hardware platform, operating system, a storage device or network resources.” For the purposes of this article, I will deal primarily with operating system virtualisation.

Operating system virtualisation allows one OS (the guest) to be run completely within another OS (the host), like an application. For example, Windows can be run on Linux, or Mac OS X.

Virtualisation is one of the technologies that will shape the way the world computes in the future. It makes it possible to carve up, allocate and manage compute resources in new ways, allowing new degrees of freedom in systems design.

While virtualisation has already found a solid footing in the enterprise market, it is still a relatively new technology in the user space. I will compare three popular virtualisation products, and grade them on ease of use, performance, features, licensing and support. As I go through the comparisons, I will attempt to cover not only the specifics of the products themselves, but also the underlying concepts. Finally, I will analyse the scores of different products from the standpoint of different types of users.

The products I will be comparing are VMWare Player, VirtualBox and KVM. I have chosen these since they are all free of charge for personal use, and have large user communities. I have deliberately excluded VMWare ESX and Xen, since they are both targeted at enterprises. Due to this, despite the fact that they shine on expensive enterprise-grade servers, neither is designed to work with commodity hardware. ESX, for example, refused to install on my test system, altogether.

Some basics

Virtualisation being a relatively new technology, its language is still evolving. Most terms in the virtualisation space have several meanings, depending on which vendor you speak to. In order to avoid confusion, here are translations into English for some of the jargon that I will use:

• Virtual machine: A VM is a completely isolated instance of an operating system (guest) running inside another operating system (host).
• Hypervisor: A hypervisor, or virtual machine manager, is a software layer that presents the virtualised hardware platform on which the VM instances run. There are two types of hypervisors:
• Type 1 hypervisors run on “bare metal” — that is, they do not require a host OS. In this case, the hypervisor acts almost as the OS itself.
• Type 2 hypervisors require a host OS, and run as an application.
• Full virtualisation: In full virtualisation, every part of the underlying hardware is virtualised and presented to the guest. This means that the guest can be completely unaware that it is running in a VM and not a physical machine.
• Para-virtualisation: In para-virtualisation, the underlying physical hardware performs tasks that function poorly in a virtual environment. This requires the guest OS to be aware that it is running in a virtual instance. Some virtualisation products provide this functionality as a set of drivers to be installed into a guest OS, while others require the OS itself to be modified.
• Snapshots: A snapshot is a point-in-time capture of the VM. Different products classify snapshots differently. However, the most common understanding of the feature is that a snapshot preserves the machine in suspended animation — that is, the contents of memory and state of the CPU are written to disk, as is. When the machine is restored, the operation resumes from where it was left off. This allows point-in-time recovery, and an ability to roll back unwanted changes.
• Live migration: In the context of virtualisation, live migration is the seamless transfer of a running guest from one physical host to another. Live migration is an advanced feature, and many hypervisors impose restrictions on the source and destination system, most commonly that the CPUs of both need to be identical (homogeneous systems). Live migration between non-homogeneous systems is more complex, and consequently supported by fewer hypervisors.

Test system

For the purposes of the evaluation, I used an Ubuntu Server (Natty Narwhal) installation on a white-box desktop-class machine, with an AMD Phenom II X6 1090T hexa-core processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a Seagate 7200 RPM, 1 TB SATA hard drive.

Asking the right questions

One route to evaluating anything is to understand the need. The first question on this route is: “Why, if at all, should I use virtualisation?”

This question is important, because unless you understand your need, it is very simple to get stuck with the wrong solution — and nothing is worse than
spending weeks tweaking your VMs to get them configured just enough to work, and then discovering that the feature you need is available out of the box in a different product.

Some reasons to virtualise:

• You need a different OS to run a particular application — for example, games that run only on Windows, code that can only be compiled on a native Linux machine, etc.
• The need to standardise environments across a group, such as a locked-down development environment for a contractor, several developers collaborating on an open source project, etc.
• Centralising, optimising and sharing resources, as in virtual desktops/servers sharing data-centre hardware.

The list goes on and on. Ultimately, there are as many use-cases for virtualisation as there are users. While it is possible to analyse one’s use-case to the last CPU cycle, and choose the right product based on mathematics, it is usually overkill from the standpoint of the average user. It is often simpler to make a choice based on the user’s skill level and patience.

The question then becomes: “How do you classify yourself as a user?” I usually see users in four categories, based on their profile (see the Box). Given that the user’s profile usually correlates to the use-case, at least in a broad sense, it is simpler to choose the product that works best for the user.

Later in this article, I will apply this approach and rate the products, first objectively, and then relative to the user profile.

VMWare Player

VMWare is one of the oldest players in the virtualisation market. Founded by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Edward Wang and Edouard Bugnion in 1998, VMWare launched its first product, VMWare Workstation, in 1999. VMWare Player is a clipped down version of the paid VMWare Workstation product.

Let’s take a look at its features.

Figure 1: The VMware Player Inventory

Figure 2: The VM interface on VMware Player. Threadbare or minimalist?

Creating, editing and managing VMs

Initially, VMWare Player did not allow users to create their own VMs. After version 3, this limitation no longer applies, though several features available in VMWare Workstation are missing on VMWare Player. For example, VMWare Player defaults to a SCSI hard disk during VM creation. This cannot be changed, unless the VM is edited in VMWare Workstation. While this does not pose a problem for the average user, power users who like to tweak configurations will find this irritating. The same limitation also applies to the virtual NIC.

One cool feature during VM creation is EasyInstall, which allows you to customise the guest OS with such things as licence keys and user accounts, directly through VMWare Workstation, without interacting with the guest during installation. This means that you can now start that long OS installation in your VM before hitting the sack, and wake up to a fully installed OS.

The network stack on VMWare Player is also noteworthy. VMWare allows three modes of networking for the guest: bridged, NAT and host-only. What I particularly like is that in NAT mode, VMWare creates a virtual network interface and assigns an IP to the host on the same subnet as the guest, allowing network communication between the guest and the host over the NAT interface. VMWare’s approach to virtual networking makes it very easy for the user to switch between networks. It is almost akin to pulling your LAN cable from one switch and plugging it into another.

Device support

While VMWare may be finicky about the hardware that it uses for its bare-metal hypervisor, the support for end-user devices that VMWare Player inherits from VMWare Workstation is quite good. VMWare is usually able to recognise the device type (for example, my installation could differentiate a USB webcam from a pen drive) and treat it accordingly.

One of the most beloved features of VMWare Player/Workstation is virtual printing, enabled through VMWare’s partnership with ThinPrint Inc. Essentially, any printer installed on your host can be used by applications running in the VM, without installing additional drivers. This is a super feature when it comes to convenience, since most printer driver installers take forever to download and install, on account of bloat-ware.

Other features

VMWare Workstation offers the ability to snapshot incrementally, thereby allowing multiple points of recovery. VMWare Player, however, does not have the snapshot feature at all. If you really wanted to back up your machine, you could copy the VM folder altogether, providing a poor man’s snapshot capability. However, VirtualBox and KVM both come with snapshot support out of the box in the free and open source versions.

The Unity feature allows applications running in the guest to integrate seamlessly with the host. This works particularly well when the only reason to run a guest at all is to use a particular application. With Unity, you can continue to use your own familiar desktop, with the application from the guest fully integrated. The only limitation is that the guest application continues to see the filesystem of the guest. However, with the ability to share folders between guests and hosts, this is easy to work around.

Another much-touted VMWare feature is the ability to drag and drop files between the host and the guest, and between guests. While “drag and drop” works well when both the host and the guest are running Windows, it is somewhat limited for other OSs, such as Linux.

Ease of use

VMWare Player is one of the easiest products to use, because of VMWare’s great packaging and simplified user interface, particularly if it is used for its intended purpose, which is to run pre-built VMs. Several VM appliances, preconfigured for common use-cases (like a LAMP server, Ubuntu Desktop, etc) are available for download, and can be run with little or no configuration changes in VMWare Player.

Installation

The VMWare download site was particularly slow on both my broadband connection and high-speed data card. It took about three hours and two attempts to download the 105 MB binary. Also, since VMWare requires you to sign up and accept several pages worth of legal agreements before any download, there is no link that can be used to download directly from the command line. Since I was running a headless system, with no browser, I had to download to my desktop and then copy the file over the network. However, after the download, the installation was fairly simple.

Administration

VMWare’s administrative tools are usually rather slick. However, much of the goodness of the VMWare Workstation UI is missing in VMWare Player. The entire experience is of using something that can do more, but has been artificially stripped down. The VM runs in a floating window on your desktop, or in full screen mode, while the VMWare Player inventory stays in the background as a separate window.

There is no ribbon with convenient power buttons as with the paid version. All options are tucked away under menus. The Virtual Machine settings page allows you to change machine settings — except, of course, the hard drive.

Figure 3: VMware Player’s VM hardware settings. No HDD :-(

Figure 4: Options settings on VMware Player

Look and feel

Having been in the desktop user-space for a while, VMWare has learnt its UI lessons well. VMWare Player definitely scores high on the look-and-feel aspect. Even over a remote X server connection, the VM display remained smooth and responsive. The mouse-pointer integration works extremely well. Cute features from the paid version, like “quick switch” and “docked view”, would definitely be nice to see in the free version.

Performance

VMWare uses a mix of full virtualisation and para-virtualisation. According to VMWare documentation, VMWare combines the best of all worlds, and picks the appropriate virtualisation strategy for each task. On VMWare’s bare-metal hypervisor ESX, the para-virtualisation support allows fairly drastic performance improvements. However, on VMWare Player, I found the performance relatively poor (see Table 1 towards the end of this article for a comparison).

In my experience with VMWare, your mileage will definitely vary on the performance front. As long as you comply with the draconian VMWare Hardware Compatibility List (HCL), you get the benefits of all of VMWare’s proprietary technology. However, any deviation from the HCL and you are on your own.

Licensing and support

VMWare Player is distributed “free, as in beer”, with a closed-source licence for most of its constituent parts. This immediately makes it unattractive from an open source standpoint. Since VMWare’s focus is enterprise, they have several partnerships and collaborative efforts in place with industry biggies like Cisco and Dell. As a result, much of VMWare’s development is directed towards industry-standard operating systems, with support for bleeding-edge releases of Linux OS flavours somewhat lagging.

There is an open source project that stays ahead of the curve on VMWare Tools features (open-vm-tools) but again, as with non HCL-compliant hardware, you’re on your own with it.

Moreover, I have increasingly found that VMWare’s communities are dominated by enterprise users, and finding community support to solve tricky configuration issues at the bleeding edge is difficult.  VMWare’s exorbitantly priced support is also unresponsive when it comes to uncommon support issues, particularly with non-compliant or experimentally supported hardware.

Score

On a scale of 5:

• Features: 3
• Ease of use: 4
• Performance: 3
• Licensing and support: 1

VirtualBox

Oracle VM VirtualBox, or simply VirtualBox, was originally developed by German software company Innotek, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008. Sun, in turn, was acquired by Oracle in January 2010. VirtualBox supports most common virtualisation features extremely well, and some uncommon ones as well.

Figure 5: VirtualBox Manager

Creating, editing and managing VMs

Creating VMs on VirtualBox is at least as easy as on VMWare Player. The edge that VirtualBox has over VMWare Player in this regard is a wider range of options to choose from, with regard to virtual hardware. For example, you can choose what model of network card should be emulated (PCNet PC II and III, Intel PRO/1000 and virt-io), as well as the disk type (SCSI, SAS or IDE).

VirtualBox allows the addition of virtual hard disks after creation, a feature missing on VMWare Player. VirtualBox also supports several disk formats, including the VMWare VMDK, which makes it easy for users to migrate to it. You could simply boot your VMWare disk on VirtualBox (some limitations on the VMDK type do apply) and test out the functionality for yourself before porting over, if at all required.

VirtualBox provides the same networking modes as VMWare Player (Bridged, NAT and Host Only), but without network connectivity between the guest and the host in NAT mode. To reach the guest from the host, or vice-versa, you need to set up a second interface with host-only or bridged networking.

Figure 6: VM Hardware Settings on VirtualBox

Device support

In this department, VirtualBox lags somewhat behind VMWare Player. USB 2.0 support is only included as a closed source extension. VirtualBox also doesn’t have the same class of printer support as VMWare does, which means you have to install drivers for all your printers in the guest OS.

Other features

VirtualBox fully supports snapshots, including multiple snapshots and branching of snapshots. This means you can use VirtualBox to maintain several versions of the same VM. The shared folders work extremely well, as does the clipboard integration, making VirtualBox all the more desirable as a desktop virtualisation solution.

Live migration is supported between non-homogeneous hosts, something that even VMWare and Citrix enterprise hypervisors struggle with. While this may not be something the average home user would use, from a systems design standpoint, this is definitely interesting.

VirtualBox also officially (albeit experimentally) supports Mac OSX guests — and that too, without any hacks on the OSX DVD!

Installation

VirtualBox is installable from official software repositories of most common Linux distros, which means that it’s downloaded from the closest mirror, making for a relatively quick download. Once the defauly distro installer is done with the installation (which is usually running a single command), there are no additional steps required to get the software up and running.

Administration

VirtualBox comes with a great administration interface that allows users to create, modify and manage VMs. Command-line intervention is usually only required for very advanced experiments. Most operations that an administrator would need are available and easy to access. Some of the settings, like the hard-disk-management page, are somewhat hard to find — but overall, the platform is extremely easy to run and manage.

Look and feel

The look and feel of VirtualBox is comparable to VMWare’s in terms of the smoothness of the experience. Mouse-pointer integration is smooth, and VirtualBox is fairly verbose about what it is going to do with regard to the mouse, even without the guest additions installed in the VM. Things like scaling and resizing of the VM display to fit the application window are adequate, even if not in the same league as VMWare.

Performance

One of the major distinguishing features of VirtualBox is its claim that it does no para-virtualisation. In fact, VirtualBox and KVM seem to be at loggerheads over the subject. VirtualBox’ site says: “VirtualBox is [also] different from so-called ‘para-virtualisation’ solutions [such as Xen], which require that the guest operating system be modified.”    On the other hand, KVM says: “So-called ‘full virtualisation’ is a nice feature because it allows you to run any operating system virtualised. However, it’s slow because the hypervisor has to emulate actual physical devices such as RTL8139 network cards. This emulation is both complicated and inefficient.”

Religious debates aside, while libvirt (KVM’s almost-but-not-quite para-virtualisation library) provides phenomenal performance (see Table 1 for comparison), VirtualBox is not too far behind. Moreover, despite the comments about para-virtualisation on the site, VirtualBox also supports the KVM virt-io standard for the virtual network adapter, which allows it to provide almost comparable transfer speeds to KVM. However, virt-io requires the guest to be virtualisation-aware. So while this works out-of-the-box for newer Linux distros with libvirt included, Windows systems will require an installation of the virt-io driver.

Licensing and support

VirtualBox comes as an open source core system supplemented by proprietary, pre-compiled extension packs for additional functionality, such as RDP, PXE boot and USB 2.0 support. The extension packs are released under the Oracle PUEL (Personal Use and Evaluation License), while the core is released under GPLv2. All of the components are free of cost, with the proviso that the extension packs will be used under the guidelines of the PUEL. Most of VirtualBox’s features are available in the open source version. The only notable absentee is USB 2.0 support.

The VirtualBox community is extremely vibrant and responsive, and solutions for most user issues are merely a Google search away.

Score

On a scale of 5:

• Features: 4
• Ease of use: 4
• Performance: 4
• Licensing and support: 4

KVM

KVM, or Kernel-based Virtual Machine, is a virtual machine implementation that uses the Linux kernel. Invented and maintained by Qumranet, a technology start-up acquired by Red Hat in 2008, KVM is included out-of-the-box with Linux kernel versions 2.6.20 and above.

Figure 7: KVM’s GUI virt-manager

Figure 8: KVM’s VM Console

Creating, editing and managing VMs

Creating VMs is simple enough with the virt-manager tool. However, importing an existing VM (from both VMWare as well as VirtualBox) and converting it to run on KVM was nightmarish. For some reason, when KVM is told to use an existing disk, it silently assumes that the disk it is being pointed at is a raw disk format, even if the disk file has a different extension. In order to get my KVM machine to boot, I had to export the VM definition as an XML file, change the disk type manually, and then reimport it.

KVM offers, by far, the most choice of all the three products reviewed here on virtual hardware selection. Several different types of hardware can be emulated, based on user selection. KVM also allows both NAT and bridged networking. However, the bridged network mode requires setting up a bridge on the host, manually, which can be tedious.

Figure 9: Choosing the bridged device in KVM

Device support

Since KVM is part of the Linux kernel, it supports most devices that Linux does. Moreover, since KVM has a large open source developer community behind it, support for new devices is usually quick to appear. However, KVM’s device support is far more appealing from the perspective of server virtualisation than the desktop, at least for the average user.

Other features

KVM’s feature set is mainly systems-oriented, without too many cute user-land baubles. Live snapshots of guest VMs are supported, from the command line. There is no concept of shared folders or clipboard. USB support is included out of the box. KVM also supports live migration of guests between non-homogeneous hosts.

Ease of use

KVM is the least user-friendly of the three products reviewed here. It has all the distinctive signs of a product by, and for, the elite geek or the expert systems architect.

Installation

Simply put, none required. KVM comes backed in with the Linux kernel. The only installation I required was that of virt-manager, a graphical tool to manage VMs, which was a simple installation from the distro’s package repository. Unfortunately, I also had to install several X libraries on an otherwise headless system, and then access it through a remote X session. The alternative was to spend several hours mastering the command-line language of KVM and virsh, the command-line tool for managing VMs.

Administration

Even with virt-manager, which simplifies things drastically, KVM’s administration requires familiarity with virtualisation. If you know exactly what you are looking to accomplish, KVM will probably have the means to accomplish it. However, if you are unsure of your need, it is very easy to get lost within KVM’s myriad options. Also, the administration console is not very good at giving user feedback.

For example, changes to a VM that require a reboot can still be made while the machine is running, and will be applied the next time the machine reboots. However, after the change is queued up, there is no visible indication that a change is pending, until the reboot happens, and the change takes place. For an inexperienced user, this sort of behaviour can be quite confusing.

Look and feel

KVM is definitely not in the same league as VMWare Player or VirtualBox when it comes to look and feel. The VM display is over VNC, the quality of which is dependent on the network link between the client and the KVM server. On my installation, the VNC display refused to recognise several keys altogether, resulting in my having to use a different VNC client. Mouse-pointer and clipboard integration are also not as good as the other two products.

Performance

Performance is where KVM outshines both VMWare Player and VirtualBox (see Table 1 for a comparison). The secret behind KVM’s success is the use of the libvirt libraries and the VirtIO network and hard disk interfaces. VirtIO is very similar to para-virtualisation, the only difference being that while para-virtualisation requires the entire guest OS to be modified (for example, Xen’s requirement that guests run the Xen kernel), VirtIO works by installing components inside the guest. These components are included as the libvirt libraries in most of the new Linux distros. However, for Windows guests, this means that a VirtIO driver needs to be installed.

For disk I/O, KVM allows the virtual hard disk to be mounted in write-back or write-through mode. In write-back mode, the process of writing data to disk receives an acknowledgement of the write having occurred immediately after the I/O subsystem receives it, even if it has not been committed to disk. This means that processes run faster. However, data in transit (written but not committed) is stored in volatile memory, and so a crash or power outage will result in data loss.

For mission-critical systems that require high data integrity, the write-through mode is preferable, since it guarantees a commit to disk. However, the existence of the write-back mode means that KVM machines can be tweaked to perform disk I/O at super-fast speeds.

Licensing and support

KVM’s licensing is hard to beat for attractiveness, since it’s completely open source, with all the components released under the GPL or the LGPL. The KVM user community is somewhat biased towards developers and systems designers rather than end users, so finding solutions to problems requires some background and understanding of the platform. Essentially, you can find help, but you really do have to read the manual.

Score

On a scale of 5:

• Features: 2
• Ease of use: 1
• Performance: 5
• Licensing and support: 4

Analysis

To sum up the comparison, look at Table 2.

From a look at the score board, VirtualBox clearly outshines the other two products by being better than average in all the categories, even if it doesn’t top any of them, with KVM next, and VMWare Player last.

Let us now see what these scores mean, from the viewpoint of different types of users.

The enthusiast

From the enthusiast’s standpoint, KVM would seem like the best choice, since it has the most configuration options. Enthusiasts will find plenty of new combinations of settings to experiment with. KVM’s lack of end-user features and complexity of use also give it the flavour of being a tool for the elite, which the enthusiast is likely to find appealing.

Next in line is VirtualBox, which offers fewer options, but still enough to keep a geek interested. Moreover, getting bragging rights on VirtualBox doesn’t require you to have a PhD. Simply reading the manual and following the forums will suffice.

VMWare Player is last in line for this category of users, since it offers very limited customisability.

The architect

For architects, the requirement determines the choice of component. For server virtualisation with an emphasis on performance and scale, KVM is the clear choice. For end users, VMWare Player is the best choice, since it can run a VM authored on Workstation in a manner that makes it extremely easy to use, particularly for a user who’s not tech-savvy. However, for prototyping and getting off the ground quickly, VirtualBox’ superior feature set makes it the tool of choice.

The executive

From the executive’s standpoint, VirtualBox is the product with the likelihood of meeting the most requirements at the least cost. If budget was not a constraint, VMWare Player’s paid version, VMWare Workstation, could give VirtualBox a run for its money on features. VirtualBox provides many more features in the free version than VMWare. The exception to this is if the VM is being authored elsewhere, and VMWare Player is being used only for access. In that scenario, VMWare Player is much easier to use than either of the other two.

KVM is not really a solution for the executive at all.

The follower

From the follower’s viewpoint, the ideal and often only supportable option is to use VMWare Player to run existing VMs (created by Workstation). Next in line is VirtualBox. As with the executive, KVM is not an option for the follower.

The Intel 8085 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was launched by Intel in 1977 and hence is something that we have never seen around. So why do we need to learn about the assembly of this old microprocessor?

The microprocessors we use are all for general-purpose computing, but there are other applications of computers such as making automatic solar-tracking-panels, automatic power-controls, or security control systems. For such applications, general-purpose CPUs are unnecessary — a waste of resources; a low-powered CPU is what we need. The Intel 8085 is one of the candidates.

To program this piece of hardware, we first need to know the programming model — the logical structure of the programmable registers, flags, and the instruction set. The Intel 8085 has seven internal general-purpose 8-bit registers A, B, C, D, E, H, L and 5 flags — S (sign), Z (zero), AC (Aux Carry), P (Parity) and CY (Carry). The BC, DE and HL registers can be used as register pairs and work as 16-bit registers, with some specific instructions. Besides these, there are two other registers: one is the program counter (PC), which is a 16-bit register, and always points to the memory address of the next instruction to be processed; the other is the stack pointer (SP), a 16-bit register that points to the top of the stack.

The processor has a total of 246 instructions with which we can manipulate data in the processor registers and memory, and also perform conditional branching in code with the help of flag values, which are set by the instructions, depending on the result. This is a brief overview of the programming model; see the References section at the end of this article for links to more information.

Programming the Intel 8085 or similar microprocessors is not like present-day programming — there is no editor, compiler or assembler, and not even a monitor. You can probably have a 7-segment display, which has to be manually interfaced, to show the memory content. You need to burn in the assembled program (essentially, some numbers in memory), connect the memory with the processor, and the microprocessor starts to run the code.

There are programmers to burn the code into memory, and microprocessor kits that help you program the microprocessor interactively by providing additional controllers, 7-segment displays, a 4×4 keyboard, the interfacing, etc. However, you still have to hand-assemble the code.

Now, no code is perfect the first time; that’s why we have bugs. Debugging code on an 8085 itself is a real pain. Even if you use a microprocessor kit with a debugging facility, the limited debugging features make it a complex and slow process, not suited for a beginner. So, essentially, to know if your code is correct or not, completely depends on your skills, the expected outputs of the code, and the minimal debugging interface.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to test the code and develop it completely before even touching the actual processor? This is what a simulator lets you do — the very purpose of the GNUSim8085 Intel 8085 Microprocessor Simulator.

About the simulator

The 8085 microprocessor simulator simulates the Intel 8085 programming model, with the same instructions available as on the real system. The input and the output of the actual machine and the simulator are identical, although the internal processing method may differ. The simulator lets you view the contents of the registers, the memory and I/O port values, execute one instruction at a time, and also write code in mnemonics instead of hand-assembled code.

While I was pursuing my undergraduate course, I began to look for a FOSS-based 8085 simulator. Simulators supplied with text books, and others available on the Internet either did not fulfil my needs, or were not FOSS. Then I recalled that LINUX For You had once published a review of GNUSim8085, and downloaded the software. The basic features listed on the official site are:

• It comes with an 8085 assembler.
• The editor has syntax highlighting.
• Register and Flags display are available.
• Has a hex-to-decimal converter.
• Provides a view of memory, I/O and stack contents.
• Step-by-step execution support.
• Print support.
• Has UI in different languages.

Now, let’s take a detailed look at this software.

The interface

When the software is launched, the editor starts with a template — sample code you can edit — or, you can open a new file, and start coding. The editor lines are numbered. The code highlighting is good, and makes it easier to read the code. To run or assemble code, you need to save it first, before compilation is allowed.

On the left-hand pane, all the registers and flags are listed in a very easy-to-read manner. All the register values are displayed in hexadecimal format. The hex-to-decimal conversion box, which is very useful in such applications, is in this pane. Personally, I feel that the implementation ought to have been a bit different. To convert from decimal to hex, or vice-versa, you need to type in the number and click the correct button to make the conversion. I would have liked it if it automatically converted as the input box value change; this would make things much faster and more convenient.

Then the I/O Ports space is displayed as a spin-box. The spin-box index is the port number, and the text box beside it shows the contents of this I/O port. Similarly, the memory space is shown with another spin-box. Note that the values shown in both are all in decimal. The default input for these is in decimal, but to enter a value in hex, you add an h after it; if the number starts with a letter of the alphabet, you need to add a zero before it. For example, AB is entered as 0abh.

On the right-hand side, there are three tabs. The Data tab shows the data variables you have defined with the assembler EQU pseudo opcode (discussed later). The next tab shows the stack state. After you initialise the stack pointer (SP) and execute PUSH, CALL or other stack-manipulation instructions, this tab will show the address and value of the entire stack, along with the associated pushed register pair or program label (for call).

This is especially helpful when you are debugging code with many nested subroutines, or using stack-manipulation instructions like XTHL. When pushing the contents of the PSW register (Accumulator and Flags), the Register name under the Proc/Reg field is incorrect, although the performed operations have no problem. This is a really helpful tool for debugging.

The third tab contains a virtual keypad, consisting of keys corresponding to each instruction. It looks good, but I do not think this is a feature that will get used a lot. It is much easier and simpler to type in mnemonics, than to click buttons to code.

In the text box on the top labelled “Load me at”, you can enter an address location, and make the assembled code load, starting at that memory location. The default input is decimal; to enter hex, use the same rules as before. An empty or invalid address means the program will be loaded at 4200h by default.

The Assembler menu has three items. The first, Assemble (F8), is used to assemble the program and load it into memory (at the load address). There is no practical use of only assembling the code in the current version, as you cannot generate an output assembled binary file that you could burn into the 8085′s memory. The next, Execute (F9), would execute the compiled program.

The following entry is Show Listing (Ctrl + L), which shows you the assembled machine code, along with the memory address opcodes, mnemonics and comments. This window is especially useful when you have successfully run a program in the simulator, and are ready to run it on the actual 8085; you simply need to enter the proper load location, and then either display the listing, or save it into a file and print it out, before entering it into the actual machine. This saves you from the hassles of hand assembly.

The Debug menu has the Step in (F5), Step Over(F6) and Step Out(F7) options, along with the program breakpoint management. These features are very helpful for debugging code by inspecting the register and memory contents at each step, or at breakpoints.

From the Reset menu, you can reset the state of registers, I/O ports, flags and memory, individually or all at once. It is useful when you want to remove old data from the simulator without writing extra 8085 code.

The toolbar is concise and clutter-free. It contains the normal save, load and new icons, apart from execution and debug shortcut buttons. The icon of the big red cross is to stop (terminate) execution when you are stepping through code, or in between.

At the bottom of the window is the assembler error message output panel, where you see any errors, with the line number and a brief description of the error. Clicking the error message highlights the line with the error.

Assembler

This simulator comes with an assembler: you write the code in Intel 8085 mnemonics, and it is converted to machine code by the assembler, freeing you from the pain of hand assembly. The assembler supports four types of syntax parts:

1. The assembler Intel 8085 mnemonics: The instruction strings as in the manuals.
2. Labels: A named point in the code, the target for JMP or CALL instructions.
3. Comments: Anything on a line after a semicolon (;) is ignored by the assembler, and used to write comments explaining the code.
4. Pseudo opcodes: Are not actual opcodes, but instructions to the assembler that provide some features to ease the coding process.

Instead of repeating the assembler features of the simulator here, I recommend you read the official site, where every detail is documented. From version 1.3.7, this assembler tutorial is included with the software, available at Help –> Assembler Tutorial.

After using this software for quite a long time, I have found some positive and negative points about it, which I will discuss below.

The highs (and the lows)

• Has a detection mechanism for when your code goes wild. For example, if you forget to place a HLT to stop processing, the simulator will automatically stop program execution and warn you about this.
• If you do more POP operations than PUSH, the simulator stops execution and tells you to check the logic. Although there is no warning on the real 8085 (it cannot — it would simply take the contents of SP as the top of the stack), this is very helpful, because such unbalanced stack operations are hard to detect in a large program.
• The stack view and tracing is a good feature and is really helpful for debugging code with many subroutines and a lot of PUSH, POP and other stack-related instructions.
• Like most simulators, this has a very good and easy-to-read register and flag views, which helps in programming.
• It provides an assembler and lets you enter the program in Intel 8085 mnemonics instead of hand assembly as on the real 8085 (when programmed manually).
• Has debugging features.
• Has assembler listing with address location, opcodes, mnemonics and comments — all as a single list. This listing can be followed when entering the code manually on the real 8085, and also keep the mnemonics of the opcodes at hand. Good for documentation.
• The editor has good highlighting, which makes the code easier to read.
• Most importantly, it has a very simple and clutter-free interface.

Here are some points that I felt needed improvement:

• The label line needs to be assigned at least a line of code. For example, if you do something like the following:

  mvi c, 0ah
  mvi b, 05h
  xra a
  loop:
  add b
  dcr c
  jnz loop

  The above code would not assemble, as the line with the label “loop” does not have any code. Either you have to move the ADD B to the “loop:” label line, or simply include a NOP beside the label “loop”.

• The memory and I/O contents are displayed in decimal, which causes a lot of confusion as the registers’ displays are in hex. Thus, each time, you need to convert the values and check the output. Also, because of this difference, if you are working with code that manipulates a good amount of data from memory, it becomes even more difficult to trace, as each time you need to pay attention to the base of the number you are looking at.
• Representation of the I/O, and the memory editing with the spin-box makes memory data entry and inspection very slow. For example, if you enter some data manually in memory, then you need to: click on the text box, enter data, click Update… and continue like this. I would recommend that memory and I/O should be editable with the mouse and also with easy keyboard shortcuts. For example, a grid display with scrollbars showing 10-20 memory locations, navigable with the keyboard, would be extremely helpful.
• The editor has only one tab — so if you open another file when one file is already open, the new replaces the old. An MDI feature would be great, but as it is, this is not much trouble, in my opinion. (See the Bugs section below for more on this)

Bugs

While using and testing the 8085, I have found some potential problems, bugs and glitches in the simulator, which are listed here.

• The PUSH PSW shows an invalid string for the register name in the Stack debugging tab.
• There is a bug related to opening and closing files. When you are working with one file and then open another, the editor displays the new file — but what is not obvious is that the old file (which you were working on) is not closed. This is not much trouble, since the limit for the maximum open files is quite large by default (run ulimit -n), but this should be fixed. You can check it by first launching the program, and then keeping an eye on the output of watch ls -l /proc/$(pidof gnusim8085)/fd.
• There is a severe problem with the simulator if you accidentally or intentionally put your code in an infinite loop — the simulator freezes, looping forever, and there is no way you can stop it except by killing it. The interface does not work in such a case. Running the interface and the execution module in separate threads would help, I guess.
• A minor glitch detected while boundary testing is that if you attempt to enter a negative program-load address, or an address greater than ffffh or 65535 in decimal, the simulator does not complain, but automatically detects an invalid range and loads the assembled code at the default loading address, 4200h. But consider this scenario: you load code at fff0h, and the length of your code is more than 15 (which will try to go beyond the ffffh memory limit). With this, if you assemble/run the code, the simulator immediately crashes. This should wrap around memory and continue to be executed from 0000h after reaching the limit ffffh, or simply notify the user about this and stop.
• Although this is a minor bug, I think it is worth pointing it out: if you enter an invalid decimal value in the decimal text box, the hexadecimal conversion shows an invalid value in the hexadecimal box. I think giving some warning of an invalid input would help users.

Version 1.3.7 v/s 1.3.5

Version 1.3.7 came out recently, almost one year after the last one. On the official website, the 1.3.7 Windows binary (with and without GTK runtime) and the 1.3.7 source code is available. The .deb is obsolete. There are not many externally visible differences in these two versions, but some nasty bugs were killed.

Version 1.3.6 was released in March 2010, but did not fix the real bugs in 1.3.5 — like in 1.3.5, clicking Help –> About would crash the program immediately. If you changed source code in an open file and clicked new, loaded another file, or simply closed it, there was no prompt to save the document. These were fixed in 1.3.7.

The really nasty DAA bug was killed in 1.3.7, for which reason you should avoid using 1.3.5. In 1.3.5, if you ran DAA after adding 99h and 01h, the accumulator ought to have contained 00h, and the carry flag should have been set, but though the accumulator was 00h, the carry flag would not get set. Try adding 59h and 45h and then apply DAA. The result would be in an invalid BCD form. Thankfully, this nasty bug was killed in 1.3.7. I would like to make you aware that there are a lot of simulators that have implemented DAA incorrectly, so please confirm DAA operation with the above sample, or with the real machine.

Some other bugs have been fixed as well, so I recommend you download the latest version 1.3.7 if it is available from your distro repository, or if not, install from source.

Have a look at the version release notes here.

Still to implement

• The RST instructions (a 1-byte call instruction, jumping to a predetermined jump location).
• RIM and SIM instructions — you would not be able to test any interrupt or serial I/O-related code. You would notice the Int-reg register in the simulator interface, which apparently represents the interrupt register that holds the masks, the pending interrupts, etc. This is non-functional.
• There are problems when printing on Windows, and the Linux environment implementation is very primitive.
• If you carefully look at the opcodes, you will notice that there are some unused ones that have no mnemonics associated. These unused opcodes are actually used, and are undocumented instructions, of which the Intel 8085 has 10 (they are not documented because they are not supported by 8086 and higher processors). These instructions and the related undocumented flags are not supported by the simulator. This will not bother many people, since, being “undocumented”, they are not generally used. Implementation of these is not that urgent, but the availability of the undocumented instructions would definitely make this simulator special and draw attention as these instructions can make some composite operation with a single instruction.

What you need to remember…

This is essentially a very good simulator to work with for educational purposes. If you have to practice code for your college exam, or to test the code in the practical copies, then I would recommend that this simulator. Some of my friends and I have used it during our engineering course, and had no problems. It has a very simple and clutter-free interface, an assembler, and the best part is that being under GPL v3, you can see the code and even edit it if you like — or request any feature update from the developers.

Programming in the simulator is easy, but it should be kept in that mind that if you are doing a course, then you need to hand-assemble and enter the code when presented with the actual 8085 in your college course. It is good to make a habit of hand-assembling and directly entering code on the actual machine, to keep in touch.

References

• Official Site
• Wikipedia article on 8085
• GNUSim8085 Wiki
• GNUSim8085 Announcements
• Microprocessor Architecture, Programming, and Applications with the 8085 by Ramesh Gaonkar

GNU/Linux is not all work and no play. Not content with the creation of work software, the Free Software community has produced a rich selection of games, quite a few of which are as entertaining as their proprietary cousins.

Strategy games are perhaps the most imaginative and fun in the whole gaming repertoire. So are you new to strategy gaming? Fellow FOSS fan, just visualise chessmen on the board. Done? Now endow the chessmen with human life or magical powers. Put them into fantasy or historic story-lines. What you get is a strategy game. Just add a computer, and you get graphical effects to rival your own fertile imagination.

Allow such joys to unfold (after work) as you become a magician and put all comers to flame and sword in Glest. Populate the wild, wild American West and win independence from the British in FreeCol. Take the path of expansion and forge alliances or make war in FreeCiv. If peace, not war, gives you enjoyment, become an urban planner and tackle pollution to render your city idyllic, in LinCity. Here is entertainment that engages your capabilities to strategise. The best part is that all these brilliant games are free/libre software!

Pit magic against technology in Glest

Glest — Opposing factions summon dragons and golems to battle. Screenshot from the Glest website.

Set in a medieval era, Glest pits the minions of magic against those of technology. Whichever side you take (the other is played by the computer, or you could play with others over the Web), you’ll stockpile gold, wood and stone, maintain stocks of grain at all times, and raise a host of foot soldiers and cavalry, with reserves of armour and even flying contraptions, demons and dragons. In Glest, the rhythm is: when you are not fighting, build fighters. Finishing off opponents is the only objective (does it have to be?).

As for battles, tactically position individual soldiers or groups of them. Reconnoitre locations, lay ambush, block paths, organise battlefronts and cripple your enemy in subsequent skirmishes. In the meanwhile, try and grow your force as fast as you can, though casualties will pile up. Choose armoured or mounted fighters over unarmed foot soldiers.

Glest is just complex enough to be enjoyable. Certain fighting units require certain buildings to function. These buildings need natural resources. Natural resources need miners. But hey, soldiers are needed, too, to defend the fort during mining. And you’ll always find yourself short of time in this arms race. So, you have multiple pressures on resources, personnel and time.

How do you balance infrastructure construction with army recruitment? That is where strategic thinking is called for. The capability to quickly build a large army and to strategise in battle should lead to a win. Mind you, the Glest AI is designed to be hard to beat. You’ll need to browse the Glest manual on wikia (see below) for tips and tricks.

Unlike turn-based strategy games, Glest works in real time. It will make you think fast. There is no respite in Glest, which feels like work sometimes. Ah, but if only building magical creatures was work…
Glest is recommended for fantasy and medieval history buffs. You will also appreciate Glest’s decent 3D graphics and its quality animations, which are somewhat rare in GNU/Linux. And this game is not only stable, but also fast.

A disclaimer: Glest reduces your screen resolution to 1024×768. So reset the resolution every time you quit the game. But what’s a minor irritant like that when it comes with so much entertainment?
This game’s on-board tutorials will teach you the game in half an hour. Extensions and addons are on Glest’s website. Most big distributions carry the game in their software repositories; Ubuntu does. With 2 GB of RAM and a dual-core processor, the game is snappy.

More than the final results of playing this game, you enjoy the sensations of a world where magic exists and you communicate with fantastic creatures. And you won’t have to use your imagination: instead, watch dragons in action on your screen. But Glest should have had a bigger and greater storyline. Strategy games have the potential to rival the experience of fantasy-genre books. Surely the fantasy genre is about more than magical creatures and rampaging around. It’s fun, but is that enough?

Conquer the world with FreeCiv

FreeCiv: A civilisation with railroads, workers, machinery and un-upgraded swordsmen

If you search around the Web for FreeCiv, you’ll read of FreeCiv addiction. Strategy buffs can’t quit before FreeCiv is finished, which may amount to three to eight hours (surely the Save Game concept is real?). Maybe that is because FreeCiv has you making so many micro-level decisions, that its heart-warming graphics, its gripping complexity and its rich storyline keep you hooked at every turn.

FreeCiv has a rich story. It is based on the history of man. FreeCiv rewards you for exploring your continent. Sometimes you find advanced technology through exploration of unknown places; you’ll find villages to annex to your kingdom; or gold and friendly mercenaries. On the other hand, you might disturb a village full of hostile pirates! Meanwhile, multiple things are taking place in your kingdom.

In FreeCiv, terrain is king. Choose your sites for cities with a strategic eye, to sustain a balance between food production and natural resources. The coastal cities are good for maritime trade, but vulnerable to invasion. Forested sites are fine for harvesting raw materials but not necessarily for food production.

The better the terrain, the quicker the population grows. A growing population lets you build more cities, which speeds up the rate of scientific development and military power. Expand your kingdom further by colonising uninhabited territories, raise garrisons, optimise infrastructure production in cities, change tax rates, construct the wonders of the world (which confer manifold military and technological advantages) like the Hanging Gardens, the pyramids, Leonardo’s workshop and Isaac Newton’s college; fund research in literacy, trade, metallurgy, mathematics, physics, and naturally, build an even greater army and raise hell.

You do these things simultaneously! The unit of progress in FreeCiv is a turn; it is known as a turn-based strategy game. You shift multiple units in one turn. There are no tutorials with this game, but there’s an excellent help system.

Politics is crucial in FreeCiv. Strike alliances and keep the peace, share technology with allies, even exchange strategic cities. But note that the computer AI will revoke treaties even when you are not any threat to it. Keep upgrading your standing army. You might play other people online, which can be a violent experience by all accounts. Why can’t people just get along?

Win FreeCiv by shedding virtual blood, or, if your civilisation is sufficiently advanced, by designing a spaceship and sending it to the distant star of Alpha Centauri!

Though rich in graphics, FreeCiv does not offer 3D effects like Glest does. But when your imagination is harnessed, what difference does fancy graphics make? Being 2D, FreeCiv will run in 1 GB of RAM, though 2 GB is recommended.

FreeCiv is as much about exploration and discovery as about building and fighting. It gives you continuous thrills when your civilisation speeds up its technology development. Turn by turn, the game keeps you entertained. There lies its adventure-novel-like charm, and you’ll play it for hours on end.

Colonise America in FreeCol

FreeCol: A wagon train moves from a large manufacturing colony to a supporting ore-mining colony. Also seen are tribal villages and a rival's colony (in red).

Although FreeCol is far less complicated than FreeCiv, its historical storyline that’s based on colonisation will appeal to adults more. The remarkable game puts the player in the shoes of a sea-faring migrant to a new continent. (You won’t have to call the continent North America.) By far, FreeCol is more story-like than the previous games. You are the governor of a new colony. Again, explore the continent no Westerner has discovered, raise your colonies on prime locations, where farmland, lumber and ores are in plenty, and maintain a respectful distance from Apache, Inca, Arawak and other tribes, many of whom are less than happy at your arrival, and ultimately, make peace with them.

Of course, other Westerners want the country — so arm your settlers! And while some tribes like the Arawak and the Iroquois are friendly, and just wish to trade with you, the Apache and the Inca are excessively warlike, and might attempt extortion during hard times. Try making periodic gifts to them, and stay on their right side. Keep sufficient hi-tech weaponry like field cannons, to deal with the more hostile tribes and other colonial powers. Note that other colonial powers are more likely than the tribes to violate treaties with you.

In FreeCol, your ethics will be tested through your choices. Do you coexist with the tribes, or wage war against them? Do you extract tribute from them because you are more powerful? Do you respect their rights to their country, or run them off it? Trading with the tribes pays dividends in FreeCol. The tribes pay well for your goods, and no taxes go to the crown, which is raising an army against you.

FreeCol isn’t about mindless mayhem. Unlike most strategy games, FreeCol has the objective of winning independence from a colonial ruler. To do so, form an army and navy, and win the citizens’ support by establishing a rebel government. And while you’re at it, start newspapers and printing presses to stoke a pro-freedom feeling among your people!

FreeCol’s charm is in its fantastic possibilities of alternate history. The emotions it inspires, though, feel real.

Urban governance in non-violent Lincity

LinCity: Mines, a pottery workshop, a market and two residential buildings in a basic village

Technically, Lincity is not a game, but a simulation. But it’s a welcome breather after the slash-and-burn of the previous games, and it involves strategy. We’ve become a mature civilisation; now let’s make the city sustainable in Lincity. The game offers no opportunity to wage wars, since there is no military. Our foes are underdevelopment, unemployment and pollution.

Lincity is not as complicated as it looks. That is because it deals with urban concerns. Start with a blank board, with a single village or with an existing city with problems. Lincity offers you not only 3D graphics, but also sound effects that will evoke the hustle and bustle of industry, transport and city living. Your micro- and macro-management skills are tested in this real-time game. Ensure that your residential sectors are close to markets/job centres, healthcare facilities, education and civic amenities. Keep your polluting manufacturing sectors at arm’s length from residences. Match infrastructure development to income to keep the economy in the black. When you can, build a port and start exporting. Get cracking on your civic services, as your city progresses from the pottery age to the space age.

There are two ways to “win” Lincity: crafting a sustainable economy, or building a spaceship and settling another planet. With no wars or violence, Lincity charms you with its 3D cartoon-style evocation of the sights and sounds of that complex organism, the city.

Installation instructions

All these games are accessible by default through the software manager on your system. It’s straightforward to install the first three games. In your software manager, search for their names. In the case of Lincity, though, don’t install the package called lincity; install lincity-ng instead, and you’ll get the 3D graphics as promised. Note that these games are big downloads: Glest is about 55 MB, FreeCiv about 30 MB, FreeCol about 44 MB and Lincity about 51 MB.

Another thing: if Lincity is crashing, it’s probably due to a bug in the graphics driver on your system. Try updating to the latest driver or (shudder!) install the proprietary driver. Then donate a bit of green to the free software driver developers.

Enjoy!

While it’s a known fact that gaming choices on GNU/Linux are fewer than on Windows, how many games do you really need in order to have a great time? Fifty? You’ll find more than that on GNU/Linux. For a comprehensive list of games, refer to websites like linuxgames.com, tuxgames.com and happypenguin.org.

Technical note: To cure FreeCiv addiction — use the sudo apt-get install willpower command.

GNOME, an easy-to-use desktop environment, will teach you how simple a Linux OS really is, with its new GNOME Shell. GNOME 3 can also be used without using GNOME Shell as the interface. I tried the GNOME 3 preview in my openSUSE 11.4 system, and based this review on that experience (so there might be slight differences in other distros).

Appearance

In GNOME Shell, the top panel has one button on the left, called Activities. This replaces the old Application, System and Places menus. The top right corner has indication applets, similar to previous versions, but with the addition of social networking applets using Empathy. This is a concept already implemented in Ubuntu, called the Ubuntu Messaging Menu. There is an entry for System Settings in the top right corner menu, where you have the Shutdown and Restart options. The clock is placed in the centre of the top panel and clicking on it will display the calendar, along with an attractive event scheduler. If you choose to open the calendar, you are redirected to Evolution.

Clicking the Activities button displays two tabs: Windows and Applications. The window switcher displays all the open windows in an efficient way, giving users a preview of all of them. When the Activities icon is clicked, you also get an application launcher dock on the left, where you can pin your most-used apps by right-clicking the app in its active state, and choosing the Add to Favourites option.

The Applications tab is where you can find your desired apps. It initially displays all the apps, but the category list is located on the right. There is a search bar included above the category list, where you can type the name of the app or file that you are looking for. However, the search bar failed to work in the GNOME 3 preview. The shell displays error messages and status messages in a pop-up screen, which does not interfere with the application that you are currently using.

In the bottom right corner, you will get a gnome-settings-daemon icon that is used to change the screen resolution, which I believe is a feature of openSUSE. The app that is currently active has its icon placed adjacent to the Activities button.

Figure 1: GNOME 3 desktop after system startup

Hardware integration

Deeper integration with the hardware is a key feature of GNOME 3, as mentioned by its developers. When tested on my laptop, it automatically added the Suspend option, but failed to start the battery indicator applet. Compositing and other graphical effects worked out of the box on my laptop — if 3D capabilities of the graphics card is not supported by the underlying OS, GNOME 3 has a fallback mode that looks like a stripped-down version of GNOME 2.x.

When a device is plugged in, GNOME 3 immediately detects it and displays a status message at the bottom. The System Settings option in the menu can be used to configure the devices. GNOME 3 displays the configuration icon for devices in the System Settings only for devices that are detected. It does make full use of the hardware, but there is always room for improvement.

Social networking from the desktop

Social networking is built on Empathy, which uses the Telepathy framework. You can add your Google, Facebook and other chat accounts by entering the details in Empathy. The My Account option on the top right corner menu is only to add user details, and not chat accounts. In case you are using some other application and your friend types a chat message, Empathy will not interfere with the active application, but displays the message in a dialogue box that rises from the bottom of the display, and allows you to reply without minimising or closing the active app.

Unity vs GNOME Shell

Unity, which was developed in a very short time, is preferred by most people for use on their laptops and netbooks. GNOME Shell provides an interface suitable for both laptops and desktops. As GNOME 3 development started two years back, it ensures stability.

Unity pushes the title bar and the menu bar of an application’s window to the top panel, which provides more space to work on small screens (netbooks). GNOME 3, too, ought to be able to detect the screen size of the system and introduce this feature in later versions.

Trying GNOME 3

The GNOME 3 preview can be tried in openSUSE 11.4. After installing openSUSE, you just have to update the system to try the GNOME 3 preview (or install GNOME Shell from the package manager). To try the actual GNOME 3 in openSUSE, you need to upgrade the OS to its Tumbleweed version, which is a rolling release of the OS, as follows:

zypper ar --refresh http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Tumbleweed/standard/ Tumbleweed
zypper dup --from Tumbleweed

To try GNOME 3 in Ubuntu 10.10 run the following command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ricotz/testing && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

Next, hit Alt+F2, and run the following set of commands:

gnome-shell --replace

To install GNOME 3 in Natty run the following set of commands:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-desktop3

As far as other distros, I also tried GNOME 3 in Debian, but the display crashed and I was left in a shell environment. For stability, Debian might not currently support GNOME 3 adequately. openSUSE 11.4 provides a GNOME 3 preview, but still has lots of glitches in the integration. Fedora 15 beta ships with GNOME 3, and gets the credit for the best integration of GNOME 3 with GNOME Shell.

Experiment with GNOME 3, and improve it. Spread the word on the use of GNOME 3-based distros to others. The questions I asked in this article’s teaser can only be answered by those who have tried GNOME 3. Do check out the new GNOME 3 website, which has a lot more information on it.

Genre: Musical

Gameplay

Just like Guitar Hero, Frets on Fire features a handful of songs and allows you to play the guitar sections with just a few keys. Instead of using a separate controller to mimic the guitar, Frets on Fire lets you pick up the keyboard and jam right in front of your desk. Best of all, a built-in editor lets you tab any song, spawning a growing community of music-modders on the web.

After choosing a song from a stack of cassettes, a wire image of a guitar bridge shows on screen running from the foreground and vanishing into the distance. Five colored blocks line the bottom, each one representing a different key. Hold your keyboard like a guitar with the fret keys by your left hand and the pick (Enter) by your right (reverse for us lefties). When the song begins, notes scroll down the screen and you must press the fret keys at the right time while tapping Enter to play the sound. Time it right and the song plays just as if you were listening to the real thing. Make a mistake and you’ll hear distorted guitar noise followed by a deafening (and defeated) silence.

The Frets on Fire download comes with a few well-made songs to get you started, each one with several difficulty levels to hone your skills. The online forum features many more tunes from other players, though they won’t share a space on the global high score board and usually feature just one or two levels of difficulty.

Rhythm games add an entirely new dimension of fun to gaming: aural rewards. Frets on Fire takes that to a new level by allowing you re-create familiar tunes with nothing more than your keyboard. The reward isn’t getting a high score, it’s listening to the song playing on your speakers and knowing you were responsible for that. The feeling you get when you effortlessly land an impossible combination is amazing.

The in-game interface couldn’t be simpler, but selecting songs can be cumbersome if you have a large playlist. The song editor is also a bit awkward and will take some practice before you can create anything decent. And while holding your keyboard like a guitar is the best way to go, Frets of Fire is just as playable on a flat desktop. Also worth mentioning is the extremely entertaining tutorial. Your host, Jurgen Guntherswarchzhaffenstrassen, walks you through the game and proves that he is, indeed, much cooler than you are.

As a warning to anyone with children: Frets on Fire is kid-safe, but like any game that encourages user-created content, not everything you download will be suitable. The tunes that come with Frets of Fire are alright, but some of the songs tagged by users may contain objectionable language.

Video

The game doesn’t really need anything flashier than the cartoon-isque animation it already has.

Audio

This is the best part. It’s you who gets to decide how the game sounds, mistah! Mine sucked big time, though.

Final Verdict: 8/10

Download

SAFENTRIX, while claiming 100 per cent virus protection and over 99 per cent spam protection, can save up to 40 per cent of your e-mail bandwidth costs. And it’s available in two flavours. The standard service is absolutely free, for any number of users, with no compromise on e-mail security. The premium service offers additional peace of mind through compliance with industry standards (HIPAA, GLB) and a 100 per cent service level agreement warranty.

SAFENTRIX uses seven different layers of spam protection to give you a spam and virus-free inbox. It uses IP checks, HELO checks, selective grey-listing, sender address/domain validation, recipient address/domain validation, in-house proprietary blacklist checks, content checks to achieve efficiency. It can support up to 20,000 users per domain and also supports the same number of users for a sub-domain.

Easy to set up

Setting up the solution is very simple and does not require too much of technical expertise. It can be configured by anyone who has some knowledge of DNS, MX and A records. Neither does it require any changes in your current infrastructure and integrates seamlessly with the existing system. Also, it is compatible with all modern e-mail servers, including (but not limited to):

1. Microsoft Exchange Server
2. Lotus Notes
3. Qmail
4. Postfix
5. Sendmail

Apart from this, it supports all hosted e-mail services like Yahoo!, Gmail and others that provide POP/IMAP services.

SAFENTRIX can be installed and configured in three simple steps:

1. Register and create accounts using an automated process at safentrix.com.
2. Add domains, corresponding delivery records and user names.
3. Change MX records for domains.

The configuration is simple, yet has live chat support that can be accessed even if you are configuring it as a free service.

Security and reliability

SAFENTRIX has secured communications with its high grade encryption (AES 256 bit) CAPTCHA check at every step: it thwarts automated attacks; sends e-mail notifications on password attacks; and ensures account access is tied to the IP address for additional protection, besides other multiple layers of security. These include host-based firewalls, application security layer and strong encryption that protect e-mails while in transit.

Having the system always up is achieved through multiple redundant e-mail servers that ensure your e-mails are always received and delivered. SAFENTRIX uses cloud computing to ensure that server problems can be overridden in 10 minutes or less. The system always sends a bounce message when it rejects an e-mail (even if it contains a virus). This allows senders to take corrective action as and when required and resend the e-mail. It can store your e-mails for up to six hours in case the e-mail server MX is down. Over all, the use of SAFENTRIX can be considered secure and reliable.

A mock set-up

We tried SAFENTRIX on one of our domains. It took us around 15 minutes to configure the entire system. The configuration is really simple and instructions on the screen are easy enough to understand. Though it provides live chat support to configure your domain, we do not think that would be required, at least during the initial configuration. Our test domain has 50 users that used to get around 125 spams per user per day after deactivating our existing anti-spam solution. When we checked up with all the users a day after implementing the free solution of SAFENTRIX, the response showed a maximum of one or two spams per e-mail account. We also tried to send an e-mail with a virus infected file attached but the system rejected the mail. We felt it passed all the tests.

Where is the ‘Spam’ folder?

Yes, this is what sets SAFENTRIX apart from other e-mail security software. There is no spam/quarantine folder to keep a constant watch on. This is the result of the product team’s efforts to reduce the responsibilities of the systems administrator. The idea is that every time an e-mail gets blocked by the software, the senders get a bounce-back e-mail informing them about the rejection, along with a unique white-list key that can later be used to white-list that particular sender’s e-mail ID.

Our verdict

There aren’t many e-mail security solutions around that provide such efficient spam and virus filtering, along with live chat with the support team, for absolutely no cost. The only downside seems to be that every time someone sends you an e-mail, two lines of their text advertisement get appended at the end of the e-mail, which one always has the option to delete, while replying back, in case one isn’t too keen to ‘spread the love’.

However, not everybody might be comfortable with the idea of not having a spam folder to check up if any genuine e-mails got mistakenly trashed. But then, everyone had wanted to kill Google too, when it introduced labels and did away with folders.

So, all in all, SAFENTRIX actually looks like a useful product to get your hands on. How it will manage to start earning the moolah despite dishing out so many freebies is what remains to be seen.

What’s the hype all about?

Flock is designed to streamline how you interface with social networking sites, RSS and media feeds, and blogs. Because it’s built on Firefox 3, its behaviour will seem familiar and it supports most—but not all—Firefox extensions. And yes, the ‘awesome bar’ is part of the latest version.

The social media add-ons are apparent from the start, though. The ‘My World’ tab—set as your home page by default—is devoted to collating your favourite stuff in one single view. It’s made up of a series of widgets that you can customise to display content from video and photo sites, RSS feeds, saved searches from Twitter and useful bookmarks.

How is a ‘social Web browser’ different?

While support from Twitter and Facebook had been present in Flock right from its inception, the browser now allows you to search the Twitter timeline and also keep them in History so that you can access them as and when you wish. Now, this is a very nifty feature because it lets you stay on top of trending topics on the micro-blogging network. Another great and useful feature is the automatic shortening of URLs that are shared on Twitter.

For the first time, Flock has integrated Facebook chat within the browser. While the side bar sits pretty, at the left of the browser, you can keep sharing content with your contacts while reading the latest news on Google reader or playing Scrabble on Yahoo Apps. All you need to do is stay logged into the Facebook network. What else? If you find something interesting while browsing the Web, all you need to do is drag the content and drop it on the side panel panel to share it with the world.

Speaking of drag-n-drop, Flock enables you to drag and drop content from any website on to the sidebar and share it with your contacts. To make life easier still, another new feature called FlockCast lets you automatically send an update to Facebook when you perform an action on another site. So, if you use the built-in functions to add a post to your blog, upload a photo to Flickr, a video to YouTube or a status message to Twitter, you can get it instantly echoed on Facebook. Right now, only Facebook is supported as a destination, but it’s a nice idea that could get much more useful if more services are supported in future Flock updates.

A Photo uploader built inherently within Flock

So, why isn’t everyone around me using Flock?

Flock can, any day, be used as a normal Web browser—the way you might use Mozilla Firefox and Epiphany for your daily surfing needs. However, it becomes a little inconvenient, with less screen space allowed by Flock for browsing, unless you are one of those rich kids who can’t think of anything below the 21-inch plasma monitors with super-high resolutions. The ugly and very bright sidebar, which is supposedly the strength and USP of the browser, actually makes browsing very cumbersome.

With the wider top bar, the side bar and the media browser, hardly any space remains for meaningful browsing

Moreover, while even Twitter can make you go bonkers with information overload, a complete browser with such heavy social functionalities built in, is definitely not meant for those with serious work to do, where one needs to remain focused. Even if you happen to be a social-media junkie, unless you have a lot of free time, you’ll always find yourself wanting to go back to whatever browser you are using.

Tip: There are a few Firefox plug-ins (like FireShot) that do work with Flock, but are not available for download. So, you can copy the Firefox’s settings folder into that of Flock to get as many plug-ins as possible. However, in case some are not compatible, you will have to disable them yourself.

Tip: There are a few Firefox plug-ins (like FireShot) that do work with Flock, but are not available for download. So, you can copy the Firefox’s settings folder into that of Flock to get as many plug-ins as possible. However, in case some are not compatible, you will have to disable them yourself.

You may continue to wonder why people are still using it. Before I elaborate on that, let me show some of its features. In this browser, you can click on a new link by highlighting a chosen link and selecting it. In one of my customised Lynx browsers, I have the freedom to enter the number of the link, as all the links are identified by number.

Support for SSL and many HTML features has been added in the recent versions. Here, the tables in a Web page are linearised. And, just like in Firefox, you have the freedom to view frames as separate pages (in fact, all the frames are identified by names). I am sure that if you haven’t been exposed to Lynx, you must be thinking about the non-text content. Lynx can handle these contents by aptly launching an external program for viewing the respective contents—say an image viewer or video player.

Lynx was the brainchild of Lou Montulli, Michael Grobe and Charles Rezac of the University of Kansas (and Thomas Dickey maintains the package now). They brought out the browser way back in 1992. Though it was originally conceived for UNIX and VMS, it is still a popular console-based browser on Linux and is available along with many distros. Figure 1 shows Lynx in Kubuntu.

Figure 1: Accessing Kubuntu.org using Lynx from the terminal

All the recent versions even run on Windows and Mac OSX (but for Mac there is a ‘classical version’ available—MacLynx!). Please refer to the box for the complete list of platforms on which it has been tested.

Why Lynx?

Now I shall provide you with the reasons why people are still after this open-source, text-only Web browser and Gopher (which is a distributed document search and retrieval network protocol) client. The first reason is that it is quite good when it comes to testing websites. Lynx tries the usability of Web pages in older browsers (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Home page of The Analyst magazine in Lynx

It is still considered an effective mode to browse the modern Web space. If you have trouble with regard to your low bandwidth or older computer hardware, it’s worth giving Lynx a try. The ‘speed benefits’ associated with Lynx further makes it lucrative to many.

Webmasters and SEOs ought to look at how their websites appear from the eyes of a spider. Many of them use Lynx for that! In the Web sphere, there are even many ‘Lynx viewers’ that allow them to have a glance at the Web pages, using emulators (rather than the original Lynx). Figure 3 shows one such ‘view’. This further facilitates the Web master to figure out (in a critical sense) whether his site is accessible to the visually impaired.

Figure 3: Home page of The Analyst magazine in a Lynx viewer

Using Lynx, you can verify whether a website is crawled correctly by a search engine. Web pages written with Lynx in mind often receive good page ranks, as robots, index or abstract generation tools can leniently imbibe and extract data from the page.

Further, you can easily modify it (as it is in ISO C) to suit your needs.

So what’s the downside?

Of course, there are a few negatives associated with the current form of Lynx. The most prominent is the bad HTML handling when it comes to forms. Lynx’s comment handling is also somewhat poor, especially when it meddles with a slightly incorrect HTML format. Even the cookie implementation doesn’t seem to be perfect.

Redirecting POST content is another facet that needs improvisation. Lynx may ask you:

“wwW: Redirection for POST content.  Proceed (y/n)? ”

If your response is ‘No’, the server may get perplexed and you may get an error.

But Lynx is still the favourite browser of many. You can easily find many volunteers who can help you while meddling with its code. Give it a try, and you can experience the advantages of a CLI-based browser!

Resources

• Lynx home page
• Lynx viewer
• Extremely Lynx
• See the web like a crawler
• An Early History of Lynx

Oxygen: Breathe in, breathe out!

Yes, that default look and feel that KDE 4.2 comes with is thanks to something called Oxygen—the theme, the window borders and those beautiful icons. The noticeable change this time round is the desktop panel, which is now a shade of blue—much prettier, I must add.

The panel

The panel has the usual stuff—the KDE (Kickoff) menu, the Show desktop utility, the pager (or the workspace switcher), the task manager, device notifier and system tray, followed by the clock. I don’t remember if that’s the exact order of things, by default, but that’s how I like it. If you’re on a laptop, the panel should also have the battery monitor next to the system tray.

Apart from a new icon for the device notifier, the utility that has attracted a significant amount of attention from developers is the system tray—the thing that generally holds the KMix (sound control), Klipper (clipboard), and perhaps a software update notifier too. The tray now looks like, well…a tray, due to it being confined by a boundary. Also, you can right click on its edge to get a hold of the System Tray Settings menu, from where you can select icons of the running apps you want to be auto hidden. After you’ve made your selections, the size of the system tray will get shortened, and the left side of the tray will display an arrow pointing left, indicating you can expand it in that direction. This option comes in handy if you run a lot of apps that place a control icon inside the system tray, thus expanding the tray to occupy the precious panel space.

The task manager has also got a bit of a facelift—it can now again group applications based on program names, and placing the tasks on multiple rows is also possible just like in KDE3. All this can be configured from the Task Manager Settings menu by right clicking on the panel. Although, I have no complaints about how grouping works, when you organise tasks in rows, the default teaming makes it look a bit odd—as if someone has shrunk the tasks forcefully (Figure 1). However, I’m sure this would be addressed in a bug fix release soon, as it looks like a theme issue. Also, by default, while tasks are sorted in alphabetical order (and not in the order programs are launched) I’ve enabled it to let me sort stuff manually. This enables me to drag and reorganise my programs as I wish.

Figure 1: Tasks in Task Manager organised in two rows

In addition to all this, more options have been added to the general settings of the overall panel. Things like how to increase the height, position and screen-edge can be much more easily achieved now, unlike in KDE 4.1, where it was much harder to guess how to go about things.

Coming back to those who’re on the move, right click on the Battery Monitor widget (should be somewhere near your clock), and you’ll see configurable options galore. This is thanks to the integration of the PowerDevil utility, another addition in this release. It offers various pre-configured ‘Power Profiles’—viz. performance, powersave, aggressive powersave, presentation, etc.—and lets you fine tune all the profiles as per your liking. Overall, although it’s pretty easy to use and understand the options, KDE4 seems to drain out a lot of battery power compared to KDE3 and GNOME.

As for the default KDE4 menu, Kickoff, it hasn’t got any visually noticeable feature additions, apart from the border colour, which is now black, to gel with the rest of the Oxygen theme.

Workspace

As for the other part of the desktop, which is the main workspace, things have again been refined a lot with respect to the widgets, and their numbers have also increased considerably. Figure 2 shows what my personal desktop screen looks like, while Figure 3 shows my work laptop. As you can see on my personal desktop, I have the Folder View widget, a Calvin and Hobbs comic strip, plus a few pictures of my family members.

Figure 2: My personal desktop the Folder View, Comic Strip, Notes and Picture Frame widgets

Figure 3: My work notebook with the Folder View, Notes, Picture Frame and RSSNow widgets

The Folder View widget, as you know, was introduced in KDE 4.1. You configure it to point towards the contents of the folder you access frequently, right on your desktop—so there’s no need to use the file manager to hunt down that folder every time you need something; however deep inside the filesystem it is located, you can see its contents right on your desktop. You can also have multiple Folder Views, say ~/Documents and ~/Pictures folders, for easy access.

Traditionally, the contents of the ~/Desktop folder are displayed as icons on your desktop. Well, by default, the Folder View widget displays the contents of this folder. In fact, if you like, in KDE 4.2 you can even make your desktop imitate the traditional versions, with icons and files all over the place. You can set it by accessing the Appearance Settings option by right clicking on your desktop and then changing your desktop activity type from ‘Desktop’ to ‘Folder View’. But I don’t think it’s a good idea, especially if you are someone like me who keeps downloading random stuff from the Web, and storing it on the ~/Desktop folder, turning the desktop into a huge pool of icons. That’s why I would rather use Folder View as a widget than use it as my desktop. The reason being that I can set its size to what I want and use the rest of the desktop to put other useful widgets, without worrying about my ~/Desktop folder becoming a junkyard of trash downloads from all over the Web.

This brings me to the other useful widgets I use. The Calvin and Hobbs is courtesy the Comic Strip widget, and it works provided you’re connected to the Internet. When you launch it, you first need to set it up. You can pull comic streams from a wide range of streams hosted at KDE-Files.org—so whether you’re into Garfield, Dilbert, or anybody else, you are free to choose from a list that’s more than a handful. This is a healthy addition considering v4.1.x only provided me with an option of a few.

The pictures are courtesy the Picture Frame widget. Here, you can simply drag and drop pictures and the widget adjusts its size according to the dimensions (landscape or portrait) of the source image. Don’t worry, the widget doesn’t depend on the resolution of the source image—it’s intelligent enough to give you a good-sized picture frame, and you are free to increase or decrease it as per your taste. This is a very useful addition for me, as earlier I used to remix an image with lots of elements (and faces) to create wallpaper. Now, I can simply select an image of some scenery for a wall paper, while pictures of people go into frames. :-)

For my work desktop, I like to track a few news sites and the RSSNow widget lets me do exactly that. Each feed automatically scrolls horizontally to show me the current news—and of course, it gives me the option to manually skim through them. When I chance upon something interesting, I click, and the default browser loads the Web page with the complete story.

Another handy widget is Pastebin. If you hang out in IRC channels, I don’t need to explain what pastebins are. You probably point your browser to a pastebin website, upload the information and then obtain the URL to share with others. Instead, the widget connects to pastebin.ca for you, so all you need to do is drag and drop text or images here, and it gives you the URL that you can post in the IRC channel you’re logged in to. Makes life a lot easier, right?

Other widgets that you may find handy are the age-old binary clock, Blue Marble (a 3D model of the earth that’s rendered thanks to the Marble application—a Google Earth-like tool), Calculator, Dictionary, Eyes, Fifteen Puzzle, LCD Weather Station (to keep an eye on the current weather of your city), Luna (to check the current phase of the moon), Twitter Microblogging client, World Clock, various system monitors (to monitor your hard disk, CPU temperature, network traffic and other hardware information), besides a lot more that don’t really seem interesting enough to me. I also hope some of these widgets get the attention of the artists teams to make them look more appealing, like the system monitors that take up too much screen space and look too dull.

Before ending my rant on the widgets, allow me to draw your attention to the Lancelot Launcher menu in Figure 4. Although, technically it’s more or less similar to Kickoff, I like the way things are organised here, besides the fact that it looks more appealing. After customising a few of its settings, I’ve finally switched to Lancelot as my default launcher menu. Although, I hardly use even this: which brings me to…

Figure 4: Lancelot menu

KRunner

This is the ‘Run’ command that you activate by pressing Alt+F2 from the keyboard. Although it’s been available for a year now, things have been more aesthetically refined in this release. You can make it work in either of two modes—command-based like we’ve been used to since ages, or now even task-based. By default, you can key in the commands to launch an application—as soon as you start typing, it starts filtering from the names of the applications available. For example, take a look at Figure 5—as soon as I type ‘Kon’, it filters from all the commands for apps that contain the letters ‘kon’. I can now either key in a few more letters to fine-tune the filtering further, or use Tab to select the program I need to launch.

Figure 5: The KRunner application launcher

You can also use KRunner for a lot of other purposes, viz., as a calculator, to find documents, search by tags, or even visit website URLs you directly key in. This extended functionality is courtesy several plug-ins that power its back-end. A few examples are spell checking, browser history, recent documents, etc. You can check out the full listing of plug-ins by accessing its configuration dialogue. In fact, this is where you can switch from command-based to task-based mode by activating it from the ‘User Interface’ tab. As you can see in Figure 6, now you can find applications by their task, rather than command—for example, I typed ‘write’ and it shows me all the applications that can help me write something. However, since I’m too used to the command-based mode, I found the task-oriented method kind of difficult to use.

Figure 6: QuickSand: KRunner in task mode

Talking about the command mode, thanks to the back-end calculator plug-in, I can now see the outcome of simple math problems from KRunner itself, without launching the calculator application separately. For example, type ‘2134*134=’, excluding the single quotes. Did you see ‘285554’ right away? Pretty cool, eh?

Overall, KRunner is not just a regular Run dialog any more—it’s turning out to be a pretty powerful application in itself.

Kwin

Kwin is basically the window manager—something that acts as a container for the apps we run on our desktop. Even in KDE 4.1, we saw some pretty cool compositing and desktop effects features added to Kwin. This release has added even more plug-ins for effects, and the ones that were already available, have been fine tuned—refer to Figure 7 for an improved Alt+Tab effect, when too many windows are open; note the horizontal viewer at the top. You can activate it from the ‘Desktop’ settings in the Personal Settings app (the replacement for KControl from the KDE3 branch).

Figure 7: The Alt+Tab effects

I won’t go on and on about the desktop effects it offers; you should try it out yourself to experience its niceties. Maybe you’ll find a lot less polish with respect to some features that Compiz Fusion also offers, but things aren’t that bad either. In fact, looking at the features made available during the last six months, I won’t be surprised if it catches up with Compiz by the time KDE 4.3 comes out.

As for me, although I usually keep these effects disabled as I find them distracting, I don’t mind playing around with them when I need to kill time, or show off in front of those Winduhs users. And for that purpose, I’d rather prefer a native window manager to take care of the effects rather than using a third-party tool, which most of the time asks me to log out and log back in to activate/disable the effects. Although, I’ve got to admit, these effects work much better on Intel’s graphics, rather than the proprietary drivers that ATI and Nvidia depend on—mostly due to bugs in the drivers.