Desktop search is one of those techs that keeps coming back and never really sticking.  At least that’s how it seems to me.  Look at how giddy I was about Beagle back in 2006.  And I tried it and it was, generally, pretty awesome.  It really worked well.  It was like the speed of locate without having to wait until the database was updated at midnight.  And it could see into IMs, MP3 metadata, emails and office documents.  Now?  According the the official website it’s no longer under active development.  Perhaps that’s because they met all their goals.  And that’s fine, but pretty much everyone switched over to tracker around 2008.  I’m not quite sure why - perhaps all the anti-Mono hatred that went on.  Fedora doesn’t even ship with Tomboy or F-Spot anymore.  They’re there in the repos, but they aren’t the defaults.

It can be seen on their site here if you think you want to setup something similar.

[caption id=“attachment_3901” align=“aligncenter” width=“290” caption=“Amarok 2.5.2”] [/caption]

There was a time when I thought Amarok was the best music player on Linux.  I even used to run it in Gnome as you can see from this 2005 screenshot.  In that first link you can read me gushing over Amarok 1.4.  I loved all the integrated technologies, especially the metadata juggling Amarok did.  The first few Amarok 2.x releases with the KDE 4 libraries were complete crap.  They were ugly and were missing nearly all of Amarok’s features.  (Mirroring the complaints people were having about KDE 4 at the time)  When I took a look at Amarok and KDE 4.4 in October I said I would take another look at Amarok.

I love to write so when I started the 2010 NanoWrimo competition 9 days late I thought it would be no big deal to get caught up.  I really under-estimated the effort behind writing over two thousand words a day.  I think I probably could have made it if I had an idea ahead of time, but I ran out of steam somewhere around 15 thousand words.  I’m nearly at 18 thousand and nearly everything I’ve written has been complete and utter crap.  Being very trope savvy has made it hard for me to just make stuff up as I go along because I’ve been trying to avoid plot and logic holes.

The Gnome panel was acting a little buggy and I was going to report that, but I decided that instead I could load up KDE.  I’d been wanting to check it out a little more ever since I took a look in October.  But I was unable to open Kontact because akonadi was being annoying.  Turns out that the version of akonadi I had installed from Fedora 13 was technically a higher version than the one with Fedora 14.  I ran most of the commands on this page after getting the link as advice from fenris in the Fedora freenode IRC room.  The most important one was the ??yum distribution-synchronization which fixed that akonadi problem.  Kontact now loads up.  It’s acting a bit funny with my gmail messages, but I’m sure that can be fixed.  So I’m going to have to get back into Gnome to see if the panels are behaving a bit better now.  After all, I ended up installing about half a gig of updates tonight as a result of the instructions on that page.  This is why, folks, everyone always recommends just going for a fresh install.  Upgrades always require a bit more work.

I just did a preupgrade upgrade from Fedora 13 to Fedora 14.  The only hitch is that it didn’t find enough space to download the installer ahead of time so that had to be downloaded after the the reboot.  Everything went off without a hitch.  My absolute cleanest upgrade ever.  Dual screen worked, nothing had to be uninstalled.  None of the repos had to be disabled.  All my usual programs work.  I haven’t tried Blender yet, that’s tomorrow.  The first thing I noticed was that the OpenOffice.org icons have changed again.  This is the third time, I think,since I’ve been using Linux.

Today I went to the funeral of my wife’s uncle.  It was a Catholic Mass, so it was pretty interesting trying to match up the Vietnamese with what I knew from English mass.  It was also interesting to hear how the priest pronounced “amen” and “hallelujah”.  So far in my life I’ve been to two Cuban funerals and one Vietnamese funeral.  One of the Cuban funerals was a masonic funeral.  The other was Protestant.  Really the only difference in my limited experience is that the Vietnamese take photos and video to document the event.

Since apparently I’m a crazy person who thinks he has so much free time, I’ve decided to participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month.  The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in one month.  Oh yeah, and I waited until 9 Nov to start.  I’d heard about it on NPR and on Linux Outlaws and I thought - why not?  The website seems to have a Lomography vibe to it - just write and don’t worry about editing until later.  I love working under constraints.  I feel that my 365 Project really pushed me to learn a LOT more about photography and techniques - especially lighting.  Anyway, you can follow my progress on the NanoWrimo site here.  See if I can make it or not.  Whatever I have at the end of the project will be posted here under a Creative Commons license and probably also posted to lulu.com.

So, a while back I caved and got an iPod shuffle.  While it worked well at first, over the last year it has been a constant pain in my butt.  All I want to do is use gPodder to get my podcasts and listen to them on the way to work and at the gym.  I went with the iPod shuffle because it was sub $100 and I didn’t really need to spend the money for the screen in the Nano.  Not having a screen meant just listening in order and having to check gtkPod to make sure I’d listened to all the podcasts before clearing the iPod.  Let me get into my workflow and why the shuffle became a real pain.

[caption id=“attachment_3851” align=“aligncenter” width=“403” caption=“Beginning Fedora 14 Install”] [/caption]

It’s been a more than a year since I last had to install Fedora from scratch.  I’m installing Fedora 14 into Virtualbox for an upcoming blog post where I wanted to do some stuff I wasn’t quite sure I was ready to do on my main box, so I thought I’d go ahead and blog about the installation.  The default artwork is very dynamic and conveys a sense that this is an exciting release.