Brian Parsons

I have been an avid user of the KDE Desktop for over 12 years. Some things about the new Plasma desktop are not immediately obvious.

Overall the new Plasma desktop is fantastic. In some cases, the usual tools are missing. KSnapshot, the screen shot utility, is one of those tools. There are a few different projects that I checked out as a replacement, but I landed on using Spectacle - https://github.com/KDE/spectacle. While I think this is getting rolled into Plasma eventually, for now you may have to install it separately. Most distros have a community package available.

Read More...

Update August 21, 2016

I am no longer maintaining Arch Linux images for Amazon EC2, and I no longer recommend using Arch Linux on servers. The attitude in some of the core pieces of the system has become far less disciplined and… what I will in a politically correct way say is more centered around agenda than users or system use.

Specifically the issue that broke this for me is the way versions of pacman since the file reorganization effort remove symlinks in the root path install path of a package. This bug has been brought up several times in pacman’s history. The author and current Arch czar has stated that symlinks are improper and should be replaced with bind mounts. This approach breaks the best practice of being able to separate the OS from the data, and using bind mounts causes disk metrics, analysis and monitoring to misreport. In previous instances, this bug was fixed, however so far this time it is not being addressed.

Read More...

I have an updated Arch Linux image for Amazon EC2 that is systemd. I created a boot script that sets the hostname and root keys. It will even update DNS in Route53 and send you an email letting you know the instance IP.

Released under the MIT license on github.

I am working on cleaning up the base image that I use on Amazon EC2 and publishing the AMI as well.

Read More...

I’ve been running Arch Linux on my workstations and on servers for a long time. Every once in a while I see a debate in an Arch Linux forum about it’s suitability for use on production servers. Being a rolling release distribution, it is different than other distributions that concentrate on enterprise and long-term support like RedHat Enterprise and CentOS. Without getting too much into the pros and cons - one of the key reasons that I use Arch on servers is earlier access to newer technologies like the 3.0 Linux kernel series (with built-in xen support). Overall, though, it is due to my familiarity with and love for it. The OS that I load on my servers is there to support my applications. I find Arch is simple and light yet thorough and stable in getting the job done. If you are running Arch on servers or are interested in doing so, here are some practices that I recommend.

Read More...

In recent KDE updates, the PIM suite (kmail, kontact) is …uh… not really working for me. I don’t know if it is truly broken or just requires a different approach and understanding.

This has me temporarily using Thunderbird for mail until I can get back to using my beloved kmail. Unfortunately, Akonadi, the engine behind the PIM suite, still insists on going out and fetching mail and doing other things.

Read More...