Thanksgiving Meme

Thursday is Thanksgiving in the United States, a day marked not only with lots of good food and hopefully good football, but also spending time with good friends and family (sometimes they’re even the same  people!) celebrating the good things in your life.

In celebration of this holiday I’m going to start a meme in hopes that it will be carried over to some of the other planets across the blogosphere.

– INSTRUCTIONS –

1. Make a list of five things you’re thankful for (stating your reasons is optional).
2. If you’re thankful for a project or organization with a website please include a link so we can possibly discover new things.
3. Post your list and these instructions on your blog for your reader’s enjoyment.

–MY LIST–

 

1.  My family, my wife first of all, and my new born son secondly

2.  My job, well the fact that I have a job that provides for my wife to stay home which is what she wanted, and some what more importantly my job is not looking to layoff people or is currently not having any financial difficulty in the current economy.

3.  Ability to travel:  This is something that goes along with my job, but i travel a lot for my job and get to experience differnt parts of the country, different company cultures and see more then the town I was born in and currently live in

4.  The Ubuntu Community:  I’ve made a lot of friends in the community and they are very open to people who want to contribute, even for a non-developer.  I can help troubleshoot bugs, can write documentation, and sometimes be an annoying pest and be accepted as a member of the developer team.

 

Go ahead and post yours

jonathan

Trying to configure PPTP VPN Access in Kubuntu 8.10

Ever since I received my Dell Mini I wanted to configure the VPN connection to my work and sign in.

So last night I spent a better part of an hour trying to figure out how to do this.  However it is impossible to do this in knetworkmanager which is a shame.  The proposed solution in the forums is to install netowk-manager-gnome and configure it there, and use it instead of knetworkmanager.  Seems to be a poor workaround.

I have found a bug that is triaged in Launchpad (https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/knetworkmanager/+bug/151867) and also the corresponding bug on bugs.kde.org (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=174439).  This bug esists in the latest packages available for Kubuntu Intrepid.  I would be eternally grateful if someone saw this post and fixed the bug.  I would owe them several beers (or whatever adult beverage they prefer).

Very frustrating to get working and one thing that is limiting me from using Kubuntu full time as my work system.

 

Jonathan

Book Meme

Following up with the different posts on planet.ubuntu.com in regards to the book meme here’s mine:

When he reaches those critical teenage years, the identity crises, will he know from his experience with you that you will listen without judging, that you really, deeply care about him as a person, that you can be trusted, no matter?

From The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

A Prayer for our President Elect

In today’s church bulletin was a prayer for the president elect.  Now our church is conservative and a majorityprobablly did not vote for President Elect Obama, however this prayer should reflect the views of all Chrisitians as we move into the transition of the Obama presidency:

We praise you Holy Father that You have reealed to us through Holy Scripture that there is no authority except that which stems from Your hand for Your purposes and that the authorities who have been voted into office for these next years habe been instituted by You.  It is with great confidence in You and not our government that we give oruselves to be subject to our governing authorities as You have commanded.  We give ourselves to pray for these men and women who have been voted into office and promise to be subject to them as long as they don lead in ways inconsisten with what You have revealed about Yourself and Your will for our living.

We specifically pray for Barak Obama as our president-elect.  In accordance with Your will, might You be pleased to draw him close to You that he might lead in ways that are consistent with Your character and Your desired intention for society.  Give strength and clarity of mind in order that he might frightly reason and will the good as he engages the monumental task of being president of the United States of America.  We pray similary for vice-president elect Joe Biden.  May your glory be revealed as these men accomplish thier parts in Your larger Story….

This is something that I will try to pray for the next four years as we embark on a new presidential term.  Hopefully this blog will reflect this as I pray for our President to lead in a way that honors and glorifies God.

Jonathan

KDE 4.1.3 available for Kubuntu 8.10

A little delayed on the announcement but for those interested, KDE 4.1.3 is available in the unsupported updates.

See the announcement here

Problems trying to run Fedora 10 – KDE

The software I consult on supports Red Hat and SUSE Linux so I’ve decided to try and learn Red Hat as it is used more in the enterprise.  I have downloaded Fedora 10 (the KDE remix) and installed it in a VM.  A couple of things I have noticed is for some reason it takes more RAM then my Kubuntu 8.10 VM does and in fact I’m having problems using it at all.

The screenshot below is the boot up of Fedora 10, no “splash screen” or anything.

Then once it starts up and I sign in I get the following screenshot with no response:

It just sits there and does nothing.

The one thing I’m trying hard to figure out is where do I go to get support for this.  The #fedora-kde channel on freenode seems to be more for developers, and I can’t find a help channel and also there is no fedora-kde users mailing list that I can find.

So far it looks like KDE is treated even worse then it is in the Ubuntu world at least as far as I can tell.

Someone able to help me out?  Haven’t had much joy googling to solve my problem

Congrats Senator Obama???

Getting ready for bed but it looks Senator Obama will win the presidential election.  Congratulations to the Senator on winning the election (if it comes true).

Hopefully the country will be a better country when 2012 comes around then it currently is.

Have a good night and Senator Obama, I will be praying that your presidency will be effective, the economy will improve and there will not be any attacks on our country.

Jonathan

Jaunty Release Schedule Announced

Another release is now out the door and the new release schedule has been announced for Ubuntu 9.04 will ship on April 23rd of 2009.  Hard to believe how quickly April will come up and we will then have another release out the door yet again.

A couple of key dates for myself:

• December 11th is the Ubuntu Developer Summit at Mountain View, if I haven’t met you before in person we should meet at UDS
• February 16th is feature freeze and time to finalize the documentation
• March 26th is Documentation String Freeze where the docs are finalized and ready for translation and l10n.

Getting excited about another release.  Hope this time work doesn’t get in the way of spending time working on Kubuntu and Kubuntu docs like what happened last release schedule.

Jonathan