I recently ditched Gentoo on my notebook for Xubuntu (Ubuntu with the XFCE windows manager), after a portage block removed my coreutils, rendering it pretty much useless. I’m still a big fan of Gentoo, but will likely be using it for servers and not desktops. I’ve recently been turned on to KDevelop for working on my Ruby on Rails projects. Although not as polished as Textmate for the Mac, I do find it a nice alternative. It has a nice class view, embedded console and IRB shell, a pretty nice “find in files”, and many other features. I’ve been a longtime Kate user, which happens to be the editor in KDevelop.

(KDevelop with the Class View on the left and console on the bottom)

But since switching to Xubuntu, starting up KDevelop was sluggish starting up. I also had “the process for the file protocol died unexpectedly” error (appearing twice). Since KDevelop is a KDE application, I knew it probably needed to KDE libraries for different file protocols, kioslaves. So although not a dependency (which it probably should be), installing the kio-locate package solved my problems.

$ sudo apt-get install kio-locate

A recent Perl-based project called for some parallel processing. I naturally turned first to fork, which I have used successfully in the past. But this time, I needed to share information across the processes - they can’t just run in their isolated worlds. To do this, I had some options, including:

• IPC::Shareable
• subs::parallel
• perl threads
• simple perl fork and pipes

As the title of this article hints, I went with the last one.

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If you have a moment, sign the petition at NoOOMLX.org. The group highlights some valid arguments, including the fact that the Microsoft-driven format does not even validate as XML. We really ought to continue to use the existing Open Document Format as seen in many existing applications like OpenOffice, Abiword KWord and GoogleDocs.