Categories
College Life LAN Linux/BSD Software

Getting Kopete to work* on KDE 3.x

To work* – My work environment’s network is a LAN shared by about 2000 users. We don’t have the neat NAT’ed type connections or transparent proxy setups other universities in the rest of the world enjoy. Our access to the remaining world is through a HTTP caching proxy which supports connect-over-http.

Step 1:
$ sudo aptitude install tor dante-client

Step 2:
$ sudo vim /etc/tor/torrc

Have the following text inside it:

SocksPort 9050 # what port to open for local application connections
SocksListenAddress 127.0.0.1 # accept connections only from localhost


HttpProxy 172.31.1.233:3128
HttpProxyAuthenticator username:password


HttpsProxy 172.31.1.233:3128
HttpsProxyAuthenticator username:password

Step 3:
$ sudo vim /etc/dante.conf

Add the following:

route {
from: 0.0.0.0/0 to: 0.0.0.0/0 via: 127.0.0.1 port = 9050
protocol: tcp udp # server supports tcp and udp.
proxyprotocol: socks_v4 socks_v5 # server supports socks v4 and v5.
method: none #username # we are willing to authenticate via
# method "none", not "username".
}

You might want to allow from: 127.0.0.1/8 alone.

Step 4:
$ sudo invoke-rc.d tor restart

Step 5: Go to KDE’s Control Centre and enable SOCKS (select Dante) under Network Settings > Proxy

Step 6: Configure Kopete – use the ip of talk.google.com

Step 7: Get cursed for those extra-spaces Kopete sends by Pidgin users 😛

Categories
Linux/BSD Software

KDE 4.0 is out!

KDE 4.0

Categories
College Life Linux/BSD Software

Go KDE 4! Go!

I’ve finally fallen in love with KDE. Finally.

The first live CDs I ever tried were the Knoppix ones and I never really used it much to love KDE. And then came the other distro days (then Mandrake, SuSE, and so on) where I didn’t stay with Linux long enough. Then came the Gentoo days where I never really enjoyed my KDE experience owing to slow startup times of a few multimedia apps. I’ve been using GNOME for a long time until the day KDE 4 RC 2 came out.

KDE apps are on a totally different level compared to GNOME apps as far as my experience goes (and my experience goes with apps such as K3b vs. Brasero, digiKam vs. <nothing-yet>, and so on). You’ll notice powerful, feature-rich apps in KDE that aren’t written by Novell’s Mono addicts if you’re not comfortable with Mono apps.

Listening to music started getting a lot more enjoyable with amaroK and even to this day Amarok is the only one. A screenshot of Amarok-2 preview. Look nowhere else for a music player.

Amarok 2 Pre Alpha