KDE 3.5 and Wiring

Another "vintage" computer for running Linux has been added to the arsenal. Originally, I thought my power supplies were bad, but it helps if you wire things right. I guess you just got to rtfm.
Another feature neglected from my KDE 3.5 review was "autorun." Whenever new media (i.e. CD, DVD, etc.) is inserted, it prompts you, asking what you would like to do (i.e. play it or open a window showing it's contents).

Wiping out all data on a hard disk

Recently, I had someone ask me to wipe the hard disk on her old PII Compaq laptop. I wanted to do this in a secure fashion. The UNIX program dd will allow me to write zero's or random data to every byte on the disk.

Since the computer had only 32MB of RAM, many modern Linux LiveCD's would be extremely sluggish. I decided to try a floppy distro called bootE Linux. Download the binary image file. In order to make a floppy disk out of this file, I ran the command:
dd if=bootE-0.20-r2.img of=/dev/fd
will write the image to the floppy. This assumes that the device of the floopy disk is /dev/fd0 and the image I downloaded is bootE-0.20-r2.img.

Next, boot the machine you would like to wipe with the floppy you created. It will boot you into a shell, where you can execute:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
will write zero's to /dev/hda (assuming this is the hard disk you would like to wipe). This will take a bit (patience is a virtue).
For the ultra paranoid, execute this several more times, using /dev/urandom.

After this completes, the drive is completely wiped, and then can be trashed, or partitioned, formatted and your OS of choice installed.

KDE 3.5 Review

I've been playing with KDE 3.5.0 RC1 on my Gentoo box. A few small things I've noticed:

• About the same speed/responsiveness as KDE 3.4
• Random freezes when try to logout (but the "Restart" and "Shut Down" buttons work
• Different animation in the task bar
• Can't seem to get GAIM to play nice with Arts

The experience is about the same as 3.4, but 3.5 is slightly more polished. KDE 4.0 seems to have some new features - a feature list is here