MagicFolder in KDE4: Plasmoid Now, but what is the future?

True story: last night I was thinking about how great a Magical ~/Downloads/  folder would be, so that downloaded PDFs, videos, documents, whatever would automatically get moved into my ~/Documents/ and my ~/Music/ and my other folders.  I thought, hmm maybe I'll make a wish on http://bugs.kde.org/ for something like that.  Granted, not everyone wants it as their Downloads/ folder (and not everyone even has that; Iceweasel and Firefox set it up in 3.5 and beyond and I don't know if Konqueror, ReKonq, or Aurora even use it).  But it was an interesting idea.

Today, I went to look for a Twitter-following plasmoid, and came across Magic Folder: write some rules, drop some files, and they get automatically sorted, just as I was hoping for!  Is this Magic or what?

Now, it isn't a real folder in that there is no path to get there in a file browser, and therefor it cannot be set in Iceweasel as the location for my downloads.  But, with time perhaps it can be a real folder, or maybe it can monitor a real folder.

The Downloads/ Magic Folder is even the first suggestion on the Plasmoid page.

Free Software and the community, always one step ahead and fillingin  the blanks.  Thank you to bizzl who wrote the plasmoid.

Dell sells great XBMC system, requires you to buy Windows

I read a review today about Dell's ZenoHD system, and it got me interested.  I would love a small, quiet, networked, powerful computer to hook up to my tele.  Watching Funny or Die on the television would be great!

So I browsed over to Dell.com (not linking that) to check out this hardware and see what it may cost me.  The moment I saw that I was forced to buy Windows7, I dropped the whole idea.

Dell, where is the "No OS" option?  Where is the Ubuntu option?  Or the FreeDOS option?  I want to GIVE YOU MONEY for a FLOSS operating system, not something that MS can use to show how many copies it has sold (since the install would be wiped anyways).  Even the Operating System icon at the bottom is Windows, giving us an indication as to how committed Dell is to selling some FLOSS operating systems.

I know that I'm not the only one disappointed by Dell's lack of FLOSS systems, and I do appreciate that they're, ahem, trying to sell some FLOSS-powered machines.  I just wish it would be a bit more possible to actually buy them.

HowTo: KDE4: KVpnc connections to PPTP Server (KVpnc 0.9.3 to MikroTik)

At work we use MikroTik as our PPTP VPN server, to allow employees into our internal network. Recently we've changed IP Addresses and we cannot get to a few remaining clients who have our older IP hard-coded into their firewalls, so I had to use a VPN to get to our old address for one particular client.

KDE's KVpnc application, while a great app that can connect to a whole lot of VPN endpoints, does have a whole lot of configuration options. This is both a benefit and a drawback, because sometimes a user (or an administrator) has no idea what needs to be set!

PPTP VPN is what I need to use, also known as Point-to-Point-Protocol, and also known as Microsoft VPN. But because the MikroTik is a GNU/Linux-based device, its settings aren't exactly the same as they would be for a MSWindows-based device (do those exist?).

After a bit of errors on my side, and getting the errors from the MikroTik side, I found settings for KVpnc that work for my connection. Please read along! This is for KVpnc 0.9.3 running on KDE 4.3.4, on Debian GNU/Linux Sid, but similar settings should work elsewhere.

First, you'll have to run KVpnc as the root user or with your 'sudo' user, to give the program enough control to edit the networking configuration:

To do this, you can launch from a command line (sudo kvpnc) or from the KDE KRunner dialog box (with [Alt][F2] if you're unfamiliar); from here you can run 'kdesudo kvpnc' if you have KDESudo installed (or kdesu):

or you can click on the Wrench icon to change the settings for that app:

Once KVpnc starts with root privileges, go through the New Connection Wizard to set things up, and then Edit that new profile to use the Authentication type of CHAP, not one of the two MSCHAP options:

 Click the above image to enlarge it

NOTE: In future attempts (after an upgrade to the MicroTik software), I've had to use MSCHAP to authenticate.

Good luck and enjoy your PPTP Connection!