Where are My Files?

Couple tidbits over the last four weeks: I "upgraded" to Edgy Efy at home and the Nibble installed Joomla and have tried using that as our portal.

In the case of the former, discussing all the problems I'm having would constitute an all-out rant. It is really a shame but I've just had problems with the last two releases of Kubuntu. Maybe it's just Kubuntu and not Ubuntu in general, but it's really feeling like "the distro of the week". You know, there's things you like about the distro, it gets lots of press, it seems lively, but there's just too many annoying problems that whatever comes out next week may just be better.

Anyhow, rather then just dig in and rant, let me just say that one problem I've fixed is to do with Konqueror not displaying files. Specifically, if I browsed to the root of the file system, I could only see home, media, data (for music and video), and windows. Not etc, var, or other folders that are useful.

It turns out that if there is a file called ".hidden" in a folder with one file (or folder) name per line, then Konqueror will not display those folders. Some dimwit thought that this would "simplify things" for "the average user". I'm sorry, but obfuscating the file system is not the answer. As it is, "the average user" pretty well sticks to "Documents" and their Desktop. No hiding of folders necessary. That seems like a Finder-esque thing to do. And though I love and respect Apple's OS X for its many fine features, Finder is a dreadful bug-ridden horror not deserving of emulation.

So in summary, if you're in Kubuntu (or maybe KDE on any system) and can't see a bunch of folders you know exist, just rm .hidden and you'll be good to go.

And then on to other news. The Nibble has been trying to setup Joomla for our portal site. We need some blogging ability, news feed aggregation, and some static pages for HOWTOs. We installed Joomla 1.5 beta which has several bugs we ran into right away (the "poll" feature doesn't strip backslashes properly, for example) and it's a little to abstract/complex of a system for our needs. We could really figure out how to just do what we wanted (blog, aggregate, static pages) and then theme it and be done. Time to move on. It seems like WordPress has all the features we need (and not much more) so we'll give that a try next.

Okay, back to work for me.