lubos lunak 

I've moved my blog to http://llunak.blogspot.com. As I no longer focus on KDE (and even previously my blogs were often more about openSUSE than KDE), I've moved to a more generic blog site. Read More

There's been a "small" upgrade to my desktop machine at work, and as a part of that I got my hands on a 1920x1080 Dell monitor and couldn't help placing it as a secondary monitor, rotated. Read More

As already mentioned, I have this certain tool in works that can do various magic when it comes to creating packages, especially for people who have no idea how to do them themselves. Read More

It is interesting to notice what is sometimes seen as difficult. "It's too hard for me, I can't do that." "I'll never be able to do that, that's nothing for me. Read More

Some things are really really tiny details, yet they can be annoying in way. Something that's been occassionally bugging me is that fact that KDE uses the same wallpaper as KDM background, the splashscreen background and desktop background, yet depending on the screen resolution it may not be exactly the same background - during login the picture may stretch or shrink at certain points. Read More

You most probably have already run into this at least once. You use the computer, try to do something and you get an error message saying "sorry, application foo is not installed" Read More

Do you know this one? Phoronix tested md5sums of ISO images of distributions. The winner was openSUSE, scoring e29311f6f1bf1af907f9ef9f44b8328b, which gave it a noticeable lead before second Slackware (b026324c6904b2a9cb4b88d6d61c81d1), which is quite closely followed by Fedora (9ffbf43126e33be52cd2bf7e01d627f9) and Debian (9ae0ea9e3c9c6e1b9b6252c8395efdc1). Read More

Those that were at either CampKDE or FOSDEM might already know, so for those this is a status update, for the rest: I've been working on a tool that makes it quite easy to create packages in the openSUSE build service, which despite the name can create binary packages also for other distributions than openSUSE. Read More

I have fixed Exmap, my still favourite tool to measure system memory usage, to compile with latest kernels, and also to work on x86_64 (the latter was a bit of guess-work, but I think I got it right). Read More

There is something magical about hacking on things without having much clue about them. It almost feels like a treasure hunt, with mysterious traps all along the way and an elusive treasure maybe at the end. Read More

So, openSUSE 11.2 is out, and that means a lot of people start using it and, well, occassionally run into bugs and sometimes even report them. As much as 11.2 appears to be a fine release, this is bound to happen now too, and that means that the number of KDE bugreports for openSUSE in the Novell bugzilla will grow again and will need to be handled. Read More

Oh, yes, just in case you haven't noticed, it's out. However, since I maintain this image of seriousness, purposefulness and so on (which I only occassionally spoil by something like doing strange things to my hair, eating way too much icecream or doing silly things at SUSE outdoor events), I would like here to reference the KDE release notes for openSUSE 11. Read More

Now that the mention of the Firefox KDE integration I've done has reached also the dot, I guess it's time for a couple of things that don't quite fit into an article but I should probably say them somewhere anyway. Read More

Since it seems it will turn up quite often, I would like to answer the question 'Will openSUSE 11.2 include KDE 4.3.2?'. The short answer is no and yes :). Read More

The decision on the matter of the (not)preselected desktop in openSUSE has been made. You can read about it in the mail announcing the decision, I would like to just offer a KDE view, from Will and me. Read More

Do you want to write something about KDE's memory usage? Simple, just follow these steps: Launch KDE. Run some random tool for measuring memory usage, preferably top. Pick a column you think you know what it means. Read More

I noticed yesterday that at the kde-apps.org page for WMIface, a tool that allowed scripting the window manager used by KDE3 from command line, a comment appeared asking about a version for KDE4. Read More

This may look like beating a dead horse, but it seems like many people discussing the WebKit issue not only actually don't have much of a relevant technical knowledge, but even fail to simply do a reality check. Read More

If you look at for example kde-apps.org or kde-look.org, there are numbers of various KDE applications, utilities, styles, decorations and what not. Various contributors post there their work for others to try and use. Read More

Since Kendy's blog has somehow disappeared from Planet KDE, let me copy&paste one entry (http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~kendy/blog/archives/monthly/2009-06.html#2009-06-15T14_37_23.htm): Thanks to the heroic efforts of Éric Bischoff, Bernhard Rosenkränzer, and Roman Shtylman, the OpenOffice.org KDE Integration has been ported to KDE4. Read More

I found out today that two of my colleagues in the office have the same problem with Firefox - when clicking on a link in a mail client, their open Firefox is brought to the current desktop from wherever it was before. Read More

As some might have noticed among all the praise, some of the features may not come at low cost. One of the biggest memory hogs in KDE4 is (again) something that doesn't have much to do with KDE itself - the OpenGL library shipped with the nvidia driver. Read More

I recently noticed that although I have already talked about using KDE4's KWin in KDE3 or any other window manager in KDE instead of KWin, there is one thing missing in the mix: Using KWin without the KDE desktop. Read More

As you might have noticed, KDE 4.1.3 has been released, codename "Change" (in line with other C- codenames recently, as a kind of a joke on all those people who fail to see that still writing comments with overuse of K after 10 years of KDE's existence can only be a sign of brain damage). Read More

Dear LazyWeb ... erm, I mean DoItYourselfWeb. As you may or may not have noticed, KWin now again defaults to compositing enabled, if possible (the self-check will possibly still need polishing a bit, but that's why it's enabled by default now, right; and the little trick for detecting too bad performance needs some testing too). Read More

Zero as when it does not work. And that's sometimes zero fun. There is a plan to enable compositing by default in openSUSE11.1 when possible (just like e.g. Ubuntu already does), so I've been again pondering the idea of enabling KWin's compositing by default in SVN too, just like it was in pre-4. Read More

I got a bit bored this weekend (ok, ok, I had to do a lot of cleaning and so and needed an excuse) and had a look at two performance related things in KWin. Read More

I would post a screenshot of what this is going to be about, but the screenshot would look remarkably similar to other KDE3 screenshots I could post. Unless I switched the decoration to Oxygen/Ozone, but then yours truly is still quite happy with the KDE2 decoration (and then, also not quite happy with all those people who think that anything that's older than a year, especially if it's not shiny, must be oh-so-bad), so let's just skip that. Read More

As every year, one can see all kinds of articles related to today's date everywhere, ranging from quite amusing ones (it's a pity I knew what day it was when visiting dot. Read More

I guess many people see KWin only as 'the window manager from KDE', but there are actually things that can make KWin beat many other WMs - features (some of them first introduced in KWin, such as the focus stealing prevention), compositing, tested codebase, handling of various broken apps, configurability, window-specific settings. Read More

As of now [*], I hereby declare that KDE4 kind of supports viewports[^] (that is, the implementation of virtual desktops that Compiz and probably practically nobody else uses). Which means it possibly still sucks a bit here and there [x], but it's at least as good as in GNOME. Read More

Today, in one user forum, I noticed somebody saying that they use different virtual desktops for different things and therefore they'd want different panel for each desktop. Our bug #79531, more or less. Read More

What was it ... ah, yes ... KDE4.0 has been just released ... just in case you haven't noticed yet in all the other blog posts all around. No, in fact, the thing I really wanted, was: People, the proper capitalization is "KWin". Read More

As one of my colleagues notes, this statement holds true on its own. However, for those like me too blind to see some things, there are two things about Flash you should know: Read More

(I suppose using such number for this part makes the previous blog entry, part IV, written already quiiiiteee log ago, to have a wrong number, but who cares about that nowadays, it's just numbers, right? Read More

I did a presentation on compositing managers at the local LinuxExpo last week. Using kwin_composite for demonstrations. And KWin actually did its job quite fine (although it had taken quite some effort to get it there, with KWin being almost ready for it for more than a week). Read More

I finally find out recordMyDesktop and played a bit with it. Animations are a bit boring as PNG images after all. Too bad the recording seems to take up quite some resources and the videos look a bit jerky because of that (GeForce2 is not that slow :) ). Read More

Ok, time for another screenshot. It actually shows most of the recent improvements in kwin_composite: [image:2548 size=original] At the bottom-left there's KWrite with the file dialog open. The dialog is transparent because I have MakeTransparentEffect enabled - it makes moved/resized windows transparent and it also makes dialogs transparent (hey, I need to test the stuff somehow). Read More

Oh, cool. Novell's PR department needed only a week to produce FAQ that'd actually answer frequently asked questions. Press releases full of quotes, long words and other strange stuff are simple, but a plain and clear explanation of what's going on apparently takes time for some unknown reason. Read More

Current kwin_composite branch can finally do some simple effects. The obligatory screenshot: [image:2493 size=original] (I'm good at impressive screenshots, am I not?) This screenshot shows the animation for a newly appearing KWrite window. Read More

Near the end of Akademy, when it was finally short enough on talks, BoFs and whatnots to leave some time for serious hacking, after staring at the source of glcompmgr, I finally decided that this OpenGL compositing thingie cannot be that hard. Read More

This was actually supposed to be a follow-up to my tests of startup performance of various desktop environments, primarily KDE of course :). In fact I even did most of the benchmarks some time after the startup ones, but, alas, I'm much better at writing things that computers are supposed to read than at writing things that people will read :-/ (some volunteer to write good user documentation for KWin's window specific settings, BTW ;) ? Read More

One of bugzilla features is displaying various headlines, probably in order to cheer up the poor bugreporter or bughunter. KDE bugzilla actually doesn't seem to have this enabled, but I liked this in the old SUSE bugzilla, it had a nice collection of funny quips for the headlines. Read More

This so often repeated myth is getting so old and so boring. And untrue. Linux doesn't need defragmenting, because its filesystem handling is not so stupid like when using several decades old FAT. Read More

LWN has a very interesting article summing up Michael Meeks' work on improving shared libraries loading as a part of his work to improve OpenOffice.org startup times (his paper linked from the article is worth reading as well). Read More

As some might have noticed, KWin is supposed to get compositing support, allowing a wider range of various effects and replacing KDE3.x's separate kompmgr (developed by Thomas Lübking, based on the original xcompmgr, and according to e. Read More

In the times of DCOP disappearing from trunk ... KDE DCOP WMIface (and of course the matching entry at b.k.o that I apparently failed to handle somehow)? What would be the best comment . Read More

Every now and again you hear someone complaining about C++. You will probably also have heard that C sucks. The two statements are of course linked; the following code is valid C, but will never compile. Read More

Yes, I'm paraphrasing the title of one of the claims how Klipper is an awful hack working in the most stupid way possible whose only purpose is to make sure clipboard content doesn't get lost when you close an application. Read More

Or at least many people apparently think so. One just has to love all these people believing that KDE could definitely perform at least as good as Windows 98 (but preferably better of course) if we developers weren't just so damn lazy and finally fixed it during one of our coffee breaks. Read More

No, not really. But it's quite close (and it actually also depends on how you twist the benchmark ;) ). When my desktop machine could start KDE in less than 4 seconds I was curious what would the situation be with this slow laptop, the one which started KDE in 5-6 seconds at aKademy. Read More

If we now spend 1/3 of time in the dynamic linker, of course it helps not forgetting to run prelink. Here's the second bootchart for KDE again (and the Xfce one for comparison, although that one doesn't really change). Read More

[13:17:58] <Seli> boy, this machine sucks ... how am I supposed to benchmark anything if it fires up KDE in 3.7 seconds? Yeah, right, it's kinda stupid to work on performance when the machine is so fast that even sysprof sometimes doesn't produce enough samples and the machine has no support for CPU throttling or anything like that :(. Read More

Strange that there are still many people who care if a mailing list changes Reply-To header to point to the mailing list (usually called Reply-To munging) or not. Like if that matters . Read More

From the KOrganizer coding style guidelines: "A null pointer is 0, not 0l, 0L or NULL. Once again, this is C++, not C." Hmmm. If you get bored sometimes, try to compile with gcc something like "void foo( int ); . Read More

In case you have upgraded your fontconfig packages to those I provided in my blog entry about new fontconfig version, you may have run into KDE bug #116176 with the KDE3. Read More

Is it just me or do the blog categories on kdedevelopers.org never match what I want to say? Well, nevermind. The latest performance tip brought to you by SUSE KDE developers (don't ask, I very likely don't know anyway) is here: Read More

Hmm ... I should wish things more often. I complained about the lack of any usable memory reporting tool on Linux, and only a couple of days later I discovered exmap. Read More

Update: The fontconfig packages linked from this post seem to cause KDE bug #116176 with KDE3.5 packages. Well, I warned you. Biggest at least in terms of slowness and memory usage. Read More

Oh boy. Gwenview uses 83% more memory than Kuickshow (http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=9847 - the last comment as of now). BTW I especially like the "83%" part - it's just one case and the measurement is imprecise, but it can't be "about 80%" or "almost double". Read More

Yes, I could really make KDE start up in just 5 seconds on a 900MHz laptop ... 6 seconds during the presentation, the laptop apparently decided to spend the extra second somewhere. Read More