pipitas 

I've received 2 emails asking for more blogging and info about current klik2, especially since FOSDEM 2008. Unfortunately, I don't have much time these weeks for 'FOSS-work', due to pressing 'work-work' duties. Read More

The FOSDEM 2008 organizers now have published their 'speakers interview' with probono and myself. If you are interested in some background about the current klik2 development, it may be serving as a good general introduction into the concepts. Read More

Due to too little testing, the Milestone 3 release announcement is postponed until Wednesday. It may actually happen even later, should I have no time to really do it on Wednesday evening, due to my work-work obligations. Read More

This weekend it's time to announce it. Finally: klik2 development has reached our internal "Milestone 2". Remember klik? That project that aims to make Linux end-user software installation and usage more easy than on any other platform? Read More

Now that OpenOffice.org does make some splashes in the IT press for the sole achievement of having created a "portable" version that can run from an USB stick (on Windows only, that is) -- isn't it time for klik to get ready for gaining its own share of public fame sometime soon? Read More

This afternoon it looks like I'll get to go tomorrow to the Systems fair in Munich. I've got various exhibitor booths to visit and see what new things they have on offer, and also one or two meetings arranged already. Read More

What a coincidence today happened. In the morning I used KDEPrint's 'poster' frontend to create a "poor man's poster" in A1 size from 4 A3 printouts. In the afternoon, a lady mailed me, asking why her KDE print dialog on Solaris didn't show the poster dialog, while her husband's openSUSE KDE did show it. Read More

Some of you may remember my blog post "How to simulate a slow network (after all, QT_FLUSH_PAINT=1 doesn't work with Qt3)" from nearly two years ago. After all, I'm still getting a private mail or two every half year inquiring about it. Read More

Today I experienced two moments of bewilderment, the second one mixed with dismay. At first, when I googled for something unrelated, on one of the returns I saw a forum post where someone said " Read More

I've never [image:2980 align="left" size="preview" hspace=4 vspace=2 border=0 class="showonplanet"] seen Xinerama combined with Compiz/Beryl/XGL (or AIGLX) in action. This morning, when checking out a printing-related blog, I stumbled upon a little YouTube video showing exactly that. Read More

Here is a recent announcement from the OpenPrinting workgroup, hosted by the Linux Foundation. It didn't receive any widespread publication, AFAICS. But it deserves to:   OpenPrinting/LinuxFoundation: "We are Hiring Students/Interns for Implementing the PDF Printing Workflow" Read More

+++ klik development taken up some speed, progressing rather nicely now +++ stop +++ currently working on version 2 of klik client/runtime environment +++ stop +++ moved all development activities to Google-Code +++ stop +++ klik2 will no longer use shell/bash for the client runtime code, but python +++ stop +++ loopmount from klik1 (with all its limits and (f)ugliness) is gone -- fusemount is the new king +++ stop +++ klik1 did binary-patch away absolute paths embedded in its images -- klik2 will use completely unmodified . Read More

So... the world is made to know already what Ubuntu 8.04 will be named: it's 'Hardy Heron'. This choice has a good and a bad side to it. First the good one: it made me dicionary-lookup the 'heron' word (and stealthily confirm the 'hardy' one, since I wasn't completely sure about its meaning any more). Read More

My Application of the Day: Kochizz for Apache2 Configuration My application discovery of the day (well of the yesterday, to be more precise), is Kochizz. Kochizz is a Qt4-based GUI tool to get to grips with the Apache2 configuration. Read More

Y'all are aware of the current frenzied push by Microsoft to whip their OOXML file format (used for MS Office 2007, described on some 8.000 printed A4 pages) through the ISO 'fast track' standardization process to make it a 'standard'. Read More

It seems to be an undisputed fact, that Afghanistan in 2007 no longer exports much raw opium at all. "Good", you'll probably say. "That is because the Western troops now have chased the Taliban back into the mountains. Read More

klik developers are looking for one or more volunteer(s) to create (and possibly maintain) VMWare images that can be used with VMWare player (and possibly other 'virtualized OS' players) for klik bundle development and testing. Read More

My last blog outlining some of the upcoming klik2 goodness has attracted some rather surprising readers -- and even seems to have inspired some to do their own brainwork and come up with ideas how to implement the base paradigm of " Read More

I'll show you the current mount table of my openSUSE notebook: 02:25 lnx5000:~ > mount /dev/hda1 on / type ext3 (rw,acl,user_xattr) fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw) proc on /proc type proc (rw) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw) debugfs on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw) udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,mode=0620,gid=5) /dev/hda6 on /home type ext3 (rw,acl,user_xattr) securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw) /dev/hdc on /media/InfoStream7. Read More

...or: Why has no consumer distro been providing updated packages for Ghostscript for more than a year? It's been more than a year that artofcode LLC and its lead developer, Raph Levien have revealed that bleeding egde Ghostscript will no longer be AFPL licensed, but will switch its Subversion-held development tree to the GPLv2 license. Read More

My freshly installed kde4-okular package (grabbed from the openSUSE build service repository, using the 'smart' package management tool) seems to be without PDF support. It doesn't even display PDFs for selection in the FileOpen dialog. Read More

According to this commentary in the online version of The Independent, there are now more hired mercenaries in Iraq than there are regular US and UK troops. Of course, information about this practice is not officially released by any government: instead, the mercenaries are very often called " Read More

I'm sure I will be using KDE 3.5.6 for most of my personal Linux time over the next few months. And I'm evenly sure I want to follow the KDE4 developments (esp. Read More

My Cool Discovery of Today: A few days ago a few little known Chinese friends of KDE must have translated the "Getting Started/Build/KDE4"-page on the TechBase wiki into Chinese (" Read More

So I now have a semi-working notebook for private Linux/KDE purposes again. May be able to build my own version (and follow the development of KDE(4)) again.... Paid 150.- EUR. Got it with a 120 GByte harddisk. Read More

The notebook mentioned in my last blog: yesterday it got an openSUSE-10.2 installation completed. What tempted me most in favor of openSUSE, was that I had read about their "build service" Read More

Not an April Fool's day article. Appeared yesterday. In the British Guardian:   "No hoods. No electric shocks. No beatings. These Iranians clearly are a very uncivilised bunch" "I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. Read More

Two days ago the first incarnation of sidux was released, code-named "Chaos". sidux is a desktop-oriented distribution. It comes as a Live CD based on the "unstable" branch of Debian, but is easily able to install onto harddisk from the running Live CD using a completely new graphical installer frontend. Read More

What a stupid idea! How shortsighted, to not consult with their readers beforehand! www.freesoftwaremagazine.com have announced that they will stop offering their publication as a PDF for download. Instead, they will go " Read More

Yes, pinotree, PDFedit is one of the two applications I discovered a few weeks ago when I searched Google for PDF manipulation tools... :-) (I'm really curious if you'd know about the other one already -- but that's a few days away to blog about. Read More

Readers of my blog will know it already: Linux printing is geared to move towards PDF to make it its core spooling and job processing format. (This won't happen over night, and this won't make PostScript printing any harder, so don't worry). Read More

Over at the CUPS mailing lists/forums, an ongoing discussion thrashes out some changes that will affect the future of Linux desktop printing. One point is about the "Foomatic" drivers. This driver family is not " Read More

Thomas Leonhard, author of Zero-Install, has written an excellent article about "Decentralised Installation Systems". I don't agree with every little detail of it, but it is definitely worth a read and worth some serious thoughts. Read More

I decided to leak a far well-guarded secret. It is about quick'n'dirty-testing of font embedding in print files. Pay attention: I use kpdf as the KDEPrint "preview" application. By default, your system most likely uses kghostview. Read More

It looks like one of the recurrent problems of people using KDEPrint's more advanced features is with "number-up" printing, combined with "print duplex when I have a simplex printer" (yes, you can turn the stack of paper round and feed it a second time through the printer; hope and pray it doesn't munch it). Read More

#140006: Yesterday I received an e-Mail from a user who asked to keep his name and affiliation confidential. He is involved in preparations for a rather large Windows --> Linux/KDE migration, involving several thousand workstations, most of them in a managed KIOSK environment. Read More

The last few days I ploughed through the KDEPrint bugs. This should serve the same purpose as outlined in my last blog entry: to make it more easy for the real coders to see the valid and important bugs (we're short of people who've enough time to work on KDEPrint code for KDE4). Read More

Last weekend I took part in the "Konqueror Bugsquad Days". We had a few handful of KDE contributors taking part, AFAIK all of them non-C++/Qt coders. Knowing nearly nothing about HTML rendering, or JavaScript and what-not, I picked to sift through all bug reports that contained the string " Read More

I've created a (quick'n'dirty) "klik recipe" for mailody 0.3 (using the SUSE 9.3 RPM made by Guru, to ensure maximum portability). Mailody embedded into one single file, mailody.cmg, with 430 kByte size, running on most current Linux systems; you can start the klik-ed mailody even from CD, or run it from a USB stick. Read More

probono [image:2591 align="left" hspace=3 vspace=6 border=3 width=150] has added a few cool hacks to the klik server. One is that all package recipes which are auto-created from the Debian repositories and klik's " Read More

This evening I've created a new klik recipe, for Opera 9.1. It makes the klik client fetch from Opera's download site their current weekly snapshot of the upcoming 9.1 release and transform it into a typical " Read More

Diary entry for Dec 12, 2006. OpenOffice.org version 2.1 has been released. 1st Question: Is there available, or will there be a suitable OOo 2.1 RPM package for my good ol' SuSE 9. Read More

In recent months I acquired a habit of poking around from time to time on the Guardian/Observer website. Here is a collection of info atoms I picked up today: Some updates to Princess Diana's last 24 hours alive: the night she died, the American secret service was eavesdropping her telephone conversations. Read More

Did you know that the FBI (and therefore, the CIA, and probably most police and secret service organisations around the world), have technology to remotely turn on your cell phone microphone to listen to you and all conversations around you? Read More

probono last week gave a presentation to the participants of the LSB packaging meeting, which took place in Berlin (hosted by SAP). His slides are available on the klik website. Read More

An interesting read: Joel Spolsky argues that too many choices lead to user unhappiness and looks at the Windows Vista "OFF" feature as an example. In a response on his own blog, former Microsoft programmer (now Google employee) Moishe Lettvin who worked on exactly that part of Vista for a year describes how the development process inside Microsoft worked for his group. Read More

Quote (incomplete): "For Novell to make this deal shows a profound disregard for the relationship that they have with the Free Software community. We are, in essence, their suppliers, and Novell should know that they have no right to make self serving deals on behalf of others which run contrary to the goals and ideals of the Free Software community. Read More

Look at it this way for a moment: If I, as an end-user, bought a car from Ford, that does indeed contain technology infringing some patent owned by DaimlerChrysler -- would there by any likelyhood that Ford would sue me, the end-user? Read More

Jason Matusow, Microsoft's Senior Director for IP and Interoperability, emailed me to point to his blog entry. There he responded to my own one that hints to the fact that Novell calls a "joint letter to the Open Source Community from Novell and Microsoft" a document that Microsoft calls "An Open Letter to the Community from Novell". Read More

Novell has published some more details about their recent business agreement(s) with Microsoft. This time it is about some financial details involved. (Looks like they are required by law to reveal these details to the SEC. Read More

Today's reading recommendation #1. Extracts: HOW THEY STOLE THE 2006 MID-TERM ELECTION by Greg Palast, for The Guardian (UK), Monday November 6, 2006 Here's how the 2006 mid-term election was stolen. Read More

Today's reading recommendation #2. Extracts: Steal Back Your Vote Published by Greg Palast November 6th, 2006 in his blog A lot of advice we're getting from our progressive friends is to take photos of your ballot and silly stuff like that. Read More

Current predictions for new U.S. Senate and Congress after tomorrow's (Tuesday) elections, based on some polls: Only 33 out of 100 Senate seats are up for election, but all 435 Congress ("House") seats are. Read More

Don't you love it if a Brit with a good command over the subtleties of the English language takes on his U.S. friends? Here is a hilarious piece (of satire? Read More

Yes, on first look it may appear so. No, not because Microsoft now pays lots of $$$ to Novell for 70,000 SLES support vouchers each year (making it the single biggest distributor of SUSE products). Read More

UPDATE: Meanwhile, the difference in the headings of the "Joint Letter to the Open Source Community" (described below) is gone. (Screenshots of original versions linked in the comment by RangerRick, below). Read More

Meanwhile I read a bit more about the Microsoft <--> Novell cooperation deal. Hell, what an utterly shameful sell-out! In essence, Novell (and the guys leading it, Ron Hovespian & Co. Read More

My head is dizzy from seeing all the current news about "Microsoft ♥♥♥♥s Novell". Had no time to carefully read all the stuff. What struck my eyes was this sentence: Quote: " Read More

Some interesting details from the Google/YouTube deal. I had already suspected some maneuverings along these lines, but preferred to not say anything. Now that others have gone public, lemme chime in. Read More

The 17th of this month was a historic day. The US President has now acquired un-controlled, despotic powers. Everybody can be declared "an unlawful enemy combatant". Everybody! US inhabitant or not. Read More

You, the reader of this blog being an internet user: I have a question for you. Have you ever heard about the topic of "Net Neutrality"? If not, you may want to google for it. Read More

Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan administration treasure secretary, has written an article Why Bush Will Nuke Iran. It's scary. Read it. (Will it be possible to offset these plans? Who will block the Neocons' rampage? Read More

Are the USA planning to attack Iran? According to news stories, the deployment of a major "strike group" of ships is prepared to head for Iran's western coast. The ships include the nuclear aircraft carrier Eisenhower as well as a cruiser, destroyer, frigate, submarine escort and supply ship. Read More

My first thoughts were: "This is hilarious! Too hilarious to be true..." Here is what I read: "With the slimming feature, anyone can appear more slender -- instantly." Yes, that's right: it says " Read More

Have you ever heard about Project Censored? That project is "a media research group out of Sonoma State University" in California. And it's again that time of the year when it publishes its annual " Read More

If more stuff like this emerges on the surface of news stories over the next few months, I'll be one of the next convert candidates to subscribe to some of the more " Read More

Today Cristian blogged about a (good) article on Linux.com dealing with label printing on Linux. But despite all the good info contained in that piece, there is an extremely disappointing aspect to it: that article misses to even mention in passing the leading application for printing labels on Linux. Read More

Thanks, Lennart! Very well written pleading. Avahi is not the only victim. Ubuntu's "no ports open!"-policy has (along with some other, similar decisions) also badly hurt CUPS, and considerably reduced out-of-the-box usability and comfort for users. Read More

Actually, I've now saved (as a web archive file) that Daily Mail news story mentioned in my previos blog entries. Just in case it "disappears" again. Or gets modified. From the beginning, it was already so well hidden even on the publishing website, that I was unable to find it by following a link from Daily Mail's portal page. Read More

A British lorry transporting radioactive material has been confiscated in Bulgaria at the border to Rumania on Saturday. The radiating load contained lots of Caesium 137 and Americium-Beryllium which can be used to build a " Read More

Following the news story about the unsuccessfull British shipment (stopped in Bulgaria) of radioactive material to the Iranian military (useful also to build a "dirty bomb"), of course a lot of questions come to mind, such as: Read More

[3] Enabling network printer auto-discovery (with new "snmp" backend of CUPS 1.2) My last two blog entries explained.... ...how Ubuntu users can restore the CUPS web interface to full functionality, and . Read More

[2] Restoring the client side CUPS printer browsing ability My last blog entry outlined how Ubuntu users can restore the CUPS web interface to full functionality. The next one will explain how they can setup network printer auto-discovery goodness into their CUPS installation, a feature that was artificially crippled by their distro's packagers. Read More

[1] Restoring the CUPS web interface admin functions (K)Ubuntu Dapper maintainers have crippled the CUPS 1.2 web interface. If you open http://localhost:631/ (link only works if you have CUPS up and running) you'll even get notified about it: Read More

In recent months I wrote various blog entries (no, they were rather "rants", and even tagged as such; [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]) dealing with Ubuntu's crippled CUPS 1.2 configuration. (I'm not complaining about the feedback -- but I was rather surprised how many emails on that topic I received; also how high a number of abusing messages by anonymous writers sought to annoy me. Read More

Boy, did I nearly miss the news! Was it because of the soccer world championship? Anyway, the news rocks. I wonder why it was not picked up by any of the major news sites. Read More

Update: Debian packager Adeodato Simo wrote a comment to my previous blog entry, establishing as a fact that the instructions in the README.Debian.gz file in fact where not added by " Read More

I installed Kubuntu Dapper now from the Live CD to the harddisk. The hardware is very "low end": Intel P IV 1.80 GHz, 256 MByte RAM, 20 GByte HD. But it should be good enough to check the printing capabilities of Dapper, and see how the packagers modified the CUPS setup away from how CUPS. Read More

Since I also got pinged on IRC yesterday by one of the Ubuntu print software packagers; I'll continue tomorrow with investigating a newer package version. He told me he had built new CUPS 1. Read More

Kubuntu Dapper CD download finished now. Took long enough to complete.... I'm booting one of the spare machines here in the office, a very cheap desktop workstation (Intel P IV 1. Read More

Yesterday (K)Ubuntu Dapper was released. The final version. I'm sure it is a great release, and most users will find it highly satisfactory for all their needs. However, this blog is not all huggin' 'n luvin' for Dapper. Read More

Linux.com today published my article "Moving to PDF as a future print job spooling format". It's already generating some feedback.... Currently I'm writing down some more notes which may eventually crystalize into a series of articles. Read More

It looks like the general idea of klik has come to the MS Windows world now too. I mean the idea of klik (or of Apple's AppDirs, if you want) how to handle software programs: namely, as by and large self-contained units that bring along all their direct dependencies within one single entity; units that are easy to relocate to a USB stick or to a CD-RW medium without a need for any installation process; units that maintain the ability to instantly run from any different place they might be saved to. Read More

Exhausted, but happy about the work we've done I'm now back in Stuttgart. I have attended the 3 intensive days of discussions and work that were the Desktop Linux Printing Summit, jointly organized by OSDL (John Cherry) and Linuxprinting. Read More

I'm suffering from another CUPS+KDE frustration right now. Today I learned that there are two bug reports in our bugzilla which I had missed to see before. They were submitted by Mike Sweet from CUPS. Read More

A few weeks ago, Jonathan had asked me on IRC in passing why kprinter and KDEPrint 3.5.1 didn't work with CUPS-1.2. My reply had been like "CUPS-1.2 hasn't even released an alpha or beta tarball -- w. Read More

I should have been doing some serious work during the last 30 minutes, but.... ...I came across this weekend's Opera9 build (no. 181) and decided to make a new klik (*) recipe for it. Read More

I think it is time to reveal a nifty little tool that I like to simulate a slow network connection, even without a network. It is called "tc" (think "traffic control" Read More

The vector graphics package Xara Xtreme so far was only available for Windows. Back in October, the Xara company announced the porting of its flagship product to Linux and Mac OS X. Read More

This is a hilariously good movie -- apparently from inside Microsoft. It outlines how MS would have marketed the iPod "the MS way". It is meant to be self-joking about the company's own marketeers; and indeed it is. Read More

amarok is a really great piece of KDE software. Its ever increasing popularity also led it to be one of the favorite and most frequently klik-ed packages of users. The nightly builds from SVN were gaining really enthusiastic user comments. Read More

Some of our recent additions to the klik recipe database are real little gems. No, I'm not talking about the various KOffice-1.5.0 Beta 1 bundles (which will soon be updated to give you an easy way to testdrive and bug triage Beta 2). Read More

hmmm... not sure if I should really leak it. Because it is totally untested. I've currently only a remote connection from a Windows/PuTTy box to a SUSE Linux server with no FreeNX or NX server installed. Read More

I've been busy with the KOffice-1.5.0 Beta klik packages. Most of the initial b0rkenness is gone now: missing dependencies, differently named libraries on different distros, etc. Thanks to isaac (who built Debian Sarge compatible . Read More

Marcel Gagne published a very nice, and well written article about klik. This piles onto the stack of recent klik publicity (canllaith has an extended piece in the current TUX magazine, which even made it into the major headline on the frontpage). Read More

[image:1671 align="right" hspace=4 vspace=4 border=0 width="407" class="showonplanet"] The weekend has seen some more work on klik. probono has re-enabled the nice "give-us-some-feedback-after-first-run" feature. It means that a kdialog (or an Xdialog or zenity equivalent) will pop up after you run a klik recipe for the first time, asking you for some feedback. Read More

We got notified from the Linux Format (a printed magazine sold in UK newspaper stands) that they give their Hottest Pick award to klik. -- Woooohoo! The January 06 edition carries a 1-page article about klik, which is a very nice read. Read More

One of my long standing feature requests now seems to come true: tabbed email processing. Not with Kontact or KMail, though. It is with Thunderbird. But it is not yet in the official release. Read More

Another two section for the klik User's FAQ done today. This time "Troubleshooting" and "Tipps + Tricks". Enjoy. Troubleshooting Q: I got a dialog saying "Error while trying to run xmule" Read More

Continuing with the klik User's FAQ today. This time: the sections dealing with "klik and the Base System", "klik and Package Management", "klik Application Wishlist" and "klik Recipe Maintainers". -- Today's local preview: Read More

klik User's FAQ continued. Today the "Usage" section: Usage Q: Where does klik store the newly installed applications? A: All applications are stored on your desktop. In the file system, this is the directory $HOME/Desktop. Read More

klik User's FAQ work continued. Today "Scope" section. The IT and Linux press is slowly becoming aware of klik. They visit us in #klik, ask questions, write us e-mails, want interviews, request articles, publish articles themselves. Read More

Work on the klik User's FAQ continued. This morning I completed the "Installation" section. This evening followed the "File Format" one. The plan to add at least one new section each day during the next two weeks so far is met. Read More

Bonus not-FAQ: Q: What is the cool klik-ification of the week?? A: Without even the slightest doubt, this would be klik://amarok-svn-nightly. There are input ingredients to the recipe: Eean provides these, Debian Sarge packages. Read More

I'm working on getting the klik User's FAQ complete. The plan is to add at least one new section each day during the next two weeks. Today, I completed "Basics" and put it up together with probono's " Read More

Guess what I regard as the most important story around The Internet today? Right. It is the one that raises crucial questions about the future of the Linux desktop platform in general. Read More

Kernel 2.6.14, released 2 days ago, has an few important new feature, that will is welcomed by all klik developers with big expectation: FUSE support (Filesystem in User SpacE) Currently, klik needs entries like these in /etc/fstab: Read More

One other improvement was introduced by probono yesterday: the beginning of a recipe maintainer interface on the klik web server. klik started out to provide a means to install additional software packages into Linux system running from a Live CD (Knoppix, Kanotix). Read More

One of the improvements to klik that has taken substance over the weekend is this: each future .cmg created on the client side by executing the klik recipe for the bundle now includes " Read More

This weekend saw some more progress in klik development. Before I write about the details involved, let me first re-iterate some very simple facts about how klik works. I think it is required, given some of the emails I received, and some of the questions asked in IRC. Read More

Yesterday in IRC (#kde-devel) this happened: Oct 03 17:13:28 <isaac> http://www.wesnoth.org/start/1.0/ Oct 03 17:13:32 <isaac> we have just got wesnoth 1.0 out :) Oct 03 17:13:59 <Narishma> is there a klik package ? Read More

A few days ago probono started blogging... and I didn't know or notice. Creative as he is, he called the thingie "klikblog"... ;-) If even I didn't know, how should the world at large? Read More

OpenOffice.org 2 has been announced as available in Release Candidate 1 shape. The SUSE-RPM is 126 MByte to download (if you include German language support). Happy installing... Oh, wait. If you install these, not only will your download time have to be accounted for, the action will also overwrite your current installation of OOo2. Read More

The IT news site Golem.de has picked up the topic of klik now. It is very obvious that they actively tested klik themselves (although they do not write so), not just paraphrased other people's writings, and that they were mainly intrigued by the klik://enlightenment option. Read More

probono has introduced a new feature on the klik comments website. It auto-creates a right-hand column with current quotes from Google search results: sites and Blogs linking back to the klik website. Read More

This is a first little highlight of what klik is able to do. Previously, the autogenerated the klik://enlightenment package didn't really work, because usually your $DISPLAY is already occupied by KDE, yes? Read More

I've now prepared 2 klik-able kdeedu packages. I compiled with "--enable-debug=full". One of the packages is stripped to save space and bandwidth. However, I recommend you to run the one with debug symbols included. Read More

The klik-enabled kdeedu-3.5 packages compiled from today's Subversion checkout are now up for download. (We do not offer yet a working klik://kdeedu link, though). They have passed some initial testing on SUSE-9. Read More

Time to reveal a few more of the little tricks around klik... This time it is "How do I fix a klik AppDir bundle if it does not work the way I want it to work? Read More

Huzzah! (would friend Aaron say), klik.atekon.de is again found by DNS. kliktestbox:~> nslookup klik.atekon.de Server: 195.20.224.234 Address: 195.20.224.234#53 Non-authoritative answer: Name: klik.atekon.de Address: 134.169.172.48 That's since about 30 minutes ago. Hopefully it stays like that. Read More

Boudewijn, the Krita maintainer has his first krita-latest.cmg on offer. It seems to be a resounding success to him, with the download number approaching 300 within the first 24 hours already, and some dozen feedback mails. Read More

Not only has IRC channel #klik on Freenode.net seen quite some influx in recent days. We now also run two new mailing lists hosted by KDE, both related to klik. Dirk was so nice to create them on very short notice for us: klik@kde. Read More

Seems like my Dot story on klik has kicked off a little avalanche.... One thing however that keeps it from growing right now is a DNS problem with the klik.atekon.de ISP provider. Read More

So my Dot article about klik is now online. It has had already 40 comments within 2 hours, mostly positive. It contains a concrete, workable proposal how to accelerate KDE development: accelerating it by bringing our non-technical/non-coding contributors more closely to the " Read More

planetsuse.org is now syndicating my blog. Thanks James, for taking my feed to your part of our world. -- Hello, fellow planetSUSE bloggers :) Maybe it was this rather interesting bug that helped proof that I have somehow some relationship with the Green Geeko Distro. Read More

How can KDE developers find ways to make binary packages of bleeding-edge code directly available to be run by usability experts for early feedback? And if you are less interested in cooperating with usability people (like mornfall ;-P ), you may still ask yourself: How can KDE developers make their bleeding-edge packages available to beta-testers? Read More

Another feedback re. my recent blog entry: there is now The First FreeNX Wallpaper available from KDE-Look. It is installable via the "Get Hot New Stuff". Looks pretty cool too (some non-Europeans say it is too Old-World-centric -- well, let them create stuff that suits their tastes better. Read More

It was only 10 minutes after my last blog entry appeared that one reader phoned me and objected: he thinks that the 280 msec latency he experiences from his currently Malaga/Spain-based notebook to his guest account on my NX server in Karlsruhe/Germany would be too much, and a data flow rate of 27 kBits/sec too sparse (he used a crappy and fairly saturated WLAN link to test this) to make users feel comfortable in using NX permanently, day-in and day-out over the network. Read More

Some of you know already: since NoMachine released the 1.5.0 of their GPL'd Core NX Libraries, KDE applications run blazingly fast over remote internet links in "single window mode". Even modem connections work great. Read More

Woohoo! I'm going to the LinuxWorldExpo in San Francisco (Aug 8-11). I'll help run the Linuxprinting booth in the .org Pavilion. The flight is booked, hotel reserved -- thanks to the generous sponsorship of Ricoh Corporation, who are helping also our new KDEPrint maintainer Cristian Tibirna to be present at the event. Read More

NoMachine NX 1.5.0 is finally out! Including sources of the GPL'ed NX Core libraries. It also sports a new NX Server Manager interface (still Beta). Ever wanted to have a usable remote desktop access to your KDE workstation even when thrown back to a modem dialup link? Read More

The European X Developer Meeting has been kept quite low profile by its organizers. Maybe because it is meant to be primarily for developers. Maybe they are just too busy with organizing things -- after all, it was announced at very short notice. Read More

My last but one blog entry prompted several people to write me personal mails. I was away and offline for most of the weekend, so upon return I was glad to see a friendly personal note from Dave Neary who pointed me to his own blog on the matter, and also to Jeff Waugh's. Read More

I was thrilled to read what Boudewijn has to say about new features in the upcoming Krita (released as part of the KOffice suite, 1.4.0). One thing he said is even better: "I’ve also toyed with the idea of asking the OpenUsability people for a review of Krita’s UI — the problem here is that we have some very clear ideas on what we want to change almost immediately after the release and that may impact the usefulness of a review. Read More

Aaron's got a better laptop. Hey, that isn't very spectacular in itself. But what thrills me, is that the first thing he has worked on with that new asset of his is. Read More

Earlier today I came across an article that made me smile. A quote first: "Gnome will join OSC's Community Advisory Board and work with the OSC to promote the open source desktop. Read More

I have mentioned it before, and I will repeat it here again: any commercial software vendor pondering to sell his product or service on the Linux platform is horrified by the complications he has to deal with. Read More

Aaron's last blog entry was a real eye-opener to me. I didn't know KFlog before. I'll tell a friend of mine about it, who "has to" use Linux at work (and he likes it) but who uses MS Windows at home. Read More

Aaron commented on the interview made by Free Software Magazin with the owner-boss of various IT websites, some of which had been the platform for a poisonous pro-SCO/anti-Groklaw propaganda campaign, culminating in personal attacks against Pamela Jones, the brain and heart behind Groklaw, orchestrated by one (now infamous) Maureen O'Gara. Read More

There is a big ballyhoo on Slashdot and many other newssites regarding a "KDE <--> Apple divorce", as well as "Firefox scolding the KDE Team". Let me summarize what happened. The story starts in 2003: Read More

No, clee -- it is old news, very old in fact ;-) And the guy for sure didnt "invent" it. The equipment is too heavy to really carry on your back. Read More

Sometimes you learn surprising things while you drive a car. Last time this happened was on Thursday evening. SambaXP conference had ended in Goettingen, and I gave Tridge a lift to the Frankfurt Airport. Read More

Canllaith seems to start liking to fly gliders. Hey, I can certainly understand that! This experience is sooo just incredible.... feel how the air is able to carry the weight of your wooden (or plastic) bird. Read More

My last blog entry regarding re. "HP supporting their printers and scanners with open source drivers" made 2 private mails come into my mailbox. They challenged me with the other product type mentioned in the LinuxToday feedback, namely notebooks. Read More

Late this afternoon, a talkback at LinuxToday annoyed so much that I had to respond. A PR story outlining that HP turns now to Linux as the OS for their new series of NAS devices (Network Attached Storage) prompted an extremely uninformed guy to headline his bickering. Read More

Today I counted: I have lots of files on my systems. 1,635,315 files on my main workstation (SUSE-9.1); 80 GBytes on one disk filled up by 50%. 1,493,166 files on my other workstation (SUSE-8. Read More

KDE developers: If you ever log off from your current KDE-3.4cvs session, think again! Couldn't you keep it running? For Konqui's sake? Because if you really log off, you'll bring Konqui into big danger. Read More

It looks like the upcoming 3.4 release will have a gorgeous new default look and feel to it. Stephan Binner produced a "sneak preview" live CD with KDE-3.4RC1 called "Klax" (375 MByte size for the iso image), and OSDir now features an excellent series of updated screenshots. Read More

Bad network connectivity sucks. Sucks big time. Especially if you had set time aside to work on completing all missing KDEPrint WhatsThis items for the upcoming 3.4 release. Complete string freeze is now very close and I can't do it. Read More

So, Aaron, you got very vocal about it.... You think the Open Source Desktop efforts are killed by porting these very same deskops' applications stack over to Windows, making a complete sweitch-over completely un-attractive. Read More

My friend Aaron fears Open Source on the Desktop gets killed. He's not afraid of Microsoft though. He thinks it's the "enemy within". Nah, not his words. I'll rephrase it: He thinks, the deadly danger comes from some little efforts going on in some corner of the KDE project to port some KDE applications to the MS Windows platform. Read More

"My precious...." It seems George Staikos' recent article for O'Reilly featuring KDE's KIO-Slaves stroke the right chord with many people. It has prompted some additional activities. First, it triggered me to blog/write down an old idea about how to increase the visibility of these powerfull tools to more users. Read More

KDE needs to find ways to expose the many different KIO Slaves and their usefulness to more users' eyes. How about this: separate the protocol part from the host/path in the various addressing fields/location bars. Read More

My favourite little KDE gem of the week is kio_locate. Its maintainer, Armin has now added support for regular expressions and piping results through grep. This increases usefulness by at least a factor of 10. Read More

In the last two weeks Fabian has made huge progress with FreeNX: he designed and implemented a new security model for FreeNX (with the help of some outstanding people who are now regularly joining debates in the #nx IRC channel on freenode). Read More

Brad is commenting about a research project that does "Internet Suspend / Resume" of user sessions: "...interesting idea - they basically envisage a thick-client model, running on a virtual machine (VMWare in their tests) which can suspend. Read More

... and the nice thing about it is that the final touches of the work has been done during the "Knoppix Remastering" tutorial at aKademy, held by Klaus Knopper himself. Read More

It was great to have the DevConf being fed by IBM sponsoring a "Free Lunch for Free Software developers". Actually, what the food voucher said was "Big Blue and Blue Angel happily invite you for a free lunch". Read More

Unfortunately I couldnt attend any of the talks at DevConf other than the fine opening keynote by Eirik Chamb-Eng (Trolltech). Too much work to do, too much of a cold having occupied the deep end of my throat. Read More