KDE Blogs 

Writing good error messages for your programs is art. Your user gets an error message - he cannot ask his computer "how do you mean this?". Error messages are important because they can help you fix a problem. Some error messages are critical because the error prevents you from achieving anything. One example are the error message of startkde. When you have a problem with startkde, you have a real problem. If you cannot solve it, you cannot work (with KDE) at all. Sad enough, some error messages resemble to the infamous OpenOffice help that (while leaving out important context) explains things like File|Open : Opens a file Today I <a href=http://websvn.kde.org/?view=rev&revision=888689>improved an error message in startkde. The error message was like the following: Cannot start kstartupconfig4. Check your installation. This error message had made me copy kstartupconfig4 everywhere: /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin and I was just about to copy it to /sbin when I started mistrusting this error message. Analyzing the code I found out kstartupconfig4 was found, called and executed, but delivered a return code of 3 (non-zero meaning error). So the error message missed point one for good error messages: be correct Second, its advice how to proceed was too generalized: "Check your installation" is not only what you do when kstartupconfig4 is delivering an error. You also do it if KDE consumes too much system load, when it eats your data or when your computer shows a black screen or starts mooing. So the error message misses point two for good error messages: be concise Read More

Back in April I did some very rough performance measurements of my new notebook vs. my desktop machine: Back then I got the following numbers for a complete build of CMake: Read More

Last week I upgraded my development machine, from a AMD Athlon XP 2000+ to an Intel based one, featuring GMA3100-based onboard graphics. Everything's working smoothly that far, I have only one issue: "Virtual" keyword in the "Screen" section seems to be ignored. This was working since my very first Linux installation in 1996, so I'm really used to having a big virtual screen. This is on Slackware 12.1, using xf86-video-intel 2.2.1. Any ideas ? Read More

I've been pretty inactive in development recently for a few reasons (I got engaged, then I had a nasty fall from my road bike due to a tyre blowout). I was impressed by the great work that David Nolden continues to do for kdevelop, particularly the behind-the-scenes improvements which make using the program bearable. However as we know it's the new features which are the most 'bloggable'... Read More

For openSUSE 11.1 the KDE Updater Applet will switch from the zypp backend to its PackageKit backend by default. Authorization is done via PolicyKit-kde: A KPackageKit package will be available in the online repository for those who don't like the YaST Qt Package Manager. Read More

Recently I've often been amazed by the ingenuity and the lengths that some people seem to want to go to, in order to be rude about KDE4. One example was a guy on Aaron's blog about the new system tray who claimed that Plasma had 'too many casts' especially dynamic_casts. 'Hey what? Huh?' I thought, as it was a bit off the wall. Read More

KDE 4.2 is in bug fixing mode and so is Marble. Time to have a look at things that got implemented right in time for Marble 0.7: Henry de Valence has been one of the most active Marble core developers during the last few months: He has implemented several exciting Marble features already. Read More

A few weeks ago I got a smart card to use with gpg for hardware encryption. I'm no security fanatic but I like the idea, so I bought a "lots of different cards all in one" reader. I got a MSI StarReader SMART which should support smart cards and was available locally (strange habit, I like to go to real shops instead of the online competition sometimes). I played around with it, but it seemed to just sit there and do nothing (except read every variant of useless memory card). What made my day is that after only one mail to Ludovic Rousseau with some info about the device and getting a response the same evening, it started working. After adding its usb id it's listed on the ccid driver page :) A big thank you to Ludovic Rousseau! Time to get it to work with gpg and mail now. Read More

Sound like magic you say? I'd say you're right! The White Wizard (also known as Volker Krause) has embedded a powerful spell in the KResource framework which summons a golem (also known as kres-migrator) and commands it to carefully transform your contact and calendar resources into a respective Akonadi setup. Read More

I always thought that some KDE apps looked a bit cluttered. Yesterday I finally tried to do something about it. I started with Gwenview. Two things bothered me: 1. the status bar buttons were too small for their text. Easy to solve by simply not forcing the height of the statusbar. 2. the sidebar had a different color than the status bar. Now this is due to Oxygen using gradients which is cool. It turned out to be rather simple. And this is also the actual reason for this blog. Read More