KDE Blogs 

Like many KDE application, strigidaemon uses DBus to talk to other programs. Debugging inter-process communication is never very convenient and strigidaemon is no exception. So far, there are no unit tests for checking the quality of the DBus communication in Strigi. I set about to write some and found it was not so easy, so I'm documenting what I did for the benefit of all the other developers using DBus. Read More

Not mine, but one Korneliusz Jarzebski (in Polish) has done the numbers (pro-linux coverage in German) and produced a chart showing exactly how the RAM consumption of comparable KDE4 and KDE3 sessions measure up. The result is a mindblowing 39% smaller memory footprint in KDE 4. This just goes to show, that it's worth making large-scale changes to your desktop environment to get the fruit hanging on the higher branches. Wait for the mini- and micro-optimisations to start happening in KDE 4.x, too.

So someone just asked in #kde4-devel whether it was worth trying KDE 4 on a 2500Mhz/256Mb computer and I was characteristically careful and guessed "It will work, but won't be good.". Then I decided to put my money where my mouth is and booted my Thinkpad X60 with "mem=256M maxcpus=1", logged into KDE 4 and set the power saving policy to "Powersave", which throttles the CPU to 1Ghz and locks it there. And then I used KDE 4 some, started Konqueror, browsed about a bit, configured a few things with System Settings, started Kopete and chatted a little. And I was pleasantly surprised with how well it all works. With a "debugfull" build from SVN. With kwin_composite 3d eye candy, on Intel. With KDE 3 libraries loaded too (for KPowerSave, since it's not ported yet). As they like to say here in Franconia, it's like "a'Traum". Read More

I finally got my hands on an EEE PC on Friday after having waited for nearly a month for the one I ordered by mail order to arrive. I found out that 'Toys R Us' had some stock and checked that the one in manchester had some. Now I've just got the difficult decision of whether to cancel my original order or not! Read More

After Jeremy adopted KNS2 as his new project, being pushed by Annma also, the first results start to show. We invaded the so far very low traffic freedesktop.org get hot new stuff mailing list and got some status updates so. Jeremy already implemented returning a list of changed entries to the app using KNS2 two weeks ago, tonight I added getting a list of installed files from these entries. This is good because it enables apps to work with the downloaded data without having to use the install command in their appname.knsrc which was rather limited in possibilities. The other thing is being able to uninstall downloaded stuff. After getting a file, one can now click uninstall again to get rid of it. And install it again. And remove it again... you get the hang of it. Since we are now trying to get it to work properly (without api modifications of course) this is probably the time to ask questions and tell us what's not working with it for you. At least regarding download. I hope upload will work soon as well, I don't know if anyone really tested it yet. Read More

FOSS.in 07 continues to be a great conference experience for me. I had no talks on the first day of the main conference, which meant I got to listen to other people's presentations, chat with many interesting people and generally hang out and hack. In the evening we went to a downtown restaurant with a bunch of folks for a traditional south Indian style meal, which was excellent. After a good night's sleep we headed out to the conference venue again, through the utter insanity that is the Bangalore traffic, and Volker and I spent most of the morning finishing up and polishing our slides for our two Akonadi talks. Read More

I just noticed the internal statistics of openSUSE News saying "There are currently 200 posts and 1,800 comments, contained within 17 categories" (posts include calendar entries). Thanks to everyone contributing to make its start such a success. :-) And I can still not understand why some other distro portals don't dare to allow user comments.

This amusing question seems to pretty bother some users in forums/story comment sections and fanboys of distros are fast with answering their distro will for sure be it. :-) It's amusing for several reasons: Any question about KDE4 is faulty by concept. Next, how can a distribution be "first" or significant earlier than all other when all get the source code at the same time, which is not earlier than when the release happens (or rather about a week before when the supposed release state got tagged)? And what do they mean with "ship"? One not serious answer I read was "Debian testing". Let us assume distro release including it is meant. I don't think that any distribution will adopt their regular release schedule to the KDE 4.0.0 release (also caused by ever moving release date). And if a distribution would do, would it do its users or the KDE project a favor? Read More

The 2007 Linux Desktop/Client Survey of the Linux Foundation closed recently. One interesting result: [image:3129 size=original hspace=50] Didn't someone claim that companies would prefer Gtk+ because of the license? :-) Update: James claims that you may have to add Gtk and Mono numbers. This is wrong as the survey asked the participants to "Select all [answers] that apply". Assuming everyone with Mono also uses Gtk+ leaves only 7.7% to non-Mono Gtk+ applications.

Dear lazyweb, I'm doing some research for a weekend KDE project, and you're all invited to help me :-) Is there anything in KDE (or Qt4) that can read the Compound File Binary Format? Read More