KDE Blogs 

This week is KDE 4 hack week for me and some other colleagues at SUSE. We have thrown in some of our ITO time (that's a certain fraction of our work time we can flexibly spend on innovative projects which aren't necessarily related to our day-to-day jobs) to help making KDE 4 ready for release before the total release freeze comes into effect on Friday. Some of the KDAB folks were attracted by this idea as well and will also chime in and do some serious KDE 4 hacking. So hopefully we will have a well-working KDE PIM in KDE 4. It certainly will be a fun week! Read More

As Cornelius blogged, this week the KDE people at SUSE are spending our hard-won innovation time on polishing KDE 4. The vast majority of our new development time is now allotted to KDE 4, so to make sure that our efforts go in the right direction and to coordinate them with the work the rest of the community, we'd like to announce an inaugural openSUSE KDE IRC meeting happening tomorrow, Wednesday 17 October, in #opensuse-kde on FreeNode, at 1800 CEST. That's 1700 BST, or 1200 EST or the same time of day as the openSUSE project meeting if you exist in the shadowy planes of hacker-time. The agenda so far is to discuss how to make KDE openSUSE 10.3++ the best ever, how you can contribute via the Build Service, and how to use KDE 4 already. 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. That blog post did describe in some detail how you can use a command like Read More

Ontario Linux Fest 2007 I had a good time at Ontario Linux Fest 2007. This being the inaugural event there were some small annoyances like lack of plugs for laptops. They did have free WiFi and there was time for me to hack on the weatherengine while there. This conference has a mix of corporate and geek culture and slightly differs from OLS (Ottawa Linux Symposium) but it's likely to grow and evolve over time. Read More

Here's a quick example of why it's nice to have a script interpreter embedded in Qt: Plasma's KRunner has a calculator which used code borrowed from the KDE 3.x minicli. The old code started up the bc command line calculator then displayed the result - not exactly an efficient way to do things. I've just committed a change that makes it use QtScript and the code is trivial: Read More

openSUSE 10.3. I couldn't follow its development as I did with previous releases and tested only after the final version appeared. First I upgraded my desktop from 10.2 and it wasn't a pleasure as it made the system unbootable and I had to fix using a rescue console. But after having it running I was quite satisfied with it. Software management has improved (but still not fast enough in my opinion), the possibility to add the community repositories from YaST is nice, as it is the search page and the one click install (well one click on the webpage, several clicks later). I found some bugs and annoyances and I reported them, in the hope that they will be fixed in an update or in future releases. I also downloaded the 1 CD KDE version and decided to try it on my laptop. This laptop run Kubuntu since the beginning of 2006, when I switched it from SUSE in order to try it and learn it. Kubuntu was OK, but I missed some things, like YaST, I was not happy with all the modifications made to KDE and suspend to disk worked, but strangely (took a long time to come back and had to play with CTRL-ALT-Fx to get back the X screen). But I was happy with the boot speed, I even blogged about it. So I replaced Kubuntu with openSUSE 10.3. All I can say is wow. This time the installation went fine as it was a clean install, not an upgrade. The system feels quite good for this computer (PIII 550Mhz laptop, 192MB RAM, Trident video card with shared memory, 30GB IBM HDD). Compared to my previous tests only the HDD is different, but works at about the same speed (13MB/s). Booting until the KDM screen takes only 45 seconds and until I can use my system is 1:15seconds. Yes, the system is usable at that time when my optimized Kubuntu did not finish loading the login screen. The only optimization I did was to disable services I don't need from the current runlevel and disable arts. Now I don't want to say openSUSE is better, faster than Kubuntu. The new Kubuntu might also be just as fast and good. What I'm saying is that I'm impressed by the speed of the latest version of a Linux distribution. Software tends to be slower in time, while this time it became faster. I also know that booting speed is not enough or really relevant. Right now all I can say is that for general use (not for development) the system feels to be responsive and fast enough. Suspend to disk takes 25 seconds, resume 36. That's quite OK, I didn't meassure yet, but I believe it takes just as much on my desktop system is which is very fast compared to this laptop. I had until now two issues with the laptop: Read More

Jim Bublitz has been industriously working on getting the Python bindings for KDE 4 into shape. Part of that work is documentation of course and for that Jim has put together a very handy documentation viewer which combines reference docs with code samples and example code all in one easy to navigate package. One of the classic documentation problems for GUIs which are as customisable as Qt/KDE, is that everyone can, and often does, have their own visual style configured for their desktop. This of course means that any screenshots accompanying documentation simply don't match what is in front of the user most of the time. Having real widgets displayed and operational in the reference docs themselves solves this problem for Python developers at least. I think it's real neat. Read More

As Aaron is reading Spook Country I also wanted to chime in with some Gibsoness. I finished Spook Country, the latest novel of William Gibson, a couple of weeks ago. It's a very stylish work of art with lots of amazingly sharp ideas. I really enjoyed reading it. His concept of locative art is fascinating (and I want a magnetically elevated bed as well ;-)). Read More

So says this advert me and the other organisers put in this month's Linux Magazine. Thanks to them all for making Akademy possible and to media partner LNM for the advert space. Read More

The openSUSE 10.3 box is shipping! Some subscribers seem to have received it already yesterday, today I received my employee copy (German version). I'm pleasantly surprised that it didn't take this time over one month after the release, and that the two DVDs are safe in a plastic cover: Read More