KDE Blogs 

I still haven't managed to settle into a PPC distro that I like for my iBook. I just tried the latest OpenSUSE RC and YaST segfaulted before the installer really got anywhere. This is not dissimilar from my experiences the last time I tried to install it. (Though this time around at least it authoritatively crashed during the install with no hope of recovery -- unlike a few months back when I tried it and it gave cryptic and conflicting error messages and still wouldn't install.) Read More

In the last months I bought two T43 laptops for my work. Nice machines. We use them for road warring/presentations and even for a bit of FEM development. So, I usually just shrink windows and insinuate geeko onto them. Read More

[image:1819 align=right]With the upcoming SUSE Linux 10.1 Release Candidate (really, no kidding!) and no further changes allowed for it I thought it was time to release Kerry 0.1 including translations for 18 languages done by the Novell translation teams. The last days I already created a small homepage in the openSUSE wiki and took some new screenshots. The source is now imported into KDE's SVN, right next to the one of knetworkmanager. Read More

Justin Karneges has released "beta2" of the Qt Cryptographic Architecture. You can get the tarballs from http://delta.affinix.com/download/qca/2.0/beta2/ - grab all three tarballs. You can also grab it from KDE's subversion archive. Read More

This was my Wednesday. 5 in the afternoon GF phones me. GF: "Your computer isn't working? It is not turning on. It is acting weird. What's wrong?" ME: "How the **** should I know." Read More

After some boring works on GSM and UCS2 encodings, bug fixing, PDU sms, finally i could spend some time on implementing a couple of nice new features. Starting with Calendar Syncing, it was quite easy by using KParts, to embedd a KOrganizer view.. it was less easy to read data, due to stupid AT commands.. but at least now it's working fine, even if read-only, and unfortunately only on Motorola Phones. Read More

Some days ago I bought an ASUS jeans. We've been searching for a jean that is good for my size (not that easy), and found this one with reduced price (~$10 instead of $22). When I saw the name, I thought it will be fun to buy it. :-) See the pictures: Read More

I find todays hardware less and less reliable. Lately I feel it on my own skin. The story started with some mess I made on my hard disk and an upgrade of SUSE to 10.1 beta9. I reorganized my partitions a little, and after that my old win partition did not want to boot. Well, let's reinstall it, but the installer din not want to start from the CD. After a while it started. Whatever, I thought it's the win installer, as I never tried it since my upgrade to AMD64, so I forgot about it (I don't really use win, I just keep for the case that somebody brings me a software that doesn't run on Linux). After I installed SUSE I had strange crashes, complete system freezes. As I also modified some settings in the BIOS, I still did not suspect anything, but that my BIOS changes made the system unstable or SUSE is still very beta. One of such freezes almost destroyed a reiserfs partition, I could only recover with --rebuild-tree, and I had to run it twice as for the first time it crashed. After that I tried to compile KDE. From time to time it produced some errors, but what it made me really suspect that this is not a software problem was frequent crashes of g++ when compiling KOffice. After a reboot even make did not start, either gave me a bus error or segmentation fault. At this stage I decided to test the memory. In less than a minute I found that it gave me 3000+ errors. I'm a little disappointed with this. It's good that I know the cause, it's also good that the memory is in warranty, but it is sad to see such failures from a well known vendor. This was a 6 month old Corsair Value Select memory, a pair of 512MB modules. Some investigation revealed that one of the modules has problems. So now I am using only 512MB in single channel mode and waiting to confirm the replacement of the module(s). Hopefully the dealer will do it without problem, as it is a friend of mine. And now back to the first sentence: if you go through the blogs on planetkde.org or read some LUG lists, you can see what kind of hardware problems did others have. The most frequent would be hard disk failures. The second might be memory failure. But there are others as well, like badly designed laptops. What's happening in hardware business? Is it really good to try to reduce costs that much and keep releasing new products like crazy? It seems that in this rush the consumer is who will loose the most, but the vendors will do as well, when brands with good reputation start to release bad products (I heard that from ASUS from example, but this Corsair problem is also bad. Plextor also released a problematic DVD-RW.) In the past there were some products that should be avoided (I remember some VXPro-II chipset), but from my experience the problem was not that the hardware failed after some time: either it was a bad design and never worked correctly or it was OK and worked for years. Even in case of cheap, low-end brands. I had an Acorp motherboard with AMD K6 on it, plus some noname S3Savage graphics card and memory, Quantum hard disks, a Creative 16x CDROM from around 1999 (some parts, like the case is from 1995 or so) and it still works for my father! From time to time you need to clean the fans, the CD drive, but it works, and is stable. Same for other PCs I know around. In the library where I work part-time, there are 586 and Pentium I computers in use. And my experience with recent hardware: Read More

During my three years of usability presence in Open Source projects, printing has twice been the stumbling block to extensive and hot-blooded discussions about the whole purpose of usability for Linux. Read More

This and next week will be busier than average. Tonight I met up with pmax (who was in town for biz) with Justin to drink some beers and play some darts at a local bar. Its too bad pmax wont be in town long enough to visit downtown, the cherry blossoms are in full bloom (last night's storm had spared them for yet another week) and its always nice to go site-seeing in the nation's capital. Read More