KDE Blogs 

So Tom's story hit Slashdot. A lot of responses, from simply requests to almost flame-like comments asked KDE4 to simply be fast. I feel urged to comment on that: Qt4 gives us a major speedup in first place. The KDE3 codebase that we ported to Qt4 is already faster than "Kanzler" (this seems to be a general positive thing about Qt4, see also here). As Aaron has indicated quite a few times during aKademy, Plasma will not only bring a nicer look, but also unify applications that have previously been separated, resulting in a faster-loading, tighter integrated Desktop Environment. KDE 4 will have eye candy, but it will still work nice and fluent on computers without modern gfx cards. Also, every decent 2D-gfx card will soon be accelerated by Exa, resulting in improved graphics performance. The granularity of libs will be a lot finer, resulting in applications that only load whatever they need. But with preloading and all the other fancy magic in modern memory management, memory whiners that base their analysis on top & co. should be careful about their results anyway. And finally: There is no hidden agenda or ally with graphics card vendors whatsoever, so we have no interest to make KDE slow, the contrary is, of course, the case. After all, we are also using KDE, and nobody of us likes to wait, either. Conclusion: Yes, KDE 4 will also be about speed, it will hopefully be even speedier than KDE 3, but that's something that future development will show. 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. (OK, that might be a pretty safe bet. After all, it will replace a previous Alpha or Beta build of OOo, and likely will not do any harm.) But upon installation, it will expand to over 300+ Mbyte and 3000+ files in 300+ directories on your harddisk. And you will not be able to just copy the installed application from your office workstation to your notebook to your home computer to your Knoppix CD.... Read More

I got very nice word from Jure Repnic that the books started to get to destination. And Jure says "... I hope we se a similar book for KDE 4 ...". I surely desire so. If only time... Read More

Update: The fontconfig packages linked from this post seem to cause KDE bug #116176 with KDE3.5 packages. Well, I warned you. Biggest at least in terms of slowness and memory usage. Yes, I'm talking about fontconfig checking all fonts and building an in-memory representation at application startup, as already mentioned in the KDE performance tips page. This fontconfig problem has had a noticeable impact on memory usage and startup time of KDE applications. But that has come to an end now it seems. Read More

Into hell. That is where I went this weekend. Those of you who've been around me a little bit understand that I suffer from migraines. A lot. Well, yesterday I suffered like I've never suffered before. It began in the morning with an unusual headache for me. Unusual, because it was not a migraine, rather it was a regular headache across the full forehead and seemed familiar to rebound headaches I have experienced from time to time. This headache persisted throughout the day until it turned into my old friend --a full blown head splitting migraine-- in the early afternoon. 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. Proof: a series of 8 very nicely done screenshots. Read More

I never liked the idea that girls are technically less interested than boys or get less into technology. But this user survey we are conducting really keeps frustrating me!!! Background: Two weeks ago, we started interviewing people on how they organise their documents and files on their hard disk. We asked random people who showed up for a web usability test, that means our participants covered all types of internet users between 18 and 50 years. 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? Enlightenment-17 being a window manager, it wanted the exclusive access to an X server display, but the :0 one was already the realm of the host's KDE. Yes, we could have gone for :1 -- but which user would have discovered it running there? Everyone would have thought it didn't work, and some would even have sent bug reports. (Hey, and if the above klik://enlightenment link didn't work for you, go back to my previous blog entries, or to the Dot story and read up on how to install the klik client.) Read More

The website Podcastinfo.nl, an initiative by Bernard Flach, mentions Amarok as an excellent player which comes default with podcasting support.