KDE Blogs 

Today I counted: I have lots of files on my systems. 1,635,315 files on my main workstation (SUSE-9.1); 80 GBytes on one disk filled up by 50%. 1,493,166 files on my other workstation (SUSE-8.0); 20 GBytes on 4 disks filled up by 93%. 418,769 files on my company notebook (Win XP Prof); 40 GBytes on one disk filled up by 88%. OK, there probably is no better way for now than organize these files in a structure of directories, subdirectories, files and accessing them by "paths". But is it really the best way to present these data to me in the same hierarchical view as the file system stores them? Read More

Whenever something in KDE has frustrated me in the last month I've added it to a list: Tidy Konqueror. Konqueror has hardly changed since KDE 2 although the settings menu has gained a few extra unnecessary entries (which should be merged into the main Configure Konqueror dialogue). The sidebar should maybe be part of each tab not global to the window and a context sensitive sidebar for file manager would be nice. Kicker's Add to Panel and Remove from Panel menus should be dialogues. HAL support in KDE 3.4 is nice but Konqueror should pop up into the forground when a device is entered not have to wait for the user. The Help Centre suffers from much the same usability issues as Konqueror, it's got too much stuff in it's user interface. I'm not convinced that long manuals are the best format for documentation, shorter articles on specific actions which can be easily searched might work better. So in KWord if I search for mail merge it can give me a two or three paragraph article about how to do a mail merge. Systempreferences (in kdenonbeta) makes a good KControl replacement, of course there are larger plans afoot for KControl. Share folders sensibly. kpf is nifty but the user interface is all wrong (in kicker when it should be in Konqueror). And I've never got the right click on folder->share folders to work. A single download dialogue to replace all those file copying dialogues. Being able to pause and resume downloads would be nice to. KGet can do that but there's no reason for it to be separate from KDE core. Improved KNotify. This is where dbus needs to replace dcop since then everything down to syslogd can pop up friendly messages on screen as required. Juk pops up messages when playing a new song and amarok pops up slightly more pretty looking messages but there's no reason why that can't be done through KNotify. See Growl for this being done well on MacOS. Search in minicli. I should be able to type something into minicli and it will pop up with all the relevent applications, recent e-mails, files on my hard disk, contacts in address book, etc. See Quicksilver for MacOS goodness. Sounds like a perfect use of Tenor (klink). An option to say that actually I really would like to quit when I close the window and please stop telling me you're going to be hiding in the system tray. abakus, because I've wanted something like it for ages. Maybe a new icon theme, one that actually is based on SVG so that it can be maintined. Maybe call it Appeal. Standardised icon names too. Nicer website, with photos and pretty things. More usable wiki.

The Kubuntu announcement and preparations kept me up until about 5 o'clock last night just in time for a couple of hours kip before the announcement this morning. The feedback has been good and there's been a few sightings of Kubuntu in the wild. Many thanks go to the helpful people at Ubuntu who put up with us being somewhat newer to this game than them. Read More

I read this article in today's Guardian. Call it a touching act of altruism or a curious assertion of maternal capability, but the bottom line is 40-year-old Hla Htay is breastfeeding a Bengal tiger cub. ... As to why Ms Htay has offered her services, when bottled milk could do just as well? "I don't even want to go there," says Strike. Read More

Job interviews really, really suck. The traditional upbringing of an Australian fundamentalist christian renders you almost incapable of 'selling yourself' effectively in an interview. As a child, you learn that to state your own talents is 'bragging' or 'being up yourself'. It makes it very difficult as an adult to then learn how to market yourself to an employer. They ask you 'So, why should we give you this job?' and you look at them blankly. 'Uh.... um, cause I wouldn't suck at it too much?' Read More

KDE is not only developed worldwide and being translated into over 75 languages making it the most and broadest translated Free Software graphical desktop environment. kde.org/international shows that the KDE community also consists of many, mostly non-English speaking, local groups worldwide who promote KDE in their country or region (like KDE Chile at the Latin America Free Software Install Festival recently) and help KDE users in their native language. Read More

Everywhere I look on the web these days there seem to be enthusiastic articles about Ruby on Rails, the web application framework. On Slashdot, with nearly 500 comments posted in a matter of hours. Or Linux Journal or an O'Reilly blog where Rael Dornfest discusses what a great combination Rails and Ajax form. Read More

I'm wondering about kicker and kasbar in KDE 4. If we can make kicker's abilities powerful enough to support the features kasbar needs, then maybe it should be less of a standalone app. At the moment, maintaining kasbar is nightmare because it makes kicker do a bunch of things it wasn't designed to support (assuming kicker was ever designed at all!). Read More

With Linspire 5 out and the sources tracked down we can now get to see the new Crystal icon set commitioned by Linspire. Very shiny. They're under a proprietry Linspire licence at the moment so the question of whether KDE will use them hasn't come up yet and just maybe the artists are working on their own super sekret plans in the icons area. Also there's no SVGs yet, sigh, anyone caught adding icons to KDE without SVGs will be thrown to the gimp. Also alert viewers might spot the folder_{voliet,yellow,orange}.png icons in the lower pane of the screenshot below, they were made by me and licenced under the LGPL so quite how they end up in a .deb which does not include any mention of the LGPL is a mystery. Read More

First, greetings to everyone who is still (already 2nd April here) reading this entry on http://planet.gnome.org. :-) I wanted to complete my collection of distributor patches with the ones Linspire has applied to the Qt and KDE packages in their Five-0 release. So I contacted them because I didn't find a hint where to get the sources. Their support offered to send me a CD with the source code. I again stated that I'm only interested in Qt and KDE related patches and would prefer a download. Seems I was the first asking for that or for sources at all. :-) They put up two Source CD images on a slow server which they linked in their warehouse (http://my.linspire.com My Products/CD Downloads). So I registered there, downloaded 1.2GB 10+ hours long and then had to diff myself against the original tarballs. I guess the (L)GPL is not talking about getting patches, convenient and fast. :-( The result of all efforts are compressed 845KB big (size is partly due to release->branch diffs) Linspire 5.0 patches. On first sight Linspire didn't patch much, at least much less than SUSE or Mandrake in comparison. Read More