KDE Blogs 

It's a small, small world. While staying in Wellington I thought I'd take the opportunity check out the local LUG. It seems to be a collection of some pretty nice people of varying geekiness, most of whom I'm interested in getting to know better. A nice man who has the same model laptop as I do. We exchanged some pointers on how we'd gotten various things working. A younger guy, burning with New Gentoo Convert Zeal. Seems very bright and funny in a goofy way. There was one other girl there - yay! Read More

Yesterday, Aaron made some interesting comments on the unified configuration system that has been discussed on the xdg-list over the last few weeks. I think some of his comments are spot on, unfortunately some others seem to be of the more paranoid hallucinogenic kind. I'm not into mushrooms myself so I will concentrate on the productive parts. Read More

My last blog entry regarding re. "HP supporting their printers and scanners with open source drivers" made 2 private mails come into my mailbox. They challenged me with the other product type mentioned in the LinuxToday feedback, namely notebooks. One of them said, that beyond printer drivers, HP did nothing to support OSS, and a well known big name company with a 3-letter name was much better behaving in that respect. What follows is a reproduction of my response to these mails (just HTML-ized and enhanced with inline-d hyperlinks). Read More

Late this afternoon, a talkback at LinuxToday annoyed so much that I had to respond. A PR story outlining that HP turns now to Linux as the OS for their new series of NAS devices (Network Attached Storage) prompted an extremely uninformed guy to headline his bickering. "HP -- Open Source Leech" and then go on: "...HP is again leeching on the opensource community. Hey HP, where are the drivers for your scanners, printers and all your laptops?" Read More

The wee 80x15 website banners have become a popular to show your allegiance and make a much more sophisticated alternative than the old style of banner which started long long ago with "Netscape Now". Read More

I'm unable to rsync with the cvs repository, so no digest is possible. It seems everything is in flux until the subversion changeover is done. Hopefully all will be back to normal next week.

It looks like my thesis will be late (Gee, what a surprise), and since I soon have to buy the apartment I've been renting, I've been looking for a job, and finally found one. Read More

Today KDE's culture is one of our most important assets. It's also one of our worst enemies. KDE's culture has been ideal to bring us to where we are today. More or less, our goal for years has been to produce a desktop -- something that can actually be called a modern desktop. Read More

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.