KDE Blogs 

In previous "elegance" entries I presented just ideas, without implementation. Readers obsessed in the area of look&feel may remember the proposal for uncluttering tab widget when used in side pane. Any specific fix would be just for Oxygen style, so it is still unclear if starting to code this makes much sense. But. As a low-hanging fruit today I called this code on my tab widget of Kexi side pane: Read More

Julien and I met up in Redmond last week, just before the Exchange Open Specifications event at Microsoft. It was a productive time, where we did some serious planning and a little coding, and learned quite a lot more about the protocols from some of the main developers of Exchange and Outlook. Thanks to Microsoft for hosting it. Read More

It is not clear if there will be another update within KOffice (2.2.3) released in 2.2 series, so for convenience of distributors, following recommended patch fixes stability recently identified issue in the default Kexi database engine: Read More

This week I noticed: I am part of Kexi/KOffice Development Team for 65535 hours now. With fine breaks of course. It's possible to check at the bottom of this file. 64k should be enough for everyone. But not for me :) Read More

While relaxing after the hard-working period that was the GSoC, I came across a comment left by Torsten Rahn of the marble team. He wondered whether it would be possible to adapt image warping functionality so that it can be used to morph some old maps. Read More

Tarballs for kdepim-4.4.6 and kdepim-runtime-4.4.6 are now available from a mirror near you. ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/kdepim-4.4.6/src There is no associated kdepim-l10n-4.4.6 tarball since I don't know how to make one -- but there are also no new messages strings so the existing 4.4.5 translations should work. Read More

The KDE API Reference (api.kde.org) web site is now providing ".qch" files suitable for loading into Nokia's Qt Assistant. Look for the "[qt]" links. Currently, auto-regeneration of these files happens on a nightly basis for kdelibs and kdepimlibs trunk, and for kdelibs and kdepimlibs 4.5. More can be added, upon request. Read More

Looks like we'll be creating a kdepim-4.4.6 tarball, with tagging expected this Thursday 9 September. So PIMsters, get your bug fixes into the 4.4 branch as soon as possible. No regressions please. :) And no new i18n strings either. Read More

The above combination was never a painless experience, still at some point in past it seemed to be better to have a NVidia card on Linux then anything else, so I continued to buy them whenever my system was upgraded. Lately although it started to make me rather bad. I have two computers, one that is a 4 core Intel CPU with 8GB of memory, the other is a Core2Duo with 3GB. The latter is a Lenovo laptop. Both have NVidia, nothing high end (Qudaro NVS something and 9300GE, both used with dual monitor setup), but they should be more than enough for desktop usage. Are they? Well, something goes wrong there. Is that KDE, is that XOrg, is that the driver? I suspect the latter. From time to time (read: often), I ended up with 100% CPU usage for XOrg. Even though I had 3 cores doing nothing the desktop was unusable. Slow scroll, scroll mouse movements, things typed appearing with a delay, things like that. Like I'd have an XT. I tried several driver version, as I didn't always have this issues, but with newer kernel you cannot go back to (too) old drivers. I googled, and found others having similar experience, with no real solution. A suspicion is font rendering for some (non-aliased) fonts, eg. Monospace. Switching fonts sometimes seemed to make a difference, but in the end, the bug returned. Others said GTK apps under Qt cause the problem, and indeed closing Firefox sometimes helped. But it wasn't a solution. Or there was a suggestion to turn the "UseEvents" option on. This really seemed to help, but broke suspend to disk. :( Turning off the second display and turning on again seemed to help...for a while. Turning off the composite manager did not change the situation. Finally I tried the latest driver that appeared not so long ago, 256.44. And although the CPU usage of XOrg is still visible, with pikes going up to 20-40%, I gain back the control over the desktop. Am I happy with it? Well, not.... As this was only my desktop computer. I quickly updated the driver on the laptop as well, and went on the road. Just to see 100% CPU usage there. :( Did all the tricks again, but nothing helped. Until I had the crazy idea to change my widget theme from the default Oxygen to Plastique. And hurray, the problem went away! It is not perfect, with dual monitor enabled sometimes maximizing a konsole window takes seconds, but still in general the desktop is now usable. And of course this should also make me have more uptime on battery. Do I blame Oxygen? No, not directly. Although might make sense to investigate what causes there the NVidia driver going crazy and report to NVidia. Read More

In my last blog post, I showed how to use a proxy QNetworkAccessManager to restrict network accesses to sites included in a whitelist. One limitation the previous version had is that it stopped the disallowed requests by rewriting the request itself to be to an invalid url. This then caused the default implementation of QNetworkAccessManager to generate an error reply for us. This post will look at how to create a custom reply directly, to allow us to display messages to the user etc. or even provide 'virtual' content. Read More