KDE Blogs 

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

A friendly note that KDE SC 4.5.1 will be tagged on 26 August. So keep those bug fixes coming.

GSoC 2010 is finished. I would like to share my opinions with you. It was great summer. I want to thank you all, especially Anne Marie Mahfouf, for trusting me I am good candidate. I learned a lot. Working with kdelibs and qt was an exciting experience to me. Trust me, I learned a lot. I believe that my little contribution will improve the quality of KHangMan. Hope so :) Read More

Though this entry will be the last one about my GSoC, it certainly won't be the last one about my work on Krita or even on its new Transformation Tool. It was a great summer, I had a lot of fun working on this project. It was all the more stimulating so as I could follow the progress of the other GSoC students working for Krita. Everyone did such an incredible job, it gave me the envy and the energy to complete my project and make it as it is. Read More

This Friday (20th August) me and Ubuntu translations man David Planella want to spend the day making sure translations in Kubuntu are in tip top shape. Do join us on IRC in #kubuntu-devel if you want to help out. See the wiki page for some things we will be checking.

Follow up of the discussion about new UI elements: "it may look weird" first-look opinions vs positive results of usability testing. GMail has removed "select all/select none/..." buttons with single combo box for exactly one reason: elegance or UI uncluttering. Read More

So, as looking that everyone is in the hiring mode... Yes, Collabora is hiring. So if you are passionate for open source, want join a company that share the same passion as well, want to work from any place in the world and have at least some of these skills below, then we want to know you. Read More

I've been fascinated by the Oracle attack on Google's Android. I don't follow sport and just couldn't understand why so many people were getting excited about the World Cup at Akademy. But to me these epic disputes are a great spectator sport, as well as an opportunity to participate individually. The trouble is that it is all a bit slow, even slower than cricket - if it is like the SCO vs Linus train wreck, it could take up to five years to be resolved. Read More

Hi, I thought since others are announcing jobs here, so I can do that too :-) So, here we go: The Competence Center for High Performance Computing at the Fraunhofer ITWM in Kaiserslautern has open positions: https://jobs.fraunhofer.de/Vacancies/57538/Description Read More