KDE Blogs 

There is something magical about hacking on things without having much clue about them. It almost feels like a treasure hunt, with mysterious traps all along the way and an elusive treasure maybe at the end. Today's treasure is KDE4's Konsole (preferably not) being awfully slow with some fonts. Specifically, as irony would dictate, the rule could be almost said that the better suited font for Konsole the slower the text rendering is, whereas if the font breaks the text layout completely or hurts to look at, the speed is just fine. Read More

This weekend we, the KDE PIM developers, met again in Osnabrück to develop and discuss the future of kmail, korganizer, kjots, akonadi and other software for Personal Information Management. There you can find all meeting minutes, time tables and results, here I want to outline what was most important to me. Read More

The Okular team has never been all that big. Recently we lost Pino as the maintainer. His reasons are his reasons, but I can't say I blame him. I can personally no longer tolerate the level of abuse that we're seeing on bug reports. The latest example is Wishlist item 157284 Read More

Being able to properly read many different file formats is important for KOffice success. By 'read', I mean 'convert to ODF' because the conversion and reading is strictly separated in KOffice. KWord will convert a .doc file to a .odt file before loading it into the internal rendering and editing structure. There is even a nice separate program called 'koconverter' that can convert files on the command-line. Read More

Now finally yesterday I installed OpenSUSE 11.2 on my notebook (this one). Installation went very smooth, and it seems all the hardware components were recognized automatically, 3D graphics, even WLAN. Read More

libxml2 is compiled without thread support in Ubuntu 9.10 due to an oversight from upstream. This causes issues with Strigi which recently added a check for it. You can get packages from my PPA with thread support. It should go into -proposed and -updates soon too. Read More

So let's talk about what's going on in the Ark land. Some time ago, Lydia blogged about raising the number of bug reports marked as junior jobs on Bugzilla. I've done my part, and currently there are 12 Ark bug reports listed as junior jobs. Read More

It seems a long time ago, but in early 2000 I had just submitted my first patches to the KDevelop project and KDE. I had wanted to port the version of Squeak Smalltalk that ran under Apple's 'Rhapsody OS' to GNUStep, and I needed some sort of development environment to do that. Read More

Some of Akonadi's resource agents (usually just called resources) work on local files, some on files containing more than one data object, some on directories containing one data object per file. Read More

For mirroring my backup drive, central data store for devices, music playing and a webserver for experiments, I'd like to run a small server at home. I want this server to be energy efficient, easy to modify, robust, silent and run customizable free software. It should have at least 500 GB of storage, but 1 or 1.5 TB is better. You can buy very low-energy computers such as the Fit-PC 2 (6 watt) or the Linutop 2 (8 watt). Energy costs for machines that run constantly can be roughly estimated by doubling the power draw in watt, so running a device that uses 8 watt constantly costs about 16 euro a year. Read More