openSUSE Factory
Thursday, 13 December 2007
One picture is worth more than 10 words, but that's the limit for a blog entry :)
prettyuistrings.py
Thursday, 13 December 2007
I posted this to k-c-d a couple days ago, but it generated zero response, so I thought I'd post it to the ol' blog in case any non k-c-d types might be interested.
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Tutorial Day Over
Thursday, 13 December 2007
That went well. We even had some of SuSE's finest drop by, were they picking up tips? :)
Logs available now.
FOSS in Dutch government
Wednesday, 12 December 2007
Today Dutch parliament discussed plans of the ministry of Economic Affairs to encourage Free and Open Source Software in government. All major parties seem to understand the issues. Even news agencies are talking about 'vrije software' which is the right term ('Vrije' means 'free as in freedom').
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KDE 4.0 RC 2 / KDE Four Live 0.8
Wednesday, 12 December 2007
KDE 4.0 RC 2 has been released so it's time for a new version of the most comprehensive KDE4 Live-CD:
[image:3140 size=original hspace=50]
Debugging help for dbus daemons
Tuesday, 11 December 2007
Like many KDE application, strigidaemon uses DBus to talk to other programs. Debugging inter-process communication is never very convenient and strigidaemon is no exception. So far, there are no unit tests for checking the quality of the DBus communication in Strigi. I set about to write some and found it was not so easy, so I'm documenting what I did for the benefit of all the other developers using DBus.
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KDE 4 'consumes 39% less memory than its predecessor'
Monday, 10 December 2007
Not mine, but one Korneliusz Jarzebski (in Polish) has done the numbers (pro-linux coverage in German) and produced a chart showing exactly how the RAM consumption of comparable KDE4 and KDE3 sessions measure up. The result is a mindblowing 39% smaller memory footprint in KDE 4. This just goes to show, that it's worth making large-scale changes to your desktop environment to get the fruit hanging on the higher branches. Wait for the mini- and micro-optimisations to start happening in KDE 4.x, too.
KDE 4: like a dream on 256Mb/1Ghz/Intel!
Monday, 10 December 2007
So someone just asked in #kde4-devel whether it was worth trying KDE 4 on a 2500Mhz/256Mb computer and I was characteristically careful and guessed "It will work, but won't be good.". Then I decided to put my money where my mouth is and booted my Thinkpad X60 with "mem=256M maxcpus=1", logged into KDE 4 and set the power saving policy to "Powersave", which throttles the CPU to 1Ghz and locks it there. And then I used KDE 4 some, started Konqueror, browsed about a bit, configured a few things with System Settings, started Kopete and chatted a little. And I was pleasantly surprised with how well it all works. With a "debugfull" build from SVN. With kwin_composite 3d eye candy, on Intel. With KDE 3 libraries loaded too (for KPowerSave, since it's not ported yet). As they like to say here in Franconia, it's like "a'Traum".
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EEE PC
Sunday, 9 December 2007
I finally got my hands on an EEE PC on Friday after having waited for nearly a month for the one I ordered by mail order to arrive. I found out that 'Toys R Us' had some stock and checked that the one in manchester had some. Now I've just got the difficult decision of whether to cancel my original order or not!
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KNewStuff2
Sunday, 9 December 2007
After Jeremy adopted KNS2 as his new project, being pushed by Annma also, the first results start to show. We invaded the so far very low traffic freedesktop.org get hot new stuff mailing list and got some status updates so. Jeremy already implemented returning a list of changed entries to the app using KNS2 two weeks ago, tonight I added getting a list of installed files from these entries. This is good because it enables apps to work with the downloaded data without having to use the install command in their appname.knsrc which was rather limited in possibilities. The other thing is being able to uninstall downloaded stuff. After getting a file, one can now click uninstall again to get rid of it. And install it again. And remove it again... you get the hang of it. Since we are now trying to get it to work properly (without api modifications of course) this is probably the time to ask questions and tell us what's not working with it for you. At least regarding download. I hope upload will work soon as well, I don't know if anyone really tested it yet.
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