Irc-Unix.net

• cmake $target/fast
• cmake install/fast

Just like Jim Rohn said: Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book, these days I force myself to read more books more often than before. Here is a list of English fictions that I managed to read fortnightly, in the order of my preference, just in case you are looking for good books and want to read some of them as well.

• Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. I always wanted to finish this one and finally I did. Needless, it is only one of its kind. At one point in your life, you simply need to read and digest this book, because there is just Santiago in each and everyone of us.
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I wrote the short review before. I also watched the movie, but the movie was not even close to the book.
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, an award winning book from Mark Haddon. ...read more...

Getting weirded out because some people claimed to have "cracked" the Hyves Desktop application Arend, Girish, Roop and had managed to release just before the holidays began. And not only that, they put the cracked version of Bittorrent and Usenet. As if there was anything to crack... And we're still trying to convince the Powers that Be that making the whole thing GPL would be a Good Thing, since it would be a nice demonstration of Hyves' public website API, as well as a morally good thing. Plus, we wouldn't have to provice binaries for all varieties of Linux, which is quite hard, really.

Becoming quite seriously worried about the outlook for 2009. Well, that goes without saying... But we're directly influenced by the current problems, since we bought a new house in 2007 and still haven't managed to sell the old one in 2009.

Watching more than the usual number of movies -- we got a great little combined second-hand bookshop/new dvd shop next door -- from Peter Sellers to ...read more...

Kein Sieger glaubt an den Zufall.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

(English translation: No winner believes in coincidence)

Photo by this girl.

A blog entry by Jure Repinc tells us about some of the new features in KDE 3.5 which according to this schedule isn't quite finished yet.

• show all cpus (for computers with multicores)
• tooltip updates continuously
• nicer visualization (maybe needs some more tweaks)
  ...read more...

Trolltech has just released Qt 4.1. Many new features were added since Qt 4.0, including integrated support for rendering SVG drawings and animations, a PDF backend to the Qt printing system and a lightweight ...

I think the title say it all.
so I wish everyone to have a nice year 2009, with
everything one might desire ....

• I'm going in completely blind here, and have no idea if this will work across distros - it could easily simple fail for most people at the first hurdle.


• A chroot is not as insulated as a VM - in particular, processes started in the chroot are not separated from those started outside the chroot.


• Again unlike a VM, it's possible for apps in a chrooted environment to e.g. crash/ lockup your X session.


• Based on John's blog here, it seems at least possible that the chrooted KDE4Daily session won't run concurrently with an existing KDE4 session, which is a big shame, if true.


• I have some difficulty unmounting /dev/ from the chroot, apparently necessitating a reboot if I ...read more...

I’m sure there’s already a million “Happy New Year” type posts up but I figured I’d throw in my two cents as well (since I’m actually here for this New Year’s Day).

While I’m at it I’ll pass along some things I managed to accomplish over the past week:

• Have some troubleshooting that you need to do that requires you to have a small partition? (In my case, troubleshooting for bug 118594). You don’t need to re-format your hard drive. Instead (at least on Linux) just create a partition on a file:
  1. Create a small-ish file (for instance, using dd if=/dev/zero of=file-name-here bs=1M count=size-in-megabytes).
  2. From there, you need to create a filesystem on it. I used plain ext2. If you’re not running as root you may need to manually run /sbin/mke2fs file-name-here. (since /sbin is normally only in the PATH for root). mke2fs should complain about the file not being a special block device but you can tell it to proceed. Please note that mke2fs is a horribly horribly destructive thing to do on a live filesystem. ...read more...

2008 has been a great year for me Free Software wise.

Not only did I get the opportunity to attend three awesome KDE developer meetings/sprints, I also got invited and attended the Linux Collaboration Summit.

However, personally the most important aspect of 2008 is me returning to serious KDE development. Hmm, probably not returning since my contributions in the early years more or less where heling other developers, doing a couple of fixes and enhancements, mainly in the KDE Games and KDE Edu areas.

Due to time being available to me only in small chunks of a couple of minutes but all over the day, I moved on to doing support. Both end user support as well as developer mentoring, the latter mostly on web forums such as mrunix (German), qt-forum and I am actually one of the initial guys behind QtCentre.

That was a great time as well as I find helping and receiving many people's thanks extremely gratifying more so when I discovered that people within the KDE community where ...read more...

Quick update: Newly available in Project Neon's kde-nightly is kdeedu . Newly available in the kdebase build is support for Google Gadgets .

First of all… HAPPY NEW YEAR ALL !!

I felt I had to do some research… and I did for couple days till yesterday morning I felt ill as hell. Now, I’m getting better, and it seems the “virus” that hit spain got me too… Anyway, I’m winning the battle to my flu.

So, before getting ill, I had a look at Qt’s signals and slots, and wondered if I could do something similar myself. Well, I called this tiny library “Ideal”, and till now it only has signals/”slots” (there are no slots, we’ll see later) and a small timer for testing purposes…

I don’t mean this thing to be huge, but I guess I will be working on it from time to time. However, it was a great thing for me seeing it working. The “bad” thing: it uses c++0x stuff to work.

Let’s see a small usage example:

#include <object.h>
#include <iostream>

using namespace Ideal;
using namespace Ideal::Core;
using namespace std;

class MyObject
: public Object
{
public:
MyObject(Object *object = ...read more...

Aaron Siego of KDE: "It would be very nice if our X server could use OpenGL directly for its display and composition.

Note: This started out as a comment on one of the Digest stories on the Dot, but I know not many people will read it there, and thought this blog a more appropriate venue than the Digest introduction section!

With the end of the year approaching, many of us are in a reflective mood, including myself.
So I decided to dust off my blog (for this limited time only!) to address the passionate, emotional and other comments about the state of my publication, the KDE Commit-Digest.

As I wrote in the first Digest after my return:
"For many reasons (like important "real-life" work and including the simple desire for a rest), the Digest has not been published for many weeks now. My plan to get up to date with current commits is to publish the weekly editions as usual on an accelerated schedule, but with no introductory content (as seen in the section above)..."

I decided that these "shorter editions" (actually, they only miss the exclusive introductory content and some ...read more...

Did some tumblin' a few days ago, as a result of me and some tram tracks at Hackescher Markt disagreeing as to the general direction of the front wheel of my bike. This resulted in a banged up wrist and rib, but no damage to the laptop or head. So while I'm still able to perform my primary function at work, namely talk, I am somewhat useless in my primary function at home, namely as a holder of hands while our daughter learns to walk. She has decided that this dire situation necessitates desperate measures and promptly started standing by herself. This works ok, as long as the realization does not hit her that no one is holding her, at which point we're back to tumblin', this time into a pile of cute making happy gurgling sounds, which I am convinced mean "Dad, check out what I did!".

My year has been awesome, folks, and the next one is promising to be even awesomerer. I wish you all the very best, for the new year, ...read more...

Being lazy here, but I suspect this will be quicker than trying to work it out myself :-)  I'm using dfaures's excellent scripts as detailed on techbase to build and run trunk in a local directory while still having a stable 4.1 desktop from packages.  It works wonderfully, execpt I can't seem to solve 2 issues.
1) When building kdeedu with the experimental Marble Python support turned on it tries to install marble.so to /usr/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/PyKDE4/, which I obviously don't want.  I've tried exporting PYTHON_SITE_PACKAGES_DIR as something local but that doesn't seem to do the trick.  Does anyone know what variable I do need to set?  This isn't a major issue now as it's now able to be turned off.
2) When trying to run the trunk startkde in Xephyr it fails, with the following being the apparently pertinant part of the log:
kdeinit4: preparing to launch /media/laptop/Programming/KDE/inst/kde4trunk/lib/kde4/libexec/klauncher                        
kdeinit4: Launched KLauncher, pid = 24785 result = 0                                                                         
klauncher(24785) kdemain: Waiting for already running klauncher to exit.                                                     
...read more...

# pkg install FOSSqt

• General hiding:
  
  
  
  • unhides triggered only where the panel is, not along whole screen edges, making non-full-width panels behave a bit nicer
  
  
  • unhides on drag enter, hides again on drag leave. I actually ended up implementing the first half of the XDnd protocol (X11 doesn't actually do drag and drop natively!) by hand using xlib calls to make this work. Every time I touch xlib I am reminded how much a I love Qt and KDE libs for making it possible to never touch xlib for anything sane. (Unfortunately, desktop shells involve all sorts of insanity. ;)
  
  
  
  
• Auto hiding: when the mouse leaves the panel, the panel hide; when it hits the screen edge it unhides. General features/improvements:
  
  
  
  • will not hide if a popup is shown, hides when the popup goes away if the mouse is not in the panel
  
  
  
  Compositing-only features:
  
  
  
  • Glow: when the mouse approaches, a small glow on the screen edge ...read more...

Quassel is an IRC client and service written in Qt. It can be used as a regular IRC client, or as a distributed client subscribed to a “core” IRC service running on a local or external server. This is similar to screening text-based chats on a dedicated server.

The purpose of the review was to determine if Quassel is a suitable Qt4 replacement for Konversation as the default IRC client in Kubuntu Jaunty. Previously, Kubuntu shipped Konversation (KDE3) as the default IRC client. Kubuntu Jaunty will be 100% KDE4. We need a replacement IRC client since Konversation and the Kopete IRC plugin are not expected to be ported by then.

Kubuntu uses IRC as a main communication method for user support. As such, we require an IRC client which is easy to set up and use. Using Quassel to connect to IRC to get user support was the primary use case for the review:

• Start Quassel
• Connect to irc.freenode.net
• Join #kubuntu
• (Optional) Change your nick

 
Overall, I got the impression that Quassel ...read more...

It is not just a comment , it is a Truth.

It becomes difficult when someone tries to translate technical documents as we don’t have proper words in our own language to describe all these technical/buzz words.

Few days back I suddenly got a mail from Jaganadh G telling that he started translated my small python book in Malayalam. You can see his ongoing work here. I am very sure that this is going to help many people to understand things easily as they will be reading in their mother toung.

Well, I've been extremely busy on the weather plasmoid and finally, '1.0' is ready for use. It's now moved to kdereview so that any final bugs can be shaken out. This should arrive in extragear as soon as the review is completed.

You'll notice some differences:

* New! Five day view. Special thanks to Marco Mart and Lee Olson also the wind icon.
* Dock applet to plasma panel thanks to Marco Martin for this.
* Tooltip support that displays the icon, place, condition and current temperature.
* Rearranged configuration dialog thanks to Davide Bettio for this.
* All the conversion combo boxes now work it you can mix and match any combinations.
* Clickable credits where present (depends on data source) this will take you to the original data from the source's website.
* Popup tooltips when you hover over the 5 day icons to show you what the condition will be.
* Clickable watches/warning links where present (depends on data source).
* If in Canada, if a watch or warning ...read more...

Today I got down and installed Ubuntu 8.10 on this new X300, and things went rather smoothly. I chose to use the ext3 filesystem on the flash disk, and not to create a swap partition (and opted to buy 4GB RAM for it).

In terms of things that work, the list is rather good. The wireless worked out of the box, sleep works, sound works, both batteries are detected, the graphics card works (with 3D acceleration) and general ACPI stuff works.

However, I have noticed a few problems.

First off (and this is really frustrating) - you can’t use the touchpad with the buttons from the TrackPoint (and vice versa). This means you can’t middle-click and drag using the touchpad. It’s frustrating because on my T43p you can, and I got into the habit of doing this because I find the buttons above are more conveniently located than the buttons beneath.

Secondly, it seems that display brightness adjustment sort of works, but keeps tripping over itself. For example, right now my screen is on 75% brightness but I can’t adjust ...read more...