Irc-Unix.net

So I have switched to KDE SC 4.5 Beta 1 on my production systems now. This is about the perfect time to play with the system a bit. And looking at my mostly empty Plasma dashboard, I figured that the Search & Launch interface (as known from Plasma netbook) would fit in there quite well.

Looking around, there is no configuration interface to configure the dashboard (apart from the “Show desktop widgets” vs. “Show an independent widget set” option), but the code reveals that the dashboard is just another containment, so one should be able to replace it. And yes, there is a way to do so:

1. Set the aforementioned option (which you find in System Settings in the workspace options) to “Show an independent widget set”.
2. Run “kquitapp plasma-desktop” (e.g. from KRunner) to shutdown Plasma. I had to do this multiple times because Plasma restarted automatically (which IMO should not happen with kquitapp).
3. Open plasma-desktop-appletsrc in a text editor. If you do not know where to look for this file, use the following command in a terminal to find it: ...read more...

Google employees have always had a remarkable amount of freedom when it comes to what operating system they wanted to run on company computers - Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, it was all fine.

Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/01/10 15:10 UTC, submitted by Marquis Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/31/10 11:37 UTC, submitted by madmalkav Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/28/10 22:59 UTC, submitted by joekiser KOffice 2.2 , the office suite for KDE, has been released.

Warning: technical babbling following.

As some of you might know from unofficial sources – I am working on bringin Ubuntu One to the KDE workspace. After I spent one month binding with the community it is now time to start talking about the important parts of life.

Namely: “How do I properly work with a JSON object”

It is more of a secret but there is a Ubuntu One server-side REST API to query all sorts of more or less useful information. From my point of view it is not the information that is interesting though, but how to make it useful in a Qt app .

So, this REST API returns a JSON “object”, and of course using JSON objects (which really are just strings, or rather variants of strings and other variant datatypes) is sort of ugly and horrible and defeats the concept of object-oriented programming. What’s more is that using those variants directly exposes internals such as actual names, instead of providing stable interfaces indepdent of the backing members. Clearly we want ...read more...

Telepathy StreamTube in KDE

Ok, maybe it doesn’t make sense at the moment, you’ll have to wait a few more weeks to get something useful…

A short note.

The KDE Release Team has decided to make a KDE SC 4.4.5 release. So please remember to continue backporting your bug fixes into the 4.4 branch.

The Schedule
June 24th, 2010: Tag KDE 4.4.5
June 29th, 2010: Release KDE 4.4.5

There are some annoying issues and crashes in KDE 4 (and particularly in KRunner and Nepomuk) that are related to the thread-safety (or, rather, thread-non-safety) of libdbus-1.  kde-core-devel has seen some discussion about this recently.

There is a patch that fixes the issue, but it won’t make it into D-Bus before dbus-1.4, due to the fact that it changes the library behaviour and could potentially break bindings.  Thiago has confirmed that the change doesn’t break the Qt bindings, and (from the bug report), no-one has found any other bindings it breaks.

This is all just background on why, if you are running Arch Linux, you might want to check out the dbus-core-mt package on the AUR.  It’s dbus-core-1.2.24, as found in core, but with the afformentioned patch applied.  Note, however, that you use it at your own risk – it should improve KDE, but it may well break other stuff.

While Microsoft is indeed incredibly profitable, it's not going as well as it seems.

In KDE Partition Manager there are three dialogs dealing with a partition sizes, all of them using the same code base internally. These dialogs are: the dialog to create a new partition, the one to resize an existing partition and the dialog to insert a copied or imported partition.

One thing that was not really optimal in version 1.0 was that partition alignment (and we all remember from the last installment what an important topic that is) took place outside of those dialogs and therefore after the user had accepted the changes.

Alignment Again

In other words, the user makes a size adjustment in one of the dialogs and only after he has finished doing so is alignment taken into account. In an extreme worst-case scenario the alignment code will have to make the partition smaller than the user intended it to be. In that case a warning will be printed. This is a very unlikely scenario, but it can happen.

So that was the situation in 1.0. What has improved with ...read more...

It's time for Computex! This means loads of gadgets and related stuff to flood the internet, so let's get started by focussing on ASUS.

As in 2008 and 2009, a new digiKam and kipi-plugins developers reunion is planned in Europe. This year, i proud to announce that i will organize the event in south of France, in the nice city of Aix en Provence.

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I have said it over and over again, Linux installations needs a Welcome Screen. This would be a huge help for new users who often are not sure where to turn for help, or what Linux is all about.

First sorry people by my late in report something in GSoC, but now i have some results to show to you.
This is my first post about GSoC with some progress, here i will describe a little of the include system in development.
The idea behind Rocs’ include system is to make the user capable of reuse the algorithms without copy paste (this make a simple algorithm file become huge and is not guaranteed that a method is the most actual).
To over with all this copy/paste and update all the files with some method, we bring to you this feature.

Now just put your algorithms in a directory and tell to Rocs where is it and just:

include ( my_file.js)

and you got it! all that methods and algorithms very useful

Now to the questions:

How Rocs know where is my files?
To make more confortable to user, he/she just say to Rocs to seek in some directories, like /home/homie/JsScripts;/other/path/.
Rocs will search in that two folder. ...read more...

KOffice 2.2 , the office suite for KDE, has been released. New features include import filters for Office 2007 thanks to Nokia, and the return of the Access clone Kexi .

This week on KDEMU we introduce Gabriel Saldana one of the co-hosts of KDEMU, we talk about KDE Mexico, his life as a rock star and emacs identi.ca mode. We also have Listener Submitted Content by Harald & Frederik of KDE Fluffy Pink Desktop fame!

What is KDEMU you ask? It’s an *all* KDE show that will cover a wide range of KDE topics, releases, interviews with developers, etc.

If you are a KDE contributor and want to talk about your work in KDE, want to submit Listener Submitted Content or just want to co-host a show or two, feel free to email me or use the contact form in my website.

Check KDE and the Masters of the Universe – 2010-05-30 out and tell us what you think! COMMENT ON IT. :-)

Also if you didn’t catch Animus Me’s latest episode Animus Me – 2010-05-25 check it out now.

This year I am taking part in the Google Summer of Code program. The project I am going to work on is the improvement of R language support in Cantor mathematical environment written by Alexander Rieder. The project includes both regular fixes aiming to bring the functionality of different Cantor's languages on par, and other more ambitious goals which revolve around upgrading Cantor itself which would allow to turn it into a serious and appealing working environment for R programmers. Following is the list of planned improvements:

• Syntax highlighting and tab-completion — the obvious commodity of many environments still lacks in Cantor for the R language. In the scope of the project it is planned to fully implement the syntax highlighting feature, highlighting of invalid code constructs, symbol completion from the working environment, available commands etc;
• Environment browser. The workplace in R is called an environment, which is composed of object the user has allocated. For the ease of the user a panel ...read more...

Good news, everyone. Cantor's R backend now has gained the same level of tab-completion as the original CLI R does, at least I want to believe in it. Turned out to be much easier than I originally thought as R comes with its own strong core tab-completion infrastructure, isolated from the interface code. So, even though it works, I'm not actually proud of the code and it has lots of stubs for those unlikely-to-happen situations. However those, who are using Cantor with R already are hereby welcomed to grab the r1132179 version of SoC-Cantor directory and play with it around for a while to make sure it works as intended in a regular workflow.

KOffice 2.2 , the office suite for KDE, has been released. New features include import filters for Office 2007 thanks to Nokia, and the return of the Access clone Kexi .

As some of you might have seen, KOffice 2.2.0 was finally released today. Quoting the release announcement:

“There are still areas in the user interface that we want to work on before stating that KOffice is fit for the general public. We are, however, at a stage where we think that KOffice can be used for real work by some users.”

I agree with this statement and it is still to be decided if KOffice 2.2.0 will make it into Squeeze. I am inclined to do so but I would love some well argumented feedback. Take into consideration some applications are more mature than others.

The packages will be uploaded to the official archive soon, but they still need some minor work and given they include new deb files (kformula shape and kexi), they need to go thru the NEW queue, it might take some time.

Meanwhile, you can find packages for amd64 & i386 from the semi-official repository at: http://qt-kde.debian.net/.
You also have available the localization ...read more...

Actually it is impossible to collect all achieved results in one single article. Compared to all other events we went to, this was the most productive one and we will need months to actually work on all that will need to be done. Let's try to point out what interests our users most: language learning.

Up to now we only considered Parley and KHangman, well ... time to broaden our list of “interesting software” with learning Alphabets: Klettres is the new bit we decided to add. But for now let's center on Parley.

During the past months we collected data with means of tables and finally, just a couple of weeks ago Ambaradan went online. Right now we still don't edit there, but it is only a matter of time. What we already can do is provide data. The sprint gave us the possibility to run a test of for applications: Parley and ...read more...

Every once in a while I write a post related to relations between lancelot and kmail or kopete.

This time it is only to notify you that until KMail2 arrives*, the ‘unread mail’ section in Lancelot will not work since L in SC 4.5 switched to Akonadi.

* if PIM devs don’t miss the initial plan, it will be for 4.5.1

I added some new options to Krazy in the past few days. Hope folks find them useful.

1. You can now control the types of files to process with the new --types and --exclude-types options.

   Use the --list-types option to see what file types are supported.

   Examples:
   

   # Run all checks against desktop and designer files in this directory:
% krazy2 --types=desktop,designer  *
   # Run all checks on all file types except C++ files:
% krazy2all --exclude-types=c++

2. Krazy now supports "check-sets" with the new --check-sets option. Check-sets are a collection of checkers with a similar high level purpose in mind.
   Check-sets currently available:
   * c++, pure C++ checks
   * qt4, Qt4 source (C++, QML, Qt Designer files)
   * kde4, everything (the default)
   * foss, checks specific to FOSS (eg. license and copyright)

   Use the --list-sets option to see what check-sets are supported.

   Examples:
   

   # Only check for pure C++ issues:
% krazy2 --check-set=c++ *
   # Only check for pure Qt4 issues:
% krazy2all --check-set=qt4

Wait! There's ...read more...