Kasperian Moving Parts

KDE/Qt California People Sightings!!

Thursday October 30, 2008

I’m out in California this week (belated warning) again, WOOT! I got to spend another awesome weekend at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit. This year, Leo and I were the official KDE representatives, but Thiago, Simon, Ariya, and Olivier got to join in on the fun too. And then today and tomorrow are the Qt DevDays, where I finally got to meet blauzahl, greeneg, and hays, as well as catch up again with the Qt dudes and njaard. It’s a really, hectic, crazy week, trying to cram everything into it, and I’m tired as hell, but it’s been an awesome week thus far. Hopefully my body will hold off on the usual travelling sickness until I get home. Read more…

Desktop, KDE

Bringin’ Sexy (urxvt) Back

Wednesday October 22, 2008

Let me tell you a (short) tale, my children. In the dark but awesome olden days, before KDE and GNOME were but glimmers in the eyes of their current communities, there existed a bunch of scrappy hackers who would take the best X applications out there and hack them into submission to their will. Why, I don’t have time to tell you of the years where olvwm reigned supreme, nor of the dark days when wm2 brazenly rotated window titles 90 degrees and put window titlebars on the side *gasp!* of the windows, nor of the exciting times when AfterStep was KING, nor the outright courage shown by rasterman who started hacking fvwm2 to do his bidding in exciting and Read more…

Desktop, KDE, Linux

Replace Laptop Video Card? Replace Laptop? Give Up Hope?

Sunday October 12, 2008

I just read Alexander Dymo (adymo)’s blog post “KDE4 performance on NVidia 8600GT: problem solved by bying ATI” and am quite sad because I’m pretty sure that it’s impossible to rip out the nVidia Quadro NVS 140M that’s crammed into the motherboard on my laptop and replace it with an ATI (or Intel?) chip. I know I blogged recently about how zippy KDE 4.2/trunk was after the latest nVidia driver update, but it only takes running for about a day solid until the performance on this laptop becomes unbearable again. And I’m not even using Firefox–thinking that Opera would fare better being Qt4 and all. Also making me sad is the fact that all 5 of the things Alexander mentioned Read more…

Desktop, KDE

nVidia 177.80 Released!

Wednesday October 8, 2008

Holy crap. KDE 4.2 frickin’ flies! And contrary to my previous post, now if I set IPP=2, everything’s blazing fast and I’m actually able to resize konsole again! WooooooT!!! YAY progress!!! [[ UPDATE ]] : Added link to my previous post. I had already posted my xorg.conf settings and since then, the only thing I’ve changed was IPP=2 from IPP=1. HTH!

KDE, Linux

KDE 4.2 (trunk) Now Rocking On My Thinkpad T61!!!

Friday October 3, 2008

My work laptop and main computing device is a Thinkpad T61 with an nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 140M (rev a1) card. It’s been a frustrating last year in trying to run a KDE4 desktop as my main work and development environment because of the problems with the proprietary nVidia drivers that show up in KDE4. However, this little post is definitely more of a Huzzah!!! than a disgruntled grousing session. Lord knows we’ve had plenty of those. =:) Thanks to the folks at nVidia who are diligently working on improving the problems in their drivers!! Anyway, I’ve followed everything I could find on Lemma’s techbase pages and in the nVidia forums, but nothing has worked. Until now! I’m running the Read more…

Desktop, KDE, Linux

Multi-Monitor Setup On A Single Physical Head (Now Better!)

That’s a big title, eh? I blogged previously about setting up a multi-head X environment for development and testing, even though I’m working on a laptop with only one card. My previous attempt used Xdmx and multiple Xephyr displays, and there were some problems with it. Thankfully, Lubos commented about his nifty little fakexinerama library that achieves the same result only MUCH easier (easierly?) and without any of the problems that I’d seen using Xdmx/Xephyr(1..n). Here, then, is a description of what I’ve done and the results…. This is a screenshot from within the Xephyr session, showing the 1600×1200 Xephyr display. The cool thing is that using ksnapshot from within the Xephyr session will actually capture the entire display, not Read more…

Desktop, Linux

A Poor Man’s Multi-Monitor Setup On A Single Physical Head

Thursday September 25, 2008

Finally!! I’ve been trying to figure out how to do this for a while now. Namely, I need to be able to test multiple display stuff out in Linux and being that I use my laptop pretty much exclusively for development, and I don’t have mulitple physical monitors handy at home (and certainly not whilst travelling), I’ve been thus far unable to test anything multi-head-ish. But, thanks to Xdmx and Xephyr, this is now possible. Xephyr :3.0 -ac -br +xinerama -screen 600×400 & Xephyr :4.0 -ac -br +xinerama -screen 600×400 & Xdmx :5 -display localhost:3 -display localhost:4 +xinerama export DISPLAY=:5 openbox& xterm& So, the first 2 lines start up X-within-X displays on localhost:3 and localhost:4. The third line starts up Read more…

Life in General

The N810, Lack of PIM apps, and Palm OS VM

Friday September 19, 2008

So, about the biggest complaint that I have with the N810 thus far is that it doesn’t have good, syncable-with-my-Linux/KDE-desktop PIM apps. At least, none that I’ve seen yet. And yes, it would be super neato if I could run KDE PIM apps (korganizer, kaddressbook, etc.) on the N810, but that still doesn’t address the syncable-with-my-Linux/KDE-desktop problem. I have discovered, though, that the Access people (those who bought the Palm OS or something) are providing a Garnet (Palm OS) VM for the Maemo platform!!! You can find out more about it here and download it/install it on your N810 pretty easily. What this means is that you can run all of your Palm applications on your N810! I’ve not tested Read more…

Movies

Nokia N810 and Videos

Dear LazyWeb, I have ripped/encoded a bunch of (my own) movies previously in order to watch them on my PSP. The command I’ve been using is a variation of this: mencoder -sws 9 -af volume=10.1:0 \ -vf pullup,softskip,scale=320:240,harddup,unsharp=l3x3:0.7 \ -ofps 30000/1001 \ -oac faac -faacopts br=128:mpeg=4:object=2:raw -channels 2 -srate 48000 \ -ovc lavc -lavcopts aglobal=1:vglobal=1:vcodec=mpeg4:acodec=libfaac\ :abitrate=128:vbitrate=500 \ -of lavf -lavfopts format=psp \ -aid 128 dvd://1 -chapter 01-04 \ -o $HOME/Movies/Seinfeld/Seinfeld-Season5-11-TheConversion.mp4 … which plays fine on my PSP. Unfortunately, these mp4 movies do not play on my shiney new Nokia N810. I’ve tried using Canola, as well as the built-in media player application, and they both don’t recognize the data as something they can play. I tried installing MPlayer on the Read more…

Life in General

Nokia N810 and an 8 GB Micro/Mini SDHC Card

Thursday September 18, 2008

After reading about a whole lot of problems people have been having with SanDisk micro->mini SDHC card adapters on the N810, I bought this awesome little Kingston 8GB Micro SDHC Mobility Multi Kit Model MBLY/8GB over the weekend for only $30(!!) and just got it in the mail today. After figuring out how to actually put the thing in (label-side up like normal–it’s just a bit of a weird fit), I was pleasantly surprised to find that the N810 promptly displayed a “Memory card available” message and that I could use the card just fine. The 8GB card came pre-formatted as vfat (FAT32) and only reported as having 7.4GB available, which is, I guess, normal (albeit annoying). I reformatted the Read more…