Yesterday was an awesome end to an otherwise already pretty good week. I got to play Tetrinet with my team at work and while this may not seem like a big deal, it was to me. Being that I’m currently working remotely, it’s very easy to feel isolated and alone and disconnected most of the time. Until I figure out how to build a virtual presence robot (like Twiki, maybe, except instead of  Dr. Theopolis hanging around his neck, it would be a webcam of me?!?), I don’t get many opportunities to feel a part of my team and get the kind of feedback that you normally get in a job by seeing how people react to you just by being around them. But anyway, it was a WHOLE lot of fun. I had never heard of, much less played, Tetrinet before yesterday, and I got my butt kicked soundly. But the camaraderie and laughter and fun was exactly what I needed.

On Tuesday, I got to spend the whole day in my dining room with a friend and co-worker from VMware and got some really cool Linux work done. It was actually some really sweet stuff that he did earlier in the year as part of his internship, but part of it got backed out due to Windows build issues. We worked through all of the issues (and found a couple of problems in GlibMM along the way) and he brought me up to speed with the features and implementation details and we did a pretty good job at documenting it all to boot. I can’t say exactly what it is, just yet, but if you’re a fan of VMware’s Unity mode (guest VM windows showing up inside your host, like normal windows instead of being contained inside the guest OS window), this work will make things just that much cooler. I’m working on Unity stuff for our next Workstation and Player releases and I’m hoping we get to include this coolness!

I’ve been using the Logitech VX Revolution Cordless Laser Mouse for a couple of years now and it is extremely cool. The neatest thing about it (other than the fact that it works perfectly in Linux and has a gazillion buttons, and the little storage compartment inside the mouse for the USB dongle) is the scroll wheel. They call it a “hyper-fast scroll wheel” and it is just that–you give it a good flick and it keeps going and going and going… awesome fun and really useful for long documents/web pages. But last week, I saw the Logitech Optical Marble Mouse and after reading all the reviews and talking to a friend who had 5 of them and loved them, I decided to give it a try, and I absolutely love it. It has the same kind of scrolling awesomeness as the VX Revolution wherein you flick it with your fingers and it keeps going much longer than a normal mouse wheel (albeit not nearly as long as the VX), but it also keeps your hand stationary to help prevent or improve RSI problems. It took just a few hours to get used to it after having used a normal rodent for decades, and it is now my favorite mouse. But it does take a little bit of configuring…

Silly me, but I am so used to having to hack things to do my bidding in Linux that I wasted a bunch of hours researching how to get the Marble Mouse to do horizontal and vertical scrolling. You see, the mouse only has 4 buttons, and no scroll wheel, so you use X’s EmulateWheel option and then tell it which mouse button to use (EmulateWheelButton) so that when you hold that button down and move your mouse, instead of moving the mouse cursor, it scrolls in that direction. REALLY cool! It seems, however, that the particulars of how to configure this mouse in X changes with each vesion of X, or at least between distributions. BUT, if you’re using OpenSUSE 11.1 as I am, just use YaST and change one of your mouse definitions to be the “Logitech TrackMan Marble FX (PS/2)” (even though you’re connecting it through USB), and you’ll find that it works beautifully (DOH! Should have tried that first!!!). I set my EmulateWheelButton to “8″, which is the little button on the left side of the mouse. I’m LOVING it! BTW, if you’re using Ubuntu Intrepid, there’s a drastically different way to get this working involving either HAL fdi files or a simple xinput script. Anyway, if you find yourself using this mouse and getting stuck on how to get it to scroll, add a comment to this post and I’ll provide more details.

I also got a chance to spend some time on Ye Olde KPilot this week, which felt really good. Truth be told, it’s darned necessary and scary, since KDE 4.2 is nearing release any day now. But I fixed a bunch of KPilot issues (layout, configure dialog, crashes, sync problems) and even got KPilot to successfully sync my calendar and contacts once. I need to spend some more time this weekend in trying out different sync scenarios to make sure we’re rock solid before the release, but the good news is that contrary to previous versions of KPilot, we’ve tried extra-special-hard to not lose your data. You may find that (right now), we err on the side of giving you  more data than less, meaning possible duplicates until we get those bugs fixed. So, right now would be a really good time for all you KPilot users (both of them?) to come on out and help us test KPilot. We have about a week to find and fix any problems. =:/ Oh, and I also went through the open Ubuntu KPilot bugs and triaged them a bit too, which felt good.

Along those lines, I actually did get a chance to talk to a couple of KPilot users this week (both of them, I think!!) and look through some problems they were having. I spent a large chunk of time looking into a bizarre problem a Kubuntu KPilot user was having from the Kubuntu 4.2 beta2 packages. Along the way, I learned how to find the kde_plugin_version in one of our .so’s (“gdb foo.so” and then “p kde_plugin_version”), and I added some debugging that should have been there all along anyway in KPilot, so it’s not all bad. But it turns out that the Ubuntu KPilot package is missing libkpilot_akonadibase.so, and so none of the new conduits work. I’ve discussed things with Jonathon Thomas on the Ubuntu bug page and this should be fixed for the next Ubuntu KPilot packages.

Before I started testing KPilot, though, I needed to get my PIM data in order. I’ve been meaning to put my contacts and calendar into Google for a while now, and this was the perfect time to do that. So I found this neat LifeHacker page about using Dropbox and KeePass for synchronizing all your private and important information, and cleaned up my contact information and put everything that could be considered sensitive or important into KeePassX, which is REALLY nice, and I highly recommend it. Excellent functionality, good strong encryption, and a beautiful Qt4 GUI to boot. I’ve not looked into using Dropbox yet, but that’s just an added benefit. After that, it was a simple matter of wasting 3 hours trying to format my kaddressbook-exported-to-csv file into something that Google likes, pulling my hair out, finally giving up in frustration, saving my std.vcf file to a shared drive, opening it up with OS X, importing it into the Mac address book, and then using A to G to create a CSV file and then importing that into Gmail’s contacts. *sigh* What a pain in the butt!! Someone seriously needs to write a Python script for this or something. Honestly.

I also discovered, much to my chagrin, that Firefox and Konqueror both consume ungodly amounts of memory with a 16-meg web page (to the point of exhausting all of my real and virtual memory and crashing X), like the error page I was getting from our internal sandbox compile machine, but Opera handles it beautifully. So I’m using Opera again, quite happily. Oh, and since Google now allows you to customize your Gmail keybindings, I can finally get around the annoyance of “#” not working for “delete”!! I’ve set up “d” for “delete” and now my Opera/Gmail experience is glorious again. Now, if we could just get THEMES in Google Apps For Your Domain, that would be AWESOME!

And in closing, the latest Street Fighter IV videos from shoryuken.com look amazing! I’m going to have to go to GameStop today and plunk down my pre-order money.

So my current “solution” involves using OWASync to pull down my Exchange calendar, crontabbed shell scripts plus some KDE ical code to 1-way-merge it into my personal calendar, a constantly-running GCalDaemon that takes it all and merges it in with Google Calendar, and KPilot which does its own merging with my KOrganizer std.ics file. Um. Yuck! This sucks! And there is weirdness that happens betwixt all the moving parts when anything non-standard happens, like updated Exchange meetings, timezone translation, etc., etc. And I’m pretty sure it’s not going to work with KDE4 and Akonadi being that all of this is operating directly on the raw ics files. And I guess that’s the real answer, eventually–Akonadi–however, I don’t believe that all the pieces are there yet. *sigh*

Does anyone have any better solutions for this? The biggest missing pieces seem to be:

• PIM (Calendar, Contacts, ToDos, Notes) software that syncs with a Linux desktop (or hell, even Google resources directly) for the Nokia N810/Maemo.
• A KDE bridge for Exchange.
• A KDE bridge for Google Calendar/Contacts/etc.

*grouse*

I can just feel the momentum behind us, can’t you?

If this were a corporation, right about now, you’d expect to see some old dude get up in front of everybody, work himself into a frenzy, run around on stage (“developers, developers, developers”?), and try to get everybody motivated to keep pushing hard at making our software the most awesomest, bestest, most stablest thing you could ever want.

But we’re not a corporation (thank God!!).

And we don’t have an old, sweaty, balding dude to put up on stage and try to whip everybody into being motivated (also, thank God!).

We just have us. And that is the magic of Open Source. It is up to us to keep our momentum going, to not give up, to keep pushing ourselves harder, to keep improving our software stack, to keep squashing bugs, to try to have the best desktop environment possible.

So keep up the awesome work, everybody. You’re doing it right!! =:)

Me (vanRijn), blauzahl, hays, and greeneg.

Thiago, Olivier, Frans, Simon, Ariya, Alex (blauzahl), Harri Porten, Andreas Pakulat, greeneg, me (vanRijn), hays, and Charles (njaard).

Me and Leo! Unfortunately, I was an idiot and this was the only shot I got of we two KDE GSOC mentors.

KDE threesome (Thiago, Jason, and Leo), plus the Qt foursome (Thiago, Ariya, Simon, and Olivier), meet the Android!! Oooooh, Aaaaaah! We’re not sure what the dog’s name is. =:/

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!

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 latest beta from nVidia (177.78). I also discovered that for me, contrary to what everyone else seems to be saying, if I use InitialPixmapPlacement=2, performance is MUCH worse than if I use InitialPixmapPlacement=1. Using the benchmarking tools from the techbase page, I found that on the Penrose Tiling test, using Opera, the Canvas test would take up to 30 seconds for me if I did “nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1″ before running it. However, if I did “nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=1 -a GlyphCache=1″ instead, then the Canvas test only took around 2.5 seconds. WOW! So I added “nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=1 -a GlyphCache=1″ to my X startup script and was very pleased to discover that KDE 4.2 now is VERY usable on my little laptop!!! Again, HUZZAH!!!

For completeness, then, here is the Screen section  from my xorg.conf:

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Screen0″
Device “Device0″
Monitor “Monitor0″
DefaultDepth 24
Option “RenderAccel” “True”
#Option “RandRRotation” “True”
Option “UseEdidFreqs” “False”
#Option “UseInt10Module” “True”
Option “TwinView” “1″
#Option “TwinViewOrientation” “Clone”
Option “TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder” “DFP-0″
#Option “UseCompositeWrapper” “True”
Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “True”
Option “DisableGLXRootClipping” “True”
Option “DamageEvents” “True”
Option “TripleBuffer” “True”
Option “UseEvents” “True”
#Option “DynamicTwinView” “True”
Option “FlatPanelProperties” “DFP: Scaling = Centered; CRT: Scaling = Centered, Dithering = Enabled”
Option “OnDemandVBlankInterrupts” “True”
Option “PixmapCacheSize” “2000000″
Option “AllowSHMPixmaps” “False”
Option “BackingStore” “True”
#Option “NvAGP” “3″
#Option “ConnectedMonitor” “DFP”
Option “metamodes” “CRT: 1680×1050 +0+0, DFP: 1680×1050 +0+0″

SubSection “Display”
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection

To be honest, I am not 100% sure which of the recently-changed variables in my setup have resulted in this improving so drastically–whether the new nVidia driver beta (177.78), the xorg.conf changes, or the InitialPixmapPlacement=1 change–but the end result is that I’m now able to use KDE 4.2 (trunk) quite happily and I’m thoroughly stoked about it.

Hope this helps some other poor soul out there. Oh–also, does it sound far-fetched that IPP=1 would work better for me than IPP=2??

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 just what fits on your host display. This is important for me because my laptop LCD display is only 1680×1050, so I can’t actually fit the entire Xephyr display inside my real physical display. Nice to know, definitely, since this means that I can create a monstrous Xephyr display that doesn’t fit inside my actual host display and still get full-display snapshots out of it. So what you see here is a KDE3 session spanning all 4 Xinerama heads. Kicker correctly only spans head 1. VMware Workstation is on head 2, in full-screen mode, but only full-screened on the second head. It can span more than 1 head as I’ll show further down.

To achieve this, I downloaded seli’s fakexinerama library, compiled it in ~/build/ like this:

gcc -O2 -Wall Xinerama.c -fPIC -o libXinerama.so.1.0 -shared
ln -s libXinerama.so.1.0 libXinerama.so.1
ln -s libXinerama.so.1 libXinerama.so

I then copied the real /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1.0.0 to /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1.0.0.real (make sure you backup your library!) and set up an alias in my ~/.profile so that I can easily switch on and off this fake xinerama library. When I start up my real host session, I don’t want to be using fakexinerama, but when I launch my Xephyr session for multimon development, I do need it to be there.

xin () {
if [ "$1" = "real" ]
then
sudo cp /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1.0.0.real /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1.0.0
elif [ "$1" = "fake" ]
then
sudo cp ~/builds/libXinerama.so.1.0 /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1.0.0
else
echo “real or fake?”
fi
}

Here’s the contents of my ~/.fakexinerama config file:

#Configuration file ~/.fakexinerama
#
# The format of the file is rather strict. Lines beginning with # are comments. First line is one
# number, specifying number of screens. This line must be followed by this number of lines, each
# containing four numbers: X Y W H, i.e. screen’s X and Y origin, width and height.
4
0 0 800 600
800 0 800 600
0 600 800 600
800 600 800 600

This establishes a 2×2 4-head xinerama configuration. Next up is creating the Xephyr display. From within your regular host session:

Xephyr :2.0 -ac -br +xinerama -screen 1600×1200 &
xterm -display :2&

You should now have a single Xephyr screen that’s 1600×1200 pixels with an xterm running inside of it. Now switch focus to the new xterm window and turn on the fakexinerama library and start up a KDE3 session:

xin fake
startkde
# (and when you’re done with this little environment, make sure you return your system to sanity by running “xin real”)

That’s about it. Really cool stuff. One last little screenshot… This one shows VMware Workstation spanning multiple heads. This obviously works with real external monitors as well. The way it works is by clicking the little monitor button to the right of the “View” menu. This tells Workstation to cycle through the available display topologies. So, on first press, Workstation spread across all 4 heads (fullscreen multimonitor, largest topology). Second press took on this configuration that I screengrabbed (vertical span). Third press spread Workstation horizontally across the first 2 heads. And then 4th press returned Workstation to just fullscreen on head 2 (where I started it from).

One last thought on the subject… One of the things I’m hopefully going to be able to work on in the next couple of months is implementing the new EWMH _NET_WM_FULLSCREEN_MONITORS hint in various X window managers. Currently, Workstation does some internal gyrations to convince window managers to allow our undecorated fullscreen window to maximize over multiple monitors/heads. _NET_WM_FULLSCREEN_MONITORS was the hint that was recently added to the EWMH spec to correctly accomplish this, but as far as I know, it hasn’t been added to any window managers yet. I’m excited about getting the chance to get up to speed on some window manager internals again! It’s been a while since I’ve last had the chance to do that (bbkeys/blackbox days of yore!).

Anyway, hope this helps someone else set up a multi-head dev/test environment, should the need arise. =:)

It started to hit me yesterday as I spent 3.5 hours in this year’s KDE Google Summer of Code mentor’s meeting (thanks again sebr!!). KDE4 just plain rocks, and it feels good to start getting excited about it again. And I don’t just mean KDE 4.0. Don’t get me wrong, KDE4.0 is a nice little release. It’s not perfect and there are some things that are irritating about it and keep me from using it as my main DE. But like Aaron has been saying over and over and over again, KDE4.0 is not KDE4. KDE4.0 is more of a preview of things to come, and what I see coming just plain kicks butt.

I am finally getting excited about our PIM space again, and that feels really, really good. KMail, KOrganizer, KPilot, and the rest of our PIM suite was what drew me to KDE in the 3.x series. (Well, that and quite honestly I find the intentional dumbing-down and lack of configurability of the other large, free DE irritating to the point of exhaustion.) But lately our PIM apps have suffered from lack of care and have started to look seriously unsexy compared with Thunderbird, Sunbird, and even *gasp* Evolution. But KDE4 gives us a chance to remedy that, in my mind, and looking at this year’s Summer of Code projects, I’m hoping we get some really nice improvements done. There’s a few really sweet ones that I’d love to see get accomplished: the Google Contacts/Calendar integration into Akonadi and thusly KDE PIM, the enhanced KMail view, and (nearest and dearest to my heart) getting KPilot fully functional, and rock solid for KDE4.

And going through the SOC-sorting meeting made me realize all over again how fantastic a community it is that we have in KDE. There’s a lot of respect and comaradarie and friendliness that I just don’t see in some other communities. Not to mention the quality of talented people that we have. PIM might have drawn me to KDE, but it’s the people and our awesome community that we have that has kept me. =:)

Anyway, I just had to say that it feels really, really good to be excited about KDE4 again. In my mind, it’s a really unique opportunity to do something fresh and new and fun and exciting again. It’s a chance to learn from past mistakes and do better. It’s a chance to take the fantastic functionality that we have and rethink how our users can best interact with it. It’s a chance to not be bound to the past and to not have to be stuck with the same old presentation layer we have just because we don’t want to make drastic changes to our applications.

As the pretty graphic says, KDE4 is truly a chance to be free. =:)