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!! =:)

That’s right. For back in these dark days, even mentioning that you used a mouse could get you in a whole mess o’ trouble. And so this theming thing that you kids *Fluffy Bunny plasma theme? harumph!* take so much for granted now was focused mainly on customizing your X terminal emulator. And I’m not even talking about bash or zsh prompts. I’m talking about cramming your ~/.Xdefaults full of xrdb lines to tweak the snot out of your terminal emulator so that it was the coolest kid on the block. For the simpletons, there was the stodgy old xterm. But soon, along came rxvt, aterm, and the brazen Eterm. We didn’t have these fancy tabbed terminal emulators that you kids have now. We had 300 terminal windows stacked carefully and neatly on our 640×480 screens, and we LIKED it! *harumph again*

And so it is with feelings of nostalgia and inner-geekly warmth that I have started using rxvt (urxvt now) again as of late (try as I might, I can’t find aterm or Eterm OpenSUSE 11 rpms??). For reasons I will not go into here, having mostly to do with the nVidia card I have on my laptop I’m told, I’ve been using urxvt for the last week with really good results. It has been a week, almost exactly (`grep Time: /var/log/Xorg.0.log`), since I’ve restarted X, and I’m not seeing any slowdowns or desktop-switching-slowness. I really like Eterm–especially the font pseudo-shadowing–but I can’t seem to get it to do transparency in KDE4. urxvt, however, actually does ARGB visual transparent backgrounds!! `man 7 urxvt` tells the whole tale, but here is my ~/.Xdefaults that I’m quite happy with:

urxvt.background: rgba:0000/0000/0000/ccdd
urxvt.foreground: white
!urxvt.font: -artwiz-fkp-medium-r-normal–16-160-75-75-m-80-iso8859-1
!urxvt.boldfont: -artwiz-fkp-medium-r-normal–16-160-75-75-m-80-iso8859-1
urxvt.font: xft:Terminus:pixelsize=14
urxvt.scrollBar_right: 1
urxvt.scrollBar_floating: 1
urxvt.saveLines: 10000
urxvt.internalBorder: 5
urxvt.depth: 32
urxvt.scrollTtyOutput: 0
urxvt.scrollTtyKeypress: 1
urxvt.color12: rgba:6666/6666/ffff/ffff

Anyway, I’m quite happy with how urxvt is looking and acting with this setup in my KDE4 trunk desktop. And besides, there’s something about stacking 10 rxvt windows vertically and being able to see the last few lines of output from each simultaneously. =;) Oh, and here’s a screenshot showing an urxvt terminal with true ARGB transparent background:

Nuts.

If I was made of money, I’d be sorely tempted now to go looking for a personal laptop to replace this frustrating hunk of Thinkpad with. New macbooks come out on Tuesday, no?

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??

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. =:)