KDE 4.2 is flat out going to rock
That's my prediction. Of course, the truth of the matter is that KDE 4.2 (trunk) flat out rocks today. Seriously. I have never been more excited about the Linux desktop than I am right now. And this, 2+ months out from our actual KDE 4.2 release. I've been running OpenSUSE 11 for a couple of months now, and thanks to the awesome nightly/weekly KDE 4.2/trunk packages, I'm thoroughly enjoying pretty-darned-bleeding-edge 4.2/trunk packages, but with half the carbs, and I am loving what I'm seeing! Recent KMail improvements are awesome. Plasma is getting more and more bullet-proof and gorgeous by the week. Kwin just keeps getting more and more stable and purty. Kdevelop4 and Kate are getting some SERIOUSLY cool enhancements and RAD-helping juju. Even our lowly KPilot has been getting some bugzilla lovin' from yours truly lately, and I'm about half-way through porting the old memofile conduit to our groovy base conduit syncing goodness. Whereas a few months ago, I just could not use KDE4 as my main work environment (gots ta make a living too, don'tcha know!), I have long-since switched and am thrilled with what we have right now. (of course, BIG thanks to the Linux nVidia team for improving their X11 driver!!!)
KDE/Qt California People Sightings!!
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. =:/ Here's some pics from the last few days...
Bringin’ Sexy (urxvt) Back
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 gothic ways. No, sadly, I do not have time to even speak of the days when brave young nyztihke (hi Brad!) started creating his own Blackbox window manager, nor of the intrepid WindowMaker clan (WINGs, anyone?). But back in these ancient days of yore, the killer application wasn't Thunderbird, Firefox, Evolution, nor even xdaliclock. No, my children. The killer application of these dark times was... *pregnant pause* the terminal emulator. (and, incidentally, mutt still kicks butt, but I digress...)
Replace Laptop Video Card? Replace Laptop? Give Up Hope?
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 as problems have plagued me for the last year and that they're all still there. I didn't realize that the system tray icon corruption problem only happened on nVidia cards. I thought it was a KDE4 bug. =:(
nVidia 177.80 Released!
KDE 4.2 (trunk) Now Rocking On My Thinkpad T61!!!
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. =:)
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....
A Poor Man’s Multi-Monitor Setup On A Single Physical Head
The N810, Lack of PIM apps, and Palm OS VM
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.
Nokia N810 and Videos
Dear LazyWeb,