Fedora provides a nice RPM-OSTree solution for folks who want to use the tech, but don’t want to use Gnome. The install is a bit barebones and doesn’t come with Flathub pre-configured, reducing the number of KDE applications that can be installed after the distro is first installed. Once Flathub is activated and Discover is reloaded, the user can start installing KDE apps. Not a good starting distro now, but with some sensible defaults, it could be great thanks to the way that RPM-OSTree makes the system more maintainable.
When I first started programming it was just at the prompt of my Tandy computer. Then it was in the QBasic text editor on the IBM computers at school. But when I started programming again with “real” languages, I ended up going with Emacs. Although I was first annoyed at the way commands like save were prefixed, it became my favorite editor. I think that was partially because of diving headfirst into the free software movement and partially because I didn’t like vi’s different modes and how annoying that made things if you didn’t realize you weren’t in the text entry mode. Eventually, I moved on to Kate because I love KDE (been running it as my main desktop for over 10 years now) and I loved the features it enabled. Also, since vi (or vim) is found EVERYWHERE while Emacs usually requires installation, I ended up switching to vi whenever I’m ssh’d into a computer. If you add plugins like powerline, it can be pretty awesome to use. Even on my desktop if I’m editing /etc/fstab I’m more likely to pull up vi than the weight of KDE (not that it takes up THAT much RAM).
As KDE 5 reaches 5.2 and many begin to debate its features (this is a small evolution on 4 compared to the difference between 3 and 4) there has been an ever-increasing assertion that Activities are pointless. (At least it appears that way to me) I wanted to share how I use Activities, why they make me more productive, and why they’re the biggest feature keeping me on KDE.
So, I have lots of Activities: Main, Media, School, Photography, Video Games, Video Editing, Programming, and Reading. In its current implementation, each Activity must have the same number of virtual desktops; three in my case. In each activity I make use of different widgets. On nearly all of them are the brilliant folder view and application launcher widgets. These allow me to quickly see the folders relevant to the task at hand. In the case of the Multimedia activity, desktop 1, this is very useful for my workflow. Let’s look at that desktop:
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
The biggest takeaway which is SOOOOO crazy is how much Scarlett has changed in just 1 year. Only 365 days. And she looks COMPLETELY different!
Around a year ago I decided to KDE in Spanish to learn some technical terms. Back then I was using GDM, but now I’m using KDM. I didn’t see a way to set the language! How would I change the language to Spanish? I took a look online and found instructions. I’m going to reproduce them here for others. The great thing about the way that KDE handles things vs the way that Gnome does is that you can set a fallback language. When might this be useful? Let’s take a Vietnamese computer user. Vietnamese people (at least of a certain age) tend to be fluent in Vietnamese and French with some familiarity with English. So a Vietnamese person could set his computer to Vietnamese with a fallback to French for any programs that didn’t have translations into Vietnamese. As usual, I LOVE the level of customization in the KDE desktop.
I did it! I have created my first ever useful GUI program. After all these years of thinking that all the useful GUIs had already been invented - I found an itch to scratch. And here’s how the final, working version looks:
And so there it is! I was actually surprised that this last little bit of the program wasn’t as hard to finish up as I thought it would be. So, as currently implemented, when the plasmoid loads up it makes the data engine fill itself. Once that’s complete you can click on the buttons along the top to load up all the photos from that group that are ready to be promoted to the next group. Clicking on a particular photo loads up the small thumbnail. View on flickr allows you to jump to the website in case you want or need to do that. Originally I implemented it so that if the next part was hard, I’d at least have the functionality of the command line version of this software. Then came the new part that happens to be easier in a GUI than on the commandline. You can add the photo to the next group and remove it from the current one. The reason I did it that way was so that if the photo couldn’t be added to the next group, it wouldn’t be removed from the current one. I tested it first with a fake group and then the real thing and it works fine. Before I post the code for my data engine and plasmoid, I have some cleaning up to do. I also need to add in a bit more functionality for robustness. After that, if I’m going to make it so that anyone can use it (and post it on kde-look.org), I will need to do some extra work. So that’s version 0.1. For version 0.2 here’s what I’d have on my TODO list:
OK, so it’s been a year since I last blogged about working on this program. I tried working on the data engine in August and then got stuck right around the time I started my first semester of grad school so I had to drop it, even though it got stuck in my head and I was thinking about it for weeks until the light bulb went off. I wrote my idea and just had the idea to work on it recently. I have to say that, overall, QML is pretty awesome for making a quick GUI. I’ve always struggled with GUI code, but with QML I was able to put together a quick GUI in about 20 minutes. Now, don’t judge QML too harshly because my plasmoid looks ugly. It looks ugly because I just put together the minimum GUI to implement grabbing data from my Data Engine. Once I get everything working right, I’ll fix it up. After all, GUIs are really so easy in QML that it can be the icing on the cake in the end.
So I took a look at Blogilo a few days ago. So, taking a look at my Blogilo post I have to say that it is pretty much ALMOST there for the perfect offline blogging tool for someone using Wordpress. Sure, it doesn’t allow your to create categories, but a blog like mine that’s been around for ~7 years probably has all the categories it needs. The extra fidelity can come from tags which Blogilo hands just fine.
For the most part, I haven’t seen the point of using blog editors like Blogilo. While there might have been a purpose to them back in the dialup days, it seems pointless in the days of always on broadband connections. Also, back before blog software like Wordpress had their great visual editors, I could see the need. However, I guess I could see some use for it on my laptop. I often compose blog posts on there in a text editor when I’m traveling. It would be nice to have it all formatted correctly and ready to go when I got an internet connection rather than have to load up Wordpress then spend time formatting it when I could have done that on my laptop while I didn’t have a connection.
I’ve been reading a lot about kde-telepathy and it seems to be the next evolution beyond Kopete. So I decided to check it out in my Fedora Rawhide VM since that’s going to have the latest packages and telepathy is still in deep beta. When I installed all the packages that seemed to be important, I got the following when I launched it from the alt-F2 menu.
[caption id=“attachment_5130” align=“aligncenter” width=“384” caption=“kde-telepathy accounts menu in Fedora Rawhide (F17)”] [/caption]
Back when I first started using Linux I was using a very underpowered computer that I got donated as part of my research at school. So OpenOffice.org was a real pain in the butt to use. It took forever to load! KOffice, on the other hand, loaded up quickly. At that time, with KOffice 1, they had the presentation program, the spreadsheet, and the word processing program.
At the time there were two neat things about KWord that I really liked and they both stemmed from something I was doing at the time. I was the head of the Phi Sigma Pi (scholastic frat) alumni team. We had a newsletter to get out. Turned out that KWord, as it worked at the time, allowed for very easy desktop publishing. I don’t think it was intended to replace Scribus, but when compared to Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Writer, it was MUCH easier to set the layout. That made it really easy to create. With MS Word (at least 2000 and 2003) it was SUCH a PITA to try and get images where you wanted to be and to have text properly wrap around it. We had all kinds of issues in this class I took my sophomore year in which we had a tutorial class session on how to do this and it was still horrible to work with. KWord also had the ability to output to PDF which was great as I was trying to help the frat save money by seeing if we could get the alumni to accept emails instead of letters. They ended up rebuffing that offer, but at least it was something I was able to do. (I hadn’t discovered cutePDF and other ways to create free PDFs on Windows)
Sure, it’s a tired and cliche phrase, but hurray for the wisdom of the crowd. I’ve received comments on identi.ca, twitter, and in the comments here with answers to nearly all my problems with KDE. Let’s see if I can get them all to work. First off, I was told that my problem with Konversation not getting my password in time to keep me from being signed into the fedora-unregistered could be solved by setting the password as a server password. Alright! That worked! woohoo! Before I’d had it set to just run the /msg identify command.
There was a time when I thought Amarok was the best music player on Linux. I even used to run it in Gnome as you can see from this 2005 screenshot. In that first link you can read me gushing over Amarok 1.4. I loved all the integrated technologies, especially the metadata juggling Amarok did. The first few Amarok 2.x releases with the KDE 4 libraries were complete crap. They were ugly and were missing nearly all of Amarok’s features. (Mirroring the complaints people were having about KDE 4 at the time) When I took a look at Amarok and KDE 4.4 in October I said I would take another look at Amarok.
For some reason, I didn’t get Linux Format Magazine issue #110 when I was supposed to. I ordered another copy and it arrived recently, so it’s time for another slate of Linux reviews. Unfortunately, something appears to be wrong with the way they mastered the magazine DVD, because I was unable to boot into any of the Slax options. So I went online and got the latest ISO off of http://www.slax.org.
Compiz-Fusion, as you surely know is responsible for eye candy on GNU/Linux distros such as windows that turn into paper airplanes when the user minimizes it to turning the desktop into a spinning cube. There’s something about the wobbly windows that provides some a sense of inertia that just makes things feel a little more dynamic on the desktop. I can’t explain it, but some of the effects make the GUI slightly more useful. However, Compiz-Fusion isn’t perfect.
On my system, running Fedora 7 and Compiz causes the computer to refuse to exit Gnome. I always have to go into a terminal and shut the computer down that way and it’s extremely annoying. So I’ve decided to run KDE as my default desktop instead of Gnome. We’ll see if I can rekindle the fire I used to have for KDE or if it will annoy me enough to drive me back to Gnome.
KDE.news has reported on part of the progress of KDE 4 specific to SVG graphcs. (I know that’s redundant) It’s redundant because SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. Ever since about 2 years ago, Gnome and other projects began to move to SVG rather than PNG, JPG or other types of graphics. “What’s the advantage?” you may be asking yourself. Well, the advantage lies in how pictures are represented in SVG instead of, say, PNG and its ilk.
I used to love KDE and thought it was so much better than GNOME. Especially after discovering Superkaramba, I was sure nothing could beat KDE in terms of cool factor. Later I started using more GTK applications so I gravitated towards GNOME, fluxbox, and XFCE. Also, I ended up not really using the SuperKaramba widgets that much because they were always buried under my other windows….where I was doing real work!
In my KDE 3.5 post, I mentioned it was the final release of KDE before KDE 4. According to this interview on O’Reilly with a KDE developer, there are some BIG changes a’ comin’! It looks like KDE will be going through some paradigm shifts in the way they think about the desktop. Interestingly enough, it is tentatively slated to come out in Fall of 2006, around the time that Windows Vista with IT’S paradigm shift in desktop philosophy should be coming out. It will be interesting to see where this goes. Both KDE and MS seem to be moving towards Apple’s chic desktop concepts.
KDE 3.5 is the last KDE release before KDE 4. As you will know if you are into the Linux world, most projects reserve a major number change for possible imcompabilities. It’s part of the reason why Gnome is no longer following math and is at release 2.13, which is larger than 2.9. When Gnome finally switches to 3, it’s open season for breaking compatibility with all the GTK+ apps that work with the past few years of Gnome. It’s a chance for programmers to say, “Hey, when I made function foo, I had to use a hack to make it work with the Gnome 2.0 series. Now, I can rewrite the Gnome libraries to make it work with proper programming techniques so it works right.” The same will happen with KDE 4, which is having a rewrite of many of the core libraries.
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