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Thursday, April 23. 2009Let's kill KHTMLReading Kyle's view on Konqueror and KHTML's current status: I couldn't agree more. I use konqueror instead of Firefox because I quite like its GUI, and its integration into KDE is obviously better than Firefox'. Issues with various websites prompt me to have an Iceweasel window open as well quite a large part of the time. Let's just switch to WebKit, so the market only has to care about Gecko and WebKit and can ignore one more marginal rendering engine. I see libqt-webkit 4.5 is in experimental and a Google query on “debian konqueror webkit” at least shows an Ubuntu packaging effort of the Konqueror WebKit KPart, so the days of khtml on my Desktop are certainly nearing its end. At this point: Kudos to the KDE folks (Debian and upstream). KDE4.2 is really, really usable, the remaining issues are really small. And, if I don't try to manually interfer like I did in my first attempt, migrating the KDE settings from ~/.kde4 to ~/.kde actually did work just fine on my netbook. Monday, March 9. 2009Powermanagement in DebianI'm eternally confused about the state of powermanagement in Debian (or in Linux generally? Not using any other distribution seriously, I have no idea.) There are just too many scripts who interact or merely run in parallel (see my short note in my first posting about my shiny toy. While I don't actively invest time to educate myself about the situation, I've just tried to uninstall a round of unneeded packages and got rid of apmd and hibernate, which both were installed by default (or by dependencies of other stuff I've got rid of earlier?) but seem not to be necessary. At least the laptop still suspends when I close the lid. This is without rebooting or even just logging out, though, so if it doesn't work out, I'll have to update this entry. Update: Thanks to Michael's comment, pointing to #451380. Scope for a Google Summer of Code project, perhaps? This would be 90% talk to people and get a consensus and only 10% coding, though, but I think it would be worth it so that squeeze would have a powermanagement /acpi framework where different components don't stand on other components' toes all the time. Tuesday, February 24. 2009New ToyLast week, I couldn't resist and bought myself an Acer Aspire One (AOA 150Ab) netbook. It has 1G RAM, 120G HDD, unfortunately needs a fan, and is the model without 3G modem. It comes with Linpus Linux pre-installed. Looks quite nice, but is obviously ultimately the wrong OS ... Besides, it's locked down quite a bit, there's not even an easy way to start a terminal :-) I still have kept it, in a dual-boot configuration, to play around or show to people. Installing Lenny went very well, and to make things more fun I'm running quite a few things from experimental: KDE 4.2, xorg 7.4 (1:7.4~5 right now) and Oo.org 3. And, to get DRI2, also the 2.6.28 kernel from the newer-than-sid repository of the kernel team (2.6.28-2~snapshot.12850, but I hear 2.6.28 has now been uploaded.) While the whole thing is fun to use and didn't make any real problems, there are a few remaining issues (yes, this is a Dear Lazyweb posting, feel free to comment. I'll try to add updates to this article as this progresses):
Ok, this has become rather a long list. But at least, as you can see, it's mostly minor issues, and hopefully a few where it's just missing configuration. One other issue is battery life: I see that there should be a large battery available for this thing. If it doesn't cost me as much as the whole netbook again, I'll seriously have to think about this... The 3-cell battery does last about 2.5h (and has, right now, uncovered a little bug where the battery monitoring applet tells me “No AC adaptor plugged in, battery capacity: 50%, charging”. Whee! I have a perpetuum mobile! I'm gonna be RICH!) Friday, January 30. 2009More on KDE...On the risk of repeating myself... While I do understand aseigo's dismay at the recent Linus-goes-to-GNOME-land media hype, caught by LWN amongst others — is anyone taking bets if and when Linus will return to KDE? — and I share LWN's (Jake Edge's) view that Red Hat/Fedora (I have no idea how far the latter really is a community project nowadays) has a long history of questionable release decisions regarding its inclusion of “newer than bleeding edge” software in releases, ultimately it's still KDE's fault for releasing KDE 4.0 with that ominous 4.0 version number in a move to get as many testers as possible for this public beta program (at least users didn't have to pay lots of money for this KDE Vista.) Why not just call it 3.9, if a “beta” label should be avoided? It would have been a release and avoided the bad press of staying in eternal beta, but the dot nine version would have made clear that it's not finished. Leaving the ranting aside, I congratulate the KDE crew for getting 4.2 out of the door, and the Debian KDE team for their decision to stay with KDE 3 in Lenny and providing KDE 4 via backports. I'm very happy with KDE 3 on my office workhorse, and have KDE 4 on the home machine and am quite impressed, but with reservations since I see parts of it crashing far too often for my taste (in the latest version I have installed, kmail rarely survives longer than 10min.) Thursday, January 22. 2009The Most Important Announcement of 2008... and I completely missed it. I've been ranting on and off about the Linux desktop world needing a shakeup, about non-techies shaking their head and not understanding why a “Linux Desktop” needs further clarification so that anybody knows what it means. Seems I'm absolutely not the only one: KDE's aKademy conference and GNOME's GUADEC are to be held side by side as the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009 in early July this year. I finally saw this in connection with LWN's coverage (subscriber only at this time, sorry) of the recent Qt relicensing by Nokia. The true Year of the Linux Desktop finally? I doubt it, seeing that many people with little computer skills are still completely unaware of what's happening. And currently, I share the pessimism about OpenOffice.org's future as shown in Michael Meeks' interpretation of the commit stats. A real killer in the collaboration platform space is still missing, as well: there are numerous commercial players, quite a few “commercial pseudo-opensource” packages, tons of real opensource frameworks, but none that can be recommended, in my opinion, without its share of doubts, either about the features, the licensing, or the future. Still, it's been the year of the Linux desktop for me since about 1997 (and that means Debian since not long after that), and I do see the situation improving year for year, so here's a big thank you to all working on it. Monday, January 5. 2009I want oneChristmas is over, and unfortunately it comes with an Nvidia graphics chip, and I doubt the color calibration feature works under Linux. Nonetheless: I want one. Dual screen on a Laptop! Who wouldn't want that? And, in addition, a keyboard with a numeric keypad. Monday, December 29. 2008KDE vs. GNOMENo, I don't claim KDE is perfect. Especially the way the transition to KDE 4 is (not) being handled. (I don't mean within Debian, this is a KDE problem.) But beyond dumbing down the UI as even a very prominent Linux developer repeatedly commented on, Josselin Mouette just confirmed my decision to stay away from GNOME. Yes, there are other desktop environments and window managers, and I haven't done more than look at XFCE very briefly, but just now I'm quite happy with KDE 3.5, and am waiting for KDE 4 to become actually useable. Tuesday, November 18. 2008SyncML (new toy)Q: is a mobile phone (nice hardware, shitty firmware, btw) waterproof? A: I now got this new toy (Sony Ericsson S500i) as aresult. And because I don't really like losing contacts again (I never managed to connect to the old phone from Linux and was too lazy to use the Windows software), I have now fired up kitchensync with the OBEX SyncML client from the OpenSync project. And was very surprised that after only very little fiddling with the configuration I could indeed copy the contacts from the phone to KDE's addressbook. There seems to be a — not so usual anymore in this decade — utf8 problem somewhere (it looks as if the encoding from the phone is converted to utf8 twice, or it is latin1 to utf8 encoded but was already utf8 on the phone), and synchronisation is only one way so far (from the phone to KDE-PIM), with changes on the KDE side being overwritten. No idea which component those bugs are in, and documentation I've found is not very verbose. So, to start with: I've gotten this nice dump with hcidump. Now, how do I extract the actual data streams from that dump? I know I have to use wbxml2xml on the data, but first I need to unwrap the network data, and I haven't found that (probably read past it in the manpage of hcidump because I'm a bit tired.) Of course, if anybody out there has solved my issues I'd be just as happy with information on how that was done instead. In the mean time, I at least have reasonable back up of my phone's contact database again. Monday, October 13. 2008The Apple Aluminium Keyboard under Linux
While it looks slick, using the Apple Aluminium keyboard under Linux has some issues I was not aware of when I bought it. I've started to document it here.
Thursday, October 2. 2008Desktop integrationSune Vuorela raises a few interesting points about integration of various (meta)data storage frameworks on your KDE desktop (read the comments, too, as several of these issues have been or are being addressed.) A huge, somewhat related, itch to me is that the end user of a Linux desktop still has to care if an application uses KDE, GNOME, XFCE, GNUstep, “old style” X11 or whatever. As an end user, I don't care that GIMP is a GTK application. Somebody told me that I can use fish:/ URLs to open remote files and I've duly noted down the syntax because I have no idea what this does, but it does open this file the webdude has told me I should edit with kolourpaint, and now I want to use GIMP because it's much nicer to use ... Similar issues with settings (I did set the web proxy in the system settings, now why do half of the application not respect this?) and all kinds of other stuff. I believe it's issues like this that will hamper the Linux on the Desktop the most in future. Obviously, in a controlled (corporate) environment, this is not a big problem because it's a problem for the IT staff, but in the SOHO and home computer market, these are real, difficult problems, and since they don't know any of the technical problems behind it it's also very hard to explain why it's not easy for me to set up their system so it works like they feel it should (I already have problems explaining why there should be different Linux distributions at all ... ) Update: It occurs to me that this is the kind of stuff we (distribution developers) should be concentrating on, by putting pressure on upstream and doing some of the work. I guess we've concentrated too much on “just” packaging the stuff. Friday, September 26. 2008More Linux Plumbing
Apparently I'm not the only one working on explaining under-the-hood non-kernel subsystems: from Lennart Poettering comes an excellent writeup on Sound APIs under Linux. (update: It appears Lennart goofed in some aspects, one response to his article is in aseigo's blog. I can't comment on the content, really, I just don't know enough.)
Meanwhile, I'd like to thank all those who have commented on my linuxplumbing writeup. There are still some comments pending in my mail queue, I will get to them eventually.
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Comments
Mon, 15.06.2009 17:13
Don't forget tab completion.
Sun, 14.06.2009 23:16
Good list. I'd replace the she ll expansion with understandin g that the shell is not your i nterface to the system, [...]
Fri, 12.06.2009 15:02
For me regular expressions wer e most difficult, since everyt hing else is the same nearly e verywhere (except that B [...]
Thu, 11.06.2009 07:58
This tendency isn't exclusive to Apple products, there seems to be a strong desire among F OSS developers to spend [...]
Tue, 09.06.2009 17:25
Unfortunately people are not g oing to stop buying these prod ucts. If we (Linux and open s ource developers) want t [...]