KDE 4.3.1 !

"About" dialog

Helio striked once again We now have official KDE versions before they are even announced (yes this link is broken at the time I’m writing, but it’s my guess for the announcement page) on kde website.

Many many thanks !

My biggest problem being now that I can’t tell (because I don’t know) the new features/bugfixes on this blog…

KDE 4.0 Beta 1 is available for Mandriva 2007.1

Warning : Beta1 isn’t as stable as you might expect and beta2 will probably give a better overview of KDE4. So you’d better install it on a test/virtual machine. (Thanks to Daniel Beck)

Yes !

• urpmi.addmedia kde4 <KDE_MIRROR>/pub/kde/unstable/3.92.0/Mandriva/2007.1/i586/media/4.0
• Update Mandriva Linux your favorite way
• You’re done

I can’t test it because I first need to clean my drive and get a lot of free space But If I manage to install it, be sure it’s gonna be on this blog !

(For you information, KDE 4.0 Beta 1 = KDE 3.92.0)

The good side of a crash

Today, kdm refused to let me log into my session and was constantly back with the login screen although I entered the correct username and password. I already had this kind of problem and is generally due to a corrupt configuration file in my home directory, but I have to have a closer look at it.

But in the meantime, as I was a bit in a hurry, I just switched my display manager from kdm to gdm by simply setting the variable DISPLAYMANAGER=gdm in /etc/sysconfig/desktop. I also looked for people having the same issue on the Mandriva forum, but found almost no one (well, two people but it was very old posts).

But I found an very interesting gdm theme for 2007 Spring. I’ve always wondered what was the point of assigning an avatar/face to users of my system because they were not in use anywhere, but thanks to this theme I can now give pretty faces to ALL my local users (well ok, ALL = 2 ).

Interesting

So let’s blog and use my new little kblogger applet I’ve just built on my system (by the way, the package is outdated on cooker, I should tell them)
I’ve just found two interesting features for konqueror in less than 2 seconds… Both of them are really trivial and may be implemented in other browsers as well, but it shows how you can discover features using your brain (well my neuron, should I say)
Feature #1
You can split your display, you probably already know. But you can use this split display to navigate both on a download site (http) and on your disk and copy/paste files from the first one to the second one… I’ve never realized I could have used konqueror like this…
Feature #2
You can right click on a link and ask it to open in a new tab. But it’s the first time I use it the other way around : you can force a window which should open in a new tab or a new window to stay in your current window and tab.

Konqueror and Gmail

Very often, I notice gmail compatibility with konqueror is broken, so I have to use firefox once again… and I like konqueror, I don’t want to change ! The usual trick was to set konqueror User-Agent to “Firefox” (konqueror settings), but it doesn’t work anymore. But a fix has been released, but didn’t get into KDE 3.5.7 in time… I’ve open a bug for Mandriva, let’s see if we can apply the patch.

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Très souvent, la compatibilité entre gmail et konqueror est cassée, alors je dois utiliser firefox à nouveau… et j’aime konqueror, je ne veux pas changer ! L’astuce habituelle consistaient à régler le User-Agent à “Firefox” (dans les paramètres de konqueror), mais cela ne fonctionne plus. Un correctif existe, mais il n’est pas passé dans KDE 3.5.7 à temps… J’ai ouvert un rapport de bug pour Mandriva et on verra bien si l’on peut appliquer ce patch.

FOSDEM (Sunday)

So I was at FOSDEM on Sunday.

I saw quite interesting presentations compared to Saturday.

Sorry Frederic, but I missed most of your presentation, it was way to early for me However, I saw quite a lot of people were interested in Metisse : I went back to the cross-platform room several times and definitely your presentation had the biggest crowd of them.

I stayed for the “Strigi internals” presentation which was definitely the best I’ve seen during this FOSDEM 2007. Yes, it was a bit technical and my C++ skills are gone since a long time, but the presentation was more about the architecture rather than the code and I was very interested in it : this piece of code is really well designed ! Thanks to this architecture, Strigi is very fast, extensible via plugins, able to parse nested files (pdf inside zip inside email attachements) and lightweight… what do you want more ? I really would like to join development of strigi and see where I can help (maybe nowhere, I’ll see…)

Then, I went to one of the shows of the FOSDEM : the presentation about metasploit exploit construction framework. The guy was really speaking too fast for me, but was incredibly dynamic and I’ve no doubt in his security nor development skills. He showed how to hack a vmware box thanks to a vmware exploit. Well… almost everyone was amazed by this but I already knew metasploit and this is really 0.1% of what this tool is able of (moreover, who wanna hack his own vmware virtual machine ? This exploit can’t be lead against a real machine so it’s a bit non-sense…). However, I enjoyed this presentation much and for ruby fans, wait for metasploit 3.X, you’ll be surprised

Then, I went to the KDE room to use the Free Wi-Fi connection and read my mail. Yeah, I just enjoyed having a free Wifi connection, so many things are not free anymore these days…

In the afternoon I decided to join people in the hidden Mandriva room. This was first time I saw all of them. I met misc, pterjean, warly, nanar and several others. We spent most of the afternoon discussing packaging policies and Mandriva Club / Users / Contributors. Then, I had to get home at 17:00

I enjoyed very much this Sunday and will probably attend FOSDEM next year.

Been a while

Been a while since I posted something here.

I’m going to be a father in two months, so it takes a lot of my time (I have meetings almost every evening at the maternity home). I’ve even seen my baby in 3D last week

For the linux part, I mostly follow what is going on thanks to all my subscriptions (RSS feeds and mailing lists), but does not really have time to contribute.

However, there’s some interesting things I can tell you :

- First there’s a lot of discussions about the new Mandriva websites structure and particularly the new wiki. Cooker and ex-development wikis contents have been migrated, but a good structure has still to be found. Moreover, the Mandriva club content is still to be migrated which is going to be a big job.

- There’s a new ktorrent release and I’ve build a rpm for Mandriva 2007. I didn’t backport it from cooker because I don’t have cooker installed (yet). So I just took the 2007 src.rpm and rebuilt it. I had to change quite a lot of things to the spec file, but it now builds correctly. The problem is that I didn’t follow the normal way of rebuilding this package (first on cooker, then backport). So I can give it to you on request, but do not want to have it online for the moment.

- kqemu has been released as GPL and at the same time, thanks to awilliamson, I discover a new virtualization program is in the wild : virtualbox. Sounds good to install a new cooker system for development !

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Cela fait bien longtemps que je n’ai pas posté quelquechose ici.

Je vais être papa dans deux mois, donc cela me prend beaucoup de temps (j’ai des réunions à la maternité chaque soir). J’ai même vu mon bébé en 3D la semaine dernière

Pour la partie linux, j’ai principalement suivit ce qu’il se passait grâce à toutes mes souscriptions (fils RSS et listes de distributions), mais je n’ai pas vraiment le temps de contribuer.

Néanmoins, il y a quelques choses intéressantes que je peux vous dire :

- D’abord, il y a beaucoup de discussions à propos de la structure du nouveau site Mandriva et particulièrement le nouveau wiki. Le contenu des wikis cooker et ex-development ont été migrés, mais une bonne structure doit toujorus être trouvée. De plus, le contenu du club Mandriva doit encore être migré ce qui sera un gros travail.

- Il y a une nouvelle version de ktorrent et j’ai construit un rpm pour Mandriva 2007. Je ne l’ai pas backporté de cooker parceque je n’ai pas cooker installé (encore). Donc j’ai juste prise le src.rpm de la 2007 et je l’ai reconstruit. J’ai du changer pas mal de choses dans le fichier spec, mais il se construit correctement maintenant. Le problème est que je n’ai pas suivi la voie normale pour reconstruire un paquetage (d’abord cooker, puis backport). Alors je peux vous le donner sur simple demande, mais je ne veux pas qu’il se retrouve en ligne pour le moment.

- kqemu est passé en GPL et au même moment, grâce à awilliamson, j’ai découvert qu’un nouveau programme de virtualisation existe : virtualbox. Ça semble sympa pour installer un nouveau système avec cooker pour le développement !

Yet another KDE troll

Sorry, but I really hate this new menu *thing*. I only like the little search box at the top. I hope it is possible to have the KDE 3.5 menu back.
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Désolé, mais je hais vraiment ce nouveau menu . Je n’aime que la petite boîte de recherche en haut. J’espère qu’il sera possible de retrouver le menu de KDE 3.5 .

Breaking news

• Koffice 1.5.1 released
• The probably most hated bug in Mandriva is in the process of being fixed for Mandriva 2006 (already fixed in cooker). If you are using dkms packages (like ATI and NVidia proprietary drivers), updating Mandriva is likely to cause X server startup failure at next boot and you end up in console mode. Quite annoying for unexperienced users and it happens each time a new kernel is released for Mandriva 2006. Thanks to Luiz, the kernel team and many contributors a fix has been found and is in testing phase (the fix will be available in the next -uc kernel).

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• Koffice 1.5.1 est sorti
• Le bug le plus haï dans Mandriva est sur le point d’être résolu pour Mandriva 2006 (déjà résolu dans cooker). Si vous utilisez les paquetages dkms (comme les pilotes propriétaires ATI et NVidia), mettre à jour Mandriva a de bonnes chances de causer un échec de démarrage de X au prochain boot et vous vous retrouvez en mode console. Plutôt embêtant pour les utilisateurs non-expérimentés et cela arrive à chaque fois qu’un nouveau kernel sort pour Mandriva 2006. Grâce à Luiz, l’équipe “kernel” et beaucoup de contributeurs, une solution a été trouvée et est en phase de test (la solution sera disponible dans le prochain kernel -uc).

KDE and PIM

I took time to read various news about KDE (and PIM). Very cool stuff is coming soon and I list them briefly with links :

• kmobiletools is looking for a student to integrate gammu engine for the Google Summer of Code 2006. Great ! It would then support my Nokia 3100 : a cheap and easy to use mobile phone, the only one I use.
• OpenSync is a new synchronisation mechanism which have a very generic approach upon synchronisation. It is composed of a synchronisation engine and multiple plugins for each “thing” you’d like to synchronise. For instance, if the appropriate plugins are written, you can synchronize your mobile phone calendar with your PDA calendar, with korganizer and why not your google calendar. It isn’t KDE-centric and will (or is) be integrated into freedesktop. Forget kitchensync, multisync, multisynk, …
• Cool apps have been released lately : amarok 1.4, ktorrent 2.0.1 beta
• I’ve discovered two KDE image applications being worked on : ShowImg, KPhotoAlbum. Arf ! I already had difficulties to choose between digikam, gwenview and showphoto (included with digikam) !
• KDE 3.5.3 is planned to be released on the 23rd May and will include some great new stuff backported from KDE 4 (even if not released yet) !

Now about KDE 4 :

• akonadi seems to be a great new “thing” (not an app, not a library, maybe a framework) which will be built into KDE 4. I’ve seen interesting discussions about it on the KDEPIM mailing list. Basically (but I’m far from having understood everything), it’s similar to an imap server which holds your contacts, your calendar, your mails even if you don’t launch kmail or any specific mail reader. It will ease sharing all of this information amongst your KDE apps and even cross-platform.
• phonon is yet another framework for KDE 4 which also has a very generic approach of multimedia (sound and video). Basically, you can use whatever back-end with whatever front-end Just read this interesting article if you want to know more.

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J’ai pris le temps de lire les différentes nouvelles à propos de KDE (et du PIM : gestionnaire d’informations personnelles). Des choses très sympas arrivent bientôt et je les cite ici brièvement :

• kmobiletools recherche un étudiant pour y intégrer le moteur gammu pour le “Google Summer of Code 2006″. Super ! Il supporterait ainsi mon Nokia 3100 : un téléphone mobile peu cher et pratique à utiliser, le seul que j’utilise.
• OpenSync est un nouveau mécanisme de synchronisation qui a une approche très générique sur la synchronisation (des informations personnelles). Il se compose d’un moteur de synchrnisation et de multiples plugins pour chaque “chose” que l’on souhaite synchroniser. Par exemple, si les plugins correspondant sont écrits, on peut synchroniser le calendrier de son téléphone portable avec celui de son PDA, avec korganizer et pourquoi pas, son calendrier “Google Calendar”. Ce n’est pas centré sur KDE et sera (ou est déjà) intégré dans freedesktop. Oubliez kitchensync, multisync, multisynk, …
• Des applications sympas sont sorties dernièrement : amarok 1.4, ktorrent 2.0.1 beta
• J’ai dévouvert deux applications photos/images sur lesquelles on travaille en ce moment : ShowImg, KPhotoAlbum. Arf ! Moi qui avait déjà des difficultés à choisir entre digikam, gwenview et showphoto (inclus avec digikam) !
• KDE 3.5.3 est planifié pour sortir le 23 mai et incluera des fonctionalités superbes provenant de KDE 4 (même s’il n’est pas encore sorti) !

Maintenant à propos de KDE 4 :

• akonadi semble être un chouette nouveau “truc” (pas une application, pas une librairie, peut-être un framework) qui sera intégré à KDE 4. J’ai vu des discussions intéressantes à son propos sur la liste de diffusion KDEPIM. En gros, (mais je suis loin d’avoir tout compris), c’est similaire à un serveur IMAP qui contient les contacts, les calendriers, les mails et qui est lancé même si on ne lance pas kmail ou un lecteur de mail spécifique. Cela facilitera le partage de toutes ces informations entre les applications KDE et même entre les plate-formes.
• phonon est encore un autre framework pour KDE 4 qui a aussi une approche très générique du multimédia (son et vidéo). En gros, on peut utiliser n’importe quel backend avec n’importe quel frontend . Lisez juste cet article intéressant si vous voulez en savoir plus.