This is not really a KDE post, but rather something that happened and took away two days from me. So, you’re free to skip it :)

Intro

Insanely enough, I decided to completely wipe out my current system and after quite some time reinstall Debian. I completely forgot how tiresome is reinstalling everything from scratch - all the packages needed by KDE SC, all the packages needed by me, and everything else. Even more, I’m used to installing the minimal system, and then installing xorg, …

So, when the initial installation was over, I decided to make a clean KDE build (like I haven’t lost enough time already) - and after a few attempts I managed to install just enough dependencies so that the stuff I want (or work on) works without a glitch.

eeePC as a graphics card

At the time I started to get pleased by my newly refreshed and cleaned system, my screen just went blank, and after a reboot, the computer made quite a few beeps before starting to boot the OS while leaving the screen blank.

One of the capacitors on my graphic card went crazy and had blown up. Since I needed to do some work, I couldn’t allow myself to be without access to the system, and using a much slower (eee)PC with a much smaller screen while my main system lies incapacitated (or incapacitor-ated) was a no-go.

The first solution was to do an ‘ssh -X’ from eeePC and connect my big screen to it. And this worked quite well except that VGA connector didn’t want to allow the full resolution of my screen so the picture was a bit blurry.

The is in a nutshell, the power of Linux and X11.

ATI

After I finished the things I needed to do, I hurried to the last open computer-store to get a new card. The last one left in the store was ATI’s HD6450, so I didn’t have any doubts which card to get.

I have to say that I was thrilled I’m getting rid of NVidia driver problems (although I didn’t really have any :) ) and getting into AMD’s world (after all I haven’t bought a single Intel’s CPU since 80286).

But, as per Murphy’s law, while KWin worked with all fancy effects (via the openGL backend), all openGL programs decided to claim that this driver doesn’t support openGL - at all. Even the simplest examples from the ‘Computer graphics’ course I teach.

After seeking the solution on the intertubes, and trying each and every one, I almost decided to quit and leave it like that. Fortunately, after a while, I /decided/ it was the problem with the fact I need fglrx-glx package which I can’t install because it would break quite a few other packages (and thus apt would uninstall them) including some qt4 stuff which required mesa-glx.

Then I decided to do the dirty thing - to simply overwrite mesa’s libGL.so* stuff with those from fglrx. Usually, this is not really a safe thing to do, but since openGL is a C library that has to conform to a few well-defined standards, all implementations need to be binary compatible, which in turn means those can easily be interchanged.

This and a few radeon.modeset=0 sprinkled in a couple of places made my system fully functional.

Outro

This morning I even decided to tear apart all the components from the case, clean them and resemble the system (cleaning the body as well as the soul - it’s a chán/zen thing :) )

Now I have something that works and feels as a completely new system.

Ok, it is the time for me to blog from Randa and KDE Platform 11 and Nepomuk sprints.

Share-Like-Connect

One of the side effects of the /usage tracking/ is that we now know what document is currently being viewed/edited, so the Aaron’s S-L-C concept can finally come to life without using the fake dummy data.

Tasks Documents applet

This doesn’t exist yet, but when applications start reporting which documents they are showing, we’ll be able to make a fully document-oriented workspace for those that like that kind of stuff.

Zeitgeist integration

We (Nepomuk - Trueg and myself) and Zeitgeist people (Seif and Trever) had quite a few hours spent deciding the best way for the two systems to collaborate and I think we have done well. Apps that support Zeitgeist will automatically support us as well, and vice-versa. So, whether you are using a Gnome application in KDE, or KDE application in Gnome, it will just work(TM).

As you probably already know, I’m a sucker for fall-backs, so I still intend to make this work even if you disable one of the services. And it will work, but badly if you disable both of them.

Contour and Plasma Active

The thing worth mentioning is that I’m now a part-time member of the Contour team at basysKom, so you can expect these things to be finished faster than it was when I had to give focus to other non KDE-related projects.

This is something I realised after reading some blogs on the intertubes - I’m bad

ZZ Top - I’m bad, I’m nationwide

I can’t wait to get my doctorate to become a Proper Villain (TM) like Dr Doom, Dr Evil …

If you were to pass by Sebas’ house these last few days of Tokamak 5, you’d see a window full of post-its that contained tasks that we plan to do (can be seen on Kevin’s blog).

One of the post-its was 1/8 in size compared to the normal ones and it only said TSP, an abbreviation for ‘The Secret Project’. I didn’t want to tell anyone what I was doing until I see what comes out of it.

So, after meddling with Xlib, strange code-paths in kde-workspace I’m proud to present a new splash screen engine that can do QML.

Why this? The main reason is that creating new splash screens currently sucks - everything is prerendered and the theme authors don’t really have any control over the process. That is probably the main reason we still have basically the same splash screen as we did in KDE (SC) 3.x.

Currently under a GIT branch of kde-workspace, KSplashQML allows the theme creator to define the animations in a more pleasant manner, to adapt the animation to the screen size…

The theme is rather simple - black/white KDE logo with rotating gear that fades into the logo that can be seen in the screenshot. If you are wondering why the text says ‘Friday’, it is because we are recognizing the fantastic song made popular by our idol Rebecca.

Tokamak 5 is approaching the end - only Marco and I still linger around (and Sebas, naturally) - and that is going to end tomorrow around noon.

So, as you all should already know, Tokamak 5 (plasma developer sprint) is in progress. The main desktop-related thing I’ve been working on last two days was presenting a few chosen activity templates as if those were real.

What does this mean? That you’ll see a couple of activities in your activity bar that don’t really exist. This was done, along some other stuff, to promote the activities a bit more.

Currently, as far as I know (as usual, I’m the backend guy and have no clue what will end up in the release for the user to see :) ) the only one /fake/ activity you’ll see is the ‘Photos activity’. It is meant for something that we all enjoy - managing our photo collections.

Before you start arguing that you don’t want to see a bunch of templates in your list of activities, this affects only the defaults - you can easily remove them like any other activity - click the red ‘x’ and you’re done.

Running applications

Apart from defining the widgets layout, templates are now able even to start applications. In the case of the ‘Photos’ activity, it will start Digikam and Gwenview.

Since the templates can be downloaded via GHNS (from kde-look and similar sites), automatic execution of apps is rather dangerous, so you’ll be asked for the confirmation on which programs to run.

You can see what it looks like in the screenshot above. Recognized desktop applications are presented with their names and icons, and are automatically selected. While other programs (like in this case ‘rm’) will have a warning icon in front and will be automatically deselected.

EDIT: I’ve just added a rather rigid test for the ‘safety’ of apps - the application is automatically selected only if it is a registered desktop application and it doesn’t have more than one argument specified. So, the things like konsole -e ‘something’ are not going to be selected by default.

As Notmart said “I have a dream!”. (I have no clue what this sentence has to do with the blog post, but I didn’t want to finish it with the usual ‘that’s all for now’ :) )