Plasma on KDE 4.3

The KDE team has released the latest iteration of their famous cross platform desktop environment. KDE 4 is a desktop environment that has great potential as it has embraced some really powerful and state of the art technologies as its pillars e.g. nepomuk, akonadi, Plasma, Qt4 and others. Also its creators have a really good vision of where they are heading and how they will keep the desktop from becoming obsolete in this Web 2.0 world.

I’ve been using KDE 4 on and off since its highly controversial 4.0 release. The 4.0 release and its subsequent 4.1 release were very immature and definitely weren’t ready for mass consumption. Although the developers claimed that these releases were not meant for regular users maybe they should have advertised that fact better and maybe they should have the 4.0 numbering. The 4.2 release was widely regarded as finally something for “regular users” and “what should have been the 4.0″. In my opinion not even the 4.2 release was ready for prime time. Many annoying bugs were still present, some caused by distributions, others due to driver issues and others were just plain KDE bugs. Also many KDE 3 apps still weren’t ported to 4 which caused a void that had to be filled with GNOME or KDE 3 applications, not a pretty thing.  But with this 4.3 release things are looking pretty good. I’ve been using this 4.3 release since this first beta and I’ve seen it grow and mature. And I have to say that this release is what I would finally label as a good release for mass consumption of general users i.e. not developers, hobbyists and enthusiasts, as long as the distributions don’t screw it up. I’m not saying this release is without problems or bugs, but they are not that noticeable and prevalent as before.

Something that has impressed me a lot about the KDE developers its the speed on which they develop the KDE environment. If you compare the 4.o release to this 4.3 release they are worlds apart. The things they have achieved in such a short amount of time is astonishing. Maybe it is due to the technologies they are using or maybe its just due to growth in the community and energetic developers.

The KDE community has fixed over 10,000 bugs and implemented almost 2,000 feature requests in the last 6 months. Close to 63,000 changes were checked in by a little under 700 contributors. Read on for an overview of the changes in the KDE 4.3 Desktop Workspace, Application Suites and the KDE 4.3 Development Platform.

Although the initial releases were somewhat half baked this 4.3 release is in my opinion a demonstration that the platform is starting to mature and that from this point on we will start seeing even more great innovations and progress on the desktop. 4.3 was released and I already can’t wait for 4.4. I’m sure 4.4 will rock big time. The GSOC student’s work will be merged in, some of the new ideas thought up on the GCDS will be implemented and this will be the first release using gitorious for development. Some of the things to look forward in future releases are the materialization of the  “social desktop” and the “semantic desktop” within KDE.

• Slashdot
• KDE Dot (News)
• Release notes and announcement

Our hackers enjoying some free beers paid by Canonical, damn I wish I was there. Credit: jcorrius cc-by flickr

If Microsoft wanted to destroy the FOSS desktop it would bomb Gran Canaria right now as the top hackers of both leading FOSS desktop environments, KDE and GNOME, are meeting there right now. But we all know Microsoft is no that evil, or are they? For the first time ever both GUADEC, the annual GNOME developers conference, and Akademy, the annual KDE developers conference, are being held at the same place and time. This will hopefully result in greater collaboration and interoperability between the FOSS desktops.

This special meeting has been titled the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit and it will feature many interesting and exciting talks. There were some really big names in the keynotes schedule including Richard Stallman, father of the free software movement, and Robert Lefkowitz, a really great speaker and a really respected and experienced man in the industry. Also in addition to the regular GUADEC and Akademy conference tracks there is going to be a special cross-desktop track. From looking over the talks there seems to be a lot of talks targeted at taking care of some old FOSS desktop issues. Also there are many talks that discuss new and exciting technologies and the innovations that will be made with them.

Also many big announcements of what is being planned for the future for the FOSS dekstop will be made there. Something quite shocking that was revealed already is that Nokia, the Finnish communications giant, plans to switch to Qt from GTK+ for its Maemo platform citing  a desire to be more cross platform. This is a big win for KDE but quite a loss for GNOME. But something that will benefit both projects is Nokia’s announcement of further commitment to Linux, the FOSS desktop and FOSS in general.

“Our vision: To bring open source and Linux to mainstream consumers. Standard Linux and free desktop technologies optimized for finger touch UI. Direct contribution to the upstream projects. Code talks. Collaboration withing key open source communities.” –Source

It seems like Nokia is quickly becoming one of the biggest FOSS centered companies out there. Recently they open sourced the Symbian OS and relicensed Qt, which was already fully FOSS under the GPL, under the more liberal terms of the LGPL. Also they have opened up both platforms, which are recent Nokia acquisitions, for community development. Good for them. This demonstrates once again that going FOSS can lead to profits and be a good strategy for companies.

If you want to keep track of the latest announcements made in the conference keep track of the GNOME and KDE planets. Also most likely by the end of the conference the press will write some summaries of the highlights of the conference. If newinfo2day had payed me to go there I would have proudly covered the event but it seems like they are somewhat short on cash, you know, because of the economy But I will do the next best thing and I will keep track of what’s going just by using the Internetz

Have you always dreamed of having your own Linux file server but were worried about hardware or energy costs? Well with 150$ or less you could build your own portable, energy efficient and powerful Linux file server. All you have to do is buy a Western Digital MyBook World Edition and perform some hacker magic which will grant you root access to the device. The device runs Linux out of the box and is quite jam packed with features but you can’t use any of that functionality without liberating your device. Without voiding you warranty you are just limited to the functionality revealed through the device’s web panel. After you unlock your device you can do almost everything with it. You could even install bit torrent on it and have it download torrents for you all day and control the torrents remotely via ssh or a torrent web panel.

A guide to hacking the WD MyBook World Ed
New WD MyBook World Ed on Amazon

You can buy the device new or just get it a lot cheaper through ebay

The friendly interactive shell (fish) is a Unix shell which focuses on interactive use, discoverability, and user friendliness. The design goal of fish is to give the user a rich set of powerful features in a way that is easy to discover, remember, and use.  –Wikipedia

Fish comes with many cool features not available in other shells, some  of the coolest ones are:  syntax highlighting, helpful error messages, tab completition support for command switches and many other things and more powerful globs. Also it removes many problems that have been kept in UNIX shells to keep backwards compatibility. If you are already familiar with bash or any other UNIX shell don’t worry you feel right at home but even happier

P.S. If you set fish as the default shell for your user you will must likely break your system! This is because fish is not compatible with bash so all of the scripts used by your system will NOT run. Only set fish as the default shell for your terminal emulator e.g. konsole, gnome-terminal.

Official fish website

A great open book about the command line

Diffuse running on Windows XP

I found a tool for Windows and Linux called Diffuse that allows you to compare multiple text documents in the same window. I took this summary from their site:

Diffuse is a graphical tool for merging and comparing text files. Diffuse is able to compare an arbitrary number of files side-by-side and gives users the ability to manually adjust line-matching and directly edit files. Diffuse can also retrieve revisions of files from Bazaar, CVS, Darcs, Git, Mercurial, Monotone, Subversion, and SVK repositories for comparison and merging.

You can download it here by clicking on the “Download” link and chosing the appropriate download. If your using Debian/Ubuntu you can simply open the terminal and write: sudo apt-get install diffuse or sudo aptitude install diffuse. There are also some  alternatives (Linux-only) like Meld for Gnome and Kompare for KDE.