KDE 4.2 And Debian.

I am a little behind on my reading as work is crazy at the moment. However, I do try and keep on top of Planet KDE. Reading while munching my sandwich today I read Ana's blog that basically say's that KDE 4.2 will not be loaded to Debian experimental and that the current (__excellent__) KDE 4 backports available for Lenny from kde.debian.net will only maintain updates for the KDE 4.1 serise.

Now I have an issue. After a long time using Sidux and a (very) short time using Kubuntu I was really enjoying using Debian. I respected the work that the Debian KDE packagers made in creating the backports for Lenny. However, I'm getting a bit disappointed now.

I realise that Debian is a great project and I respect their opinions and guiding rules. However, the delay in shipping Lenny is getting ridiculous now. It wasn't really bothering me prior to today but now it seems that it is preventing KDe 4.2 getting into experimental.

What has also annoyed me is that restricting the KDE4 backports to following the KDE 4.1 release's means that until KDE 4 makes it into Debian testing the most stable KDE 4 Debian will support is KDE 4.1. I mean there will only probably be 2 support release's to KDE 4.1 and how long will it take to get KDE 4 to Debian testing? That leaves a big gap which not all Debian users will be happy with.

Me for one

KDE 4.2 "Caterpillar" Released

KDE 4.2 Beta 1 is out.



This release is for testing and bug triaging and reporting.

Apparently over 800 bugs have been dealt with in the past week. 4.2 is shaping up to be a great release.

Keyboardr

I received some spam this morning to my work mail account. It wasn't the normal spam for increasing performance (mine not my pc's) but rather from a web developers reference site. I had a quick look at the site and found it to be quite a good reference. Whether I use it or not might depend on my feelings about being spammed by them.

Anyway, I digress. While looking around I found a link to short article on Keybordr.com. This is a great little site which aims to bring a QuickSilver (Mac), Launchy (windows) or KDE Run (!) to the web. Basically go to www.keyboardr.com and start typing what you want to search for. As you type the search results start to be displayed below. You can navigate the results with the keyboard. It would seem this is a very early release and if you watch the webcast that the developer has put together you can see he has some very interesting plans for it.

Microsoft, erm I mean, SCO Finally Lose.

So as scattered all around the web SCO have finally lost their case against Linux. Here is a link to one such article on the matter.

As highlighted in the above article it would seem that SCO can not ever raise the case again. Oh well. It's my belief that Microsoft were behind the whole sorry story. There have been some interesting articles in the last few years pointing to Microsoft exec's close to Bill and Steve leaving Microsoft and joining various companies that sit on the fringe of the case. I very much expect that Microsoft bank rolled at least some of the SCO attack. We will obviously never know.

Kate VI Input Mode Is In For KDE 4.2.

I have just been reading a great post on Erlends blog that he has finally submitted his code to enable VI input mode as a Kpart for KDE 4.2. This is a really welcome patch.

You can read a full set of supported commands in the above post.

KDE 4 Debian Lenny Backports.

I have just noticed that the KDE 4 Lenny Backports page has been updated to show that KDE 4.1.3 packages have now been created and uploaded.

I have not updated yet but will tonight.

There is some thing about a known problem with KDM so make sure you read the above page before updating.

Interesting News From Adobe - Alchemy.

Over the last couple of weeks there has been some big news release's from Adobe. I'll be honest apart from using Flash (Youtube!) I do not really use any of their products. That is a matter of I have neither had the need or the opportunity rather than any other reason.

However, I was very interested to read some more information relating to some news leaked onto the net some time ago. The leak stated that some guys at Adobe where working on a way to compile c/c++ code into Actionscript to be run in a browser.

Well at last there is a post about it on the Adobe site. Looks interesting.

More importantly it could open up the web to finally start the road to moving what we regard as the desktop today to a web based solution.

Visual Studio 2008.

Why does it need 205,184k just to open my solution? And why does it need to trash my hard drive?

Vim Macro Recorder.

I love simple tools for simple jobs and the VIM Keyboard Macro recorder is one such tool. In fact it was the reason I found VIM in the first place.

Anyway, how to use the recorder. To record a macro hit the q button and then enter a name for your macro. q is a great name as it is quick to type (qq) but you can name it bob (qbob) or whatever you want. When you finish completing your keyboard maneuvers then hit q again to end the recording.

To play the macro back you type @name. So if you are lazy like me that would be @q. If you want to repeat the macro a number of times then 10@q will play the q macro 10 times.

Konqueror & Dolphin Interesting Poll.

This is a rant about Dolphin and it's development as the default file manager within the KDE4 desktop.

I actually have mixed views on the subject because although I agree with the author of the above that Konqueror is an excellent file manager I can also see the argument for a separate file manager, i.e. Dolphin.

The trouble is that although I like Dolphin I have been having some performance issue's. Now this could be down to the Debian Lenny Backport packages or it could be down to the point that the author of the above has missed. Dolphin is a new application. It has only had 10 months of real world usage and still has a lot of development to go to improve things like stability and performance.

The interesting thing at the end of the above article is that they have a poll of what should be used for web browsing and file management. The outright winner is Firefox for browsing and Konqueror for file management.

Next Version Of IE To Use WebKit..... Maybe?

So the George Bush of the propriety software world, Steve Ballmer, was in Sydney talking to Microsoft developers when one clearly gifted individual stood and asked the following ...

"Why is IE still relevant and why is it worth spending money on rendering engines when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster?"

Ballmer's reply? "That's cheeky, but a good question, but cheeky".

He then went to to say

"There will still be a lot of proprietary innovation in the browser itself so we may need to have a rendering service," No surprise there then.... but then came...

"Open source is interesting, Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8."

So is he saying that Microsoft could one day ship a WebKit based browser? From the earlier comment that would require Microsoft to develop WebKit to work with their extensions and plug ins and would they give them back to the Webkit project. Would the WebKit dev's want the changes to be back ported? Could they even be backported without Microsoft giving away details of the inner's of IE.

Interesting questions which will probably never have to be answered.

KDE 4.1.3 "Change" Is Out

The KDE project has announced that KDE 4.1.3 (codenamed "Change") is now available.

4.1.3 is the 3rd maintenance release for 4.1 with the main updates being :

• Two crashes fixed in the Dolphin filemanager
• A large number of bugfixes and optimizations in the KHTML HTML rendering component.
• Several bugfixes in the Kopete multi-protocol Instant Messenger.

The rest of the changelog can be found here.

QT Creator - First Impressions.

I will be honest, I am maxed out completely at the moment and haven't had much of a chance to look at the new IDE from QT Software. I have however, been reading some interesting posts from around the KDE community which seem to be split as to whether or not the application is a good move and welcome.

The KDevelop team seem to think it is a duplication of effort and I can see why. However, as someone that spends much of his days battling, erm I mean enjoying(!) Visual Studio it always suprised me that QT did not have a good IDE of it's own. I have loaded monkey studio and tried to build something with code blocks. They are both ok IDE's but VS does provide a benchmark for IDE functionality. i would say that VS goes so far as to make certain tasks very easy and some programmers very lazy. I don't think that this is a good thing but that is my opinion.

I have used KDevelop in the past but have not always found it's UI to be particularly easy to work with. Of late I have started to head down the same route as Aaron and Ivan, basically Vim is my friend. Both of those previous links are to posts relating to QT Creator and KDevelop. Aarons makes for very interesting reading while Ivan basically agrees.

As for me well I installed the windows binary of QT Creator this morning while waiting for a build, fired it up and got a memory error. Tried again and it fired up. First impresssion is that it looks professional. Once I have tried to use it I will report my honest opinion.

QT Creator - Technology Preview Available.

The project that has been rumored around the web over the last couple of months is now finally available as a technology preview.

QT Creator (know previously as Greenhouse) is a cross platform IDE that aims to provide a single development environment for QT. With code editor and designer for the UI elements and integrated debugger.

You can grab downloads here for linux, mac and windows.