Rubénerd!

I keep discovering new and wonderful things about KDE again since moving back! These tips are probably already well known, but just in case :).

The problem

If you use KDE like me, you probably have a series of launcher icons in your panel for easy access. The problem with this is on lower resolution displays they take up a lot of horizontal space, which reduces the amount of space your Task Manager widget can use to display window titles:

The answer

The clever solution is to let the Task Manager widget handle your shortcuts instead.

1. Remove all your application launcher icons
2. Launch the application you use frequently
3. Right click its button in the task bar
4. Choose the Advanced menu
5. Click "Show A Launcher For X when It Is Not Running"

Icons will appear to the left of the task bar as before, but when you launch applications, their corresponding launcher disappears. This quickly saves large amounts of precious screen real estate when you have many different windows open.

As Kmahjongg said to me in 2007:

Since moving back to KDE, I've been reacquainted with a lot of my old favourite applications, and perhaps none are as awesome as the KDE Games, KNetWalk in particular. If you've ever played Pipe Dream from the Windows Entertainment Pack days, the gameplay should be a little familiar. Essentially, you're connecting all the chips to the power source.

Insanely addictive. If you're a KDE fan, install KDE Games from your package manager and launch it from the "Tactics and Strategy" menu.

For your consideration, my adventure with getting LibreOffice running optimally on the KDE spin of Fedora. Not too hard :).

While KOffice and the Calligra Suite perform better on KDE (for obvious reasons) and I prefer their use for my own ODF needs, I've found LibreOffice still handles Microsoft Office documents the best, even ones that are saved in those terrible Microsoft OOXML-based formats. I use the term "OOXML-based" given even Microsoft Office doesn't strictly conform to their own ratified standard.

Method one: downloading from LibreOffice.org

For those wanting the latest bleeding-edge release, downloading the RPMs directly from LibreOffice.org is the way to go, and the good news is the RedHat integration RPM even lets KDE pick up the newly installed applications.

The downside is that the GTK+ interface seemingly doesn't inherit any theme, even if you've specified one in your KDE settings. The result is an otherwise usable office suite that looks even more out of place in a Qt desktop than usual. There may be a way around this, but for now I just opted for method two.

Method two: Fedora repos

For those using the default Gnome install of Fedora, you can simply fire up a Terminal and issue this obfuscated command:

% su
# yum groupinstall "Office/Productivity"

I wish I could just as easily install office productivity into my brain, sometimes its hard to garner enthusiasm for writing reports and the like. But I digress.

The problem with this approach is it introduces a lot of Gnome dependencies I don't want or need on my beautiful KDE desktop, so I prefer installing each component separately. For example:

% su
# yum install libreoffice-calc \
libreoffice-draw \
libreoffice-impress \
libreoffice-writer

Running this command didn't introduce many Gnome dependencies at all, leading me to think another LibreOffice application I don't use needs them. In any case, I fire up these applications and they look and perform as much like a Qt app as a GTK+ app with the correct theme can.

If you run LibreOffice (or even OOo) on KDE, I'd love to hear how you use it.

Yesterday I finally received shipment of my KDE shirt from FreeWear!

The shower

Picture the scene if you will. My resurgent interest in KDE after several years of isolation lead me to desiring some form of KDE advertising device for my laptop. A sticker, for example. Alas, I resigned myself to the fact that anywhere that offered KDE stickers had to charge more for the shipping than the actual merchandise.

Which got me thinking... what could I purchase affordably but could still justify having shipped? The answer came to me in the shower, of all places: a shirt. The question was, where to get it?

The advocacy pages on the KDE website were surprisingly unhelpful, and while I got excited at this article on Dot KDE, I quickly noticed the publication date. Other sites such as Zazzle had people selling KDE shirts, but I couldn't find anywhere on their pages that KDE would see any of their proceeds, which seemed a bit dodgy.

After searching for what seemed like an eternity, I laid eyes on the FreeWear.org site. Enamoured with their delicious pun, I ordered a shirt!

The shirt

FreeWear had several different KDE shirts, but I'm a sucker for this shade of blue, so I had very little choice but to get this one! Pantone 229 is the second best colour after purple.

The shirt is emblazoned (can I employ heraldic language here?) with white KDE letters and the KDE gear logo along the front right hand side, and with a smaller KDE gear logo on the back. The shirt is in my second favourite colour (after purple of course!) and for something a little different, the collar and ends of the sleeves are white.

The quality is amazing. So often I've bought shirts printed in that fashion that feel like they'll crack up after being folded once or put through the wash, but the silk screening on this shirt is sharp and solid. That was [almost] some pretty spiffy apparel related alliteration there.

As an added bonus, they even shipped me four circular KDE stickers for free! I've had free stickers from sites like Threadless before, but from a small site like this it was a pleasant surprise!

The company

FreeWear.org is a small operation based out of Spain that silk screens prints for various different free/open source projects by hand; they have photos on their site showing how they do it.

Most importantly, some of the proceeds from the sale of each item go towards the project you're choosing to advertise as you walk around. In my case, they made a €3 donation to the KDE e.V. in Germany.

Now all I need to do is wait for the weather to warm up a little so I can wear it to uni and blow the minds of some of those crusty old professors who are probably still on CDE ;D

I knew Apple had derived WebKit from KHTML, but having been away from KDE for so long I had no idea Konqueror had the ability to switch its rendering engine to it.

Temporarily

1. Fire up Konqueror. If you need to be told this, you have deep seated problems a change of rendering engine won't fix
2. Open the View menu
3. Under the View Mode subheading, choose WebKit

Permanently

1. Fire up Konqueror. If you need to be told this, you have deep seated problems a change of rendering engine won't fix
2. Open the Settings menu
3. Choose Konfigure Konqueror (sorry, couldn't resist!)
4. Choose General from the sidebar
5. Under General Konqeuror behavour, change the drop down box from KTHML to WebKit

Now you can test your projects with WebKit browsers without subjecting yourself to Chrome/Chromium for Linux, and without any additional software. Pretty sweet :)

After several years of self-imposed KDE exile, I'm back and loving it :).

I still have my Red Hat Linux CDs

KDE and I go a long way back. When I first started using Red Hat Linux 5.0 in primary school I was fascinated by the concept of having multiple installable graphical environments instead of just one, and used Anaconda to install Gnome and KDE at the same time. I quickly settled on KDE because I thought the UI was the nicest, and it felt the most feature complete.

In 2006 (above) when I started experimenting with FreeBSD on the desktop as well as on headless servers, I blogged about my experience with getting those maddening xorg.conf files working , and installing KDE from the ports system. I was living in Malaysia at the time and we were all obsessed with The Melancholoy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which naturally made its way into everything I was blogging about at the time!

In 2008 I also briefly ran KDE with Openbox, this time when I was obsessed with Clannad:

That's why I love having a blog compared to anything else, you can go back in time and see what you were doing all those years ago. ^_^

At the same time I was also trying Xfce however, and with the release of KDE 4.0 which was more unstable than the Windows OSs I'd left behind, I gradually moved over to it, then to Gnome. I justified my decision by claiming most of my software was GTK+, and it made sense using a DE that was too.

UTS is Pro Qt

Fast forward to 2011, and something fateful happened. Walking into my first class for a semester, I noticed our tutor was running KDE 4.6 on a ThinkPad X60, the next model up from my X40. Not only that, it was running fast!

That night, I went home and installed the KDE spin of Fedora onto my venerable ThinkPad X40. I knew Fedora had a (in my opinion an undeserved) reputation for treating KDE as a second class citizen, but it's the distribution I was most comfortable with and love how easily it can be configured with SELinux and whole drive encryption.

In an O'Reilly Nutshell (see what I did there?), I was blown away. KDE only took marginally longer to boot than Xfce, and included all the graphical bells and whistles. I was reaKquainted with Konqueror, Konsole, Kate, KNews, amaroK and the venerable KDEGames. I installed KDevelop and instantly remembered why I thought it was the finest F/OSS IDE. I was able to install VLC and Opera without worrying about dependencies!

Other than performance, perhaps most surprising still was just how well my GTK apps like Firefox, the Gimp, Inkscape and LibreOffice (with a little tweaking) looked with the Oxygen-GTK theme. Aside from the lack of subtle gradient in their title bars and a few other minor visual tells, they were otherwise indistinguishable.

A lot of things have changed since the time I used KDE 3.x, but I'm gradually getting my bearings back. No doubt you'll be seeing plenty of posts on the subject in the coming weeks.

Ah Qt, how I missed you :')

While I was quick to point out the release of Apple's Aperture 3 software, perhaps even bigger news is KDE 4.4 now available. Time to check out openSUSE or Mandriva again soon?

9th February, 2010. Today KDE announces the immediate availability of the KDE Software Compilation 4.4, "Caikaku", bringing an innovative collection of applications to Free Software users. Major new technologies have been introduced, including social networking and online collaboration features, a new netbook-oriented interface and infrastructural innovations such as the KAuth authentication framework. According to KDE's bug-tracking system, 7293 bugs have been fixed and 1433 new feature requests were implemented. The KDE community would like to thank everybody who has helped to make this release possible.

Hysterical, no wait, historical

If you look through the archives here you'd see even as late as 2008 I was a huge fan of KDE and preferred it to Gnome. Qt rocks GTK's socks, and the applications that came even with the kde_base FreeBSD port felt more complete and mature than anything on competing desktops. KDE felt professional.

When KDE 4.0 was released many people switched because of stability concerns and a lack of features, I hurriedly switched to Gnome. Then Microsoft shamelessly copied it for Windows 7, go figure.

Comparisons are like comparing

I've tried each release of KDE 4 since, but I've gone back to Gnome each time because at some point Gnome became fairly usable, simple to use and polished whereas KDE feels as though they're competing on glitz and wow to the detriment of consistency and usability.

Apple still seems to be the only tech outfit that can create stunningly beautiful user interfaces that are also a pleasure to use. Gnome is like Google in that the interface is plain but very functional. The good news is many of the new features like the desktop widgets can be disabled and the new KDE menu can be configured to work like the menus in KDE 3.x (or Gnome) amongst other things, but it bothers me how much work I need to put in to get a desktop I feel I can use.

Of course all this is my own opinion and there are plenty of people who are really happy with KDE 4.x. I'm hoping the 4.4 release might give me enough reason to move back; Gnome has the better interface but as I said I prefer Qt and Mono's encroachment worry me. Plus I'd love to start using the KDE developer tools again, KDevelop is so much fun to use it's almost criminal.

In the interests of disclosure, you may have noticed the old graphic I had on the side of the site here promoting FreeBSD and the KDE desktop has been replaced. I figured that while I really liked the KDE 3.5.x desktop, I don't use the 4.x desktop on any of my current machines. Not sure whether that will change, I'm presuming it will, but for now I'm really happy with Xfce. The Xfce desktop is simple, lightweight, and fits all my GTK+ apps nicely.

In it's place I'm using some Spread FreeBSD graphics which [surprisingly] link to http://www.spreadbsd.org/, a BSD server and desktop advocacy site as well as an advocacy site for the BSD licences themselves.

If you like FreeBSD or PC-BSD (the desktop) you can register for a free affiliate account too which will allow you to keep track of the number of visits your site has generated. You don't get any money, just a warm fuzzy feeling that you're helping to spread FreeBSD awareness and whatnot, even if (like me) you're not Bill Kurtis.

As I've said before here many times, I like to think of the how-to guides I post here as guides to help myself remember how to do something, with the added benefit that if someone else finds what I've written useful I've been able to help someone else too. My how-to guides are probably far too verbose and contain superfluous images for their own good, but I figure the last thing the world needs is another dry, text-only technical blog right? ^_^

In this case I feel humbled that the Fedora Tunisia team of all folks are listing my guide to using OpenBox with KDE in amongst other recommended guides in their window manager wiki page. I'm afraid I can't speak any Arabic and my limited grasp of the French language restricts me to just saying merci beaucoup!

Reading what I wrote in that post I wrote on the 19th of March 2008 reminded me of just how much attitudes and opinions can change in such a short amount of time. Back then I was primarily a KDE desktop user on FreeBSD who also dabbled in Xfce for his GTK+ (a graphical toolkit) application needs; now with the advent of KDE 4.x I've moved over to GNOME as well as Xfce and more generic vanilla window managers. That's why I love blogs and journals in general; they're a fascinating view into how you used to think... even if it was less than a year ago and even if I'm not Bill Kurtis.

It's official, the first images and details of Microsoft's up and coming Windows 7 operating system have been released to the press. The always interesting PC Pro in the UK has the inside scoop:

Microsoft has released the first pre-beta code of Windows 7, writes Barry Collins at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

The next-generation operating system includes a bevy of new features, including a revamped Windows desktop, support for multitouch, USB drive encryption and improved boot times and performance.

While all this does sound promising for people still using Windows, the preliminary screenshot definitely failed to impress. I'm hoping that Microsoft's history of refining and modifying the interface to the point where it barely resembles the betas repeats itself, because this is just awful:

Screenshot of the first preview of Windows 7

Not only that, but I feel as though they've blatantly and unabashedly ripped off my beloved K Desktop Environment. The panel is pixel-for-pixel the same size. The layout is the same. The widgets look the same. Though for what it's worth, you've got to hand it to them for taking such a gorgeous interface and making it look terrible!

I think it does make a strong statement though that a software company that has been so desperate to label free and open source software as a movement that largely can't be taken seriously, then turns around and attempts to emulate the fruits borne from such projects.

Screenshot of the current release of the KDE Unix (Linux, FreeBSD etc) desktop

I continually find it amazing how Microsoft's user interface standards have so dramatically slipped over the years. Our first home computer came loaded with Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions which we later upgraded to 3.1. It was by no means perfect, but I'd argue in many ways it was superior to anything outside Amiga Workbench at the time. Windows 95 was clean and organised and personally I thought it was much slicker than System 7.x and all the other classic Mac OS's. Windows 98 was marginally worse, XP's cheap graphics looked childish, and Vista of course was an abomination.

With the bar now set so low, let's hope for the sake of people who still must use Windows that this latest version gets some serious cosmetic changes before it ships in 2049.

Windows 3.1 in all it's glory!