i won't be making many commits this week. it's crunch time for the release event in mountainview now. presentations to be slicked up, videos to be downloaded and prepped, final bits of travel plans to be figured out.
but i'm rather happy with the plasma devel of the last couple weeks. it's been pretty much solid bug fixing and feature polishing. which is exactly what one would hope for right after a big release. after the release event, task #1 will be the panel toolbox so we can all get at panel configuration options. between now and then i'll still be on the mailing list and dealing with the bug triage; good news on that front is that we're seeing few reports of new bugs now, so it seems we've tapped out most of the major flaws in the existing features.
i picked up a new laptop last night that i'm hoping to do the presentation and demos on; it's slightly better than the one i've been using for the last couple of years, to say the least. the sales people at the best buy i went to happened to be big kde/linux fans; i was wearing a kde t-shirt and they spotted me from across the computer section and homed in on p. and i =) they hooked me up with a good deal and we talked about kde development. they were young guys just getting into software; one of them starts his comp sci degree this year. i left with a laptop, and they both have my email address and some info about getting involved with kde development. didn't really expect to do any community building / new developer recruiting while i was out, but then you can never predict these things =)
i've got OpenSuse 10.3 on the new machine and i have to say that i'm more than pleased with it. i was afraid i'd miss apt-get ... but zypper rocks. the only annoyance i had in the whole ordeal was the built in ricoh webcam: to get that working i had to build the r5u870 driver from source and manually copy the firmware (ugh!) into /lib/firmware. not a big deal, but will be nice when that stuff gets into the drivers:webcam repo.
update: in the comments section, Carlos pointing me to this rpm search that shows that someone has packaged up this webcam driver! i had (silly me ;) gone looking in the main software and then the webcam repos; the rpm search through community contributions is yet another really great thing that has happened during my hiatus from suseland; really nice to see and something i'm sure to use again in the future... thanks for the tip, Carlos!
everything else seems amazingly slick, and i'm pretty happy with the improvements in yast that have happened since i've been gone. i stopped using suse after several years of loving it due to the sad releases that were 10.0 and 10.1. but after seeing 10.3 i was impressed enough to try it out again; i'm a little tired of the *buntu world these days and unhappy with some of their decisions. didn't help that on my last upgrade of my laptop, it rendered my system unusable due to a screw up in their evms packaging; this was doubly "humorous" as the system wasn't using evms at all. it was just installed and that was enough. this isn't the first time such a catastrophic update has come down those apt-get pipes, so it's just in time for me that OpenSuse starts to look like its back on the rails again. there were even kde4 packages available as an option in the installer =)
on an unrelated topic, on the way into school this morning p. offered me a proof that the first person who lived is no longer alive somewhere on the planet: he noted that people die, and that all people before the people who just died have also died, so the people before that also died, and so on .. so the first person must also have died. i couldn't help but grin ear to ear as he used what is essentially induction as proof of his theory, and that he actually was thinking about things like "where is the first person who lived right now?" .. kids are amazing.
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Hello, i'd like to point you to this little thread about users (well... especially me it seems) having big problems with kwin4 and nvidia.
http://dot.kde.org/1200050369/1200126492/
Maybe as the presidente you could pull some strings to get the kwin guys to do the howto thing?
"Maybe as the presidente you could pull some strings to get the kwin guys to do the howto thing?"
heh, thankfully that's not how things work in the project. my position within KDE e.V. is purely business related and has nothing to do with the technical workings of the project. which is how it should be, imho.
however, as a kde developer i might be able to do something.
having a "techbase, but for users" is something we've been discussing intensely recently.
http://packages.opensuse-community.org/index.jsp?
searchTerm=r5u870&distro=openSUSE_103
Hi, I hadn't come across carlos' search page but it seems to be a slightly less pretty and verbose version of the 'official' opensuse package portal. It too lists all the packages from the official repo's and those of the users (btw, anyone can get an account to build their own obscure package in a few clicks).
http://software.opensuse.org/search?baseproject=openSUSE:10.3
If you fire up Firefox in your new install there is an opensuse folder in the bookmarks toolbar which links to that search page, news and the community page (which hosts one-click installs for useful codecs). This menu may be in Konqueror too but I only run KDE4.0 now which is yet to be fully suse'd :)
Good luck with opensuse I love it!
(ps - 1) 'smart' is also a good package manager for suse, if only because you can set it to store downloaded packages and set repo precedence. 2) installing packages is fast or faster than *ubuntu if you only set refresh on for those repos which actually change - ie not the full opensuse ftp 10.3repo, just updates etc..)
Apropos: I've always wondered where to get those blue KDE shirts you wear on that photo!
In the merchandise shop at kde.org i only find those ugly black ones. :(
Aaron, what is the brand and specifications of laptop you bought? Just wondering what you chose, you write they hooked you up with a good deal, which makes it seem like an impulse purchase, you didn't do research on the Linux capability of the hardware? If Windows XP/Vista was included with it, are you going to try getting a refund for the Windows license? Didn't you buy a laptop which comes which Linux, like Dell's laptops?
BTW, first time I'm posting a comment on your weblog, but I've been reading it for years. I must say that you are an excellent weblogger, especially because you write some interesting posts not only about the very technical aspects of free software development, but also about the social aspect, the community and your own life, which is very appealing to read for the less technical crowd. Keep on blogging please, you're doing excellent.
@Alexander: it's a Sony Vaio CR220E. there are open source drivers for all the hardware, including the webcam, except for the modem. but i haven't used a modem in probably a decade now.
it comes in pink ;) , but i got the dark blue one. i liked the pink top, but the inside was also pink which was too distracting. the white top was ok, but the interior was also white and looked .. not so hot. so i went with the dark blue lid with champagne interior.
i did research the hardware in it while i was there. i looked online while in the store as to which chipsets were used and knew all the chipsets in it were supported by linux.
one of the staff recommended another laptop of similar capability (not sure why, but whatever) but another of the salespeople said, "no, he wants a linux friendly system. those aren't.." so i had friendly staff to back me up too.
brave new world, this, compared to even just a couple years back, where i can go into a "Big Box" store and find linux savvy sales staff eager to help out.
If you wanna search for software (and files who are part of packages) for openSUSE, and if you are not afraid from Konsole, there's nothing that beats the "webpin" commandline tool. (Heh... it's a CLI frontend to the very same web-based search utility you have been pointed at.)
cp@l5:~> webpin r5u870
5 results (5 packages) found for "r5u870" in openSUSE_103
* r5u870: Webcam driver for Ricoh r5u870
- 0.10.0 [BS::home:/dantm(S:n)]
* r5u870-kmp-debug: Webcam driver for Ricoh r5u870
- 0.10.0_2.6.22.5_31 [BS::home:/dantm(S:n)]
* r5u870-kmp-bigsmp: Webcam driver for Ricoh r5u870
- 0.10.0_2.6.22.5_31 [BS::home:/dantm(S:n)]
* r5u870-kmp-xenpae: Webcam driver for Ricoh r5u870
- 0.10.0_2.6.22.5_31 [BS::home:/dantm(S:n)]
* r5u870-kmp-default: Webcam driver for Ricoh r5u870
- 0.10.0_2.6.22.5_31 [BS::home:/dantm(S:n)]
My advice: use web search to find the webpin utility, install it, and never look back at web search... :-)
Yes webpin does indeed rock (for openSUSE users).
Well, I'll be damned. Seigo likes openSUSE.
I never would have expected to hear that when we first met back at Socal Linux Expo a couple of years ago.
--Ted
@Ted: heh.. well, i don't hold grudges, i try to judge groups based on current performance. i'm still not happy with Novell's corporate position on many things.
i am quite impressed with the SUSE technical team, having dug itself out of what i consider a rather large hole that was dug for them during the Novell transition period, and even more so by the community that has grown up around OpenSUSE.
i'm not quite prepared to start recommend Novell Linux to corporate clients quite yet, though. =)
see you at the next conference we're at =)
You know, aseigo, your kid scares me. He already knows what mathematical induction and recursion means. When you tell me that he understands how to balance AVL trees... you know what? I don't want to think about it! ;-)
How old is he?
he's 7.75 years old.
"i was afraid i'd miss apt-get ... but zypper rocks."
You can't be serious!!!
Well, someday you will say yourself: "Why I must remove X to install Y?" or "Build Service is great, but I have already 18 repositories... a priority system would be handly".
That day you should go here
hi seigo
please back port the " future" config panel thing to kde 4.0 branch and i'll invite you to my wedding next month
You've timed your conversion for the first time in years the opensuse repos have gone down!
Seems like somebody spilled a lot of coffee..
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-announce/2008-01/msg00006.html
Yeah, I also switched from Kubuntu to openSUSE 10.3 which impressed me, too.
That was at christmas and now it's my favorite distribution :-D
The only bad thing is that the repositories are partially down at the moment due a hardware failure :-(
Regards, marrat
Suse repositories being filled up now. In the meantime you can use the not widely publicised repository mirror @ http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse
seems like kids know a lot more than we give them credit for :)
I remember when I was about ten or twelve, my dad explained the basics of highschool algebra quite quickly by phrasing it in a way that made me realise I *already* knew most of it, and it was just using different words and symbols to describe the same things.
morphado: no can do, 4.0 is feature-frozen, and I'm fairly sure that would be considered a new feature.
You'd better than me.
My laptop was not completed to build KDE.
So I just left the laptop just build. :(
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