I have finally convinced my sister to write on her blog. It has been almost a year now since her last post. And since my friend Boris started to publish his photos, I suggested the same to my sister. Under all the pressure she bulged and uploaded some of her photos of nature to Flickr. Check out her blog entry for links to the photos. I hope she continues to post on her blog and upload photos.

Tags: blogging, photos, photographs, photography, nature

Let me remind you there is less then a month until the beginning of the 2nd international Linux training camp, which starts on 20th and ends on 27th August here in Bohinj, Slovenia. Last year’s Red Hat Summer Camp was a huge success. For this year Red Hat and Housing prepared a program with 4 different tracks to choose from: Pingo Linux (for beginners and people new to Linux), RH300 with RH302 (get certified for RHCE), RH133 (Enterprise Linux System Administration) and Lab track (MySQL, PHP, firewall). In addition to learning about Linux, each track includes sport activities (adrenalin park, canyoning, rafting…). I hope you come and visit us here in beautiful Triglav National Park.

Tags: linux, training, red hat, summer, camp, bohinj, slovenia

A few hours ago a news entry linking to my KDE 3.5 Previews article was published on Slashdot.org. And immediately my blog started to receive A LOT of visitors form all over the world. If I had my blog hosted on my own server on a poor cable link the Slashdot effect would bring it down in no time. I’ve never imagined that one of my articles would cause this.

But with good there also come some bad and irritating things. Some stupid spammer started to fill comments here, and some of the text was even racist. If he has something intelligent to say (which I highly doubt) he should set up his own blog. I think this coward is very sick and should get himself some professional help. Thanks to this ill person I had to disable all the commenting on this blog. Sorry for this! And after this incident I finally see how poorly Blogger.com service is prepared to fight against spam. I hope they improve this very soon or else they will loose their users to competition.

Tags: blog, blogging, spam, slashdot

Part 2 >

Introduction

Every year, during the summer holidays, I regularly download the source code of the new version of KDE desktop that is in the works and compile and test it. If any bugs are found I report them and from time to time I also make some feature suggestions. When the feature and message freeze comes into effect I also start helping with translation into Slovenian language. This year is no exception, in most parts. One of the differences is that now I’m testing on two computers: 32-bit Athlon 1200 MHz (with Mandriva Linux 2006 beta installed and GCC 4.0.1) and a much faster 64-bit Athlon 64 3000+ (Gentoo Linux and GCC 3.4.4). It is always good to have things tested on as many platforms as possible. Another change is that this year I’ve decided to post previews of and experiences with development version of KDE on this blog. I’ll try to put up as many screenshots as possible so that everyone can see what is coming in the future.

General

Stability of this prebeta version is very good. I rarely encountered crashes or freezes. Speed is also about the same as with current stable version 3.4.1. The default font sizes have been reduced to 10 points, which makes a little bit more room on the screen. This is how the default desktop looks like:

As you can see there is not much change since the previous versions. Even the version on the wallpaper is still the old one. You can expect to see more innovations in KDE 4. But there are some more or less hidden differences and some of them I’ll show you next.

Kicker

The first thing I noticed was that the new tooltips, first introduced in KDE 3.4 (only for buttons), are now also used for minipager, taskbar buttons and clock. I think it would be a good idea to also use them for system tray icons.

There are now three different appearances for Kicker that you can choose from: Elegant (the default), Classic and For Transparency.

Minipager has received many improvements. It can show icons of applications, background can now show desktop wallpaper or it can be transparent. You can even drag and drop windows from one desktop to another.

Another improvement for kicker is Add Applet dialog. The inspiration probably came from GNOME desktop and it replaces the current context menu based method. It makes it quite a bit easier to find the right applet.

Storage Media Notification

Next new feature in 3.5 is storage media notification. This is something users of the current Windows desktop already have and some Linux distributions, like Mandriva, implemented their own version, mostly just as simple autorun. KDE will now also show a special dialog of possible actions when some media is inserted. I hope authors of KDE applications will soon start to add actions for their program. On the other hand it is simple to add, edit or remove actions yourself.

home:/

KIOSlaves are a special feature of KDE that make it simple to work with files and folders over different protocols. You probably know some of them very well, like file, http or ftp. A new one has recently been added: home. When you open location home:/ in Konqueror you can now see all home folders of the users belonging to the same group as you do.

Konqueror

One of the main complaints about Konqueror was that there were some menu options that just don’t make sense in file managing mode and should only be shown in web browsing mode (and vice versa). The work is being done to correct this.

Konqueror now supports AdBlock content filtering. You can add simple filters by, for example, right clicking on an image and selecting to block it.

There are a lot of other behind the scenes improvements to various parts of Konqueror. And now that Apple provided access to their improvements to KHTML and KJS, KDE developers can and did backport them into Konqueror.

End of Part 1

Well, this is it for the first part. I hope you like it. I’ll take a look at other applications and new developments in following articles. Expect the next one in an about two weeks. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Translations and derivative works

Hebrew by Uri Sharf
Slovenian by Jure Repinc

Part 2 >

Tags: kde, desktop, konqueror, kicker, linux

As of now all the articles on this blog are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. This license is similar to the GPL license for free software and lets you remix, tweak, and build upon my work even for commercial reasons, as long as you credit me and license your new creations under the identical terms. If you are also an author there are a lot of different Creative Commons licenses to choose from. Pick one and let other people clearly know (by marking your work by the famous CC mark) how they can use your work and share it on.

Tags: creative commons, licensing, copyright, copyleft

While reading Wil Wheaton’s blog I found out that today, on the anniversary of the first Moon landing, James Montgomery Doohan died at the age of 85. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease. If you are a Star Trek fan you sure know him as the funny chief engineer Scotty from the starship Enterprise from The Original Series. As he would say: “Scotty to Heaven… One to beam up.”. May he rest in peace!

Tags: james doohan, scotty, star trek, the original series

A few hours ago my first patch for KDE has been committed to KDE SVN. It is nothing big, just a fix for a compilation problem for Juk (a very nice music player and tag editor) when Akode is not installed on the system. But it is a start and I hope to learn enough C++ and Qt soon to be more helpful. Until then I’ll continue to do my best with translation into Slovenian, testing and bug reporting. Oh and by the way, I was following these instructions on how to send patches to KDE.

Tags: personal, programming, patch, kde, linux

Only a few days after releasing versions 1.0.5 of the extremely popular web browser Firefox and e-mail client Thunderbird there are allready new releases available. The previous releases had some changes in API (application programming interface) which broke some extensions. So all should be fixed in versions 1.0.6. You can get them here:
Mozilla Firefox 1.0.6 | ED2K
Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.6 | ED2K

Tags: mozilla, firefox, thunderbird, web browsers, e-mail, email, internet

Yesterday evening my roommate Vito informed me that in the next semester his girlfriend is finally moving in to live with him. This unfortunately means that there is no free bed for me left in the apartment and I will have to join my sister in a search for a new room in Ljubljana. I hope we find something that is close to our faculties and that is reasonably priced. The task is not easy and good luck plays quite an important role in this. Anyways, I had a great time in this apartment. The best place I’ve had in Ljubljana so far. Thanks to all roommates for this and sorry for any inconveniences I’ve cased. I must also say goodbye to our neighbor students on the upper floor. Take care and have a great time! All of you in the house. Oh and if anyone reading this knows of any cool place for two or three students, be sure to drop me a note.

Tags: personal, room, apartment, ljubljana

Issue 5 of Free Software Magazine is finally here. Articles for June 2005 are:

• Editorial

• The internet’s plague: spam

• Linux in a Windows World by Roderick Smith
• From Bash to Z Shell by Oliver Kiddle, Jerry Peek and Peter Stephenson

• The leap from virtual host to virtual machine
• Xen, the virtual machine monitor
• Linux-VServer

• Haskell
• Newsflash!
• Web site blocking techniques
• Who’s behind that web site?

• The future of computing: is free software ready?
• Free software 2.0
• On the “Creative Commons”: a critique of the commons without commonalty

Download from home page, using ED2K links or using BitTorrent.

Tags: free software magazine, fsm, magazine, free software, open source

While we are all waiting for the next issue of Free Software Magazine I would like to tell you about another free magazine I have come across a few days ago. It is called MyOSS Magazine, where MyOSS stands for Malaysian Open Source Software. And no, it is not written in Malaysian, it is in English so everyone can read it. To find out more about the magazine be sure to check out its mission and social contract. If you already have some FOSS article ready or are thinking about writing one you are more then welcome to contribute to the magazine and community. Besides downloading MyOSS from its home page you can also use ED2K links. Oh and a big thanks to people behind MyOSS for a link to my blog in one of their articles on the home page.

Tags: myoss, malaysianoss, magazine, free software, open source

Just a few minutes ago I found out that after about 20 years of existence IBM is going to stop marketing (now) and selling (on December 23, 2005) their OS/2 operating system. OS/2 Warp 4 was the first operating system we had on our very first computer. I still remember all the countless hours I spent playing the excellent game Galactic Civilizations. As far as I remember OS/2 was a great operating system. Completely 32 bit, very stable and powerful. Much better than Windows 95 we had to buy later. Well OS/2 is gone now and IBM are recommending that their customers migrate to Linux now. They have even prepared a special OS/2 to Linux Client Transition guide.

Tags: ibm, os/2, os2, linux, operating systems, galactic civilizations

Right after updating the best web browser Mozilla foundation has also released a new version of my favorite e-mail client (additionally it is also a very nice client for news groups (usenet) and a great RSS/Atom feed reader) Thunderbird. Version 1.0.5 has improved stability and a couple of fixed potential security problems. Download here. You can also get the new Thunderbird using ED2K links or any BitTorrent client using these torrents: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X

Tags: mozilla, thunderbird, e-mail, email, internet

A new version of one of the best web browsers, Firefox, is out. Version 1.0.5 is bringing you some stability fixes and plugs a couple of potential security holes. So update as soon as possible. Download here. You can also get the new Firefox using ED2K links or any BitTorrent client using these torrents: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X.

Oh and by the way. Firefox has recently just passed the 70 000 000 downloads mark and is also on the 4th place of the most frequently downloaded apps on Download.com during the past 10 years. Extremely impressive for such a young application.

Tags: mozilla, firefox, web browsers, internet

The extremely popular web browser Firefox already has many easy to use modern features by default. And there are a lot of additional extensions that make Firefox even better. Google released three extensions of their own yesterday:

• Google Toolbar: among other things it brings spellchecking, automatic fill out for forms and translation
• Google Send to Phone: enables you to send short text messages of web page content to your mobile phone (unfortunately limited to US numbers only)
• Google Suggest: completes your search terms as you type them into the search box located to the right of the address bar

If you are still using some old and insecure browser like Internet Explorer be sure to check out Firefox and extensions for it.

Tags: firefox, extensions, google, browsers, web browsers, internet