At around 5:30 I was woken by a sea gull (or something like that) which was banging on our window. I couldn’t go back to sleep so I waited until breakfast, waited some more and then headed to the conference, which started at 9 o’clock.

I’ve been in the Room 1 for the entire day, listening to 2 keynotes and 10 other talks. Let me mention just some of them, the ones which were the most interesting to me. At the Threadweaver talk I found out what this library actually is, where and how it is useful and that it shouldn’t be that hard to use. Definitely something to take a closer look at when I get home. After lunch (where I met Mike from Edinburgh and Matt from Philadelphia) Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical (Ubuntu) presented 13 suggestions to make Linux even better and more widely used. People agreed on most of the stuff, like the importance of the first impression. However, some were not convinced that 6-months release cycle would be beneficial to KDE. It was also nice to see that he recognizes the valuable work translators do. Later in the day Zack Rusin presented a talk about computer graphics and introduced a tool/framework called Quasar, which should make graphical effects easier to create. Another thing to check out later. Aaron Seigo also talked about how important beautiful graphics are for enjoyable experience when using a computer. But the effects must be natural and subtle. At the end, we listened to a talk by Patrick Harvie, who is a member of the Scottish parliament. It was very refreshing to see that there are politicians who actually understand the true meaning of the word free in Free Software and know about the many benefits of Free Software for society.

All in all it was a great first day at aKademy. The only thing we missed a lot was the working wireless internet connection.

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland

I just came back from aKademy 2007 early registration at Livingston Tower, University of Strathclyde, which is about 20 minutes of walking away from Euro Hostel. It was a bit hard to find the registration place at first. I was looking for a big KDE banner, but it turned out that there was only an A4-size piece of paper with handwriting attached to the front door, so I completely missed it. Luckily my sister has a keen eye and she noticed it and we found the room just fine.

At the registration I got a name tag and a bag of cool stuff. Mandriva, which is one of the sponsors, provided most of it. They put together 5 items: a Mandriva Linux One 2007 CD, a 2 GiB USB memory stick with bootable Mandriva Linux on it, a Mandriva branded pen, a sheet with Mandriva stickers, and a Mandriva branded plastic bag. From other sponsors there were: July 2007 edition of Linux Magazine, Google Code branded notebook, and a Kubuntu 7.04 CD. Organizers also provided a Glasgow Tourist Map and a Greater Glasgow & Clyde Walley Essential Guide, which will both come in handy. From AMD we got a promotion leaflet for their developer tools. Oh, I almost forgot, there was also the KDE branded mug among the cool stuff.

So, aKademy 2007 hasn’t really started yet and it is already great.

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland

Right now it’s 13:20 and I’m sitting here in the lobby of the Euro Hostel, so this means that I’ve arrived to Glasgow safely. The trip was quite long and tiring. The drive to the Maribor airport (which was a bit hard to find) was 3 hours long, waited 2 hours for the plane to London Stansted, the flight was about 2 hours long, then I had to wait another 6 hours for the flight to Glasgow and the flight itself was about 1 hour and 30 minutes long. After arriving to Glasgow Prestwick airport we waited about half an hour for the bus to Glasgow, 45 minutes of bus ride and 20 minutes of walk I’ve finally checked-in at the hostel. No wonder I dropped dead right after getting into the room. When I woke up I had some nice breakfast and now I’m waiting re-check-in as part of the KDE aKademy 2007 group.

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland

Together with my sister we’ve just finished packing our luggage for our trip to Glasgow, Scotland. As I’ve already written before, we’re going there for the annual KDE community meeting called aKademy. I think I’m quite well prepared for the conference. Using KOrganizer I’ve made a detailed plan of all the talks and BoFs and other events that I intend to visit. KOrganizer also has a very nice export function which outputs all the events into a nicely formatted HTML file. So thanks to KOrganizer you can see my detailed aKademy 2007 calendar. Our plane lifts off in less than 12 hours and we also need about 3 hours to get to the airport so I should better get some sleep. I’ll report back, here on my blog, when we get to our destination. Can’t wait to meet all the KDE people in person. Oh, and thanks again to Linux User Group of Slovenia for sponsoring my trip.

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland

Well almost. There was a concert performed last night by an Italian Pink Floyd tribute band called Seamus. Although it was raining heavily the day before the event, the sky was luckily clear during the concert. If the weather wasn’t good with us, the performance would be in a large tent here in Bohinjska Bistrica, which sucks badly when it comes to acoustics. So the concert itself was at a place we call »Pod Skalco« (could be translated as Under the Rock) right next to Lake Bohinj. Seamus band played for about two hours and a half and everyone from our team of five agrees that they were very very good. And if old Pink Floyd gurus like my father and his friend Toni say this you can safely believe it to be true. It was a lot of fun and great music for only 5€ of entrance fee. In fact I was quite surprised that there were not more people at the concert. Ah well, those not being there, including my sister, can be very sorry. They missed a lot of great music for little money.

Tags: pink floyd, seamus, rock, concert, concerts, bohinj, slovenia, slovenija

When I got my first 64-bit processor (AMD Athlon 64 3000+) about 3 years ago I sure wanted to take all advantage of what it had to offer by running a 64-bit operating system and 64-bit applications on it. While there was 64-bit Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, there were almost no 64-bit programs and drivers for it. And even today the situation in the Windows world is quite pathetic when it comes to 64-bit computing. It was a few months after I got Athlon 64 when I started to look seriously at Linux which was much more at home on 64-bit hardware.

Searching the internet I found out that the best 64-bit Linux distribution for AMD64 (now called x86-64) was source-based Gentoo Linux. I knew it was harder to set up than normal binary-based distributions, but I was ready for the next level. I was ready to learn more about Linux, ready for 64-bit world and damn all that processor power had to be used for something, like compiling source code for example This was not my first encounter with Gentoo. I managed to install it before, on a very slow computer at video store where I worked over summer. So after a few days of of compiling, installation and setting up the new computer was ready and everything was 64-bit. There was only one exception, OpenOffice.org.

At that time OpenOffice.org wouldn’t even compile into 64-bit form. So I had to use 32-bit binary package of OpenOffice.org and 32-bit emulation libraries. Over a couple of years OpenOffice.org 64-bit porting team improved the code to the point it would compile, but reports said it was crashing a lot. A few months have passed and a couple of days ago version 2.2.1 of OpenOffice.org came out. I decided I would try to compile this version into 64-bit form. I did this today and it compiled just fine and after a couple of minutes of testing it didn’t crash at all. So my entire system is now pure 64-bit code and I can safely remove the redundant 32-bit emulation packages.

Tags: openoffice.org, openoffice, office, 64-bit, x86-64, amd64, em64t, x64, gentoo, linux

One of my favourite films of all time is Das Boot. It’s a story about a German World War II submarine U-96 and its crew embarking on a dangerous mission. Submarines also fascinate me in general. When younger I’ve often played submarine simulation games like Silent Hunter and Jane’s 688(I) Hunter/Killer. Today I’m happy I can say we have a free and open source submarine simulation game that also runs on Linux.

I’m talking about Danger from the Deep (DftD) which is a World War II German submarine simulaton game. Source code is released under GPL license and artwork under Creative Commons license. Danger from the Deep 0.3.0 has just been released and it features much improved graphics (thanks to upgrade to OpenGL 2.0 and GLSL 1.1), 4 new u-boat types (IIA, IIB, IIC, IID), a new Tribal class destroyer, models can now have moving parts (turrets, guns…), multi-threaded code, new sound system, improved torpedo management, new basic torpedo camera and more. For details see latest news section.

I’ve played DftD for a couple of minutes today and I can say it looks like a very promising open source game project. If you are also a submarine fan be sure to download Danger from the Deep and… Dive! Dive! Dive!

Tags: navy, submarines, simulations, simulation, subsim, games, game, gaming, free software, open source, danger from the deep, dftd

Just in time for summer people from Trolltech have released a new version of my favourite framework for cross-platform GUI programming. For me the most interesting novelties in Qt 4.3 are much improved OpenGL support (I’ve just started learning basics) and integration of QtScript (based on ECMAScript 3, like JavaScript 1.5). Main Window is also enhanced quite a bit with new styles, more advanced tabs, titlebars and animated toolbars. For more details check out Qt and Qtopia Core 4.3 Release Announcement, What’s New in Qt 4.3 and list of changes in Qt/Qtopia 4.3.0. By the way, this version is also the one which the upcoming KDE 4 desktop will be based on.

Download Qt 4.3 for Linux/X11, Mac and Windows

Tags: programming, development, c++, trolltech, qt, qtopia, gui, qtscript, javascript, ecmascript, opengl, kde

I still remember the excitement when we were getting our very first PC in 1996. One of the things we also had to do was to choose an operating system for it. The two main options were IBM OS/2 Warp 4 and Microsoft Windows 95. After reading a couple of articles in Slovenian computer magazines we decided to go with OS/2 Warp 4 as it appeared to be quite a bit more advanced (about one year later we installed Windows 95 and I could experience for myself how much better OS/2 Warp 4 was). I spent countless hours playing the game Galactic Civilisations 2 on OS/2. My first attempt at programming was also on OS/2, using a programming language REXX. So you see, I liked OS/2 Warp 4 a lot.

Here’s a nice video about OS/2 Warp:
Computer Chronicles: OS/2 Warp

This April I’ve read an article on The Inquirer about OS/2 being 20 years old. My nostalgic memories of OS/2 have woken up and I started digging for more information about OS/2 on the internet. I’ve found out that OS/2 community is still alive and kicking and it looks like free and open source software is bringing fresh new life into the venerable operating system. There is even a company Serenity Systems International which has licensed the OS/2 code from IBM. They are still developing and advancing OS/2 in the form of their eComStation operating system (version 2.0 is about to be released). You can also download a demo version of eComStation which is a nice Live CD. I’ll have to try it out soon.

Two weeks ago I tried to find our OS/2 Warp 4 CDs and the box. But unfortunately it looks like we threw all that into the trash can. So the only option was that I download a copy from the internet. Luckily I found it on ED2K network, together with Galactic Civilizations for OS/2. I’ve also started a little hunt to find and collect various OS/2 items, starting with the operating system itself. Let’s see how much of the OS/2 part of computer history I can build up. The first piece of the puzzle has just found its way into my hands. It’s a brand new box of IBM OS/2 Warp 3, the red edition with bonus pack, still wrapped in plastic foil.

Some more videos of OS/2 Warp:
Opening OS/2 Warp 3 for the 1st time…
Upgrade to Win95? Upgrade to Vista? It hurts again!

What’s next. First I’ll check out the eComStation live CD. Then I’ll try to install OS/2 Warp 4.52 in a virtual machine or maybe even build a special computer for it from old parts. I’ll try to recreate the computer desktop from the days when I was younger and again play some Galactic Civilizations. Oh, if you have (or know someone who has) some OS/2 software or other item and you don’t know what to do with it, leave a comment or send me an e-mail, just don’t throw it into the trash can.

Go Team OS/2!

Tags: os/2, os2, warp, os/2 warp, os2 warp, ibm, operating systems, ecomstation, rexx, computer history