On 1st and 2nd December this year the KDE Education project is preparing its first meeting. I’ve already been to a similar event during aKademy 2007, where one day was dedicated to free and open source software in education and schools. I enjoyed it a lot and was very happy that Anne-Marie invited me to the meeting which will be happening in a little more than a month in Paris. I’ve already booked my flight and I can see that there are currently 10 more people registered at the travel page. Can’t wait to meet them all. Thanks to Anne-Marie for hard organisational work, thanks to KDE e.V. for sponsoring the meeting and thanks to Mandriva for allowing us to use their offices.

As a preparation for the meeting I have started to check out how to use Valgrind which helps you find memory leaks in the code. I used it on KStars and it revealed a problem in constellation boundary highlighting code which leaked about 13 MiB of memory on my short test run. As I had some more free time today, I also updated the Slovenian keyboard layout for KTouch and converted it into the new XML format. Blinken didn’t escape me as well.

These were my little contributions to KDE today. Now I have to prepare for a lot of work that awaits to have as much KDE 4 translated into Slovenian language as possible when it gets released.

Tags: kde, community, meeting, education, free software, open source, paris, france

I got a new laptop a few hours ago, for free again, thanks to LUGOS. It’s a HP Compaq nx6325 and it is a very similar model to my current nx6125. It has some more hard disk space (80 GiB instead of 60 GiB) and instead of single core AMD Turion 64 it has a dual core AMD Turion 64 X2, still 1800 MHz. Being similar to nx6125 laptop also means that it has the crappy Broadcom wireless network adapter which doesn’t even have any open source drivers from Broadcom. So I’ll still have to use NDISwrapper with Windows drivers or the reverse engineered bcm43xx drivers which are open source but don’t work as good. The laptop also has the integrated ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 graphics card, which has some problems with closed source drivers and no good open source drivers when it comes to 3D support. At least ATI/AMD have started to provide specifications for their graphic chips so there is hope. In addition, their latest closed source drivers, starting from version 8.41.7 are much improved. No such hope for Broadcom yet. Another thing I hope is that HP did their job right this time and that nx6325 doesn’t have as broken ACPI as nx6125 has. Anyways, double processor power will sure come in handy for compiling Gentoo Linux and KDE 4. Temporally the new laptop is running the new Mandriva Linux 2008. When I get back home I’ll install Gentoo Linux on it and give the nx6125 to my cousin Matej.

Tags: hardware, computers, laptops, notebooks, hp, nx6325, broadcom, ati, lugos