While we are still eagerly awaiting the release of KDE 4 - on which developers, artists and other contributors are working very hard - here comes a new service release with many bug fixes and translation updates. In addition, KDE 3.5.6 brings a couple of new features:

• Fields for entering passwords show bullets instead of asterisks
• Kicker, the main panel, got support for Compiz window manager
• Akregator, the feed reader, got session management support for tabs
• KMail, the email client, now enables you to create templates for messages
• Kontact, the personal information management (PIM) suite got new Summary menus for appointments and To-Dos

KDE 3.5.6 is also the first version that fully supports Euro as the new national currency here in Slovenia. For more details about the new version you can check out KDE 3.5.6 Release Announcement and KDE 3.5.6 Changelog.

Tags: kde, kde4, kde 4, desktop, linux, kicker, compiz, akregator, kmail, kontact, open source, software, slovenia, euro

Just in time for Christmas holidays the community of developers, artists and translators released a new major version of free and open source turn-based strategy game The Battle for Wesnoth. In version 1.2 single-player mode has a new tutorial and three new campaigns: Two Brothers, The South Guard, and Under the Burning Suns. The existing campaigns include new scenarios, dialogue, items, and optional bonus victory objectives. Multi-player mode also has new features. There are new units, new terrain types and artwork has also improved much. Translators have worked hard to update the translations and I’m proud to say that my cousin Matej also did a great work helping with Slovenian translation. For more info about the new version check out the release notes, where you can also find download links for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Now let’s get playing!

Tags: games, strategy, strategies, turn-based, tbs, fantasy, linux, free software, open source, mac os x, windows

A few minutes ago a postman brought me a package. This time it wasn’t as unexpected as the last time and I immediately knew that it should be a free retail box of openSUSE 10.2 Linux distribution (you can buy it for around €45/$60). And sure it was. In case you don’t know yet, Novell sends you a free retail box of the latest version of openSUSE Linux, if you help with beta testing and report bugs you find into their Bugzilla database. I guess that you get a free box even if you only report a bug or two. So make sure you don’t miss this opportunity when the work on the next version of openSUSE starts.

Some of the highlights of the new version 10.2 include the new Kickoff menu for the KDE desktop. A lot of usability research went into this one and I liked it a lot. There are also a lot of improvements in power management features. A new software management tool has been added to make software management easy for people who don’t need advanced features. They also didn’t forget about desktop eyecandy so they have now integrated Compiz and Xgl, which enable 3D desktop effects that take advantage of hardware accelerated OpenGL. You can also install Beryl which makes Aero technology in Windows Vista look just plain old and boring. Not to mention 3D desktop on Linux works faster at the same time and even works well on older hardware.

The openSUSE 10.2 box came just in time for Christmas holidays. So I will give it away as a Christmas present to my cousin Gašper. His family is still running version 10.1 so I think this, together with the upgrade work, will be a perfect gift for this holiday season.

Tags: linux, suse, opensuse, novell, os, operating systems, distributions, free software, open source, desktop

About 11 years ago we were using OS/2 Warp as our main operating system on our first family PC. I was 15 years old back then and it is only natural I liked playing games a lot. By far the largest chunk of my computer time was spent playing a 4X (explore, expand, exploit and exterminate) strategy game Galactic Civilizations developed by Stardock. I just loved researching new technologies, using planet resources to build fleets of spaceships and conquering more planets.

After a year or so we had to switch to Windows and since I couldn’t live without a healthy dose of 4X I had to find a game similar to GalCiv. Luckily I found the game of Stars! which was developed by Jeff McBride and Jeff Johnson who were at the time employed at Microsoft (at least something good came from them :)). Even today I think Stars! is the best 4X game ever. Very complex and deep and a lot of fun. Later I also played Galactic Civilizations for Windows, but that didn’t last long since I started to switch to Linux and I spent less of my free time on games and more on other things.

Let’s fast forward to present. I’m a full time Linux user now and some time ago I was in a little bit of a nostalgic mood. So I started looking for free and open source Linux games similar to Stars! and Galactic Civilizations. I found a project called FreeStars, but its website didn’t show much promise, especially since it stated that it doesn’t yet compile on Linux. So the search continued and I came across a project named Thousand Parsec. The website was looking very nice, there was a lot of information, and there were screen shots of working clients.

Thousand Parsec project doesn’t try to be just a clone of Stars!. They are creating a general framework for making 4X space empire building games, that can be very long, have a huge universe and can be played online. Although the game is not yet at the same level as Stars!, I see a lot of potential in it. Noticing that there is a C++ protocol library (libtpproto-cpp) available, I’ve decided that I could also help with the development. But more details about this later…

Anyway, if you are like me and love playing games like Stars!, Galactic Civilizations, VGA Planets and Master of Orion, then be sure to check out the Thousand Parsec project. A major new version 0.2.0 of Python/wxWidgets based client has just been released and in addition to Linux it also works on Mac OS X and Windows.

Tags: games, 4x, strategy, turn-based, strategies, tbs, stars!, galactic civilizations, vga planets, master of orion, linux, mac os x, windows

My first experiments with Gentoo started about four years ago when I was working in a video store, which also had a couple of computers running Slackware to provide internet access for visitors. One evening I got bored and together with my friend Boris we decided to try to install Gentoo on one of them. It didn’t go without a problem, but with the help of great Gentoo community and documentation we were successful. In fact, I loved what I saw so much that soon after I bought a new computer with AMD Athlon 64 3000+ I installed Gentoo on it. It was by far the best 64-bit Linux distribution and operating system in general (Windows XP x64 was and still is a big disappointment). Now, after four years, I’m still a happy Gentoo user. I’m also running it on my laptop.

And today the people working hard on Gentoo Linux announced the release of version 2006.1 of my favourite Linux distribution. The default compiler is now GCC 4.1, GNU C library is upgraded to version 2.4 and there are many improvements in the start-up scripts. There are also now separate profiles optimized for desktops and servers. Gentoo Linux installer now also supports installations without internet connection and is easier to use. For more details check out the Gentoo Linux 2006.1 press release. In case you decide to give it a try, you can download Gentoo from a mirror or using BitTorrent. If you like all the power and all the control over it, you will not be disappointed.

Tags: gentoo, linux, distribution, distributions, free software, open source, os, operating system, operating systems

I’m about one day too late with this, but anyway. Happy birthday Linux! It was 25 August 1991 when Linus Torvalds, a student from Finland, announced his small hobby project: making a free operating system similar to minix. And today, 15 years later, the Linux kernel is far from being just a hobby. In fact, together with the free software movement, initiated by Richard Stallman, it started a small revolution in the world of software and computing. Today GNU/Linux is one of the fastest developing platforms and a lot of innovation is happening here. Just one of the latest, more visible, things is a great looking 3D desktop that works nicely together with touch-screens. Can’t wait to see what Linux kernel and other open source projects will bring to the world in the years that are coming.

Tags: linux, kernel, birthday, anniversary, free software, os, operating system, operating systems, linus torvalds, richard stallman

After a couple of weeks of travelling across the Atlantic ocean the book C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 was finally delivered into my hands this morning. Quite a nice timing actually. Today the first development snapshot of KDE4 was released. KDE 4 will be based on Qt 4.2, so this book will also be of great benefit for learning programming for KDE 4. Another nice thing is that authors of the book have added a short chapter about embedded programming with Qtopia (a special version of Qt for embedded devices). This is nice because more and more mobile phones and devices are nowadays running on Linux. A couple of days ago Trolltech introduced the world’s first fully open and programmable mobile development device Qtopia Greenphone. It attracted a lot of interest from developers all over the world. So I guess it will only be beneficial in the future to also have some knowledge about programming in Qtopia. Now I only have to read and learn. When I finish (won’t be that soon) I will write a review of the book.

Tags: book, books, c++, programming, development, gui, trolltech, qt, kde, qtopia, greenphone

While I was reading SUSE Linux Rants blog by Scott Morris (the guy who wrote the free book The Easiest Linux Guide You’ll Ever Read) I’ve come across his post What does Linux and frappr have in common? It turns out that if you are contributing to Linux (by translating, programming, testing, bug reporting, promoting or something similar) you can put yourself on the frappr map and win one of these cool prizes:

• 3x HP laptops loaded with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (value: $1999)
• 6x EVOLT cameras (value: $800)
• 20x 2 GB iPod Nanos (value: $200)

Don’t miss this great chance and put yourself on the Linux map. You only have time until 14 November. You snooze, you lose

Tags: linux, deal, deals, open source, free software, operating system, operating systems, prize, prizes, frappr

A couple of hours ago Harish Kukeja submitted quite a lot of new source code for Physiks into SVN repository at KDE. The basic features of the physics simulation framework should mostly be functional now and I’ll have to take some time later to take a look at the new code more closely. Probably I will also have to brush up my knowledge of the C++ that is related to this code. If I’ll have enough free time, I may try to write some simple Qt application to test the current state of physics engine and see how it feels using it. Maybe I could also start working on a web page for the project. It would also be nice to come up with an icon that represents something (someone) that immediately makes you think about physics. But first I have to catch Harish on Jabber so we discuss about this idea.

Tags: physics, engine, simulation, simulations, education, kde, linux, soc, summer of code, programming

Although VIA was the first company (as far as I know) to claim that their drivers for graphic cards are open source, these claims were questioned several times and many still believe that they are far from open source. Anyway, today we were blessed with news that could indicate things in the graphic drivers world are finally moving into the right direction that will benefit people. Intel has just announced they are releasing free and open source drivers for their 965 Express Chipset family graphics controller. The drivers support 2D and 3D and are only the beginning. All future development of the drivers will be done openly and in close cooperation with X.org and Mesa communities. To read more about this visit the newly created website Linux Graphics Drivers from Intel. Now we can only hope that AMD (which is the new owner of ATI), nVidia and other companies follow this noble example. There are already some rumors (read the last paragraph) that AMD will follow a similar path with ATI drivers.

Tags: hardware, graphics, drivers, driver, graphic cards, open source, free software, linux, intel, via, amd, ati

A few minutes ago I committed a fix for a little cosmetic bug in KMix, that irritated me a bit every time I opened the mixer window. If you had relative volume values enabled and the volume was at 100% then the number 100 in the QLabel was cut of a bit at the end. I first tried with altering the code which used the function boundingRect from QFontMetrics and functions to get width, margin and other properties from QLabel. I didn’t succeed with these so I simply removed the entire QFontMetrics voodoo and used a nice function sizeHint like this:
QLabel *number = new QLabel( "100", this );
number->setMinimumWidth( number->sizeHint().width() );

The function sizeHint, gets just the right size for the widget so that it fits its content and now all looks just fine. In addition to this I also made the frame of the label thinner by one pixel and I think it looks a bit nicer now. You can see the old mixer window on the left and the new one on the right:

Tags: kde, programming, qt, desktop, desktop environment, open source, free software, linux

A new version of the most popular desktop environment for Linux is out. KDE 3.5.4 is here and in addition to a lot of bug fixes and updated translations there are also some small enhancements. Removable devices are handled better, KHTML engine for rendering web pages is much improved and Konsole and Kate are faster now. For all the details about KDE 3.5.4, including the instructions for downloading, check out the release announcement. AMD Turion 64 in my laptop with Gentoo Linux is already compiling the new version. My desktop computer will have to wait a bit longer, until I get the new AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core, which will make compilation a lot faster.

Tags: kde, desktop, desktop environment, open source, free software, linux

There is a new free book available for all of you who have decided to make the first step of breaking free from the world of Windows and to try Linux. The author, Scott Morris, starts describing the book like this:

After several months of writing and revising, I have made available the Easiest Linux Guide You’ll Ever Read. It is a 160-page book geared towards people who are competent with using Windows, who have never attempted to use Linux but are interested in giving it a try.

The book will help prevent you from getting lost in the new world of Linux, help with understanding the concept of freedom behind Linux and show you some of the many advantages it has to offer. No more excuses, download the book and try Linux.

Tags: linux, book, books, open source, free software, operating system, operating systems

Mandriva has long been my favourite Linux distribution for installation on computers of people who are new to Linux. One important reason for this is that it has the most complete translation into Slovenian language. With the recent releases of other distributions, especially Kubuntu 6.06 and SUSE Linux 10.1, Mandriva got a very serious and up to date competition. In order to not fall behind Mandriva team is working hard on their next release, Mandriva Linux 2007. They have just released the first beta, which is codenamed Thor. There are four different kind of CDs available: with KDE or GNOME desktop and each of them is available for i586 and x86_64 (AMD64) computers. There is also a completely new option: a DVD which has both desktops and is available for both processor architectures at the same time. Versions of some software: Linux Kernel 2.6.17, KDE 3.5.3 and GNOME 2.16 beta 1. Some more information about the release is available on Cooker Wiki. To download Mandriva Linux 2007 Beta 1 see this list of mirrors.

Tags: mandriva, linux distribution, linux distributions, beta, open source, free software, linux

I couple of days ago my friend Boris told me about a handy little application YaKuake. It’s a terminal emulator for KDE very similar to Konsole. What makes it different is that it is normally hidden from the view, even while running. It doesn’t even clutter the taskbar. When you need the console you simply press F12 key (configurable) and YaKuake console drops down from the top of the screen, much like the console in games like Quake. In addition to other Konsole settings you can set the size and position of YaKuake window and the animation speed of showing and hidding it. YaKuake hides when you press the access key for the second time or when it loses focus. It sure would be great to have something like this by default in KDE 4. To see how YaKuake looks check out this screenshot. If you would like to try it out, go and download YaKuake.

Tags: console, consoles, terminal, terminals, open source, free software, linux, kde