KDE

I’m not a music fanatic. While I see many of my friends and colleagues working, with their headphone on and music playing, for me, it is not at all possible. It is just the opposite. I can’t work with music (or any kind of distracting sound) on.

So when I sometimes run Amarok, I used to think what a pile of crap it really is. I mean, look at the resource consumption. Amarok alone took around 20% of CPU cycles when just playing music. This was disappointing as I am a KDE addict and prefer KDE applications over any other. Trying to run other applications led to additional libraries being installed/loaded.

Many of my friends, when watching me work on my laptop, think that I’m using Windows. But now it is going to be real.

They’ll soon be using, what I use, on Windows. Yes, I’m talking of KDE. KDE on Windows.

The recent builds of KDE for Windows have been awesome. Most of the applications, " Just Work"

That to Qt and KDE, to road to Freedom has just begun.

Most of the applications from KDE, even though they are under Beta currently, work perfect on Windows.

While the Debian KDE Team has done a great job of packaging KDE4 in time, with quality, it is not always possible to fulfill the request of every odd user.

Unfortunately, I fell into the Odd user category because I still want to have KDE4 and KDE3 installed together. For many reasons.

So here’s one way to do it.

• Install KDE 3 Packages from Debian Repositories
• Install KDE 4 from SVN
• Create a X session file like this.

rrs@learner:~$ cat /usr/share/xsessions/kde4-svn.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=XSession
Exec=/opt/kde4-svn/kde/bin/startkde
TryExec=/opt/kde4-svn/kde/bin/startkde

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KDE 4.0 is out

Despite all the FUD that KDE4 won’t stay up to the expectations of the users, I must say KDE4 has impressed me a lot. It is definitely a lot more faster than KDE 3.

The shiny new desktop with all the new core technologies of KDE 4 and the new visual effects (kwin, plasma, oxygen), all make KDE 4 the best.

Go ahead and install. It is wonderful.

I recently came into the necessity of having something which could load equalizer prests by reading the genre from the current running track.

For Amarok, I couldn’t find anything available. So I filed a bug report. But soon realised that my wishlist could be accomplished just bhy a small amount of work.

I then looked at Amarok’s scripting framework. It is amazing. It took me just 3 hrs to get my wishlist item done.

For those who are stuck up with using Kontact with an Exchange server should have experiences of how difficult it is to get everything properly working.

For instance, address book is an issue. Assuming that your exchange server holds more that 10,000 user records, it is going to be a challenging task to get your addressbook configurd to fetch those addresses.

A friend of mine figured out that this was rather a bug with either ldap or exchange (in that case a feature) which restricted the query response to 1000 replies. This bug is inherited in the ldap code of K Address Book also because it silently fetches 1000 records only.

For many who don’t know, root-tail is a small utility which can write to your Desktop’s Screen (Often called the root window). It is mainly used to display critical system messages.

I’ve been a root-tail fan for long. It like the idea of displaying syslog messages on my desktop. It almost fixes 50% of my problems.

The problem with KDE is that it drwas its own Desktop image on top of the root window because of which you can’t see the messages drawn by root-tail. But KDE is something I’m an addict of and can’t live without. But recently I realised that KDE already had the framework in place for applications like root-tail.

Happy Birthday KDE