Category Archives: Software

KDE 3.5 RC1 First Impressions

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Just upgraded my home Ubuntu with KDE box to KDE 3.5 RC1 and it’s looking pretty nice.

The main thing that jumps out is that Konqueror now passes the ACID2 test that most other browsers (including the latest RC’s for Firefox 1.5, previously called “Deer Park”). This is down to the excellent work that Apple have put in on their Safari browser for OSX which uses WebCore, derived from KDE’s rendering engine, KHTML. They beauty of open source is that Apple have been contributing their work back to the project, leading to these improvements in KDE.

But in general it just seems snappier and sleeker, tweaked, nicer and better – I guess the really radical changes are being lined up for the much anticipated KDE 4!

Memory Usage

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Stewart, I feel your pain. This is what it’s like with KDE’s Kmail (part of Kontact):

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
10134 csamuel   16   0  337m 236m  28m S  0.0 23.3   2:32.73 kontact

That’s for a 685MB mail directory..

On a slightly related tangent, you may be amused by Alec’s splashscreen rant which makes a lot of sense. I guess they’re there because of the novice users who assume because they don’t see anything instantly then they should start the program again… and again… and again.. and then wonder why their machine has turned into a thrashing writhing wreck and 52 different windows are appearing very, very, slowly…

Configuring KDE’s Kopete for Google Talk

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Now that Google Talk is live and is a Jabber service the next question is – how do I connect to it using the KDE Instant Messaging client Kopete ?

It’s dead easy – it’s just another Jabber server with the only restriction that you *must* connect to it via SSL.

So, what you need to do is:

  • Go to the Settings -> Configure Kopete menu option;
  • Start the new account wizard with the New button there;
  • Click Next at the welcome screen to start creating a new account;
  • Select Jabber as your account type and press Next;
  • Enter your Google Mail email address as your Jabber ID;
  • Click on the Connection tab at the top;
  • Tick the Use Protocol Encryption (SSL) option;
  • Tick the Override the default server information option;
  • Enter talk.google.com as your server;
  • If you are behind a restrictive firewall you can set the port number to 443 (normally used for secure websites)
  • You should now have a screen that looks like the image at the end of this article.

At that point you should be ready to hit Next to create the Google Talk Jabber account in Kopete!

Kopete configured for Google Talk

Trying KUbuntu

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Finally had time to backup all my old data (well, hopefully all) and trash my old Mandrake 9.0 install that I’ve not been able to touch because of it being our mail and web server (now hived off onto the VIA Eden box).

Initially I was thinking about upgrading it to Gentoo as I use that on my desktop at work at the moment, but in the meantime I’ve upgraded my laptop from an oldish Mandrake Cooker install to KUbuntu, a version of Ubuntu Linux that uses KDE rather than Ubuntus usual GNOME desktop.

The fact that Ubuntu chose to go with Gnome rather than KDE is the one thing that’s put me off using it, I’d switched from FVWM2 to Gnome back in 1997/8 and found it incredibly unstable, so I started to use KDE and found that it just worked. I’ve never been tempted to go back, especially having given Ubuntu a go on another system and found it a bit of a straightjacket. Anyway, I digress..

The fact that KUbuntu had a build of KDE 3.4.1 available when the official release came out was great, Gentoo still don’t have 3.4 marked as stable yet (probably for good reasons) and trying to mark 3.4 as unstable and keep the rest of the box stable was too much hard work, so I gave KUbuntu a go.

Well I’m impressed. It’s not faultless, but the installer is great and creating a completely LVM2 system is dead easy (and to my mind is the only sane way to build a system these days). The only major headache was my monitor was configured to run at 1024×768 rather than 1280×1024, but simply adding the “1280×1024” line to the start of the config for 24-bit depth fixed that.

Adding a few extra repositories in meant I’ve now got access to KDE3.4.1, KOffice 1.4 (which again had Kubuntu builds out within a day or so of the official release), all the usual media codecs that you’ll need for browsing badly designed websites (flash, etc) and even Java (ugh).

The thing that most impressed me is that it detected my DVB-T card I brought from the UK and KDE’s Kaffeine media player can auto-detect channels and play them seamlessly. It will also do timed recordings.. 🙂

If you do use KUbuntu then don’t forget to add this repository which gives you updates to KUbuntu that wouldn’t be in the mainline Ubuntu. I’m suprised this isn’t in by default, and it corrects a nasty bug in Kaffeine that causes you to get a crash when exiting.

deb http://kubuntu.org/ hoary-updates main

You can read on to see my entire /etc/apt/sources file.
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Follow Up to “Administrator” Post

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Well, I got an email from Todd in reponse to my posting his story about not being able to contact me. Todd runs the Fall Creek Place Community website that looks like a nice idea, an attempt to help foster a real community through the web (in addition to real life, needless to say!).

Turns out what he was after was not quite related to the xBackends.php script that generates my RSS feed, but the little HTML tags that I used to tell Firefox and Konqueror/Akregator that there is an RSS feed associated with the page that they are viewing, and so to show the little RSS indicator at the bottom of the frame.

I wrote about it before, somewhere, but to recap here’s the little HTML tag that does the magic.

Administrator inaccessable, user concerned.

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This arrived in the submission basket today..


Today, a user searched frantically for some way of writing to the Administrator, Chris Samuel. Having found nothing, he concocted a fake news story as a thinly vieled attempt at a complaint, in hopes that said Administrator would consider creating some link to internal or regular email, so that said user may ask him a question about his xBackends configuration for PostNuke.

Film at 11.

– Todd.

🙂

Todd, it’s easy – you just email to:

chris
at
csamuel.org

and it will (should!) get to me, spam filters allowing…

Note that I’m off on Sunday to Canberra for LCA 2005 and so life is a bit hectic at the moment, but I’ll do my best to answer!

RSS Feed Backend Updated to RSS2.0

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Hoorah! I’ve just replaced the standard Postnuke RSS 0.91 RSS backend.php with the xBackends 2.6 from LEXeBus to give me an RSS 2.0 feed instead of the older 0.91 version.

The two minor hacks I did was to mimic the behaviour of the old backend.php so I could just drop it in as a replacement by setting the following variables at the top of the script: 

$show_content=1;        // Default to showing the content of articles
$feedtype="rss2";       // Default to giving an RSS2 feed

With that done I get a successful validation via FeedValidator, viz:

[Valid RSS]

Gentoo Split Ebuilds for KDE 3.4 and Onwards

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Here’s a good thing, those nice Gentoo folks are going to create ebuilds for the various components of KDE, migrating away from the monolithic, all-or-nothing ebuilds for kdebase and kdepim to packages for things like kdebase-kioslaves and kopete. The monolithic ebuilds will be maintained for 3.4, but for KDE 4.0 and later there will only be the split ones.

For the details see the Gentoo KDE Split Ebuilds HOWTO.

Making Postnuke Understand Time Properly

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I finally got fed up enough with the dumb way that PostNuke does its time stamping to try and fix it. Basically it uses local time everywhere, then gets you to tell it which timezone its in via its preferences and finally expects users to register and set their timezone so it can re-correct the time for them!

Anyway, this isn’t obvious until you go hunting around for why it doesn’t seem to work if you’re not in the same timezone (or in my case, continent & hemisphere) for where your website is. Googling around for Postnuke “time zone offset” gives some helpful references, especially with respect to a Postnuke Forums posting about fixing it. But before you go off and read that, note that (a) it won’t work on current versions and (b) there’s a simplified variant of the hack. Still kudos to them for working this out!

You’ll need to read on for the guts of the article, as I don’t want to scare the non-techies out there by putting it on the front page directly.. 🙂

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