KDE

If you're still visiting this blog and wondering why it's been oh so quiet as of lately... well, things have changed, haven't they? Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus came around the corner and blogs were suddenly too much hassle to maintain and keep uptodate. To put it technically: Blogs are pull-mode, social networks are push-mode.

Twitter trained me like a little monkey, so I'll keep it brief: The awesome Tomahawk Player is what I'm up to. It's a new kind of music player, allowing you to socially interact with your friends and (existing) social graphs, as well as turning the "Web 2.0" in media players up a notch. It leverages the wonderful services of YouTube, Spotify, Google, Grooveshark, Last.fm, Echonest, OwnCloud, Ampache, SoundCloud, Official.fm, Ex.fm, Rdio, Jabber, Twitter (to name just a few) to create a new listening experience which breaks existing boundaries. Open Spotify playlists and play it from your friend's music library, YouTube or one of many other services. Why not import the top tracks for a Last.fm tag and have the songs play from Spotify? It's up to you. Share your favourite tracks and playlists directly with your friends and listen to theirs. Coming to a system near you, whether that is running Linux, Windows or OS X.

"Tomahawk gives us a look into the future of music players, and this future looks bright!" - hypebot.com
"... groundbreaking open source media player" - Evolver.fm
"The social media player of tomorrow" - ZDnet

Follow Tomahawk on Twitter
Follow me on Twitter

Ever since I switched to KDE4 I kept having the weirdest issues with Plasma. The problems ranged from small design glitches to freakishly strange behavior which rendered Plasma unusable every now and then. Today I've solved (almost) all of those issues, which, as it turned out, could all be fixed within a minute. But let's not jump to the cause & workaround just yet.

Let me give you a few examples of "weirdness" that I got way too used to over the last few months (or even years):

- Having filetransfer jobs shown in the notification area of the taskbar made this area constantly resize itself. It kept flickering and jumping all over the screen.
- Items in the systray would overlap each other. Some items would simply miss their caption entirely.
- KRunner would start up at fairly random (but constant) position in the top-half of my desktop.
- The Activities widget on the other hand would leave a huge gap below it and the desktop border.
- ... I could go on, really ...

Today I simply couldn't stand starring at all those glitches anymore. I had enough of it. No, I didn't install Gnome, I haven't made the switch to Windows 7:

I did something way more desperate and pathetic: I've switched around the way my monitors are connected to the DVI outputs. Now my primary desktop (from KDE's point of view) is also connected to the primary DVI output. That already solved some really weird issues I kept experiencing on a daily basis. The other thing I did had an even more dramatic impact though. One small change in xorg.conf and suddenly Plasma behaved just fine - "as if someone rewrote it from scratch".

Old:
Option "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, DFP-1: nvidia-auto-select +1680+150"

New:
Option "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, DFP-1: nvidia-auto-select +1680+0"

The old option caused my monitors to line up at the bottom of the desktop. The new option lines them up at the top border (y-coordinate: 0).
I can already imagine all kinds of havoc that this could cause if you don't keep account of that gap in your calculations. I bet you can, too.

Finally: I can't tell you how great and polished KDE 4.6 suddenly feels. It's been a while I've been that proud of it. And all because of two extra digits in a little text config file.

For months and months now, my Linux Desktop is suffering from one particular issue, which makes it a pain to use on a daily basis: After having it running for a few hours, suddenly X.org and KWin go bonkers and start eating up all my cpu horse-power.

It's not uncommon to see X.org spiking up to a whopping 60% CPU usage, followed by KWin using roughly another 25%.

Since I'm suffering from this issue now ever since I switched to KDE 4, I thought it's time to turn to you fellow KDE developers for some good advice, since all my undertakings to resolve the issue have failed:

I have tried to switch to a different / newer graphics card, experimented with various versions of the NVidia driver and tweaked X.org settings, have turned off various desktop effect plugins, switched between XRender and OpenGL, even re-installed Kubuntu on a new machine.

No dice, though... after it's been running for a few hours my desktop is completely unusable. Every mouse or keyboard action becomes sluggish, scrolling through lists takes ages and logging out from my KDE session up to two minutes (which is the only known way to resolve the situation, giving me another six hours or so, before I'll have to repeat that routine).

From talking on IRC, forums and a bit of googling I know that I'm not the only one who's having this problem. So I'm curious if anyone has experienced the issue and gained some insight as to what's actually going on. I'd be happy to know.

Update on July, 13th:
Still investigating and collecting data to figure out what's going on. Since I wrote this blog entry originally, my system suffered from terrible slowdowns twice more. In both cases X.org and KWin instantly stopped utilizing my CPU when I closed all GTK-based apps. (e.g. Firefox, Chromium, Pan, Gimp, ...)

At least this is some progress, even though I still don't know what might possibly be causing this. Running a pure Gnome installation, I've never experienced those issues.

Thanks,
Chris

Just wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year. Keep on hacking and thank you all for your contributions to KDE this year. 2007 ought to be great

Now go and party till dawn!

Quick check: Someone working on an "Apple PhotoBooth"-like KDE application? Does something similar even exist already?

In case I missed something, drop me a note please!

Cheers,
muesli

...the first piece of opensource, I've ever written. Back at the age of 15, pretty much exactly 10 years ago. Funnily back then nobody really seemed to care or know what opensource is. Neither did anyone really realize the power behind. Except a few developers, of course. Nice to see how things have changed in retrospect. Let's just imagine what could be done in another decade. I'm looking forward to it.

Thanks to google for caching it. I wouldn't have a backup otherwise, I reckon.
COMUnit at Google Groups.

Kudos to the Fink Project!



I installed most of KDE and a fresh svn-version of amaroK on my iBook today. Worked pretty much without a problem. I just needed taglib and the gstreamer packages from fink's experimental repository (thanks RangerRick) and a small patch for amaroK.

Hooray!
...muesli

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today...A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose."

Now guess who said that originally?

Linus Torvalds? Wrong.
Richard Stallman? Wrong.
Muesli? No-ho.

Bill Gates? Just kidding. Oh no, wait. He did. He really did.
Maybe he was developing an opensource OS named Billux back then? Just guessing, though.

...muesli

Just stumbled over the amaroK Desktop Script on kde-apps.org. Nicely done, cool script

If you're curious: since I didn't have the pyqt/pykde stuff installed on my Debian desktop yet, I had to run "su -c apt-get install pyqt-tools python-kde3 python2.3-kde3" to get this stuff installed. Easy job.

So, now there's always a cool blended coverart of the currently playing album on my desktop. Sweet

...muesli

Recently I installed new CVS checkouts of kdelibs and -base on my system and played with the "new" Kicker. Kudos to Aaron for all the changes, fixes and new features.

Now, I just added the Storage Media Applet to my Kicker and noticed a few things:

1. It rocks I got used to mount / unmount / eject my CDs, iPod and Cam with it. Two clicks instead of a few keystrokes in Konsole. And it even shows the current mount-status, hooray!

2. Ejecting audio discs doesn't seem to work. It tells you, that the current disc couldn't be mounted - which is correct, but shouldn't matter at all

3. After I mounted a disc I clicked "Open in New Window", which opens a Konqui-window pointed to "media:/hdc". That's fine so far. I got into trouble once I tried opening a big mpeg-movie with xine: KIO started copying the file to my kdecache prior opening it, which took ages. It would be better if KIO detects, that the disc already is mounted and opens xine with the real url (the mounted location) of the file.

Nuf' ranting. CVS head feels stable and great atm

Now start drinking your favourite kind of alcohol, the new year's coming
...muesli

Here's some stuff I just installed recently and I'm rather happy with:

1. My new mouse cursors:
Pinux Theme.

2. kio-locate:
A KIO accessing the locate database.

3. Active Heart style:
This and Lipstik are my favorite styles currently.

Have fun,
muesli