Sonntag, 19. Juli 2009

KDE 4.3 - Now you can even use it!






I admit it. KDE4 and me are still in a "love to hate"-relationship. Of course there was no alternative to move on beyond KDE 3.5.10, as feature complete and stable
as it was. But to release anything earlier than 4.2 for productive use to end users sure was no thought through decision but just a bad joke with even worse consequences for the cause of KDE that only now become more and more apparent.

The historic chance of the misery that is Vista should have been used to pick up windows converts to an ready and inviting KDE 3.x by the minute, while simultaneously perfecting KDE 4 to true final release qualitity. Instead KDE4 seemed to be trying to imitate every one of Vista 's mistakes, in general everything that can go wrong with a complete rewrite.

The time that could have been used to compete with Vista, was lost to catch up with KDE3. Now that KDE4 is finally there, where KDE3 already was, Windows 7 is getting ready to make good for every failure of Vista.

What could have been a lead ahead for KDE4, may once again be only a head to head run.

Do not get me wrong. There is no alternative to KDE4 and that is a good thing. The future of KDE looks beautiful, not only because KDE4 is the first to look beautiful right out of the box. With KDE 4.3 everything is finally set to the right direction.

Just let us acknowledge the mistake to push an unfinished product to the user and to loose all that already built up trust and reputation as a consequence.

Let us make the next KDE be done when it is done.


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Sonntag, 5. Juli 2009

Free your Eee! Or how to install openSUSE on an Eee PC 901



For long i had resisted the netbook bug, that has turned the personal computing world downside up. But now, having made the plunge for an ASUS Eee PC 901, the convenience of true everywhere computing, including on this sofa, has proven priceless.
The true geek challenge of course, is not to go with the installed proprietary youknowwhich OS but instead install your Linux distribution of choice. In my case this is openSUSE, the tried and true Volvo to the fancy and unreliable Porsche that is Ubuntu. Flames useless ;-)

Now, with the help given here and here, the installation itself turned out no challenge at all. What indeed did border on frustration, was to find the right driver for the wirless lan chipset RT2860. After hunting high and low over Google, it finally was found here, after requiered registration as well as download and rebuild of a source .rpm. Attention! For the least trouble always go for the source .rpm rebuild!





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Freitag, 22. Mai 2009

openSUSE 11.1 Bug 506351 - sound output through xine to bluetooth headset crashes amarok, mplayer works fine

http://www.geektips.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/amarok-logo.jpg
time after time, it is very helpfull to use one 's blog as means to leverage a request for customer support, especially in an open source environment.

So here we go again:


To those of you, who also want to have this fixed, go register and vote for this bug!

Thanks!