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Well hello! I can't believe you are actually still reading this blog! (hehe) In hopes of finally getting my little corner or the web active again I will probably be moving away from the tech blogging (if you called how I used to blog tech blogging) and be kinda keeping an online journal. But, to cover my butt I am not making any promises that I will actually be blogging at all so, here goes nothin'!

As I sit here and wait for Oneiric to install on this amazingly small Freescale i.MX53 dev board (I won it at UDS! yay!),  I though it would be a good time to finish my second report about my time at UDS. I should have plenty of time as the included microsd is not very speedy so it is going to take a very long time to complete.

On the documentation front, we have finally been able to get our documentation updated, and work will continue on that front.  DarkWing will work on prettying things up, and adding a snazzy online component to the Kubuntu website  with some basic info on using the awesome Plasma desktop. An added bonus is that any KDE documentation we do can be pushed upstream,  which will benefit KDE users everywhere. Sign me up for this, too

Honored. Privileged. Amazed.
I like to sum things in a couple of words whenever possible. But that is simply impossible to do in this case, so I think I will break it down into smaller chunks.

Honored

First of all I am honored to have been selected to attend UDS and to help represent Kubuntu. Go Blue! (I just realized that I have been using Kubuntu for almost 7 years now, and kubuntuforums is around 6 years. Wow!)

Privileged

Being on the community side, it has been nice to see so many of us who are less technical here. It is fascinating to watch how the people who do such wonderful work get things done. Surprisingly from the sessions I have attended, it is not as far over my head as I though it would be.

Amazed

I have seen and experienced many surprising and amazing things in only a few days:

• Florida is actually quite nice this time of year, I have not sweat too much
• EVERYONE is so nice and pleasant, I never sit at a meal alone, and there is always something to discuss, hot tubs to lounge in, places to hang out. I even had my belly rubbed by a complete stranger who was discussing cups filters. I may have had my quadrennial adult beverage, details are sparse.
• There are many tablet users present of all shapes and sizes. I lust after them greatly, as it makes my measly Droid charge look puny.
• I won a raffle! A Freescale dev board!! So now Kubuntu have another Arm machine for dev work and testing.
• Somehow I have lost weight, just enough that I need to find a way to put another hole in my belt.

Qt. KDE. Kubuntu.

We also have a nice that there is a good Qt presence here. And a A KDE developer as well. All cool people as well.

Qt’s qml language seem to be drawing some attention, it looks quite interesting to me as a non coder, but I am somewhat biased It looks on the surface to be easy to learn, at least the basics.

Alex’s positive inputs, insights and suggestions from his KDE perspective have been enlightening and well appreciated.

Time to run, I will have another update soon with a more Kubuntu-specific focus.

An almost-overlooked addition to the upcoming Kubuntu 11.10 is the new Kubuntu Low-Fat Settings package. With this set of new default settings for various KDE bits, it is quite possible to reduce memory usage by as much as 32% and reduce KDE’s start up time by 33%, according to our intrepid apachelogger. This is a boon to those of us with older and slower hardware.

What this package does is turn off desktop effects by default, changes the default window decoration style and tweaks some style-related settings, disables the auto-loading of various KDE modules such as bluedevil, the printer applet,  and some nepomuk bits. It also reduces the number of Krunner plugins that are enabled by default as well.

This does make the desktop look a bit different as the Plastik windeco is not as pretty as pretty at all like the default Oxygen is, but doesn’t have all the animations, shadows and bling .

You can check this all out by installing the package kubuntu-low-fat-settings. However, any existing users you have will not see any of these changes as most likely all the specific config files have already been created in your ~/.kde/share directory. New user accounts will see this immediately, and boy, there is a definite difference! The savings mentioned do seem accurate from a quick check, my new user account was using literally half the ram my normal account does after login, but the fresh one does not yet have any email accounts or calendars set up, so Akonadi was not running. KDE does load at login lickety-split, too.

Here is the list of config files involved (they are locally found in ~/.kde/share/config)

 ~/.kde/share/config/kdedrc
 ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals
 ~/.kde/share/config/knotifyrc
 ~/.kde/share/config/krunnerrc
 ~/.kde/share/config/ksmserverrc
 ~/.kde/share/config/kwinrc
 ~/.kde/share/config/nepomukserverrc

One could simply delete these files while KDE is not running, but you would loose any other settings you may have changed.

If you are curious, you can download the source tarball and see what the changer are. Most are configurable from within System Settings and other places.

This is a good starting spot for KDE fans who have, as one can then go and tweak some settings (Plastik is sooo KDE3 ) to better fit what one likes and can live without.

Have fun!

Plastique is soooo 2007....

As it get closer to release day, Kubuntu’s 11.10 is shaping up very nicely. KDE 4.7.1brings further polish on what is already a great desktop. Some things in my opinion aren’t really highlighted enough, things the everyday user might find nice.

The network management widget has received some love and attention. It provides for more options, including being able to choose which connection is the system connection, and the ability to edit. disable, and disconnect the pervasive ‘auto eth0′ wired connection from the gui is a welcome Little Thing.

          

                     

Muon! Software! Center! This should be in the Favorites menu in Kickoff by default!

We should all sing praises to Jonanthan Thomas, it’s creator for bringing usable gui package management goodness to us KDE users. I personally have gotten used to NOT  browsing for fun stuff to try, I was happy to discovered an mail client I had never seen before. Not quite a Little Thing, yes, but but little highlighted.

Since I usually keep my KDE configurations backed up, I sometimes miss the little tweaks, such as what they did to Dolphin’s menu. By turning off the menu bar and adding a separate config buttom a-la Chrome browser and others, it does open some real estate in the file manager’s window. I often use dual panes and terminal in there, the added space makes it nicer while not having to turn off the info pane. A welcome Little Thing, some extra space is.

     

Now to a Big Thing: Kmail2 migration testing.

As KDE 4.7 now comes  with the new Akonadi-based Kmail2, users will either have to utilize the migration tools, or reconfigure their accounts from scratch. The migration needs testing, more on that in another post.

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