kde

After some of my friends asked me how, I wrote this article which lists out the steps I took to switch from the additional kde-devel user approach to the single user approach while building KDE SC from trunk. It might be helpful for newbies who have followed the instructions on techbase and got a working KDE SC trunk with the separate kde-devel approach.

Right from the time I found about the Gluon project (which I found on the GSoC ideas page), I've been very excited and having loads of fun with the Gluon team (as usual :)

I'm happy to announce that the Plasmoid has taken its first step, displaying a Gluon example game on an OpenGL rendered Plasma applet. The applet is a Plasma::GLApplet which uses the Gluon Framework to create game graphics and output game audio alongwith support for input.

Here's a screenshot (yes, the transparency is a bug)-

With the type and select feature implemented in the Folder View Plasma applet, I hope that we finally resolve bug 187241 completely. This makes the applet even more usable than before.

This fix was different in a way that I had my first ever usability discussion with the KDE Usability team over the type and select behavior differing from Dolphin (and in general with anything derived from QAbstractItemView). Finally we concluded that the behavior be modified to match Dolphin's, and thats what the current state is.

The fix will ship with KDE SC 4.5

(Update: See Yuen Hoe's nice screencast here and Diego's post here).

There are some moments in life which are just too exciting and thrilling. The best of them came just recently - when Plasmate's first release happened.

Since the new Widgets Explorer was added to Plasma, the Add Widgets... options from the Panel context menu was not working. I thought it might be fixed later because Widgets Explorer was in heavy development.

After a long time of excitement and joy, atlast FOSS.IN 2009 started today. Reached the venue at 10:30 AM instead of the 10 AM I had targeted. At the venue, NIMHANS convention centre there was a long line for delegate registration (surprise, I'm a speaker this time, no queues Smile ) and the weather was really hot and uncomfortable.

Some days back, while compiling kdebase, I faced the following errors-
 

Recently after recompiling my KDE build, I was exploring what has changed in the few weeks when my notebook wasn't with me. Marco is really working hard on the netbook shell and I thought to give it a try. Man, it looks superb and I like that on my notebook :)
Anyway, I switched back to the regular Plasma desktop and after I logged back in, plasma-desktop refused to start automatically. I tried removing my .kde, but no luck.

If Amarok is to be built from source the Qt Script Generator at http://code.google.com/p/qtscriptgenerator/ is required. However after going through the compile steps in the package, the following errors are encountered

make[2]: Entering directory
`/users/user/downloads/software/qt/generator/svn.080725/qtbindings/qtscript_phonon'
make[2]: *** No rule to make target
`../../generated_cpp/com_trolltech_qt_phonon/main.cpp', needed by `debug/main.o'. Stop.

As pointed out on BUG: 187241 , Folder View applet didn't support navigation using the HOME and END Keyboard keys. Again, this greatly reduced the usability of the applet as a replacement for the normal Desktop.

This revision adds the required support to the applet so that navigation to the first and last icons.