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The Ogg Vorbis+Theora version works in Totem and Helix Player (better in Totem than Helix Player on my Fedora Core 4 GNU/Linux machine, actually).

Thanks to whomever made this version available. I appreciate distributing something for FLOSS users in FLOSS codecs.

"Oh, uhm... would not time be better spent at kde.org fixing the many bugs in KDE 3?"

What makes you think they won't? Migrating to a new version of the Qt framework doesn't require rewriting all of the underlying logic, therefore allowing for bug fixes in a major portion of application code. Not to mention, there are plans for another release in the 3.x series (development can happen in parallel). Also, you should be happy to know that the things you complain about, kicker and kdesktop, are slated to undergo a major overhaul for the KDE4 release.

I mean, you must've gone to an awful lot of work to copy that blurb verbatim from the Dot.
</sarcasm>

The article describes a replacement system for rendering. It will improve the rendering pipeline for COMPOSITE. For screenshots, you need to find a composite-oriented desktop.

KDE, and possibly Gnome are good examples. As composite rendering is still experimental, screen shots may not be available.

Linux pwnz j00 serves as a functionary of the Linux Centralized Command Center (LC3). It is the leading informant of ill-informed users. Many of which don't know how to read.

I don't want to judge, but based on the page layout, this server is about to get fried. Article in question:

As some of you know I've been working on bringing in KAA to X.Org to replace XAA.

XAA is nowhere near being enough for the modern desktop usage. It's plagued by being rather complex and incapable of properly accelerating XRender.
The two main goals of our new acceleration architecture were:
1) properly accelerating XRender,
2) being as simple as possible.
The first one is aimed at making sure that people can run composite manager on very low end hardware for as long as Xgl isn't ready to go mainstream. The second was set to make the transition as simple as possible for driver developers.
That's exactly what the new architecture achieves. For the purpose of this email lets call the new acceleration architecture Exa. It's heavily based on KAA. It incorporated the memory manager from KDrive which does wonders for the common desktop usage.

So lets get to the question everyone wants to ask and that is: how do I get a usable xcompmgr with the new architecture?

1) include "exa.h" in your driver and load exa,
2) use the code from XAA primitives for solid-fills and screentoscreen copies to implement Exa's Solid and Copy hooks. So no real changes at this point.
3) create an ExaDriverRec structure and fill in the accel hooks.
4) call exaCardInit(exaDriver, memory_base, off_screen_base, memory_size, offscreen_byte_align, offscreen_pitch, flags, max_x, max_y); to let the system know what are the capabilities of your card. This is really a convenience macro and you may fill in all those individually if you prefer that.
5) exaDriverInit(pScreen, exaDriver); once you connected yours hooks and setup your card.
6) replace xf86AllocateOffscreenArea with calls to ExaOffscreenAlloc

This should be enough to get a more less usable xcompmgr on your hardware.

Now if your hardware is below 1.5ghz you want to implement two more hooks:
- DownloadFromScreen,
- UploadToScreen,
this should be enough to get you happy with the basic composite manager on any hardware.

Now if the transparent windows aren't enough and you want things to be way more fancy, implement the last of Exa hooks meaning the Composite hooks. I'm planning to write a paper sometime early next week on how to implement composite acceleration and DownloadFromScreen/UploadToScreen
hooks in a simplest/best manner on typical hardware. So don't worry if you're not certain about how to do it quite yet.

All in all the code is available at:
http://ktown.kde.org/~zrusin/dev/exa-snapshot.tar. bz2

I'll be here to respond to any questions. If there's anything you think is silly, I'll be more than happy to change it.

I refuse to add acceleration hooks for low level primitives (e.g. lines). At this day and age it really just doesn't make any sense.

I will also provide a sample ATI R200 driver implementation (didn't feel like cleaning it up today :) ) along a document on how to implement composite acceleration sometime next week. All the cards which don't currently have a maintainer but are using XAA will be ported by me, as soon as I get the respective hardware in my hands.

I want to make sure the following things are very clear:
1) Exa can coexist with XAA. You can keep code for both in your driver.
2) Exa doesn't depend on any changes to the Xserver. Once we'll feel it served its purpose we can simply remove the exa dir and the relevant driver code and we'll be sure that no cruft has been left in the server.
3) As everyone can see adding Exa support to a driver which already has XAA support is trivial.
4) Following the 7 steps I outlined above will speed up the common desktop usage by quite a bit. Note that you don't have to be a driver developer to switch any of those drivers. Note that this also means that we can easily give the u

amaroK

gtkpod

These all transfer/generate playlists and files for ipods connected to linux machines.

Here's the real one: http://bugs.kde.org

I guess that's what I get for posting in haste.

I prefer JuK; I have no idea what sort of black magic it uses to index files, but it sure isn't MySQL, and it is reasonably fast to index and blindingly fast to search/filter/organise.

but looking at the screenshots I would say Apple has another lawsuit possibility iTunes anyone? ;-)

I've looked at a bunch of different ways of playing and organizing my small mp3 collection (is 20GB still small?). Amarok has been one of my favorite aps when I'm using my linux desktop. When I've set up my file server to stream mp3s over the web to my office computer (running Windows), I've used Jinzora.

Now, both of these programs use a MySQL database backend to help organize and catagorize mp3s, and use id3 tag information. I think it'd be an absolute joy to have them share the same data, instead of using two redundant databases. Perhaps as this project matures, we could see this become a standardized format for multiple projects to use, so the information can be shared and edited more easily.

High quality? Looks more like a bunch of dodgy knock-offs of legitimate software. Oh, and anyone following the links in the parent post might want to be aware that at least one of the links will infect your computer with a virus which will render your computer unable to play games and potentially could prevent you from even BEING ABLE TO BOOT YOUR COMPUTER!

Remember kids, knowledgeable computer users only use legitimately licensed software!

I'm lucky. I know lots of really fast FTP servers with lots of high quality software on them. And best of all? It's completely free, and legal.

This post to kfm-devel yesterday is important to bring up. Tests are useless if nobody runs them an fixes failures. Hopefully the khtml developers will be embarrassed enough by this post to /. + the mailing list message to stop and fix the problems.

Will the other projects? For that matter will kde clean this up? Fixing failing tests is often hard and boring.

This post to kfm-devel yesterday is important to bring up. Tests are useless if nobody runs them an fixes failures. Hopefully the khtml developers will be embarrassed enough by this post to /. + the mailing list message to stop and fix the problems.

Will the other projects? For that matter will kde clean this up? Fixing failing tests is often hard and boring.

Nokia is currently doing 2 WebKit (based on KHTML/KJS by the KDE project) related webbrowsers:

1) for 770/maemo
this will be shipped with an opera-browser, but WebKit was ported to GTK+ (the toolkit used by maemo) as part of the feasability study. This port can be found under the name gtk-webkit and is used for the atlantis browser.

2) for the Series60 (Symbian based)
For this series Nokia is porting WebKit to the Symbian OS and Symbian toolkit, and will thus create a new browser.

links:
http://khtml.info/
http://kde.org/
http://gtk-webcore.sourceforge.net/
http://www.akcaagac.com/index_atlantis.html
http://www.series60.com/
http://www.symbian.com/
http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,1522,,00.html?orig=/7 70
http://www.maemo.org/

g'luck...
Cies Breijs

The KOrganizer is way cool and understand the TZ too.
It talks to crappy Exchange 2003 with no problems.

What about KDE PIM and it's KPilot component? Works wonders for me...

Kontact and/with Korganizer do their thing quite nice.

korganizer allows this. (if you run one of the unixes) I used it the other day for my birthday. =)

To make sure I look at it, my login session opens it whenever I log into my machine (and I do shutdown nightly just to start clean though it's hardly necessary). A cron job to open it every morning would be just as helpful.

Obviously, this needs at least some level of KDE installed.

Seems to be in preliminary conceptual stages, but KDE is having ambitious plans for these kind of things in KDE 4 with Tenor http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/581 6/1/ http://dot.kde.org/1113428593/ http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2005/04/tenor-for-devel opers.html

I'd die if my computer were as difficult to use as macos. Good thing I run a real desktop.

If you write XHTML 1.1, you cannot serve it as text/html.

I know that, but afaik IE can't handle xhtml 1.1 served without text/html, and that doesn't affect rendering. It's a bug in konqueror, and a regression since it worked on older versions, and the bug is already acknowledged on the database

> it looks like the KHTML developers might have been working harder than usual just to pass the tes

I know that those guys do this for passion, and Allan is the best at doing this job.I invite you looking at:
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdelibs/khtml/Chan geLog?rev=421762&view=log
Here you can see only 1, maybe 2, entries related to the Acid2 test, among all.

Khtml is good, fast, has great developers behind it and more are joining (welcome Ivor Hewitt! :-). Ever looked at the sexy sidebar of Amarok? Khtml is behing it, and I ensure you it's spreading around.
Have no fear :-)

Yes indeed, it's very important that they block software patents. But I'm very optimistic on this one, because Europe is a place where there are many people directly involved in Free software. I mean, for instance, all these KDE and GNOME European developers must have some weight in the battle against software patents.

Accessibility has been the main focus for recent release of KDE.

A few links to relevant pages:

• The KDE 3.4 Announcements which stresses improvements for partially sighted people.
• The KDE Accessibility Project
• Linux Accessibility Resource Site (LARS)LARS
• The GNOME Accessibility Project
• The Accessibility Workgroup of the Free Standards Group

The general tendency is close cooperation between the various projects. No songle project currently offers a complete accessibile solution on Linux, but by combining the different solutions, a lot is possble, and closer cooperation will make even mor ethings possible in the future.

A lot of this cooperation was kicked of at the Unix Accessibility Forum last sumnmer, which the KDE project organised as part of the KDE World Summit.

We are currently busy organising a follow-up event during LinuxTag 2005.

Olaf Schmidt, co-maintainer of the KDE Accessibility Project

Accessibility has been the main focus for recent release of KDE.

A few links to relevant pages:

• The KDE 3.4 Announcements which stresses improvements for partially sighted people.
• The KDE Accessibility Project
• Linux Accessibility Resource Site (LARS)LARS
• The GNOME Accessibility Project
• The Accessibility Workgroup of the Free Standards Group

The general tendency is close cooperation between the various projects. No songle project currently offers a complete accessibile solution on Linux, but by combining the different solutions, a lot is possble, and closer cooperation will make even mor ethings possible in the future.

A lot of this cooperation was kicked of at the Unix Accessibility Forum last sumnmer, which the KDE project organised as part of the KDE World Summit.

We are currently busy organising a follow-up event during LinuxTag 2005.

Olaf Schmidt, co-maintainer of the KDE Accessibility Project

Accessibility has been the main focus for recent release of KDE.

A few links to relevant pages:

• The KDE 3.4 Announcements which stresses improvements for partially sighted people.
• The KDE Accessibility Project
• Linux Accessibility Resource Site (LARS)LARS
• The GNOME Accessibility Project
• The Accessibility Workgroup of the Free Standards Group

The general tendency is close cooperation between the various projects. No songle project currently offers a complete accessibile solution on Linux, but by combining the different solutions, a lot is possble, and closer cooperation will make even mor ethings possible in the future.

A lot of this cooperation was kicked of at the Unix Accessibility Forum last sumnmer, which the KDE project organised as part of the KDE World Summit.

We are currently busy organising a follow-up event during LinuxTag 2005.

Olaf Schmidt, co-maintainer of the KDE Accessibility Project

Fine, you know what you're doing, I rename them too (My Computer -> .box and My Network Places -> .net or something clever and non-default) see: One True Way. Not a big deal to you but a big deal to a teacher/instructor.

What about in a classroom where all the lab/learning computers are set up like this by default? It's confusing as hell.

"Class, double click on My Computer."
"What do you mean Your Computer?"
"No, I mean your My Computer."
"What?!"
"Click on the icon My Computer on Your Computer. *sigh*"
"Computers are stupid."
"Yes. Now do it or your resume will suck."

etc, etc. I always hated that My Computer organization, I never go to network shares via My Computer. Really, the only thing I use My Computer for is getting to the Properties screen so I can fiddle with Device Manager or some other crap. Windows-break is much faster of course. If I'm trying to get to the C: drive I just hit Windows+R and type "C:". it's 4 key strokes (if you count the windows key).

I like Gnome's Home Directory on the Desktop or "Macintosh HD" on the Desktop. It's much more logical in my mind.

Not bashing Windows. I'm still trying to learn to keyboard navigate under OSX as fast as I can in Windows. Someone should organize a GUI race between OS keyboard navigating experts.

Did you know that in Windows detail view in explorer you can auto-fit the columns with ctrl-shift-numpad +? I haven't gotten those kinds of shortcuts down under Gnome and OSX.

Like http://worldwide.kde.org/ and http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWorldWide.

(I am assuming here that Windows as such would not exist today if it were not for Bill Gates.)
Here goes:
So you want a world without MSDOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, XP, with all their admitted faults?
Without those as a benchmark, would KDE be here today?
How about Loadlin?
Go check 'em out if you want to see how they might be related in some way to the products Microsoft has brought out.

We, of the open-source world, would not have the PC's around in such great numbers to install our distros on, if it were not for Windows.

The one thing that Windows does is bring a PC to market that Boots to X, Soundcard Works, everything else works, and is engineered to do just that before the box shows up at the store.

Sure, I get a thrill when a Linux Distro boots to a decent X configuration. I loved Mandrake 8. You could go back and forth till you got it just right.
Windows users don't know what we are talking about there. They just turn the box on, and the GUI appears. With XP, it is fairly fast, too.
Because of the requirements of Windows Longhorn, we have the new dual core processors coming on the scene just this week from Intel and AMD.
Soon, computers with these processors will be available.
Dell already has their Model 9100 with the Dual Core Intel model D, for $100 extra. (they have 3 more, for extra $$)
Would Intel and AMD have spent the money, and brought them to market in a world without Windows?
Didn't Bill Gates say he wanted lots of processing power, memory, and other advanced features for Longhorn? Because of that, we have these new machines available.

We'll all benefit in the long run because Windows is around.

I disagree that MS has become a better company, it has become a worse company in my eyes. But they do some products better, of course, as there are open source programs kicking the butt of some of their 'best' expensive ones (Apache against IIS for example).
I don't know what you mean when you say that MS has boosted ease of use and a good office suite, I hope you are kidding.
KDE came because of the availability of Qt for free, and because the Qt API was so great, look at the initial KDE announcement (http://www.kde.org/announcements/announcement.php ), this is the major reason, not Windows 95/NT.
MS Office Suite arguably was not the better office suite at the time (or today), and was not even good, until Mac developers made it better, and then MS killed all competitors.
Gnome followed because of KDE, which was not Free Software, not because of MS.
And OpenOffice is there because it is Open Source, I don't know what would have been the fate of StarOffice, but given the fate of Word Perfect, I bet it would not have lasted long.

MS surely boosted some things in Linux desktops (KParts, Bonobo), but surely not usability. Most of the most powerful usability features of Linux desktop are not even available in Windows (but MS is quickly trying to add them) !!! :
- Powerful out-of-the-box (and sometimes on-the-fly) i18n and l10n
- Powerful integrated accessibility
- Virtual desktops (that work) !
- Lots of integrated apps, for nearly any day to day task (that was one of the initial goals of KDE and Gnome 2)
- Looks good (with optional anti-aliasing, adapts to your monitor, themes, SVG icons, translucency, ...)
- Reliable and consistent (the main goal of KDE and Gnome 2): no 3 different printer dialogs, no 4 different widget sets, no 3 mix of icon sets (4 bits, 256 bits, ...), no disappearing menus, no reverse order selection, no different behaviours between reboots, no 1-3 minutes locks, sessions that work, no slowing after 5 days of running, ...

Linux kernel - 2.2.14 or higher with the following libraries or packages:

* glibc 2.3.2 or higher
* XFree86-3.3.6 or higher
* gtk+2.0 or higher
* fontconfig (also known as xft)
* libstdc++5

yeah of course :)

from http://kate.kde.org/info.php

* Edit all kinds of text files even if they are BIG (i.e. open a 50MB file in a few seconds).
* Powerfull syntaxhighlighting engine, extensible via xml files.
* Code Folding capabilities for C++, C, PHP, ...
* Dynamic Word Wrap - long lines are wrapped at the window border on the fly for better overview.
* Multiple views allows you to view more instances of the same document and/or more documents at one time.
* Can reopen files if you want it to.
* User can choose the encoding he wants for each file at save/open dialog.
* Built in dockable terminal emulation.
* Sidebars displays a list of open documents, a directory viewer with a directory chooser, a filter chooser and more.
* A plugin interface to allow third party plugins.
* Default project handling, possibly to be overridden by project handling plugins.
* A "Filter" command allows you to run selected text through a shell command.
* Global grep dialog

amarok, a KDE media player, can use MusicBrainz to tag songs. Home Page. So far I've had good results with it, although I haven't needed to re-tag very many songs yet...

Some stuff is listed in the Wiki: http://wiki.kde.org/KDE+4+Goals

• it lacks an optical drive;
• the processor is about as powerful as modern-day PDAs;
• it's fucking expensive for what it is;
• less RAM, VRAM, disk space, etc. but on the plus side you do get an RS232 serial port...

Actually, Linux is moving onto the desktop.
http://www.kde.org/ The K Desktop Enviroment, really stable and is what I use
http://www.gnome.org/ GNOME, made by red hat and shipped with Fedora Core

If anyone else could post some more GUI's i'd appreciate it

When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus. And the small size of your code is a significant reason for our winning startup performance...

QT
X Server
Perl
BZip2
ZLib
PCRE
LibPNG

By all accounts I've read, KHTML had a smaller code base which better lent it to modification and expansion, and had a faster rendering engine. Apple's big push with Safari was to beat IE on speed. This was before Firefox had made its appearance, and Mozilla 7 was not making any real inroads with average users.

Check out the KDE reaction to the new Safari browser back in Janary, 2003.

I'm not a usability expert, but looking at the basic print dialogue, I see a number of things that could be done differently. Ok, there's three main control areas on the page. The top one is labelled "Printer", the middle section can have different contents depending on which tab you are in, and the bottom area consists mostly of buttons.

In the top area, there is a preview checkbox. Presumably this means print preview. But why is it in the printer control group? Is it previewing the printer? Why is it a checkbox? Presumably when it is checked, it changes the functionality of the "Print" button to "Print Preview". Wouldn't it be more sensible to have a "Print Preview" button instead?

In the form, there are multiple greyed out options and blank fields. Why is the type of the printer blank? Why is the location blank? What do I have to do to enable the output file control? Why can I specify to print all, print a range of pages, but not print the current page.

Grouping could also be improved. Why not put the "Print System currently used" under the "System Options" button? Why are the copies, html settings and advanced options all treated as tabs while the System Options is separated as a button? If the tabs are document options while the System Options are more global, then this could be made more obvious. For that matter, why exactly is HTML Settings a category of printing options.

Terminology can also be improved. What does collapse do? What do the funnel and magic wand icons next to the printer drop down signify? What information is supposed to be conveyed by the "Comment"? How is "Advanced Options" different from "System Options"?

Is it only me who finds that KDE Print just has too many icons, buttons and configuration options? Just take a look at this: http://printing.kde.org/screenshots/. Without intimately knowing the system/environment you are working at, it might be impossible to setup a printer. It happened to me once...and I am not that much of a newbie. Or is it that I am not that bright?

Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't have the only screenshot on the whole kpilot page making it look like the thing barely works:

KPilot has been reported to cause data loss

Starting KPilot daemon ...
Daemon status is 'not running'

Pilot device /dev/pilot does not exist
Trying to open /dev/pilot
Could not open device /dev/pilot

The thing might work great, but that screeny certainly isn't confidence instilling.

http://pim.kde.org/components/kpilot.php

The thing is, the KDE guys did Apple a favor, and DID make it easy for them to get at the code.

This is the second time I've seen you post this bullshit. Quit it. It isn't true. The first the KHTML developers heard about it was when the first Safari beta was released, so they couldn't possibly have done anythingto help Apple out. Everybody was expecting a browser based on Gecko because of their hiring decisions.

If you still don't believe me, read the email yourself:

I'm the engineering manager of Safari, Apple Computer's new web browser built upon KHTML and KJS. I'm sending you this email to thank you for making such a great open source project and introduce myself and my development team. I also wish to explain why and how we've used your excellent technology.

Does that sound like the KHTML developers gave Apple any special help?

Again, people, stop modding this up, he's a clueless idiot spreading lies.

(Saw this comment while meta-moderating and had to reply...)

(Saw this comment while meta-moderating and had to reply...)

>If someone could explain how this relates to OO.o's use of Java, I'd appreciate it.

As I say in the story--in a one sentence remark--it's because in both cases, some people are objecting to the use of proprietary software in an open source project.

It's not like this is a new battle between free software advocates and open-source supporters. The one most people probably know best is the use of TrollTech's QT in KDE. For more on that, see:

http://developer.kde.org/documentation/books/kde-2 .0-development/ch19lev1sec2.html

For the original version of the OO.o story see:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1813986,00.as p

Steven

What is needed is a bounty system that users could pay into easily so the bounty could grow over time.

Users love this idea, but FLOSS developers generally hate it. I develop my project for fun in my spare time; I don't want users dictating what I must do with my project. Don't get me wrong; I love getting ideas from users, and more often than not, I implement them. I like my hobby, I don't want it to be a job.

Anyway, there was a huge thread on kde-devel on this very topic a few weeks ago, in case you want more dev perspectives on the matter.

Have you seen KDE? Not to be flaming, but i think you should do some more research on linux desktops. Some good sites for this...

http://www.kde.org/ The K Desktop Enviroment (what i use)
http://www.gnome.org/ GNOME, another Desktop Enviroment thingy. The competitor to KDE
http://www.xfce.org/ XFCE, a lightweight desktop for less-powerful comps.

And that's all i can think of...