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That being said, I'm not a huge fan of the way the KDE panel looks. It still seems to be trying to grab your attention. When I'm looking at the bottom of the screen in KDE, I always find myself looking at it because it looks like a glass bar.

As for icons, I don't like the icons in KDE. They look like someone tried to draw cartoons on glass. I prefer OS X's icons, because they seem the most realistic and least cartoony. XP has somewhat-decent-looking icons, but I don't think they look as nice as the icons in OS X.

"Microsoft uses DCERPC, an extension of TCP/IP, as a transport mechanism."

and this is relevant how?

it is *another* protocol in the sense that nobody would be running it if it weren't for Svn

WebDAV is an open standard that plenty of products support, including your precious arch. I'd hardly describe it as a lame duck.

Note that now they've given up on getting everyone to install Apache2 and use DAV/SSL, the recommended protocol is svnserve, which was invented from scratch.

do you have any idea what you're talking about, or do you just make things up as you go? they seem to still think that DAV is still an option. And how is it possibly bad that they give you the option of a standalone server (as well as tunelling via ssh, or filesystem access)?

the same Anon Coward

Gstreamer is a complete open source media framework. It is being adopted by the KDE and Gnome desktop projects, making it the defacto standard for media applications in Linux/*BSD.

Gstreamer's plugin system is ideal for making a proprietary codec such as Real available to open source players, without having to open source or give up control of your codec. The benefit to you is that all of the codecs supported by the current Gstreamer plugins would be available to Helix player, without any additional work by your developers.

Gstreamer developers have approached the Helix developers and offered to cooperate in the past, but received only an absurd response about "splintering".

Cooperation between Helix and other media frameworks would be mutually beneficial. Lack of cooperation only ensures that Real's codec will marginalized on Linux and eventually obsoleted.

I didnt really get a chance to see the original article to which his responses were made but all in all his comments do seem pretty fair. I think that sometimes some of us linux-heads can get a bit fired up about things that are worthy of taking on face value.

Its a perfectly valid to point out areas where linux has problems, and i'll be the first to admit that sound is probably the biggest problem area.

Id also like to point out that if linux is to continue to become more and more mainstream as is happening at the moment. This generally means that more and more less techie people are going to be using it. And if we want linux to become more and more successfull then we must address the needs of you regular joe-sixpack user. Thats a fact, it is also very well dissing the man but he is presenting a genuine viewpoint, broadly speaking that point is that linux does not always deliver the expectations of the average joe-sixpack user. There are two ways to adress this problem, and that is for distro vendors not to make overrated claims etc. Or, fully test distro's to ensure that their claims are met.
Its perfectly acceptable for Microsoft to lie and bullshit about windows, because thats what people have come to expect. We dont wont people to think linux vendors are full of shit too. We need to be much more diligent because Linux isnt yet in a position to have its problems accepted and taken for granted like they are with windows.

And for christs sake us linux-heads should really be nicer to people who are reviewing and testing our beloved OS, because sooner or later this guy is going to do another review. It would be nice if he remembers the linux/open source community as being a friendly and helpful one. Instead of one full of elitist zealots thinking that every person that uses windows must be thick. * (some people)

The other point that I would like to make is that pointing out problems is actually good for linux because highlighting them will generally, hopefully lead to them being addressed. Its a little embarrasing for us when they are pointed out in a high profile review such as his was but, at least he has got his point heard.... I submitted a bug with Arts some weeks ago, i dont even think anyone has actually even looked at it yet, but hopefully it will. New users with problems should be encouraged to submit bugs, problems and wishlists to open source projects. Everyone can help make Linux better no-matter how techie/non-techie you are. The best thing about Linux and Open Source is by far the community. Generally speaking we are a helpful bunch and only to happy to help freinds and newbs out because its something we love to do.

Lets be nicer to each other!

Nick

Bah, frankly I'm tired of people modding things like this "Insightful".

Are you completely ignorant to reality? The Internet is like the real world: there are bad places, but there are also good places! If you get flamed down at an IRC channel, big deal. Move on to a good channel where people are willing to help you.
Saying that everybody in the Linux community tells you RTFM just because someone from a certain channel said that is like saying every human is a thief because a certain human is a thief. It's a completely wrong generalization.

An excellent Linux support forum would be the ComputerTotaal Forum (Dutch). People have been very helpful to me ever since 1999. People will Linux software and hardware problems are never flamed down.
Just take a look at the GNOME and KDE mailing lists. Do you see RTFM anywhere? I don't.
Take a look at the GNOME support forums. Where do you see newbies getting flamed down?

In other words:
Stop spreading the RTFM-myth!

This is specific to games where you may develop the engine using open source tools and release the engine as open source, but charge for all your data files the engine uses for your particular game.

Let's take a look at gaming development under the GLP. It offers an excellant case-study of how GNUlatic-ism will destory America.

1. NetHack: This game promises to connect your computer to a "net"work and expose it to "hack"ers. This is not a good model for a law-abiding company

2. Frozen Bubble: I'm not up on the street-lingo these days, but I'm 101% sure this is a drug reference; perhaps to "crystal methane" or "the acid". Do you want drug users working for your firm? Is that a way to be profitable? Also, I believe it comes from France, that notorious hangout for Maoists and ne'er-do-wells.

3. Klotski: Like many pinko names, it begins with a "K-" and ends with a "-ski". It's also affiliated with a sinister group of known East German "hackers" whose avowed goal is to "conqer" the American workplace.

I could proffer further examples, but any healthy-minded citizen will clearly see that GLP games encourage roguery of the worst kind and are unsuitable for emulation by the large, dependable corporations upon which our Constitution is based.

What the hell is this?

I've been using the transparency in Konsole (KDE's terminal) since I switched to Linux over a year ago, and reading around, Konsole's had it for years. KDE has it in their KDE 2.x screenshots page (fourth screenshot from the top).

I think you replied to the wrong comment, but I spotted your comment amongst the mist.

Basically its all pretty standard stuff.

Im using the latest build of KDE. Simply right click on the panel

go to panel menu-> configure panel. In there you can find options to make the panel transparent, resize it and all sorts of other funky stuff. Also I removed all the applets and created a child panel (right) which i use for the applets and system tray. Again i made this transparent.

For the stippling and other look & feel stuff you will need the Baghira look & feel from themes.kde.org

For the icing on the cake you will need the icon theme (16mb) and the shadows patch

I think you replied to the wrong comment, but I spotted your comment amongst the mist.

Basically its all pretty standard stuff.

Im using the latest build of KDE. Simply right click on the panel

go to panel menu-> configure panel. In there you can find options to make the panel transparent, resize it and all sorts of other funky stuff. Also I removed all the applets and created a child panel (right) which i use for the applets and system tray. Again i made this transparent.

For the stippling and other look & feel stuff you will need the Baghira look & feel from themes.kde.org

For the icing on the cake you will need the icon theme (16mb) and the shadows patch

This so-called 'paradigm shift' of spatial browsing should not be enforced on users. We like Linux. We like choice. Stop being fascists and give us a 'turn off spatial browsing' button.

You have choice. Use KDE. Use Rox Filer. Use Evidence.

You like GNOME but don't like the new nautilus? You can use Konqueror from inside GNOME no problems. You can use Evidence from inside GNOME.

Dearly love Nautilus but don't like spatial? GConf is far from cryptic. The choice is right there.

Don't want to have spatial existant in any way shape or form? Grab the Nautilus source, make a few edits so that only the navigation behaviour is enabled in the build, and build your own version.

Explain to me ... where exactly was your choice taken away?

Jedidiah.

Redesign filters to use Sieve internally. Allow editing of Sieve scripts on IMAP servers to get rid of the bug reports a la "KMail doesn't support IMAP folders for fitering"

Sometimes it's hard not to kick oneself for being an early adopter. I've been successfully deploying LTSP labs at work this year using SuSE 9.0 as a base system, and the project has been a success, but it's been a heck of a lot of work. As we're deploying these as student lab computers in a K12 environment, lockdown is key, so I've had to learn (and make good use of) the KDE Kiosk API, and of course this is before the Kiosk admin tool became available. Additionally, we have an Active directory with accounts for all secondary students, so I got to learn how to compile, install, and configure Samba 3 to get winbind to do some of the tricks I needed it to do besides just auth. Also, our primary students don't have an account of their own but rather use a shared school account, and Mozilla has that very annoying profile problem when a user tries to run multiple instances of it, so I had to write a wrapper so that it could run sandboxed (which also provides the benefit of keeping the kids from setting bizarre configurations which are then replicated to all the other users as they are wont to do in our other labs).

All in all, I'm kind of glad I did all this work by hand - I learned a lot, and most of it is now very easy for me to do. On the other hand, had the rumoured deployment tools been available when I started the project, I would have jumped on that and quick. I'm frankly not sure which is better in the long term, but I know it would have been faster to just click'n'run =]

One last thing - before someone flames me for being stupid and not just using K12LTSP, I have to say I tried it, and didn't like it - for one thing I needed more flexibility than was provided by K12LTSP, especially where AD auth comes in, and besides that, as a matter of preference I like what the KDE Kiosk api provides, and we all know just how much Redhat-based distros Don't Support KDE =] In the end, I got to know the system a lot better, and can do a lot more with it than I would have been able to do under a K12LTSP system. This isn't to disparage the effort and amazing work produced by the K12LTSP team - they really do have an excellent product and I recommend it wholeheartedly for K12 staff needing to get a fast deployment out - it just wasn't the fit I needed for this project.

Sometimes it's hard not to kick oneself for being an early adopter. I've been successfully deploying LTSP labs at work this year using SuSE 9.0 as a base system, and the project has been a success, but it's been a heck of a lot of work. As we're deploying these as student lab computers in a K12 environment, lockdown is key, so I've had to learn (and make good use of) the KDE Kiosk API, and of course this is before the Kiosk admin tool became available. Additionally, we have an Active directory with accounts for all secondary students, so I got to learn how to compile, install, and configure Samba 3 to get winbind to do some of the tricks I needed it to do besides just auth. Also, our primary students don't have an account of their own but rather use a shared school account, and Mozilla has that very annoying profile problem when a user tries to run multiple instances of it, so I had to write a wrapper so that it could run sandboxed (which also provides the benefit of keeping the kids from setting bizarre configurations which are then replicated to all the other users as they are wont to do in our other labs).

All in all, I'm kind of glad I did all this work by hand - I learned a lot, and most of it is now very easy for me to do. On the other hand, had the rumoured deployment tools been available when I started the project, I would have jumped on that and quick. I'm frankly not sure which is better in the long term, but I know it would have been faster to just click'n'run =]

One last thing - before someone flames me for being stupid and not just using K12LTSP, I have to say I tried it, and didn't like it - for one thing I needed more flexibility than was provided by K12LTSP, especially where AD auth comes in, and besides that, as a matter of preference I like what the KDE Kiosk api provides, and we all know just how much Redhat-based distros Don't Support KDE =] In the end, I got to know the system a lot better, and can do a lot more with it than I would have been able to do under a K12LTSP system. This isn't to disparage the effort and amazing work produced by the K12LTSP team - they really do have an excellent product and I recommend it wholeheartedly for K12 staff needing to get a fast deployment out - it just wasn't the fit I needed for this project.

They mentioned that they had trouble locking down the system. I am surprised that they didn't use KDE and its kiosk mode. It allows you to specify any setting in any kde application and lock it down so users can't change it. There is even a GUI tool in beta right now that lets set and lock the settings.

-Benjamin Meyer

swaret is more in the category of tools to semi-automatically keep the box up to date. You configure where to take updates from, where to create local repository, and what to install. Should also handle library dependencies.

You may also have a look at KDE's kpackage

Good choices are available.

Evolution

Kontact

Kontact Features

Good choices are available.

Evolution

Kontact

Kontact Features

Any thoughts? Implementations? Cool things that you would like to see done after you die?

I love thinking about this; maybe I'll spend some dream time on it.

In the hollywood movies and TV, it's always someone very trusted who puts things into motion, like a butler, a sister, a friend who knows about your secret and sinister past.

If you're running Linux, you have tools like kalarm, which can send text OR RUN COMMANDS at specified times. On login, you could timestamp an empty file with the command "touch". Every day or week or other, you could have kalarm run a script to check the stamp. If it's been a while since you've logged in, the script senda a warning e-mail about self-destruct. If, after another 2 days and 2 more warnings the file's timestamp is unchanged, self-destruct commences.

Of course, it would be cool if someone would write a script like this, call it SELF_DESTRUCT, and place it under the GPL. It's a fantastic way to piss off the greedy capitalist trolls on slashdot, and you would have many adoring fans.

Browser wars?
one konqueror takes out several explorers

Failing that, as most of us do, the next best practice is to program defensively: anticipate where problems might occur in your code and include assertion checking and logging (yes, print statements) to illuminate those problem spots. Generally, I include debugging flags on the command line that allow me to control the level of assertion checking and logging (0=no logging, except for errors (the default), 1=log all branches, 2=log branches and variable values, 4=log everything).

This defensive debugging strategy works quite well. First, it forces the programmer to think harder about both the algorithms they are using, and their implementation. I catch about a quarter of my programming errors just in the process of adding assertions. Second, the program will tend to abort as soon as a problem is detected, rather than running on for a couple billion instructions, dumping crap into the output file or database and then either aborting mysteriously on some marginally related condition, or, worse, completing without any reported errors! Finally, when errors are detected, the debugging can usually be done simply by inspecting the soure and following actual execution from the log file.

All debugging comes down to one, fairly simple, idea: show me the program status at crucial points in the flow of control (generally at every branch and return). A few other tools are of some use under special circumstances: Purify, Electric Fence or Valgrind for detecting problems with dynamically allocated memory, or something like ddd for examining linked structures (though I prefer to just write a validation function for my data structures, see my AVL-tree code for an example). Defensive programming works because it answers the important question that usually forces you into using the debugger: what the hell just happened?!? Defensive programming gives you a way to examine program states without invoking an outside tool.

The only class of bugs that doesn't succumb well to this approach is race conditions. Unfortunately, anything that changes the timing of the program (such as stepping instruction-by-instruction in a debugger, or writting log messages out to a disk file) will change the behavior of the race condition. I'd be really interested in tools or techniques that could address this class of bugs.

They might not be revolutionary, but the is a few ideas
which can be just to reduce the number of bugs in a program.

1) 100% unit test coverage of your programs.
2) Statistical Debugging

3) Valgrind

4) The D programing Language
with build in support for unit testing, contracts and class Invariants.

Yes, because no-one is going to make things if other people can just take a copy without paying.

I don't like programming in Java, but having a free Java (as in speech) would be really great !

There is a very good free java implementaiton. GCJ (GNU Compiler for Java). The library lacks a few things (e.g. AWT/Swing), though, but other than that it is a great implementation. And it is not based on a JVM, but is a traditional ahead of time compiler, so the related disadvantages (as well as the advantages, if any) dissapear. It uses the same (or at least a very similar) object model as C++, so interoperation with it is much easier.

Think about how it can be easy to include Java in a Linux Distro.
Sun's Java JVM can be included in linux distributions without problems. Knoppix, SuSE and SoL include it. Don't know about others. The reason some distributions don't include Sun's Java implementation is because they don't want to include it.

If Java becomes free, I can imagine a lot of thing. Why not bindings with GTK for example They already exist. Check Java-GNOME. It includes GTK and GNOME bindings for Java.
There are also bindings for Qt and KDE.
You can also use GTK via the SWT toolkit .
Java is NOT a proprietary language (despite some ignorant people who say so), you can find many open source libraries for it, and there is at least a high quality free (as in speech) implementation of it.

Locality of reference... that's why we should all be using profiling tools. I'd like to take this opportunity to promote Valgrind. Ddon't fear the kde URL, it runs in text mode and the requirements page has no mention of kde libs or even X Windows.

It has awesome memory checking, cache profiling and heap profiling.

I'm just a satisfied user, i have no relationship with the Valgrind developers.

You've just described what DCOP does in KDE. Contact info is offered by the address book component, which can be queried by the email suite, the IM tool, etc. The entire desktop is built upon this approach, in fact.

The Freedesktop group has begun working on a generalization of DCOP called D-BUS, primarily geared toward exchanging message between backend (hardware detection...) and frontend (desktop environment), if I got it right, but I think that GNOME will also eventually be able to use it to tap into KDE components as well. This would be really nice.

Science : KDE Conquers Astrophysicists with Kst
Posted by simoniker in The Mysterious Future!
from the winner-is-you dept.
Telex4 writes "The Free Software community is constantly inundated with interesting new projects, but occasionally something crops up which is really special. Kst is just such a project. Started by Barth Netterfield, an astrophysicist, as a personal project to plot data from his experiments, it has now taken on a life of its own, being used in numerous academic projects, and finding funding from several government agencies. Intrigued by this project's success, and with a little prod from co-developer George Staikos, I interviewed Barth and George about kst, Free Software and physics."

1. I looked around kde-look.org; when you upload something, you have to specify the type of license. But at least for the mentioned images this license is not clearly shown before downloading them - I couldn't even find it at all!
2. All the copyright information I saw was "Copyright 2001-2004 KDE-Look.org Team" below the page. I suppose Linspire must have seen the same copyright.
3. KDE-look.org is sponsored by Linspire. That effectively makes them allies on the front of spreading KDE to the world:)

So in my opinion kde-look.org is at fault; they receive a copyrighted upload for which the uploader has specified the license and what do they do? They totally ignore the license and republish the work of art as if it was their own. Until we know if Lindows possibly got permission to use this work from their "partner" kde-look.org, we won't know if they really made a mistake. If they didn't, kde-look.org sure did.

• gentoo linux
• FreeBSD
• bash
• vim
• perl
• ruby
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Apache
• PHP
• links www browser
• wget
• K Desktop Environment
• Mozilla Firefox
• xchat
• gimp
• Openoffice.org

Scribus is a desktop publishing program for Unix and Linux which has been gathering momentum recently. SuSe now proudly proclaim that with SuSe 9.1, Professional layouts can be prepared with the desktop publishing application Scribus. Scribus is also recieving critical acclaim from other big open source quarters such as Newsforge who recently proclaimed Scribus to be one of Free Software's Killer Applications.

ut what is Scribus really like? Can anyone just pick it up and use it? Is it really as powerful as they say it is? And does it live up to the hype surrounding it?

About ScribusScribus is a desktop publishing program for Unix and Linux. It is built with the Qt libraries and is run natively in the KDE desktop environment. Scribus is published under the Gpl and is similar to similar to Adobe PageMaker, QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign. Scribus has an unusually small development team and is mostly the work of a German programmer called Franz Schmid. The Scribus team are positioning the program as an easy to use DTP publishing program for the Linux and Unix operating systems with support available for professional publishing features. These professional publishing features include:

• CMYK Colour

• Press Ready PDF Creation
  • Further advanced PDF features for making interactive PDFs exist together with a large amount of support for the PDF 1.4 specification including:
  • Transparency
  • Encryption
  • Form Field
  • Annotations
  • Bookmarks

EPS and PDF import/export

Complete ICC colour management

Font embedding and sub-setting in both postscript and PDF exportIn addition to this Scribus also provides:

• A WYSIWYG viewpoint for document creation
• An XML based file format allowing for easier file recovery if corruption occurs
• Drawing tools for custom shapes including: lines, curves, ellipses, bezier curves, polygons, etc.
• Drag'n'drop with KDE 3, including a Drag'n'drop scrapbook for frequently used items such as text blocks, logo images, backgrounds etc

As can be seen Scribus certainly isn't devoid of features, and there are many others in the program which I haven't described above. All in all, Scribus is a fairly feature rich program and more features such as importing from Microsoft Office and OO.org are expected in future releases. Installation of Scribus

I installed Scribus by going to the download section of the Scribus homepage in order to obtain the latest version which at this moment in time is 1.1.6. There are several different methods of installation available, including source and prepackaged files. Prepackaged files are available in the form of RPMs for Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 1 and SuSe 9, Deb files are also available for Debian users.

Since I'm using Fedora Core 1 I downloaded the RPM from the site and installed it. I used the Scribus website instead of a Fedora Yum repository as I have only been able to find out of date versions of Scribus on them. When installing the RPM I did encounter a dependency issue in which I needed to install a program called

Then try gaim. It allows the same behavior, and is OSS to boot.

Or, if you're into the KDE thing, Kopete does the same thing, also OSS.

Um ... like ... kwallet?

From the interview of Trolltech's guys:

PF: Now, a question that everybody has been asking: Why isn't there a GPL version of Qt3 for Windows?

EE (laughing): As some people mentioned on the dot, it has partly to do with finances, sales and Trolltech's business model. Another point is the fact that Windows is a closed source Operating System. There is no community for Free Software development under Windows. The situation is very different from Linux, as you know. On Windows development usually happens as shareware or commercial software and we don't see that community evolving into producing Free Software.

Hope this clears the situation a bit :)

As a former tinkerer in that port, I'll have to say that it is about 80% of Qt is ported, but that other missing 20% creates problems with many real life apps. The other problem is that there aren't any active developers for a few months. So if you any Qt and/or win32 experience, and have never looked at Qt/Win's source code, sign up!

You mean something like kimdaba, which you can get for free and comes included in your good ol' Mandrake 10 distro?

No need to go to best buy, fork over your money, etc.

Take a look, for example, at one of the latest KDE releases for example. Looks of distributions have released packages, even some gnome-centric ones. Where are the Mandrake packages?

You might be able to apply some security patches to Mandrake releases, but the only package updates visible to me in 9.2, is a little bit of documentation.

IAAMCM (I am a Mandrake Club Member)

why don't we have a team ... telling MS what to do?

We do, they're located here, here, and here

Even with their update, the entry level Macs are still not even remotely competetive with today's cutting edge Intel machines. Apple fanatics, I don't understand why you continue to waste your money on such machines. Take a look at the configurations of the following machines:

Apple eMac
1.25GHz PowerPC G4, 256MB DDR SDRAM
80GB Ultra ATA/100, SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW)
17-inch (16-inch viewable) flat CRT
ATI Radeon 9200 32MB
Mac OSX
= $999

Dell Dimension 2400
2.4GHz Celeron, 256MB DDR SDRAM
80GB Ultra ATA/100, DVR+RW optical drive
17-inch (16-inch visible) CRT
Intel 3D Extreme Graphics
Windows XP
= $679

I specced the Dell to be similar to the high-end eMac. Suprise, suprise - it's $320 cheaper. The Intel equivalent is even $120 cheaper than the low-end $799 eMac! What's up with that?

But if we go ahead and spend the extra $300 on an Intel based machine, we get some really flashy upgrades that start to compete with Apple's high-end G5 offerings. For example, we can easily get a 3GHz hyperthreading Pentium 4 (which is 2 processors in one - an effective clockspeed of 6GHz assuming 100% efficiency running parallel tasks). For example:

Dell Dimension 4600
3GHz Pentium 4 with hyperthreading, 512MB DDR SDRAM
120GB Ultra ATA/100, DVD+RW optical drive
17-inch (16-inch visible) CRT
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 128MB graphics card
Windows XP
= $998

Ta-da. Conclusion: Apple is still really bad value for money. For the same price as an entry-level Apple system, you could get a significantly powerful workstation capable of handling anything you throw at it - including games. If you're willing to go a step further and build your own machine from components (gasps from the Apple audience), you can get an even higher specced machine for about the same money.

An ultra-high end computer is $1000 if you're willing to shop around. Nobody should settle for anything less, or for overexpensive, underpowered solutions like eMacs. You don't even have to run Windows if you don't want to. Gnome and KDE await you on Linux and FreeBSD (on which Mac OSX was originally based).

Usability and UI are exactly my background. Please explain to me how I can have a positive impact on OSS...

Wow. This reads something like:

I am a hot chick with a geek fetish who desperately wants to get laid. Please explain to me how I might manage to do this...

I think the problem is that you aren't talking to usability folks -- most OSS projects don't currently have a "usability guy" or often even a designated "interface programming guy". It's kinda too bad. I'd like to suggest that if you are interested in GNOME, try the Usability Project folks, who *are* interested in taking and cataloging suggestions. Dropping by their IRC channel and working on identifying user interface issues with GNOME is something that a lot of folks would like. Sun donated some UI people's time to the project for a decently-sized study, but they always would like more input. If you like KDE, try the KDE Usability Project. Since these two are about the most usability-focused projects around, they're probably a good place to put in some improvements, where your work won't get dropped or ignored.

One of the main problems with OSS is that generally programmers are used to, y'know, doing their own thing. It's hard to take advice from someone else on a volunteer project, especially since they might get less of that precious credit for an improvement (and credit must be a primary motivating factor, since the code-for-self motivation generally isn't when it comes to UI). Hence the "well, why don't *you* implement it" business.

I realize that funding is a problem when it comes to doing studies, but you probably *do* have a knowledge of existing problems, stuff that people like Apple have run into in the past (I read interface articles as a bit of a hobby, and I've got a ton of interesting things that people have run into to try to avoid).

Do remember, though -- usability people and artists are the resource in shortest supply in the OSS world.

This basically means that TrollTech can block any move made by the "Free Qt Foundation" by denying a majority.

That's wrong. The KDE developers have an extra vote in case there is a tie.

See the KDE Free Qt Foundation Announcement for more details.

Those programs are written with security and functionality in mind, adhering to the *NIX mindset ... Linux community wouldn't stand for it being insecure.

Yeah right. 99% of the problems that Windows has are derived from "desktop integration" and not underlying operating system security.

For example, check out this thread where KDE developers defend launching a KMail virus attachment using Wine. That's at least 1 virus that was blocked by Outlook but spread through KMail. Oh, but the user sees a "warning dialog" -- I'm sure the folks in Redmond said the exact same thing :P

So here we have a prime example of Linux developers actually ignoring the security lessons of the Windows world in favor of "usability".

I'm in the process of rewritting some small freely available application because the original caused my computer to segfault under two circumstances which I consider normal use. In rewritting it, i've eliminated those errors and maintained the same performance. As well, I decided to start using a memory profiler, Valgrind. The end result is a more user friendly tool because it doesn't crash in normal operation giving bad error messages that only a programmer would understand. It is also more secure... no more buffer overflows.

My point is, moving towards usability shouldn't mean that we should loosen our belts, allowing the user to run amock in the system, we should tighten them.

After the Swing API has been successfully ported on top of SWT (SwingWT) - why not a Swing API on top of QT? SwingQT would be a useful step for both, Java and QT.
There is already a QtAWT but Swing on top of the QtPeers is still just Swing, not Qt.

> If there is a hostile takeover you bet they are going to release a BSD version. In fact this is what the free qt foundation is about.

Wrong!

There is nothing in the Free Qt Foundation Agreement that deals with Trolltech being bought.

The "BSD" clauses in the agreement state:

> The Foundation shall have a non-exclusive, irrevocable right to grant a license based on the BSD license (exibit 3) on the latest version of the Qt Free Edition, in the event of stoppage or discontinuation for more than 12 - twelve - months of the release of the Qt Free Edition under the Qt Free Edition license. The Foundation shall have the same right if the license is unilaterally terminated or changed.

> Such right will also come into existance if no new edition of importance (major release) is launched within 12 - twelve - months, and the Foundation regards the said edition for stopped or discontinued.

> Furthermore, whenever unanimously decided by the Board, the Foundation shall have the same non-exclusive, irrevocable right to grant a license based on the BSD license.

As I said, nothing about the company being sold.

So let's say that Microsoft pays $1 billion to buy Trolltech.

The Trolltech representatives on the board, having decided that they want the $1 billion, are not going to vote againt themselves, so the third clause, which requires unanimous agreement, does not come into effect.

And the first two clauses won't have an effect for 12 months, and even that can be avoided if Microsoft continues to release new versions of the Qt Free Edition. Even if those versions were to tie Qt to .Net, or were completely different than the non-Free edition of Qt, it wouldn't matter, as long as they were "of importance."

Thus, Microsoft could end up with lock-in control of all proprietary Qt-based applications on Linux.

And there is nothing we could do about it.

The growing use of proprietary Qt for proprietary Linux applications (Kylix, Opera, etc.) is one of the greatest threats to the freedom of Linux. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft and Trolltech are already working together, with a Microsoft plan to lock-in Linux.

No widespread use in Linux? Last I checked, KDE uses QT. How many Linux distributions distribute KDE? Probably all the major ones.

What real reasons are there for QT to change it's licensing for the Windows platform? The interview clearly states why they won't. Your logic makes no sense to me. Someone who embraces the predatory licensing of MS-Windows will be afraid of the licensing of non-Free QT? I doubt it. If someone doesn't like non-Free QT license, but will tolerate MS licensing, then they have some weird conflicting views.

Your insight about the QT logo is a bit off the wall, if you ask me. read into it what you want, though.

Here ya go.

MediaWiki in particular implements many ideas that were already envisioned by Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart. It does show backlinks, but perhaps more importantly, it also allows dynamic inclusion of any page in the current development version. For example, you could have a header and footer in your documentation that is the same for every page. What's more, you can add parameters to these templates to dynamically search and replace patterns of text in the template before transcluding it. This will allow us to replace the currently statically hacked Wikipedia infoboxes with dynamically included and parametrized templates, for example. One long term feature that might be worth hacking on top of this would be transclusion of labeled sections from another page, or interwiki transclusion.

Check out the current feature list and the development roadmap. Subscribe to wikitech-l to help us in improving the software. In true wiki spirit, we are fairly liberal at handing out CVS access (over 40 developers with CVS access at present), so please do ask if you want to work on a larger project.

There are many other wiki engines that are worth working on, such as TWiki and MoinMoin. Their main deficiency, in my opinion, is that they do rely primarily on the traditional wiki link pattern of CamelCase, which is nice for geeks but very ugly for everyone else, and also useless for search engines. MediaWiki uses [[free links]] instead, which are harder to type, but look just like normal links to the reader. Still, working on any other wiki engine is a lot better than starting yet another one.

A collaborative tool which is badly needed is a free software clone of SubEthaEdit. Combine wikis with real-time editing and the fun really begins. I imagine something like that might be hackable on top of a powerful graphical editor like Kate. For now WebDAV-support for MediaWiki would also be very cool, as Kate/KDE already supports editing WebDAV resources. So many worthwhile hacks, so little time.

This is an area where open source coders can make a big difference while corporations are still bewildered by the fact that open wikis can produce useful content. So please, let's work together on these tools.

Where have you been? The KDE developers have been doing a YEAR of usabillity studies and have activley cleaned up the menus for good defaults. See the kde usabillity mailing lists and see that they have cared, but they can't satisfy everyone.You can send your complaints to the KDE developers. Or, you can click Settings, Configure toolbars and configure things to your liking.

AND REMEMBER! Microsoft is so big because of the monopoly! My brother has difficulty reading, yet he figured KDE out before windows because of the easy to under stand colorful icons that KDE uses.

GNOME 2.6, which you OBVIOUSLY haven't used has a lot of device management intergration. KDE as well with the Kinfocenter program.

Either get informarmed or modded troll!

Don't forget if you want to use kmail...

Rename the default identity, add an email address, shutdown kmail, reboot the machine, and then MAYBE you can send messages via SMTP.

(as a side note, I have twiddled every kmail option, restarted, everything, and kmail will still not send mail via SMTP. I gave up and am using Mozilla which worked the very first time I tried.)

We'd jump all over this if this problem existed in Outlook.

> This article's been up for over quarter of an hour now and...
> where's the KDE v Gnome flamewar?

The flamewar is included in the article, no need for a flamewar at slash dot.

The reviewer should have called his article^W^Wflamewar not "First Look at SUSE LINUX Professional 9.1" but "My First Look at SUSE LINUX from a Gnome's point of view".

Let's start the flamewar with Yast (there is a QT-based (->evil) GUI for it)

My only concern (and this has been a standing concern for some time now) is that the YaST-based (Yet another Setup Tool) installation process is too lengthy. The installer asks a lot of configuration -related questions which could most likely be automated or, at the very least, give the user an option for a 'beginner' install.

Huh? If you want, you only need to click "Next" and "Yes". OK, you have to type your root password and login+password for a user account, but that's it.

I really don't mind the more complicated questions during installation, but it might be a bit intimidating for new users to Linux.

Of course, because there are no complicated questions for beginners to answer.

I half expected Ximian GNOME to be the desktop of choice with this release. Instead, a very vanilla GNOME 2.4.2 was included.[...]You can definitely tell that far more effort was put into KDE development as there was into GNOME, as it look very 'stock' and unattended to.

Maybe you should say that to the gnome people? Is it Suse's problem if Gnome looks bad?

Granted this software is in beta4 release, so there is still room for improvement, but so far all of the development effort has been on KDE. Even still, it hasn't gone unnoticed. KDE has never looked better.

Can you prove that "all" of the development effort has been on KDE? Hey, the reason for KDE looking better is not Suse, but the release of KDE 3.2.x! ->Screenshot

SUSE, as usual, has spent some time tweaking the KDE desktop to look the best it can.

Nice try, but the KDE-Menu of Suse 9.1 looks like a KDE-3.2 standard-menu.

None of the visual effects (drop shadows, transparency, etc.) are turned on by default but can easily be adjusted within the KDE Control Center (Kcontrol).

That should give Gnome an edge over KDE.

The K Menu (similar to the Windows Start menu) has been reworked and organized to an extent that it makes many other distros look pale in comparison.

It looks like the K-Menu from Suse 9 or Suse 8.2 or any other distro. Welcome to KDE 3.2!

As I stated earlier in the review, I chose the default system configuration to see how well it equipped me to do everything I would need to do on a daily basis. Well, I was not pleased with the results.

Let's see...

While it had several very useful applications, and very well could satisfy most users needs, I found it lacking a few key components. For one, the Mozilla web browser was noticeably missing, as was Gaim instant messenger.

Mozilla is missing because there is Konqueror 3.2.1 and Firefox. Gaim is missing because there is Kopete, which offers more features and better integration.

There was also no graphical FTP clients available such as KBear or gFTP.

Welcome to KDE 3.2. KBear or Gftp is not installed by default, because there is KWallet + Konqueror. With KDE 3.2 there is nearly no need for a stand alone Gui-FTP-Client.

Sure, they are technically GNOME applications (on a certain level anyway), but that's no reason to leave them out of the configuration.

There are good reasons, see above.

YaST has been tightly integrated into Kcontrol (see the screenshots below) to allow centralised administration of all system settings. This is an excellent modification to the package.

NEWS?? Have you ever look

IMHO, if slashdot were to join, it should be more than a banner. It should be a cover page with a Click here to enter our website link. Nowadays, people are so used to banners that they don't even notice them (quick poll: how many of you do know that Slashdot advertises Microsoft?)