Category Archives: openSUSE

New KDE Desktop! Version 4.5 not perfect, but much better!

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So of course, while I’m spending a glorious and relaxing week hanging out in Boulder, Colorado, the KDE community is working overtime fixing a few showstopper bugs. Version 4.5 of the KDE Software Collection (also known as KDE SC) was released Tuesday, a week late from the original release plan, but it looks like a pretty good one.

Tyler Ballance over at OMG! SUSE! has a good overall summary of the highlights of this release. I got my Kubuntu laptop upgraded with only a little fussing with APT repositories (semi-inevitable on launch day).  After just a day of playing around, I’m pretty happy.

This initial happiness is really centered on several small things:

  • Boot time seems faster than it’s been. Haven’t clocked it, but login-to-start-working may take half the time it did in v4.4.x
  • The external device notifier now appears by default in the main panel when there’s something in the USB port.
  • The infernal announcement that Akonadi is installing its front end on every boot has finally gone away!

Yet, it is still a dot-zero release, and some weirdness has been puzzling me:

  • Since I reset four of my virtual desktops with different wallpapers, an empty box appears in the upper left corner of the screen on boot. Clicking X makes the panel, and all the wallpapers, disappear. Logging out solves the problem, but I’m sure something short of that will fix it.
  • One time I rendered my mouse unusable by apparently activating a gesture (I think) that added a plus sign to the cursor. No combination of clicks restored mouse functioning, and a again I had to logout/login (thankfully I could get KRunner to run logout!) to get back to normal.

More research required, but if anyone has an idea, I’m all ears.

Meanwhile, if you want to try KDE 4.5, instructions for some of the leading distros can be found here (thanks  to Planet KDE):

openSUSE:
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-kde/2010-08/msg00057.html

Kubuntu:
http://www.kubuntu.org/news/kde-sc-45

Mandriva:
http://not403.blogspot.com/2010/08/kde-45-final-available-for-mandriva.html

I’ll have more on this release in the coming days. In the meantime, let me know what kind of experience you want or are having with KDE 4.5 in the comments.

openSUSE Strategy Discussion Takes Shape

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A few weeks ago, I noted that the openSUSE Community Project was working on a new strategy. The purpose of the discussion is essentially to answer the question “Why openSUSE?”

I have to admit that, while I have a knee-jerk positive response to any democratic process that ends in a vote on something important, I wasn’t completely certain what the point of this exercise was. Today I’ve got a clue:

A strategy statement should answer the following questions:

  • Who are we?
  • What are the goals?
  • In which time frame?
  • By doing what?
  • Who is our target?

–openSUSE Strategy Process document

In the newly created openSUSE Wiki space, you can get a solid grasp of where this discussion started, how it has progressed, and what the next steps are: Portal:Strategy – openSUSE. If you’re interested in participating, be sure to visit these pages (in addition to the proposal links below):

Today marks the beginning of 16 days of focused discussion on the four main strategy documents developed by the openSUSE board (yeah, I’m late to the announcement on the community statement):

These discussions are taking place in the openSUSE Forums and the openSUSE-Project mailing list. They end on August 10, 2010 and the board will revise the proposals based on the discussion to date.

I may have some ideas to share here about the proposals, but I’m going to make my opinions known in the project first. You should too. If you want to say something about the process, though, feel free to comment here too.

By the way, regular readers may be noticing an uptick in frequency for “Notes from the Metaverse.” I’m trying to develop some consistency in posting (that is, at least one post per week) without diluting the quality of the posts. That said, it is summer in the northern hemisphere, and your humble scribe is heading out for a week with family and friends in Boulder, CO. Please forgive me if the posting takes a break too, unless something blogworthy happens, of course.

Following up on recent posts: Support and HTML5/CSS3

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If you haven’t heard already, openSUSE 11.3 was released last week, to mostly rave reviews. I’ve been running some of the pre-release versions in VirtualBox, and am planning to convert my laptop Linux from Kubuntu to openSUSE 11.3 this weekend. Will let you know how that goes.

In the meantime, there are a few items to share with you:

In many many years on the internet, I’ve found people tend to prefer one or
the other.

Forums:
1-invariably mousetype (rude, tiny text; certainly applicable to forums.opensuse.org)
2-higher ratio of unanswered questions to answered questions
3-higher ratio of good answers to unhelpful answers
4-better moderation
5-subject miscategorization widespread (leads searches in wrong directions)
6-pulled (more work to get, but get no processing forced)

Mailing lists:
1-displays text legibly and comfortably at users preferred size
2-better ratio of questions asked to questions answered
3-better ratio of good answers to unhelpful answers
4-poorer moderation
5-topics lack categoration within particular lists (hard to narrow searches)
6-pushed (less work to get, more work to process)

This ties in somewhat with my post of a few weeks ago on learning about KDE, etc. My completely unscientific poll seems to indicate that forums are pretty popular, but did not address specifically the quality of answers you get from a particular venue (BTW, you can still vote in the related poll–Click the link at the top of this paragraph). What do you think? Comment below.

  • Let me give you a few more links related to HTML5 and CSS3, discovered this week:
    • I found the TinyMCE Advanced plugin, which adds some excellent standards-compliant features to the WordPress default Visual Editor. Unfortunately, some WordPress 3.0 users are complaining that it doesn’t install. See Comment 964 for a possible workaround. This plugin does not address HTML5 directly, but perhaps with a few persuasive notes, that can change.
    • The fine folks at SitePoint are offering cheap online classes for HTML5 and CSS3, starting next week. John Allsopp, one of the founders of the Web Standards Project is teaching them, and it sounds really interesting. The two-week HTML5 course begins July 26, and costs just $9.95, and the three-week CSS3 course that follows is just $14.95. Take ‘em both, and it’s just $19.90. Even though I will be on vacation for part of this time, I think I’m signing up.
    • Over at the About.com HTML site, they’re taking a poll on interest in CSS3, with a few links highlighting some of the features you can use now.

How Do You Learn About KDE?

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A discussion has popped up on the KOffice-Devel list as to whether to discontinue the user-oriented KOffice mailing list. Some developers are wondering whether it’s worth it to keep this admittedly low-traffic list going. The main argument being that if people aren’t using the list now, the few questions that do get asked may not be getting the attention they deserve.

I have an opinion on the subject, but I’m not sure that’s all that important. As a technical communicator, what I’m interested in is how others learn about and solve problems with their software, particularly in the open source arena. KOffice doesn’t have the mind share and user base that other open source productivity suites (OK, I mean OpenOffice.org) have, but are there channels today’s Linux geek and her grandma use to get support for their software. There are lots of choices, and it would be interesting and helpful to me, the KOffice and KDE teams to learn those preferences.

I’m going to try to set up a poll here, but please use the Comments section as well. The official question is “How do you learn about or get help with KOffice and other KDE applications?” Here are the options I’ve thought of:

Share your journey in the comments. Choose as many options in the poll below as you like. Explain what you like and don’t like about getting help. Even if you don’t use KDE specifically, feel free to chime in.

Shiny new openSUSE and WordPress toys to play with

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Happy solstice all! It’s summer in the northern hemisphere, and open source development teams are busy kicking out new versions before going on holiday. Of most importance to readers of this blog are this past week’s release of WordPress 3.0, aka Thelonious, and the first release candidate of openSUSE 11.3.

If you haven’t rushed to pull these down (or been nagged to do so by your WordPress.org dashboard), here are your links:

WordPress 3.0 + Announcement Post

openSUSE 11.3 RC1 + Announcement Post

In some ways, even more exciting than the software releases was the release for discussion of a Strategy for the openSUSE Project. This is a proposal from the openSUSE community board (composed of equal parts Novell employees and elected community members) to create a future for this distribution and its community.

Note that each statement contains three lists of activities describing current activities the openSUSE Project does and possible future activities (or tasks). The first list (“We need to be excellent in the following”) describes the items that we want to do really excellent and better than everybody else. The second list (“We will try to do the following effectively”) are needed to do but we don’t need to strive for excellence, just for effectiveness. The third list (“We will not focus on the following anymore”) are activities we will not do at all as part of the project but rather rely on other FOSS projects.

This is exciting because it represents a serious opportunity for openSUSE users and community participants to have a say in the direction of the distribution, and a significant sector of the Linux community as a whole. If you care at all about Linux generally, and openSUSE in particular, head first for the wiki page to read the documents. Then head for the openSUSE Forums and have your say.

Between assorted family obligations and some wacky DSL issues at my house this weekend, I haven’t had much time to play with any of these toys (or read the strategy documents). I did upgrade MichaelMcCallister.com to WordPress 3.0 with no hassle, but haven’t implemented any of the new features. I’m upgrading my openSUSE install on VirtualBox Tuesday, and hope to have a summary of that later this week. With some good fortune, I’ll get the strategy documents read this week too. You’ll certainly see more about that here. Meanwhile, feel free to contribute your own ideas on any of these items (or the coming of summer, for that matter) in that Comments box below.

KOffice 2.0 Released: Alternatives to OpenOffice Survive

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It’s always good news when a major desktop Linux project hits a milestone release, and so it is with KOffice 2.0.0 being released this week. The KOffice team realized the tremendous opportunity for reinvention offered by its KDE 4 parent community, and have worked to make this suite more usable and compatible.

The biggest transformation in KOffice 2 is the Flake Shape concept, described as something

as simple as a square or a circle or as complex as a chart or a music score.
With Flake, any KOffice application can handle any shape. For instance, KWord can embed bitmap graphics, Krita can embed vector graphics and Karbon can embed charts.

This could be very cool.

It’s also an excellent decision to standardize on the Open Document Format (ODF) as the default output. KOffice 1.x had its own default format that was widely ignored when other applications built filters, making it very difficult to share KOffice docs with anyone. The move to ODF should largely solve that problem, and it won’t hurt that a Windows port (thanks to the Qt4 base) is also available.

As with KDE 4.0, KOffice 2.0 is viewed by its development team as very much a work in progress. The announcement is strewn with phrases like “first preview,” “first of a long series,” and “not aimed at end users.” I’m going to withhold judgment until we get a more stable and mature release, probably next year. The team projects a version 2.1 in late fall 2009. But I do intend to play with the new KWord and the other components in the coming days.

While the vast majority of folks who even have a mental picture of an “open source office suite” think solely about OpenOffice.org, open source (as I so often say) is really all about choices. So it’s good that KOffice continues to pursue its vision, independent of any company. One hopes that continuing success in building an alternative suite might even persuade the folks involved in the GNOME Office project(s) to revive their integration efforts to provide yet another alternative.