KDE 4 beta 2 released

Hi friends KDE team has released beta 2 of K Desktop Environment.

http://dot.kde.org/1229613785/

I have been using packages from Neon repository and I find them pretty much stable when compared to beta 1. The dolphin text problem I described for beta 1 is gone and Plasma crashes are also gone. The desktop crashed only one time so far. That was when I was using an external 21 inch monitor and opened a pdf in okular in presentation mode.

I have to check the screen lock problem. Okular did not crash when I was not using the external monitor. Also at that time I had the okular specific window settings which caused the presentation mode to be opened in a small protion of screen . Now that I have removed this I will test this again on external monitor.

Installing kde 4.2 beta

First you have to enable ppa lauchpad repository Neon nightly by doing the following instruction

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/project-neon/ubuntu intrepid main
and sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install kde-nightly

It does not affect your existing kde installation. You can start it like another desktop session from your login manager window.

Issues I am facing:
1. Dolphin menu has no text all says No text.

2. gtk applications look ugly as its not setting the correct gtk rc files.
UPDATE 1: There is a script in .kde/env copy that to .kde-neon/env to fix gtkrc problem

3. kopete is not connecting to gmail as it can't find qca ossl plugin
UPDATE 2: to fix this we need to copy qca ossl plugin to qt plugin path of kde 4.2 beta.
Do sudo cp -r /usr/lib/qt4/plugins/crypto/ /opt/kde-nightly/lib/kde4/plugins/

4. After locking screen you cannot unlock it as its not accepting any password.

5. And random plasma crashes.

Well its the first beta release and I am pretty much sure kde folks will fix these when they release the final version

KDE 4.2 beta1 released

Hi everyone KDE dev team has released kde 4.2 beta1 one step forward to kde 4.2 desktop release.
I am planning to test the new version in my box. So stay tuned for more news.

http://kde.org/announcements/announce-4.2-beta1.php

Installing amarok 2 and openoffice 3 in Kubuntu

OpenOffice 3 is out and I heard its pretty much good. And my favorite music player Amarok( hmm now with competition of songbird I have re consider this statement) has now reached version 2 beta 2. So I decided to test them out. These packages are available at repositories at launchpad's ppa(personal package archives) which hosts packages from sources provided by individuals.

The repositories we need to add for that
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu intrepid main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main

For open office 3 it will be available as updates for existing ones. For amarok 2 beta 2 you need to install amarok-kde4, which will uninstall existing amarok package and install amarok 2 beta.

Yahoo Zimbra!!

Hi every one. I recently bumped in zimbra desktop e-mail client which is from a Yahoo owned company. The moment I started using it I knew this is so far the best I have seen. I have used outlook, Thunderbird and Kmail each had its own problems.


Say for Outlook, I am allergic to microsoft products :). And for thunderbird it never properly recognized and event invites from outlook. With Kmail things were even pathetic it applied filters by first bringing them to your desktop clients inbox and then applies the filter. So if you get a lot of mails together you can see them one by one dissappearing from your inbox and moving to respective folders which was annoying. And I do not know if we can add Yahoo mail account to them if it was not the pro account.


I can say that zimbra is prefect when seen in the light of above problems. We can add all e-mail accounts we have gmail,yahoo mial MS Exchange, or any IMAP or POP3. One thing I LoveD about Zimbra is the way the deal with invites they automatically adds them to your calender in case if you missed to add them. Nd it a complete product. It can easily import all your contacts from any accounts.


Another aspect of zimbra is that it syncs your local copy and server copy that is it download all the messages locally. I first thought for a user with a lot of messages in it would be bad, but Zimbra downloads only messages with in a date range. If you want to use a client with minimal configurations to do manually then Zimbra is your best bet.

Get Zimbra form http://www.zimbra.com/products/desktop_download.html

Firefox 3 plugin support.

One thing which pissed me off with kubuntu is that it does not have nice firefox 3 plugins for handling media. I tried mozilla-mplayer, mozilla-plugin-vlc, and kafeine-mozilla but they all suck.
Finally I installed totem-mozilla and its perfect. I think only totem-mozilla is the only best solution for our multimedia needs in linux.
To install it do
sudo apt-get install totem-mozilla
It will pull all the dependancies and will install totem media player also.( I am not a great fan of running gnome aplications in kde, but apps like pidgin are too good not to use :) )

KDE 4.1.3 released

The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of "Change" (also known as KDE 4.1.3), another bugfix and maintenance update for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop. Change is a monthly update to KDE 4.1. The info page points to the sources and the distros quick with their packaging: Debian, Kubuntu and openSUSE.

http://dot.kde.org/1225914929/

To install this update open adept manager and edit software sources to enable unsupported updates. This means that kubuntu team will not support any security related problems with this packages. These packages are tested and maintained by backport maintainers and are assumed to be pretty much safe.
For more information read https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports

UPDATE: OK kudos to kubuntu team it seems that they have fixed the issue. Now multimedia keys are working. Though muting works it's not reflected in the OSD.
UPDATE: Word of caution- This update made my multimedia keys stopped working on my laptop. I had to downgrade kmix to 4.1.2 version to resolve this problem. I have opened a bug at intrepid backports https://bugs.launchpad.net/intrepid-backports/+bug/294515

Memcached

I have been trying to understand memcached lately.
A useful story
http://code.google.com/p/memcached/wiki/TutorialCachingStory

I will be posting more as I dig up more.

Better ssh support in kde 4

One thing I like the most about GNOME is the integration of gnome keyring manager with ssh. That is the first time we use ssh it fires up a dialog box which asks us for our pass phrase which is used to unlock our private keys and add them to ssh-agent. So we do not have to enter pass phrases later. This is donr via a programcalled ssh-askpass. Though there is one called ksshaskpass in kde , it never gave me the behaviour I wanted.

After a lot of searching I found this
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=50971

Refer to the post KDE 4 version. I am using it and it works like a charm.

Google Earth on Kubuntu 8.10

For some reason google earth was not working correctly on my laptop HP Compaq 6910p. Which uses intel graphics chipset. For more about the problem and solution refer to the following thread

http://forum.kde.org/showthread.php?tid=11227

So when you want to use google earth you have to disable Desktop Effects from System Settings and enable it back after you are done if you want the nice and cool effects without which I cannot live :)

If you are having issue with fonts also install package msttcorefonts
sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

Introduction

I am a KDE fan, now on gaga over KDE 4. Things are never easy with linux. We can make the system work the way we want but might need some fine tuning to have things our way.
Through this blog I want to say things like the difficulties I encountered or some cool software I set up in my box.
I use kubuntu Intrepid Ibex.(Well I have no allegience to any distro, I have used Debian, Red Hat, Fedora,Mandriva,OpenSuse,PCLinuxOS,Ubuntu ...) Now I feel that kubuntu offers me a better KDE 4 experience, so I am with kubuntu.