So, one of the first distros that contacted me related to branded Stripes was openSuse. So, this is one of the versions.

(there are ~7 in total, including the plain blue like the Debian one was)

Working on modified Stripes turned out to be rather gratifying. I didn’t expect the wallpaper to /work/ with different colours.

It even looks cool when two different colours are used for the background. (maybe I’ll do that for some other distro)

Some time ago, Nuno was talking about us (KDE) modifying/adapting artwork we have to suit distributions so that both KDE and distribution brand can be retained. (if someone has the link to the blog posts in question, I’d be much obliged)

So, without a further ado, the preview version of a Debian-specific version of the Stripes wallpaper:

get the larger version (currently only 1440×900) at deviantArt

So, if you maintain (or whatever you call it) artwork for your distro, and would like to have a distro-branded version, just send me an e-mail or find me on IRC.

p.s. Why Debian? I’m using it and the swirl looks awesome in Stripes

p.p.s. I know marketing people will not like the idea of distorting their logos, but… it looks rather cool!

If you haven’t noticed, KDE SC 4.5 comes with a new wallpaper named Stripes. It has replaced the old default_blue that has been our friend since 3.x days (and maybe even earlier, I don’t know).

Since it is used in KDM, it can’t be (yet) shipped with multiple resolutions, but due to its simplicity it scales rather well.

If you are not satisfied with the default resolution (strangely enough it is 1440×900), you can download the multiresolution package from my gallery at deviantArt. Unfortunately, dA doesn’t accept .tar.gz so the wallpapers are zipped.

EDIT: Note that this is not the *same* version as the one shipped with KDE SC – this one (apart from multiple resolutions) includes a gaussian-noise hack Nuno suggested to make gradients look better.

At last Tokamak (Plasma developer sprint), I’ve made a small KWrite proof-of-concept patch just to see how it will behave with the new activities framework – notifying system when it opens and closes a document. A lot of time has passed since, and activity classes were completely revamped, turned upside-down, went through one API review, and moved from the playground to kdebase/libs.

That original patch doesn’t exist anymore, and even if it did, it wouldn’t work for all the changes that were made to activities.

The uber-awesome KDE conference – aKademy – was a time for something new!

New client

Ok, after this introduction you’d expect that I’ve written another patch for KWrite. Well, you’re wrong. The first application that supports activities as a client is Vim!

The main reason I went for Vim this time was to prove that non-kde apps can work with our awesome concept of activities. Another reason is that I didn’t want to use KActivity* classes, so that I can see whether the d-bus protocol is sufficiently profound for this task. It turned out that it is, but there are some improvements to be made.

At the moment, only Vim invoked from a terminal emulator program (eg Konsole) can work with activities since I can’t find a way to retrieve the window id of a GUI-enabled Vim from vimscript, so I’m essentially using WINDOWID environment variable that terminal emulators set.

The following is a debugging output of the activity manager daemon related to Vim windows

resourceWindowRegistered: 54526034 file:///home/ivan/mailacc.txt
resourceWindowUnregistered: 54526034 file:///home/ivan/.vimrc
resourceWindowRegistered: 85983274 file:///home/ivan/
resourceWindowRegistered: 85983274 file:///usr/share/vim/vim72/doc/options.txt

Truly limitless possibilities!!!

^^^^ just wanted to write an awesome marketing-speak sentence for the end of the post

I always was a nonconformist, so while everybody was at aKademy in Tampere, I decided to hold my own version of aKademy in Munich. Well, it wasn’t really my decision, I had more than 6 hours gap between my flights, so I decided to go to the town.

Pictures are worth a lot more than words so:

As you can see, the city was crowded, and they served weissbier and weisswurst.

I arrived to Tampere at 9PM – just in time to join the ongoing party in some fancy nightclub

Just a small reminder – in KDE SC 4.5, Lancelot shows Plasma‘s widgets/viewitem.svgz as a background for the items in the lists. So, you should remove the files that match lancelot/action-list-view-* except action-list-view-headers.svgz from your themes.

If you don’t, the list items will have two backgrounds and will look *ugly*.

The reason why I didn’t disable the old backgrounds directly in the code is that someone could possibly want to have the two backgrounds (an example where it looks OK are the list headers).

For those who didn’t see the notice by Tom, you should convert your password based SVN accounts (https) to SSH (svn+ssh) as a first step of migrating from SVN to GIT. For instructions, head straight to: http://www.omat.nl/2010/06/23/convert-password-based-accounts/

I’ve already converted, and I can’t be happier – the sun is shining, everyone wants to be my friend, all members of Pink Floyd are alive again, and I have 10% more girlfriends than before. Ok, I’m stopping with commercialism before somebody kicks me…

Every once in a while I write a post related to relations between lancelot and kmail or kopete.

This time it is only to notify you that until KMail2 arrives*, the ‘unread mail’ section in Lancelot will not work since L in SC 4.5 switched to Akonadi.

* if PIM devs don’t miss the initial plan, it will be for 4.5.1

There were a lot of complaints when we decided to limit the size of icons placed on panels in plasma to 32×32 pixels.

The reasoning behind limiting the size were requests from users who use vertical panels – vertical panels are usually made wider then standard panels, and icons would grow to 300×300 pixels taking up most of the space on the panel.

Putting a maximum size for icons was a good decision generally, but the bad side of it was that the new size was hard-coded. There was an option in the system settings to change sizes of icons, but setting the size for panel icons was disabled.

Now, thanks to a patch by Mike Kasick, this option is enabled and it works. Mike is one of the best types of users – although he isn’t a Plasma contributor (as far as I know – no SVN account) he sent us a patch, and responded to all of our suggestions with revised versions.

In the end, Aaron and myself adapted the proposed patch a bit to better fit the rest of Plasma, and it entered the SVN so it is on its way to KDE SC 4.5.

In KDE SC 4.5, the option is located in System Settings -> Application Appearance -> Icons -> Advanced -> Panel

It is a well known fact that devs hate writing the user documentation (we are not even fond of writing devel documentation), so it was the same case for me and Lancelot‘s manual.

But from time to time our conscience tells us that we should do something about it. In this case, the role of my conscience was played by annma

In preparation for KDE SC 4.5, I’ve updated the main userbase page for Lancelot and added two more detailed articles – one to contain the basic instructions and one that compares Lancelot to other launchers.

The comparison is most probably biased (although I tried hard for it not to be), so any help in that department is appreciated. (any help in any department is more than appreciated)

Now, the article that is yet left to be written is the introduction to the Shelf applet (ex Lancelot Part) and I’ll be able to rest on my laurels with the shiny new Lancelot that will be published with the KDE SC 4.5.