The theme music in the background of this post (obviously, you don’t hear it, but let your imagination go wild) is from a rather dull movie, but with a more than awesome soundtrack:

“I have something to say, it’s better to burn out than to fade away… There can be only one!” ~ Kurgan

Well, I just wanted to show you the prize I won thanks to Qt Centre’s contest I mentioned sometime ago. Special kudos go to miss (or Mrs) Erica Brescia and Bitrock for providing me with this beauty!

And, I would like to take this chance to congratulate the other winers of the contest, and that I hope that they will enjoy their prizes as much as I do mine.

eeeLancelot

I’ve named my new pet eeeLancelot for obvious reasons. It currently runs with some strange looking KDE manufactured by Xandros. But not for long, I’ve begun the Debianization, so soon it will be a clean Debian GNU/Linux with KDE 4.2.

Cheerio!

Breathe, breathe in the air
Don’t be afraid to care

The KDE 4.2 has been released today. Although in the image below, and in this post’s title it says “Breathe”, the official code name is “The Answer” since it is the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything [link]

The release announcement can be found here, but for more information you should head straight to the visual guide which was nicely prepared for all of us by the KDE Promo team.

Introducing Lancelot

It is a peculiar feeling, although most of you who read my blog know what Lancelot is, and possibly using it already, KDE 4.2 is the first version that ships it. So, it is like Lancelot didn’t exist before, it is a new KDE application. Therefore, I’ll post here a small introduction of what it is.

Lancelot is an application launcher menu (or ALI) for KDE 4 designed to provide a place from which all your jobs begin. It provides quick access to applications, places, documents, contacts and system information.

For detailed info and documentation, visit the website.

For those of you who know what Lancelot is, here are the improvements since the 1.0 version:

• Full keyboard support
• New lists with scrollbars
• Themes that match Plasma themes from kdeplasma-addons kdeartwork module
• Even less bugs

KRunner integration

The most elusive feature in Lancelot is its KRunner integration. There are two reasons for that, the other menus (I speak mostly of Kickoff, as it is the default menu) tend to search only through the applications they navigate. The second reason is that the users are so accustomed to Alt+F2 to start commands, that they can’t be bothered to try something new.

As you probably know, KRunner now comes with two different interfaces which you can set in its configuration dialogue. Lancelot is the third. It integrates the menu and the usual application (and whatnot) browsing with the power of the /Run/ dialogue. Everything that you can do with the default KRunner interface, you can with Lancelot also (yes, the calculator also works ).

It is not my intention to say that you should ditch KRunner, it is an awesome application, but if you are really accustomed to L’s interface, you don’t need to use two different applications for basically the same task – starting applications. Before KDE 4.2, this was a bit tricky since you had to click on the search result in order to start it, but now, you can just press “Enter” to start the first match, or you could navigate with your arrow keys. The keyboard is a wonder, I say!

Dot

One of the great things that followed 4.2 is the new Dot (dot.kde.org). It looks fantastic! (I’m even thinking of changing the theme of my blog to something like the new dot interface).

In the other news, there were a couple of KDE bashing news lately which I really don’t care for. So, here’s just one quote for them (when I say “them”, I don’t think of poor Linus who doesn’t enjoy the bliss of KDE anymore, but of all others who made it a big deal, and started flames all over the net):

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Well, I just had to put a provocative title so that you open this post. In a nutshell, the plasma binary is from now on called plasma-desktop.

For more info, visit Aaron’s blog

Well, the first feature for 4.3 is finished even before the final 4.2 is in your favourite distro’s repositories.

Before today, when you clicked ‘Switch User’ in Lancelot, it would use KRunner and query it with the magic word ‘SESSIONS’. That would show the KRunner results inside Lancelot.

There were a couple of problems with that approach:

• The first was that it induced a bug when you try to invoke the ‘Switch User’ a couple of times in a row.
• The second is that although ‘SESSIONS’ is a magic keyword, it doesn’t get only the responses from the session runner, but also from Strigi [for example], so it produced rather unpleasant results.

Why those two bugs weren’t fixed? Because I planned something a bit different for the ‘Switch User’ button, and, for that matter, the rest of the buttons. So the first step towards the goal has been done. Now, instead of loading the sessions inside the main list, you get a pop-up menu, as shown in the screenshot.

Next steps

Now, the next thing to do is to make a menu for the ‘Log Out’ button, and to make the buttons configurable. So, if you don’t have the use for ‘Lock Session’ or ‘Switch User’, you will be able to replace them with something different.

…

Enough for this time, cheerio!

Znam da odavno nisam pisao ništa na blogu na /naškom/, pa, rekoh, ovo je dovoljno važna vest da bi trebalo da je čujete.

Elem, kao što vidite iz naslova, Nokia koja je kupila Trolltech (sada Qt Software) je odlučila da objavi najpopularniji multiplatformski C++ toolkit pod LGPL-om. Sve to pod mantrom Qt Svugde (Qt Everywhere). Jedini (realni) razlog u prošlosti za izbor nekog drugog toolkita za razvoj aplikacija bio je u tome da u slučaju da želite da razvijate vlasnički softver, da ste morali da platite komercijalnu verziju Qt-a. Pošto Nokia ne zavisi toliko od profita koji dolazi od komercijalnih licenci Qt-a (koje će i dalje postojati, uzgred budi rečeno), mogli su da naprave ovaj veliki korak u potpunom oslobađanju Qt-a i njegovoj popularizaciji.

Za one koji ne znaju razliku između licenci GPL (dosadašnja licenca Qt-a) i LGPL, bitna razlika je u tome da ako koristite GPL biblioteke u svom programu, i program mora da vam bude objavljen pod GPL-om. Kod LGPL-a to nije slučaj.

Pa, pozdrav, i počnite da učite Qt

So, if you are following the kde-cvs-announce mailing list, you have seen this message about tomorrow’s changes that are bound to hit the SVN.

In a nutshell, when KDE 4.2.x is concerned, this means a couple of things:

• 4.2 is moving away from the trunk, and starts its life in its own branch.
• 4.2 is entering the last stage before tagging it as /final/

While this is great news for 4.2, it is even better for 4.3. This means that the SVN trunk is now exiting the /feature freeze/ state. This is a great thing for developers because the development becomes fun again (squashing bugs can not be labeled as fun), great for PlanetKDE readers since you’ll get real news from now on, and great for feature junkies for obvious reasons.

Lancelot 1.5

Lancelot’s version that will be branched tomorrow is the final 1.5. Compared to the one in beta 2 (1.4.9), it has a couple of bugs (that you haven’t noticed, if bugs.kde.org is to be consulted) fixed and is ready for prime-time.

Now the development of your suggestions can begin!