KDE 4 is definitively my daily desktop environment, although it’s not yet mature like the 3.5.x branch i consider it enough stable and usable, but sometime the default settings and the few time available, don’t help us to appreciate it, so let’s resume some little tip for beginners that feel lost with everything new and don’t want waste their time.

(This article is also available for italian users)

• If you want Delete/Move items over the panel click the Plasma icon in the right edge: a second panel will help you to insert other plasmoids, resize the panel, align it, activate the auto-hide, and plus will be enabled the drag’n drop over any item for change their positions
• The Show Desktop icon is one of the most feature i use, unfortunately it’s hide between the other plasmoids and his place is taken from the Show Dashboard. If you need see quickly your desktop then right click over the panel and select Panel Settings > Add Object then select Windows and Tasks and drag Show Desktop plasmoid over the panel. Add a key shortuct is easy: right click over the icon submitted and select Show Desktop Settings then click over the button and insert it (if Win + D sound more familiar you can use it too)
• Link your software over the main Panel or the Desktop with few steps: just search it into the main menu (Alt + F1) and drag’n drop over the Panel/Desktop. If a folder is dragged from Dolphin/Konqueror over the Desktop you may create, through the popup menu, a Folder View, a Lancelot menu or just an icon that will start a dolphin’s session
• You don’t like the Plasma Desktop? Switch back to the old style just selecting the Folder View under Desktop Settings > Type
• Everyone has just installed KDE 4 want see the Cube and probabily this effect it’s already activated through KWin, then press CTRL + F11, switch the faces with the arrow keys and select your desktop pressing Return
• KSnapshot doesn’t popup with PrtScr? If you miss this feature, then fix it: launch systemsettings, select Input Actions and create a new global shortcut (Command/URL) into the tree list through the contextual menu, fill the multiline text field with a comment, set PrtScr as key, and insert the command ksnapshot, then save. With the same system you can associate your favorite software with a combo key (think on it if you want launch dolphin with Win + E or kfind with Win + F)
• The Grid View is something useful for watch and select any window opened in your desktop, try it with Ctrl + F9 or Ctrl + F10 if you want see the windows opened in every Desktop. This feature is also available for align the Desktops in the same view (Ctrl + F8)
• KDE 4 seem slow? Before say it try to disable some effect under systemsettings > Desktop. Usually i disable the effects related to the windows minimization (slow redesign) and move (transparence), but if your system is very old, before to leave KDE 4 disable them completely
• How to show/hide the invisible files? Both in Dolphin or Konqueror switch their visualization with Alt + .
• Klipper improve the clipboard’s system: use Ctrl + Alt + V for paste one of the last ten, twenty,… items already copied, it support also the actions (Ctrl + Alt + X for enable/disable) configurables through regular expressions, they allow to open the string selected with a particular program. Try this feature selecting this: http://www.opensuse.org
• Tired to navigate the main menu? Krunner can help you: call it with Alt + F2 and begin to write in the text box a part of the application’s name you would like start and it will search the string between the whole menu. Krunner can also open a folder, search between contacts or bookmarks, convert units or execute little math operations, look the official page on KDE.org for more details.
• Some plasmoid look very useful, not only gadgets for fill your Desktop: webmaster should love the Color Picker and keep it fix in the main panel; the Timer will help us to manage our time counting down a configurable interval; Notes is a post-it system; Quick Access is another way to reach our files and folder and navigate between them directly from the main panel.

That’s all for now, hope it help to enjoy a bit more this fantastic Desktop Environment, any new hint is welcome, just leave a comment below

I was buried with work in the last couple of days, so whats new on my GSoC-project:

• a lot of patches went into factory and some more are queued
• fixed issues with qemu
• most yast packages already building
• zypper builds, but requires some more bugfixing
• X11 builds
• cross-compilation stable, speed is good

Todo:

• create image (bootable to console)
• create image (bootable to x11 on beagleboard)
• evaluate switch in webfrontend for cross-feature
• project documentation/GSoC

To know more, see here

It’s scheduled to release Enlightenment-DR17 Desktop Shell as a Christmas gift and we glad to announce the update of SOAD to the version 3.2.0. It’s a current openSUSE-11.1 with all updates and Enlightenment set as a prime GUI.

We tried to cook a nice documentation. Please examine it before you consider to download the images:
General Documentation
USB-stick readme

The EFL is compiled from official 3-rd pre-release sources and pretty stable here.
Software is updated and several nice utilities added as well. We created some modest GUI customizations/presets and hope that you like them.

Our TODO list is to fix all errors with “Ecomorph” and provide it for LiveCD and USB systems.

We wish to say “HUGE THANKS!” to “cyberorg” (Jigish Gohil) and “schaefi” (Marcus Schaefer) for their help with this release.

Have fun!
Regards,
SOAD Team

P.S. active mirrors:
GWDG.DE
Yandex.ru

Some days ago, KDE 4.3.0 has been released by the KDE community and I myself as a loyal GNOME user was just curious about this new release of the KDE4 desktop environment. Thus I took a test-drive of both openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 5 and the Kubuntu Karmic Daily Build as of the 8th of August 2009 – both are shipping with KDE 4.3.0. Utilizing my Eee PC 901 I setup LiveUSB sticks of both distributions and I’d herewith like to share my findings with the openSUSE community. As you might have noticed, openSUSE Milestone releases provide the ability to deploy the LiveCD ISO image directly to USB flash media as of 11.2 Milestone 4, which is a great step ahead from my perspective. So, let’s get started:

1. openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 5 – (so far) non-persistent

Only one single step is needed here Couldn’t be easier!
# dd if=openSUSE-KDE4-LiveCD-Build0201-i686.iso of=/dev/"usbdrive" bs=4M
2. Kubuntu Karmic Daily Build as of the 8th of August 2009 – persistent

While this setup is a bit “harder” to complete it delivers (at least from my perspective) the smoother solution – so far!
Mount the ISO to /mnt/ and rsync the whole content to a FAT32 partition on the USB flash media (here labelled “ubuntu”)
# mount -o loop karmic-desktop-i386.iso /mnt/
# rsync -avh /mnt/ /media/ubuntu/
Now install GRUB (Syslinux should work as well, but I myself prefer GRUB here)
# grub-install --no-floppy --root-directory=/media/ubuntu/ /dev/"usbdrive"
Create a GRUB configuration file /media/ubuntu/boot/grub/menu.lst with the following content
default 0
timeout 3
hiddenmenu
###
title Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Daily Build 08-Aug-2009
kernel /casper/vmlinuz file=/preseed/kubuntu.seed boot=casper persistent quiet splash
initrd /casper/initrd.lz
Last but not least, resize the FAT32 partition labelled “ubuntu” to its minimal extent and create an ext2/3 partition labelled “casper-rw” within the remaining free space.

Conclusion:

What I’m currently curious about and the major reason for posting this comparison actually: Could some fellow openSUSE community member extend my current solution to beat the Kubuntu setup not only in ease of creation but also in regard of usability? The major difference here is that the openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 4/5 LiveUSB setup isn’t persistent while the Kubuntu one is due to the casper-rw aufs overlay partition.

In the spirit of releasing early and often, here is PDF Mod 0.5, a quick three days after 0.4. Contributors Bertrand Lorentz, Michael McKinley Features

• Password-protected PDFs can be opened
• Page labels shown in tooltip, eg A-10, or iii
• Undo/redo have descriptions, eg "Undo Move 5 Pages"

Bugs Fixed

• Loading document doesn't block GUI thread
• Desktop file validates
• Process name set to pdfmod
• Parallel make (-jN) works
• make distcheck passes
• icon-theme-installer included in tarball

See the website for links to tarballs, git, packages, the mailing list, irc, bugzilla, and more.

On our way to F-Spot 1.0, we slowed our well oiled machine to change the tires, fill the tank and do a complete check against the various regressions we might have added while packing tons of new features and changes since the 0.5.x releases.

The truck is now ok and ready to ride to the next milestone. Check 0.6.0 in order to make your own opinion.

Neither this short post nor the NEWS file reflects the really hard work pushed by our contributors, translators and designers, but rescanning the git log this evening reminded me how hard we all worked for this. Thanks guys.

Get it here.

The openSIS team is proud to announce that the conversion from Postgres to MySQL is nearly complete. Check it out at http://opensis.sourceforge.net  We have a few small bugs in the SQL left in some of the less used features. For the most part the project is on track and we have started to divide the team in two with one half working on bugs, the other working on Moodle integration. By mid fall we hope to have a “push” mode of integration with Moodle version 1.9.5 and hope to have work begun using Moodles new 2.0 version with SIS API.

We have IMHO created what will be the next “killer” , “must have” application  in the education administration venue.  Paired with the offerings produced by my good friends and teammates of the opensuse-education team. I think we will be producing a wonderful tool for all humanity.  A free education software suite.  Much has been done with the ideals founded here, Linkat, and the Edubuntu add-on are just a few. I hope it keeps going , for the children’s sake “let’s make a difference”!

So far it was only possible to have upto 16 device nodes for a single disks. This restricted the number of usable partitions. As a workaround kpartx could be used to create device mapper mappings for further partitions but that was never fully integrated in openSUSE.

With version 2.6.28 the kernel supports upto 256 device nodes per disk, much more than the partition table allows. But since the implementation is not straightforward, the additional device nodes are assigned dynamically, user-space programs may need to be adapted.

For openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 5 YaST was extended to support this new kernel feature.

Some quick tests showed only problems with LVM. If you are interested in this feature and have the possibility please give it a try so that we find remaining bugs.