This Old Blog

Back in July I made the rather silly proposal to 'fork' KDE 3 to using Qt4 . I made that proposal based on my negative experiences with KDE 4.0, before actually checking out the KDE 3 code and performing even a cursory review of the code base. I eventually performed those actions and came to really understand how complex and convoluted the KDE 3 codebase had grown over the years. And I came to appreciate, as others had warned, how difficult a task it would be. It was only a short matter of time after making that announcement before KDE 4.1 was released. And with that release have come new releases of distributions that use it. An excellent example of a KDE 4.1 DE/distribution release is, in my opinion, Mandriva 2009. The more I work with the latest version of Mandriva and KDE 4.1.2 the more comfortable I am with the entire distribution. I honestly haven't felt this good about a Linux distribution using KDE since openSUSE 10.2 and KDE 3. I believe the best course of action n...

I'm a commercial user of Trolltech's Qt on Windows. I got this in the inbox today: 28 January 2008 Dear Customer, Today, Nokia has made a public tender offer for all the shares in Trolltech. We think this is great news for both you and us. In Trolltech, we have for a long time had a vision of “Qt Everywhere”. Being acquired* by Nokia, we will continue to provide you with the most advanced cross-platform software framework for desktop and devices in the market. There will be further investments in Qt and Qtopia and an even better long-term security in your decision to choose Trolltech for your business. We are confident that with Nokia we can accelerate our cross-platform software capabilities and grow Qt and Qtopia significantly in desktop and mass-volume device markets. The plan is that we will continue our current organizational setup, operating inside Nokia as a distinct unit. Nokia is already using Qt for its PC Suite, and they aim to significantly expand the use of these t...

I've spent some pretty intensive work time on my M685 notebook over the last months. My first Gateway, the M680 has been wrapped up in storage since October of last year. The M680 is the Pentium M-based Gateway on which I installed Suse Linux 10.0 (before it became openSuse). In the past few weeks, tucked in between my primary job on OneTESS and proposal work with SPARTA, I slowly began to investigate if the M680 was worth the effort of upgrading the Linux partition beyond Suse 10. The answer is absolutely yes. After installing and tweaking Suse 10, I had a pretty solid development system. I still had to add additional libraries and upgrade some of the default tools (such as gcc) to more current versions, but overall Suse 10 on the notebook was very satisfying and effective. Rather than automatically upgrade from Suse Linux 10 to openSuse 10,2, I decided to check out three distributions to see if I should upgrade to openSuse, or pick another distribution. For testing purposes I ch...

It's not hard to impress me with new visual software. I love eye candy, the flashier the better. So it should come as no surprise that I'm awfully impressed with the latest version of the Qt framework , 4.3.0. I installed it on three systems for a quick and dirty evaluation; algol (my XP Core Duo notebook), europa (my OpenSuse 10.2 Athlon XP system), and my daughter's Toshiba Satellite A135 notebook running Vista Home Premium. I've got screen shots from XP and Suse, but I didn't bother to do a Vista capture. I'll explain why later. Installing Qt Windows Open Source Edition is dead simple. Download and click on the installation binary. It will install the complete Qt set of tools and examples, and if you don't have it installed already, it will also install a copy of MinGW to compile applications with Qt. Note that the Windows version of the Qt framework does not have to be compiled. Everything is pre-built and ready to use. The screen shot below is the appli...

I spent part of the weekend migrating the Qt-based qconf, used to help configure the kernel, from Qt3 to Qt4. A screen shot of the final result is below. The move from Qt3 to Qt4 started when I tried to build the 2.6.20.3 kernel on SLED 10, and I attempted to run 'make xconfig'. I'd already downloaded and built Qt 4.2.3 and I wanted to use it instead of Qt 3. I knew that Qt 4.2.2 was available to Ubuntu 7.04, and a version of Qt 4.2.1 is also available as part of Open Suse 10.2. With KDE 4 to be released sometime later this year and based on Qt4, I thought it might be a good idea to get a feel for how to port an application from Qt3 to Qt4. The astute reader will note that I performed this on Ubuntu, which is Gnome based. Why not just execute 'make gconfig' and use the Gnome-based configuration tool? To be different, I guess. Observations As mentioned earlier, Ubuntu 7.04 repositories now have Qt 4.2.3. I installed and used KDBG to help debug some of the core dumps...

This post comes at the convergence of a number of events. First, there was the story on OSNews titled " Has the Desktop Linux Bubble Burst? " That generated a number of responses , one of them from Aaron J. Seigo . With all the drama buzzing in the background, I went back to my Suse 10.2 installation and started to look at the KDE desktop. When I installed 10.2 I installed both Gnome and KDE with an eye towards really testing and comparing both. I've slowly grown dissatisfied with Gnome over the past year, and I'm ready for a real change. I've played with KDE in the past, and I've started to use the underlying GUI toolkit, Qt from Trolltech . I've wondered if I should switch and use KDE as my default desktop. With Suse 10.2 it looks like the answer is yes. With both environments installed it was a simple matter to log in using KDE. The first thing I did to my KDE desktop was to change the blue background into something, anything, a little livelier. I like ...

I installed Suse 10.2 December 10th on my home system, europa. I've been working on it as time and schedule permit, documenting my experiences. New Software Java 6 was released one day after finished installing Suse, December 11th. I was able to download versions for both 32-bit Linux as well as Windows, and to put them on my Western Digital Passport (80GB) via my notebook. I plugged in the Passport into my home system, and as usual, Suse mounted the hardware without any problems. I was then able to install Java 6 for Linux off the Passport. Why install Java 6? After all Java 5 (1.5.0) update 8 already installs with Suse 10.2. Why not use the installed Java 5? The short answer is that as good as Java 5 may be, Java 6 is demonstrably better than Java 5. I've been working with every release of Java 6 since June 2005, and it has gone from good to better to best to outstanding. It's a simple matter to run Java 6 side-by-side with Java5, and there are a number of applications ...