I don't know why, but often I have the impression that KDE fonts are quite big, and this can be changed by modifying the X11 dpi settings.

Let's head over to good old Slackware. How is it done here ?

There are plenty sources for KDE relates feeds and news, but reading them through the usual neutral feed readers or even on separate sites takes the fun out of the less serious ones. Also the common separations between different parts of KDE (internal devs, external dev, artists, usability experts, bug hunters and pr people) is reflected in the different community cultures (mailing lists, bko, dot, wikis, kde look/apps/files, other forums) which usually never mix (dot comments are probably the closest to that happening).

The fact that day by day, new people try to use free software or free operating systems (like GNU/Linux) is a good thing, and we all know that.
Something is supposed to help in the process is also the set of the various communities: GNU/linux distributions, applications, etc. Though, this is also something really delicate, where everybody invloved should (IMHO) be careful in what is shown towards the new comers.

Nowadays, you can basically do most (if not all) of the basic operations without even caring about what a terminal is. That is something really nice! KDE, GNOME, whatever graphical interface does not matter, as long it's there and works.
What I cannot really, really, really stand is when you read on user forums, blogs, and other help support dedicated to users, instructions like (emphasys by myself):

Today the application Foobar v2.1 was released.
You can update your previous Foobar version by opening a terminal and doing the following:

$ wget 
$ cd /opt/whatever
$ tar xvzf foobaris-x.y.z.tar.gz
$ chown $USER:$USER -R foobar..
$ chmod -R ugo+rwx foobar...
$ cd foobar...
$ ./foobar

What the hell is that, for a normal user???

Leaving aside the fact that distros (especially the most "user-oriented" ones) try to have all the updated versions available (even the same day of the release!), why the hell do we have GUIs for unpacking archives, file managers for managing files and their permissions, package managers to install packages even out of the distro official update channels, etc???
I feel all the work for doing these interfaces seems "lost", if the user channels just propose this attitude.

Communities, STOP IT!! The only effect is loosing and discourage new users!

Important note: this does NOT mean this is something that all the communities or all the people in each communitiy do, but still it's something sadly not so unusal to see. Sigh...

One of the mottos of Ubuntu is "Linux for humans". And sometimes the "humans" could even not bother about the terminal, especially for easy operations.

Ok, so because the old notebook is starting to fall apart (it is probably around 5 years old or so) I need a new one.
So, I want to buy a new notebook, nothing too fancy: 14 inch, non-glossy, Intel Core Duo, Intel Graphics, Intel WLAN, 1GB RAM, price at most 800 Euro.
I guess it's obvious to everybody reading this that I'd like to have fully Intel chipset because of the free drivers. This will actually be my first non-AMD CPU I buy new since 1994 or so.

I recently upgraded from Kubuntu Feisty to Gutsy, and all went well apart from one thing. Konqueror began putting up a crash dialog everytime it accessed a site with Flash, making it pretty much unusable. In fact until I had this problem I didn't realise quite how many pages on the web use Flash.

Thiago has set up the KDE Summer of Code 2008 ideas page. Thanks!

So, given that I'd be on a holiday next week, I thought it would've been a good idea to do an upgrade of my Debian install on my laptop, in the hope that it'd use less power. The good news was that it seemed like it did, with slightly lower temperature (I guess due to tickless timer on AMD64 in the 2.6.24 kernel). The bad news was that I couldn't even try to quantify it at all: all my battery-measuring tools wouldn't work at all anymore. In particular, no KDE Battery Systray icon anymore, leaving me without any indication at all about how much battery I have left. Hoping it'd be just a KDE update fluke, I checked my other favourite power-related tool, powertop. Unfortunately it also failed to show any relevant information about power usage...

I must say, it's real fun to lose the ability to see your battery status a few days before you leave on a holiday. Particularly funny, given that at the same day that I discover this, I read a post on the planet about some people getting double battery information.

Which of course pointed me directly to the most likely cause: a change in the kernel. Some googling later, it turns out that, once again, I am pretty angry at the Debian people. It seems like they switched to the new way of doing this kind of stuff, sysfs style. Unfortunately, they completely disabled the legacy support for the procfs way of measuring things, leaving all applications that use the old way in the cold.

Now, you'd think that once you'd point this out, the Debian people would try to fix this post-hase. But nooooh!, apparently having people's applications and systems become useless and being userfriendly is less important to the Debian kernel maintainers than keeping their kernels clean of 'deprecated' /proc entries...

So, how do we fix this? I just wasted my time making my own debian kernel package. In particular, in the make menuconfig, go to
Power management options --->
ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) Support --->
And then just enable
[*] Deprecated power /proc/acpi folders
(If you're particularly pissed, you could perhaps take it out by disabling [ ] Future power /sys interface...)

Luckily the walkthrough was clear enough, except that the package's name prefix had slightly changed. I just had to issue a dpkg --install ../linux-image-2.6.24_Custom.DebianFuckwits.0_amd64.deb to install the kernel, and then edit my grub file manually (bah!).

After a reboot, I had restored full usability of my power-measuring tools. Turns out my laptop seems to have an increased power use. No idea why, but at least now I actually know it is the case.

Anyway, this isn't doing pretty well in trying to prove to other people that Linux is decent to use. In particular, one of my colleagues pointed out to me that this is exactly the kind of crap (noting something doesn't work, wasting time googling for the problem, hoping someone else has described a fix, trying to apply the fix) he is so happy to have left behind him by switching to OS X...

Until a few weeks ago, I had Kubuntu running on my Acer Aspire 5630 laptop (as described here), and was more or less satisfied. It looked great, hardware support was satisfying, but I was missing the incremental package upgrades that I was used to on Debian (so that things break one small piece at a time, not everything at the same time when you do an upgrade).

From time to time I get overwhelmed by my passion for computer games and I buy a game which promises to be fun. So it happened a few weeks ago when I saw a special offer of Valve's "The Orange Box" in the local electronics store. This box contains all kind of Half-Life 2 stuff including the new Episode Two and the very promising looking game "Portal". But boy was I wrong. This was one of the worst buys I ever made.

The box comes with two DVDs, but to be able to play you need to connect to "Steam", an online restrictions management server, which then downloads tons of data to "update" and "activate" your game. It took almost an hour before I was even able to start the game. Needless to say that of course Steam gets autostarted on each login and annoys you with advertisements. What a "steaming" pile of crap.

After this unpleasant experience I thought I would be ready to play the game, but no, I was caught in the nightmare of graphics card drivers for Windows. Trying to be helpful Steam told me that I would have to upgrade the graphics card drivers to the latest version, so I did that. But then when starting the game I only got a cryptic error message. Fortunately problems like that are so common, that it was relatively easy to find an entry in a forum which offered an solution: Downgrading the graphics card drivers to a specific version. So I went again to the ATI site, downloaded some more Megabytes and finally it worked, but another hour was gone. If you think that graphics drivers on Linux are a problem go back to Windows and you will see that it can be worse.

The game itself is brilliant, by the way. What a pity that Valve ruined it with their crappy restriction management concept. But it also had a good side for me: I was reminded again how precious the freedoms of free software are. It feels so good to know that we are doing the right thing by writing great free software instead of inventing strange concepts to annoy users through restricting what they can do with the software they bought.

I was just completely amazed to read that British MPs think that the Galileo project is unimportant. To me the combination of accurate and cheap global positioning systems, combined with the infrastructure to determine the relative position between one thing and another, and a semantic web that allows that GPS meta data to be annotated ubiquitously to all information on the web, is so important that every 21st economy will depend on it.

A BBC article MPs urge action on Galileo costs suggests that: