Well folks, it's been a while since I've had time to do anything KDE related. Fortunately, I've now emerged from the smoke mostly intact and with a few extra letters behind my name. The road doesn't end here, however, and as the figure of speech goes: "out of the smoke and into the fire". I start my M.Sc. program in Planetary Sciences (Geophysics) as of September 1st. In the meantime, I get to work for my thesis advisor for the summer and, I guess, get a head start on whatever I'll end up working on...
This means I actually get to spend a minute or two on KDE once in a while again! Whee! First up, getting my desktop box running again. It's been out of commission for a few months now, ever since I tried to install PC-BSD on it. Now, don't get me wrong, I love PC-BSD - it's a sweet system, which runs fast and stable, with a good KDE implementation. My box just doesn't like PC-BSD, and will randomly hard-lock. I think it has to do with the ATI RS-480 chipset and FreeBSD just not getting along. Works fine in linux though...
So that brings me to the next order of business. Reinstalling linux to resurrect that box. I did some poking around, after having been out of the loop a bit, at some distros, and their status (statuses, statusi, stati? what's the plural of status?). To my pleasant surprise, Slackware now has an official 64 bit variety, although unreleased, which seems promising. I used to run Fred's Slamd64, which was very nice (thanks Fred), but because of it's 64-bit status, I'd end up having to modify all sorts of things to get them to build. Fun, but time consuming. Slackware64-current comes with KDE 4 (yay!), and flash is now available in 64 bit too. Tomorrow I will attempt to install this to get my box back up and running.
That reminds me - that box no longer has a monitor attached to it - instead, I've been running it through my 1080p HDTV, which at 42" and 1920x1080 is just a really big monitor. I've set up a wireless keyboard and mouse, and use the computer from across the living room. KDE and plasma actually fare very well for this task, after some font-size tweaking. There are a few glitches here and there, so once I've reinstalled everything and have an up-to-date KDE, I'll start filing bug reports for this use case. SVG graphics really help here, and so does kwin's effects. Nuno, your artwork is fantastic! Everyone who's seen KDE running on the screen has been left breathless. Good job everyone.
Who knows, maybe I'll have some time to actually contribute more than bug reports this summer. Looking forward to 4.3, and very envious of everyone heading to the Canaries.
Cheers
- Log in to post comments