KDE 4 Plasma theme to make panel usable

Here I introduce my first KDE Plasma theme, very humble artistically but, I believe, most usable.
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?action=content&content=106543

What it do?
It do make Plasma panel usable:
-it do make the task buttons clear.
-it do make the foreground, background and attention requesting tasks clear.
-it do make the pager clear and give big button to tray.
-it don’t confuse user with transparency.

After trying out so many overly artistic themes and finding that none of them is usable for me I made this one. It is lacking in artistic expression, but who cares. Now I can finally differentiate between things in on the panel. For the first since adopting KDE 4.

Skulpture Style for KDE 4

Skulpture is a very nice style for KDE 4, very clean and easy to the eye, with a modern attractive look, having that cool appearance without sacrificing any bit of usefulness or going too far. The page is at http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Skulpture?content=59031. This is definitelly the widget style I like the most, and I take into account everything from the old Windows style, to Keramik, Plastik and Vista and OS X styles.

I just found it in the Debian packages by mistake a few days ago and I like it so much that I can’t wait for more KDE 4 programs to make it into the Debian repositories.

Well, it seems that this tiny thumbnail is a little bit unfortunate, it is 200 KiB while the original image is 300 KiB.

Diverse

1.I really want some tagging for my files. How can I do it? I know about desktop search and use it up to some point, but Amarok gave me the habbit of tagging and I can’t stand their missing from my FS. Yes, I know, I have to give a try to NEPOMUK from KDE4. Do you know about some other simple solution?

2.I hate Raiffeisen, both in Romania and Austria. If “hate” too tough replace it with: “I am very dissapointed with the services”.
-today I wanted to make a transfer and they told me I can only do a transfer in the place where I have done the account. I asked if I can do it with cash, the answer was no. I asked if there is any way to do it there, the answer was no. I was so lost and surprised that I just tried to fake a smile, say goodbye and left.
-the e-banking was not working. Went to the bank, the lady didn’t know why it was inactive, she said that in a few minutes should be activated. When I last checked (3 days after the happening, it was still not working).
They are generally slow. The employees are not as polite and helpful as they could be (except from the ones in Roman).

3.In Debian there exists a software named Cycle (page on Sourceforge). You guessed it, it is about women’s cycle. Citation from the description:

Cycle is a calendar for women. Given a cycle length or statistics for
several periods, it can calculate the days until menstruation, the days
of “safe” sex,[...].

NOTE: This program is not a reliable contraceptive method. It does
neither help to prevent sexual transmision diseases like AIDS. [...]

I am pleased to see this is a GUI program. I only note it for being interesting. The next one will be noted for being funny.

4.PornView, is an image viewer that appears in my list of Debian software. It was covered for its name before, so I won’t do it again. Page on Sourceforce.

5.KDE has made some excelent advances. In two or three weeks since the last compilation the following have happened:
-the panel received a new design that makes the tab of one window distinguishable from the tab of another.
-Plasma crashes less often and when it crashes it doesn’t massively reset the panels, desktop and other related settings. It still does reset some of them.
-I haven’t seen any KWin crash.
-the panel is now stable, its components can be moved without any major oddities.
Excelent work, the first two points already made try the new KDE for longer.

Using the microphone in Debian – I hope Windows XP works on my laptop

Update: Using the ncurses program “alsamixer” I was able to get decent settings and make the mic. work right. Unlike KMix and Alsamixergui, changes made with alsamixer were applied. It is also keyboard friendly (it’s stupid console in fact, couldn’t be otherwise). I’m still thinking about other OS, this was too big a hassle

VoIP is finally reaching us, and offers prices that are unbelievably good. Buy credit from a VoIP provider (TerraSIP in my case), start a VoIP program (WengoPhone in this Debian case), do some settings to the program and call home. I have mention that quality is also surprising, I guess that in more than half of the case it is better than phone to phone. Being abroad this means very important savings.

And I did this, until Debian sabotaged me. To make the microphone work correctly on this laptop, a fair bit of experimentation is necessary, I did that and everything worked. After some time, with no conscious ALSA related changes on my system, this doesn’t work anymore, and the sound is no longer clear. It now misses all the higher frequency sounds and transforms them in squeaks.

The bad thing is that I don’t know where the problem is coming from, and more, I have no idea how to solve it.

Here’s a picture showing Alsamixergui with the best settings I could get. The program has tons of controls and none of them is explained. Googling didn’t give me too many answers. Some of the controls cannot be used (although KMix uses them, but to no effect), and also the range of possible combinations, without using a manual, is frightening.

So counting the sacrifices done for running Debian:
-no 3d acceleration -> No playing CS with friends. No other interesting gaming. I never got too far with Blender to feel the need for real 3d, but I will.
-problems with opening fancy shit office documents, not using proprietary math software from the university, others like this -> A few bad marks and some time wasted.
-calling at home from abroad with prices as much as 15 times higher than the VoIP ones. Well, this is the hot point, the costs are directly measurable as money. I guess now I have enough reasons to leave the Debian away.

So, where to?
I guess Windows XP/Server 2003. (The Vista saga is also written on this blog, and it is also not happy.) After about 3 years of running Linux on an underpowered desktop (but at least with good sound ), I have to give up goodies like KDE+Kwin, a decent console, nice package management from Debian, easy development with Qt and easy plugging in of external libraries, the Xorg middle click paste and easy switching of users and desktops. The good thing is that Amarok, Kate, Konqueror, KOrganizer and others make their way to Windows, I will be able to use the decent Visual Studio debugger and some others.

There are alternatives, but with shortcomings:
KUbuntu, I’am afraid they will try on me stuff like PulseAudio, the kernel TCP/IP bug (they didn’t release this one after all), and other half working thinks.
SuSE looks attractive, but it seems they said goodbye to KDE 3 and I guess there are not as many programs as with Debian.
Mandriva. My all time favorite, although the lack of proprietary packages (and also free ones) makes it hard to use.
And also, there’s no guarantee the sound problems will go away, while with Windows I have high hopes they will.

Oh, and later random thoughts:
-the man/woman/guy/dude (I didn’t dig to see who he/she is) from linuxhatersblog said he would stop. I still think he knew a lot more about Linux than I do.
-I still hate AMD/ATI for tricking me into buying a laptop with a radeonhd “supported” shit video card. I hope they will get their shit together though, as competition is always good.
-I will ask some help from some ALSA guys before leaving Debian. I would do some coding myself, but it’s a bit beyond my power.
-I think this message has a record number of “shit” words, I think 5 if we include this one. There is no f-word though. I hope there’s none on this whole blog.

“Vote for Bug” and “Privacy Concerns Two (as in ACTA)”

1. Please go to the KDE bugs page and vote for one of the most stupid bugs the Linux desktop has: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149676
It seems to me that having this written here is the most polite way of people get interested with this bug (as long as I am not able to provide a solution myself), as other means had no effect.

2. The most outrageous idea ever is brought to our attention by LWN. Customs police should have the right (and obligation ?) to search through a traveller’s electronic documents to see if he carries pirated multimedia. This shit seemed has a name: ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), and a wikipedia page : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement . Of the fears:
-for one right (copyright) you negate many others. The most important. Why should someone look through my files.
-makes for spying.
-looks like 1984 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four) is coming to us very fast.

Too good that we don’t have yet technologies to guess what’s in ones mind (with our current understanding it looks imposible to copy a man’s mind without touching it somehow by mechanisms of the observer’s effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenberg_uncertainty_principle).

Aside the important stories:
The second part of my message has changes to make it to a new article, as it goes very well my last post. By the way, since then: I bought a USB flash; I changed the server through which I send my e-mails, it’s google no more; and from time to time I use the Yahoo search engine.

Of course, at this moment Yahoo looks very good to me, as managers had the guts to refuse Microsoft, altough may not bring the most of profit to the shareholders. It’s refreshing to see that you can hold a business for other reasons than making maximum profits (though it may not be the case for Yahoo). I hope to see times when Romanian companies will try to solve other problems than having the maximum of profit.

Continuation of the first “Privacy concerns” article http://alecs1.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/my-privacy-concerns/.

Hello?! Display producers, you can continue evolution now! (part II)

This is a continuation of the first article, found at http://alecs1.wordpress.com/2008/01/25/hello-display-producers-you-can-continue-evolution-now/. It is not as full of information as the previous one, but it may get more.

I took again the time to test these DPI settings, on KDE 4 this time, and again the results are mixed, very much like the previous ones. Typical buttons resize nicely to fit the text, but everything else is not so shiny. There are two big loosers in this episode, the Oxygen decoration and the Start menu.
So here they are:
96 PPI with the Oxygen style and window decoration, with non working hardware acceleration therefore so no shadows, therefore hard to understand which window is which. Antialiasing always activated.

200 PPI, everything else the same. The window title no longer fits inside the decoration. Also notice the progress bar showing how much space is left, very sexy at these dimensions, I like it.

400 PPI. The window decoration is a bit ridiculous. The clock is not showing anything now.

Here comes the sweetest part, the „revolutionary” start menu versus the classical one at 400 PPI.
The new one (Kickoff I believe they call this sweetheart) would not fit even if it had two screens, so I didn’t know how to use it to logout:

The old one did its job better and filled the screen and showing me more buttons:

A very nice thing about KDE now is the icons, which may have any dimensions you want. So unfortunately Vista is still a bit ahead, let’s catch up.
Oh, and here is how to change de PPI / DPI without restarting the xserver:

xrandr –dpi value

That’s all about other people’s work, next time about my own.