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Archive for the ‘KDE’ Category

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Usability Symposium

November 27th, 2009 by

On wednesday Will and me visited the Usability Symposium 2009 of the Network for User Oriented Software Design, a group which consists mainly of people from the Georg Simon Ohm University of Applied Sciences here in Nuernberg and people from local companies such as Astrum. It was the first symposium of this group and they gave three presentations about software usability.

One of the presentations were given by Evamaria Fuchs and Dr. Sigi Olschner, both former SUSE employees who worked in the usability lab. They presented about the development of the KDE KickOff menu that we shipped in version 10-something for KDE 3. Its successor became the KDE 4 default menu. Eva and Sigi presented how consequent usability work which goes along with the development effort can improve the quality measurable. They also gave a very good insight on free software and open source development in general, taking into account that most people from the audience did not have any experience with it. It was a very nice talk.

While Will was presenting KDE 4 to some interested people Sigi gave me some lessons on how to set up and use the eye tracking device that we have in the Boosters team now. We certainly need another lesson and much more knowledge about usability in general but that was a good start – thank you Sigi 🙂

Usability experts out there – our Eye Tracker is ready to be used by you for the good of free software! I am wondering when we will have the first session where we try to examine user experience of our software with that device.

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Posted in Boosters, Desktop, Events, GNOME, KDE | 3 Comments »

openSUSE Edu Li-f-e : creating open minds

November 17th, 2009 by

openSUSE Education community is proud to announce openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e: Linux for Education based on openSUSE 11.2 . Li-f-e flavor bundles the best of softwares openSUSE has to offer, such as most popular Desktop Environments, educational application, development suites, multimedia, great user experience out of the box, and a lot more that is expected in a modern Operating System.

Li-f-e
Some highlights of what makes this a very special distribution:

(more…)

Posted in Desktop, Distribution, Education, GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice.org, openSUSE 11.2, Server, Usability | 22 Comments »

11.2 64 bit and mp3

September 12th, 2009 by

Now that 11.2 gets closer and closer to the rc status being able to play mp3 becomes important in order to make the testing experience even nicer.

Here is my workaround to get that mp3 working in amarok. I do not know about the dvd’s as the only one that I own is to boring to use it for testing purposes

wget http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/repo/oss/suse/x86_64/libcdio7-0.80-5.30.x86_64.rpm
zypper in file:<Path-to>libcdio7-0.80-5.30.x86_64.rpm
wget http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/repo/oss/suse/x86_64/libiso9660-5-0.80-5.30.x86_64.rpm
zypper in file:<Path-to>libiso9660-5-0.80-5.30.x86_64.rpm
wget http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/repo/oss/suse/x86_64/libMagickCore1-6.4.3.6-5.3.x86_64.rpm
zypper in file:<Path-to>libMagickCore1-6.4.3.6-5.3.x86_64.rpm
wget http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/repo/oss/suse/x86_64/libMagickWand1-6.4.3.6-5.3.x86_64.rpm
zypper in file:<Path-to>libMagickWand1-6.4.3.6-5.3.x86_64.rpm
zypper in libxine1-codecs

So as you can see I just use the missing libs from 11.1.Of course I assumed that you added the 11.1 packman to your repos already.

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Posted in KDE, openSUSE 11.2 | 4 Comments »

Sending lots of pictures in one message

August 22nd, 2009 by

Thanks to Gwenview, you can email the pictures of your last trip, which are usually many, without having to spend hours. It’s very easy!

Open Gwenview and go to Plugins -> Images -> Email Images
emailimages

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Posted in Desktop, KDE | 3 Comments »

Some KDE 4 tips you should know

August 13th, 2009 by

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)

(more…)

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Posted in Accessibility, Desktop, KDE | 4 Comments »

Comparing openSUSE 11.2 and Kubuntu Karmic LiveUSB setups

August 8th, 2009 by

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.

Posted in KDE, openSUSE 11.2 | 7 Comments »

The Desktop DingDong

August 5th, 2009 by

Just incase you’ve been living under a rock on Mars there is a certain feature request in openFate. Both Michael and Zonker have posted on the matter but as they are both Internal (as in they get paid by the Big N) I thought I’d throw my external views (these views are not solicited by anyone other than me, yadayadayada) into the pot.  Now I know I was asked to put my thoughts down and send them into the mailing list, but to be honest the whole discussion has turned into a childish “My dad’s got bigger knuckles than your dad” style flamewar and there are multiple threads on the one topic.  Personally I have now switched off of the discussion on the lists as it’s hard to follow and frankly going nowhere.

Firstly I’d like to think that Frank had no malice in filing the feature and only had the best intentions for KDE and openSUSE at heart.  The problem is there doesn’t seem to have been enough background checks and verification of facts prior to unleashing this handgrenade of annoying pointlessness.  If you default on a loan/mortgage/credit card you are in jeopardy of loosing assets.  The same can be carried over to this discussion.

(more…)

Posted in Desktop, Distribution, GNOME, KDE | 10 Comments »

openFATE feature 306967, KDE default

July 31st, 2009 by

There are pretty many pros and cons and even more people with their opinion about the feature. I’d like to summarize what has been said in the discussion in the feature itself and during yesterday’s openSUSE project meeting. Unfortunately the only sure thing is whatever decision is taken – it will be wrong for some. This is why, at this time, we have no default – because openSUSE has strong GNOME and KDE implementations, we offer them side-by-side as equals.  And we made 2 years ago on opensuse-project the decision that we stay with “no default” desktop.

So what do we have so far?

  • a feature request from one of the KDE e.V. board members
  • the feature asks to make KDE default. Reason for that, is to make openSUSE more simple for newbies and to make openSUSE the best KDE distribution around
  • Through the discussion in the feature I’d translate that feature into put the radio button as default to KDE on the desktop selection screen during installation instead of today’s status where everybody needs to make a choice between
  • the highest rated feature in openFATE until today
  • a majority of people supporting this feature (currently approx. 90% pro, 1% neutral, 9% against)

(more…)

Posted in Desktop, Distribution, GNOME, KDE, openSUSE 11.2 | 12 Comments »

New Package: Association Subscribers Manager 3.0

July 30th, 2009 by

I’m happy to announce, that i imported the Assuma Manager to openSUSE. Special Thanks goes to David Haller. The Package can recieved in KDE:KDE4:Community.

More Infos there: http://www.opendesktop.org/content/show.php?content=109313

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Posted in Contrib, KDE, Packaging | Comments Off on New Package: Association Subscribers Manager 3.0

Lydia Pintscher: The Way to Amarok 2.2

July 16th, 2009 by

The following Lines are from Lydia Pintscher, Community Manager from the Amarok Project:

We have been working for a long time on Amarok 2.0 and the whole team was relieved when we finally released it to show what we have been working on and to get feedback from a wider audience. It was a platform release and as such didn’t have all the features Amarok 1.4 had.

(more…)

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Posted in KDE, lizards.openSUSE.org | 10 Comments »

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