Fading Memories

That I am a Linux user. I would probably be just as happy as a BSD user or an OpenSolaris user -- and I'm really glad that I'm not really a Windows Vista user. I used to keep a Vista partition around to test Corel Painter X with (because Corel Painter doesn't install under Wine), but seldom boot Vista.

So, when I last booted into Vista, it had an enormous backlog of updates to install. Which I foolishly allowed it to do. The result? Something called winload.exe is apparently borked beyond recovery. A quick google shows that it's apparently a know problem. Right... Breaking your basic OS kernel loading during an update, that makes Ubuntu's X11 foul-up look good in comparison! At least with Ubuntu, you can get all the media you like -- my laptop came without installation media, and the recovery thing on the recovery partition seems to want to erase my whole hard disk.

Oh, well -- another 16GB of hard disk available!

I had to upgrade -- since moving to KDE4, I cannot get KDevelop 3 working again, and OpenSUSE's 10.3 XEmacs crashes when editing C++ files if the all-important kde-emacs extensions are active. And I cannot get used to developing with Kate -- even though the katepart in KDevelop works just fine for me. No editor, no code! A quick test with the OpenSUSE 11 live-cd showed that the XEmacs bug is fixed -- so, I had to upgrade.

Generally speaking, I'm impressed. The installation artwork is very nice, the installation was very smooth. Hardware recognition on my X61t tablet is fine, although the tablet is not activated out of the box. Networkmanager works, for the first time in my experience. The OpenSUSE guys have succeeded in making a perfectly usable and pretty desktop out of KDE 4.0. Installing software is a lot faster. Somehow, the xrandr rotation still doesn't work like it should, though.

And I need to decide: will I upgrade the 4.0 desktop to the factory packages and try to develop on that (if that's actually possible, or should I delete the 4.0 desktop and use my kdesvn-build KDE4 installation?

One of the things people immediately notice when they see Krita for the first time is that we've got the same basic layout as Photoshop: toolbox on the left, palettes on the right and a single toolbar under the menubar. The second thing everyone notices is that Photoshop has nice, small widgets in their palettes, and we use ordinary Qt widgets. Qt doesn't provide any way to scale down widgets to, say, 80% (although we might use a QGraphicsView in the dockers with Widgets-on-Canvas...). KDE4.1 offers a "small" font setting that, when used, shrinks the dockers a little bit.

But... Do we actually grab more working space from the user than Adobe? The following image says not: it's a 1024x768 display screenshot of a maximized Photoshop 7 overlayed on a ditto Krita 2alpha8 screenshot, using the Oxygen style.

As you can see, our toolbox is a bit wider because of the Oxygen margins, but our dockers are a bit smaller. All-in-all, the working area is just as big as in Photoshop.

I've always thought it a pity that the krita.org domain was already taken when I started hacking on Krita. Originally it used to be the abandoned gallery site of some artist; now it's occupied by a domain squatter. Still, it was taken.

But having a Krita website could very well be a good thing: I've frequently heard remarks along the lines that someone either would never have expected a decent graphics app to be hidden in an Office suite, or even from people who flat-out refused to use Krita because it had got office-cooties.

Enter... krita2d.org. Wait! Don't click that link yet! It's empty...

Someone suggested tacking on the 2d suffix to Krita to show that Krita is about 2d painting -- something I liked so much I grabbed the domain. I might even consider renaming the application with the next version. The website is graciously hosted by the same people who host the koffice website.

But getting the domain and asking for hosting is all I have had time for: I'm really looking for a volunteer who can take the material we've already got and the texts prepared by Valerie and create a website. I guess any kind of cms or php system can be installed -- a wiki with a nice stylesheet and some accounts might be best, even.

So, if you want to help setup the Krita2d.org website -- please mail me: boud@valdyas.org or join us on the #koffice irc channel (if not afraid of office cooties) or on #krita2d.

Naomi has ICT lessons at school -- and this time the kids are being taught how to create tables with tabs and how to mix portrait and landscape pages in Microsoft Word. The former is doable in OpenOffice Writer. The latter, too, but the way OOo works isn't compatible with Word. If you save you text with the page styles for portrait and landscape pages as .doc, everything will have disappeared on loading the .doc file again. KWord 1.6 can't do it at all, KWord 2.0 is definitely not ready to work with -- so we're stumped. This round is for Microsoft.

(And I won't even start about the website the kid has to use to hand in her homework. Completely IE-only.

Everyone who knows me even slightly, knows that I am not a mathematical genius. I'm very glad that people like Casper Boemann, Cyrille Berger and Emanuele Tamponi or Michael Thaler handle that part of Krita. But it becomes a problem when your eldest daughter has a problem with her maths homework, and you cannot help her.

I've tried reading up on mathematics, and Mathematics for Computer Graphics is exactly the right level for me. But ever since Simon Stevin invented a purely Dutch vocabulary for mathematics in 17th century, it's been very hard to read about maths in English and then explain in Dutch. Especially since the text book Naomi's school uses refuses to talk mathematics, instead offering unexplained shortcuts and "steps to follow".

Enter KAlgebra

With this application we can explore the formulas in her book and discover how they work through experimentation. And for any given solution, we can then work backwards and discover the right steps ourselves. It's a very nice, polished application. Sure, there are things that could be improved: a floating palette with things like unicode power symbols would be easy, a mode that adds brackets to show the order of evaluation of a formula or a way to generate the steps necessary to solve an formula would make it even more educational. And the crosshairs could have a snap-to-grid mode.

Of course, there's also KMplot. That has the palette with symbols, It turned out to be just a tiny little bit more difficult to get started, The big problem here being that I couldn't choose the plot I needed among the various kinds of plots provided: cartesian, parametric, polar, implicit, explicit. Handling the graph is not as easy as with kalgebra, either.

For application developers, the biggest problem in the past two years has been that we could not develop against released KDE packages. We had to keep up with the joneses: keep checked out qt-copy, kdelibs, kdesupport, kdepimlibs and kdebase, keep them compiled, just to be able to get to a point where we could work on KOffice.

It's unavoidable, of course, and not a big problem for me personally. This dual core X61 61 bits OpenSUSE tablet can compile kdelibs before breakfast (if I start the compile before going to bed). By the way -- with the current kernel, OpenSUSE is incredibly stable. Suspend and resume is as reliable as with my old Pismo Powerbook under OS X -- and faster.

But it makes it really hard to attract new developers, people who'd like to report a bug and are prepared to compile koffice svn just to check whether it's already been fixed. Those are the people who tend to stay around and even help out with development after a while. Asking them to also compile all of kde is often just a bridge too far.

But yesterday night I managed to clean out my installation of all previous attempts, install the OpenSUSE KDE4 rc2 packages and succesfully compile KOffice against them. Yay! We're getting really close to the end of the road, and I'll try to keep developing against released packages only from now on.

It also marks my switch to KDE4 as my default environment. Things work quite well. Oxygen is drop-dead gorgeous, especially after making the window color #CFCFCF. I love all the subtle details. I wish I could have the scrollbars always in the gorgeous green color, instead of only when I hover over them. KWin's effects work great on OpenSUSE. Kickoff has completely won me over: I've added a couple of favourites, and that made all the difference. Dolphin rocks -- I hadn't expected that, I must admit.

Sure, there are irritants: the fish kio slave doesn't seem to work. I get a login prompt, but no directory listing. The panel is a little high, especially on my 1024x768 screen. I cannot get the pager to show up to the right of the K-menu button. Migrating my feed list from akregator3 to akregator4 baffles me. KWrite doesn't word-wrap, but glyph-wrap. There are still lots of glitches and bugs -- but life is very much worth living, and I salivate at the thought of what goodness will be built on top of these foundations.