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Kubuntu Intrepid and KDE 4

By Richard A. Johnson on Published: October 4, 2008 at 11:15 am

Well, I accidentally nuked my partitions last night so I decided the hell with it and install Kubuntu Intrepid. Due to my super busy schedule with my job and what not, I haven’t really followed the development of Kubuntu, nor KDE 4, in a few months. I apologize to the people who filed bugs that I didn’t get around to, but I should be easing my way back into things for Jaunty and hopefully getting out to FOSSCamp and UDS in a couple of months.

Well, my first though of Intrepid, argh!!!! Ya, after installing I would enter my first encrypted partition password and then the screen would go insane. Then I politely asked on IRC, “OMGWTFBBQ!!! THIS SUCKS, YOU BROKE MY COMPUTER!!!!” Luckily my buddy Scott was there to simmer me down and provide me with the fix (boot into recovery mode and then select xfix). YAY!

So now, I am logged in and the first thing I notice…Adept notifiers everywhere! That will get fixed here shortly, but I was actually impressed with the new look of the Adept notifier and Adept Updater. Good job on those of you who worked on that! After some tweaking and what not, I was up and running the way I like. KDE 4 has come a long way and it is so impressive to see the amount of work the community has pumped out in such short time. So KDE peeps, if you go to FOSSCamp, I will buy you a drink of your choice!

On that note, I just want to let the KDE and Kubuntu communities know that I am coming back! I was busy the past few months with work and personal life (got into cycling hardcore). So if you are expecting an email from me, a bug fix, or a vote on an application, you should be hearing from me in the coming weeks. Thanks again to the entire KDE and Kubuntu communities for all of your hard work and dedication!

Posted in Linux | Tagged KDE, Kubuntu | 4 Comments

Who you should vote for

By Richard A. Johnson on Published: September 29, 2008 at 10:51 am

Well it has been a while since my last post only because I have been super busy working here at Cleversafe and enjoying the challenge provided to me every day. Many of you think I have died and gone to proprietary heaven, but that isn’t true! I get to maintain and develop for a Linux distribution at work, and no it isn’t Ubuntu (unfortunately). Besides working I have recently quit smoking (again!), got a new car, looking at a new house, and riding my bike like crazy.

I haven’t given up on this community at all! I am still trying to fit in my MOTU Council duties and trying to get back into developing Kubuntu, definitely next iteration. If you have missed me and want to see me in person I will be at Ohio Linux Fest next week, and then FOSSCamp and UDS in December. In between there I will be doing multiple centuries and cross state rides in the US on my bicycle, so come out and ride along with me!

VOTE FOR PEDRO!

Posted in Personal | 2 Comments

Docunification

By Richard A. Johnson on Published: August 23, 2008 at 1:36 pm

As a member of both the Ubuntu Documentation Project and the KDE Documentation Project, one thing is clear, our current state of system help isn’t the greatest. An initiative that the GNOME project has looked at taking on (for the greater part of the past 3 years) is called Project Mallard. There are some things in this project that I like and dislike, however one thing is clear, they understand the inefficiency of their current system and know it needs to be fixed. KDE is realizing this same exact thing and know we need to fix it, but figuring out how to do so correctly, isn’t the easiest thing.

One thing that GNOME, KDE, and others have worked hard to do is collaborate with Freedesktop.org specifications on many levels. Maybe it is time we look at continuing this excellence, but this time add documentation to the menu. How many of you GNOME users love using Amarok or another KDE application, but hate the fact that KHelpCenter is installed just so you can view the help documentation? Granted a lot of this has been fixed by just recommending KHelpCenter in the packages, but this doesn’t fix the issue, because now you have a .docbook file to read, and guess what, Yelp isn’t going to open it cleanly for you, or at least the last time I looked at Yelp it didn’t. Or you have KDE and want to open up the .xml file with KHelpCenter, but it just doesn’t work correctly. I think if we were to unify documentation we could move toward the goal of world domination