Upgrading to KDE 4.2.0 HOWTO

I have written a small HOWTO (in Indonesian) to upgrade KDE 3.5.10 to KDE 4.2.0 on Slackware. This is a compilation between Patrick Volkerding's README and what i experienced when i upgrade both my laptop and my desktop at my office. I have added some notes based on what i see on my system after i upgrade to KDE 4.2.0. I'm still using KDE 3.5.10 on my desktop at home due to insufficient space.

Please note that KDE 4.2.0 provided in Slackware-Current is supposed to be installed on top of Slackware 12.2 at minimum. Do not try to install on previous version of Slackware.

In the last two days, i have been playing with KDE 4.2.0 and so far, it's just great.

Faster and Faster

Lately, i haven't download anything big and today, i saw a stable Internet connection by speedy. It always get a full speed around 1 Mbps (128 KB/s) when i download something from the Internet, even if it comes from abroad servers, such as RapidShare.Downloading 100 MB of file only took me 15 minutes. Usually i got only 60-80 KB/s at maximum and it will require about 30 minutes to finish. I just hope this will hold not only temporary, but a permanent. Even better a raise in speed in the future

Graduation Day

Finally, after completing all my graduation papers, i can officially get my master degree this morning. The graduation was scheduled to start at 8 AM, but the students must be there at most 7 AM and sign an absence list. This was a mechanism to sort the certificate, so if you didn't sign it, you won't get called even though you attend the event. It will be embarrassing at that moment.

The event was finally over around 10 AM, just like as planned and i went to my friend who owned a photo studio and take some pictures there with my parents and my girlfriend. My sister didn't attend my graduation because she has to work and it will be to costly just to come here and then she would have to go back to his city few days later. No problem for me though.

Well, graduations also means to my laptop, as it graduates and being upgraded to use KDE 4.2 as the default window manager . Some photos of my new KDE 4.2 are on my Facebook account. It's running on Slackware-Current, but the KDE packages are still working for 12.2 for now.

KDE 4.2 Released

It's three days before the end of this month and finally the final KDE 4.2 has been released. This version is targeting for broader public usage. Many improvements and bug fixes has been incorporated in this milestone, making it more usable by most people.

Since it's debut, KDE 4 has been struggling to make it's way for stable version and incorporate all the features available on KDE 3.5. Perhaps it's time for KDE team to give a proof of that by giving this release's codename "The Answer".

The announcement can be read here and the visual guide for KDE 4.2 is also available.

Have fun with KDE 4

OOo 3.0.1 Final

The first maintenance update since OOo 3.0 debut is now officially released. It provides bug fixes along with many translations updates done by the L10n teams around the world. It's now being mirrored to many servers around the world to provide better access for people closer to the server without giving more burden on the main OOo server.

For Indonesian people, the OOo 3.0.1 releases are now available through Kambing. Soon it will be followed by many mirrors as well.

Enjoy OOo 3.0.1

Preparation Finished

Alright, preparation for tomorrow is finished. I did have some problem, because i forgot to make an article for informatica magazine, so i finished that up in about one hour while downloading CSI movies .

After finishing the article, i continue revising my syllabus for tomorrow's class. I will start this semester with distributed system and software modeling class. Actually i had a class today, but since it's national holiday since it's Chinese New Year, the class will be substituted one day before mid test is conducted.

Last Minute Change

Sometimes, people can't make up his mind before the last minute.The result is last minute changes. It can be a positive or negative, depends on the context. If you are building a software, this isn't a good thing, mostly for developers, as changes will make them rework the code, re-test, and rewrite their documentation and manuals.

I have just done a last minute changes to the syllabus i made for this semester. Why would i call it last minute? Because it's 2 minutes away from Chinese New Year 2560

Member Surpassed 14000

Member of Indonesian Linux Forum has surpassed 14000 people. What a great achievement on the first month of this new year. We are now aiming for 15000. Any idea when will this be achieved?

It's a good sign that more and more people are now using Linux and open source applications.

Last Weekend

This week is the last weekend before i will start teaching next week. I still haven't finished all the materials, but at least i'm safe until week 4/5. This gives me some time to work on next materials.

I should enjoy this weekend as much as i can

WebKit Instead of Mozilla

I'm a big fans of Liferea, an open source RSS reader application. It's very easy to install, with only small dependencies. It only asked for some GNOME/GTK libraries, which is easy to be found on most Linux distributions.

That idea has changed when 1.5.x (unstable) was released. New libraries are needed, making building process a little bit harder than 1.4.x. In 1.5.6, there was a big change on the HTML rendering engine. They have dropped Mozilla/Gecko/XulRunner support which was used until 1.5.5 and turn to WebKit. I don't know why, but it works and they changed it just like that. I know WebKit is also a good rendering engine, but in most RSS feeds, the layout are mostly very simple and plain. It's being focused on the content itself.

In order to compile the latest version, i had to compile webkit and all it's dependencies first, then i can install Liferea. It's a pain in the past, but i have managed to install webkit and now Liferea is lurking back again on my system

H-7

It's precisely one week towards my graduation which will be held next week. Yesterday, i have taken the dress (Toga) and the invitations. Too bad the invitation was only valid for two people. I want my girlfriend is there with my parents too. I will ask for more invitation, even if i have to buy one for it.

There are six people (including me) which will be graduated in this period. They are Wiranto, Lasmedi Afuan, Tontowi, Nurhadi, and Rocky. Wiranto had a perfect GPA, 4.0. Congrats

We will see you guys next week

Start of New Semester

After having quote long holiday since December, it's time to start the new semester. This year, the semester will start in 27 January 2009 because 26 is Chinese New Year day and it has been marked as a national holiday. There are four classes that i teach this semester, UNIX system programming, distributed system, component-based programming, and software modeling. Most of them are new, except distributed system, which is my third consecutive class.

Since early this year, i have been busy preparing the syllabus, lecture notes, and also assignments for each subject i teach. Well, some are finished, with more to come in the next few days. I may not be able to finish all the modules before the class started, but i'm pretty sure i'll make it before the class started

There might be some time where i might have to postponed the class for this semester. The first one will be on Wednesday, 28 January 2009. I have to attend the rehearsal for my graduation which will be held in the next day, Thursday 29 January 2009. The second one is around February 9. I had an assignment to take part of EC-Council Certified Secure Programmer. It will be 4 days, so i had to find a new schedule for my class.

This semester will also be my first year to be a supervisor for UKDW Net Club and also Informatica magazine. It will be a busy semester, but i'm 100% i can finish this job

Shopping or Family?

When i accompany my mother shopping at amplaz today, we went to one of the boutique. While she was looking for items, i saw a mother was coming in with his daughter and son. Few minutes later, the son asked the toilet and the SPG pointed the direction. In less than 10 seconds later, the boy went out of the shop to the toilet and then his little sister went on too.

It's not something unusual, but the strange thing was that the mother seems noticed that her children were away from her and keep looking on the dress she holds without worrying her children. Is that how parent supposed to be?

Uptown Girl Indonesian Version

Here's a remix of Uptown Girl (check my blog if the YouTube link doesn't showed up)

Social Event

This morning, we from the Fu Qing Youth went to Panti Asih in Pakem to hold a social event there. It's a place for people who were disabled, both in physical and mentally. We donate lots of items needed by them, including foods, clothes, medicines, and many more. We also had fun communicating with them, even though it's quite difficult at first.

After coming at this place and watching disabled people from close range, i am relieved that i'm still given a chance to enjoy a normal life with my family and friends around me. Thank you God for all you have given to me

One Step Further

Even though a simple plan is better than no plans at all, it would be great if we can predict one step further. That's what happened in the second part of Red Cliff II movies that are now playing in most movie station in Indonesia (or in several countries as well). In the movie, Ge Liang can predict the fog to get lots of arrows without sacrificing one of his troops. He done this in just three days, even though at first he was given ten days to do so.

Another prediction which is the key to win the war is the wind prediction. It affects the whole war, since the fire can blow all the ship chains that was supposed to be perfect strategy and turned it into a deadly strategy.

Oh well, i guess you should see this movie by yourself and enjoy the movie . It's 135 minutes long if i'm not mistaken, so bring your pop corn and eat it slowly

First Meeting

I will attend the first meeting on this year today. We will discuss our preparation for this semester which will start in the next one and half week and also final review for those who will graduate this year. Usually, the meeting was set at Friday, 1 PM, but since the semester hasn't started yet, the meeting will be held at 10 AM and hopefully we will be finished around 1 PM, so we could have lunch together with all the staffs.

Let's hope this first meeting will give benefits to all the students

Busy Semester

This semester, i will be busier than last semester. On the next six months, i will teach 8 classes in a week (it's five working days). I will have two class on Monday (Software Modeling), two on Tuesday (Distributed System and Software Modeling), two on Wednesday (Unix System Programming), and two on Friday (Component-based Programming).

Not only that, because i may have to supervise field work and (probably) final project also. Well, it's new year, so i should come up with new resolution at work, so... GANBATE!!!!

KDE 4.2 RC

KDE will be releasing KDE 4.2 this month, but before that, it's a good idea to release one RC version. This will enable users to give feedback needed by the developers to see if the current build is suitable enough for them and whether there are bugs lurking on the code which hasn't been caught by the tester during development cycle.

Here's the highlight of this release:

• The KDE 4.2 series will offer considerable improvements in stability, feature-completeness and performance over its predecessors in the KDE4 series.
• The Plasma desktop shell has gained many feature that users were still missing in earlier KDE4 revisions.
• Applications shipped with KDE 4.2 Beta 2 have many features added and bugs fixed
• The KDE development platform has seen significant improvements on non-Linux platforms such as BSD, Windows and Mac OSX, making more applications available to users of those Operating Systems.
• Writing KDE applications and add-ons in scripting languages such as Python and Ruby is easier than ever.

Improvements on this release:

• Compositing desktop effects are enabled where hardware and drivers support it, with a basic default setup. Automatic checks confirm that compositing works before enabling it on the workspace.
• New desktop effects have been added such as the Magic Lamp, Minimize effect, Cube and Sphere desktop switchers. Others, such as the desktop grid, have been improved. All effects have been polished and and feel natural due to the use of motion dynamics. The user interface for choosing effects has been reworked for easy selection of the most commonly used effects.
• Central elements of the desktop experience have seen significant improvements to give a usable and coherent experience. These include grouping and multiple row layout in the task bar, icon hiding in the system tray, notifications and job tracking by Plasma, the ability to have icons on the desktop again by using a Folder View as the desktop background. Restored features and minor tweaks round out the work, such as the return of panel autohiding to maximise your productive screen space, icons now remain where they are placed in the Folder View, the location of new applets is improved, and window previews and tooltips are back in the panel and Task Bar.
• New Plasma applets include applets for leaving messages on a locked screen, previewing files, switching desktop Activity, monitoring news feeds, and utilities like the pastebin applet, the calendar, timer, special character selector, a quicklaunch applet, a system monitor, among many others.
• KRunner, the "Run command..." dialog has extended functionality through several new plugins, including spellchecking, konqueror browser history, power management control through PowerDevil, KDE Places, Recent Documents, and the ability to start specific sessions of the Kate editor, Konqueror and Konsole. The converter plugin now also supports quickly converting between units of speed, mass and distances.
• The Plasma workspace can now load Google Gadgets. Plasma applets can be written in Ruby and Python. Support for applets written in JavaScript and Mac OS dashboard widgets has been further improved.
• Wallpapers are now provided plugins, so developers can easily write custom wallpaper systems in KDE 4.2. Available wallpaper plugins in KDE 4.2 will be slideshows and of course regular static images and solid colors.
• Theming improvements in the Task Bar, Application Launcher, System Tray and most other Plasma components streamline the look and feel and increase consistency. A new System Settings module, Desktop Theme Details, gives the user control over each element of various Plasma themes.
• Multi-screen support has been improved through the Kephal library, fixing many bugs when running KDE on more than one monitor.

Updated Applications:

• Dolphin now supports previews of files in tooltips and has gained a slider to zoom in and out on file item views. It can now also show the full path in the breadcrumb bar.
• Konqueror offers increased loading speed by prefetching domain name data in KHTML. A find-as-you-type bar improves navigation in webpages. It also gained the option to use your bookmarks as the start page by means of the new Bookmarks KIO slave.
• KMail has a powerful and attractive message header list, and reworked attachment view.
• The KWrite and Kate text editors can now operate in Vi input mode, accomodating those used to the traditional UNIX editor.
• PowerDevil, the new KDE4 power management infrastructure brings a modern, integrated tool for controlling various aspects of mobile devices.
• Ark, the archiving tool has improved UI, gained support for password-protected archives and is accessible via a context menu from the file managers now.
• A new printing configuration system brings back a number of features users have been missing in KDE 4.0 and 4.1. The components "printer-applet" and "system-config-printer" are shipped with the kdeadmin and kdeutils module.
• KRDC, the remote desktop client improves support for Microsoft's Active Directory through LDAP.
• Kontact has gained a new planner summary and support for drag and drop in the free/busy view.
• KSnapshot now stores the window title as meta data when saving screenshots, making it easier to index them using search engines.
• The secure file transfer protocols SFTP and FISH are now also supported by KDE on the Windows platform.
• Killbots is a new game shipped with the kdegames module. Other games have improved user interaction and added themes and levels.
• Educational apps such as KAlgebra, KStars, KTurtle and Parley have seen major improvements in UI and feature sets.
• Okteta, the hex editor has significantly improved various aspects of its user interface.

See the details on the Changelog.

KDE 4.2.0 will be released in January, 27th 2009, 6 months after KDE 4.1. KDE 4.2.0 will be followed up by a series of monthly service updates and followed up by KDE 4.3.0 in summer 2009.

Registration Session

Tomorrow, the students from informatics department will have their registration session to pick up subjects that they are interested with. It will be started at morning and they will have their registration finished around 2 PM and this will hold for two days.

Nowadays, most students in general mostly choose the subjects not based on the knowledge they want to learn, but due to other reason, such as easy grade, cool or beautiful lecturer, not too much assignments, and so on. They are after the grade and not the knowledge. Let's hope in this new year, they have better resolution for themselves

RC1

Usually, software developers never pushed a final version without releasing RC (Release Candidate) or Beta version, because software is getting more complex. With lots of configuration, options, and possibility of hardware combination, it's getting more difficult to have a perfect software running on every machine and devices available on the market.

In most cases, RC can be considered a snapshot of what will the final version be, with some bugs that are still around and need to get public attention so that testing will be done by people around the world as they try the that version.

It is somewhat quite different in the Linux kernel development. In Linux kernel development, RC1 is the time that marks the end of merge window, which is the time where Linus accept all the MAJOR changes to the kernel to be included in the next version. You can say that RC1 will be FULL of SURPRISES you will never know before as before RC1, the new features are mostly build separately outside the kernel mainline.

While some people have no problem working on RC1, not everybody has the same experience. Check this thread in LKML, where Gene Heskett, one of the kernel tester has just destroyed his MCP55 eth0 port on his US$275 ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe motherboard when he tried to run 2.6.29-RC1 on his first attempt. While it's not yet concluded that the kernel who did this, this might be a lesson for us to be more carefull dealing with software.

Imagine if there are no RC releases, then it will ruin most people who has the same motherboard around the world. Public testing is very important as you alone can never overcome the result of people around the world. This is the power of collaboration. Even when the developers are still sleeping, people at the other side of the world are working, testing, and compiling the kernel and report it to the mailing list. It's just so great to see the harmony

Facebook Phenomena

Facebook is truly phenomenon. Most people will love Facebook, due to it's simplicity (even though it can be complicated), easy registration, and lots of application available and the best of all, it's free (some application may require you to buy something if you want to get more items or features, but it's optional features since you can still play without having to buy those items). You can also participate on the development because they opened their API for developers.

One thing that i don't see in Facebook is Blog, but i guess it's not very crucial, because there are already several blog services which are also free, such as WordPress and Blogger. Wiki is also not crucial in my opinion, as there are already Wikipedia.

I wonder what kind of evolution which will make people switched from Facebook? Any ideas?

Picnic Day

Today is the day where the picnic is held and i just came back from Pacitan where i visited Tabuhan and Gong cave and also Gajah Mungkur dam. We departed from Jogja around 7.40 AM and our first destination was Tabuhan cave. We saw a natural stalagmite and stalagtite there and take some pictures (of course ). The unique thing about Tabuhan cave is that the stalagmite could produce a sound like Gamelan, so it's called Tabuhan. I had my trousers dirty, but i managed to find some water to clean it up. Next time, roll up your trousers before you enter the cave.

Next destination was Gong cave. It was better organized than the first cave and the panorama was better than Tabuhan. On both place, i managed to take some pictures of it. You can see it on my Facebook photos (here and here) or my PicasaWeb account (only the person, not the sceneries).

The last place we visited was Gajah Mungkur Dam. We had our lunch at 4 PM (i know, it should be between lunch and dinner, but that's our lunch actually) in a restaurant near Gajah Mungkur. When we were finished, we were about to visit the dam, but the officer was ready to go home when we arrived there, so we decided to cancel it, otherwise we would be late arriving in Jogja (it was scheduled to got back to Jogja at 7 PM).

It was fun and i'm looking for more picnic in the future

Picnic

Tomorrow i will have a picnic with most of the lecturers from my faculty to Pacitan, east of Java. It will be a one day picnic, so i guess i will be very tired when i got home tomorrow night, but i have never attended such event, so i guess i will participate for tomorrow

I hope i can take some good picture and upload it to my PicasaWeb and FB account

Looking For Good Mood to Work

In the past, i usually make my material long before the class even started, but in this year, even though it has passed one week, i'm still not in the mood to make it. I don't know why, but i have to fix this before my class started or i will get more trouble later on.

Oh, please give me good mood to work

Three Days in a Row

In the next three days (including today), i will be a reviewer for three students for their final project. Today's topic was about JavaFX. Tomorrow's topic will be about steganography, and the day after tomorrow will be about case based reasoning, sub part of expert system.

I'm still trying to be a good reviewer and find as much as defects found on the reports

TypingSpeed Application

Few days ago, i installed TypingSpeed application on Facebook. It's quite an interesting application, so i played it several times and i didn't get bored, until i reached 90 WPM (Word Per Minute).

Even though it's faster than 91,8% of Facebook users (currently), i'm not quite satisfied with it. I'm targeting for 95 WPM. For that, i had to practice more and more. The problem is that i don't have the time as the work keeps coming and the new semester is about to begin in the next two weeks

It's good to reduce your stress level

First Day Working

It's been five days already on the new year, but my workday just started today. There wasn't too much activity on my office today, even though most of the lecturers came to the office. I, my self gave the grade points, make a new website for next class course, and revised some syllabus for it.

This semester, for the first time, i am paired with another lecturer in computer science department. I have done this before in information system once, but not in CS. Since it's a two lecturers class, we have to share our thought on the material and the teachings as well. It should be a fun semester

Being Vegetarian

I have just came back from small reunion. It was my girlfriend who had a reunion, but she asked me to join, because i know all of her friends who came to the reunion. Most of them are vegetarian, so we went to Tomi's restaurant, which was also a vegetarian restaurant. There i read an IVS magazine which contains lots of articles about the benefit of being a vegetarian. It seems that the organization is quite big, as it already has more than 30 branches on most big cities around Indonesia.

Actually being a vegetarian is good for our health. The problem is whether we have enough commitment to do it or not. Since we were small, we have eaten many animals product and we were used to do it. Being vegetarian meaning that you must try to avoid such food. Can you do it?

LogBot

For some time, i have been following ##slackware on irc.freenode.net. They have one bot which can be used to log all conversations on that channel. I wanted to have it also on ##id-slackware, so i searched for some IRC bots, and i found one of them which is very easy to set up. It's called LogBot.

It's an open source application and the setup is very easy. All you have to do is extract the content and make sure the directory structure is preserved. Next, set the configuration on config.ini file and make sure you have the write permission on the output directory where the log files will be placed. Run the bot and it will log all the conversations on the channel you set on the config.ini file. You can edit the presentation files by editing the files in html directory for better layout.

It's very simple and it can be setup in less than 5 minutes

Unplanned Reunion

For some time, my group which consists of seven peoples never gathered for reunion. All of us has worked and we lived in different cities with one people are working abroad. So tonight we had an unplanned reunion at Papindo, eating corn. I just came back and it's already past midnight. It's very rare to have this kind of reunion so i'm willing to spend some time until midnight just to have a talk with them, because i never know when will we be able to hold such reunion again in the future.

First Post in 2009

New year always brings joy to everybody. Even though we are all in global recession, nothing stopped us from celebrating new year with all our friends and relatives.

Since it's new year and it's marked as holiday, most shop in Jogja were closed, except for shopping malls, so there was no traffic jam in the morning like it used to be. It's good for bicycling

I'm still too lazy to start preparing my material for next semester which will start this month, so i filled it with watching movies and working something else. Maybe i will start when i got my mood back

Anyways, this is my first post in 2009 and there will be more to come