KDE For Windows - An Overview

KDE is turning out to be a fabulous Desktop. The latest version - KDE 4.4.0 aka Caikaku is choke full of features which gives the term "Desktop usability" a new meaning all together. What makes KDE all the more appealing is the plethora of well designed applications that come bundled with it.

KDE 4.4.0 Ushers In New Innovations To The Desktop

KDE 4.4.0 Software Compilation codenamed Caikaku has been released. KDE 4.4.0 brings an innovative collection of applications to Free Software users which enhances their experience while using KDE Desktop.

GNOME vs KDE - Income and Expenses

Being avid users of GNOME and/or KDE, have you ever wondered how much revenue these well known open source projects generate ? If popular perception is taken into account, GNOME should generate far more revenue, in-turn more profits, than KDE. But reality is somewhat different.

The following are some nuggets of information gleaned from the quarterly reports that give a birds eye view of the income and expenses of GNOME and KDE respectively.

KDE 4.3 released with incremental innovations

KDE 4.3 has officially been released. Code named Caizen, this release builds up on the previous release of KDE (4.2) bringing with it new innovations mainly on the desktop, applications and development platform.

Watch the following video to learn more about the fabulous new features in KDE 4.3.

GNOME Do - An intelligent launcher tool for GNOME

GNOME Do is an intelligent launcher tool which makes all your default menus and panels in GNOME redundant. Since last time I had written about GNOME Do, it has gotten only better. Just a glance through the numerous plugins available for GNOME Do will be enough for any sceptic to fall in love with it.

Linus Torvalds ditches KDE 4 for GNOME

Linus Torvalds says he has ditched KDE for good and is now sleeping with its arch rival GNOME. Oh well, rhetoric apart, he says the move over to GNOME happened because in KDE 4, he found it quite bothersome that he couldn't get his Right mouse button to access the right menu he wanted. In short, he ran into usability issues while using KDE 4.0.

In an interview given to Rodney Gedda of "Computer World" - Australia, he had this to say, and I quote :

I used to be a KDE user. I thought KDE 4.0 was such a disaster I switched to GNOME. I hate the fact that my right button doesn't do what I want it to do. But the whole "break everything" model is painful for users and they can choose to use something else.

I realise the reason for the 4.0 release, but I think they did it badly. They did so may changes it was a half-baked release. It may turn out to be the right decision in the end and I will re-try KDE, but I suspect I'm not the only person they lost.

I am sure the GNOME camp must be rejoicing in having won over a high profile Linux user to their side. This when a few years back, Linus Torvalds had gone on record severely criticizing GNOME for over simplifying the user interface.

Linus Torvalds was in Australia to attend the annual linux.conf.au organised by Linux Australia. While he was rather critical of KDE 4 in its current form, he did say it was a good thing for Nokia to release Qt as LGPL. Among other things, he also gives his views on Microsoft Windows 7 advising Microsoft to release sooner and decouple the operating system from the applications. A really interesting interview.

A visual walkthrough of the enhancements in KDE 4.2

The main emphasis of KDE 4.2 release has been drastic improvement in desktop effects. KDE has its own composite window manager called KWIN which received a huge graphical upgrade, with composite and GL support.

Lucas Murray has put together a collection of videos showcasing all the improvements in desktop effects that have found its way into KDE 4.2.

The desktop effects being - Present windows, Snow, Desktop grid, Invert, Box switch, Cover switch, Magic lamp, and of course a slew of subtle features which makes KDE 4.2 a major release in itself as far as the end user is concerned.

All the videos are in high definition format and can be viewed here.

Browse the Web in Konqueror using only the keyboard

KDE Konqueror is much more than a file manager. It is also a standards compliant web browser. Here is a neat trick to surf the web sans the mouse - that is, using just your keyboard.

Fire up Konqueror in Linux, FreeBSD or what ever OS you are running that has KDE installed. Konqueror usually opens in File browsing mode. Type in the address of the website you wish to view, in the Address bar - for instance http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com and press Enter key.

Here is the interesting part ... Once the website loads itself, tap on the 'Ctrl' key once to activate the "Access Keys" and Konqueror will label each link in the web page with unique alphabetic characters. You can follow the link in the web browser by just tapping the corresponding character associated with the link.

Tapping once more on the 'Ctrl' key will deactivate the "Access Keys".

How is that for mouse free web browsing ? To get an idea of how it looks on screen, view the following screenshot...

Fig: Active Keys enabled in Konqueror

C++ GUI Programming with Qt4 - Book Review

Qt is a cross platform application development framework which is widely used for the development of GUI and non-GUI programs. Some of the most visible products which have been developed using Qt are KDE, Opera web browser, Google Earth, Skype and Photoshop Elements just to name a few. Some of the pertinent reasons for using Qt are -

One: Qt library is released under a dual licensing business model which means you can develop open source or closed source applications. If you are developing the former, then you do not have to pay any money for using the library.

Two: It is truly cross platform - which filters down to the fact that you can write the code for your application in one platform - say Linux, and then copy the code to Windows and recompile the code without making any changes and your application is guaranteed to run on Windows.

Three: Cellphone behemoth Nokia's recent acquisition of Trolltech has definitely infused fresh breadth and energy into the future of Qt. The latest version of Qt namely version 4.3 has a lot of enhancements which make developing GUI applications using this library a joy for most C++ programmers.

"C++ GUI Programming with Qt4" authored by Jasmin Blanchette and Mark Summerfield; published under the Prentice Hall Open source software development series is well into its second edition. This book is touted as the "Official book on Qt from Trolltech".

The main goal of this book is to teach how to write GUI programs using Qt4 and is targeted at the entry level to intermediate and advanced C++ programmer. So it starts off on a shallow curve, hand holding the reader from the first rudimentary steps in writing a simple C++ GUI program using Qt4. And over the chapters, gradually builds up steam and introduces the reader to complex scenarios such as creating plugins, 3D graphics, application scripting and more. Going through the book, I didn't feel like I was studying a programming framework rather I found the language used in explaining things quite lucid, clear and interesting all the same.

The book is divided into three parts. A new programmer in Qt will find the first part really useful because it covers the fundamental concepts and practices required for programming in Qt. The second and third part of this book comprising of 12 and 7 chapters respectively deal with specialized topics and can be read in any order. For example, if I want to build a GUI program which needs to connect to a database at the back end, then I can straight away read the 13th chapter namely "Databases", of this book provided I am conversant with Part I of this book which covers the foundation of programming in Qt 4.

The second edition of this book builds up on the first edition and contains numerous changes. For one, a couple of additional chapters have been included such as "Look and Feel Customization" and "Application Scripting". The book has been thoroughly revised to include changes incorporated in Qt 4.2 and Qt 4.3. The original "Graphics" chapter has been split into 2D and 3D graphics chapters respectively. The tiny chapter on Embedded Programming has been expanded to include programming in Qtopia, thus making it not tiny anymore.

What I really like about this book is the realistic examples which are used to introduce each Qt control or concept. There are plenty of images scattered within, which impart visual appeal to the book. More over, these images hopefully give the reader an idea about the correct way of designing their software.

Going through this book, I find that the authors have explained different scenarios of developing programs in Qt 4 exhaustively without overwhelming the reader. Each program is split into digestible chunks of code with detailed explanation succeeding them. This makes it quite easy to understand what each line of code accomplishes.

The appendixes contain a new section namely "Introduction to Qt Jambi". Qt Jambi is the Java edition of the Qt application development framework. Apart from that, there are of course the other sections in the appendix namely installing Qt, building Qt applications and also a concise section listing the main nuances of programming in C++ for Java and C# programmers.

One thing I noticed is that the hard bound book I received did not have a companion CD containing the Qt library and the IDE used to design your applications. Then again, one can always visit the Trolltech site and get the Qt 4.3 library and applications which is available as a free download. Even better, if you are developing your Qt applications in Linux then it is very simple to install all the necessary libraries depending upon the Linux distribution you are using.

All in all, this is a great book not just for any neophyte in Qt but also for the accomplished Qt programmer to use as a ready reference.

Book Specifications
Name : C++ GUI Programming with Qt4 - Second edition
ISBN No : 0-13-235416-0
Authors : Jasmin Blanchette & Mark Summerfield
No of pages : 720
Publisher : Prentice Hall
Price : $ 59.99 (US), $ 65.99 (Canada)
Rating : 9/10

Nokia cell phone giant acquires Trolltech

Here is news which will be interesting for all Linux users. Nokia the cellular giant headquartered at Finland has acquired Trolltech the Norwegian company which is developing the Qt library. The deal is believed to be worth around US $153 million. While many of us relate to Trolltech via the ever popular Desktop environment KDE which is built using the Qt library, a lesser known fact is that Trolltech's product is also used by other popular software such as Skype, Google Earth and Adobe's Photoshop Elements just to name a few.

What does that mean for us Linux enthusiasts ? Well, in the future we can look forward to better cell phones and devices from Nokia with a slick user interface powered by the Qt library. Nokia is a big supporter of Open Source. For example, it has released the N770 and N800 Internet tablet in the past which is powered by Linux. Trolltech has also released an open cell phone dubbed the Greenphone.

So in all respects, this acquisition bodes well for the Open source and Free software community at large.

You can read the Official press release at the Trolltech website as well as a joint statement (PDF) by Nokia and Trolltech CEOs to the KDE and Open source community.

Install KDE 4 on Windows

Not even a month has passed since KDE 4.0 has been officially released. Already the Windows port of KDE 4.0 is functional. Nay, you can really install many KDE 4.0 applications on Windows 9x/2000/XP (Vista users please excuse) via an installer.

The installer as such is a small piece of software which pulls the required packages from the remote repository and installs them on your Windows machine. It also automatically downloads any packages which are required to satisfy any dependencies which makes it very user friendly.

The download for me took a long time since the installer had to pull in over 400 MB of packages. But once all the necessary packages finished downloading, the installer then proceeded to install all the packages in the specified location. In my case KDE 4.0 applications were installed in C:\kde4 directory.

There are a number of applications already such as the KDE games, KWrite, Konqueror, Dolphin file manager and so on and all of them worked on my machine. I have to concede that other than the KDE games which played quite well, most other software is at the least, still buggy. Konqueror and KWrite guzzles up memory like there is no tomorrow. The Konsole (KDE terminal) has yet to be ported to Windows and so you cannot access the terminal from within Konqueror. Dolphin complains that it cannot find the home directory each time I open it in Windows. KWrite is a lot slow in opening up and so on.

But these chinks are sure to be ironed out soon. The complete build system of KDE 4 is ready. KDE 4 on Windows currently support two compilers namely Mingw and Microsoft Visual C++. Since Qt 4 is truly a cross platform library and KDE 4 being built using Qt 4, it is only a matter of time before you see people using KDE applications on Windows. Who knows, perhaps this could be one more reason which will prompt more and more people to embrace Linux.. or maybe not.

Check out a few screenshots of the installer and KDE 4.0 applications running on Windows. You can download the installer from windows.kde.org

Fig: KDE 4 Windows installer

Fig: Basic setup - choose the installation mode

Fig: Select proxy settings for your machine if any.

Fig: Select the most appropriate mirror

Fig: Choose the packages

Fig: The installer settings (most important section of installer)

Fig: The installer does automatic dependency resolution.

Fig: Installation completed dialog box

Fig: Dolphin file manager and a card game running natively in Windows XP

Fig: Two KDE4 games and KWrite

Fig: Konqueror running natively in Windows XP

Keynote address by Aaron J Seigo at the KDE 4.0 release event

On January 18th 2008, Aaron J Seigo, President of KDE e.V. and its lead developer gave a keynote address at the KDE 4.0 release event held at Google campus in Mountain View, California. This is a video recording of this august event. In his talk, Aaron gives a birds eye view of the different features in KDE 4.0 as well as a glimpse into the future of KDE 4.

The video is in streaming format and unfortunately Google has not provided a download link with it. So for those who are interested in downloading the video to view it in their free time, can do so using the 'wget' utility as follows :

wget -c --output-document=kde4keynote.mp4 "http://vp.video.google.com/videodownload?version=0&secureurl=twAAANo77xYbVm8VXV5rhG_qPPpRNCbSEwfixV2tMd2j4Uo4ntmtDVLDPHv8b_tQPoUJLJU8lvIfj47OgHJ7bJ4RRwep_TFHvSGSreO8JGQSiA1OxXR4qiGM8upVqU__NCUyGZLbQ1xofY2aPsatvJBqPpJjooYujsvezZduVlne8N2e2jgrjNJkf5JlwHBHpMBkCbzReaQPOoPrQMFpRTM9jkLcsAGjye2-MJbx_0ydYM3cfayiofNm3hE1SmvOtnBW8g&sigh=eklYkc_l10OrI60da0Ybj7O8_oY&begin=0&len=466236"

Those who have a broadband internet connection can watch it below.

Also take a look at the talks given by a number of other delegates at the KDE 4.0 release event.

KDE 4 (version 4.0) released

Here is good news for one and all. KDE 4.0 has been released. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.

Fig: KDE 4.0 desktop

Check out the visual guide of KDE 4.0 to get an idea of the depth at which changes have been wrought when compared with KDE 3.x. To put it simply, the visuals are stunning.

And if you are raring to take KDE 4.0 on a spin, download the Kubuntu LiveCD featuring KDE 4.0. Or if you are running Ubuntu, you can also download just the KDE 4.0 specific packages and install it along GNOME or even KDE 3.x. Or you could also download an OpenSuSE liveCD which contain just the KDE 4.0 specific packages. The choice is yours.

I am so excited about this new KDE release which will surely herald a new movement on the Desktop - err... I mean the portable desktop.

KDE 4.0 to be Released in January

KDE 4.0 is finally going to be released some time in January - the current specified date is January 11th 2008 but I am willing to wait longer as long as the final release is as stable as the current stable version aka KDE 3.x. Now it might seem that KDE team is procrastinating the official release indefinitely. But I think all things said and done, it is much better for the project to take its own time and correct all the bugs in KDE 4.0 in its present form especially pertaining to the UI instead of trying to keep up with the deadline.

I recently tried the KDE 4.0 beta RC1 release packaged as a Debian Live CD and my experience as far as the user interface is a bit disappointing. Lets not get this wrong. KDE 4.0 for me is one of the most fascinating happenings in the Linux world. But in its current form, I faced the following glitches :

Sound was not working properly, some of the widgets could not be closed, then the sluggishness of the user interface is not something to feel ecstatic about. It has been officially told that the panel provided is not the final one.

On the positive side, I do like the new KDE menu which has had drastic design changes. It does take a bit of getting used to but the search bar on top of the menu makes accessing programs many layers deep much easier than in KDE 3.x. Dolphin file manager is quite good and Konqueror is even better than before. And then, most of the important changes in KDE 4.0 has been under the hood so to speak and these changes will definitely maintain KDE 4.0's lead as a cutting edge cross platform Desktop for many years to come.

Announcing the winners of the Oxygen Wallpaper Contest

In August this year, the Oxygen team which are behind the famed Oxygen icons unveiled the Oxygen wallpaper contest. And the formal results are out. The response of the contest was supposedly overwhelming with over 2000 stunning photographs submitted by numerous KDE enthusiasts.

In an earlier post, I had talked about the work of Vlad Gerasimov and his stunning wallpapers. Well two of his entries (EOS and Emotion) have been selected to be included in the default set of wallpapers to be shipped with KDE 4.0. And of the two he submitted, one of them (EOS) has been chosen as the winning wallpaper. Um... I like the other one (Emotion) better, though I am happy the color is blue because blue is pleasing to the human eyes.

Fig: Winning wallpaper which will be the default in KDE 4.0

Many wallpapers in the final selection are stunning photographs of nature, flowers and animals. Do check out the complete selection of wallpapers destined to be shipped with KDE 4.0. Boy, I am brimming with anticipation of the treat that is in store for Open Source enthusiasts when KDE 4.0 is finally released.

KDE 4.0 beta 3 - more beautiful than ever

KDE is moving into the fast track of becoming the number one Desktop environment. And if the latest beta release (3) of KDE 4.0 is taken into consideration, 2008 could very well be the year of KDE.

KDE community has released the 3rd beta of KDE 4.0. A couple of months back, I had listed a number of new features expected in KDE 4.0. Since then KDE 4.0 has got even better and more good looking. As of now, since the last beta release, no new features are added into KDE 4.0 and it is going through a bout of bug fixing and necessary polish.

Fig: Plasma widgets in action in KDE 4.0 beta 3

I think, when KDE 4.0 final is released in December this year, it is going to be a heck of Desktop - lean, beautiful, responsive, modular and user friendly.

Read the full news of KDE 4.0 beta 3 release on the official site.

Update : KDE 4 beta 3 release packages are available for Kubuntu. If you are a Kubuntu user then check out how you can install KDE 4 alongside KDE 3 and give it a test run.

KDE 4.0 beta 2 released

KDE 4.0 is going to be a heck of a Desktop when it is finally released some time in December this year. For the time being we can satisfy our curiosity by taking the beta version of KDE 4.0 for a test drive.

That is right, KDE 4.0 beta 2 has been released. And what is important about this release is that it marks the beginning of the feature freeze. While KDE 4.0 has entered the bug fixing mode now and major ideas and changes will be held off until 4.1, some KDE components, such as Plasma, are exempt from this freeze and will still see significant improvements.

Fig: KDE 4.0 beta 2 - nicely shaping up

So if current beta 2 release of KDE fail to excite your senses, there is a good chance that you will change your mind and fall head over heels in love with the brand new KDE 4.0. Of course, a large percentage of the so called major changes in KDE 4.0 is happening under the hood so to speak which means there is great potential to see a desktop which is slick, user friendly and pleasing to the eyes thus giving a boost to ones productivity.

You can read the full official press release to know the finer details of the features in KDE 4.0.

Oxygen wallpaper contest

Oxygen is the team behind the beautiful icon sets you will get to experience in KDE 4.0 when it is released sometime this year. The goal of Oxygen icon set is to create a set of icons for use on the desktop which are beautiful, support usability and accessibility and in a way, better fulfill the needs of the users.

The Oxygen team has announced a contest. Put your creativity to task and create a wallpaper. The wallpaper can be of jpg jpeg bmp gif png svg svgz formats. The theme for the wallpaper you create can be any of 3D art, vectors, photos, and pixmaps and it can be of any standard wallpaper dimension but bigger the better.

Fig: A sample set of Oxygen Icons

Once you have created the wallpaper, upload it to their website. If you are lucky and your wallpaper is selected, it will be included in the wallpapers that will ship as default set in KDE 4. More details here.

New features in Amarok music player - Sneak peak, pretty playlist, raw plasma

Amarok is a versatile music player for Linux/Unix platforms. A couple of months back I had reviewed this versatile music player which has a lot more features than just playing music.

The next avatar of Amarok is Amarok2 which is going to see a number of enhancements such as :

• A better integrated play list
• Artists can be associated with more than one genre
• Purchasing from Magnatune now supports using gift card codes as an alternative to credit cards.
• A OpenGL support for album selector - I may add that anything related to OpenGL at present requires you to install the proprietary graphics drivers of Nvidia or ATI depending on the graphics card you use.
• The big central area has just been switched to using Plasma, the new desktop and widget technology in KDE4.
  

Courtesy : Amarok blog.

Create a Linux Desktop application In 14 minutes flat using QDevelop and Qt

Who said creating gui applications for Linux were difficult, tedious and mind numbing ? Ok, perhaps this was true 10 years back or so. But now Linux has a plethora of tools which make it possible to create GUI applications - I dare say as easily as programming in Visual Basic for Windows.

You can literally drag'n'drop, move and resize all the widgets such as buttons, text areas, radio buttons and so on and design a very good GUI in minutes. And in the forefront of ease of use is QDevelop which acts as a visual integrated development environment (IDE) for developing Qt applications for Linux.

Clive a 54 year old programmer who has over 25 years of developing experience walks one through the nuts and bolts of creating a GUI application from scratch. What is really interesting is that he uses QDevelop to design the application and also walks one through the steps involved in installing Qt & QDevelop, the different layouts in Qt as well as the final finished product. A very informative tutorial targeted at beginners.