Monzool’s Personal Publishing

KDE4 ON WINDOWS is a very exiting and ambitious project of the people in the KDE project. The thought of having all those wonderful KDE applications available whether I’m on my Linux box, my Mac OS X box or even my Windows XP box is very appealing, so I had to give the new KDE-Windows edition a go.

I downloaded the unstable kdewin installer 0.8.6-beta4. The installer provides a package installation like that of the Cygwin installer, were packages are selectable and the necessary dependencies are resolved by the installer.

After a huge download the installation ran but never seemed to finish. After a long waiting period with the computer running at 100% CPU load, but otherwise giving no other indication of activity, I killed the installation process. Regardless of the abrupt termination all files seemed to be installed. I then started kwrite. But it just punished me a sequence of popups of missing dll errors, making me flashback to the Windows 95 or Slackware days of dependency hell. The story repeated on every other program I started. Guess that installer wasn’t finish hogging CPU cycles after all. I then started the uninstall, but after an extended period of patience with the CPU at 100% and no other indications of progress, I terminated the uninstall process and deleted the files manually.

After downloading the stable kdewin installer I wanted to save some installation time and selected only Amarok. The installer resolved the dependencies to Amarok and eventually completed the installation process. Unfortunately executing Amorak only resulted in a missing prce.dll error – damn it!. I then restarted the installer and discovered an non-installed package prce.mingw in the win32libs package selection list. After that last install (and a reboot forced by Konqueror freezing the Windows box) Amarok would now start – yeah

Regarding the installation experience, then I think the installer makes a not so positive first impression. A part from apparently missing dependencies, its an extremely long installation duration, all of which it maxes out the CPU load to an extend where it doesn’t even manage to redraw its own window. But then again, it needs to copy just about a gazillion files (especially Oxygen has many tiny icon files).
Being on an conquest into the Windows world, I think it is somewhat disappointing that no shortcuts are generated to populate program menu (Well not quite surprising I guess. Having seen the KDE 4.0 keynote presentation its clear that the KDE Windows porters are command line hackers :-))

Now some of the good stuff – for there is plenty of that because most applications works rather well. The games all seem to work perfectly. Here is Kreversi demonstrating how the graphical contents rescaled when its window was resized – kool :-)

Most exited I was to try a true KDE “killer-app”, the powerful editor Kate. I use that editor a lot in Linux and it would be awesome to use it on a cross platform basis.

The file open menu (here from Kate) is very sweet (e.g. icons on the left resizes as the dialog is resized). I like that Windows Vista style (?) of navigating the directories.

The open file dialog gave me some usability problems though. When I wanted to open a file on another partition I found it very unintuitive to realize, that clicking to the right of the last directory item, changes view to the normal path selection box.

There is still small quirks, like Dolphin started with an error dialog about directory ‘~’ could not be show but would otherwise work just fine, but the general experience is very positive. All work is not done yet, but this is gonna be huge.

JUST LEANED THE obvious today. Screen does null modem connections too.

At work I’ve been struggling with minicom. One thing that especially annoys me, it that it clears all text history when minimizing or resizing the VMware window. When I finally had had enough and googled for a replacement, I stumbled upon this blog entry using-gnu-screen-as-terminal-emulator .

Doh!. Should have known. Of course it does. Screen rocks!

IT IS EASY to see why people really love their MacBooks. These computers are sleek and run a cool operating system. I also really love my MacBook that I bought at TheCamp 2007, just from the fact that its killing me!

Where feasible I prefer to use keyboard shortcuts instead of mouse navigation, but on Mac OS X there are annoying hurdles.

On a Danish PC keyboard some the often used programming characters are accessed via the AltGr key, e.g. ‘{‘ = AltGr+7, ‘[' = AltGr+8, ']‘ = AltGr+9, ‘}’ = AltGr+0. This is fine as they can all be accessible one handed.

On my MacBook I am running an English Mac OS X with a Danish keyboard and keyboard layout. The PC keyboard and MacBook keyboard differs, so it was no surprise when I could not find those characters. Tried a few combinations, then referred to the manual – no help. The Apple support forum wasn’t really that helpful either (seems that every other link is a sales or marketing page), but did find a poor swede that had some of the same problems that I had. The comments luckily mentioned that the Mac OS X shortcut for ‘[‘ is Command+shift+8.

Going from a one hand operated shortcut to a two handed is not a change for the better, but at least I could now do some programming :-)

Having found the ‘[‘ I was a happy camper as Command+[ is the shortcut for Safari 3 and Finder to do history back actions. No more grapping the mouse for doing trivial back actions I thought… but nooo. It seems that neither Safari nor Finder recognizes the key combination – aaarrgh! I speculate that this is because the true shortcut is Command+[ and what I am pressing is actually Command+shift+[. One could suspect that those programs switch on the actual keys pressed, instead of receiving characters thats been outputted from a localizing filter?

Btw. how do I enter a directory in Finder? Pressing Enter just enables me to rename the directory! WTF! This is surely a sane default action; I’ll much rather rename a directory than look whats inside – NOOOT.

Well, I’ve finally “solved” my Safari and Finder problems. A long time Mac owning friend of mine, told me that back history in Safari could also be done with Command+left-arrow. ZOMG! A secret solution?! Argh, kiss my ass Safari, I’ve installed Firefox. This new shourtcut didn’t work in Finder of course, so I installed Xfolders and then Finder could go fuck it self.

Btw. every time a dialog pops up for an action (e.g. Accept/Cancel) – how the hell do I select the desired action using the keyboard? And why do I even have to ask this question in the first place?

I would characterize the Mac OS X shortcuts as being either, very long, very non-English unfriendly or both. Wouldn’t be surprised if Mac OS X were written in Emacs by non-non-Englishmen ;-)

All this is making just me really Charles Bronson angry of how stupid Mac OS X is. Not just different, but stupid! Arrrrgh. So the lesson is short: “Apple and others – Don’t use special characters for keyboard shortcuts! It’s fubar.”