1. nano /etc/rc.conf

2. Append these contents at the end: https://gist.github.com/949987

3. /etc/rc.d/network restart

4. Done! You should have proper network connectivity now.

Notes notes notes. Moar Notes!

For those who don’t know yet, you can start a fresh chrome window with a custom UA using the –user-agent command-line parameter while launching it:

# Using chrome, or chromium -- as you like it.
chrome --user-agent="My User Agent String. Bow to it, statisticians. Kidding."

You can then visit http://whatsmyuseragent.com/ to verify the results of the user-agent property change in Chrome/Chromium.

The command-line parameter, –user-agent, is (not very) surprisingly not documented under the supplied manual page.

RSIBreak - Repetitive Strain Injury prevention software for KDE

It isn’t a full fledged timer feature but I think it will get your needs covered with its offerings easily enough. One of the amazing utilities I’ve used, built with KDE Libraries. It should be available in your Linux distribution’s software repository too.

Violet was the UML modelling tool I had to use to save me some fun-later-time and make the whole process quick and painless. It also supports exporting to an image format and all in all it is a lovable, simple and just-works tool. But do note that it uses Java to do all that magic.

The other alternative I had was Umbrello which sadly isn’t in a very usable state yet. Perhaps this summer its GSoC fix may make it better. Wish I knew enough of QGraphicsView stuff to try it myself

To add GMail is easy, using the Jabber protocol:

account add jabber username@gmail.com password

To add Google Apps Mail needs one more step:

account add jabber username@domain.tld password
account set 0/server talk.google.com
# You may want to replace '0' with your account number via 'account list'

account on and have fun with your now-more-powerful IRC Client.

If you’re bored of your single-point input already, do check these MT stuff out. Ignore if am too late and the train has already left

I did the same for KDE, having had an on/off relationship with it since 3.x, and finally settling onto 4.3, I managed to get into writing code for it. Although not a fan of the entire desktop, it is what I use on a daily basis and I do feel the lack of a few things sometimes. There’s already too much to customize; and am sure I don’t know the half of it yet.

I read a lot of comic books in my free time, on the PC. While I do have my collections named and arranged neatly, it has always been hard finding a particular file since there were no previews of its covers on KDE 4. Since Okular, KDE’s magnificent all-in-one document reader, reads the files (.cbr, .cbz type) why not also preview it. That became my itch, my want. And I scratched it with copious amounts of help provided by its development community. However, I’d be glad if some artist came along and gave the format an Oxygen-style icon as well – since it still lacks one.

In KDE 4.4, you will have comic book previews which would show you the comic book covers in its file manager’s preview mode. This should make your life easier. However, for .cbr thumbnails to work, you’d need the non-free version of unrar cause the free ones don’t do version 3+ files well. It isn’t a hard dependency, and .cbz ZIP files would work just fine without unrar. I’d also written support for .cbt, but it’d have to wait until KDE 4.5 cause of their ‘feature freeze’.

Since I made it this far, I also fixed certain minor annoyances – some reported by other people as well. A small list:

• Move spelling suggestions to top level menu
• Add timezone data to KRFB while sending desktop invites
• Don’t show ‘add to places’ in dolphin if item is already in there
• Fix the new Kickoff menu for recent applications
• Fix a minor annoyance with KMail’s Composer shortcuts

I’ll be more than glad to hammer more bugs, once the feature freeze melts. Go here to read about what’s new in KDE 4.4.

The Desktop

A lot of visual changes are present in the KDE Desktop. There are changes to Style, Behavior and the Plasma – the one which provides the desktop and widgets to boost your desktop experience.

KDE 4.4 Desktop

Activities

Desktop activities, a concept introduced in KDE 4.2, has received a ton of improvements. An activity in KDE is simply as the word goes – a separate view for a specific behavior. You have probably used, or heard of the Virtual Desktop concept – in which one can manage their applications with separate views.

Extending that concept, an Activity is a separate view for your group of widgets. Right now you may notice that switching virtual desktops does not change the widgets available on the desktop – this task’s possible if you use Activities.

Folder View Activity

New features in Activity include Mouse Plug-ins, and two new types of Activities – Search & Launch and Newspaper.

Mouse Plug-ins

This is a configuration area of any activity that, for now, allows you to configure (mouse) shortcuts for your desktop operations like switching activities, showing the context menu, switching tasks, etc..

Activities Mouse Plugin

New Activities

Ever since 4.2, there have been two types of activities in KDE, namely Folder View and Desktop (Default). The former shows the desktop area as a traditional one – with icons from a set folder, while the latter is an empty and clean one with only your added widgets. The two new activities – Search & Launch Containment and Newspaper Activity bring about some refreshing changes to the whole Activity concept.

New Activities

Search and Launch Containment

This is an interesting activity that could replace your need for a panel. It essentially transforms your desktop area into a launcher. There’s a favorites area at the top, followed below by a runner-like search bar and then the Menu groups, which can be double-clicked to open and show all applications contained within. Navigation is simple and animated prettily and bookmarks/favorites can be added by clicking on the star that appears when you hover over an item/application.

Search and Launch Containment

Newspaper Activity

I haven’t found a use for this yet, but it seems to automatically align your widgets in a columnar fashion. It’ll be neater after a little more polish – maybe give you that grid aligning feature for widgets if you needed it. I’ll report more on this as the development progresses in the coming months till the 4.4 Final.

Newspaper Activities - Notice the scrollbar on the right.

Style

In my opinion, the best attraction of the KDE 4 desktop is its Oxygen style. In 4.4, it will be cleaner, have more icons, new animations, fabulous new artwork, and some fine-tuning. You’ll love the amount of advanced customization and simple fine-tuning options Oxygen will give you in KDE 4.4.

Title-bars

The window borders have an improved style than before. The difference can be seen in the screen-shots below as artwork is hard to explain with words. Let’s just say it feels more liquid, and is much more responsive to press actions. Not a change that’d make you care about, but its pleasing and refreshing nevertheless.

KDE 4.3 - Old Title-bars

KDE 4.4 - New Title-bars

Window Borders

Borders are all gone. The Oxygen style does not apply any window borders anymore and instead has added inner and outer glows, which are configurable (colors, spread size, etc.) in System Settings – Appearance. Also changed, are the neat drop shadows, whose colors can also be customized. Once this kicks in, it feels easier to work with non-maximized windows.

Animations

A lot of animations have been added to the Oxygen style and what I’ve noticed is that a fade effect is applied to every kind of change in the UI. That means you’ll see smoother label transitions, fading effects while you switch from a tab to another, fading selectors as you scroll through the options in a context menu, and etc.. These also apply to the hovering effects, like the glow that appears when you hover on a tab. At first the thought of irritation in seeing these animations popped into my head but as good as the Oxygen-Project guys are, the default rates of the animations are well above that barrier although not configurable.

Progress-bars also have animations now and a progress, like from 30% to 50% is done with smoother, running progressions than abrupt and instant ones. This change is very welcome by me; I could do with some fancy feedback stuff while an application makes me wait. Using progress-bars must also adhere to certain standards and not be like how most applications on Windows are.

Since I can’t show the new animations with mere screen-shots, here’s a video to watch – by the developer himself.

Plasma

Under Plasma, there are too many changes and improvements to count. Its perhaps the most concentrated-upon part of KDE. I’ve listed some easily-visible changes like the new Widget Chooser, Remote Widgets, System Tray and the Device Notifier.

Widget Chooser

The classic Add Widgets… dialog has been replaced with a more wider, flashier chooser. Currently, it does not support removing widgets like the former dialog does, and in behavior and style it is pretty similar to the Search and Launch Containment, which I mentioned earlier. It’s still pretty handy, as it makes listing and scrolling through categories and the widgets under each much easier than when done vertically. What I might be missing is an easier way to see the full name and descriptions of each widget, which was easily displayed in the earlier dialog.

Widget Chooser

Remote Widgets

A concept I could not try out, since I have only one terminal. It seemingly lets you share any widget over the network and allows you, or others to use it remotely. Every widget can be asked to enable sharing, and the configuration dialog has a privacy option for it as well.

Remote Widget Policies

System Tray

The System Tray has improved in many ways. Firstly, the Auto Hide feature has gotten way better than the selective thing it was before. It now supports, for each of the registered items, three modes – Hidden, Auto and Always Show. Auto probably hides it after a certain amount of time or inactivity. Second, there’s a new feature that lets you add your widgets to the tray, or at least some of them. This is useful, from what I could make out, if you’d like to hide some of your panel widgets from showing all the time.

Auto-hide System Tray Apps with more control

Plasma Widgets in System Tray

Device Notifier

The device notifier widget in KDE has received a good amount of new features – called Actions. Its similar to how Windows shows a dialog when you insert a device. Appropriate actions can now be added via System Settings – Advanced – Device Actions and they will show up for each type of devices as you configured. Actions can then be seen while or after mounting the device. There is also an auto-mount configuration coming in KDE 4.4, but that’s a different thing for a different article.

Device Actions Configuration

Device Notifier with Actions

That’s it, under Desktop!

More articles with screen-shots regarding enhancements in File and Window Management, new Application Features under various KDE extensions coming soon. Mostly by the Beta 1 KDE 4.4 release, which is at the beginning of December 2009.

There are also enhancements made for Netbook users but that’s beyond my scope of interest at this point – since I don’t own one.

Oh, and did I mention the amount of bugs fixed? Tons!

I was trying out the kde-extragear-plasmoids AUR package yesterday on my ArchLinux’s plain KDE installation and I came across this wonderful plasmoid known as Smooth Tasks. While nothing innovative in itself, its a simple plasmoid that apes the Windows 7 taskbar. Provides icon views of the applications running and allows peeking into them when hovered upon, and if grouped – lets you switch using the previews. I’ll leave the screenshots to do the rest of explanation.

What I liked most about Windows 7 is its ability to color the hover-glow on the icons in the taskbar based on the average computed color of the icon itself. This feature, as explained by Long Zheng, “delivers some sentimental value by making it easy to identify applications by color.” I completely agree with that point. However, Smooth Tasks missed this feature, and the built in light feature didn’t move entirely with the mouse pointer as well.

I cloned the code today to add, at least an initial working version, the color hot-tracking to Smooth Tasks and it was done by the afternoon. I’ve pushed the changes to the Smooth Tasks fork over at Bitbucket (which is a great site, by the way) and the image below describes how the initial work looks like. Notice the soft color glow. Here are some more pictures, with other icons.

Color Hot-tracking in Smooth Tasks on KDE

Now all I’ve to figure out is a way to enhance the glow or another component of the effect to give it a more polished look. Windows 7 also colors the border of the taskbar item with the average color but that’s not possible with the way the KDE’s glow around items work, as far as I know. Please let me know if am wrong.

To do so, one must first create the local site-packages directory, and then place the required package or module file or folder under it. The following commands are all for UNIX. ~/ expands to the user’s $HOME automatically.

# To create the required directory
mkdir -p ~/.local/lib/python2.6/site-packages

Now place the module or package folder under this directory, or link to it for achieving the same installation effect as you would with a global site-packages directory. For example, for my django copy from svn I’d do:

ln -s ~/.django-svn/django-trunk/django ~/.local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/django

Running the Python interpreter (in the same user account) will show this working:

Python 2.6.2 (release26-maint, Apr 19 2009, 01:56:41)
[GCC 4.3.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import django
>>> 

So there you have it, when you want a package just for your user account while developing just put it under the local site-packages directory. Python automatically adds this to its path (PYTHONPATH).

References: PEP 370 (Has notes for OS X and Windows users)