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Posts about kde (old posts, page 25)

Me and FLOSS in the late '90s

I have no idea how, but I ran in­to this in Lin­ux­to­day:

KDE Pro­gram­ming Tu­to­ri­al 0.2 (Dec 22nd 1998, 00:09:36 )

Rober­to Alsi­na an­nounced that he up­load­ed to ft­p.kde.org the ver­sion 0.2 of his ex­cel­lent pro­gram­ming tu­to­ri­al. It is al­so avail­able here. Hope­ful­ly, this must-have ma­te­ri­al will be soon in­clud­ed in the kdes­dk pack­age and in CVS.

Now, this was pret­ty shock­ing be­cause I don't re­mem­ber writ­ing it (any­one knows where a copy may be?). I have no idea what was in it, and in fac­t, the idea of peo­ple learn­ing C++ from me in 1998 is so stupid it's shock­ing, since I knew very lit­tle.

Then it hit me, the URL! Ul­tra­7? That was my 486 at col­lege [1].

It had a web­server? What on earth had I been drink­ing back then? Why can't I re­mem­ber this???

Way­back ma­chine, come here! Fetch!

Here's my first home page. I must say it's pret­ty good. It's not gar­ish. Very We­b2.0 in the abun­dant white space.

First in­ter­est­ing thing: there is at least one ex­tant copy of PyX­Forms, my first free soft­ware pro­jec­t, used by ab­so­lute­ly noone.

And there are even two cool screen­shot of a func­tion­al pro­gram noone ev­er used [2]:

im1im2

In fac­t, I have no idea how I did that high­light­ed mes­sage dis­play.

Then all that pro­to-­good taste goes away when you reach the page for my most "pop­u­lar" project ev­er... Krn in my 1999 home page [4]. It' so 1999 free soft­ware style. All that's miss­ing is an elec­tric blue back­ground.

It seems I had dis­cov­ered The Gimp and it's ban­ner script­s!

BTW: I won­der what's Mag­nus Ref­tel do­ing nowa­days? We used to ex­change dozens of mails a day and for some rea­son we lost con­tac­t.

There was al­so a mail­ing list ar­chive for the very very very first posts of our pro­to LUG (which would lat­er be­come LUGLI)

And here's the best part, and the one that makes me kin­da sad... Themes for Qt1.

You can read a lit­tle about them in this thread.

I have writ­ten about them once or twice be­fore but here's the short ver­sion:

Raster­man was start­ing to hack themes for Gtk. I de­cid­ed they could­n't be the on­ly ones with this cool new tech­nol­o­gy but I had the big dis­ad­van­tage of not be­ing able to touch Qt's code be­cause of li­cens­ing is­sues. So I in­ter­cept­ed the draw­ing events us­ing a LD_PRELOAD hack and im­ple­ment­ed a theme full of gra­di­ents with­out mod­i­fy­ing or re­com­pil­ing Qt or KDE.

Now that's one of the most im­pres­sive hacks I have ev­er per­formed, even if it was a hack done with the most evil code ev­er, and... there seems to be no ex­tant copy of the code or the screen­shots.

Which is kin­da sad, in­deed.

A bit sad about this

It seems that dur­ing the big SVN con­ver­sion some da­ta were lost in com­mit­s.

So, if you check KDE's svn for the re­al­ly old stuff, it has no au­thor in­for­ma­tion.

For ex­am­ple, check this out:

http://web­svn.kde.org/branch­es/KDE/1.1/k­denet­work/krn/

I know I wrote pret­ty much ev­ery­thing there, but you are prob­a­bly not go­ing to no­tice it, and I spent a good cou­ple of years work­ing re­al­ly hard on that thing.

Sure, it was crap, but it was hard-­worked crap, and there is at least one thing I am slight­ly not ashamed of: TypeLay­out, which is still nicer than most tool­kits have, even if it was sham­less­ly copied from Lin­ux­Con­f.

But what the heck, it's old stuff.

KDE 4.0 beta1 released!

Which is usu­al­ly the point where I switch to new ver­sion­s...

BTW: Cnuth? Best re­lease name for KDE ... ev­er!

Please, KDE marketing guys, start showboating!

I am no longer on plan­etKDE so this will prob­a­bly not be read by many in the KDE com­mu­ni­ty but...

Please, please, please start mak­ing big noise about the Asus eee. It ships with KDE and is ex­pect­ed to sell "up to 500.000 by mid­dle of next year and 5,000,000 by 2009" [1].

Is that num­ber not big enough? It's prob­a­bly more than our cur­rent in­stalled base.

Way too excited about the Asus eee

Re­al­ly. I can imag­ine hav­ing one of these as my main com­put­er (with ex­ter­nal HD and mon­i­tor).

I prob­a­bly won't and use my ful­l-­size note­book or a desk­top when at home­/of­fice, but it should take me back to the days when I sim­ply car­ried my Li­bret­to ev­ery­where be­cause it was light enough.

Here's the best re­view I found so far.

Peo­ple wor­ry about the 4GB or 8GB "disk". If you keep your me­dia (ISOs, movies, mu­sic) on an ex­ter­nal HD, you prob­a­bly can have ev­ery­thing else there.

Us­ing rsync to keep two box­es synced... lots of po­ten­tial.

I am prob­a­bly buy­ing two of the cheap ones.


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