Tag: KDE
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Go KDE 4! Go!
I’ve finally fallen in love with KDE. Finally.
The first live CDs I ever tried were the Knoppix ones and I never really used it much to love KDE. And then came the other distro days (then Mandrake, SuSE, and so on) where I didn’t stay with Linux long enough. Then came the Gentoo days where I never really enjoyed my KDE experience owing to slow startup times of a few multimedia apps. I’ve been using GNOME for a long time until the day KDE 4 RC 2 came out.
KDE apps are on a totally different level compared to GNOME apps as far as my experience goes (and my experience goes with apps such as K3b vs. Brasero, digiKam vs. <nothing-yet>, and so on). You’ll notice powerful, feature-rich apps in KDE that aren’t written by Novell’s Mono addicts if you’re not comfortable with Mono apps.
Listening to music started getting a lot more enjoyable with amaroK and even to this day Amarok is the only one. A screenshot of Amarok-2 preview. Look nowhere else for a music player.
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Gentoo, KDE, amd64!?
Not so long ago, I gave LG3D liveCD a shot only to end up losing a partition 😐 The included file-manager was at fault here. All I did was try browsing the contents of that partition and it’s gone!
I lost another partition. This was when I was trying out the pirated copy of MacOSX86 freely available on LAN. The Partition Utility on the installation DVD only looked good, but very deadly to actually use. Ah well.
All this activity was on the Seagate 160GB HDD. A faithful old chap from one of the best HD makers out there who sell in India. The other ill-fated hard drive is my infamous Samsung 160GB SATA HDD. My Gentoo installation on it got screwed when I was trying to rebuild the reiserfs partition’s trees. Apparently, it was filled with bad-blocks 🙁
So, made use of the other hard drive which recently suffered partition losses 😛
Installed gentoo-amd64 as usual. Emerged gnome-light and a few essentiall apps. Was happy for a few days until one day we had to test out our LAN TV setup for the upcoming cricket matches. VLC was our friend. Had to recompile the kernel with v4l support and stuff and VLC was ready to go. It picked up stuff pretty well from the TV card we had. The CPU usage was however, heavy compared to a similar setup on a neighbour’s 32-bit windows installation.
All that stuff for a month or so ago. Before the earlier post on LDFLAGS.
Now coming to the title of this post. I emerged KDE out of boredom after seeing a lower-end comp showing very good startup speeds for KDE apps on openSUSE. Surprised as I was, I quickly went to #gentoo-kde on freenode and asked around a bit on how to go about this KDE business. There are a lot of split ebuilds and takes a lot of time to go through. I began with one of those overlays which had a
“kde-lite” ebuild which was neat and just what I wanted 🙂
KDE is good. I usually prefer running a desktop with all-Qt/KDE or all GTK+/Gnome. I didn’t want to use Firefox or Linuxdcpp on KDE. So I had to get opera whose flashplugin wrapper never plays youtube or googlevideo :|. It too, like mozilla’s firefox binary, doesn’t render indic-fonts properly. Konqueror does it fine. But it seems to be unsupported by many websites even though Konqueror claims standards compliance.
Yestereve, we had a meeting to discuss MEMP’s current development status and plans for the future. Arun asked us if we are going to support amd64 and asked us “will we be able to convince that plain x86 installation is better than amd64”? Suprised as U was, on asking him the howcomes, he logged into my comp and fired up firefox and mplayer and did the same on his 32-bit gentoo Os and compared the ‘htop’ monitor. Firefox and mplayer on my comp was unusually, strangely, using up too much memory. Is the 64-bit OS at fault here? Is it worth all the trouble? Or should I just install a 32-bit Os and be happy with it?
(this post is kind of written in a hurry)