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The KDE Underworld

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Open HardwareNovember 1

Being a hacker, the part of free and open-source software that really appeals to me is being able to tinker.  This is why I use Arch Linux rather than its more polished compatriots.  But I’m also interested in the way volunteer communities largely composed of hoobyists and enthusiasts can be leveraged to solve problems that are normally very expensive.

Even after only working in the software industry for a couple of months, I can already see how writing software is an expensive business for companies like Microsoft.  Developers’ time is not cheap, and it takes a lot of time to produce a product of any complexity.

But you only have to look at Linux or KDE or GNU to see the levels of complexity that can be reached by people working essentially for free.  Sure, there are people being paid to work on all of those areas, but even then the fruits of their labour are being given away for free.  They can’t even do what Qt Software does and simultaneously sell a commercial version and give away a free one, because they don’t own the copyright to the whole codebase and hence can’t dual-license it.

All this is why I was interested to read about

Music in the AirOctober 31

I upgraded the Archlinux AUR mysqle package (an easy way to satisfy the most annoying dependency for Amarok 2) to 5.0.70, from 5.0.60.  I’m not sure why it was 5.0.60 in the first place, since 5.0.68 was out when I made the build script.  I blame the fact that 0 looks quite similar to 8 on a console…

Having a new job has meant that my KDE involvement has taken a dip over the last couple of months.  I realised today that I’d completely missed the hard freeze to get MPD support into the Now Playing dataengine for Plasma.  It will be in for 4.3, I promise.  I might even have pluggable backends by then, and a shared library between Now Playing and Kopete.

Speaking of Now Playing, the applet needs some serious work.  It works, providing you have it on the desktop, but it’s not as pretty as it could be.  Trying to put it on the panel seems to quite successfully screw up Plasma.  Which is a pity, really, because that’s where it’s most useful.  I will endeavour to fix this before the 4.2 is released, but help would be very much appreciated.  I don’t get on with user interface design.

Another pet project that never really got off the ground is my reimplementing of the slideshow screensaver.  Ever since I started using it (in KDE 3), the fact that it occasionally gets stuck has annoyed me.  I believe this is down to a design issue - it depends on the paint even

/me hates my DVD driveOctober 3

I’ve finally given up on my DVD drive.  For a long time, VLC has been the only thing that would countenance even trying to play DVDs on it, and even that occasionally claimed that there was an audio CD in the drive until it was removed and put in again.

Now, after upgrading libdvdcss and unplugging a harddrive from the IDE channel my DVD drive is on, trying to play dvds gets me:

export DVDCSS_VERBOSE=2 && vlc /dev/dvd

libdvdnav: Using dvdnav version 0.1.10 from http://dvd.sf.net
libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.9 for DVD access
libdvdcss debug: opening target `/dev/dvd’
libdvdcss debug: using libc for access
libdvdcss debug: disc is scrambled
libdvdcss debug: requesting AGID
libdvdcss error: drive would not authenticate
libdvdread: Could not open /dev/dvd with libdvdcss.
libdvdread: Can’t open /dev/dvd for reading
libdvdnav: vm: faild to open/read the DVD

Epic fail.  Other people have had this problem with AOpen drives, so I think it’s high time I got a new DVD rewriter.  Preferably one that can write double-layer DVDs (which mine currently can’t).

The main reason I’m posting this is because, after I googled for problems with DVD playback, I discovered that almost no-one knows about the DVDCSS_VERBOSE environment variable.  There’s a corresponding one (DVDREAD_VERBOSE) for libdvdread, although I couldn’t get

A JourneySeptember 20

I’ve been a Linux user, on and off, for some eight years now. My system has been single-boot Linux for between four and five years. And I contribute to one of the biggest user-visible projects in the free software world, KDE. So, how did I get here?

To start at the beginning, the first computer I remember was my mother’s BBC Micro B. My parents only actually threw that out about a year ago. It was like a large keyboard, with a flat block at the back that contained the actual processor and so forth. And what was essentially a small TV screen for a monitor. It had a word processor (which was my mum’s use for it), BBC BASIC (my first, disappointing and short-lived, foray into programming) and an amazing collection of games, including one called Wizalong that involved two witches on a see-saw. All this on a few giant, low-capacity floppy discs (5 1/4″, I believe).

From there we went straight to an IBM 486 with Windows 3.1. It was a whole 33MHz! Here we got the magic new 3 1/2″ floppy drive with a whole 1.44Mb storage. It had pictures, icons and WYSIWYG office applications. But no Wizalong. So, as an 8-year-old (or there abouts) the box it came in was far more entertaining.

The last shop/factory-built PC we got was a Pentium I 166MHz machine with Windows 95. A fancy new interface, and even some games (I think my favourite that came with the computer was Gi

25 Years of GNUSeptember 6

Stephen Fry wishes GNU a happy 25th birthday.

“GNU and Linux are the twin pillars of the free software community”.  I’m sure the BSD folk would have something to say about that…