Posting Pertama dari Kontact

Kalau berhasil, ini adalah posting blog pertama dari Kontact. Instuksi untuk psoting ini bisa dilihat di sini: http://mikearthur.co.uk/2008/09/kde-blog-from-korganizer-howto/

Hari ini Intrepid Ibex dirilis!

Funny Thing When KDE Neon Meets Enlightenment

They say that opengeu is “when gnome meets enlightenment”. Now, what do you get when you put KDE Neon on opengeu?
This week I wanted to install opengeu to resurrect my old laptop. This laptop used to have a Kubuntu system (starting from edgy if IIRC). After Intrepid alpha emerged in the wild, I installed it fresh on the laptop, since I was going crazy about KDE4. Mind you, I have a functional Intrepid, updated to alpha 3 at the moment, and Hardy with KDE Neon on my other laptop. Although there is small problem with the nvidia card, overall it is very much reliable.
I don’t know about you, but I found that Intrepid’s KDE4 is slower (yeahh I know its alpha! but KDE Neon is OK). My poor old laptop with its ancient trident graphic card feld so slow and the rendering problem is dragging the overall perforamance to its feet. So, it was a was mistake to wipe out Hardy and put Intrepid there.
I’ve been hearing good review about enligtenment 17 (e) and decided that instead of just put Hardy back I would give the ‘e’ a spin. I installed a minimal Hardy and the xorg packages to get the X running. Then add up the opengeu repo and install the opengeu-desktop.
Yes, I really like the enligtenment. Small, feels modern but lot of eye candy. But for a full desktop it needs to borrow many programs outside. In the case of opengeu, it borrowed many packages from GNOME and XFCE. So opengeu actually is a mixed desktop, a ‘gado-gado’. If the purpose of opengeu is to have e as the WM then why it also installed metacity, GNOME control center, and co?
I think it is just a logical thing to do to promptly do “sudo apt-get remove –purge gnome-* xfce4-*”.
Then I thought why not install KDE Neon and run it inside ‘e’? I added the KDE Neon repo and install it. Minutes later its all there. I click the desktop, open konqueror, dolphin, konsole and it just feels that they runs perfectly well in enlightenment. It is faster and, because plasma is not running, there is no rendering issue when we click in the desktop.
Satisfied with the results, I then tried to run plasma. And this is what I get..:)

It tempted you to wonder why don’t we have a kickoff like that in the first place?
Now, I am back to KDE Neon fulltime. I have no KDE3, even the libraries, in that laptop, only Hardy+KDE Neon. I don’t know why but my laptop with its KDE4.2 trunk feels snappier, just like it used to.

Trident Microsystems Cyber 9525 display not fullscreen and the fix…

I have found this bug and meant to blog about it long time ago. As you know, since hardy, Kubuntu used bulletproof-X, so that we would get a basic X as fallback in case there something wrong. If you look at the /etc/X11/xorg.conf you’ll see that the configuration is very basic.
A problem arise if you happen to own a trident microsystems cyber 9525 like I have. Although my laptop (Hitachi Flora 220FX PC7NP7) is 7 years old, i know it is capable of having 1024×768 resolution fullscreen, although only in 16 color depth.
Now, no matter what you tried, you could only have a maximum of 800×600 resolution and the most annoying thing is that the screen can’t not be displayed fullscreen. There is this black area as thick as 3 cm around the screen like a border. (I guess this is what it feel in eee..). Before Hardy, I had no problem like this. Just to remind you that you will still have the same problem in Intrepid.
The fix is really simple actually. Just put the the value for Horizontal Sync and vertical refresh in /etc/X11/xorg.conf like this in the monitor section:

Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Configured Monitor”
HorizSync 30.0 – 80.0
VertRefresh 30.0 – 60.0
Option “DPMS”
Option “PreferredMode” “1024×768″
EndSection

Section “Screen”
…………….
DefaultDepth 16
…………….
EndSection
…..end you’ll get your full display back.

Intrepid alpha and jigdo problem

I like to use jigdo for my kubuntu cd because my internet connection is limited. It is always better to use the limited bandwidth for something more useful, like browsing and blogging for example…:) With jigdo we can cut down the time to download the CD image. I’ve been using jigdo for the first alpha series of Intrepid and I always encountered problems. I always followed the official link to download the jidgo advertised in kubuntu announcement. Turn out that some of files on the jigdo template that made up the iso afterward had been removed from repositories. When I encountered the problem in Intrepid Alpha 1, I managed to get the missing files from this repo: cn.archive.ubuntu.com (china?) which eventually is slower than Indonesian mirror. Three days ago when I wanted to download Alpha 3, I stumbled the same problem, this time 15 packages were missing, I switched the repo again to cn.archive.ubuntu.com but only got 10 packages and still missing 5.
I decided not to waste more time and decided to download newer jigdo template which is from the daily images. In case you didn’t know you can get them at kubuntu daily images. So my advise is to use the jidgo template from here since it is in sync with the ever changing repo.
I did managed to download all the files with jigdo this time. I decided to fresh install my intrepid and it failed. Obviously there were some kde3 dependency problems that make it impossible to install adept, amarok, and others (and yes..that included kubuntu-desktop).
I don’t know whether the official cd image had this problem and haven’t check the launchpad on this issue. But if you had this problem and insist to procede with the install you can install a minimal sistem. After it finished installation of base system and you key in the username and password actually you are almost there. So when you were faced with the failed install screen (red background) you just skip the process and choose to proceed with the installation of grub. You will end up with a minimal system. But from there you can add up the packages. Since the dependency of kubuntu-desktop is borked, you can’t install it, instead try to install the packages one by one (xorg, konqueror, kdm, konsole, kdebase-workspace, etc).

Desktop efek kwin terbaru di KDE 4.1

KDE 4.1 membawa beberapa efek kwin baru, antara lain:
- flip switch

- cover switch

- snow

- wobbly window

Efek-efek ini sebenarnya sudah lama dapat kita nikmati dengan menggunakan compiz tetapi sekarang pengguna KDE dapatmenikmati efek tersebut dengan menggunakan kwin yang lebih terintegrasi dengan KDE. Untuk KDE 4.2 kwin mengenalkan efek baru lain yang merupakan primadona di compiz yaitu efek kubus. Silakan lihat videonya di you-tube.

Handle baru plasmoid di KDE 4.1 rc1

Ternyata KDE 4.1 rc1 memperkenalkan beberapa hal baru yang belum ada di KDE 4.1 beta sebelumnya. Setidaknya ada 2 perubahan baru hasil commit setelah beta 2 kemaren. Pertama, adalah perubahan pada handle plasmoid yang lebih sederhana

Kedua, applet/plasmoid yang ada di panel sekarang bisa dengan mudah dipindah-pindahkan. Cukup klik kanan, pilih panel setting, maka aplet tinggal diklik terus digeser-geser. Kemudahan untuk menggeserkan aplet ini, disamping mengubah besarnya panel, adalah salah satu hal yang paling banyak diminta oleh user KDE 4. Sebelumnya cuma di OpenSUSE 11.0 kita bisa menggeserkan aplet di panel karena mereka sudah membuat patch tersendiri di KDE 4.0.4.
Sampai sekarang paket kubuntu intrepid di mirror dl2.foss-web.web.id belum semuanya terupdate dengan KDE rc1. Paket kdeplasmoids terbaru misalnya belum diupload jadi kita harus uninstall dulu paket ini karena jika tidak plasma akan crash!

Kubuntu Intrepid sudah versi 4.0.98

ini adalah screenshot terbaru dari Kubuntu Intrepid Alpha 2. Nampaknya versi ini sudah mulai upgrade ke KDE 4.1 rc1 (versi 4.0.98). Saat ini beberapa paket seperti kdebase sudah versi itu, mungkin beberapa hari lagi semua paket KDE sudah diupgrade.
Salah satu perubahan visual yang nampak nyata adalah wallpaper di bawah ini, blue curl. Wallpaper ini senada dengan kplash baru yang menggunakan gambar yang sama tetapi berwarna hitam.

Kubuntu Intrepid Alpha 2 (3) ….. Fix untuk iwl3945

Setelah mengecek ke sistem Hardy dan bowsing ke launchpad
saya menemukan bahwa permasalahan iwl3945 sebagaimana saya sebutkan di posting sebelumnya muncul karena tidak adanya file iwlwifi-3945-1.ucode. Setelah dicek dengan apt-file ternyata file ini disupply oleh paket linux-restricted-modules-common.
Setelah paket ini di-instal, lakukan:
“sudo modprobe -r iwl3945″
“sudo modprobe iwl3945″
Bing! lampu LED menyala. Wireless berhasil berfungsi.

Penjelajahan di dunia KDE 4.1 berlanjut

Aplikasi blog yang saya sukai adalah kblogger karena sederhana. Kalau dalam KDE 3, kblogger hanya merupakan “aplikasi setengah hati” karena hanya merupakan applet untuk kicker maka dalam KDE 4, kblogger sudah menjadi “aplikasi penuh”.

Yang perlu diingat jika ingin menggunakan kblogger versi 1.0 untuk KDE 4 adalah pada saat memasukkan alamat blog jangan lupa mencantumkan http:// karena jika tidak maka kblogger akan komplain dengan menanyakan apakah kita sudah on-line atau belum.

Hal ini saya alami ketika mensetting alamat blog saya di wordpress. Saya tidak tahu apakah masalah yang sama akan timbul untuk blog yang lain.

Kubuntu Intrepid Alpha 2 (2)

Hmmmm…hari ini saya install kubuntu intrepid yang sudah didownload iso-nya kemaren. Semuanya berjalan baik…kecuali wireless (iwl3945). Wireless tidak berfungsi, wlan0 yang biasanya tidak ada masalah selama ini (termasuk pada waktu alpha 1) tidak muncul. Di dmesg ada keluhan:
iwl3945: iwlwifi-3945-1.ucode firmware file req failed: Reason -2
iwl3945: Could not read microcode: -2

Untuk sementara saya harus menggunakan koneksi kabel dulu sementara cari pemecahannya.