KDE 4.6 on Arch Linux

The first reaction to KDE 4.6 on Arch Linux was that it looked nicer. Minor display issues in Netbook workspace were gone.

Earlier, it would often display only one favourite application. If one dragged the icon to the left edge, all would show up. Some times the application categories would not show at the start. Searching for an application would make them appear.

The graphics effects would cause the desktop to hang. Now, that is working very well. One nice new feature is that one can close a window on the screen displaying all the windows.

The power button of Lenovo S10-3 would not trigger the power off/suspend menu on KDE Plasma Netbook workspace. This problem is sort of resolved. On first attempt, it takes about half a minute to show the dialog. But if one cancels it and retries, the menu is displayed immediately.

But there is a new 'bug'. Wifi does not connect automatically. It waits for me to click ok on the password. I will try with a fresh KDE session just to confirm if the problem is related to some change in the configuration files.


Update:
The 'bug', where the network manager fails to start the wifi without any user interaction, seems to be that I was not using the KDE Wallet. Once I used the KDE Wallet, network manager starts the wifi without any prompt.

Meego on Fedora

Comparing with Smeegol, I found that in /usr/bin/startmoblin, the following line is commented:
#export GCONF_DEFAULT_SOURCE_PATH=/etc/gconf/2/moblin.path

The related configuration files are also missing. This results in the default
plugin being used by mutter and the screen being white. 

By adding the configuration files and making the needed changes, the desired plugin was selected but failed to load.

I added my comments to a bug report in Fedora bugzilla. It seems that meego is working in rawhide and will be working in Fedora 15.

I will try if by selecting a few of the packages from rawhide, I can get it to work.

Revisiting Smeegol

My experience with Smeegol had been pretty good except for getting the wifi to work. Now that the wifi on my Lenovo S10-3 was normal, I decided to retry Smeegol. Smeegol 1.0.5 is still based on 11.3 OpenSuse repositories. I could not find one based on the in-progress 11.4.

I could install the wifi driver. However, I had to build it from source as the Packman repository had the binary only for the i586 version. The official Meego boots in under 30 sec. Smeegol took 40 sec. Not a big difference. Unlike Meego, Smeegol uses gdm to launch uxlaunch. The script startmoblin is run using the /usr/share/xsessions/smeegol.desktop.

The directory /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.moblin contains the gconf options for smeegol desktop.

It seems straightforward. So, the question is why is meego desktop not working in Fedora14? It just shows a white screen on Lenovo and on my desktop system. It has been reported as a bug in Fedora's bugzilla. Need to dig and try to narrow down the cause.

Stastical analysis of the importance of Mummy and Papa

It is good that someone, even if British, analyzed the composition of the Indian parliament. I wish an open source tool had been used instead of SPSS even though that would not have made the results any less disturbing to me.

The dataset  is available. So, may be someone interested in stats can experiment with open source tools.

Effective sharing for social networks

I stopped myself from sharing a link thinking that I had already shared enough for the day. There has to be a better way than the current - broadcast to connections or to a group among them.

It is easier for me to categorize what is being shared than to think of a group of recipients. Two broad categories I use are technology and play (to borrow the term from Google reader). If categories were available, I may be less inclined to feel that my quota of sharing for the day is over.

As a consumer of shared information, I may choose to follow, say, only play category from some connections. Somewhat like turning off viewing of twitter feeds in Buzz.

In the Facebook-like scenario, it is hard to ignore a request for being a 'friend' from an acquaintance but it may be useful to restrict the categories he/she may see. It is somewhat like a group but, I think, more amorphous.

Furthermore, as a 'friend', I may choose to see/or ignore posts from specific categories on a connection by connection basis.