Take a look at http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/4179 and give it a try. You may find that it’s right for you in providing a quick and easy way to access files.

And I again, kudos to the KDE crowd that made even the scrollbar super slick here (do this with a folder that has enough files that you have to scroll).

Thanks for visiting! Any suggestions for content that would be helpful to you? Contact me.

Amarok is not a simple media player and I don’t think it’s intended to be. I’ve said all along that KDE isn’t the ’simple’ choice, but it is packed with powerful functionality. Amarok goes right along with that. I have some gripes with it, but I’ll wait to post about those after I’ve resolved them.

One thing I’ve started doing is rating my music within Amarok so that I can build a dynamic playlist that plays all my favorites. This presents a problem since like everyone it seems, I have a lot of music and no time to rate it. This is what I’ve done and maybe it will work for you.

Ratings

The most important thing when setting the ratings for your music is what you want it to mean. I think when it started I was hung up on putting how good I thought the music was. But really, I don’t care about that. My rating criteria was simple: how often do I want to hear it?

It makes it a lot easier to ‘decide’ what rating to give it. You can also rate in half stars but I don’t want that much granularity.

New Sounds

Next set up a dynamic playlist. Go to Playlists > Dynamic Playlists and add a Proportional Bias. I will say that the ‘Bias’ label is confusing but just don’t think about it. Set the Proportion to 100%, and Match ‘Rating’ With ‘equal to’ 0 stars. Now add more Proportional Biases for any genres you want to exclude- I excluded Audiobooks and a couple others. When you’re finished, save the new dynamic playlist. If you make changes, save them as a new playlist- saving over the old one didn’t actually save on my system.

Now while your music plays, use the global hotkeys to save the new rating as you listen. Like what you hear? Set the rating with Super (which is usually the Windows key) and 1/2/3/4/5 depending on the rating you want to give it. And don’t stress about it. If you miss rating because you were busy and didn’t think about it- don’t panic! It’ll come up again.

The iPhone shows an error when you try to open an Excel file you’ve created in OpenOffice. The exact error is

The document was created with an unsupported version of excel.

Now it may seem at a glance to be unfair. OpenOffice support for MS Office formats is pretty reliable. No desktop OS has trouble with it.

The trick to solving this is in the error message itself. The file was created with an unsupported version of Excel. You’re thinking “nah…”. Yes. Create a blank file in Excel. Open it in OpenOffice. Paste all you want. Save. Ta-da. You now have an iPhone and Blackberry compatible file.

Here’s one in case you need it:
Blank Excel File

I am just loving KDE. It is not perfect. But it is fun to use and (almost) never gets in my way. Instead it shows me new ways to work. Can’t wait to learn more.

Alone among desktop developers, KDE seems to have grasped that the free desktop is no longer trying to equal the proprietary ones and that the task now is to imagine what the computer desktop could become.

Bruce Byfield

Watch some videos!

To be honest, I’m not too in love with Facebook but I’m always happy to see a company use a recognized standard to do something. Facebook now uses the Jabber instant messaging protocol to do chat which means Kopete (and many other instant messengers) now support Facebook chat without a hitch! Instructions at the Facebook site.

One caveat- no SSL currently.

As I’ve started using KDE (alright- the KDE Software Compilation), one thing I’ve run into is that all the dialogs seem to default to certain folders. I ascribe to David Allen’s Getting Things Done and have tried to create a desktop environment that reinforces those habits. So I don’t use the ‘Documents’ folder. As it turns out if I had just deleted the folder the Documents path would have reverted to the home folder (supposedly).

But the better way is to adjust the paths the system looks for. You can find them under System Settings > About Me > Paths. That cleared up some of my problems. Say what you want about having too many options- it’s nice that there’s a nice UI to change those options.

I know. I’ve railed against KDE for a long time. And yet here we are. Leaving GNOME behind.

Why

To be frank, part of it I’m sure is that I’m kind of restless with technology. And KDE has a lot that has impressed me. Not just slick appearance- maybe even too slick- but there is a focus in KDE that feels lacking in GNOME. I think part of that is that with so many of the major Linux distributions- Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc.- standardized on GNOME, there’s lots of development but it’s fragmented. I like the ideas behind GNOME Shell, but I don’t understand how that justifies a 3.0 label. As far as I can tell, the code that makes up the rest of GNOME will still just making baby step improvements. That’s fine. But the KDE 4 evolution to me says a lot about KDE, their ambition, and their potential. They are moving. There is a solid foundation- still a little buggy for me, but pretty solid. GNOME by comparison seems increasingly fragmented with different subsystems and architectures leaking out the sides. Do not misunderstand. I love GNOME and I love using GNOME. But KDE is what I have chosen now. I think it’s the future.

How

The great thing, one of them anyway, about using openSUSE is that it has fantastic distributions of both GNOME and KDE software. So it was just a matter of installing what I wanted. It will take a bit to get used to some apps, but I’ve been surprised how easy it has been to switch. Even KMail had an ‘import from Evolution’ option that made that shockingly easy. DigiKam read in my photos and Amarok is playing my music.

Should You Switch?

You don’t have to. Look, I think there is a lot to like about KDE, but it’s not perfect. Points I’ve made about it in the past I think are still valid- there are too many options, an inability to make choices for users. And yet, for me and my productivity, those are great, powerful features that make my workflow better. Does that mean we will lose users that can’t think? Yes. Luckily, most people can think- what I’ve found is that many just aren’t willing to- they have something that works ok so why would they switch? There has to be something that makes not switching painful.

What It Means for Tuxrocket

It is my site, so if you’re using GNOME, I apologize, but I will be moving things to a KDE focus. What I present here needs to be what I feel deeply or I will not make time for it in my life.

For the longest time I’ve been getting this error dialog when I log in:


Error activating XKB configuration.
It can happen under various circumstances:
- a bug in libxklavier library
- a bug in X server (xkbcomp, xmodmap utilities)
- X server with incompatible libxkbfile implementation

If you report this situation as a bug, please include:
- The result of xprop -root | grep XKB
- The result of gconftool-2 -R /desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/kbd


Nothing bad happens (I think). Just annoying. I have the layout set to USA Macintosh and the keyboard model as MacBook/MacBook Pro. If I set it to Apple Laptop it works without the error. But- I have a MacBook Pro. Through trial and error I changed the layout to plain USA and now have no errors with MacBook/MacBook Pro selected. Yay.

For others with similar issues- this thread may be enlightening.

It may seem odd on a ‘Use 100% of the Time’ blog but occasionally I have to use other OSes to check for browser compatibility. Maybe someday I can even throw that out, but in the mean time, this chore is necessary but usually only once every week or two.

When I fired up VirtualBox it wouldn’t run- no doubt due to changes I’ve made. And the kernel module wouldn’t compile. I spent a long time working on this. I had identical versions of kernel-default and kernel-source installed. For whatever reason linux-kernel-headers has a different version (this is apparently normal and was a red herring).

I would get lots of errors like warning: "KERNEL_VERSION" is not defined and cc1: error: include/linux/autoconf.h: No such file or directory

After a long time searching and installing, uninstalling, reinstalling packages, I finally found this thread http://www.pubbs.net/opensuse/200909/84336/ which got me on the right track.

1. Install kernel-sys

That’s it. I was suddenly able to compile etc. Yay!

Way back when I was starting out as a web designer we used technology from RealNetworks to do some things that were, at the time, pretty amazing. But they quickly got left behind. To the point that the other day when I was attending a webinar, I realized I haven’t had RealPlayer installed for years.

I made an attempt to get it- it wasn’t in openSUSE at all- not even in the openSUSE Build Service. Not even for the open source Helix Player. But I downloaded the raw installer from their site.

I ran the command line installer. I wasn’t able to get the plug-in working and rather than leaving it on my system, I decided to get rid of it. The next day, downloads of supported media types were still showing a RealPlayer icon. Looking online I didn’t find any clues, nor could I figure out any switches I could run on the installer to remove the installation. Finally I poked around in the files it installed. Within the RealPlayer it installed to was a postinst folder with a number files like uninstall_icon_resource.sh. I ran all the ‘remove’ and ‘uninstall’ scripts and am now back in business, RealPlayer free.