After some initial struggles (gentoo-user mailing list) I have managed to update to KDE4.2.
I will not say that this applies to everyone, nor will I make a sweeping statement like "KDE is back", but, KDE is back on my desktop and I'm reasonably happy with it!
I'm using a reasonably dated machine, AMD Athlon XP 2500, NVidia GeForce FX 5200 128MB and 640MB DDR333. Not the greatest machine, but after disabling all desktop effects, things are running quite smooth.
I decided to give the new Kickoff menu a go since KDE4.1.3. Although it's not what I am used to, it is still not something that will completely deter me from using KDE4. After all, if I really can't adapt, I can always go back to the classic style menu.
There is however a few things that I think could be improved. The first thing is adding shortcuts to the bottom panel. I always keep a few icons in my panel - konsole, the home folder and firefox at least. When I wish to add an icon to the panel , the widgets need to be unlocked. I feel that even when the widgets are locked, you should still be able to add icons to the panel. Having different context menus depending on the locked status of the widgets are a big confusing. For me the main advantage of locking the widgets is the absence of that configuration bar next to desktop applets. But, this is also no show stopper, I only need to add shortcuts for my favourite applications once.
Another thing didn't work that great was Okular. I opened "Learning CMake", but it was painfully slow. I haven't had time to test it with another PDF reader like xpdf or kpdf, so maybe it's just the PDF document?
But overall I'm impressed with KDE4.2. From now on this will most definitely be my default desktop!
Open source flash workflow
I needed to do a project in flash and I needed to find a way to do so on my favourite OS - gentoo linux.
After browsing through a lot of google search results, and links on osflash.org I found what I was looking for. Unfortunately I could not find a single utility to do everything, but true to the linux spirit I found multiple separate utilities that could be used to accomplish what I wanted.
First and most important is haXe. haXe is a open source web programming language. It can compile to javascript, php and swf and the syntax and semantics felt familiar enough for me (I'm used to C++). Using haXe you can produce swf files that can be opened using Adobe's flash player.
The second important utility that I found was swfmill. swfmill compiles xml and resources into swf. This is very usefull as it allows you to build resource libraries that you can use from your haXe code.
I decided to use make as the build system - didn't want to learn too many new things at once.
I used vim as my code editor since I wanted to test what doing a whole project in vim would be like and syntax highlighting exists for haXe!
For graphics I used a combination of gimp and inkscape.
This combination of utilities enabled me to create a flash application without needing to buy the Flash SDK, windows, photoshop or anything for that matter. It could also be possible to target an older version of flash like flash 7, which could then be opened using the open source gnash!
After browsing through a lot of google search results, and links on osflash.org I found what I was looking for. Unfortunately I could not find a single utility to do everything, but true to the linux spirit I found multiple separate utilities that could be used to accomplish what I wanted.
First and most important is haXe. haXe is a open source web programming language. It can compile to javascript, php and swf and the syntax and semantics felt familiar enough for me (I'm used to C++). Using haXe you can produce swf files that can be opened using Adobe's flash player.
The second important utility that I found was swfmill. swfmill compiles xml and resources into swf. This is very usefull as it allows you to build resource libraries that you can use from your haXe code.
I decided to use make as the build system - didn't want to learn too many new things at once.
I used vim as my code editor since I wanted to test what doing a whole project in vim would be like and syntax highlighting exists for haXe!
For graphics I used a combination of gimp and inkscape.
This combination of utilities enabled me to create a flash application without needing to buy the Flash SDK, windows, photoshop or anything for that matter. It could also be possible to target an older version of flash like flash 7, which could then be opened using the open source gnash!
Putting haXe to wood
After using haXe for a personal project and finding it quite useful I decided to do a little write-up on what I did.
Being related to a certain individual (my sister) with a dream to establish an "audio visual print and digital" magazine (PostBox), the duty of creating the digital part was naturally bestowed upon me. I needed to create a cross-platform DVD interface (the kind of interface you view on you pc, not your dvd player).
The DVD contains photos, music, video and articles from various artists. All of this content needed to be handled in an efficient way that works on any PC regardless of the software installed (read codecs). This led me to flash.
But this didn't completely satisfy me, I also had another consideration: I am most at home in a linux environment (gentoo specifically) and I wished to do all the work in this environment. (okay, so I like the idea of free software as well)
This led me to haXe! After taking a look at the community and trying haXe out for a play project (which I may still finish someday), I decided that this was the tool to use.
I have had to solve many problems (some with plenty of time, other with way too little sleep and a tight deadline) and I wish to discuss some of those.
In this series of posts I wish to discuss the following topics:
And for those asking the obvious question - I will make the source code that I'm not too embarrassed about available under some open source license, BSD or GPL.
Please leave all your suggestions and any questions you may have!
Being related to a certain individual (my sister) with a dream to establish an "audio visual print and digital" magazine (PostBox), the duty of creating the digital part was naturally bestowed upon me. I needed to create a cross-platform DVD interface (the kind of interface you view on you pc, not your dvd player).
The DVD contains photos, music, video and articles from various artists. All of this content needed to be handled in an efficient way that works on any PC regardless of the software installed (read codecs). This led me to flash.
But this didn't completely satisfy me, I also had another consideration: I am most at home in a linux environment (gentoo specifically) and I wished to do all the work in this environment. (okay, so I like the idea of free software as well)
This led me to haXe! After taking a look at the community and trying haXe out for a play project (which I may still finish someday), I decided that this was the tool to use.
I have had to solve many problems (some with plenty of time, other with way too little sleep and a tight deadline) and I wish to discuss some of those.
In this series of posts I wish to discuss the following topics:
- The flash linux workflow
- Getting started with haXe
- Creating a generic audio player
- Creating a generic gallery
- Shared libraries in haXe
- Preparing video and audio for use with flash
And for those asking the obvious question - I will make the source code that I'm not too embarrassed about available under some open source license, BSD or GPL.
Please leave all your suggestions and any questions you may have!
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