KDE 4.3 RC3

You may already know that KDE 4.3 RC3 released, and release delayed for a week. I can't stand that news, I thought that is will be released this Monday, but another 2 weeks... And of course I want to try it without harming my every day system with KDE 4.2.4 and only stable packages. In that moment I remembered about kde4live CDs, that I used some time before SUSE 11.1 released. And of course I found it fast enought using Google. And there are good news - on top of the page there is message that KDE 4.3 RC3 already packed to LiveCD and can be downloaded from SUSE's repositories. Well, Kubuntu users, don't you feel betrayed that your favourite "KDE-oriented" distro is far behind great and green OpenSUSE?

Kompare - the only valuable diff for M$Windows

I used KDE and Linux for many years, and of course I was shocked when I had to switch to Windows in new office and I didn't found all those little but important tools KDE guys made for us all. Today I will tell you about Kompare.

My history as Kompare user
While being developer from time to time you need to diff between two files. Of course almost any IDE and other development-oriented tool have own diff UI. Of course I used many of them, some are more useful than others. For example older Eclipse diffs were so ugly that it was hard to look at, IDEA had horizontal 3-way comparison, older NetBeans versions - vertical 3-was comparison, KDiff3 showed too much of not required data and also was ugly enought. Only SmartSVN and Kompare used two-way clean and informative diff, but while SmartSVN was written in Swing - Kompare used all possible KDE features including font antialiasing, user's colouring and icon theme and of course smooth comparison blocks. While being feature-rich it was only comparison tool with great UI, so I stuck with it.

Switching to Windows
Of course after I got used with pretty tool like this - it's hard to move to something ugly and not so usable. When on the new job I had use Windows - I went to wikipedia to search for another file comparison tool. And what do you think, I downloaded every free-to-download tool and tried it - and it failed. Some of them took 3-4 steps before show you actual diff, others were overloaded with features, others had ugly UIs. I couldn't make myself use them. I've been lucky and by that time NetBeans team swithed to 2-way diff, and I used NetBeans for even smallest comparison operations.

kde4win salvation
I was lucky enought not to die before kde4win project released with Kompare ported to Windows. Of course few first releases didn't helped me also, but starting with 4.2.0 release Kompare was fully functional. And not with kde4win you can use this great tool if file comparison operations is critical for you.

installing
It's not hard. You don't even have to compile something. Only few steps:

1. Go to gnuwin32 diffutils, download and install.


2. Download kdewin installer and launch it.


3. After installing kde4win - start kompare and in "Diff" section show him where your diff.exe (from gnuwin32 diffutils) is located.


4. Restart Kompare and it's ready to use!

Now you can enjoy your life without feeling the pain of uncompared files on your system.

PS: Kompare can be used even for folders comparison - and it's much more powerfull than you can expect from simple file manager!

KDE for Windows

KDE 4.1 is here, and windows.kde.org packed it for Win32 already. As long as there are lots of useful apps in KDE without good win32 alternatives - I installed it on my working XP machine.

While Amarok is still in deep alpha - I couldn't start it. But there are two apps I can't live without - KWrite and Kompare. Both of them have great user interface, and gives you all advanced possibilities you can imagine. There is no other free editor to support about 90 different source file types and full encoding support, with possibility to open file with one encoding and to save with any other. There is no good file comparition program with such pretty and usable interface as Kompare. If you are interested - give it a try!

I am still waiting for Krusader and Okular, but my life under windows is already much simpler.

KTorrent vs Anti-Cheater

After updating to SUSE 11.0 torrent client for KDE updated from KTorrent 2.2.1 to KTorrent 3.0.x. But on my favourite tracker I receive "Anti-Cheater: You cannot use this agent" as status message while using KTorrent 3. I installed KTorrent 3.1 - and get same message. But after installing back 2.2.x - everything works fine. So, problem is User-Agent string. It is not very hard to search over KTorrent sources and modify it a bit to change User-Agent string. I already mentioned great tutorial about rpm building, and this time it saved me again...

Get the source
Download the src.rpm file and unpack it. I am using mc to navigate into src.rpm and copy all files from there to /home/to_build/src/ktorrent folder.

Diff to change user-agent
You can add diff to any spec file to apply it before build. It is much better than modify and pack sources back. So, here is my diff to change KTorrent 3.1 User-Agent string from "KTorrent + version" to plain "KTorrent". Now just save it in same folder ("/home/to_build/src/ktorrent" for me).

Modify spec file
Now only few modifications to spec file and time to start building:
Add this lines:

Patch10: user-agent.diff
%patch10

It is easy enough to find where to insert it, there are already few patches applyed.

And now, to enable blocked by SUSE trackers, comment this two lines:

#Patch2: remove-links.diff
#%patch2

Now just build and use your favourite torrent-client with your favourite tracker!

SUSE 11.0 first impression

Yesterday I have installed new SUSE 11.0 linux at home. Impressions are very ambiguous...

1. Package manager works great! Starting from SUSE 10.0 it was slower and slower, scanning repositories for minutes, than hours, checking depencencies, updating indexes and doing lots of interesting, but totally unusable staff. New package manager in 11.0 is faster than light! Adding huge repositories takes less than second, depencency checks are done faster than you can even notice!
Second great improvement for package manager - much better dependencies lists. I hate mono, banshee and other dotnet staff, I totally disregard it. But in SUSE 10.1 and 10.2 I HAD TO install mono just because of some yast pattern. That time I even downloaded few distros to look for SUSE replacement. Why, the Hell, I need software patterns for package manager if there are plain dependencies with straight structure?! But now I am totally happy - no mono, no beagle, no banshee, no gtk-sharps and other crap in my fresh system.

2. Older SUSEs with first boot after installing loaded yast to configure different devices, network and graphics. This did not. It was very hard to read fonts with default screen resolution (1280x1024), while installer worked with 1024x768.

3. Selection of KDE version is very hard. KDE 4.0.4 is very interesting, giving great fast new desktop experience. While there are some leaks: 1) I am not extreme enough to use PIM from unstable 4.1 sources; 2) Alt+Tab hangs sometimes when you have few windows from other users; 3) there is no printer configuration in KDE control center now, and YaST module changed from 10.2 and can't configure it for some reason... So, clicking few hours in KDE4 is great, but I'll wait a month for 4.1 to arrive.

4. It is hard to choose all programs from one of KDE desktops. KTorrent is KDE4 by default, KGet in KDE4 is totally great. But Dolphin will never move Krusader away, K3b and Amarok still not ported to KDE4, Gwenview of KDE4 differs too much from original KDE3 version, and older is much more usable.

current KDE version determination

I have a problem. KDE4 is comming, and I need to determine current running version from Java application. Do you know how?

After some investigations I found few ways. KDE is setting it's own env variables. For KDE3:

KDE_FULL_SESSION=true
DESKTOP_SESSION=kde

For KDE4:

DESKTOP_SESSION=kde4
KDE_SESSION_VERSION=4
KDE_FULL_SESSION=true

But it works only for SUSE, Kubuntu have only KDE_SESSION_VERSION=4 and KDE_FULL_SESSION=true. And this is only for 8.04 KDE4 release of Kubuntu, there was no such flags in 8.04beta. So, determination is simple:

public static boolean isKDERunning() {
  return "true".equals(System.getenv("KDE_FULL_SESSION"));
}

public static boolean isKDE4Running() {
  if (!isKDERunning()) {
    throw new IllegalStateException("KDE is not running");
  }
  return "4".equals(System.getenv("KDE_SESSION_VERSION")) ||
    "kde4".equals(System.getenv("DESKTOP_SESSION"));
}

If you feel paranoid and want to get 100% result it will be better to run Konsole (konsole --version) and parse output. Output for different versions looks like this:

konsole --version
Qt: 3.3.8
KDE: 3.5.7 "release 72"
Konsole: 1.6.6

/usr/bin/konsole --version
Qt: 4.3.4
KDE: 4.0.3 (KDE 4.0.3) "release 9.1"
Konsole: 2.0

So, parsing code:

public static boolean isKDE4Version() throws Exception {
  Process process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("konsole --version");
  InputStream in = process.getInputStream();
  byte[] buffer = new byte[32];
  ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
  int read = 0;
  while ((read = in.read(buffer)) >= 0) {
    out.write(buffer, 0, read);
  }
  String output = out.toString();
  int indexOfKde = output.indexOf("KDE:");
  if (indexOfKde >= 0) {
    char v = output.charAt(indexOfKde + 5);
    return '4' == v;
  }
  throw new IllegalStateException("KDE version information not found");
}

And don't fear performance issues - on my Athlon X2 6000+ this operation takes only 26 millis!

life before KDE 4.1

Lots of Linux distros will release major versions before KDE 4.1 will arrive. What for? May be better to still use KDE 3.5.x?

according to Wikipedia:

In principle, in subsequent releases, the major number is increased when there are significant jumps in functionality, the minor number is incremented when only minor features or significant fixes have been added, and the revision number is incremented when minor bugs are fixed.

again, according to Wikipedia:

KDE 4.0 was released on January 11, 2008. Despite being a stable release, it is intended for early adopters.[22] Users wanting a stable, "feature complete" desktop may wish to continue using KDE 3.5 for now.[23]

Kubuntu will be released this month with KDE 4.0, Mandriva was released with KDE 4.0.2, and SUSE will be released just few days before KDE 4.1 will arrive, with latest KDE 4.0.x on board.

I am not against releasing. I am just afraid of possible low quality of KDE 4.1 from update centers...