Firefox with image previews while browsing

An issue that has come up with Firefox is not being able to view thumbnails of images to submit to webpages (for example, in message boards that let you upload an image as part of your post). Fortunately, this site offers a solution — replacing GTK dialogs with the equivalent KDE ones. Since the KDE file dialog allows you to see previews of images, it effectively solves this problem.

One drawback is that I was unable to make it work outside of KDE itself for some reason; however, there should be a way to do so (the instructions are on the site). Compiling under Ubuntu requires the GTK development package, the KDE development packages, and of course build-essential.

The End of SCO, The Beginning of Something Worse?

According to Groklaw, the case of SCO v. Novell is all over but the crying.

[T]he court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights.

Wait, wait, what?

If you’ll recall, Novell has been sleeping with the enemy. Concluding that Novell is the owner of UNIX/UnixWare could open something horribly nasty here. Imagine a scenario where Novell gives the rights to Microsoft as part of the deal, then Microsoft going after Linux for violating any patent, copyright, code, or anything else Microsoft can dream up.

Microsoft v. Linux will make the whole SCO thing look like nothing. That really scares me. The whole SCO thing never really did, but with Microsoft on the attack, there could be some real trouble.

Maybe I’m just paranoid and nothing will come of it, but it’s in my nature to be paranoid. Microsoft wants nothing more than to get rid of Linux, and since it can’t be done the traditional way, this seems like the perfect way for them to try.

Wow

Almost all these views were for my KDE4 post.  Note that nothing else I’ve posted got anywhere near the attention that did.  Thanks.

KDE4: Not Yet

KDE4 Beta 1 has appeared on the scene, and thanks to backports for Ubuntu/Kubuntu, it was easy to get and test out.

First thing I noticed was the sheer size of the thing. One package was almost 100MB (!), and others were similarly gigantic. I guess they weren’t stripped executables or anything, but that’s pretty big. After downloading this thing, I followed the instructions to get it up and running normally (without running in a nested X server), and logged in.

First, it looks nice. If you want screenshots, though, look at the site linked above, because mine wasn’t stable enough to get any. It crashed. A lot. A nice little Run dialog popped up after hitting Alt+F2 once, but I was not able to make it appear again. There was some strange desktop applet in the top left corner that let me add a clock to the desktop (just a clock?), but little else, as there was no direct way to access kcontrol (the control panel) that I saw, and running it directly brought up the GUI but had no configuration settings anywhere in it (no tree on the left side of the app). Similarly, the Panel’s configuration dialog was completely empty except for the standard OK/Cancel/Apply/Help buttons.

None if its programs had much improvement over the latest KDE version, and all took longer to start up — sometimes much longer, in the case of the personal information manager Kontact. The new file manager, Dolphin, wasn’t really that much of an improvement over Konqueror — even though I dislike Konqueror’s double duty as file and Web browser, at least both were excellent. Dolphin really didn’t improve on anything Konqueror already does. Finally, almost every time I closed an application, I’d get KDE’s “This program has crashed” dialog.

So yeah, KDE4 has a way to go, and I don’t think they’ll make the late October projected release of the final. But maybe with this beta KDE can get it to a dedicated pool of testers to make the road to the final version go smoothly enough that they won’t have to take a lot longer. If you don’t want to try very buggy software, don’t bother yourself with KDE4, but definitely keep an eye on this, since while right now it might not be too impressive, the final just might be something truly special.

Here’s hoping.