Sunday 07 November 2010 at 09:46 am
My recent experience with Mozilla ThuderBird, IceDove.
With KDE 4.x, the KDE team took a radical step of ripping apart most of the stuff and rethinking many of the designs. Quite a bold move. Many people appreciated KDE's efforts to start afresh while others moved away from KDE. For some reasons, I decided to stick to KDE. Maybe it was because of the awesome flexibility KDE provided provides to customize the DE to one's personal taste. Or maybe because I was too used to the KDE way of doing things. I stayed with KDE while 4.0 was released and stayed with it up till very recently.
I started to lose my patience with the PIM Suite. I know the PIM team is also going to some very radical changes which will bring very innovative stuff later. But, at the moment, the KDE PIM suite is very broken. Broken not in the first impress, but broken when you regularly use it. It leaks memory like anything and keeps doing lots and lots of I/O. I hope some day the KDE team decides that they do need a core team, a core team that could take care of important tasks, making sure that the imporatant tasks are Continuously Usable. It takes time to earn the reputation but it takes a lot lesser time to lose it.
Anyways, having been a KDE (PIM) user for long, I had been bearing the PIM torments up until, I recently saw a colleague using IceDove. There was a time when the Mozilla suite was in itself terribly slow. But things seem to have changed a lot. Both, the browser and the PIM suite, have improved a lot lot in terms of functionality and performance. Performance is very important. What good is a feature if its performance is terrible and it hinders the usability. Some of the things that really impressed me were:
Indexing: Nepomuk might be good one day but that day is yet to be seen. I patiently wait for that day to come. Well, don't have much choice. Have been patiently waiting for it since KDE 4.0 was released. KDE has great ideas with Nepomuk which is good. But realisticly, what all do you want to see indexed ? There has to be a realistic line drawn. The browsers already have indexing for the history. Amarok, the player, also does indexing. It can tell you when your last favorite song was played. For pictures, I have the awesome KPhotoAlbum that cannot be beaten by anything. But above all, the most important thing to index is your conversation. Those emails that you send daily. And indexing is no good if you can't find the information you need, later. IceDove has filled that place. It does an excellent indexing (in terms of performance) and presents a very user intuitive way to narrowing it down to, when looking for a particular information.
Organization: The other great thing about KDE PIM is its ability to break down its applications into small parts and glue them together into a new, well integrated application. Yes, Kontact. It is used to be the best PIM application. Used common libraries to make the suite more efficient than the rest. But all this was used to be. Today, kpart itself might be Kontact's problem. We have different applications glued together that if built with a common design, could have benefited a lot more. Take for example: kmail, knode and akregator. They are all very important parts of the PIM suite. Yet all three are different. The only thing common amonst them is is that they are available from the same Kontact shell. kmail has a different navigation. akregator has very nice aggregated folders but the same cannot be available in knode and kmail. knode, while still okay, has been rotting for some time. So it was time to see how IceDove performed when testing it up against this Use Case. The good thing about IceDove is is that it has one single uniform interface to most of the PIM needs. I can use the same window and the same interface for all my rss feeds, my emails and my leafnode newsgroups. That has a big benefit in itself. I have only 1 integrated interface to look at and only 1 interactive method to learn. There aren't different keystrokes for different applications. All is one in IceDove.
And I think one of the main reasons for Mozilla's success is its plugin architecture. It is very difficult to satisfy everyone's needs. In the same way, it is very difficult for one group of developer's to be able to innovate differently. This is where Mozilla rocked. They provided a solid foundation with basic standard interface and let new fresh minds to do the rest of the innovation. Turns out it has worked well.
So, with my PIM needs satisfied, I thought KDE was serving as nothing but just a mere shell. So, now was the right time to do the thing I always thought of doing. Switch to GNOME. GNOME looks elegant at first look but that is it. I wanted to take a screenshot of an application to report a bug. I fired up PrntSc key to let the screen capture utility pop-up. It did not have the opiton to select just the application window. Hmmm! Time to return back to KDE and use the Mozilla PIM suite and hope the KDE PIM team learns and does the right thing.
Friday 29 May 2009 at 01:34 am
I've been using KDE for a while now, probably 9yrs. I've also been an early adopter of KDE 4.x. While KDE 4 is still far way behind in proving its worth of the radical core changes it made (take for example: Nepomuk, Strigi, Phonon, Decibel - I still wonder when they are going to be ready for the *user*), I still find KDE apps far far ahead of GNOME.
Probably, many would disagree. Possibly, they might flame me too.I mean everyone supports GNOME as the default - Red Hat/Novell/Ubuntu. And I always wonder WHY.
Was it the licensing ? I can't think of anything else. Anyways, why I still think that the GNOME design sucks, I'll give an example.
Evolution: Many call it the real killer app for GNOME. Maybe. There's one small feature in Evolution, that I've tried many times and I just feel that it is a UI design with stupidity at its best. The NewsGroup plugin of Evolution. Ever tried ? How fast can you subscribe to newsgroups there. Take these examples. I'd be interested to know how Evolution users subscribe to newsgroups.
I personally use leafnode to cache the news contents. In Kontact Knode, when the Gmane newsgroup listing appears, it appears with thousands of newsgroups. But KDE allows me to run a search on that list and find for the relevant newsgroup that I need.
Such a basic feature and I wonder what was there in the mind of the GNOME Evolution devs when they were designing that interface.
Thursday 12 February 2009 at 2:21 pm
So my friend game me a cute little birthday present, a Motorola S9 Bluetooth Headset.
Making it work under Linux was not very difficult but still has to catch-up in terms of utils.
To make the headset work, I just had to run a scan on the Linux host, and get the hw address and specify it in .asoundrc.
pcm.bluetooth {
type bluetooth {
address = xx.xx.xx.xx.xx
description "Motorola S9 Bluetooth Headset"
}
}
And then to play a file, like in mplayer, you just specify the alsa device.
mplayer -ao alsa:device=bluetooth foo.ogg
KDE's Phonon currently doesn't show the Bluetooth Headset even if it is paired.
PulseAudio doesn't work good. (I couldn't make it work in my limited attempt)
Monday 29 December 2008 at 7:15 pm
I created pypt-offline with the hope that it'd be useful for people who don't have an internet connection but would still like to enjoy Debian. Enjoying Debian is about enjoying its Package Manager, APT. I don't have any data to show if pypt-offline is in use by anybody. I too, use it rarely, when at my hometown. But I hope people who use it, find it useful.
At my hometown, I use internet service from my friend's ISP. I have a 10kb/s connection at home. That's slow.
And I've been using KDE 4.2 in Debian. The Debian KDE team decided to defer public availability of KDE 4.2 Beta packages for a good reason. But I did want to use it and find more bugs, sooner. So I ended up with the unofficial sources. There, it comes packaged almost every 2 days. That ends up being a 600-700 mb download quite often. (This includes the debug packages).
Being at home and downloading 700 megs of deb is painful. So I rushed to my friend's ISP. There I can get 500kb/s bandwidth. But apt didn't want to play good. The problem is that apt is not threaded. So from a single source, only a single download can be initiated. That ended up me using on 120kb/s bandwitdth to download. That was time consuming. I wanted it to be downloaded faster so that I could spend more time at home.
That's when I thought of using pypt-offline. When I designed pypt-offline, one of my requirements set, was threads. pypt-offline is threaded. This ended up being very helpful for me. I was able to utilize the bandwidht upto 600 kb/s by using 5 threads. This has yielded in faster download for me, while it must be choking the bandwidth for the server ;-)
I wish if apt was threaded. But I think it isn't threaded for good reasons. Having a threaded apt will end up with excess load on Debian servers. But then, if you really want fast downloads and do have the bandwidth, do give pypt-offline a try. And yes, you can try it on Windows/Linux/Mac.
It makes me happy today to see a good use of pypt-offline. :-)
Thursday 31 July 2008 at 03:51 am
Yay!! First of all, Thank you.
I think now is the time most of the KDE users are going to migrate to KDE 4.1. KDE 4.1 looks so tempting that I really can't wait. So while I compose this blog post, apt is doing all the needful to download the KDE4.1 packages from Debian Experimental. That doesn't mean I wasn't following KDE 4.x. While, becuasae of resource constraints, Debian made a wise choice of sticking to just a single KDE version (i.e. KDE3 in testing and KDE4 in unstable/experimental), there still are many ways to be able to test KDE 4.x. And by ways, I don't mean a VM or a Live CD. You can definitely do a much better and realistic testing of KDE4 on your production box without fearing of screwing your current KDE 3.x installation. At Debian Wiki, there's a cool howto describing how to do it. If you follow the wiki howto properly, you should even be able to test bling features like KWin's Composite and Plasma.
For me, I've been a native KDE user. I try to stick as much to KDE as possible, for all my application needs. While my workplace depends on MS Exchange for Calendaring, they're pretty open and have provided all the standard access to exchange, i.e. Webdav, IMAP, POP et cetera. With kdepim returning with KDE 4.1, I hoped I'd finally be able to do a complete switch to KDE 4. But that wasn't the case when I did a KDE 4.x testing during RC/Beta using the above mentioned cool howto. Thus this KDE Bugzilla entry. I was very happy to hear that we'd soon be having an akonadi native exchange resource.
But still KDE 4.1 looks very tempting and I can't wait. So here's a small howto on how to sync your exchange calendar while using KDE 4.1 (which doesn't have any of the exchange resources)
- On your KDE4 host, install an IMAP server. I use it for my personal mails that I sync to my hard drive. Using IMAP is good because that way I reliably store the Personal - Contacts/Calendar/Birthdays/Journals/ToDo and more on my laptop
- Setup a Debian chroot of lenny. Follow the Cool HOWTO
- Install the kdepim suite into the lenny chrooted installation
- Use sux on the host and fire up kontact. You should be able to see your chrooted kontact show up in the current X server desktop
- Configure kmail to use the IMAP server. Make sure you don't subscribe any folder apart from INBOX which contains the PIM resource folders.
- Under Configuration => Miscellaneous, Enable IMAP Groupware Resource Functionality. Make sure to use the KOLAB Format. Resource folders should be in your local IMAP account.
- Now sync your account. Done.
- Now switch to Korganizer of the same chrooted installation.
- Go to its plugins page and enable Exchange 2000 plugin.
- Now, first, add a resource. Calendar of IMAP server. Make it the default resource.
- Now configure your Exchange 2000 Plugin.
- Now Download your Calendar data. This data should now automatically be saved to the IMAP Calendar resource.
- Just do a mail sync and quit from the chrooted environment.
- ..........................
- Now in KDE4 Host installation, fire KDE4's kdepim.
- Do similar configs as above except, subscribe to all folders that you need.
- For Korganizer, enable the Calendar on IMAP Server resource.
- Bingo, You should be able to see your Exchange Calendar requests in KDE4.1 KDEPIM Calendar.
- If all works, send me a Thank You email :-P
Some other things to keep in mind. If you are a Debian User like me, you'll need to do some tweakings because the current KDE4 packages are modified to store all settings in the
~/.kde4/ separately. With this, you'll end up having
2 separate configs. One option I think of is to create a
.kde4/ symlink to .kde/ . I believe that should work and inherit most of your settings. I'm
yet to try because my installation is still going on.
Monday 26 May 2008 at 1:03 pm
I have been a long time KMail user and love this email client. It has most of the features that I care about, like Message Threading, Spam Filtering, Disconnected IMAP et cetera.
KMail has good integration with SPAM Handling softwares like spamassassin and bogofilter. The KMail wizard will autoconfigure spamassassin, bogofilter and others (as detected from your installation). The default settings were a little annoying because messages detected as SPAM were re-written with the SPAM Heading. The problem was when spamassassin mis-judged a genuine message as SPAM. Well, we could mark it as HAM, but the added heading never went off.
To revert back the message to its original state, do the following:
- Select the Classify as Not Spam filter
- Add a new filter action
- Pipe Through
- Add the following command in the text box, spamassassin -d
That's it. Now when you click on Not SPAM, the database gets updated and the email message is restored back to its original format.
Wednesday 16 April 2008 at 12:53 am
I'm not a music fanatic. While I see many of my friends and colleagues working, with their headphone on and music playing, for me, it is not at all possible. It is just the opposite. I can't work with music (or any kind of distracting sound) on.
So when I sometimes run Amarok, I used to think what a pile of crap it really is. I mean, look at the resource consumption. Amarok alone took around 20% of CPU cycles when just playing music. This was disappointing as I am a KDE addict and prefer KDE applications over any other. Trying to run other applications led to additional libraries being installed/loaded.
But last night when I was bored and was just running through some of Amarok's features after reading an article about Amarok and Magnatune, I was surprised. Amarok is a music beast. It is a massive wolf. It rocks........ Along with the superb services provided by the folks at Magnatune and Last.FM, Amarok is a wonderful music player to use. I have always advocated about software and related services being tightly integrated. Amarok + Magnatune + Last.FM is just that.
Magnatune, what to say about it. It is just awesome. You want to buy an album of a band but aren't sure if the album is good enough. Magnatune is the answer. Magnatune allows you to listen to the music online (using Amarok) and then purchase at a nominal price in all major formats (ogg, mp3, flac et cetera). You can also order a CD to be delivered to you if you don't prefer to download the music. This is awesome. Wonderful. Sweet.
Last.FM. Another wonderful service. Last.FM is an online community of music listeners. You create an account with Last.FM and then feed the credentials to Amarok. Then, as you keep playing your collection in Amarok, Amarok keeps updating the details at Last.FM. This has many benefits. It helps you find people and music, like-minded. You can then listen to music from your Neighbours (Last.FM) which would be similar to what you've been listening. This is again awesome. Wonderful. Sweet.
Podcasts. Another thing I wasn't much aware of. I said it, I'm not a music fanatic. So that led me to not even explore features in Amarok which are beyond music. Amarok is awesome in tracking Podcasts and playing them for you. Now I have my KDE Radio and Linux-Foundation podcast added to Amarok. Amarok informs me of new podcasts, when released. Simple. Wonderful. Sweet.
There must be many more features in Amarok that I've yet not explored. But the above mentioned features alone make Amarok a great player for me. Thank you Markey and the team. Amarok Rocks.
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