Follow us at the new digg.com

So digg.com has been completely redesigned and KDE now has an account, too.

http://digg.com/KDE
will automatically publish KDE.News stories and Planet KDE posts.

Let’s see how/if that works.

[EDIT] It works! \o/
So in case you don’t use Akregator (shame on you!), you can now also follow KDE in digg to get Planet KDE posts. KDE.News stories will take a bit longer but they’ll come.

Now don’t forget to digg (=vote up) your posts.

Bye Firefox, hello Rekonq

I’ve been following the development of Rekonq since quite some time. With the release of 0.6beta I finally made the switch from Firefox.

While FF is nicely extensible, it got more and more on my nerves with its slow JavaScript execution, bad KDE Workspace integration (even with SUSE’s KDE extension for FF), etc.

Getting FF’s bookmarks into Rekonq took some manual steps, but overall went smooth:

1. Export FF’s bookmarks with its bookmark manager as HTML file.
2. Close Rekonq/Konqueror, run keditbookmarks and import the HTML file.
3. Let keditbookmarks fetch all favicons (select all and then right-click).
4. Define your FF bookmark bar folder als KDE bookmark bar folder.
5. Close keditbookmarks and launch Rekonq again.

A few glitches came up pretty soon: All text fields were off, weird crashes on Facebook, and no spell check in text fields.
The first two glitches have already been fixed in Qt. So I added openSUSE’s pre-release Qt 4.7 repo and upgraded all Qt components. So far I don’t see any problems despite its pre-release status (it even fixed the flickering with apps using dbus-menu in the systray).

Spell check is indeed missing but luckily after Qt 4.7 the QtWebKit team will release new QtWebKit versions independently from Qt. So getting spell check after WK Bug 42100 has been fixed, we don’t need to wait all the time for a new Qt release.

Currently Rekonq has no extension support. It’s in development, though, and AdBlock support is built-in anyway (not that I care about a Web Inspector but that one is built-in as well).

A small but irritating quirk is the too high bookmark bar in Rekonq. Favicons are 16✕16 pixels but Rekonq stretches them. I circumvented the problem by manually defining higher resolution icons in keditbookmarks. Now my bookmark bar looks very pretty with those high-res icons.

Yeah, I listed a few quirks but considering the big picture and how much FF sucks (performance-wise) these days, the benefits outweigh the quirks. Maybe if Mozilla Corp. reconsiders and officially releases a Firefox 4 variant built on the Qt port which Nokia has done for MeeGo Handset and follows the KDE HIGs (eg. no "Preferences" in the "Edit" menu), I may switch back. But since that scenario is unlikely, I stay with Rekonq for the foreseeable future.

K3b 2.0.1 Released

So, here it is: The first K3b release done by me (Michał and Sebastian are still the main programmers, though).
I hope I didn’t mess anything up – I’m still fresh at this release manager job.

Get the source code tarball from here (be sure the file is 11.7MB in size – in my first test download SourceForge aborted after 4MB).

The following bugs have been fixed since 2.0.0:

• Freeze on ripping Audio CD using external encoder to MP3 or FLAC (236466)
• Drag and drop from Dolphin doesn’t work (242745)
• Symbolic links are not added to a project when a folder is added recursively (243555)
• Install app icons to hicolor so that they are visible in non KDE WMs (BNC619731)
• Overburn doesn’t work (241534)
• Data part of mixed CD is not written – searching for previous session doesn’t work (246798)
• Fixed the speed comparision and formatting when cdrecord changes the writing speed automatically (246262, 243482)
• Track pointer seg fault (247588)

If there anything wrong with this tarball, please comment here. If you have usual bug reports, please file them at bugs.kde.org.

Apart from the both usual suspects Michał and Sebastian, this release contains fixes by Nicolas Lécureuil (Mandriva) and Will Stephenson (SUSE). Thanks to both!