Why small KDE projects are useful for the big KDE picture?

On Wednesday, Burkhard Lück began sending mails to the kdegames mailing list about the shortcomings we had regarding translations not being loaded, not being possible, etc.

One of the most reported issues was that translations of theme names were not used even though they had been translated. That shocked us as we use the typical KDE way of using .desktop files, so we investigated a bit, and came up with with a very small test case that showed that the kdelibs class for accessing .desktop files was not working correctly.

In less than two hours we had the bug fixed. So that's why small KDE projects like kdegames are useful for KDE, they are as good testers as anyone else.

KUbuntu Gutsy issues

Yesterday i updated to what will be KUbuntu 7.10 to 7.04. Here are the results:

* They still poppler patch kpdf even if the 3.5.7 packages for KUbuntu 7.04 did not, so expect that i still treat KUbuntu users as second class users when reporting kpdf bugs.

* There's a ¿kernel? bug that hogs the CPU https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/udev/+bug/119315/

* My network configuration was lost, resulting in not being able to access the internet anymore, that is because now my second network interface is supported (that's good) and so what before was my eth0 is now eth1 and nothing worked (that's bad)

* They fixed a bug i reported about exit dialog accelerators not working correctly

* kdesu hangs randomly https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase/+bug/144397

* XF86Mail key is hardcoded to a new mail message and you can't reassign it to something else like for example opening KMail https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase/+bug/144398

* They added a ugly user list to kdm that when disabling it results in an even uglier kdm https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase/+bug/129309

All in all, my opinion is quite negative at the moment.

New KTuberling playground and looking for a description

Thanks to Jocelyn Etienne KTuberling in KDE 4.0 will feature another nice playground



Besides, the other day, Robert Knight, our konsole overlord warned me that normal menu users, current name of the game is "Potato Guy" and the description is "Game for Children". First is actually wrong because of this new playground and second is really really precise, eh ;-)

So i'm open to any suggestion for both name and description.

Kate welcomes Find Selected

Thanks to quick work by Sebastian Pipping (sping) and some small contribution from my side, kate will have in KDE 4 the "Find Selected" feature.

Basically it's the find feature, but starts find automatically on the selected text and does not show the find dialog. At start it may seem not useful enough, but those used to Eclipse (ctrl+k) and nedit (ctrl+h) will surely welcome this new addition to kate

Poppler 0.6 released

Poppler 0.6 is available from http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.6.tar.gz

Changes since RC2:
- CairoOutputDev fixes
- Allow pdftoppm to read/write from stdin/stdout
- API work on Qt4 frontend
- Fix pdfimages produces inverted image for black & white image
- Fix error on the NFKC text matching routine
- Add support for word and line selections
- Do not enforce %%EOF at the end of file
- Pad zeroes instead of aborting when rendering 1-bit images
and the stream is too short
- Update glib bindings documentation

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.