New job

Today has been my first day in my new job. I've started working as Software Engineer for

Since late August I had been doing interviews here in Barcelona but most of them were not really interesting only fullfilling the last of my four wanted points:
* Interesting job
* Linux related
* Free Software related
* Barcelona based

Working for Canonical gives me those four points and as an extra the salary is better than the average Barcelona job, so I can't complain :-)

As note i am almost sure my regular work will *not* be working in creating Kubuntu so don't ask me for feature improvements/bugfixes for it.

KUbuntu KDE 3.5.9 kded lock fixed

So this is the great thing of Free Software, people care about their programs/distributions/wathever and we got a relatively quick fix for the ugly problem about kde locking on Kubuntu. Cheers to Jonathan for fixing it.

KUbuntu 8.04 released with rock solid 3.5.9 goodness...

...unless you try to automount USB devices, because that'll give you a deadlocked kded! HORRAY! It's quite interesting to see how a bug caused for a patch to use LUKS is not fixed or the patch reverted when such an used feature has such a big bug like deadlocking kded...

Performance of radeon free drivers

The other day, i updated to KUbuntu gutsy and saw it ships a free graphics driver for my Ati X300 card (r300 based). I switched to it from the non-free driver but i have went back.

Why? Well, actually it does work, but it is slow, for example, hiding and showing again a normally sized ktuberling, takes around 180ms on the fglrx driver while it takes 550ms on the radeon driver.

But well, after all, as far as i remember they reverse engineered the driver, so i should congratulate the people doing it, it's a bit slow but works, so people that NEED a free driver or where the non-free one does not work can actually use the card now, thanks :-)

This is with driver 6.7.194 which i would say is latest released version.

UPDATE: Setting the driver to use EXA makes it go as fast or faster than fglrx driver in this scenario of swapping ktuberling windows, now i ask me why this is not the default :-S

UPDATE 2: Now blogger.com newsticker makes CPU go to 100% on both konqueror and firefox. I think i'll wait for the next iteration of the driver.

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.

Cannot find konq-kubuntu.rc problem and fix

On one of the five machines i've upgraded from Edgy to Feisty, i got a weird error with Konqueror. When starting it, i got a very weird Konqueror without Address line for example and two symptomatic errors
konqueror: WARNING: KXMLGUIClient::setXMLFile: cannot find .rc file
konq-kubuntu.rc
konqueror: WARNING: KXMLGUIClient::setXMLFile: cannot find .rc file
konq-kubuntu.rc

For us that know some KDE programming that means Konqueror was trying to find the konq-kubuntu.rc
file to create it's gui but failed to find it.

Quick solution was looking for some file that referenced konq-kubuntu.rc I found it at .kde/share/apps/konqueror/profiles/webbrowsing

As i had another working machines it was easy to see that XMLUIFile=konq-kubuntu.rc should be XMLUIFile=konqueror.rc and now it is working like a charm :-)

Fix for gphoto2 breakage in Kubuntu

It seems gphoto2 got broken on latest Kubuntu 6.10 (not sure if it's a backport or what) so one can no longer use digikam.

I got it working following the suggestion on Ubuntu bug 91250 that is basically changing BUS!="usb*", GOTO="libgphoto2_rules_end" to SUBSYSTEM!="usb*", GOTO="libgphoto2_rules_end" in /etc/udev/rules.d/45-libgphoto2.rules