So as to spare everyone the annoyance of continual build-progress and porting posts, I’ll just say that KDE4 on Solaris continues to progress. I finished up the captury and capseo packaging yesterday, which exposes more KDE4 code, which leads to more patches.

With Sebas’ plaintive cry still hanging in the air, I hope that the FrOSCon guys repeat their “bringing beer to Berlin” stunt of last year. I’m glad he wrote Plasma docs before drinking, though. We need some acronym to explain “cashew” though, don’t you think? Configuration And Settings Holistic Entry Widget is my suggestion; hitting the CASHEW places the application in some kind of visual / fluid / physical configuration mode where you can drag things around to influence the settings (as opposed to the more traditional configuration dialog).

On the SFF / tablet front, MPX is here. More than one mouse attached to your plasmoids? Assign a special keyboard just for twittering ? Ooh. The possibilities sounds stupid to me right now, but that is because I apply my creativity to acronyms and not to input devices or photo shoots. There’s a good quote in the MPX announcement:

It is at this point that you may realise that neither GNOME, KDE, nor any other environment actually works decently with multiple devices. So start fixing them right now.

Wade, the reason I care abou what software other people use is twofold: I want to be compatible with them and vice-versa, and I would warn them of the potential hazards of proprietary software and vendor-lock in. But maybe you’re approaching the sheep from the other side (remember, “baaaaaaa” means “no”) and want to encourage people to think outside the box in their software choices. That’s why they get a mac, right?

Chani has been doing good work, in a field I can sympathize with. This year my family and I have a 100-square-meter plot of land to call a vegetable garden, except that it started in april as a patch of weeds, unmaintained for two years. There’s surely a software engineering metaphor in there somewhere between the thistles and the “helmgras”. It’s fun to root through the dirt and amazing to see what plants can do. No, we are not going to grow Nederwiet or BC Bud on this plot; everyone knows you don’t get good dope from outdoor crops. The news is reporting that cannabis use has dropped in the Netherlands for the first time in years, and that is a good thing. The last house I lived in had been previously occupied by a dope fiend and enthusiastic little hemp plants kept coming up in the lawn.

Sune scratched an itch and gets pointed to an existing kde-looks Amarok plasmoid that does the same thing. This might be used to illustrate two things: sometimes you just want to build it yourself or that it’s hard to keep track of the sheer quantity of KDE apps that are out there. I imagine an Amarok control plasmoid will ship with Amarok for KDE4.

Speaking of Amarok and segueing into third-party applications in general, it’s time to start thinking about which ones I want to port to Solaris first. I expect something similar to porting KOffice: only very minor C++ issues. Problem is picking something. I tried Digikam on a whim (and to exercise the GPhoto package I’d made) but that turns out to still be a KDE3 application. Any suggestions for real KDE4 apps that don’t live in KDE SVN that could use a sound scrubbing at the hands of Studio 12?

Finally, in the time it took me to type in this blog entry (and drink coffee), our cruncher box at the Sun labs in Amersfoort built a complete KDE4, from support through to office, taking in edu and games and sdk along the way. Get the tarball from the BionicMutton Solaris site, which is our extremely lo-fi place to spit out packages for now.

The Wayback Machine ⏲ does not archive everything. Broken links are marked with a 💔.