Last night after giving my talk on KDE4 on Solaris at the NLOSug meeting (the talk itself went pretty well, although I managed to put a spelling error on the very first slide) I had the honour of driving back to Nijmegen with HJ Thomassen, one of the nestors of modern computing in the Netherlands. He’s responsible for bringing UNIX to the Netherlands; partly responsible for the first Internet connections in the country. That kind of things. His talk “A little bit of UNIX history” is also very worthwhile.

Anyway, KDE4 behaved itself while I demonstrated it on Solaris with nothing falling over; folks agree that turning the analog clock on its side reduces its usability phenomenally, but that the feature itself is cool. HAL and hotplug and recent devices Just Works (big win for shared desktop technologies there). I may even have figured out where the bugs lie in Konsole and Pty handling, but need to sit down and do a lot of recompiling to find that out.

Instead of the usual bottle-of-wine for the speaker, I got a Sun type 7 keyboard. Which, frankly, is much more long-term useful.

There were a fair number of “hey, I’ll give that a try!” responses to the talk from Solaris sysadmins who were there, so this reminds me that I really need to fix up some of our documentation again. It’s easy to get so caught up in the technical work around porting KDE4 that you forget to document what is going on (and why).