TW Blog :: Archives for July 2005

Plastic Fantastic KDE

Relates to Browsers and X11

Last week I finally installed Tiger and at the same time set up a dedicated partition for Fink to simplify future upgrades in the absence of extensive backup media. The disadvantage of this decision was that I could no longer use the default /sw directory for Fink package management - well by mounting the directory onto the partition I probably could (a course of action I choose for the OS X Users directory on a third partition) but I also wanted to store other open source material in the partition so the /sw directory would not be at the root level. This did not present any major problems other than the fact I would be restricted to only building source from the Fink tree. Just calls for a little patience - and the occassional piece of detective work!

Unfortunately progress was slow when I initially choose to build QCad being half way through a scale drawing of my soon to materialise new home - probably one of the few programs acknowledged to be incompatible with Tiger's GCC version 4. Still following a trip to a colleague's broadband fitted office I had the source for bundle-gnome and bundle-kde waiting to go. The plan was to leave them alone for a while and try and settle on a comfortable working environment in Tiger, but finally having the mammoth tetex source files that would allow me to build the monopd server was just too tempting. Of course I didn't consider at the time this would also mean building the entire KDE-games package which in turn would mean building the KDE-base package.

So around about 6 hours later (not bad for my lowly iBook!) I had the core KDE 3.4 ready to go as a full-screen replacement for Apple's rootless quartz window manager. At first I disregarded this as I had not found the binary KDE 3.1 build that inspiring on Panther, and had generally stuck with Gnome or WindowMaker if I wanted to use a full screen window manager for X11. But the Plastik theme and the countless number of improvements over 3.1 are simply delectable! Performance is excellent on Tiger and other than the erratic sound behaviour and current absence of several office applications I can see this becoming a regular set up. Most noticeable, and pleasing, is the vast improvement in the CSS and script support of the Konqueror browser which now, among other odds and ends, handles my CSS negative margins experiment from last year perfectly.

Ok, its not quite pure Linux (yet) but this laptop never ceases to amaze me!

Posted on Tuesday, Jul 19, 2005 at 01:26:12.