This week’s DWN picks up Florian Zumbiehl’s worries about wrong spelling within package descriptions. Acronyms, especially FAQ, seem to cause some serious uncertainties. Nice to see in which unexpected directions Debian’s quality assurance is working

Piotr Szymański created a patch for removing the text of Kontact’s icon panel. Not exactly eagerly awaited but nice nontheless. Especially if kdepim’s source is lying around anyway. Took about 7 minute to recompile/install Kontact, no big deal for some minimalism . Take a look:

For more enlightening and kde-related scribbling, check planetkde.org.

I wanted to do this since the beginning but just didn’t find a appealing solution. Yesterday, Patrick pointed me to Konqueror’s Create Image Gallery feature. Basically this will create thumbs and a html-file for the current directory. Dead-simple. Kudos to KDE! This should allow me to upload images, index them on ftp and have a nice and easy to use gallery running. At least I thought so. When trying to use the feature, Konqi refused:

Guess I have to use a local mirror, then.. anyhow, it’s up and running.

BTW, there’s already a wishlist-item posted on bugs.kde.org for this. Want to vote?

I added a new category, –verbose, which will cover unexpected bits of communication between my system and me.

While configuring gstreamer v.0.8.9, it told me the following:

configure: WARNING: Sissy ! By asking to not build the tests known to fail, you hereby waive your right to customer support. If you do not agree with this EULA, please press Ctrl-C before the next line is printed. By allowing the next line to be printed, you expressly acknowledge your acceptance of this EULA.

Yeah, right. You expect me to keep track of ./configure’s output while it takes place and then abort it? Nice try. This is no 8086 running here. Btw, I never cared much about EULAs. Did anyone, anytime, anywhere? Now this is how it looks if developers want to sneak away from the responsibility to support their product.. calling me a sissy

One of the things that gives me the creeps every now and then is audio-output on a linux-system, that is, at least on my system. Seems that I’m not alone with this. Eugenia from osnews.com posted a rant to the alsa-devel mailinglist some time ago and she surely had some valid points. Anyhow, I don’t want to complain, what’s following is just my own perception; your mileage may vary.

It’s not like basic audio output itself, no matter if using OSS (anyone still using it with a current kernel? OK, who cares about it beeing depriciated.. ) or ALSA, is difficult to set-up. It’s the “exotic”(!?) stuff you never thought about when using other operating systems. Maybe other distributions provide solutions that work out-of-the-box but getting multiple applications to output to a non-h/w-mixing capable sounddevice can be a real pain on the local Debian installation. And before some smart person comes up with it: no, there’s simply no space left in my XPC to put in a cheap Soundblaster with h/w-mixing capabilities. Long story short: this is about watching videos without having to quit my audio player using the hardware at hand.

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