Quickies: Krita, Trolltech, Lindows, Beagle-2, KOrganizer

We noticed that Everaldo,
the author of the Crystal icons,
is working at Lindows these days. At the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo New York,
OSDL announced that Trolltech has joined OSDL and will participate in the
Lab's new Desktop Linux Working Group.
Some news from the development of Krita which has now
pressure-sensitivity support.
Stewart Hall, principal developer for the European Beagle-2, told
Linux Devices that they use the SuSE 8.0 distribution with the KDE desktop and applications like KCalc,
KHexEdit and KDevelop in their development and operations.
Curious what the upcoming release of KOrganizer will bring? Have a look at its website where
all new features of KOrganizer 3.2 are summarized. Also check out those workshops on
group scheduling, importing calendar files from Microsoft
and the Exchange Plugin in KOrganizer.

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Comments

by Mike (not verified)

Not what I'd call a figurehead...
Hasn't it got lost somewhere?
KDE certainly isn't the cause ;-/ !!!
No really ;-)

Anyway: Nice that Krita is somewhat back to life
again. A KDE/QT-based painting app is certainly
needed and GIMP is now the last GTK app that
has survived on my desktop - and frankly I hate
that stupid multi-windows interface.

by JohnFlux (not verified)

Are there any screenshots of krita anywhere?

by Boudewijn Rempt (not verified)

Most of the notes in my blog on my progress with Krita this week have a screenshot or so-- in fact the link above points to one of them. It might be a bit slow, though, since my server is behind a slow ADSL link.

by fab (not verified)

Boudewijn,

I should have asked maybe. Didn't know that. Dot.kde.org can still mirror the image if you would like that.

Ciao

PS You live in the Netherlands, if so are you going to Fosdem maybe?

by Boudewijn Rempt (not verified)

It's no problem for me -- I don't have to wait for the images to load :-). And judging from the little knetload graph most people only have to wait a second or two before getting the image.

I thought about going to Fosdem, but I already had other commitments, maybe next year.

by Mike (not verified)

BTW: Is there some info on how to compile
only Krita? I've checked out Koffice from
CVS but don't really want to compile it all.

by Nicolas Goutte (not verified)

Try to use KDE's inst-apps system.

Create in the top directory of koffice a file inst-apps and on each line of it add the top subdirectories that you want to compile.

For Krita, I suppose that you need lib and krita. (Sorry, no guarantee that it will work.)

Have a nice day!

by Boudewijn Rempt (not verified)

Well, if you have installed KOffice (and all headers, of course), you could try to checkout the koffice cvs module, do a make -f Makefile.cvs && ./configure -- and then cd into the krita subdir and do a make from there. I'm not sure it would work, but it's worth a try.

by Mike (not verified)

OK, if anyone else is interested:
It won't work.
Well, guess we have to be patient until a
first beta comes out...

by Boudewijn Rempt (not verified)

Well, I think that you'd get a KOffice built sooner than that I can get Krita into even alpha shape... I mean, even on my seriously underpowered Powerbook G3 it only takes four hours or so :-)

by Boudewijn Rempt (not verified)

Oh, and I forgot to say: you really need both ImageMagick and LittleCMS to compile Krita. SUSE provides development packages for both, as does Debian.

by Inorog (not verified)

Now, Korganizer nears a "killer-app" status. It's nice to see it present in dot news, as a start for a good PR campaign. Congrats to the hardworking PIM team.

by Andre (not verified)

Can Korganizer be intregrated with Plone?

by Cornelius Schumacher (not verified)

If you explain what you mean by "integrated" and what would need to be done for that, I might be able to give you an answer.

by Eu (not verified)

I would love to see this as well. I am not the original poster, but I'd love to seethe ability to save calendar data and integrate it into plone's calendar or maybe create a module for plone that would interface with korganizer.

by Birdy (not verified)

Is it possible that you are looking for "kandy" (http://pim.kde.org/components/kandy.php)? It may be limited but until "kitchensync" is finished it's quite nice...

by rizzo (not verified)

Nothing kills an application faster than a horrible user interface. Look at the icons in Kontact/KOrganizer's sidebar - they are horrific. The KMail and the phone/contacts icon just has to go. It is just simply ugly to look at.

KOffice had ugly icons for a long time (bold, italic, underline), but they've fixed it. Time for Kontact to follow suite.

by Cornelius Schumacher (not verified)

What do you think is missing in KOrganizer that would finally make it a "killer-app"?

by Mike (not verified)

IMO the only major thing I'm missing is the ability to
click on a mail and turn it into a todo-item with
the body of the mail attached. The current attachment
system seems quite obscure to me BTW: Why is it asking
for a URI?

by Cornelius Schumacher (not verified)

You can turn a mail into a todo item by dragging the mail in Kontact onto the todo list icon.

At the moment you can only attach URIs to events, what's wrong with that (other than URI being a term not understandable by almost every user ;-)?

by Mike (not verified)

Ah! Drag&drop functionality is very cool indeed. Thanks for the hint.
There should be an easier way to jump back to get to the mail though.
Right now I have to open the edit dialog, go to attachments,
double click on the attachment. Now the mail is selected in the Kontact
mail KPart but it doesn't go there directly so I have to activate
the mail part separately. And afterwards I have to switch back to
the todo KPart to read the next item. Thats really complicated.
Why not simply opening the mail in a new window just like when you
double click on a mail in KMail? And even better - because usually
there is just one attachment - there should be a menu item / key combination
which opens the first (and only) attachment directly without opening
the edit dialog.
Anyway: The more I play around with the new KOrganizer the more I like
it. The quick entry for new todo-items is really useful. It's the
first time I think that an organizer app isn't too complicated for
everyday use. Until now, I didn't like all of them because they required
so many click & keystrokes and forced me to organize more than I actually
want to.

by Tuxie (not verified)

Stability? Stress-testing?

I was just trying KDE 3.2rc1 and I managed to crash KOrganizer after only 1,5 minute of playing around with it, creating a couple of random overlapping meetings, resizing the window, opening and closing some windows and things like that..

by Cornelius Schumacher (not verified)

Please report the problem at http://bugs.kde.org so that we get a chance to fix it. Don't forget to include detailed instructions how to reproduce the problem and a backtrace of the crash.

by Tuxie (not verified)

I don't have any non-stripped non-omit-framepointer binaries around so I don't think that wouldn't be of much use..
However, just create a couple of overlapping meetings, try clicking around like crazy, resizing the windows. hiding and showing the window 20 times in a row by using the traybar icon, selecting every single menuitem, and stuff like that...

The first thing I do when I test a program for stability is to abuse every single feature I can find... If there is a button I will click it 20 times... If there is a checkbox I will enable it... AND disable it ;) If it wants an image I give it an executable. I will try to save to the CDROM ;) I will cut and paste text and data between all fields I can find.. And so on...

by Tom (not verified)

BUT - there's still one thing I find oddly missing. Not every event that needs to be tracked is something scheduled for a future date. Often, keeping an organized journal of events that have *occurred* is just as important - conversations with clients for example. Currently you can kludge this by entering the same value for both the start and end dates, along with the "No time associated" option, but then this suggests a "duration" of at least one day. I'd like to see a journal section added - the entry from would include, at minimum: Summary, Date, Time, a text field (for the journal entry itself), and a category. It would also be useful to view the entries in a list format that can be sorted by date/time, summary, or category. A search function would be nice as well.

by Stewart Hall (not verified)

FYI The Beagle 2 control software used 7.8 and 8.0. Release 3.1 of ESAs mission control software framework SCOS 2000 runs on SuSE8.2 and Solaris 8. Release 4.0 (due 1st quarter of '05) is targetted at SuSE9.0 and Solaris 9.