In the beginning there was the swamp, the hoe, – and Jussi!

And just to join the fun:

I like my internets…

After a fairly eventful time in Australia, I am heading to my adopted home in Helsinki, Finland. Its been great to catch up with family, friends and even a few random people from IRC (yes you, wgrant). The downside of this trip is that while playing soccer in the park, I managed to tear my anterior cruciate ligament in my knee. This means I cant walk, I’m on crutches and in a fair bit of pain, which makes travel really hard. So hoopefully my plane trips go well tommorow and Qantas/BA/Finnair are all really nice to me. Ill also be not around for a few days while things get sorted and I get a new knee.

Real quick one today:

Just read about Red Hats Christmas party, and thought it was worth a mention. Good to see open source companies being socially involved outside of Free Software

I read in Stephan Hermans blog that QT will be ported to Symbian S60. This is really good news, especially as my favourite IRC client is QT, and Im hoping for a port

Good news day today

Well Ive been away for the last 4 days or I would have blogged about this sooner, but Last week I went and bought a shiny new PC. The old one was getting a bit slow and annoying, and it was time to upgrade.

So I went out and bought a nice load of components and build a beautiful new machine.

It includes:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
ASUS P5Q Motherboard
ASUS Nvidia 9500GT 512mb DDR3 Graphics card
Samsung 22x DVD Writer
LC6550GP “Green Power” Power supply
Nexus Caterpillar Silent System case
320GB Seagate HDD
4GB Kingston RAM

Overall I’m incredibly happy with it, its fast, quiet and works great with Linux. I’m running Intrepid Kubuntu with KDE4 (which is beautiful, just wish they would fix/replace that mess that is konqueror) with my old dual head setup and it works a charm.

And the obligatory photo

So following on with others on Planet Ubuntu…

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

As many of you know, Im an avid KDE user. Now I like to keep up with where KDE is at, so Im currently running KDE4, which is a lovely system – for many reasons. However, one thing that really sucked on KDE4 was the menu system. The default menu was quite user unfriendly in my opinion, the main reason  being that things were labelled with their description and you had to hover over them to get the name (at least this was so on the dark theme I use). For example Ktorrent was just labelled “Torrent Client”, which make it hard to find if you are looking for “Ktorrent”.

Enter Lancelot. This was packaged for hardy recently – its in the Kubuntu-members-kde4 PPA – and I decided to give it a try. It is beatiful! Its useable! The only small things I dont like are the fact that the menu section is hardcoded white (see the screenshot below) and that it comes with a weird goblet icon – I want my k-menu icon!

Other than those, its a nice menu and you should give it a try today!

So yesterday I checked out the new firefox qt version to take a look how it is going. I am very excited about this project – it brings my favorite browser to native status in KDE . It was a little confusing at first, but with some help from people on IRC (Thanks apachelogger ) It still has a few bugs, but thats all part of being in development.

So here is how I did it.

First install mecurial so you can check the source out:

$ sudo aptitude install mercurial

Then install the required build deps:

$ sudo aptitude install libidl-dev libqt4-core libqt4-gui libqt4-dev libasound-dev autoconf2.13

(you only need the libasound-dev if you want to have ogg support)

then make a new working directory, and check out the source:

$ hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/users/vladimir_mozilla.com/mozilla-qt mozilla-qt

Then you need to configure, the options I used are here, but you can select your own from the list with ./configure –help

$ autoconf

$ ./configure –enable-application=browser –enable-default-toolkit=cairo-qt –enable-debug=”-g3″ –enable-tests –disable-installer –disable-crashreporter –disable-javaxpcom –disable-printing –disable-embedding-tests –disable-elf-dynstr-gc

and then make:

$ make -j3

After that you need to run the binary:

$ cd dist/bin

$ ./firefox

And the obligatory screenshot

So I’m just figuring the final bits out to add this blog to Planet Ubuntu. Hopefully it will be sorted in a min and you will all see some posts on there soon.