A day should have 48 hours .. at least

Hey!

As if I haven’t got enough unfinished projects running I’ve “started” another one… control center for Sabayon linux (see this thread: http://www.sabayonlinux.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=3410&start=50 )

Sabayon’s really cool but it’s really missing a graphical frontend for all the config files. I already started the discussion back in 2007 and yesterday when I was lazy I brought it back up.. well.. now we are 3 people (irc) who are willing to do some work..

I tried porting yast to sabayon but I wasn’t successfull yet because my portage is broken now aber my pc crashed (it’s likely it was too hot -.-  ) during a portage update 😦

Also I experienced .. for the first time in my life .. really good support in a tech related company.. DiTech.. a austrian company selling pcs, components, notebooks..

I asked the employee some questions and he was really anxious on answering them 🙂 I’ll now for sure by myself this one: Dimotion StrongBook S5 (Based on Compal JHL 90):

Intel Core2Duo P9500 2,5Ghz, 6MB 2nd Lvl Cache
4GB DDR2 667MHz
NVIDIA 9600M GT GDDR3
320GB 5400rpm
Fingerprintreader
1680×1050
15,4″

and other cool stuff I’ve forgot ^^

So.. it’s late here in austria and I have to stay up early tomorrow.. last day at work for this summer 🙂

cu guys

Centrino 2 notebook.. you just have to search :-)

Hey!

Today I spent my time doing 2 things. 2 Hours at work I ported the Sidebar of Allevo to Ui files and the rest (6 hours) I was searching for a notebook.. I came across many many companies I’ve never heard before (e.g. Sager, Zepto, Powerbook, …) with all matching the spec of my dream notebook.. but.. they either don’t ship to austria or it costs 380$ or there’s no support for our local power connectors 😦

When I went home I had pretty much given up the idea about getting a new notebook soon…

After dinner I actually looked at derstandard.at (a local newspaper) in the web section.. bam.. there it was… dimotion notebook based on centrino 2 o.O … I could’nt believe my eyes.. it has everything I want.. some € more expensive others I ran across.. but that doesn’t matter.. I’ve found it 🙂

On friday I’ll go and try it in reality and if the quality seems good I’ll buy it as soon as possible (and as soon as my money from my internship has arrived 😉 )

Here’s the spec:

Intel Core2Duo P9500 2,5Ghz
4GB DDR2 800Mhz
320GB HD 5400rpm
NVIDIA 9600M GT 512MB

and the best thing: if I don’t like a component I can configure it 🙂 e.g. I don’t want to buy vista 🙂

So.. my advice to you: don’t give up and keep searching.. you’ll find the right one 🙂

Not much to say

Hi!

today I’ve got not much to say… what has changed since yesterday?

I’m now working on a new homepage for Allevo, my chef has gone on vacation which means that my last days at work will be really relaxed, the sun’s shining again and it’s getting hotter and hotter each day.. I don’t even want to turn my tower on anymore.. it produces too much heat 😦

so yeah… have a nice day everyone

*beeing in a good mood today*

bye

Realizing something

Hi!

Today I realized that I was wrong with my opinion about Qt Designer. It is pretty good in the last version (4.4)… until today I didn’t know how to make widget’s fill the complete widget and how to actually build mainwindows which are resizeable (widget’s resize too) … it’s soo easy now that I’ve found out how it works.. you need layouts too ^^ (don’t know why I haven’t thought about using layouts in designer too… it’s soo obvious) … well.. now that I know I’ll try to port the kilometres of code regarding the MainWindow of Allevo to Designer… I’m already come pretty far 🙂

Also I tried to build the nouveau driver for my 8800gts 640mb today on my openSUSE 11.1 alpha 1 box.. wanted to know if it’s better for my card than nv and if there’s any 3D accelaration yet.
didn’t work out… it crashed at startup 😦 young project.. no specs… still good progress they are making 🙂 maybe it was just my fault.

So.. tomorrow I’ll get back to work in my summer internship… well.. work.. I’m already done .. the last weeks (3 out of 5) I had pretty much nothing to do because I was so fast at the beginning ^^ .. yeah.. I have other things to do if they can’t find any work for me… Qt documentation is pretty big 😀

Nothing earthshaking

Hey!

Today nothing earthshaking happend.. parents came home from their vacation (2 weeks full of rain 😀 … well… an traditional vacaction in austria ^^)

Nonetheless I had some time in the morning to hack a bit on Allevo.. theirs now a brand new documentchooser dialog. It’s by far not complete and I’ll surely redo the whole thing again but if you’ve got any suggestions for me please leave me a comment (if anybody is actually reading this blog ^^)

New document dialog

Cause I haven’t posted any pics yet and if you haven’t looked at the links I posted some days ago you don’t even know how Allevo looks.. so .. here are they:

Allevo v.1.2.0 (stable)

At first I wanted to show you a screenshot of the current dev version .. but when I started it I realized that it’s far from ready to be screend 😦
I’ll try to get it ready until the first week of september.. so stay tuned 🙂

Sometimes you just have to wait

Hi!

The time heals everything … well.. seems to be true also for KDE ^^ Yesterday I tried starting KDE without success.. today I compiled a new version from svn and now it’s running again 🙂

Cause of the 2.6.26 kernel which opensuse 11.1 alpha0 uses now I can’t use the proprietary nvidia driver anymore which means that I now got decent KDE4 2D performance with the nv driver 🙂 The only downside is that I now can’t use the desktop effects anymore 😦  .. well.. better no 3D than crappy 2D performance

Another example matching the title of this post is the situation of my “notebook buying process”.
I really want a notebook with the new montevina platform

• b/g/n (draft) wireless
• new cpus (25W) (P9400)
• nvidia 9600m gt
• intel x4500 gma
• ddr3 support
• and the most important point imo switchable graphics

Sadly my main point of interest (switchable graphics) is not yet available in ANY notebook and also hasn’t been tested anywhere..
Quality is another very important point in my plans for buying a new notebook.. my current notebook (Asus Z9252Va) is just crappy.. the lid hinges are broken, the paint on the palmrest has completely gone away as on my touchpad buttons, the keyboard keys are worn out and so on.. from a quality point of view I’ll never buy a Asus notebook… it was just such a great deal when I bought it 2 1/2 years ago …

Exactly such a deal has again occured:  ASUS M51VA-AS019C Intel Core 2 Duo P9400 2.53GHz / 4096MB / 320GB / TFT15.4 / BD/DVD-RW / Win Vista Home Premium
It has everything I want except a long battery life … and I’m afraid that the quality is as bad as that of my current one.. also service is surely not as good as Dell ones.

I really hope that Dell is going to  present a new Dell XPS 1530m with all the new goodies within the next 2 weeks. If that’s not the case I’ll likely buy this one:

• Intel T9300 (2,5GHz)
• 4GB DDR2 667MHz
• NVIDIA 8600M GT
• 320GB 5400rpm
• DVD RW Double Layer^
• 1440×900

If anyone got any suggestions where to get a good montevina notebook matching these specs (mentioned above) with decent support and good quality please write me a comment 🙂

One quick note

Last quick note for today: NVIDIAs drivers for linux suck! Some months ago their drivers where the best you could get.. but the 2D performance of the current ones is really (read: unbelievable) slow …

even my years old ATI Mobility Radeon X700 outperforms my highend NVIDIA 8800gts 640mb 😦

It’s really bad in KDE4 sessions too (see http://techbase.kde.org/User:Lemma/KDE4-NVIDIA)

Well.. can’t change it.. will just need to buy my next notebook with a model from another graphics card vendor .. or a combined thingy (intel + nvidia + intel switching graphics … well.. needs to come out really soon if I should buy it .. I desperately need a new notebook.. my old one’s dieing (Asus Z9252Va) … hope I can get a Dell XPS 1530 with the new montevina plattform, intel core2duo P9500 and an 9600m gt with switching graphics

Getting KDE 4.2 trunk to work on my rig

So.. I’m back 🙂

On my recently upgraded openSUSE 11.1 Factory (Alpha 0) I’ve just retried to get my KDE trunk checkout back to work again (after I unbroke my system after one canceled system upgrade). The first step was replacing kdm3 with kdm4 … after a lot of fiddling with config files (/etc/sysconfigs/displaymanager), xessions, recompiling the kdm module, setting the right path variables, etc. I finally got it to work *sight*

But it has payed off.. it looks REALLY cool in the default theme 🙂

Well… problem 1 — Solved

Let’s attack problem 2: KDE startup… I’ve removed my config files to get a clean setup.. well.. seems it was the wrong decision.. the current trunk (24.7.2008) has a bug which prevents the recreation of the configs (if I’ve understood the problem correctly) .. it’s described here:

Mailing list entry: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=121615750824656&w=2

I’ve tried the patch.. doesn’t work.. I’ve tried the script.. doesn’t work.. plasma just won’t start.. krunner works, and all programs I start from it .. as far as I’ve seen plasma starts and disappears emmediately 😦

well… I’ll try copying my config  files from my notebook to that pc.. hope that will work out.. stay tuned for some more news tomorrow ^^

btw: take a look at phoronix (http://www.phoronix.com) … very interesting articles to read.. my favourite articles atm are about the upcoming improvements in the X-Server (GEM, DRI2, Kernel based mode settings) .. can’t get enough of news about them ^^

Another one :-)

So… now I’ve got some time 🙂 Well.. let me introduce you to my projects. All of the important/bigger ones are written in C++ with the help of the Qt framework *yay*

1.) Allevo (Qt 4.4)
That’s my newest pet project 🙂 It’s a cost calculation program developed for school in the beginning.. it has grown to a testbed for new technologies I’ve found and it is under heavy development atm to reach 2.0 soon.
Homepage: http://sourceforge.net/projects/allevo

2.) Systemcenter (Qt4.3/4.4)
Systemcenter is a tool for monitoring and controlling the state of your hardware (cpu frequency, temperature, graphics card clock, time controlled shutdown/…) . It will be crossplattform but not anytime soon because of the lack of time 😦 If I remember correctly I’ve uploaded the last stable and usable version for linux (the windows version was never stable 😀 and the macos version virtually doesn’t exists)
Homepage: http://sourceforge.net/projects/systemcenter

3.) CollectYourIPs (C#)
Well.. this was a short hack… We have tons of ip addresses in our school so I had something to do against this chaos… maybe I’ll have the time to finish it this summer.. xml support is definately on the road map
Homepage: http://sourceforge.net/projects/collectyourips

4.) Many many ideas which just haven’t reached the keyboard yet 😀

Hm…. yeah… because of talking so much about my projects I’ve totally forgotten to introduce myself 😀
My name’s Bernhard Friedreich, I’m a 16yo student from vienna going to a school for EDP* (at least they tell us it’s for EDP :D)… just finished 3rd year … two years remaining *sight*
Edit: now that I’ve reread this section about me it seems pretty short ^^ so.. well… my hobbies are programming, beeing a part of the opensource community (especially kde) ^^, swimming, skiing, dancing

So.. atm nothing else comes to my mind which seems important enough to tell you … cause of that I’ll leave you alone so that you can recover from my awful english 😀

*EDP: For those who don’t know (like I did some years ago before I’ve heard it the first time): EDP = electronic data processing which means in other words: computer stuff 😛

“First” entry

Hi!

Well.. seems to be my first entry on my brandnew blog 🙂 First is written under quotes because I tried numerous times to blog on various sites.. but I always lost interest or didn’t have the time to do so… I’ll try to get better 🙂

What have I got to say? Hm.. good question… I’ll tell you stories about my everday life with software, the problems of proprietary systems, the ongoing development of my projects and wine about not having enough time ;p

Sadly my lunch break is over now so I have to get back to work..