Warte sehnsüchtig auf gutes Wetter ...

... denn ich komme nicht mehr zum Modellfliegen ...

Kubuntu 8.10 with wrong keyboard layout

After the upgrade to Kubuntu 8.10 the keyboard layout was invalid. I had the german layout, but the option "nodeadkeys" was not set. Because of this I had to press some keys twice before the character appeared on the screen.
Thank god we have the Internet and the following command entered in Konsole did reenable the expected behavior:

#> sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

How to delete a directory recursively ...

I use subversion for version control. That means that I have those little .svn directories all over the place. I was wondering if there is an easy approach to remove those folders in all of the subdirectories with a single command. And I came upon this solution:

find . -name .svn -type d -exec rm -r {} \;

QtCreator ...

I do software development for living... C++ development with Qt to be exact. I like the Qt framework, which makes writing C++ applications as much fun as writing e.g. Java or C# applications.

The biggest problem always was to find the right IDE to do Qt development. On Linux one doesn't have to look any further than KDevelop 3.5.3, but what to do on other platforms? Finally we decided to buy a Visual Studio license, because the Trolls did offer plugins that do allow development of Qt applications with it.

Now there is another player in the game. The Trolls did release a technical preview of QtCreator. The IDE even in it's alpha state does make a good impression. All projects we maintain to load and build in the IDE. It has some nice features, which allow you to specify different Qt versions for debug and release build. Why would anyone want to do that you ask? Well I always keep my commercial Qt license stuff under lib in my home directory. That way it doesn't interfere with the version installed in the system. The problem is now if you try to debug UI applications. What did work just like that under openSuSE, caused quite some headache under Kubuntu. If you did run your application under gdb and used any of the system dialogs like file open etc. the application did just hang. If you were lucky then you would be able to do the next step maybe after a few minutes or so. This is of course not acceptable for professional SW development.

At some point I found that I would not have any debugging problems when using the Qt libraries installed in the system be Kubuntu. So that is the reason why I use the system libraries for development and debugging, and my commercial licensed libraries for the release build. This does work perfectly for me, and now QtCreator does support me in working like that - great!

On the other hand there are some things one has to get used to... in QtCreator there is no such thing as a default toolbar with standard toolbar actions like file open/save etc. They decided to keep the UI plain and simple, so you need to start using keyboard shortcuts more often than you did in the past. But doesn't that make you even more efficient? Using the keyboard is most of the time much more efficient than using the mouse.

At this point I'm not sure wether I should stick with my lovely and reliable KDevelop, or try some projects using QtCreator. Maybe I'm going to use both ...

Upgrade to Kubuntu 8.10

Well I couldn't leave my hands off the new Kubuntu release. Even so it was not too long ago that I crashed my so much loved desktop environment with a similar attempt. I struggled with the urge to upgrade... but finally started to the process. What can I say. This time everything went smooth as it should be. And let me tell you. The Kubuntu and KDE guys made so much progress. I'm not sure what it is, but a lot of things I missed from KDE 3.5.xx are now back again. E.g. that I can now again reduce the back-light level when I run my notebook without power supply attached. Then I finally are able to resize my desktop to take advantage of my office LCD without the need to logoff/on. The whole thing seems to finally come tohether. Also I was looking for a grub editor, which is now also part of the system settings panel.

Lot of other applications received an update. One is the nVidia driver which is now 177 and may be the cause of some of my KDE4 problems disappearing... then I use kMyMoney for account management and this Kubuntu finally has a decent version of it available. 

The only thing I recognized was that a lot of kde4 packages which I had installed next to my KDE 3.5 desktop do not seem to be available anymore... but that may be my own mistake, by not reading the upgrade instructions. Maybe I should have removed those packages prior to the upgrade? But that is all I have to complain about at the moment. I really like this Kubuntu version and the KDE desktop is quickly getting to the point where I left KDE 3.5.12.

Thanks to all the people making this release happen.