Bobulate


Archive for January, 2011

Newer OSOL packages

Monday, January 10th, 2011

KDE 4.5.4 (why wasn’t that codenamed "pound" or such?) was released some time ago, so there’s updated OpenIndiana packages available. You can find them at the KDE 4.5 package repository. The naming is now deceptive: it’s KDE 4.5.4 in the 4.5.3 repo. Use specific FMRIs if you want to stick to the previous version. Only KDE packages were updated, so all the dependencies stay the same.

We have decided to drop OpenSolaris build 134 as a target. You can use these packages on OpenIndiana build 147 or later or Oracle Solaris Express build 151a. Maintaining compatibility with the older OSOL was increasing the complexity of building packages, putting our resources under strain. So we dropped it. We’re also still on the fence regarding Solaris 10 — no one seems to want it, which means that it may be swept under the rug sometime as well.

Change of direction

Sunday, January 9th, 2011

I see it’s been about six weeks since I last wrote something – anything – on my blog. Since then we’ve had Sinterklaas, Christmas, New Year’s, I’ve baked a variety of things that might have spiced up various tech articles, there have been interesting patent issues, etc. etc. My mind hasn’t really been on writing about that kind of stuff. My brother was over from Ethiopia, so I now have a fine assortment of spices and an Amharic cheat-sheet. Good holiday-season topics, but not something to bother Planet KDE (or other aggregations) with.

Allen kept reminding me of some sysadmin-ish things I needed to do with the EBN, so that finally was fixed, and now it has some useful DNS aliases as well. There was some occasional KDE e.V. work. didn’t get as much done there as I might have wanted — there’s the Sprints web-app and Sprints wiki pages update to go as well as the KDE e.V. website to clean up.

Anyway, time to wake up. December 1st I started a new job in a non-KDE programming position; I hack Python and documentation now. It’s for a non-profit association and development is Open-Source-ish — association members have SVN access, for instance. There’s some new sysadminning things to learn (like runnning Edgewall’s Trac) and I have many reasons to be thankful for today’s KDE 4.5.4 on Windows release. So far I’ve been using VMWare Player to avoid a good deal of pain — suffice to say that KMail on the desktop kicks Outlook squarely in the nadgers (a range of mountains near the Hub).

I’ve gotten used to the commute, reading the papers on the way out and using my n900 to catch up on KDE news on the way home in the evenings. What I do miss is a good WordPress blogging client on the phone (e.g. Blogilo). A nice Trac client would be a bonus, too. Maybe I will get into mobile apps development with Qt.