One Soap Box

Recently, I compiled a list of apps from kde-apps.org that I thought would be useful in Fedora. In addition, I recently edited the wiki to move the table of requested packages to a page of its own. Ryan Rix is now taking that list and putting it into that table. If anyone sees any applications there that they would like, please add your name to the table and keep it up to date. If you need any help with a package or would like to know how to get started with packaging for Fedora, feel free to join #fedora-kde on irc.freenode.net (webchat link is here).

I'm not sure how long the table will take to propogate and I am only up to page 60 or so of the things on the kde-apps website, so keep an eye out for any applications or libraries you use or would like to maintain.

I know a while ago I posted that I wouldn't get a netbook, but woot prices are hard to beat. I'm actually quite pleased with it. The keyboard could still use a few extra keys (right control is sorely missed with the new setup I'm attempting). Only issues I've run up against are the 4GB SSD (no second drive) and the camera which I would have liked to have.

This machine has proven to be very useful. Light and agile for class. Quiet, suspend/wake up in a decent time (in KDE, there are...faster ways however). A full KDE install fits on the machine (though I have nm-applet, but I removed basically everything GNOME-ish from the thing, even nodoka so it looks like X days) and I still have about 1GB of space left to clone repositories and hack around. RAM usage (it has 512MB) is amazing. KDE fits and operates in under 160MB of memory.

However, I do have something else I have been attempting to try out. I set up the antidesktop on it using ratpoison. After screen starts up, I have a grand total of...60MB of memory used. And that includes the htop instance used to view usage. I'd like to get some console apps running to try and stay in screen as much as I can, but mutt seems to be a pain to get to do what I do with a basically stock KMail (5 SMTP/IMAP accounts side-by-side), so I'll end up using KMail at least and probably KNode as well since it's the same package. I have Bilbo and Choqok installed for blogging and denting, respectively, as well. I wish there were command line clients for these (full read/write, not just posting), but this seems to be a dead end.

Besides the apps, I do have some things that I have been unable to get working nicely. If anyone else has a similar setup the current issues I am having with the ratpoison setup:

• Losing session DBus connections from the screen instance when I restart ratpoison for config tweaking
• wpa_supplicant magic (nm-applet dies with X and cnetworkmanager can't find nm-applet configs to use those)
• locking X and screen on lid close
• sleeping on lid close (currently using a script to execute acpitool -s, which is very fast)

Any tips? My Google-fu has not turned up anything.

I am also learning to use the Colemak keyboard layout on the eee. The keyboard is different enough that switching between the two is easy. The biggest change (for me) will be that there aren't any dead keys. I use us_intl normally and tend to type out "' " a lot on non-us_intl keyboards.

So there's a GPG signing party here soon, so I decided to whip up a LaTeX file that creates a PDF with a bunch of slips of paper with the important information on it to hand out at the party. Instructions are included in the file.