So Kubuntu Dapper came out last week, and I thought I would try to upgrade. Last time went moderately well, and the same again this time - only moderately well. Still, four problems for an operating system upgrade (and in the linux world, that’s every single application as well) isn’t too bad.

Here, for reference, are what happened to me, and how I fixed them.
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It’s been a few days of upgrades recently. First off was the new version of Firefox, released last week. The lightning-fast forward and back is great - especially noticeable when you click on a link halfway down a page, and hit back. No more reshuffling the page as the layout is recalculated. Also, error pages (server not found and so on) are shown as pages, instead of dialog boxes. That’s been a long time coming. The only downside is that most of the themes haven’t been upgraded, so I had to find a different one. Most of the plugins I used are now redundant, since tabs are a lot easier to work with. Overall, a highly recommended upgrade. (If you don’t use Firefox already, you really should try it!)

Yesterday was a not-quite seamless upgrade for my Kubuntu install. I think it took about three chunks of upgrades to sort itself out - each time it would upgrade about a third of the packages. But it eventually worked, and I like the minor upgrades to all the software that I use (and especially to the package manager!). And it’s so nice having the OS and all the programs you ever need sorting themselves out automagically.

I’ve finally got round to upgrading the software that powers this weblog. That’s been a long time coming too. So if you notice anything wrong (or badly styled) let me know. I’ve also got all the spam-filtering plugins disabled; I want to see how well the new version copes by itself. It’s like putting your head in a lions mouth to see if he’s hungry…

This post was brought to you by the words “Open Source”, “Free Software”, and “absolutely fantastic”. Oh, and probably “preaching to the choir” too.

Every so often, there’s something about KDE that really impresses me. This time it’s text selection in KPDF. I’ve just tried to copy some code from a pdf into kdevelop, so I had to activate the selection tool. Surprisingly, it’s a rectangular selection tool - you select the area you want, and then choose whether you want the text, or an image of the selected area copied to the clipboard. Ingeniously, I wanted to copy the code without the line numbers - not a problem.

It’s the little things like this that really impress me about linux and KDE in general. A couple of months ago I upgrade my linux box for the first time in three years, and the more I use it, the more impressed I get. “KIOSlaves” are fantastic too, and are one of these really simple and obvious things that come in really useful. I can’t find a simple explanation of them though, so maybe I’ll need to write a “KIOSlaves in fifty words” entry at some point.

A long while back, I decided that if I ever had a problem, and the answer to the problem wasn’t obvious from Google, then I’d write it on my weblog and hope that the next person with the same problem finds my solution instead. So here goes. If the wording sounds a bit funny, it’s because I’m trying to cast the search-word net wide enough to catch anyone who’s looking for similar things.

In Konqueror (the KDE file manager), there is a limit to the file size for the file previews to work, to try to stop your computer getting bogged down if you’ve got lots of large images. I ran into this today when I was trying to look at some of my new photos, since my shiny new toy takes rather large pictures, and only a couple of them were small enough that the preview worked. Searching for ‘kde preview image size limit’ picked up some stuff about the limit being hardcoded into KDE, but that’s waaay out of date, and you can change the limit from the menu nowadays. For KDE 3.0.3 at least (yes, I know how old it is), try Settings->Configure Konqueror->File Manager->Previews->Maximum File Size, and increase the slider.

Fairly obvious, I know, and I fixed the problem a lot quicker than it took to write all that out. But the internet is supposed to be the Source Of All Answers, so I’m just doing my bit.