Raster to be the default Qt4 graphics engine @ Gentoo Linux

February 23, 2010 · Posted in Gentoo, Linux · 18 Comments

In our latest meeting[1] we decided to test and enable raster[2] use flag by default in Qt4. In order to achieve this, we kindly ask you to set this use flag on qt-gui and test as many Qt4 apps as you can. If you don’t feel like rebuilding qt-gui, you can simply append

-graphicssystem raster when launching a Qt4 application like this:

qmpdclient -graphicssystem raster

You may also post your results on the respective topic on Gentoo forums[3]

Your feedback is much appreciated.

On behalf of the Gentoo Qt team, thank you

[1] http://gitorious.org/gentoo-qt/pages/Meeting20100219

[2] http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/10/22/so-long-and-thanks-for-the-blit/

[3] http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-816758.html

Tags: Gentoo, qt

Migrating to a minimalistic desktop

February 5, 2010 · Posted in Gentoo · 9 Comments

Since I moved to Linux OS ( 5-6 years ago ) I use KDE as my main DE. This wasn’t a random choice, since I ‘ve tried or at least seen all the others main DEs such as xfce and Gnome. KDE is so much beautiful and convenient that I never bothered searching for something else. This is because my main activity on computers was purely based on multimedia entertainment despite the fact that I had to deal with a heavy load of University projects. Since I finished University , and dedicate most of my free time on Gentoo and other Open Source activities, I started to use more and more utilities designed for such things, such as Qt-creator, version control systems, ssh connections to various servers etc.

It is pretty clear that a eye-candy desktop enviromment couldn’t be as much beneficial as I wanted. Hence I had to search for an alternative. A minimalistic desktop or WM allowing me to take advantage of every single pixel of my 19” monitor and don’t waste them with various widgets and stuff would be ideal.

I tried fluxbox at first but I wasn’t too fond of it because it looked kinda ugly by default and I just couldn’t get along with it. So next thing to try was Openbox. I was quite surprised to see that I could tweak it and tune it up by simply editing 3 files located at ~/.config/openbox

Having created my shiny menu.xml and autostart.sh files, I emerged obconf in order to perform that last tweak on my new enviromment.

I plan to migrate my laptop to openbox as well since it looks and feel quite fast and light . Exactly what I was searching for my “tired” laptop

To conclude with, I added fluxbox-9999 and obconf-9999 packages to gentoo tree since I wanted to try the latest version of those two packages and I guess our users will like that as well.

So, enjoy :)