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 :)

Refs:

Gentoo Openbox Documentation

Gentoo Openbox wiki

Tags: <development, Gentoo, openbox>

Looking for the “ideal” C/C++ IDE

April 4, 2009 · Posted in Programming, Various · 12 Comments

Choosing the best IDE for your development projects is somehow a difficult task.

Recently I had to develop ( and I am still developing it) a University project. Basically I need to write some code on C ,some other on C++, use some (?) Qt4 for the user interface and use some rtai/rtnet headers and functions as well. The thing is that I haven’t written C/C++ for a long time. Last time I needed to , I used Anjuta . It was a very simple IDE that did the basics ( as far as I remember ). The years have pasted , now I am older and more mature (no comments) so I need to use a more mature IDE.

Kdevelop3 was the first IDE that poped on Google search. But.. it is a kde3 application. Hell NOOO :) . I dont feel like using old kde3 apps for my development. I just dont know why!!! I am that weird. Since I use kde4, I prefered to find a more “recent” and up2date IDE. Isn’t that normal? Kdevelop4 is pretty much broken right now so I had to search for another IDE.

Codeblocks was the second IDE that came into my mind. Very very handy ( not interface wise ) . I could have loved it ,if it wasn’t a GTK application :) . But still ,that IDE seems somehow pretty good for my project. Despite the fact that the interface was badly designed, it had some nice features. Unfortunately you can’t do much work if the interface is that ugly. And since I was supposed to do heavy development , I had to look for another ( more pretty ) IDE.

I do maintain qt-creator for Gentoo Linux. So I thought it was about time to give it a shoot. Great interface, pretty convenient but…. it was mostly for Qt4 development. So I decided to use this program to design my gui . Believe me , you should TRY IT if you write Qt4 applications. it is AWSOME. Great designer, handy features (fakevim, auto-completion , cmake support ). I liked the project tab that let me configure my .pro files just like I wanted them. gdb embedded debugger was really helpfull as well :)

Ok we are done with the user interface. What about the backend???? I was out of ideas…

But Kenneth’s blog post , reminded me of Eclipse :).

I didnt know ( and I still dont ) what version of eclipse exists on portage so I just downloaded the C/C++ version from here . I unpacked it on my $HOME folder and started using it . I think I found the ideal IDE for my projects ( at least so far ).There are not many words to say about eclipse. I am sure everybody (who has developed java/c++ ) knows about it.

What about you fellows? What is your prefered C/C++ IDE?

Tags: <c, development, ide>

Join the Gentoo Development team – Part ΙΙ

February 7, 2009 · Posted in Gentoo · 10 Comments

…or jumping the gap. A couple of days ago I joined the Gentoo Development Team :). I will be on KDE/Qt Herds. However, there are many things to be done on Qt eclasses ( qt4.eclass and qt4-build.eclass ) so I will focus on them for now. Not much else to say. I guess I should start messing with portage tree now :) .

Being a gentoo user for 3 years and now serving it, is a weird feeling. I would encourage people to join this project. You can deal with anything you like. KDE, Gnome, alsa, kernel. There are so many projects to participate on:).

On the other hand , if you dont have much time you can join Arch teams and test packages for your arch and mark them stable or something. This is quite important if you want more and more packages to be on the tree :)

For those who really dont have time at all, submitting bugs is more than appreciated. If you file a bug , we will be able to fix it. Dont keep bugs for yourself, and dont accept bugs as normal behavior. It will cost you 5′ to file a bug, but those 5′ will be beneficial for the rest of us.

So, about Qt, two days ago Qt-4.5.0_rc1 was released. As a result we bumped Qt-4.50_beta1 to Qt-4.5.0_rc1. qt-copy has been moved towards 4.5.0_rc1 hence we dropped 4.4.9999 packages and bring the shiny new 4.5.9999. Futhermore the first Qt-creator release candidate version is on our overlay as well.

Feel free to try them and report any issues you find either to me or to #gentoo-kde on freenode servers.

There is also a topic on Gentoo forums about our overlay.

Finally , I would like to thank Alex (wired) for testing and giving feedback for Qt-live packages.

Hope to see you around :)

Tags: <core, development, Gentoo, qt>

Join the Gentoo Development team – Part I

December 20, 2008 · Posted in Gentoo · 8 Comments

Saturday evening… Haven’t written for a while…

There is not much to do (Gentoo wise). I am testing qt-* beta ebuilds in order to commit them on kde-crazy overlay. I was pretty busy for the last two weeksl. I completed the ebuild quiz and sent it to my mentor ( yngwin ) for review. I also got my personal bug number plus I got access on kde-crazy overlay . Suddenly I feel quite more resposible about anything that happens around Gentoo. I am testing the ebuilds again and again in order to make sure that everything is ok. Commiting ebuilds on a public overlay which is directly available to users is a huge thing. You need to make sure that your ebuilds won’t brake their systems and flood you with bugs.

Apart from this, hopefully , I will join Daniel on Gentoo kernel team, when my training period is done. I have so many things to learn though. But I need to thank all those people who encourage me doing my first steps on Gentoo development.

Thank you yngwin,tampakrap, pchrist, scarabeus, Tommy[D] ( I hope I don’t forget someone :) ).

Tags: <development, Gentoo>