Monday, March 30, 2009

While looking for a major I found a potential bug

Yes, I am looking for a college major. Right now I'm pre-pharmacy. I have applied, and now what I am going to study next year hangs in the balance. Since I hate leaving things up to chance (even though it's been proven that regardless of how much I plan, things happen a certain way in-spite of my best efforts). So I am choosing a major besides pre-pharmacy. I said all that to say, if you have any idea of an interesting College majors that also would help me get a job please offer the information.

Yes, I know, a shameless attempt to get non-kde adivce on a kde related blog, but here is what I am "actually" blogging to discuss.

Everyone type the following in your konsole while in an empty directory.

svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdelibs/kdeui/tests/krichtexteditor/
Now enter the directory krichtexteditor and type

mkdir build
cd build/
cmake ../
make
Now run that application

./krichtexteditor

Now use that to open a file with bullets or an ordered list (and this may even work with any rich test at all). In fact I have added below a list you can copy in there. Make sure there are misspelled words in the document.

  • adadad
  • asd
  • adsdfas
  • adsfdaf
  • adaafa
Now that you have your document with misspelled words and a list of some sort. It's time for the exciting part! Right click to get the context menu and Click Check Spelling.

When the spell check dialog comes up click cancel. If all worked as it did for me, you should now notice that the bulleted list has been removed. YAY! Actually this seems to be an issue in other things I've used with this as well. I haven't checked around into this, but I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't hallucinating.

UPDATE:
Sadly, I wasn't hallucinating, and so here is the bug report. For those of you who have encountered this issue, you can follow it there. I'm going to try and see later this week if I can do something about this.

UPDATE2:
I forgot to post the bug report link.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=188523

Friday, March 20, 2009

Hello KDE

Well, this isn't exactly, my first post, it's my third. The two before this adequately explain what I set out to do when I made the decision to contribute to kde. This is more background, nontechnical information.

Since I started using Linux with Fedora Core 4 & Ubuntu Breezy, I have been looking for a way to contribute. Since then I embarked on a mission to explore numerous distros, to get the feel for not only the software but the communities as well. My goal was to find a place I felt I could really contribute. However I didn't really settle anywhere and all I got out if it is a really bad habit of distro hopping. (Though I mostly stick to Fedora, Ubuntu/Debian, and Arch). Then I started looking into KDE 4 (at the time I was a gnome user). I watched the keynote speech on KDE4's frameworks and advancements, and I was hooked, because I truly saw potential in these new software frameworks. It was well integrated, and it was well thought out. On top of all that the DE looked slick and professional. Between Qt and KDE libs I saw endless possibilities. So I switched DE's and began looking for ways to contribute. I outlined some of those in earlier posts but I'll put a quick run through here. (DISCLAIMER: the above wasn't a jab at gnome, I still thinks it's a nice DE and keep track of it, I just prefer kde over gnome).

1. Development: I want to help with actual coding. Though I am new to KDE, Qt, and C++, so I hope those of you out there will help make my a better programmer. To some extent I have already embarked on this mission. Recently I submitted a patch to Stephen Kelly (who has been a great help) that added and auto decimal list feature to Kjots. It was my first code contribution to a FOSS project and I am still very proud of it, and I hope those of you out there will test it in svn.

2. Documentation: I am very big on this. I know it can be tedious even hard to write good documentation, but with all the new frameworks (not to mention improved language support) with kde 4 I think we can do better on the documentation end. I really hope to get started on this end sometime soon. (For those of you who are part of the "inner circle" for developer documentation in kde, please let me know where much of the discussion takes place etc.

3. Any other way I can really (with time considerations of course).

One thing I have to say is that KDE's community is one of the most friendly open minded communities I've seen in FOSS. If you are considering helping out with kde, there are tons of different ways to do so, whether it be code, art work, documentation or anything else you can think of. If you would like to ask any question regarding this, please feel free to ask me I'd be more than happy to help.

I look forward to working with all of you in the future. Here's to happy KDE 4.3 release.