For those people involved in working with free software, the FSF has launched a new jobs directory. The announcement is here and the site itself is here.

At first, I wasn't sure if it was going to be particularly North American focused, but it seems that there are jobs from around the world present already, plus some which are more "location independent".

After a couple of weeks or so of having KDE 4.0.0 installed, which has already been upgraded to 4.0.1 thanks to the speedy Kubuntu packagers, I thought I'd post a few screenshots to show what it looks like. As I mentioned in this previous post, though the desktop is looking good, many of the applications are not quite there yet. However, I was still very pleasantly surprised to find a dark background colour scheme available in the default installation. The scheme is much better than my own incrementally built fairly dark scheme for KDE 3. These screenshots are then in KDE 4's new dark scheme, "Obsidian Coast". You can view the full size screenshots by clicking on them.

Firstly, let's take a look at a basic KDE 4 desktop. The new panel is sitting at the bottom (where until 4.0.2, later in February, hopefully, it seems it shall remain) and there's a clock widget sitting at the top left. Here I'm using the new file manager Dolphin to look at some photos.

Now, there's been a lot of controversy over the introduction of Dolphin into KDE, and its position as the default file manager. In KDE 4, the original Konqueror file managing code has gone, but the Dolphin KPart can be run inside Konqueror to allow the latter to still be used as a file manager. One very useful (in my opinion) feature of this is that you can still use tabs for file management, or indeed a mix of file browsers, web pages and SFTP connections in one Konqueror window. This has been one of the best features of Konqueror since it was introduced, allowing the logical grouping of windows according to task. This next screenshot shows the same view as before but in Konqueror, with the tab bar visible.

As I've already alluded to, one of the new things KDE 4 offers is its deskop, Plasma. This is a completely new thing, built out of the desktop widget idea which Superkaramba showcased in KDE 3. Apple OSX also has a similar thing. The desktop and the panel can be populated with various widgets, called plasmoids. The weird looking splash of paint in the top right is the button to add more plasmoids to the desktop. In this next shot, the splash of paint has been clicked, and it's asking me which widgets I'd like to add. There area quite a few available already, and they're incredibly quick and easy to write, in pretty much any language you like from HTML to C++. Here, I've dragged the "comic strip" plasmoid onto the desktop, and it's automatically pulled in the latest edition of whichever comic strip it's pre-configured to from the internet.

As I said, there are lots of plasmoids available, which can each be freely moved, resized, and rotated.

For those people (like me) who use the terminal regularly, Yakuake has been very nicely ported to KDE 4, and it's now got proper transparency. Take a look at this next screenshot.

The compositing features of the new version of the window manager, KWin extend all across the desktop environment, including dimming out-of-focus windows and the OSX style window switcher.

The launcher has also been completely redesigned, with menus behaving rather like they do on the iPod (I'm not sure what I think about this yet). There's also a search box, which I've found very handy in case you can't remember whether something was hidden away in "utilities", "system" or "settings".

KDE 4 comes with a good selection of silly addictive games too. Remember the Simon Says game?

We were looking at images in Dolphin and Konqueror eariler, but KDE 4 comes with a newly revamped Gwenview too. The browse mode, shown here, with its associated panel (on the right of the window) makes organising pictures a lot easier.

One of the most demonstrated programs in KDE 4 has to be KStars, a "desktop planetarium". This really is an excellent program, realistically simulating and labelling the night sky from any given location and time. Okay, so I haven't actually checked it against the real night sky. I live in Birmingham, and the light pollution has created this sorry state when I have to check my computer to see what I should be able to see from here... KStars also makes use of "Get New Hot Stuff", which apart from having a really cheesy name, integrates the finding and downloading of add-ons directly into the program. It works for desktop themes, backgrounds, maps and, here, planetarium data files, such as the locations of comets.

Well, that's all for now. KDE 4 is available for Ubuntu / Kubuntu, and will install alongside your existing KDE 3 or GNOME, without interfering with any of your current settings. Take a look here to find out how. There area also live CDs available from SUSE and Kubuntu.

So today I'm working not from my office in Birmingham, but from the University of York, where my girlfriend, Marla, is doing a Master's degree. Here I am sitting in the library, and I fire up my laptop. Immediately, I see Kubuntu's network manager icon whirring away, and within just a few seconds, I have two bars of wi-fi signal, connecting me to the Eduroam network, a service which currently allows me to log on to wireless networks at universities all across Europe and Australia, using my home university's credentials. Well, until today, that was the theory, but I'd had so much trouble just connecting to the wireless network at my home institution that I never expected it to be this easy. I wasn't even looking to get online today (in fact, I was looking forward to the lack of distraction), but here we are, and I thought it worth a mention.

This is IT done right.

For the last couple of months, I've been very fortunate and grateful to have been lent a Neo 1973 smartphone by Andy Loughran. Thanks Andy.

The Neo is the first piece of hardware which has been released by FIC, as part of the OpenMoko project. OpenMoko aims to create a fully free (as in freedom) mobile phone. Both harware specs and the software source code are free and open. So, what's it like?

Well, for a start, the thing runs Linux, which is rather cool and makes sense given how successful Linux has been on other small devices such as the Sharp Zaurus. The Neo is very obviously running Linux too, with the scrolling text boot-up screen Linux users will be famlilar with, from time to time hidden by a progress bar decorated splash screen. I decided not to put any real pictures or screenshots on this post, since none of the ones I tried came out very well, and there are lots of good examples on the net already, such as this video on YouTube and these pictures on Flickr. Zeth Green has also written about the OpenMoko software, and his post here has some great screenshots.

This is a project which I wholeheartedly support. Mobile phones are probably the last major area of modern personal computing-based technology which does not yet have a decent free software option. Indeed, since the phones are very often bought from the network operating companies themselves, the companies almost without exception impose some form of locking down on your phone. The extreme example is probably the iPhone, of which a friend of mine is currently having to downgrade the software, in order to get it to do what he wants. Apple has left no doubt as to its view on people having any kind of control over their own equipment. Other examples of locking down include non-optional firmware upgrades, tying you into one particular network and most importantly making it very difficult to develop your own software for the thing, in order to make it work in the way in which you want it to.

OpenMoko is changing this idea. Okay, but let's be honest, we're still not there yet. Whilst the hardware is virtually finished, the software is still really a work in progress. Power management, for example, is still quite broken, meaning that the phone won't go into standby mode properly and loses its entire battery in just a couple of hours. The phone is also quite a pain to charge, since it seems to go through phases of turning itself on and off repeatedly when it doesn't have much juice in it. These problems, of course, will be fixed in good time.

But these initial factors, whilst making the Neo unusable as an everyday phone at present, cannot rain on the parade that is the achievement in bringing really good free smartphone software into the world. The OpenMoko software suite looks nice, being based on GTK+, the widgets used in GNOME, and works well for the most part. The phone's touchscreen makes it feel more like a PDA than a normal phone, but I guess that perceptions will change with more and more touchscreen phones being invented, such as the aforementioned iPhone. There are small usability problems to be sorted out, like the touchscreen keyboard requiring accuracy the likes of only Robin Hood possess with the stylus, in order to enter words. Nevertheless, it's easy to see how this will be a major player in the phone market once it is finalised.

The OpenMoko software will run not only on the Neo 1973, but also on many other phones, according to the OpenMoko project. It's easy to predict a scenario where OpenMoko can be installed on pretty much any phone, rather like how Rockbox can be installed on pretty much any music player. This has to be a good thing.

And in case this wasn't enough, there's also the Qtopia smartphone software, also open source, being developed by Trolltech, the Noweigian company who develop QT, the libraries upon which KDE is based. While OpenMoko will look familiar to GNOME users, KDE users will probably feel more at home with Qtopia, and it looks just as good. The Qtopia software, which has been primarily developed for their reference platform, the Greenphone, is perhaps a little closer to release quality at present, and can, as mentioned, be installed easily on the Neo.

All this flexibility, in my opinion, hails a fantastic, revolutionary time for our now ubiquitous mobile phones. Pretty soon, we will all have the choice not only of which phone to use, but also of which software to run on it, regardless of hardware or network. We'll be able to extend it, modify it, and share our work with the community. The success of the free software model has really been demonstrated through many hugely successful projects. When the ability to improve stuff is open to anyone, it seems, all sorts of possibilities come into play and things get better. Just take a look at this video showing someone running the KDE 4 desktop, Plasma on the Neo, merely a couple of weeks after its release, and this one of Enlightenment E17 running on it.

OpenMoko is a great start, the Neo is quite a cool looking phone, Qtopia is coming along really well, and with projects like KDE embracing PDAs and phones as part of its cross-platform approach (see my post on KDE 4), the future looks very bright for free and open phones. Arguably the KDE vs GNOME desktop competition has been a good driver of free unix-based desktop systems, and it seems we won't be able to escape that particular war even on our mobile phones.

Anyway, flame wars and trolling aside, I'm looking forward to the freedom to choose.

This post is somewhat delayed (given that I wasn't around much last week) but KDE 4 has now been released. The internet is now full of reviews and blog posts about this highly significant milestone in the development of KDE and free software generally. The KDE news post can be found here, and there are articles here, here and here. If you have a spare hour, I also highly recommend watching the release event's keynote speech, delivered by Aaron Seigo, President of KDE e.V, the non-profit organisation which represents the KDE project legally and financially. The video, available here, contains lots of nice demos of the new functionality, and also introduces the new frameworks (or pillars) upon which KDE 4 is built. It also shows early demos of KDE running natively on Windows and OSX, as platform independence was always one of the goals of KDE 4. This is a little contravertial, but also quite exciting as it has the potential to bring in many more users (and testers and developers).

I myself have installed the KDE 4.0.0 packages, available with Kubuntu Gutsy (see here), though haven't had much time to look at it yet. Hence I'm going to refrain from any real judgement or review until a later date. I will say, however, that despite a few of my concerns around Dolphin and the general move to dumb down much of the user interface, it does look very nice indeed, and I like the sound of where the project is heading. It's good to see a piece (suite?) of software which I use so much having so much effort and momentum behind its development. Personally, I'm going to be very interested to see the new Akonadi (named apparently after the Greek god of Knowledge) personal information management framework come into play in forthcoming releases.

As all the release statements and blogs say, KDE 4.0.0 is merely the beginning of KDE 4. The frameworks are now laid out and finalised, the applications are coming together. It is in no way yet suitable as a replacement for KDE 3.5, simply because the applications are not there yet (such as Kontact), but with a little time, I am certain that this will become an excellent leading edge desktop system.

After my little foray into the land of GNOME over the last month or so, I've finally got my KDE desktop back and pretty much configured on my home PC. Mmmm... hopefully without sounding too weird about it, this feels much better....

A few people have expressed dissatisfaction with the default KDE look, and I've always indicated that I tend to tweak the layout quite heavily. So, here's a screenshot of my current set-up.

There's nothing out of the ordinary KDE stuff going on here. But, for those unfamiliar, there are a couple of Konquerors (one in web-browsing mode with three tabs open, the other looking at some picture files), Amarok (the KDE music player) is in its xmms-style mode, and Yakuake (the quake-style terminal program) is rolled down and just visible at the top of the screen. I tend to have my Kicker (the taskbar thing) occupying the left border of the screen, which works much better in this day of widescreen monitors. There are a few other minimised windows on the current desktop, but nothing on the second. I have a few shortcut buttons, the K menu (depicted for a bit of fun by the gorilla guy) and then some other stuff, such as Kontact indicating how many emails I've got, sitting just above the clock and deleted items widget.

Anyway, so there we go. Perhaps a little boring for a blog post, but now we know. :-)

Stephen Fry - recently self-outed techie - has posted a rather excellent bit of text on world-wide web inventor Tim Berners-Lee this weekend. Erm, I think this used to be called his "Guardian column" or something like that ;-) But anyway, whether you read it in the Guardian or on his blog, it's well worth reading if you're not familiar with this rather inspirational pioneer.

I did find it rather funny though that Fry points out that the omnipresent acronym for World Wide Web, WWW, is significantly (3 times) more syllables than its expansion. Perhaps this is one of the first acronyms designed purely for ease of use on computers (especially since it's the same key three times), rather than to save time in speech...

I wrote a month ago a little about my experiences with GNOME and KDE, the two most popular desktops for Linux-based systems, and, being a long-time KDE user, decided to spend a month using GNOME. A month later, I will now relate my experience and opinions.

So... has a month using Ubuntu's default choice of desktop environment convinced me of the wisdom of switching more permanently? Have I been shown the error of my kways? In summary: No. For me personally, the difference between the two desktops is still stark, and GNOME has very little to offer anyone used to the functionality and configurability of KDE. Plus, in other places, I found that it just didn't work.

Firstly though, some positives. GNOME's default look has certainly been well polished. Its use of shadows, and choice of fonts are well made. The integration of compiz enables a fun and useful three-dimensional desktop, with very few glitches given how new the software is. Plus, it's easy to use (if a little confusing to configure). "GNOME looks better" is often the first comment people make when they realise that I'm a KDE user. They've perhaps installed KDE and played with it for a bit, but never long enough to want to customise its looks very much. And let's be honest, the default look of KDE (even the pre-release KDE 4) really sucks.

However, we are urged not to judge a book by its cover, and this is no exception. Firstly, because KDE's look and feel is so highly configurable when compared to GNOME (my KDE desktop is altered almost beyond recognition from the default), but also because looks aren't everything.

As ever, it's functionality that really counts. Now, GNOME's feature-set is fairly standard, and what it does do, it does relatively well (for the most part). It has a web-browser (either Epihany, or else Firefox fits in well), which does what it says on the tin, it has an email and calendar program (Evolution), a movie player (Totem), music player (Rhythmbox) and a file browser (Nautilus), all of which do what you would expect, but there are very few added extras. This was my initial opinion upon first using the system, and it came to be backed up over time.

For example, take Totem, the movie player. Upon firing it up, you have three buttons, play/pause fast-forward and rewind, plus the usual menus to load files and discs, and the beginnings of some playlist support (though the way this worked really wasn't obvious to me, and there's no "add to queue" option in any other application). So far so okay, but there's strangely no stop button, and the position of the seek bar doesn't seem to particularly relate to the current position in the movie, especially when used with the mouse-wheel, which sends the film backwards then forwards somewhat in an oscillating motion. Okay, so there's a couple of bugs, but that's okay, I'm sure they'll be ironed out.

I've alluded to the main annoyance I found with Epiphany and Nautius already, a real lack of context-sensitive options for files and links. Why the default option for mp3 files is "open in movie player" I don't know, but for files to be opened in either Totem or Rhythymbox there is no "add to playlist" option. While I can live without this for films, it's fairly useful for building music playlists.

Another program of which I've become a heavy user of over the last couple of years is yakuake, a terminal emulator which sits just off screen, ready to slide onto the screen at the touch of a button (rather like the one first used in Quake and still in many games). Doing without this has been the most clumsyfying part of the last month; I just don't like having to alt-tab through dozens of windows to find a terminal. And yes, I tried tilda, but it didn't really cut it.

Okay, so I'm going to stop picking at small annoyances now (which to be honest can be overcome), and deal with some more fundamental issues for me. These issues can be largely summed up as a lack of integration and configurability. Integration, something which KDE does so very well, is just not there in GNOME. Okay, so all the programs use the same "open file" dialogue, but there is a general lack of awareness between programs, exemplified by the lack of "add to queue" option already discussed. I dislike using Firefox under KDE since it is not part of the integrated desktop, and hence its context-sensitive options must all be separately configured by hand. Konqueror behaves much better, knowing how to deal with items from local directories, ftp servers or websites. Epiphany falls down here however, providing usually only a simple "open link" option, which behaves like a poor cousin of Firefox's.

The lack of configurability of menu options doesn't make it any easier. Take Evolution, GNOME's flagship email and calendar program. As with most GNOME apps, it does what it says on the tin, but no more. In KDE, one consistent feature is that you can right click on a menu bar and configure which buttons it has. I find this most useful in KMail, where I replace the single "reply" button with three: "reply to author", "reply to all" and "reply to mailing list". All three have very different but highly useful functionality. I could not find a single way to achieve this in Evolution. The most it allows me to configure the menu is to decide whether I want text next to the icon or not. Evolution's threading support also lacks features to the extent that it makes a large folder of threaded messages difficult to handle, but I won't get back into small grievances...

This post was not intended as a blow-by-blow review of GNOME or KDE, and as such I will not cover every feature and gripe I have with each. There are enough websites around which do that already. Instead, I hoped to simply point out a few of the possibilities which are available, but which GNOME's lack of extended functionality prevents users from perhaps even realising exist. GNOME works, don't get me wrong. But Windows XP also works, as do Windows 98 and AmigaOS. When moving from Windows to Linux for the first time, it suddenly seemed that my computer would behave how I wanted it to, rather than me having to conform to the paradigm provided by its user interface. The feeling has been comparable but contrary this last month. KDE certainly gives the user more control over their interactions with their computer than GNOME does, and has more functionality. I believe that GNOME's restrictive "user friendly" design approach is bad for the cause of free software, which should encourage people to think about and use their computer in new and imaginative ways (such as IMAP resources for contacts, session management and consistency between handling of files wherever they are based), rather chaining them to what the designers think they want. Open, extensible and configurable functionality is the only way for this to be an option for the vast majority who are not prepared or able to dive into the code themselves.