Thomas Bergheim dot com

I don’t remember when it started, but every now and then when I got back at the computer after leaving it on for several hours, the keyboard-leds would blink and the computer would not respond to anything – in other words a kernel panic. The problem was nothing got written to any logfiles, so debugging this didn’t seem trivial. After reading a bit around, I decided to try adding noapic to the kernel parameters (this disables APIC). This was a few weeks ago and it hasn’t happened since. Apparently the problem is well-known, but notoriously difficult to fix properly since adding “noapic” is much easier for users, and it Just Works.

While setting up Nagios3 I got this error: (Return code of 127 is out of bounds – plugin may be missing). I couldn’t understand what it was because I could run check_nrpe manually from the CLI and other plugins (link check_ping) worked fine. After a lot of looking around it turns out (atleast in Gentoo) nrpe places check_nrpe in another directory (/usr/nagios/libexec/) than where the others are (/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/) (and where $USER1 points). So I just made a symlink and Nagios finally worked.

Another thing that isn’t pointed out very well I think is that servers are generally backwards-compatible with clients (but not the other way around). In my case this means running 3.0.6 on the server and 2.12 on the (etch) clients works fine!

Although dependancy on /tmp is a bad idea, I still want to be able to recover things like OpenOffice and Okular files between boots. You could probably set up where these programs do temporary storage, but this is quicker; open up /etc/rc.inittab anddelete the line “/bin/rm -rf /tmp/* …”.

This works, however old stuff is now never removed, which is bad, so add a new line there, something like “/usr/bin/find /tmp/ -mtime +14 -type f -exec rm -rf {} \; &>/dev/null”. This will make sure files that are over 2 weeks old will be removed.

And since you don’t delete the directory anymore, there are a few mkdir /tmp/… that will give you a warning during boot – just add “-p” to the mkdir arguments and it will be fine.

First, it is possible to just copy your old .kde dir to .kde4. Some things didn’t work for me and anyway it’s a good opportunity to do some housecleaning, so I decided to try and import data instead (and keep the old .kde3 dir in case I need it later).

Konqueror: import bookmarks from 4.2 works fine (bookmarks -> edit bookmarks -> file -> import -> kde2/3 bookmarks, select KDE_35_FOLDER/share/apps/konqueror/bookmarks.xml.

Kaddressbook (contacts): export them in kde3 into one big vcard file, import in kde4.

Kmail: Use the import mail options. I quickly gave up on finding the files for the identities and just set them up again in 4.2 instead.

Kgpg: replaced by kleopatra. Just copied ~/.gnupg over and everything Just Worked.

Kopete: The only thing I wanted over was the history. Copy over the files and directories under ~/.kde/share/apps/kopete/logs/ to the ~/.kde4 dir. In Kopete for KDE4.2 it uses a new MSN-plugin, which uses a different folder for logging. I just moved the logfiles from MSNProtocol to WlmProtocol.

Akregator: I first just used file -> import feeds and found the rss-file under the old kde3 folder. Works well, however I have a few articles marked as important so to get these over I copied the Archive-folder over as well (.kde/share/apps/akregator/Archive), which worked fine.

The other programs just requires minor adjustment and I didn’t import the settings.

So apparently Linus doesn’t like KDE anymore and here we go again. Apparently for people who LOVE KDE 3.5 the only choice if they don’t like KDE4 (yet anyway) is to switch to gnome. I’m writing this post on a KDE 3.5 installation and a big WTF floats in my head. If KDE4 doesn’t suit you, then why do you HAVE to move to gnome? People are raving about how good 3.5 was. Then don’t upgrade! It’s just stupid. Linus was apparently forced to “upgrade” from 3.5 to 4.0 which is fucked up. Fedora is obviously a distribution which suck nuts. KDE 4.0 was utter crap, and not recommended for average users, and for Fedora to force this upgrade and take away KDE 3.5 is just nuts. Actually a lot of other distros followed like sheeps, Kubuntu forced this upgrade with KDE 4.1, which is still a bad and not-yet-ready release in my book.

But all this poor handling and storm around KDE 4.0 just means what I (and many others) was thinking all along: releasing a major new version (4.0) and calling it a developer release is just stupid. Apparently they HAD TO DO IT in order to gain widespread adoption, all the while saying that this was NOT for endusers, and distributions should not include it. Sounds like a paradox to me. “KDE4: Developer Preview” or something sounds more like it. I’ve never heard of a .0 release not being intended for anyone except developers (sans all Microsoft software ofcourse), and KDE can’t just coin a new convention and excect it to work out flawlessly. I don’t like the convention either, it means that the average user will have no idea which version is intended for widespread release – it might be .1, might be .4, might be .129. Version numbering is pointless but if you are going to use it, .0 should be usable by anybody. KDE4.2 really is the first 4.0 for regular people. I still don’t think it is better than 3.5 though.

But, 4.2 really is starting to make KDE4 rise again. I never used kontact on KDE 3.5, but for some reason in 4.2 it just appeals more to me. Might be that it just looks better on 4.2, I d’no. Personally I am waiting eagerly for opensync 0.4 to stabalize and the kde4-pim plugin to be released. Nepomuk, when it is more integrated than in 4.2, will also bring lots of coolness to the desktop.