The long and painful road to useful Plasma 5 desktop

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UPDATE 22.1.2018

Some parts of this angry rant still hold true, but Plasma desktop sure improved greatly since this post was originally written. I now run latest KDE software on Manjaro for several months and it sure got good enough for my day-to-day use. New post incoming… maybe when I get around to it.

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First of all, I would like to state that I’m a fan of KDE. Some of their programs and utilities are unmatched by any other. For example file browser Dolphin, text editor Kate, the great PIM suite Kontact, … the list goes on. Also the level of customization is borderline fetishist. KDE desktop lets you do absolutely anything you ever thought possible and more… or it seems so at first. Then, in the moment of awe, the first crash comes. Then you start noticing weirg glitches and somehow missing features.

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Running Ubuntu natively on Nvidia Shield Tablet

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Thanks to Nvidia’s Linux4Tegra and work of Bogdacutu and Steel01, as of today I’m running desktop Ubuntu on my Shield Tablet. And it works surprisingly well. Except some tablet-specific hardware like the modem, accelerometers and such, of course.

All it takes is to install MultiROM, patch the kernel and install the appropriate Linux4Tegra installation archive next to existing Android system and there you go:

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Xfce 4.12 on LMDE 2 (Betsy)

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After the relatively recent switch from LMDE Jessie to Betsy and the developer’s intention to change the base repositories to Debian stable, the frequency of interesting package upgrades became horribly low. For me, this became too much of a problem with the availability of new version of Xfce. LMDE will probably stick with the old 4.10, while others can have fun with these pretty new features. So, how to deal with this?

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W10: Are you serious, Microsoft?

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After the initial fuzz about the new greatest version of Windows, the mighty big Ten with it’s many userspace improvements (there are rumors on the Internet about the new UI being a fork of Plasma 5), the hard moments of truth are finally here. The W10 has been released! And with it many jokes about it’s new brilliant error announcement dialog windows and various bugs. Of course, it would be unusual if everything went absolutely without errors, guys from Redmond will sure get everything important in order very soon. But there are other issues at hand. Very serious ones, actually. What I am talking about are those various gaping security holes and actual Microsoft spyware, built-in in plain sight.

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Eppur is muove!

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The final version of the BLDC driver is working, at last. It is a simple modular controller for sensored BLDC motors with easy-to-understand scalar commutation. The code is work in progress, and should be usable in a few days. The hardware was designed so it could be completely assembled manually without special instruments, and the PCB layout is also DIY-enabled.

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My first GIT repository

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Today I have finally created a repository at GitHub. You can find it at my GitHub profile. This repo contains code for the BLDC motor driver for my diploma thesis, which I mentioned earlier. So far nothing really interesting, but wait for the release of other software and hardware schematics & layouts. As the deadline is just around the corner, it should be ready to release soon enough. I would like to publish it all under a copyleft license (GPL2/3?), but I need to get my university’s approval for that first..

And by the way, GitHub is awesome. If for some reason you didn’t have the opportunity to try it so far, take a look. It’s primary objective is coordination of groups of coders on a project, but can be really useful even for your own project progress tracking and backup.

Linux Device Tree – a slight disappointment

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After reading about the much discussed Device Tree for quite a long time as a holy savior of the ARM world I had the chance to get my fingers on it in a real world application. The issue was to upgrade Linux system from 3.0 kernel to 3.13 on a custom Vybrid VF610 board. The original 3.0-based system from Timesys was not working properly in some aspects and needed a bit of an overhaul.

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N900 USB port replacement

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UPDATE 22.1.2018

My old N900 is collecting dust in a drawer for over a year now. However, the time to resurrect this beast might come soon:
https://postmarketos.org/

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About a week ago the USB port on my N900 stopped working. Again. This is another phase of a long battle against that strange force, which keeps breaking it. I have decided to finally give up on micro USB and find a different solution.

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Diary of an unsuspecting developer

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For the last semester of my studies I have been thinking about getting some part time job. My previous and current assignments as toilet-paper replacement technician and garbage scavenger were mostly ok or even good, but I felt the time came to try something different, more demanding and respected. But my brother returned me back to reality with a statement that even for him (body builder) it is amazingly difficult to work as a shelf stacker. Tough luck.

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