Luca Ferrari

Producing PDF the easy way: PDFQuirk

2020-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

I found a very nice tool to use on my Plasma desktop to produce PDF documents starting from a range of other documents.

Producing PDF the easy way: PDFQuirk

PDF Quirk is a fresh and simple tools, and at the very same time a very powerful one, that is available as an application that runs on top of Qt 5 (and therefore, on Plasma too).
The idea behind PDF Quirk is that it is possible to produce a single PDF froma list of images or other documents, something like what you can do with ImageMagick or similar tools. Effectively, this is just a front-end for the well know ImageMagick, so it exploits the same reliable technology.
So where is the advantage of using PDF Quirk? An easy and clean GUI instead of having to deal with the command line. I’m not scare by the command line, and quite frankly is the only way I do my stuff, but I find it hard to remember how to merge documents into a single one, and therefore PDF Quirk is somehow a relief.
On the command line I’ve to do something like the following:

% convert 'pre 1.jpg'  'pre 2.jpg'  'pre 3.jpg'  'pre 4.jpg'  'pre 5.jpg'  'pre 6.jpg'  'pre 7.jpg'  'pre 8.jpg' pre.pdf

that will merge all pre JPEG files into a single PDF.
Now with PDF Quirk I can launch the GUI and add the images with Add from File button, that handles multiple selections, and then Save to get the progam asking for the output file to produce.

The tool is at a very early stage, but it is already useful to me (and probably to many others), and will get surely improved during time.

Eclipse Frozen: the strange case of the SSD disk

2020-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

I lost almost three days trying to figure out why my computer was freezing…

Eclipse Frozen: the strange case of the SSD disk

It started on Thursday of the last week: while I was happily developing within Eclipse my home computer got frozen, nothing was responding, including the Plasma desktop. After a couple of minutes, I rebooted the computer, increased the amount of memory related to Eclipse and started working again.

On the next Monday I got the same behavior, again while working within Eclipse. I’m not a big fan of Eclipse anymore, I believe it is too much huge nowdays, and so I blamed Eclipse 2019-12 as the responsible of this whole Plasma desktop freeze. I then tried, after a reboot, to keep Eclipse resources at a miminum, for example closing not interesting projects, but with an increasing frequency, the computer was freezing and I was getting nervous.
I then start digging into the Eclipse workspace logs, without any success. Also the Linux logs were not reporting anything, the computer simply stopped working.
In the meantime I have experienced slowing computer performances, and I’ve noted hat only 2 GBs out of my 240 GBs Solid State Disk were left. I therefore decided to trash some stuff to make more room on the disk, and the computer immediatly started to behave better.
But then, again, it froze.

As a last resort, I tried to update Eclipse from 2019-12 to 2020-03, a couple of time without any success.
I then started to move my stuff out from the hme folder to another partition (on the same disk) in the hope to get it resuming its performances.

But here the clue: while rsyncing content, in particular a quite large git project, the computer froze again.
Could it be something related to git? Quick, run git gc on the project! And in fact the project was moved to another partition easily, so that mademe hope again I found and fixed the problem, that appeared to be due to git misbehaving in Eclipse and on the filesystem.
But the very next day, another freeze.
Ok, enough for me: get rid of Eclipse! Let’s install Netbeans.
But I was unable to complete the installation, since the computer was freezing every time I attempted to run the installer.

Ok, there was nothing remaining except the hard disk drive. My Sandisk SSD 240 GB was misbehaving after only two years of usage.
So, here I’m removing the hard disk and substituting it with another SSD, reinstalling the operating sysem from scratch and hoping this can be a solution.

It is not as simple as it is

Reinstalling an operating system from scratch is a very long activity: you have to reconfigure the whole system.
But luckily I placed the old SSD disk into a container and attached it via USB: I was able to restore pretty much everything in a matter of hours (yes, USB 1!). And the Sandisk SSD was always working, I suspect USB was not pushing pressure on the data bus.
Of course, the hardest part was to remember how to unlock my encrypted home folder, but thanks to ecryptfs-recover-pivate I was able to unlock the content and get back many of my settings, including git repositories not yet pushed!

Strange Plasma Behaviors (at least to me)

2020-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

A few things I found strange in Plasma.

Strange Plasma Behaviors (at least to me)

Recently I had to install my computer from scratch, due to the failure of its hard disk. I then installed the most recent of Kubuntu from scratch, and with that the most available version of Plasma desktop available for it.
Also, due to the COVID-19 scenario, I’m working from home (let’s call it smart working), and I’ve prepared a workstation with a double monitor. I’ve never used Plasma with two monitors before.
First of all, I’m running Plasma 5.16.5, that is not the latest version (that at the time of writing is 5.18.4), and so part of the things I describe as problems could have been reverted back to what I remember was the old behavior.

And here comes the strange things…

A Panel in Another Monitor

It should be trivial: you can move a window from one monitor to the other by right-clicking on the titlebar and move it as you would do with a virtual desktop.

However, moving a panel from a screen to the other is not the same. In fact, in order to move a panel you have to drag it form one screen to the other. Ok, that could sound trivial, since the same can be done with any window, but placing a menu entry in the panel settings could help people like me that don’t like dragging very much. Moreover, having a panel to be created in the screen you are working is surely better than creating it on the main screen.

Plasma Single Click to Open Folders

When I opened a folder in Dolphin, nothing happened.
I clicked the mouse, but nothing. I quickly realized that there was the double click mode active: I had to press double click to open folders, that to me is quite annoying and remembers other operating systems.
But hey, this is Plasma, and I know there is a setting for that!
I opened the System Settings dialog and go straight to the Input Devices and then to the Mouse, but the setting was not there.
I spent several minutes in searching for the setting, and finally I found it under the Desktop Behavior:

I don’t want to say this is a poor choice, but there are several forum posts bout this same problem that are pointing to the old location, the Mouse Options, that to me seems much more natural.
While I understand that this could be a way to uniform the input device click behavior, I also think that different input devices could require different behavior, so I would at least make a clear link between the Mouse Settings and the Deskatop Behavior to make it clear that the clicking behavior is configured outside the scope of the mouse.
That’s my opinion.

Conclusions

Plasma is a great desktop, so far the best I’ve never far with respect to other operating system (and quite frankly, I’ve used a lot of them, proprietary or not). However, some choices with regard to configuration and setup are not always optimal, considering that here optimal is in the eyes of who uses the desktop.
I have written this post not to blame Plasma, rather to be useful with my considerations and experience to other users that could find the same settings and behaviors odd to their habits.

A week with Latte Dock

2019-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

I tried Latte Dock for a week or so, in order to see if this great piece of software can improve my desktop experience. Here is what I think about.

A week with Latte Dock

Latte Dock is a dock that provides multiple visual effects in order to improve the experience with icons and applications. I’ve already written about it, mostly in a negative way and not because of the software nor its quality, but because I don’t see too much excitement around another OSX style dock bar.
However, in order to let me give a more accurate review about the experience with Latte, I decided to try it forcing to use it as the only one dock on my main computer.

I don’t know much about the history and goals of the project, I suspect it is aimed to be a more elegant dock than the default plasma one is, and is of course inspired to the OS X dock that provides parabolic zooms and removes the application tray. It is worth noting that there are multiple layouts out there, each one adding one or more features to customize the appearence of the dock, for example adding a top bar or changing the bar layout and size. I’d rather used the out-of-the-box layout in order to get a more unbiased impression.

My Plasma Dock

My plasma dock was pretty much simple and is composed by (from left to right):

the plasma menu;
the switch desktop applet;
the application tray;
a deck of my main applications (four);
the plasma dashboard icon;
the notification area;
the (digital) clock;
the logout applet.

I tend to keep my panel always laid out the same on all my computers, so that my eyes and movements get acquainted to each part I need for opening a resource.

The Latte Dock

I placed on the dock all the main icons that were present on the deck of my old panel, so that I can have them always on the screen. Then I placed the device notifier, useful for my USB activity (I do use a lot of USB storages), the clock and the logout applet. The panel looks like the following:

So here are my first impressions after a week of usage of Latte.

However, after a few days of using, I changed the layout to the more comfortable, in my opinion, Plasma one. Here it is a short video of how it appears on my home computer:

Advanatges of using Latte Dock

the panel is automatically configured to hide itself, and this makes the application whole screen sized improving the visual space for every window. While this can be achieved also with the Plasma panel, making the latter auto-hide makes the applications to switch before full screen mode and almost-full-screen when the panel pops up;
when an application needs the user attention Latte makes the icon jumping on the dock, and this noise is easy to catch up by the user;
the quick launcher also does as an inco-only task manager, and this helps keeping the panel at the minimal size (this is something that also Microsoft Windows does, but apparently not Plasma!).

Drawbacks of using Latte Dock

the panel automatically grows or shrinks depending on the number of applications executing, and this makes it difficult to know where an icon will be exactly;
hiding the panel makes more room for application windows but, at the same time, removes some useful information from the desktop like the clock, the number of windows opened and so on. Keeping a top panel for those icons and information is not a solution, since it vanish the hiding of the panel and the gained space on the monitor anyway;
dialogs don’t recognize the size of the dock, and sometimes they undergo the panel which, when a dialog is shown, pops up. This makes some interactions annoying, unless you switch from the default dodge active mode to auto-hide;
having a zoomable centered panel has the drawback that menus and alike are shown in a more random position across the screen, with the side effects that the mouse could be pointing the middle of screen itself and thus resulting in a wrong selection.
it tends to forgot icons in the launcher section. After a reboot some of my favourite applications (and related icons) are missing, I don’t know why;
sometimes the launcher duplicates icons of running applications, as if there were two active instances. As an example, below you can see Emacs running on a single instance but reported with two identical icons; I suspect it could be tied to non-KDE applications mainly.

It is clear that some of the above drawbacks, e.g., 5 and 6, depends on my lack of knowledge about Latte Dock configuration rather than bugs, but they make harder for me to switch to this panel.

Conclusions

I do believe Latte Dock is really a great piece of software and is really cute on eyes, unluckily so far it is not something I get used to, probably due to my eyes problems. Therefore, after having tried it for a week, I decided to switch back to Plasma default panel. So far, the only things that Latte made me think about are:

an icon-only task manager;
an *auto-hide** panel.
Therefore my actual Plasma panel looks like the following:

I strongly encourage everybody to try and help improving Latte Dock because it is really a very nice piece of software and clearly demonstrate the Plasma supremacy, however so far it is not something I see using in my near future on my desktops.

Plasma 5.10 is amazing!

2017-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

I took the time to upgrade my main desktop to Plasma 5.10, and it is amazing. Allow me to explain why this project is so great and why I like this powerful desktop.

Plasma 5.10 is amazing!

A few days ago I spent some time upgrading my main desktop to a stable Plasma Workspace, or for short 5.10. It is well known Plasma (KDE) is my only and true desktop, and there as a time when my computer was always compiling and upgrading the desktop, but in these days I tend to stay with a working instance the most and tend not to upgrade it quite often due to the fact that I need more computer power and time to make things done than to upgrade my desktop. This also means that what I find as new in this Plasma version could be a well established feature in previous versions and I was not aware of them or never tried directly.

Anyway, the update was a little problematic, but that was mainly due to the automatic upgrade of the Linux distribution I use, and that is another reason I tend to stay behind the bleeding edge version.

Once finished I was astonished!

First of all, Breeze is a really great theme, must better than the ugly (to me) Air and more consistent as it was the old Oxygen. The dark theme is very relaxing for who has eye problems like me. Desktop effects work like a charm, and the application dashboard is something really cute, and much more useful than other desktop activities (yes Gnome, I’m looking at you!), even if text search is a little slower (I believe that’s due to the semantic desktop search).

I tried the Global Menu for applications, something like what OS 9 had several years ago (and yes, also KDE 1 did!), but I’m quite greedy on screen space, so I disabled it after a few hours. Instead, the choice of the menu within the application title bar is a lot more useful for me, especially if you think I tend to do a lot of things thru keyboard shortcuts (and therefore not needing the menu at all).

I showed my desktop to a few friends, and they pointed out that it was really similar to the OS X workspace. It could be, I’m not sure since I’m not working with Apple systems by far, but I have to say that Plasma is deploying a rich and elegant workspace for free, do other vendors do the same?

My story about KDE

2015-02-10T20:03:00+00:00

~

KDE is by far the Open Source project I used longer than all the others, of course excluding Linux itself, a few shells and to some extent GNU Emacs.

I first met the Kool Desktop Environment (KDE) when I was a student at university. At that time I was spending my time digging into this Linux-thing, as well as learning a lot of new cool Unix stuff.

At home, I had just installed a Red Hat 5.2, that was shipped with what I believe it was a prototype of some Gnome applications (I remember the configuration system was a GTK application). There was no KDE desktop at all.

At the university, there were machines running Debian GNU/Linux (with Gnome) and a few Solaris workstations with the CDE.

I liked CDE, I really did! It was quite clean to me, and I found the multiple desktop a very interesting idea. I also liked the panel with multiple menus, or docks or whatever their name was.

But my Linux box at home looked ugly, with FWWM2 and WindowMaker as the more advanced "desktops" available.

Later that year, I don't remember how, I found a distro called Mandrake.

And everything changed.

Mandrake was based on Red Hat (if my memory serves me well the numbering was pretty much the same) shipped with KDE installed as default desktop.

I was impressed from such piece of code: I felt at home with such an UI.

There was a dock, there were applications and a file manager that didn't suck (well, the Gnome one sucked for a while in my opinion), a lot of ready-to-go applications.

The look and feel was great, and it seemed that developers did spent a lot of time and effort in making all consistent. As an example, I remember even the window title animated when the size of the window did not suffice to make it all readable.

Well, at that time I was not doing a lot of stuff using Linux. I was just experimenting and trying to get some documents well written using an office suite (it was too early for me to learn some LaTeX!). Internet was something quite obscure outside of the campus, and I spent a few money chaning my winmodem to an external one that allowed me to use KPPP to connect to the Internet.

My KDE desktop had a classic configuration:

KDE did play an important role in my Linux conversion: the command line is quite scarying to anyone who is just learning, and having a fully integrated desktop (even more integrated than others) allowed me to sit in front of my computer and concentrate on learning, being assured that if I cannot do something via the CLI the UI would have done it for me.

So my university life continued using KDE and some KDE applications (e.g., the debugger) assisting me in the small homeworks. However the university was not using KDE at all, preferring Gnome desktops on both Linux and Solaris; I suspect the choice was done due to some issues between the Free Software Foundation and the Qt-KDE, as well as some major distro (like Red Hat) offering and supporting Gnome.

I have to admit that at some point in time, a few Solaris machines started prompting the user for a CDE/KDE alternative, but many students excluding me were using CDE because that was what the university teached us.

At that time it was a lot easier to find some help related to the Gnome desktop than to the KDE one, and the latter was something not well appreciated here in Italy, or at least not as strongly pushed as it was in Germany. But a few distros started shipping KDE and KDE-only installations, such as SuSE and Caldera. Feeling a little less alone in using my desktop of choice, I sticked with it and continued to use and explore.

I believe a huge jump in quality was at the time of KDE 2, where the "component" model become more and more apparent to the bare user. I'm not talking directly at KOM (and Corba related stuff), even if that was the engine under the hood, but to the fact that an application could do a many things because they were simply available to the desktop as a whole. So for instance you could open a PDF file into a web browser, or use a web browser to see a directory tree (and not with the horrible apache-like web interface), and stuff like that. That was a kind of impressive cohesion amongst the application components.

In those years I did not have a broadband Internet connection, so the only thing to do in order to have a fully fresh KDE desktop was to wait for some magazines to issue with a set of CDs. And most of the time updating from such CDs was a pain, and that was how I become quite good in doing backups and restoting a working machine from scratch, but this is another story.

By the way, at a point in time I got a Red Hat 9 shipped with KDE 3, which was really cool. The look and feel, the applications and the themes were pure eyecandy. And how to forget the great work done by Mosfet (and the incident that occurs with Pixie)?

That was the time of my master thesis.

Having acquired more confidence in the desktop itself, as well as in the toolchain required to build it, I started to build my own versions. That was not so simple, since I had to download all sets using the Internet connection of my job place and then let the computer doing the hard work. My poor Intel Celeron was busy all day compiling KDE in background, and you cna imagine how responsive it could have been at peeks! But it did not matter, in less than a week I could have a new KDE version up and running on my system!

The 3.3 release, with the bubble titles and that great icons was really impressive to me.

I did that until version 3.5, and then, shame on me, I switched to Microsoft Windows for a while. That's because I was doing a kind of University project, and having university laziness on me, I didn't want to spend a lot of time in configuring my laptop.

Luckily, as when you got drunk, the bad effects go away sooner or later, and so I quickly joined back KDE. At that time a distro in particular was famous in the KDE panorama: Kubuntu. I installed 6.04, if my memory serves me right, and liked the idea of having a KDE-specific distribution. I still use Kubuntu on a lot of machine of mines.

The jump to KDE 4 was quite a shock, even for me that I have followed the decisions and improvements. However, once I got used to the new interface and look and feel, I was at home again. And of course, I was not expecting the big vendors shift, but was running 4.0 as soon as it was considered stable. I laugh remembering a colleague of mine that, in the act of emulating, get messed with KDE 4.0 and was forced to switch back to something he knew better. He does not know KDE a lot even today, sorry pal!

Even if the desktop was not so complete as in previous versions, the ideas behind it were really promising. In particular the widgets and SVG graphic were winners in my opinion (and in fact were "migrated" to other popular proprietary platforms).

In the last years my KDE-aggressiveness has calmed down, and now I follow only stable and mature branches, even if I'm always excited when I get the opportunity to get a new release.

And yes, I've not switched yet to Plasma 5...I was a lot busy at the time. But I'm going to try it very soon.

Daniel is free

2012-11-16T14:53:00+00:00

~

According to the last message sent from his wife, Daniel is at home and fine:

Thank God he came home well, and is now recovering, we appreciate all the help and support of you!

I don't know if the battle is over, but at least Daniel's nightmare is!

Update: as Daniel blogs, he spent 6 days in jails and can now be again together with his family since he is free. The trial is not over though, but one piece is done!