I recently upgraded from kde4.2 to 4.3 on both my desktop and my laptop machines. I found that after the upgrade, when desktop effects were enabled, the open windows would randomly resize themselves in a reversed/mirrored format. It appeared as if the bottom of the window was moving back up to the top of the screen and it would drag the contents with it. I’m looking to resolve this issue.

I will follow-up should I find the solution. In the interim, I have disabled that desktop effect and the windows seem to perform as expected again (minus the effect).

I’m looking for a couple authors that are also interested in contributing back to the community. We all receive a lion-share of input, utilities and resource from the online community and this blog is designed to be a forum to allow us to give back.

It’s not mandatory that the posts be long and since this is wordpress, we’re happy to take posts from a wide array of topics as tagging and categorizing are built in. The requirements are minimal. Of course, we ask that you have a technical background so that the posts are related to technology. Within that scope, we are open to desktop support, programming, new technological advances, articles on resolving worms/virus issues. security alerts, etc.

If you’re interested, reply to this post or send an email to shaun-at-olebox-com. I am excited to open this up to a broader forum and look forward to reading the articles that our community contributes.

Of course, we are a free forum of volunteers with the focus of being an open resource for end users. Unfortunately we do have expenses (hosting/broadcasting) we ask that you visit our ad sponsors to help us cover these re-occuring fees.

- Shaun

So as I mentioned in previous posts, I use Gentoo as the distro on my primary desktop system. Recently, I was having some portage compiling conflicts so I decided to re-emerge most of my package to make sure package dependancies were all in sync and that the USE flags were considered for deep dependancies that needed them. It takes a while to perform this task, so make sure that you have some available downtime to resolve any bugs and issues.

The biggest frustration I had during this process was with libX11 as there was limited documentation on the issue I had experienced. Here was the focus of the error:

cd util && /usr/bin/make
make: Entering directory `/usr/src/libX11-1.1.5/src/util’
make: Nothing to be done for `all’.
make: Leaving directory `/usr/src/libX11-1.1.5/src/util’
../src/util/makekeys < /usr/include/X11/keysymdef.h > ks_tables_h
/bin/sh: line 1: 3530 Floating point exception../src/util/makekeys <
/usr/include/X11/keysymdef.h > ks_tables_h
make Error 136
make: Leaving directory `/usr/src/libX11-1.1.5/src’

Well, there are two points that interested me in this error, the “Floating Point Exception” as well as the Error 136. Neither of which provided much assistance in the google searching. I finally found a bug report through following link after link. hopefully this article helps you to find the root of your issue faster: Bug Zilla Error 15111

Ultimately, you need to check the version of xproto that you have installed. By masking 7.0.15 and re-emerging 7.0.14, I was able to resume the emerge without any remaining libX11 errors.

So recently, I was tasked with reinstalling windows on all of our spare PCs in the office. A few were some of our tech guys computers (some of which had linux on them). Most of the processes went as expected with the exception of the linux to windows conversion. After researching, I found there was an error/incompatibility with the Master Boot Record that Windows could not resolve, causing the screen to boot to blank after the “Setup is inspecting your computer’s hardware configuration” prompt stating the CD was checking the hardware.

So I ran across another article about the differences between Gnome and KDE. This one was a bit different that usual, in that the evaluation was not solely on features and support; rather, the development direction of each. Is it better to focus on legacy system support or put more effort towards new cutting-edge technologies? Which leads to the most exposure for GNU/Linux? Is there a truly, “Best Desktop Manager?”

I suppose it’s a matter of which affects each individual the most. I personally use KDE, so I’m a bit biased, but this article does a great job of reviewing the development practices and estimating the future direction of the two drastically different Desktop Managers.

Enjoy the read.
Link: http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3812616/GNOME-vs-KDE-Which-Has-the-Evolutionary-Advantage.htm

Shaun