Recently in MacOSX Category

Just a note to say that I've released KDE 4.2.4 to Fink unstable. And now it's time for the fun part: big bold red text telling you it breaks stuff.

KDE4/X11 Plasma Desktop on Mac OS X in Xephyr

Working KOffice file asociations

Actually, that was just the text saying that I was going to have big bold red text telling you it breaks stuff. Here's the real thing:

It breaks stuff!

But let me explain: it makes things better! Because of some esoteric stuff relating to case-sensitivity, existing packages, and bugs in Fink dpkg, there were issues on a number of people's systems with the existing KDE packages and conflicting paths. Of course, the root of the issue is that Fink didn't have a proper "/opt" type directory, so a number of packages for quite some time have been using "/sw/lib" for that purpose (/sw/lib/qt4-x11, /sw/lib/flex, etc.)

Since I was going to have to move things around anyways to fix this issue, I decided to do it right. As of Fink 0.29.7, the package validator accepts "/sw/opt" as a valid path to root packages. All of the KDE4 packages have been changed to use this new path, so when you upgrade to KDE 4.2.4, you will end up with a nice fresh clean KDE in /sw/opt/kde4/x11 or /sw/opt/kde4/mac (or both).

But wait, there's more!

I've also spent a lot of time fixing bugs and tweaking some fink-specific behaviors so that KDE integrates better with your Fink experience.

• Fink's kdelibs4 automatically knows about the usual locations for kde4 files, so all KDE4 apps will start properly without needing /sw/opt/kde4/{x11,mac} in the path. This includes KDE4 apps launched from the Finder.
• The kdebase-workspace package is now supported for KDE4/X11. That means you can start a full KDE desktop!
• As a test, I created proper Info.plist files for KOffice, so file associations actually work. Till Adam has been working on a more robust way of doing this in the future, but if I find the time I might work on setting up more associations for common KDE apps in the mean time. (Kommon apps?)

So, for those of you who have already tinkered with KDE4 in Fink, I'm sorry to say it all needs an upgrade. But, on the bright side, once you do, you'll have a much nicer KDE.

As always, if you run into any issues, please let me know.

I've just committed all of KDE 4.2.2 to Fink Unstable.

There's still a lot of rough edges, but it's definitely at least beta quality, and a lot of apps work great. It includes a number of fixes, including updated scripts to register all of the desktop files properly with ksycocoa on post-install, case-sensitive filesystem fixes, and a number of other packaging fixes. I've also finished packaging all of the "core" KDE distribution.

I've got Amarok working in my experimental tree, I just need to do a little more testing before I can release it (It's based on a snapshot of what will become Amarok 2.1.0, since 2.0.x has some build issues on Mac OS X that are difficult to resolve). Also, the KOffice folks just put out a release candidate that I'm working on finishing up packaging on. Hopefully I will have that out soon.

As always, please let me know if you run into issues. I've test-built on 10.5/i386 and 10.4/ppc so I'm sure some 10.4/i386 and 10.5/ppc users will give bug reports soon. ;)

I've had a chance to get a few more of the KDE4 packages polished up into what I hope is a releasable state. :)

Please give them a shot, let me know if you have any issues, if things don't work as expected. I know one major thing to look into still is to get document-opening working. Right now the KDE desktop files describe which apps should open different document types, but that is not being translated to OSX's document-opening APIs.

The following packages were released to unstable today:

• digikam-mac and digikam-x11
• kdeaccessibility4-mac and kdeaccessibility4-x11
• kdeadmin4-mac and kdeadmin4-x11
• kdeartwork4-mac and kdeartwork4-x11
• kdeedu4-mac and kdeedu4-x11
• kdegraphics4-mac and kdegraphics4-x11
• kdemultimedia4-mac and kdemultimedia4-x11

Big ones left on the hitlist are amarok2 and koffice2. Amarok2 I'm starting work on again as a snapshot of the 2.1.0 build, since there are some issues with 2.0.x building on OSX. KOffice is actually working pretty well in my experimental tree, but 2.0 release candidate is due out in the next week or so, so I'm going to wait to update to that before doing a release.

Since this blog is more about my own personal development on OSX, Fink, KDE, and OpenNMS, and This Week in OpenNMS is about, well, all of OpenNMS development, I figured it was high time to move it to somewhere more official.

Without further ado, I present to you: This Week in OpenNMS. Same bat-time, different bat-channel.

RSS is still available, but the url has moved here, rather than getting everything through my blog.

Please, update your links!

Yes, that's right, a post to my blog that isn't about OpenNMS. ;)

As you can tell, I've been pretty busy having fun hacking on OpenNMS lately. While I have been keeping up with my Fink work to some extent, one major thing was still looming: finally getting all the work I did on KDE/Mac released in Fink, now that things have stabilized.

If you've been watching the commits for the last few months, you've seen the beginnings of that work. Updates to Qt, releases of support things like strigi and soprano... The big hurdle was getting D-Bus in a state where it plays well with KDE/Mac. After some initial hiccoughs, the D-Bus updates have been released to Fink now, and seem to be working well for people.

Today, I released the base packages for KDE 4.2.x into fink: kdelibs4, kdepimlibs4, and kdebase4.

Because of the cross-platform nature of KDE, I've released them in 2 variants: mac and x11, so you can run konqueror as an X11 app, or as a mac app. :)

Some things will only be present in one or the other, for various reasons (X11-specific features, etc.) One thing that will be in the X11 variant that is not there now is kdebase-workspace, so no plasma desktop as of yet. I've built it, but it doesn't act right currently, so I'm waiting to release until it's in a usable state.

This is still early test stuff, so if you run into issues with it, please feel free to let me know and I'll see what I can do.

I can't thank enough Orville Bennett and the other KDE/Mac folks. They have picked up the early work I did on porting and ran with it, helping polish it into a nice, buildable, and solid set of code while I was on my "hiatus" from KDE packaging. :) They have done a lot of great work in helping bring native mac KDE from "freakish mutant" to "used every day by KDE developers."

In the coming weeks I hope to get more of the base KDE packages done. I'm in the testing phase for koffice, amarok, kdeartwork, and a couple of others, and working my way through packaging more. I'll post as I get anything interesting.

I've got Mono 2.0 updated and packaged up for Fink unstable. It includes Cocoa#, Gtk#, and MonoDevelop 1.0, all tested and working.

Congratulations to the Mono team on getting 2.0 released!

Just a quick note to say that based on these instructions, I was able to get Google Chrome running on Mac OS X, using Fink.

You'll need to enable unstable ("fink configure", followed by "fink selfupdate-rsync"), and then do a "fink install wine cabextract". Then start at the "offline installer" part of the instructions.

Woot!

Do you see that picture on the right? I bought Windows XP when it came out. An actual legitimate copy of Windows XP Home Edition. It promised a lot of things that it eventually pretty much delivered after a couple of service packs. It's moved from machine to machine as I've updated hardware. I've gotten rid of basically all of my old PC hardware and now it lives on my Macbook Pro. I've been reasonably happy with it. Except...

With such a long history, I've long-since passed the time when Microsoft accepted my key without question through internet activation. Do you know what happens when you pass that time? Painful crushing phone activation.

Observe:

First, you have to call a number, and enter 9 sets of 6 digits (they're kind enough to let you use the touch-tone phone to do it, instead of braving their voice recognition system). Then, on the 9th set, it always complains that it didn't understand the last set of digits, until you're forced to tell it to forward you to a human without finishing the automated input.

Then, since it didn't actually record all of those numbers you put in, you get to read them again to the call-center person.

Then, they read a string of numbers back to you, that you have to type in, and finally, in true Microsoft fashion, you hit "Next", followed by "Finish", because it wouldn't be Windows without a wizard with a few extra unnecessary clicks. ;)

Have you seen what you have to do to activate a pirated version of of Windows XP? I did a quick Google search out of curiosity. You use a pre-made serial number, and then run a command that will do the activation for you, and one more command to trick Windows Genuine Advantage(TM). Voila!

It's sad that I find it so tempting to pirate something I legally own just because it's so frustrating to activate the damn thing.

The best part is, the only reason I had to re-activate at all was because the logic board went bad in my MacBook Pro, and Windows no longer recognized it as the hardware it was installed on.

Even better, now that it's done, I have to re-activate every time I switch from booting in VMware to booting natively through Boot Camp, or vice-versa.

Alternatively, you know what I had to do to register my copy of Mac OS X when I installed it? Nothing. Imagine that.

With the help of a number of folks, I'm happy to announce the latest KDE/Mac snapshot, based on KDE 4.1 Beta 1. Also, while it's been available for a while, I'd like to point out that KDE/Mac now has an official website, at mac.kde.org, using Benjamin Dietrich's pretty design.

Torrents are all seeded, and downloadable.

Note: Apparently bittorrent doesn't preserve executable flags. :( Before installing, run, in a terminal:
chmod a+x *.pkg/Contents/Resources/postflight

As always, questions are welcome in the comments, on the kde-mac list, or in a bug report. =)

Now that KDE 3.5.9 is out, I've updated all of the Fink KDE/X11 packages to match it. Nothing new specific to Mac OS X or Fink, just a version bump with some bugfixes and a significantly updated kdepim.

It also includes a few things that are updated to understand Chris's new libflac package.

As always, let me know if you run into any issues.