KDE team has announced the 1st beta release of 4.5 series.

May 26th, 2010. Today, KDE has released the first beta version of what is to become KDE SC 4.5.0 in August. KDE SC 4.5.0 is targeted at testers and those that would like to have an early look at what’s coming to their desktops and netbooks this summer. KDE is now firmly in beta mode, meaning that the primary focus is on fixing bugs and preparing the stable release of the software compilation this summer.

I just love this new interface for the system tray.

A reworked notification area. Thanks to the new, D-Bus-based protocol that replaces the old “system tray”, a uniform look and consistent interaction scheme can now be guaranteed across applications and toolkits.

Check out the details and snapshots in the announcement page.

As currently i am on openSUSE 11.2, if you want to upgrade to KDE4.5 beta 1 i will guide you in few simple steps to do that. But as a caution i will suggest to not upgrade it on a production pc, but if you want to test it and report bugs you will be most welcome by KDE bugzilla team.

My experience, of course i give it a try yesterday and i am impressed but there were some bugs which force me to roll back to KDE4.4.3(which is stable enough now and very fast and nice). Dolphin was consuming the whole memory and left the system crawling, crash on closing some thing from system tray, Firefox was awfully slow and some more. But the interface was great, love it. I am sure this one going to be the best release ever for KDE4 series. ATM i am on KDe4.4.3 with latest updates.

Ok, so you want to upgrade, are you sure? really, ok then what we are waiting for lets the fun begin.

NOTE: As we will use unstable repos so i will again say, don’t use these upgrade from unstable on production pc unless you want to test it on a testing machine. This is for openSUSE 11.2.

One more thing, if you have factory repo or other kde repos enabled like kde4.4, so please disable that repos before doing the below operation.

1- Add these repos in Yast -> software repositories.

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Distro:/Factory/openSUSE_11.2/

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Extra/openSUSE_11.2_KDE_Distro_Factory/

Are you using playground repo also for KDE4.4 or KDE4.3, you can add this also, but if not just ignore this repo:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Unstable:/Playground/openSUSE_11.2_KDE_Distro_Factory/

Until here you are done.

2- Now two ways to run the updates.

2a- By Yast, go to software management and choose the repos from the repository tab and then click ‘switch system packages‘, do the same for the other repo you just added. and then click accept button.

2b- Open terminal and type the below command to update the whole system with vendor change etc.

zypper dup

That’s it, you are done. Restart you pc and check the new KDE.

Have any problems, check out openSUSE forum Pre-Release/Beta section.

If you want to use KDE 4.4.3, can follow this guide.

Arif

Popularity: 23%

Hi all,

M6 came with a lot of bug fixes, now its time for M7 with some more improvements in hand. And its the last milestone for 11.3, two more release candidates after this and then there we go for the final version(mid of July 2010).

openSUSE 11.3 M7 is available for download in the openSUSE developer zone.

Link for download.

Keep in touch for the announcement later.

————————————————————

Update (27-05-2010):

Announcement from openSUSE.

gwdg mirrors for download.

New features:

• Netbook support with both Moblin and KDE.
• The approaching Btrfs file system can be configured in the installer.
• Better graphics driver support for Nvidia cards with integration of Nouveau driver.
• Kernel 2.6.34
• Great desktop experience with GNOME 2.30.1, KDE 4.4.3,  LXDE 0.5.5, and XFCE 4.6.1. LXDE has been newly integrated and is part of the DVD media.
• Imagewriter tool to copy ISO images to an USB stick.
• and many more… read the announcement page above.

————————————————————

Have a lot of fun!

Arif

Popularity: 8%

Hi/Salam all,

I own this domain with exabytes and also hosted it with them, i joined ‘I’m Happy customer‘ contest and luckily was winner of the month for April 2010, as a reward there were 5 X KFC vouchers with some nice exabytes stickers. Thanks exabytes for the best hosting around.
Check out exabytes facebook page for details, snaps here and my facebook wall.

Leave your feedback and comments here.

Thanks.

Arif

Popularity: 4%

Salam/hi all,

Ok, this was not that easy stuff if you don’t know how to do it and where to find it. I mean 1st fonts, then installation or copying to the right directories. Websites like bbcurdu.com and urdupoint.com are common Urdu news sites which i am sure most of the Urdu reading surfers will surf for the latest news and articles. These two websites use different fonts rendering system for browsers like Firefox and Chrome. I am not using any Urdu keyboard here and not using translation for the whole system, its just how to read Urdu websites in Linux, this tutorial is just for installing fonts system wide for browsers in Linux not a language pack etc. I will focus on two distros at the moment, Ubuntu and openSUSE. Ubuntu 9.04,9.10 and openSUSE 11.2(KDE4.4.3) will be used for the installation with Firefox 3.6.3, Firefox 3.0.19, Chrome 6.0.400.0. If you are on 10.04(Ubuntu), you can install it there also by the mentioned way below.

Before going further to discuss the installation, we need to download these fonts:

1- NafeesWeb.ttf (For urdupoint.com etc)
Go to this web page, http://www.crulp.org/software/localization/Fonts/nafeesWebNaskh.html
Download the file with this title ‘Font with MS VOLT project source‘. Unzip it in the directory where it is downloaded. Until here we are done with this font.

2- asunaskh.ttf (For bbcurdu.com etc)
Download directly from this site, http://www.urdulife.com/font/asunaskh.ttf

So lets start from openSUSE, the easy one which will make your life easier.
1- Open ‘Personal Settings(Configure desktop)‘ and click on ‘Font Installer‘
2- Click on ‘Add‘ button and navigate to the fonts where you downloaded it.
3- It will ask for three options like: Personal, System, Cancel. Which means you want to install it just for this user or system wide for all. I went for System to install it system wide for other users too. It will ask for the root password upon installation.
4- Repeat step 2 and 3 for the 2nd font.
5- Restart your browser and there you go.

Easy i would say!

Now its turn for Ubuntu. Here also have two types of installation/copying, one is system wide and another is user specific.
Method-1 (User specific):
1- You are not much familiar with this terminal thing?, so lets do it the easy way then. Go to your home directory like my case /home/mian. You can use nautilus for this. Click on Places -> Computer and then navigate to your home directory.
2- Now click on ‘View‘ in the menu and check ‘Show hidden files‘. Alternatively you can use Ctrl+h, just press and hold Ctrl and press h.
3- Search for folder .fonts, is it there?, if yes then no worries. Ohh..is not there?.. don’t worry, lets create it, right click and create a directory with name without quotes ‘.fonts‘. (Note the point before fonts, don’t be confused. It’s dot with fonts, so that it becomes .fonts).
4- Now copy the fonts from the downloaded directory and paste it in .fonts directory.
5- Now a little bit terminal thing, but don’t worry its not rocket science. Just open terminal and type this.

sudo fc-cache -vf

If ask for the password, enter your password.
6- You are done, restart the browsers and check the websites.

Method-2 (System wide):
1- In this case, we will use terminal, but will be just two commands to get you these fonts working. Open terminal and type this:

gksudo nautilus

Enter your password to proceed.
2- Now go to this directory, /usr/share/fonts/truetype and create a folder named ‘urdu‘ without quotes, and paste fonts here from the downloaded directory. Close this window now.
3- Now in the terminal, run this command:

sudo fc-cache -vf

4- Done, restart Firefox or Chrome or other browser and navigate to your favorite Urdu site.

I haven’t tested this on new release of Ubuntu 10.04. I have to give it a try later.

Here are the two working examples in the form of snapshots for urdupoint and bbcurdu after font installation:

urdupoint.com

bbcurdu.com

So now your fonts are installed and working. Enjoy reading and surfing these sites.
Good luck with it!

Arif

(+1 rating, 1 votes)

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Popularity: 11%

Hi all,

While working on a project last week, i implemented a function to generate random password by calling it. There are many styles of password generator available over the net, but it depends which one suits our taste and need. The function i used has the ability of creating random password from the given set of characters with digits. So lets have a look at the code 1st and explain it after that:

<?php

function  randpassword() {
$length = 8;
$characters = “0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz”;
$string = “”;

for ($p = 0; $p < $length; $p++) {
$string .= $characters[mt_rand(0, strlen($characters)-1)];
}

return $string;
}

echo randpassword();

?>

Now lets explains the important components:

function  randpassword() {

randpassword() is the function name to call it later for use.

$length = 8;

$length variable holds the number of characters to generate while passing it to the for loop condition.

$characters = “0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz”;

Important part of the function to tell the function to use these characters and numbers for the password, you can change it according to the need like using capital alphabets or both.

for ($p = 0; $p < $length; $p++) {

For loop to get the condition and loop it until the loop finished.

$string .= $characters[mt_rand(0, strlen($characters)-1)];

Another important part of the function in the for loop condition to analyze the characters. $characters are coming from the variable above. mt_rand() is PHP function to return the desired min and max number given to it. For example mt_rand(2,10) will generate random numbers between 2 and 10. In the above line, we pass 0(zero)  and then characters length with -1, please note that -1 is necessary here to avoid index out of bounds error. If you miss -1, the function will sometime generate 7 characters with error index out of bound but mentioned above 8 to generate. That’s because we are using mt_rand function which will sometime return integer $max and there will be no proper value in $characters[strlen()].

return $string;

echo randpassword();

And the last return $string will return the string value stored in it and then just echo it to see the outcome of the function.  You can save it in database or send it to user before storing a hash of it in database.

That’s it easy and simple.

Arif

Popularity: 3%

Hi all,

Firefox 4 will be released in the upcoming winter with a lot of promises, as Mike Belzner, vice president of engineering at Firefox added, ‘Performance, power and personalization’. Chrome?, yeh its a fact chrome is fast, light weight and elegant. Many of us are using chrome, but the fact is that that many are not near to Firefox many. Firefox have a lot of user base than chrome. Both are ideal browsers and very good one to use. I personally use Firefox instead of Chrome, yup i use Chrome for some websites like surfing Google and news sites etc.  So that mean, i am using both at the same time. Chrome is from openSUSE contrib repo with weekly build and updates. Currently using 6.0.397.0 (0) from build repo and have facing some crashes with flash (annoying and disaster flash), but at the same time i also have little bit crashes with Firefox 3.6.3. but its rare and not caused by flash.

Here are some more reading and some screen shots of Firefox 4 from zdnet.com.

What you think about it?

Happy reading.

Arif

Popularity: 2%

Hi all,

Kde4.4.3 had been released on last Wednesday(05-05-2010). There are some bug fixes for the existing apps in Kde4.4.2. This post will guide you how to upgrade to Kde4.4.3 from Kde4.4.2 for openSUSE 11.2, also the process is similar if you are still using Kde4.3.x or Kde4.2.x.

May 5th, 2010. Today, KDE has released a new version of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). This month’s edition of KDE SC is a bugfix and translation update to KDE SC 4.4. KDE SC 4.4.3 is a recommended upgrade for everyone running KDE SC 4.4.2 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. Users around the world will appreciate that KDE SC 4.4.3 multi-language support is more complete. KDE SC 4 is already translated into more than 50 languages, with more to come.

Official release announcement
Change log

I will do all this process  in three different methods which will be sufficient enough to get you Kde4.4.3 latest build. Just follow any method you like and best suits your needs.

Method-1:
1- 1st of all we will have factory and community repos. Add repos from here (Just follow step-1 from there).

2- Now open software management in YaST and choose repositories tab, select the repo you just added with some name, Click “Switch system packages”. And do the same with community repo too. And click Accept button.

3- You are done! Logout and Log back in OR Restart your PC.

Method-2:
1- Open Terminal and become root by su -, and type:

zypper dup

2- Type y upon asking for upgrading.

Method-3:
This method will use terminal way but the difference will be just to use a selected repo name.

1- Open Terminal and become root by su -, and type:

zypper dup -r <repo_name>

Lets say you saved the factory repo above as Fac_kde4.4, so the above command will goes like this:

zypper dup -r Fac_kde4.4

2- Type y upon asking for upgrading.

NOTE: Method-2 will update the system wide packages, so if you don’t want to upgrade some packages follow Method-1 OR Method-3.

Good luck and have fun!

Arif

Popularity: 25%

Hi folks,

Ubuntu 10.04 is released few days ago, i haven’t used Ubuntu for some time, but 10.04 looks promising, so i downloaded the iso and tried it on my system as Live CD but did not go for installation, it was just to check and see what it have in the bowl. And sincerely it impressed me, i am user of openSUSE for long time, but i think Ubuntu also need some space on my laptop Hard Drive now. For now i am busy with some projects, and mainly with my thesis, no time to spent on its installation. Will install later.

It detected my laptop hardware when it loads the desktop and there was no installation needed for any driver. Wireless net was up on the spot, the time it loads desktop. I took some snapshots of different applications. Here they are:

Last words: Worth a TRY..

Enjoy and have fun with it.

Arif

Popularity: 13%