LinuxTag is a free software expo held every year in Germany. This year it will be in Wiesbaden, May 3-6. As usual, KDE will also have a booth, at Hall 9, Booth 938.
I'll give a talk about KOffice - mostly of course on the fresh KOffice 1.5 as well as some live demo - on Wednesday (May 3), right between Jacqueline's OpenOffice.org and Kurt's klik. Check the the summary and drop by if you are interested in.
Any other KOffice developers will be there?
If you have fast Internet connection, you can give the latest KOffice 1.5 a try, without the need to install Linux and/or download any other programs. You can even do it from normal Windows desktop. Just go to CosmoPOD, register (free) and launch your KDE with KOffice 1.5.
The speed may not be the fastest (e.g. compared to running it locally), but surely enough to check out those brand new features mentioned in KOffice 1.5 Tour.
Note 1: I'm not affiliated with CosmoPOD.
Note 2: "no-install" is a bit incorrect, since you may need NX client. But I hope you get the point.
Everytime a preview, alpha, beta, and final release of KOffice is announced, this question would arise: OpenOffice.org can handle Microsoft Office files pretty well. Why doesn't KOffice reuse the code? Especially since default file format KOffice 1.5 is OpenDocument Format (ODF), just like OpenOffice.org 2.
Answer: the code for OO.o converters is tightly integrated with the rest of OO.o. It will take a lot of effort to pull the relevant part and place it in a library so that KOffice can also use it.
If somebody is willing to do it, of course we'll happy to consider it.
That does not mean that there's no cooperation. Look at libwpd, a library to read WordPerfect document (or WPD files). OpenOffice.org, Abiword and KOffice are all using this library already to import *.WPD, isn't it great? In this case, it is easier because previous OpenOffice.org did not have support for WordPerfect import and thus a clean library could be designed with code-sharing objective in mind.
Now, volunteer(s)?
I don't own an iPod or similar player, my music collection is not large and I prefer to listen to radio. But if I need to kill time with music (e.g. during a trip), then I just use Zaurus. With Opie, it can be quite interesting:
It is just the normal Opie Media Player, with the pod skin. No need for iTunes-like or special tool on the desktop side, I just use drag-and-drop within Konqueror.
Consider that the four-way navigation buttons of the Zaurus SL 5500 serve also for the next/previous and increase/decrease volume, this nicely emulates an iPod-like player.
It can survive up to three hours. This is actually quite astonishing since the battery is already quite old. Even if it's new, it's just not up to iPod's. All songs are in CF card, there is no aggressive buffering, MP3/Ogg decoding is done in software (not special DSP chip). So, not so bad.
Right after upgrading to the latest Opie (I'm using OpenZaurus), it came to my mind to write this tip. Actually, it's not new and I'm sure many know it already. Just in case you are not aware yet.
Typically people use Qtopia Desktop to sync between the Zaurus and your main machine. I never however managed to make Qtopia Desktop looks good, i.e. using the antialiased font rendering. Beside, it is just much easier to use Kontact (with its Kitchensync) so that your PIM data is integrated with the rest of KDE.
But how to transfer documents? Well, just use the powerful kioslave of KDE. Since Opie is running an FTP server on port 4242 (forget first the security implications), you just need to type:
ftp://root@192.168.129.201:4242/media/cf
in Konqueror, then you will (after got prompted for password and confirmed in the Z side) have access to the Compact Flash card (CF) content. Bookmark this, and you never have to type and memorize that long address again.
Since my digital camera also uses CF, I also don't need to search for that camera USB cable anymore (one less to care for). Just pull the CF from the camera, plug it into the Z, then copy my pictures conveniently. I still hope Krita runs on Z one day :-)
Even more interesting, you can work directly on that folder. For example, when I use Z to jot some notes and save it as a text file in CF, later on I just dock my Z on the cradle, click on my CF-on-Z bookmark, open the text file with KWrite, type some content, then save it again. No hassle.
The power of kioslave has been often demonstrated. In this particular use, it allows me to skip the download-edit-upload or sync-edit-sync steps. Nice, isn't it?
SpeedCrunch is now also available for pdaXrom (PDA distro, among others for Zaurus), compiled by 2or0.
(Via tyrannozaurus)
