KDE Connect

Updated KDE connect to the latest version (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kde.kdeconnect_tp)
For the new features, the latest desktop client in KDE need to be built from source. The source code is available at : git://anongit.kde.org/kdeconnect-kde

The new version support browsing the device SD card contents from KDE. Loading the folders take a bit of time, but once loaded it browsing through the folders are reasonably fast.

In the previous version I was unable to sync the clipboards if the text was not English. This version does not have that limitation.

A must have application if you use KDE.

kde-connect

Successfully connected Android 2.3 to KDE/Fedora. Multimedia remote control from phone work like a charm with Clementine. :)

Fedora 20 installation

Fedora 20 was released yesterday and I managed to download the DVD by this morning. Pretty soon I found myself installing it in a virtual machine.

The installation procedure was mostly smooth. Few annoyances from Fedora 19 still lingers. When I was installing Fedora 19 for the first time, I clicked "Installation Destination" expecting to see some mechanisms to partition the disk; couldn't find it there. You have to click "Done" to see that - not very intuitive. The story is no different in Fedora 20. You can partition it either automatically or manually once you get that screen.

The software selection is still a bit of disappointment. There are some pre-configured profiles/environments/settings. It is difficult to customize the software selection from here. I guess I need to try this part once again to see how selecting software from different profiles/environments works. Since I use KDE, went with KDE Plasma Workspaces. I remember selecting Firefox somewhere but it was not installed!

The installation process went through without problems. However it took a while (about 10 to 15mins) in the post-installation setup tasks though - may be because it was running in VirtualBox.

After a reboot, I was able to log in to KDE (4.11.3).  Within few minutes of logging in, package kit told me that updates were available for 177 packages :)

Didn't try the new installation much, but will be testing it bit more in the coming days.

Blackened new windows and pop up menus in Linux

I was facing this strange problem of new windows and pop up menus blackening after my Fedora 17 system has run for couple of hours. To recover, I have to disable the KDE desktop effects. Once the desktop effects are turned off, things went to normal. However I was unable to turn on the desktop effects until I restart KDE using ctrl + alt + back space. I was thinking that it was a KDE issue, my searches did not yield any results.

Few days back I found that there was an error “intel(0): Failed to submit batch buffer, expect rendering corruption: Resource deadlock avoided” in the Xorg.0.log. Further searches indicated that the blackening is happening due to the bug in Intel video driver and the work around is to use SNA for 3D acceleration. Adding the following line in the “Device” section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf resolved the problem.

Option "AccelMethod" "sna