New Laptop and KDE 3.5

Well I seem to have my new laptop working pretty well. I decided to just put KDE 3.5 alpha1 on there from the start and see how it goes! It is working great with the new hal/pmount stuff. I was using the old hal/pmount stuff on KDE 3.4 which worked really well but the inclusion of pmount was delayed quite a bit for various reasons I won’t even go near… I have been looking at the possibility of getting KDE 3.4 working with the new hal/pmount API but that doesn’t look as easy as I had first hoped. The KDE bug shows some progress but it is not working yet.

KDE has some great laptop tools too. I am using the battery monitor to take care of power whilst I am on the move, and the kwifimanager to look after my wireless network connections now. Still no sign of working WPA, but I am happy enough with WEP for now. The powernowd daemon is happily clocking down my CPU as I work on ebuilds, LaTeX files for work, data analysis, browsing the web and writing blog entries.

As I got back into digital photography with my new camera I also discovered digikam and digikamimageplugins for storing and manipulating my photos. There is always krita when more features are required too. I am still getting the APIC errors in my log - worrying entries like APIC error on CPU0: 00(40) but it still seems to be running stable.