KDE4 - Kalzium

KDE4 is the latest and greatest in Desktop Environment ( Yeah, I like to use that phrase). Its is not as user friendly or as stable as KDE 3.X but displays the promise to be the best in its class. KDE 4 has many usability and eye candy improvement over KDE 3.X and I hope to see a lot of them in KDE 4.1.

Apart from those KDE 4 has also improved many KDE applications and introduced a few new ones.
I am planning to start a series wherein I'll try to look at some of the non-core KDE applications.
I am starting with KDE Education package and Kalzium in particular.

Kalzium is an application which will show you some information about the periodic system of the elements. Therefore you could use it as an information database.

With the merging of Eqchem with Kalzium, we can now even calculate chemical formulas within Kalzium.
The opening screen displays a periodic table with different color coding for each block.


We can select any element and get to know its details. For instance I have selected Gallium.
Kalzium displays the symbol, element name and mass along with the atomic number.

It also offers much more details about the element like the atom model,



Miscellaneous details like discoverer and Mean Mass.


Isotopes.


Data Overview like Melting Point, boiling point etc


and the Spectrum.


We can even view the periodic table with respect state (Solid, liquid, vapor and unknown) at a given temperature. For instance at 0(Zero) Kelvin (K) the state of various elements look like :

and at 3047 K it is


We can calculate the chemical formula

Kalzium is not just a database, but explains things very clearly too.
The different Phrases are

Greek Alphabets and Numbers

Spectrum

Isotopes

Chemical Equation solver

and various configuration options


Kalzium offers a very comprehensive database of information on elements and various tools to apply chemical formulas and equations. I confess I was never very good in Chemistry during school so do not remember any formula to apply and test the feature, but if I had access to Kalzium, I might have been better.

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OpenSUSE -- thy name is stability

I came across a lot of sites which claimed that KDE 4 is highly unstable. I even came across a post that says that KDE 4.02 is so unstable that he had to downgrade from KDE 4.02 to 4.01.

I know that KDE 4 is not as feature rich as KDE 3.X but its decently stable and under no circumstances a release version of KDE 4 performs worse than previous version as far as stability is concerned.
Most distributions shy away from KDE4 thinking it to unstable or not ready for mainstream use. Well maybe its true for some unfortunate ones who do not use OpenSUSE.
OpenSUSE devs contributes a lot to KDE 4 development and are the first one to release a live CD based on latest stable KDE 4. Currently KDE offers two live CD's and they are both OpenSUSE based.
The installable 1.0.2 Live-CD contains only stable applications of KDE 4.0.2 release and third party and the installable 1.0.66 Live-CD contains all KDE4 modules, KOffice and some extra applications.

I thought of testing the KDE 4.02 version to verify that 4.02 is stable. It ran perfectly with hardly any error prompting me to install it on hard disk. The only problems I faced was a few crashes of Konqueror when trying to open flash based sites. Then I upgraded my system to KDE 4.0.66 and the crashes stopped. OpenSUSE has a package named kde4-gtk-qt-engine in repositories which makes GTK applications like Firefox and Gimp look great and as part of overall KDE 4 theme. Not sure if we have Kubuntu packages for KDE 4.0.66, but OpenSUSE version is very stable and pleasing looking.

In my pervious experiment with OpenSUSE 10.3, I found the default KDE 3.X desktop to be ultra stable and functional.
KDE 4 version is not that functional and lacks the polish of KDE 3.X version but is definitely much better than KDE 4 implementation of other distributions.

EDIT::
Check out another nice review of OpenSUSE at http://jamesangus.ucantblamem.com/general/opensuse/150.
I specially liked the words "OpenSUSE is the first distribution that I’ve used without having to touch the terminal."

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Three releases with very different package managers.

This week saw the release of three very different distributions, two of them being Linux distribution and the third being a BSD. Yes I am talking about Frugalware, PC-BSD and Foresight Linux.

The reason I call them different is because none of the above implements a widely used package management system.

1. PC-BSD. This is basically a rip-off and easier to install version of the highly stable and ultra fast FreeBSD (6.3) operating system. The FreeBSD devs claim that FreeBSD 7.0 is faster than latest Linux kernel versions. However, FreeBSD is not so simple and easy to setup, enters PC-BSD and makes FreeBSD as simple as a windows install. The default desktop is very much like a modern KDE based Linux desktop, a la OpenSUSE or PCLinuxOS. The main feature of PC-BSD is its software installer, the Push-Button Installer (PBI). PBI is a GUI wizard that lets users download from PBI directory and install a wide range of available applications in a self-extracting and self-installing format. A software install through PBI is identical to a software install in Windows XP. Windows users will find it very intutive and easy to use. The PBI directory contains a huge list of applications and I was amazed to find an installer for MSN Messenger 7. Again removing PBI applications is as simple as "Start Menu > Settings > System Administration > Remove Programs (PBIs)". As PC-BSD is based on FreeBSD so it also supports the FreeBSD way of installing packages through FreeBSD Ports and pkg-add utility.
   
2. Frugalware is a marriage between the simplicity of Slackware, "packman" package manager from Arch Linux and user friendliness. Pacman is a very fast and lightweight package management tool that makes applications install and keeping them updated as easy as a child's play. Pacman allows for installing binary packages as well as building tha packages from source files. Frugalware further improvises on this great tool and uses Pacman-G2. It is a fork of the not-yet-released cvs version of the complete rewrite of pacman. It provides a library interface to create real front-ends (not just wrappers) to this great package management tool. Some features that pacman-g2 has over pacman: (September 2007)
1. It provides C#, Java, Perl and Python bindings for libpacman.
2. libpacman provides a configuration file parser (for pacman-g2.conf).
3. It provides support for subpackages, ie. creating more than one binary package using a single build script.
4. Localized manpages.
5. Stable library API
3. Foresight Linux. Finally, here we have a release which uses a highly innovative approach to package management. It features the Conary Package Manager. Lets take a imaginary scenario where we install the latest version of Flash player in Firefox and OOPS!! the flash videos stop working or Firefox starts crashing frequently, whereas with the previous version it was working perfectly. What do we do ? Under normal Linuxes we uninstall Flash and then search for previous version on net ( usually the repositories have only a single version and that is buggy in our case) and then install it. Fare enough. However, I am a developer and am used to of this Faux Paux in application development when the latest version of a source file is buggy, then we simply extract the previous working version from svn and work on it. Conary takes its uniqueness from this concept.
   In our above case Conary will simply rollback to the previous working version of Flash. Now thats not only simple and easy but also much more logical. This gives a feeling that if with the latest update anything goes wrong, I can simply switch back to a previous working state. Conary is definitely the most technologically advanced package manager today.
   

I was busy entire weekend downloading and trying Frugalware and PC-BSD. Foresight Linux comes as a huge DVD so it is still downloading and I'll try it this weekend.


NOTE::
I did encounter some problems both in PC-BSD and Frugalware, but nothing that a little web search could not resolve. My major problem was my wife who was very upset with me sitting in front of my desktop on a Saturday, hence, I got very limited time with PC-BSD on Sunday.
I might write about my experience with both depending upon my wife's mood :).

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