DigiKam woes

Archimedes reproducibly failed to connect to my digital camera with digiKam, with the following message:
'Failed to connect to the camera. Please make sure it is connected properly and turned on. Would you like to try again?'
Root access worked.
The omniscient Google came up with two answers:

My USB soundcard did not want to play mp3s

As Tisiphone's line out jack is pretty worn out, I bought a cheap C-Media USB soundcard to finally get stereo sound again. It's quite plug-and-play, the channels showed in KMix without me having to change any settings, but the damn thing refused to play mp3s.
It turned out to be Phonon's fault, and it's actually a pretty cool feature.

Plasma can be hungry... kill the widgets!

Some days ago, after I had played around with some plasma widgets, I recognized Medea (AMD Athlon 2000+) becoming very slow and not very responsive after about 20 minutes of operation. Good old console "top" yielded that plasma was eating up CPU time up to 80% and was consuming a lot of memory. Short googleing didn't find any really helpful results, although the problem seems to appear at least for some users.

I was too lazy to sort out what was causing the problem, but deactivating all widgets I had started (calendar, clock and the analogon to knotes) solved the problem and my computer runs nicely again.

For the interested guys: openSuSE 11.1, KDE 4.2

Tu quoque, Python?

Ah, well, it's nothing compared to certain Excel bugs…

Texlive 2007 and inkscape 0.46 on openSuSE 10.3

I hadn't thought this would be a problem, but I fiddled quite a while with inkscape's and texlive's alternating complaints about missing poppler libraries.
Poppler is a pdf rendering library (xpdf fork), of which texlive 2007 needs version 1 (provided by the poppler package), while inkscape 0.46 (yes, the new version with built-in pdf import) needs libpoppler2. For some reason YaST apparently deleted one of them :-(
Well, I learnt quite a bit about library linking conventions.
Altogether, it has to be some problem of the expiring support for SuSE 10.3; texlive 2008 probably already depends on a newer poppler version (cf. the 'PageGroup detected' error, which is fixed by now), but it's packaged only for 11.0 and higher. Still, Archimedes is stuck with 10.3 until I've got my PhD at least - or so I thought.

Switch to KDE 4.3

It's not like the quantum leap from KDE 4.1.3 (shudder…) to 4.2 , but 4.3 is slick and was pretty stable even in β

• Lots of improvement in Plasma: bundled notifications, hover folder previews, taskbar icons work - and a pretty new theme to boot
  
• greatly improved krunner - I love the list view and it's much faster in selecting frequently used programmes
• KDE PIM works at last - no bloody akonadi crashes every 5 minutes
• the NetworkManager has been ported
• revamped system tray

More features in the release announcements.
And it's been out since yesterday! For openSuSE it's still on Factory, though.

Miserable renegade

DaWuzzzz just got himself a MacBook Pro. I am not going to talk to that smug bastard ever again. Expect some posts about how to get openSuSE to run on it ;-)