More fun with Frescobaldi: KDE updates

On Tisiphone, Frescobaldi had a segmentation fault immediately at startup after a KDE 4.3 update; the next update corrected that, luckily (OK, score wizard is still broken, there seem to be major overhauls somewhere). Now the problem has diffused to Archimedes' 10.3 / KDE 4.2 setup, and here it's rather sticky.
Frescobaldi is written in Python, so I tried running frescobaldi.py line-by-line from the build directory. Turns out that the PyKDE4.kdecore module is broken, it kills python as soon as you try importing anything from it. You can't use a different version, because it has to be in sync with your KDE build. I tried building the source RPM, however, it crashed building libakonadipart1.cpp :-(

Hell, I don't even use akonadi on 10.3 because it breaks down anyway...

Update: As of today, (July 6th), the python bindings from the KDE:42 repository seem to work, as well as frescobaldi. Frescobaldi 0.7.13 in combination with KDE 4.3 even displays the score wizard.

Flash not working on some pages?

… e.g. thedailyshow.com or arte.tv (yep, procrastinating again). By now, some pages require Flash 10, while the SuSE repos are stuck on v9. Get the Flash RPM from the Adobe page. Remove flash-plugin in YaST, and install the new one. Flash will still not work in Firefox, because a symlink is missing. Ben Kevan found it:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/browser-plugins/libflashplayer.so

Microsoft Research publishes in LaTeX

…as witnessed by this paper (and many more) I found linked on Heise Security.
It's declared a tech report and not published in a specific journal, so I imagine they could have used Word. We have to ask ourselves: are the Microsoft Research employees a bunch of faithless renegades?
I think not - because this is a pretty appalling example of LaTeX layout: A strange mixture of Computer Modern in the document body and Helvetica (?) in the section headings, capitalised headings, crowded pages, orphaned lines, horrendous bad boxes…
If this is an informal pre-print, I concede the orphans and bad boxes, but deliberately choosing a document style this ugly?
Now that's what I call partisanship.

Fres -- co -- bal -- di!

Frescobaldi has a nifty tool for setting hyphens automatically in Lilypond lyrics. For this purpose it uses hyphenation dictionaries included in myspell, OpenOffice etc. As the locations for these resources vary between distributions, frescobaldi is likely to not find the dictionaries automatically: you have to set the paths by hand in Tools->Configure Frescobaldi…->Paths and, if you don't know the location, look for the hyphenation dics in the file list in YaST-> software. I had no luck with myspell (frescobaldi didn't list any languages), but after installing OpenOffice_org-hyphen I found appropriate files in /usr/share/ooo/hyphen and automatic hyphenation worked reasonably well (didn't hyphenate "buia" and couldn't do vowel slurs/elisions, of course).
Did I mention that I like Frescobaldi?

How to eject an iPod

Archimedes is notoriously bad at automounting, which means that it's a bloody nuisance to play music from my iPod. The sound output from Archimedes' on-board audio is not that good anyway, so I just want to use the USB port to power the Universal Dock. The only problem is that Archimedes still grabs enough control over the iPod's disk for it to display the Connected. Eject before disconnecting message and not play any music, even though the drive doesn't show up as mounted.
How to eject it properly (see the comments here):
Find out which device the computer is using for the iPod with ls -l /dev/disk/by-id. Eject the pod with sudo eject /dev/sdd1. (replace "sdd1" appropriately)

How to align plasma widgets

Update (05/2012): The kdeplasma-addons (Kubuntu; plasma-addons on SuSE) package provides a grid layout. Access via right mouseclick on desktop->Desktop Settings->Layout. Widgets snap to the grid when resized/moved.

The discussion about how to best do plasma layouts is in full cry in the forums (e.g. here), so this is the foot soldiers' method to somehow uniformly scale and align plasma desktop widgets:

All geometry values are set in the ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc file (KDE4.3; 4.2 users take plasma-appletsrc).
The relevant entries have e.g. the following structure and can be identified by their plugin name:

[Containments][73][Applets][76]
geometry=1168.0,480.0,90.0,90.0
immutability=1
plugin=networkmanagement
zvalue=418

The geometry option specifies xposition, yposition, width, height. According to this (german) forum discussion zvalue handles foreground/background and transform specifies rotations. Adjust to your liking (those calculations could definitely be done by a script) and restart plasma as described here

Hey, I know that one!

A problem apparently not confined to Windows.

Be careful with your KDE4 update

…if you are using factory: openSuSE snuck in KDE4.3 β 1, and it has its snags. Shouldn't beta 1 be in the unstable repo?
Systray icons seem to be an all or nothing issue: while their display has greatly improved on Tisiphone, they are nearly unusable on Archimedes (try and find Kmail in the image above…). Akonadi keeps popping up an error message about not being able to connect to localhost on SuSE 10.3 for all KDE versions - the akonadi/PIM integration in KDE 4.2 is still being worked on according to the developers.