Wade brought me a new Mini-ITX motherboard for a demo machine we used to have in the boothbox (but which had one minor issue: No X, not even after lots of driverfoo.). So I’ve replaced the VIA Epia board with an Intel Atom one with integrated 945 graphics chip. KWin’s compositing now works nicely on this machine, it’s swift and I see no graphical glitches. The machine has a 1.6 GHz Atom CPU. One problem now is that the slot-in DVD drive doesn’t fit nicely. I can squeeze it in, but as soon as I screw the cover onto the small desktop case, the DVD doesn’t eject the disc anymore, caused by a slightly squeezed top of the drive. So I’ll need to find a way to gain a couple of millimeters of space in that box (or stick a note under the case that you need to open the case to use optical discs ;-)). Also left to do is testing multimedia. I might need to install a couple of plugins there, and I didn’t check yet if sound works at all. I’ll see if I can bring it to Froscon this coming weekend (depends if the boothbox will be there, or someone to take it to the KDE office in Frankfurt. (Drop me a note in that case :).)
Otherwise, we have a nicely working demo machine, with KDE 4.1 and exampla data on it that should also be easy to maintain for some time. I’ve installed all the interesting things from KDE4, so we don’t end up with not finding all kinds of applications and need to install them on slow fairground connections. Yesterday, I tried to reinstall my desktop machine, a rather nice dualcore with lots of RAM and fast disks. It’s got two 17″ displays connected. Lately, Nvidia’s drivers have caused me some headache there, making it just no fun to work on that machine. So I’ve been mostly using the laptop lately. I do miss the comfort of a good desk and chair though, so I’ve hooked up the laptop with one of the TFTs. I need to try the latest nvidia beta drivers, a posting on the NVNews board sounds promising, at least. Can’t wait to try … People on #suse have been rather helpful in getting me better acquainted with the system. I found out that’s it’s apparently quite helpful to people guiding you to tell them in how far you need guidance (“I’m an advanced linux user, but just don’t know the distro very well”) helps to avoid a couple of unnecessary questions (“did you restart X after trying the driver?”).Ereslibre has apparently fixed the Konqueror toolbar issue, I’ve been seeing for some time, I’m rebuilding everything as we speak.