For the (N+1)th time I'm praising Trolltechs and their divine wisdom.

While hacking on Skype support for Eee I ran across a feature request to make a small system tray applet to show current power management status of the Eee camera.

The words (Q)SystemTray(Icon) obviously led me to a Qt4 path - and thanks to geniuses at ASUStek Eee has Qt4.3.0 preinstalled in full glory. So 20 minutes later this little utility was born, all in Qt4, small, handy, good lookin'.

A great time is upon us. A time of change. A time of revolution.

In the past, we have struggled in a world of glass panes and fruits. Forbidden from seeing the world around us. Denied the possibility of showing who we are. But today, our eyes open. We are not afraid to see, and we are not afraid to show ourselves.

Indeed this is a time of excitement, but it’s also a time where we can share our happiness, our sadness, our anger and our love, for video has arrived to Skype for Linux.

This release is not just a revolution for us in Linux, but a revolution for the Skype world at large. No longer are we, the people of Linux - the workers of the world, prevented from socialising in the same way as our peers.

So join us in this revolution, join us by downloading Skype 2.0 Beta for Linux today.

Read on for less of my speech and more technical information about this release.

ps/ This post is courtesy of Andy, and today is 7th of November if you haven’t noticed yet.

pps/ Just a bit of known issues with video stuff:

• Using uvc webcam driver with new Logitech cameras can cause a split video effect which does not recover until you restart video. [this is fixed in internal versions]
• Using uvc webcam driver with ATi fglrx graphics card driver results in a memory leak and potential crash currently. [this is fixed in internal versions]
• gspca webcam driver can crash sometimes during webcam initialisation (which can also happen during the call).
• Using a display driver with only a single Xv port means you can only see video in one direction currently.
• Using a display driver with no Xv support will not work at all.
• ATi fglrx driver versions before 8.42.3 may crash your X server and lock up video during the call.
• ATi fglrx driver version 8.42.3 may crash your X server and lock up video at the beginning of the call.

Quicklook is a series of small posts with first-view impressions on some things. I’m not going to post longish reviews but instead just several one line descriptions of what I noticed or stumbled upon. Sometimes with pictures.

Let’s get on.

• Device looks slick and sturdy. Feels pleasanly heavyish but not heavy.

• Boot up time is amazing - < 10 seconds from power on to working desktop. I had to make 3 tries to capture the eee logo screen.

• Interface is nice, bright and appealing.

• Keyboard has all the regular laptop keys. markings are english and chinese (looks funny, now i know how chinese keyboards look!)

• Quite web oriented.

• Has Skype 1.4.0.118 preinstalled.
• Applications are divided into nice categories, which help finding (or losing) the proper ones.
• Based on Xandros Desktop with ASUS modifications. Forked off of Debian Etch. i call it Xeeendros.
• Sound quality is very good.
• Camera is good even if only 0.3 Mpix. Webcam works in skype. The only tweak was to power it on: “echo 1 > /proc/acpi/asus/camera” (or enable in BIOS)
• Has a mix of KDE and Gtk software preinstalled. Many of kdeedu apps are there. Default mail client is Thunderbird, but KMail can be installed from debian repos and runs fine. Akregator runs fine also :P
• Device unfortunately misses bluetooth. A few solutions using USB or SD/MMC BT dongles are proposed, but would be better to have this integrated.
• Available connectors: 3 USB, 1 SD/MMC, RJ-45 lan connector, D-Sub video output.
• A nice helper application lets you set up output settings - to internal LCD only, to both internal and external and external only, and set resolution from autodetect up to 1280x1024.
• WiFi interface is very nice, shows all available networks, AP signal strength, remembers network keys between reboots.
• Battery lasts slightly over 3 hours - as specified.
• MPlayer video playback is very smooth.
• Touchpad became a bit stubborn after a few hours - I need to put my whole thumb on it to make it move. I personally would prefer clit - it’s nicer to use on such small device.
• “Voice command” didn’t work in the office, probably because it was too noisy. at home it recognised the commands but didn’t run anything :(
• Running startfull.sh from terminal window brings you into a full KDE session instead of iceWM-based AsusLauncher.
• Since it’s basically Debian you can install millions of available programs with ease (but beware: some packages may break your system because of wrong dependancies, read eee wiki to know more), yet small 4Gb solid-state disk with only 1,5Gb free doesn’t leave much choice.

Conclusion.

wow factor: high
overall rating: 95% qoolies

Here I am sitting in super-nice small hotel in the center of Munich, taking a short rest after the DevDays before flying back to Tallinn.

It has been an insane two days, packed with meeting new people from all over the Earth and consuming knowledge Trolls have to offer. And they got quite a lot.

I've met in person a lot of Trolls and all I can say they are amazing people. It was extreme pleasure to see them on stage, talking with a real passion about the things they know and love - Qt, Qtopia and life in general.

There is tremendous amount of interest in Qt from a lot of developers from all areas - from microcomputers to space, from medicine to construction, from seismic research to business solutions. In my estimation there was about 500 people writing or maintaining Qt programs for a living. Somebody said there are not too many Qt applications out there. Well, they didn't bother to look. Maybe a TMR scanner in a medical facility nearby you runs Qt, how do you know?

Trolltech's commitment to developing Qt is so big, that I'm completely smashed and totally happy for choosing Qt for working on Skype for Linux. And more interesting things are only ahead.

I've also met my outstanding goal - to finally see some KDE developers I've known for long on the IRC but never managed to talk to in person. You guys are absolutely awesome.
While roaming around with a bottle of wine, I stumbled into Matthias Kretz sitting doing some Phonon debugging, so we sat together and shaped an API for VOIP and real-time audio applications in Phonon. With Torsten Rahn talked a bit about Marble and Google. This kind of meetings is really facilitating and I hope to have more chances to see them all more frequently in the near future.

My special "thank you" for inspiration to Aaron Seigo, the Man behind, above, below and in front of KDE. I even went to his talk two times in a row. Good job and have more working examples at hand!

Looks like there is literally A LOT of Qt and KDE people going to Munich and I'm already lost how am I going to see and talk to all of them in just two days, given that I'm pretty antisocial person (especially in autumn).

Probably I shall abandon sleep (mine and theirs) and go through these two days with lots of Red Bull, Red Eyes and popping blood vessels.

To all KDE and Qt folks I might virtually know (or not) - do not hesitate to come over and talk to me. While I'm myself too shy to talk to strangers usually, I'd be really glad if I could communicate a bit with everyone. (It's a real shame I didn't manage to go to aKademy this year! So consider DevDays a small replacement for it.)

Worked yesterday and today on extremely nasty deadlock on D-BUS.

Even though I don't like D-BUS (and this I am saying lightly), I spent whole night testing this issue and came up with a test program that reproduced the case sensibly. Then I turned to Trolltech for help and Thiago was extremely helpful in diagnosing the problem and providing hints on proper solution. Thank you very much Thiago!

Also Trolls were so nice to send me a fresh Russian translation of their "C++ programming with Qt4" book by Jasmin Blanchette and Mark Summerfield. Thank you guys, I'll sure enjoy (proof)reading it :)

Today I sweeped the last pack of bugs on our way towards the golden 1.4 client. This includes several crashes when using public API and some audio fixes.

Tomorrow I expect to go through a list of not-so-critical-but-nevertheless-nice-to-have-fixed bugs and fix some just for fun.

It will take some time for testing and maybe a couple iterations of "fixing the fixes" before we put this 1.4 out, but gosh it's close!

Just a notice that comment posting can be done again.

Turned out to be a very weird caching issue in Mephisto vs. Apache.
Comments section still needs some more love and CSS work.

I also resurrected some of the old RSS feeds, so they should be reachable for older configured clients.