KDE 4.1 is now available for general use. This first major update to KDE 4 brings the KDE PIM suite, various Plasma improvements, and many other features. Plasma can now replace the KDE 3 shell for most casual users. Indeed, the whole KDE 4 can now replace KDE 3, as it’s gotten so polished.

Get it while it’s hot! Packages are already available for various distributions such as Kubuntu.

The performance issues with NVidia’s proprietary driver still exist, however. Engineers at NVidia are aware of this problem, but they have not yet issued a fix.

KDE 4.1.1 is due on September 3rd, and KDE 4.2 will arrive at the end of January next year.

Since it takes so long for me to install new software every time I reinstall, I figured that I’d create a metapackage that pulls in all the software I need. After I’ve done that, I was thinking, “what about setting up a repository too?” It’s not necessary, since dpkg is sufficient for working with metapackages, but somehow working with apt-get feels cleaner. I’ll be putting other packages up as well that may be of public interest.

A new HAL was recently released that allowed MadWifi to support the AR5007/AR2425 devices by Atheros. Last month, there were still some hiccups with the code, but it seems smooth enough for general consumption now. The new driver supports both 32-bit and 64-bit environments, unlike the older 32-bit-only hack. As a bonus, I successfully patched the code for injection.

The commands required to checkout, patch, build, and install the driver are rather simple. I’m posting it here both as a note to myself and for public benefit.

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Word is on the street that motherboard manufacturer Foxconn was sabotaging its BIOS to break Linux ACPI support. While Foxconn claims ACPI-compliance, its motherboards only work with select versions of Windows. When used with non-Windows operating systems such as Linux, ACPI-related activities caused the system to crash or freeze. Ubuntu Forums member TheAlmightyCthulhu disassembled his BIOS for clues, and was horrified at what he found.

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I was designing a photo album viewer for a Jalbum user and ended up with iAlbum. It’s basically just a PHP script that crawls through a bunch of images in an album-oriented directory structure, generates thumbnails, and presents the images using a lightbox.

Originally, the script generated one thumbnail per image. The result loaded quite slowly, and the thumbnails appeared out of order in the browser. After I switched to using CSS sprites, the thumbnails loaded much faster and were displayed all at the same time. The first time an album is viewed, a strip of thumbnails is generated for it and cached. After that, the cached version is sent to the browser (there’s an option to regenerate the thumbnail should the album change). I was worried that clustering all the thumbnails into one long strip would be too much for PHP to handle, but it turned out to be pretty fast even for an album with a couple of hundred images.

During the project, I encountered Lytebox, an excellent lightbox implementation that does not depend on any of the bulky libraries the way the other implementations did. After minifying and gzipping, the script weighed in at only 5.7kb. I left the CSS alone for an additional 5.7kb, but it would have been about 1kb gzipped.