hi all,
No one but the hardcore techies will care about this post, because I wanted to rant about Fedora 10 w/ KDE 4.2, since I spent Tuesday afternoon updating my laptop to it.
KDE 4.2 is a vast improvement over KDE 4, but 4 was a piece of trash: it had a crappy and buggy start menu, it lacked many of the features that KDE 3.5 came with out of the box, etc. Some of these features have been rebuilt in 4.2, and some very cool new ones have been added (more later).
Fedora 10 itself is pretty: it boots up about 3X faster than Fedora 8, has built-in webcam support (Fedora 8 required you to patch and re-compile the kernel to use a webcam), and looks like it has better wi-fi support (personally, I never got wireless to work on Fedora 8).
KDE 4.2 has basic Semantic Desktop support through the Soprano, Strigi, and Nepomuk packages. Most people are familar with Semantic notions in the form of tags stored on mp3 (or in my case, Ogg-Vorbis) music files, and users of Gmail are familiar in the form of Labels on emails. What the above packages allow you to do is spread this ability to all file types: I can add tags/labels like "semantics," "verbal classes," and "Greek" to my linguistics PDF files, "Amsterdam," "Leipzig," and "Sils-Maria" to JPG files of my trips. Further, because these tags are stored in a machine-readable form, I will be able to search for them using my standard file manager. Aside from the cool stuff above, this also leads to a flatter file directory structure: multiple tags can be associated with a single file, while a file can only reside in one directory.
I leave for Atlanta tomorrow, and my pile of stuff to pack seems to keep growing.
Cheers,
