Colors

The world is not as black and white as it seems. Yesterday morning I went to the supermarket to do the usual food shopping and the cashier was a woman in her mid 50s, looking like someone's grandma. We chatted a bit as I shop there 3 times a week and Clarisse wins everyone over so I'm sort of known over there. Then in the afternoon I decided to upgrade my Linux installation which was 1 year old and my partitions were quite bloated. I quickly came back to the supermarket and only bought a magazine I noticed which has a Mandriva 2008 DVD in it. The same cashier was still there and she looked at my mag and said "oh, you're installing Linux?". On that I thought "come on, what can she know about that" and I said vaguely "well, yes" and she went on: "I'm more on graphical stuff than on technical, I do website design, flash,..." I swear nobody would have said that she would be able to draw on a PC... The wonder of uniqueness behind every human, sharing something you care about with someone you think is very far from you: that makes my world colorful.

So I installed Mandriva 2008 on my laptop and a few hours later, I got my KDE 4 built again. The process was very smooth and quick, installing the development packages ensured that I had everything I needed to build KDE 4 without the hassle of getting every -devel rpm. Sound is working out of the box (I could not previously hear the headphones without the speakers) wifi was more painful but that's the fault of this stupid Livebox, nvidia driver got configured with the help of #mandrivafr. I even cleaned my /home (which I didn't reformat of course) and removed a few Gigs of music, videos, tarballs and thus went from 98% to 28% of the 16Gb here. Having a clean install will enable me to carry on debugging KDE 4 without asking myself: stale config or bug? In the past 2 weeks, I tested a few patches from bug krushers, I fixed System Settings locale tab, kdelibs fonts dialog, and overall tried to tackle issues noted on the techbase krush page.