Guy Rutenberg » KDE

Using MusicBrainz when Ripping CDs in KDE

Guy — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 08:37:29 +0000

I guess this tip is Gentoo specific. By default KDE uses FreeDB for getting CD info when ripping CDs. If you want to use MusicBrainz native service (not via their FreeDB proxy), there are several steps you’ll need to take.

First, you should compile kde-base/libkcddb with the musicbrainz use-flag turned on. Next you should go to System Settings->Advanced->CDDB Retrieval and check the “Enable MusicBrainz lookup” box. From my experience MusicBrainz is not a complete replacement for FreeDB as some CDs aren’t recognized by it (but recognized by FreeDB).

Disable Touchpad Tapping in Kubuntu

Guy — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:13:50 +0000

In Ubuntu (gnome) there is an easy graphical way to disable tapping on the touchpad. However, KDE lacks such thing. But lacking graphical configuration doesn’t mean this should be difficult. All you need is the gsynaptics package. The package provides a small utility called synclient. Now you can disable tapping by doing

 synclient TapButton1=0

To disable the tapping permanently you should use the following to run the command at the start of every KDE session.

echo "synclient TapButton1=0" > ~/.kde/env/disable-tapping.sh

Upgrading All KDE Related Packages in Gentoo

Guy — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 06:24:01 +0000

Yesterday, Gentoo marked KDE 3.5.10 as stable on amd64. I looked for a way to upgrade all of the KDE related packages, without manually specifying each one of them. Normally one could do

emerge -avu world

but I encountered some nasty conflicts that I didn’t have time, nor will, to resolve at that time. So I’ve looked for a different solution. To my rescue came qlist for the great app-portage/portage-utils package. This package provides a set of very fast utilities to query portage. I’ve used qlist to list all of my installed packages, grep‘ed the list and piped the result as arguments to emerge using xargs.

 qlist -I --nocolor | grep kde | xargs emerge -pvu1

Take a look at the package list that will be merged. If everything looks fine, then do the actual merging.

 qlist -I --nocolor | grep kde | xargs sudo emerge -vu1

The --nocolor is important, or else emerge will complain about the benign looking atoms such as dev-util/kdevelop because there are invisible terminal formating characters around them.