I know that this blog seems dead, but I did not forgot about it. I hope to get new material to post soon.

Today we are going to upgrade KDE to the new version 4.3.1 on Kubuntu.

KDE 4.3.1 has been released yesterday and it is a Service Release of the 4.3 series that brings many bug fixes, performance improvements and translation updates.

For stability reasons the Kubuntu standard repositories do not offer the update, so you have to add a third party repository.

First thing, open KPackageKit.

From KPackageKit

Then go to “Settings” and click on “Edit Software Sources”.

From KPackageKit

Go to “Third-Party Software” tab and click “Add” At the bottom of the screen.

From KPackageKit

On the dialog windows you will get insert the following line, but wait before clicking “Ok”:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu jaunty main

From KPackageKit

Before clicking “Ok”, open Konsole and execute the following 2 commands:
gpg –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv 2836CB0A8AC93F7A
gpg –export –armor 2836CB0A8AC93F7A | sudo apt-key add -
(in the following screenshot, Konsole tells that “key 8AC93F7A: “Launchpad Kubuntu Updates” not changed”; that is because I already had the key, but in your case it should tell you that the key has correctly been imported).

From KPackageKit

When you done it, go back to KPackageKit and finally click “Ok”; when you do it, KPackageKit will tell you that it has to regenerate the master list of the software available.

From KPackageKit

From KPackageKit

When you have done it, close it and click on the small wheel with the green arrow that you will see near the clock on the task bar and confirm all the available updates.

When the installation has completed, log off from your KDE session and log back in. YOU ARE DONE!

If you want to verify that you actually installed the update, open any KDE own software (like Konsole), go to “Help” and select “About KDE”; you should get a windows like this.

From KPackageKit

I hope you will enjoy your new and update version of KDE.

Stay tuned for more guides.

You can find more info on the PGP key page.

Hi all,
as I mentioned on my last post, I given up (due to time constraints) on reporting daily news on the IT industry and I was going to focus on computer guides and editorials on topics that are really breaking news.

Well … I decided to start with the latter, by reporting the news that Blizzard is releasing on BlizzCon 2009 about the third expansion of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.

Beware that, while those information are public, some people may consider them spoilers. If you are such kind of person it would be better if you do not continue.

First I suggest you to bookmark this article since the BlizzCon 2009 is still in progress and there may be new details to add (as a matter of fact I apologize if in this report I will keep switching between discursive paragraphs and cold bullet-lists ).

For example, the last updates are:
23/08 – 13:45 GMT+1: clarified the issue of mana regeneration and haste;
23/08 – 14:00 GMT+1: included info on profession changes;
23/08 – 21:45 GMT+1: listed classes for Worgens and Goblins;
23/08 – 22:20 GMT+1: some clearup.

Let’s do a recap for the rushers (more details on the following pages of course):

• Two New Playable Races: Adventure as the cursed worgen with the Alliance or the resourceful goblins with the Horde.
• Increased Level Cap: Advance to level 85 and earn new abilities, tap into new talents, and progress through the path system, a new way for players to customize characters.
• Classic Zones Remade: Quest to level 60 as you never have before. Familiar zones across the original continents of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms have been reforged by the cataclysm and updated with new quests and content.
• Flying Mounts in Azeroth: Explore Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms from a whole new perspective.
• Guild Advancement: Progress as a guild to earn guild levels and guild achievements.
• New High-Level Content: Explore newly opened parts of the world, including Uldum, Grim Batol, and the great sunken city of Vashj’ir beneath the sea, and enjoy even more high-level raid content than in previous expansions.
• New PvP Zone; Rated Battlegrounds: Take on PvP objectives and daily quests on Tol Barad Island, a new Wintergrasp-like zone, and wage war in all-new rated Battlegrounds.
• Archaeology: Master a new secondary profession to unearth valuable artifacts and earn unique rewards.
• New Race and Class Combinations: Explore Azeroth as a gnome priest, blood elf warrior, or one of the other never-before-available race and class combinations.

Now, this yet another hiatus forced me to think what I should do with this web site. Is it worth to keep trying even if I keep ending up in hiatus? Should I close it, accepting my inability to update it daily? Well … no … to both questions.

Upon asking my self the above questions I reviewed both my original intentions and the eventual projects I have attempted to launch on this site: at the beginning (when I originally opened my account on wordpress.com) the purpose was to have some space where to host some guide about computers (I started with a series of Knights of the Old Republic’s Hints even if that guide was already some years old).

Than I realized that, since I would have seldomly wrote computer guides, the site would have often been gone for some time without updates; that leaded me to start reporting any tech news I found interesting. As I started I was compelled to report at least 3-4 news a day.

While writing news, I decided to start offering two additional services: the first was to have posts dedicated to the specifications of any tech gadget, like iPods, BlackBerry, Palm’s smartphones; the second service is to offers videos about gadgets and eventually computers.

Surely the site was building content in matter of days, but that effort leaded me to another problem: time management; since the site wasn’t born to be an economical venture I could have lived on, I was still bound to my day job, but that meant I have limited time to promptly keep the news flow (and as you know, prompt time is critical on the news market, especially on Internet; if your site cannot offer the news in a timely fashion, readers will keep themself updated on other fronts and then they have no reason to come back re-reading something on your web site).

For months I keept trying, hoping to find some balance between the promptness nature of the news and my limited time available, but I always ended up to either involutarly go to hiatus, like the one at the end of the last year or this recent one, or I resorted to publish brief news about software updates filled with mere changelogs.

And now here I am wondering what to do. My intentions? I don’t want to give up on Silicon Gadget: I have decided that from now on the main focus of this web site will be back on guides. The “news” segment is not totally scratched away, but definitively you will not going to see the usual mini-posts I have produced so far; instead of writing brief news for anything interesting on the IT market, I will SELDOMLY write editorials on topics that are really breaking news.

That are my intentions, but wait a second … you are the readers! That means that it is you who read my posts! That means you are the judges of this site! What do you think?

This is an extremely small patch, about 7MB, as it addreess only one aestetic problem: the mere tooltip of the paladin ability Exorcism.

As announced by Aratil, U.S. community master:

In 3.1.1, the paladin ability Exorcism cannot damage other players, but the player game client does not display this change properly. Patch 3.1.1a will fix the tooltip to display the appropriate text; it also displays an error message when a player tries to use it against other players.

The major changes are the following (original version here):

• Show a dialog on application crashes.
• Much improved OLE copy/paste support.
• Various listview improvements.
• More Direct3D code cleanups.
• Various bug fixes.

The source is available from the following locations:

http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/system/emulators/wine/wine-1.1.20.tar.bz2
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.1.20.tar.bz2

Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:

http://www.winehq.org/site/download

You will find documentation on http://www.winehq.org/site/documentation

You can also get the current source directly from the git
repository. Check http://www.winehq.org/site/git for details.

Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file
AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.

Bugs fixed in 1.1.20:

2221 Hyper Chem v7.5 doesn’t open/save files
4464 d3dx9_*.dll are unimplemented
9084 Panzer General III SE pinkish text instead of transparent
9102 Panzer General III Scorched Earth in-game crash (memcpy)
9637 Switchball only shows a blank screen
10253 Fraps does not record videos or take a screenshot
11716 star wars battlefront crashes with sound enabled
12040 Stronghold 2 1.4: crash when starting the application
12057 Power! Estimator renders numerical cell text incorrectly
12393 adobe illustrator 10 crashed on startup
12560 Perfect World: Corrupt Bitmap Images
13563 Nestopia: crashes with enabled shaders
13820 Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 beta hangs on login
13825 Morrowind pagefaults when trying to run fullscreen with missing videos
14456 Diablo II hangs when it loses focus
14812 dsound bug causes games to crash
14970 everquest crashes in winmm
15081 Perfect World – Grey Characters
15088 Lotus Approach page faults on open dialog
15172 File Names with spaces seen as seperate files
15303 dragonshard crashes or presents a corurpted screen
15494 ddraw_test throws an exception when run
15557 GTA Trylogy can’t install
15566 GTA 3 doesn’t find DVD
15575 Word Pro table nubmers get reformatted
15603 Screen periodically erased in Starfleet Command II
15622 Everquest crashes
15630 Program LaTeXPiX crashes at startup
15764 Homeworld 2 Patch (homeworld2_update_en_10_11.exe) to v1.1: crash during setup
15881 Pharaoh – can’t play on fullscreen
16613 A Vampyre Story Demo installer doesn’t work
16989 Cobra 11 Nitro: Cars drawn as artifacts
17198 World Editor: Tree Component of Unit Editor doesn’t (re)draw correctly
17397 Ventrilo 3.0.4 won’t initialize GSM 6.10 codec stream
17478 Fix dpa warning from comctl32/listview.c
17498 winemaker fails on 64-bit systems
17528 3D Mark 2001 SE Dragothic: Textures not rendered on running humans
17774 Fable crashes on starting a new or existing game
17910 Black & White: Crashes in texture code at start
17984 Invalid handle for RegOpenKeyExA in win64 bit application
17987 Autocad toolbars mis-sized
17991 QueryPathOfRegTypeLib fails to locate typelib when (major.minor) = (0xffff.0xffff)
18007 Subtitle Workshop “Save as..” selection menu not appearing
18030 Images not show (or flickering) in old app
18076 SmartDraw.exe: unimplemented function gdiplus.dll.GdipBitmapSetResolution
18090 Watchtower Library no longer starts
18111 Powerhorse crashes
18114 rpcrt4.NdrDllCanUnloadNow: COM proxy/stub factory reference count eval incorrect (crashes Visual Studio 2005 on exit)
18125 Drawing problem in Wine
18150 Foobar2000 properties dialog is blank
18155 Approach crashes on File, Export

The main changes of Ubuntu 9.04 compared to the previous version are:

• Gnome 2.26 for Ubuntu and KDE 4.2 for Kubuntu;
• X.Org server 1.6;
• Wacom tablet hotplugging;
• Improved boot performance;
• Linux kernel 2.6.28.8
• Ext4 filesystem support

Links
Ubuntu 9.04 announcement:  http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-9.04-desktop;
Ubuntu 9.04 release notes: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/904.

The main changes of Firefox 3.0.9 are:

• Fixed several security issues.
• Fixed several stability issues.
• Many users experienced an issue where a corrupt local database caused Firefox to “lose” its stored cookies. (bug 470578)
• Fixed an issue where, starting with Firefox 3.0.7, inline image attachments on popular webmail services (like AOL and AIM) would not display. (bug 482659)
• Large forms would sometimes take a long time to submit. (bug 426991)
• In certain cases, new windows would not have proper focus. (bug 446568)

Links
Mozilla Firefox 3.0.9 announcement: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0.9/releasenotes/;
Mozilla Firefox 3.0.9 complete changelog: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?keywords_type=anywords&keywords=fixed1.9.0.9+verified1.9.0.9.