Testing KDE video players, setting up backups and a cluster, cleaning up poppler and sqlite stuff

Today I tried Kaffeine 0.8.4 with XCB support. It is supposed to fix the stability issues when playing embedded videos in Konqueror, so I wanted to verify if it is a real contender to KMPlayer. Kaffeine indeed does not seem to cause instabilities in Konqueror anymore. That’s good. I tried viewing videos on vrtnieuws.net and this worked fine. Unfortunately, trying to view an Apple movie trailer failed, while KMPlayer (with mplayer back-end) worked fine. When double clicking on local video files while browsing system:/home in Konqueror, Kaffeine still copies the whole file to a temporary directory. Actually the default use of system:/home instead of /home/login by Konqueror is completely braindead, but I do not understand why Kaffeine needs to copy the whole file, while KMplayer does not need to do this. So for now, I still recommend KMPlayer.

At work, I started to install a cluster system, consisting of about 6 (IIRC) computers. I will try Kerrighed on Debian Etch. It seems an interesting project: more actively developed than OpenMosix with a clear roadmap for the future. And it does not seem too difficult to install. I’ll post my experiences soon.

Also at work, I recently discovered the rdiff-backup and backupninja projects. These programs really rule for making backups on free hard drive space. For tape back-ups I like Bacula, but it is not that easy to configure. For simple backups on hard drives, nothing beats the simplicity of rdiff-backup and backupninja. I should definitely check whether these good backuptools are also included in the Mandriva repositories.

Some things I have on my personal TODO list: I want to find out which programs still depend on xpdf, or have their proper xpdf code included in the source. We should maximise the use of poppler instead, because it is a shared library. If all PDF programs use poppler, all programs will easily benefit from improvements to poppler. And it will make security updates for all these programs much easier. And we will gain some space, which is always interesting for the One live CDs. Because now, a lot of packages have to be separately updated which is a PITA. I would like to do the same for sqlite. Seems like a lot of packages still depend on the old sqlite 2 instead of the more modern version 3, and some programs still use their own private copy. Let’s hunt these packages down, and see if we can compile them with the sqlite 3 shared library. If not, bug reports should be opened upstream so this gets fixed.