Andrew Ash

I switched my play laptop over to Arch sometime last semester, and had a great time getting everything set up. It’s much more of a hands-on experience, and like everyone who writes up an account of an Ubuntu -> Arch transition, I feel like I have a much better idea how the boot process and wireless configuration work. Of course, nowhere near as much as setting up an LFS installation, but still…

After two years with Mac OS X on my primary laptop, I’m getting that itching again for going back to an open source community OS. Sure, suspend/hibernate is flawless on Macs, and Firefox is formidably fast, but iTunes is a poor replacement for my Amarok installation. There was an Amarok2 build for the Mac a while back that I beta tested, but it’s just not ready for primetime yet, and I haven’t heard much of any development work done for the Mac platform in months.

So with a weekend where I’m already busy (finals week — papers, projects, exams anyone?), I sat down and figured out ABS, found an amarok2-svn PKGSOURCE, and have started hacking away. A great first place for KDE projects to look for trivial things to fix is Krazy (down now for some reason). I looked at comparison to and concatenation with single-quoted characters instead of double-quoted ones (QString works faster on characters than other QStrings), and sent off a patch to the Amarok mailing list.

Hopefully with a few weeks at the beginning of this summer between school and my internship, I’ll be able to finally hack around on Amarok a bit. It’s about time, since I’ve been following development for at least two and a half years now!