Qt and Eclipse under Mac OS X
May 13th, 2009
There is a plugin for Eclipse which makes it possible to develop Qt applications with Eclipse. However, there are only versions for Linux and Windows at the moment. If you are working with Mac OS X you cannot use the plugin. I will show, how you are be able to develop Qt applications with Ecplise and Mac OS X.
To the topIsn’t HP able to write working drivers?
April 19th, 2009
Because the old printer was not working anymore I had to buy a new one. It was a HP Photosmart C5380. But it gives me no joy, because the Mac drivers have a big bug. Showing the ink levels, printing test pages and stuff like that works without problems. However, if I try to print from a normal program, I get the error message “USB class driver missing.”. Therefore, I wrote to the support and they told me there might be different reasons for this error message, but in may case the problem is that I’m using a case sensitive file systems. These are not supported.
IMO such mistakes should not happen in a big company like HP and if these should be fixed as soon as possible. For me it seems that there are only written some file names in the source code in a wrong way and this should be now big deal to fix.
Macbook with a Multiboot System
April 11th, 2009
A short while ago I bought a 500 GB harddrive for my Macbook Pro. To be accurate: It is a Hitachi HTS545050B9A300 from the Travelstar 5K500.B series, which was released at the end of February. A nice thing is not only the additional space, but also that this harddrive consumes a little bit less energy than the original one. But I suppose the effect on the battery life is not very noticeable. The old harddrive is now used as external TimeMachine backup volume in an IcyBox.
But that’s not the real reason for writing this post. With the new harddrive I have enough space to run a triple boot system with Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. In most tutorials to set up such an multiboot system is written that you can use only three partitions for it. But this is not absolutly right. Therefore, I will in show in the following post how to set up a multiboot system with more than three partitions and where there are really some limits to the partitioning. Additional to that I will cover problems with NTFS partitions and the msftres flag which may occur if you try to partition your harddrive for such a multiboot system.
Digikam 0.10.0 under Mac OS X
April 10th, 2009
With the release of Digikam 0.10.0 for KDE4 it is possible to compile Digikam for Mac OS X. There are remaining some minor bugs and, maybe, it does not run as stable as under Linux, but it runs! The steps to compile Digikam for Mac OS X are as follows:
Graphic Tablet in Gimp under Mac OS X
February 11th, 2009
When I tried my new graphic tablet in Gimp under Mac OS X, I noticed that it did not work there. After searching the web for a while I read nearly everywhere either that tablets won’t work with Apple’s X11 at all or that the work, but not the pressure sensitivity.
Luckily, all this information was outdated. To get a graphic tablet working in Gimp under Mac OS X is really easy. All you have to do is to install the newest XQuartz and Gimp versions (for the links see below).
Once this is done you go to Edit > Preferences > Input Devices > Configure Extended Input Devices in Gimp and set the devices pointer, pen, eraser to the Screen mode (the names and number of your devices may differ, if you have another tablet).
My Wacom tablet is working very well now!
New Backgammon version
January 27th, 2009
I’ve just released the version 1.6 of my Backgammon game. Beneath some bug fixes I implemented an undo function. Moreover I compiled an official Mac OS X version of the program.
Cursor acceleration under Mac OS X
December 15th, 2008
I’ve bought recently a Macbook Pro and was very annoyed by the cursor acceleration of Mac OS X: Either the mouse cursor was moving very slowly or (if you moved the mouse faster) jumped nearly from one screen edge to another.
Luckily I could solve this problem now. You can download a file name “killmouseaccel.tar.gz” from this forum thread (somewhere in the middle). It contains the program killmouseaccel. You have to start it from a terminal:
/path/to/killmouseaccel mouse
Instead of “mouse” you can also specify “trackpad” or even both. For me this program works very well and it is free unlike most other solutions (e.g. USBOverdrive or SteerMouse).