Ha! KDE did it again! someone thought over the problem with prelinking and the startup speed of KDE apps aside the current plan from the gcc people to make the ld linker optimize the apps and libs for dynamic linking. He posted a patch with a clear description how to apply it. It's actually not a patch, but a program that is to be run over the object files (*.o) after a make, then touch all object files and run make again to link libraries/applications. The speed improvement is *very* significant. As some people didn't have it handy on IRC, I just put that stuff on my webserver and added a link: http://kandalf.homeip.net. Just follow the link and read the file prelink which is a copy of the mail, and compile objprelink1.c.gz, which is an updated version that has been sent in later yesterday. I used it on my machine and it's *incredibly* fast now. It seems that in terms of speed, KDE apps will finally be able to compete with Microsoft apps under Windows, even though the graphics subsystem on UNIX is not inside the kernel :))

One thing that sucks about this diary is that the cursor moves a bit slowly. I really think moving this diary to my own webserver would be a good idea and just leaving the link here. Uhm...that requires cgi-scripting, right ? :) And a database to hold the contents, right ? :) Could you advogato people send me your cgi-scripts ? :))

Anyway, I tried ktexmaker2 yesterday with that LJ article. Noticed I didn't have latex installed on the laptop while I read over that article in the train. And I didn't have the listings which were on separate sites. Now I fixed that and I can finally start using latex a bit. I think I need to learn that anyway because I will need that for my thesis and that semester report that I have still open to write for Uni. It will be fun, definetly. I would really suggest taking ktexmaker into KDE and enhance it on several places. There could be templates and some of the very first, basic things mentioned in the tutorial from the LJ are missing in the menus. Auto-completion would be nice as well, so you get a popup for the available commands and you don't make so many errors that require you to fix them. Also, the output could be inside a terminal window inside the program, not in an external. Clicking on an error line would set the cursor there and so on. Eeek! Wait, that's what KDevelop does for programming! Couldn't someone just add a plugin for that stuff and write up some templates for all kinds of latex documents, say, book, article, report, slides and letter ? The locale could be asked for the paper format to set a default on that. Well, if noone else is up for it, my diary saves at least my ideas.