Lamont Peterson

Along with Doran Barton and Mark Spute, I’ve started a new website and podcast about politics, technology and where both affect each other. You can find the website at [ http://stonepatrolmen.com/ ].

We’re just getting started and though we’ve learned a lot, there’s much more for us still to learn. It’s always a good time when we get together to record the podcast. We have so many good ideas (and plenty we hope no one ever traces back to us) it’s going to be hard to get to them all.

Our current plan is to publish a new podcast episode every 2-3 weeks. Each episode will have content covering political and/or technology news stories and discussions. We also have some regular topics. For example, we are going through a complete, in-depth discussion covering the entire text of the Constitution of the United States. In episode 1, we talk about the preamble, its meaning and how those words are meant to be applied to entirety of the Constitution.

We’re having a great time and we want to hear from you. So go over to the Stone Patrolmen website and check it out.

After installing openSUSE 11.0 on my HP Compaq 6715b notebook, of course, I wanted to be able to use my bluetooth mouse. I setup the installation with KDE4 and without KDE3 support. Logging in via KDM and using KDE4 wasn’t a problem, but the KDE4 version of the bluetooth integration and configuration tools are not quite ready yet. It would appear that Novell hasn’t included it in their release. Not to worry, the KDE3 tools can still be used successfully to configure bluetooth devices and/or connections.

But, kinputwizard wouldn’t run. I would get:

# kinputwizard
kinputwizard: error while loading shared libraries: libkbluetooth.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

So, I thought I’d try it under KDE3. After installing KDE3 support that I had omitted from the original installation selection, I tried to log in with KDE3. No go. It wouldn’t run KDE3. Needless to say, this could be frustrating, but I thought of it as another clue.

I found the “missing” library in the kdebluetooth RPM:

# rpm -ql kdebluetooth | grep libkbluetooth.so
/opt/kde3/lib64/libkbluetooth.so.0
/opt/kde3/lib64/libkbluetooth.so.0.0.0

So I took a look at the /etc/ld.so.conf file:

/usr/X11R6/lib/Xaw3d
/usr/X11R6/lib
/usr/lib/Xaw3d
/usr/i386-suse-linux/lib
/usr/local/lib
/opt/kde3/lib
include /etc/ld.so.conf.d/*.conf

Ah, the /opt/kde3/lib64/ directory is missing from the list, so I added it and ran ldconfig (as root, of course). I then tried to run kinputwizard again and it works. I haven’t tried logging in under KDE3 (I’m in KDE4 as I write this), but I’m sure it’ll be much happier, now. Still, I’m going to remove as much of KDE3 from the system as I can.