A New Theme for KMail: Modern Headers

I’m using KMail to handle my emails every day. It is a very powerful program and heavily customizable. Thanks to Baloo, I finally see the pictures of my contacts in their emails. I just didn’t like the way the pictures were shown in the email header. In case you did not know, KMail supports many different ways of presenting the header of emails. Laurent Montel implemented not only theme support, but also built an editor that you can use to make your own themes. So I took his editor, started playing with the example theme and then ended up writing … Continue reading

Compiling KDE Kontact from Source

I’m running Debian Sid, because I like to have a rolling distribution with the latest and greatest software as soon as it is released. Unfortunately, the KDE packagers in Debian lack (wo)men power and still ship 4 year old KDE PIM packages. Using their experimental KDE repository does not help. Since I have multiple annoying issues with Kontact 4.4.11 and because I need it functional for work, I decided to take a rather extreme step: Compiling it myself from the source code repositories. Turns out that it isn’t all that difficult. I documented the process below for those who want … Continue reading