KDE-CVS-Digest for October 3, 2003

In this week's KDE-CVS-Digest:
Quanta gets a table editor. KSVG improves with new gradient algorithms. KStars implements suggestions from the KGUS, aka
KStars Girlfriend Usability Study. Many bugfixes in KMail, KHTML and elsewhere.

Dot Categories: 

Comments

by gray (not verified)

As uaslly -- great work, Derek!

by Hoek (not verified)

C'mon, you knew someone would ask.. =)

by LMCBoy (not verified)

That was just a joke; it should read "KStars Girlfriend Usability Study". One of the developers sat his girlfriend in front of KStars to see how well she could understand the interface. We got lots of good feedback from our GUS, and I heartily recommend it (or a BUS, of course) to other projects ;).

by Derek Kite (not verified)

Over the last year there were a few similar comments in commit logs. Jason just gave it an acronym. And yes, it works.

Derek

by Random coma (not verified)

Why stop with girlfriends? Take your cousins, uncles/aunts, grannies, etc. etc. An app like KStars is ideal for usability studies, since it's much more entertaining for general public than spreadsheets and the like.

I hope results of these studies are applied to more desktop apps. It's a wonderful idea :)

by anon (not verified)

Recommend? You wanted to say "rent", or? :-)

by LMCBoy (not verified)

Derek,

Thank you for your insightful commentary in this week's CVS Digest! You nicely encapsulate some of the concerns I've felt recently. I think there is a growing sense of entitlement among some KDE users, and I think you are absolutely right that this sentiment has the power to damage our community, by alienating or even driving away contributors, and widening a perceived gap between "developers" and "users".

I encourage everybody who uses KDE to contribute to the project however you can. Don't just use KDE; become a member of our community. Don't just complain; help! More developers are always a good thing, but even if you don't code, there is plenty to do. You can help bring KDE to a wider audience by joining one of the 40+ translation teams. You can improve documentation by writing Handbook chapters. You can improve usability by redesigning a dialog with Qt Designer. You can checkout KDE-CVS and submit detailed reports of any bugs you find, or submit specific, well-formulated wishlist items. You can check old bugs at bugs.kde.org to see if there are some that may be closable. These are just some of the many ways you can join the KDE project.

I agree with Derek that the Gentoo forums provide an excellent model for how we can effectively eliminate the growing gap between "developers" and "users". We need active forums where the community can help itself, and really feel like part of the project, rather than the recipient of the project's result. We have kde-forum.org; maybe this can become our community commons.

by Derek Kite (not verified)

There is something strange going on in Gentoo. Who, three years ago, would have thought that one of the most popular distributions would require half a week to install, require editing system files. And long overnight compiles to install large packages, with all the uncertainty that goes with that. I had the experience a while ago of walking a first time linux user through the process of compiling his kernel, to make sure his ethernet module would load. He stuck with it, and learned a whole lot in the process.

The kde i18n community is vibrant and active. The developer community (core, multimedia, development tools, games) is vibrant and active. The eye-candy community is active and busy (kde-look). The user community needs a little bit of life, or maybe a center of gravity.

Derek

by Tom (not verified)

There are two places where KDE users can help build something like Gentoo's forums, but they are almost ignored by the KDE project. The kde-forum.org and KDE Community Wiki sites are the perfect launch pad for a proper community side to KDE... why doesn't www.kde.org link to them, promote them, lend resources?

If the KDE project took these resources seriously, lent them credibility, and maybe got a few developers to visit them in their spare time, they could grow and take a lot of the load off developers' backs.

by anon (not verified)

www.kde.org links to kde-forum.org as long ago I can remember!?

by Derek Kite (not verified)

I'm sorry, but there is no "they" here. "They" are quite busy preparing a release, fixing bugs. Any spare developer time would probably be better used sorting through the morass at bugs.kde.org.

#kde on irc is usually empty. Some developers watch and respond. Where are the many users, many quite technically proficient, that could help with questions? If I have a question regarding kde use, Waldo, Dirk, George, or others shouldn't have to answer, although they probably would. It is so easy to say maybe the developers could spend more time on this or that. BZZT. Wrong answer.

Derek

by Tom (not verified)

Sorry, but it is precisely my point that by taking a couple of minutes to promote the forum and community wiki on the web site a little, the developers could continue to focus on coding and not have to worry about the problems you highlight, the most prominent of which is a Gentoo-like support community for KDE.

It would be nice if the whole KDE coding team could contribute 100% of their time to coding, but I think giving a tiny amount of that time over to helping a community establish itself is not only the right thing to do, but sensible in the long run. Half an hour given over to some links, news articles and maybe a redirection url (e.g. wiki.kde.org -> the wiki site) and the developers would then be able to return to coding. That's not much to ask.

by James Richard Tyrer (not verified)

To some extent, I is "they". Why, because I realize that I can learn a lot by answering other.s questions -- learn things that will help me in writing code and fixing bugs.

I was spending time "sorting through the morass" of bugs. But, I had problems determining the proper criteria to close a bug. I am starting to wonder if there is any point in submitting a bug for anything by HEAD. But, I guess that it is of some help to test bugs to see if they have been fixed in the current BRANCH.

A small suggestion for the morass. Perhaps there should be a separate section in Bugzilla to submit bugs for HEAD and such bugs should expire after a certain length of time (e.g. 90 days), or the ones filed for HEAD before the BETA is tagged should all be deleted when this new BRANCH is released (because they are then obsolete).

I don't use IRC, but I usually answer those questions that I can on: 'kde-linux' once a day.

It is good to see the some of the main developers are reading the list.

--
JRT

by Olaf Jan Schmidt (not verified)

> why doesn't www.kde.org link to them, promote them, lend resources?

I added KDE Forum to the front page once it was started.

To have KDE Wiki linked as well, it would be nice if someone could send a patch to [email protected]

I am not sure about forum.kde.org or wiki.kde.org, but anyway, it is also best discussed by sending a mail to [email protected]

by Anonymous (not verified)

> We need active forums where the community can help itself, and really feel like part of the project, rather than the recipient of the project's result. We have kde-forum.org; maybe this can become our community commons.

And don't forget http://kde.ground.cz/tiki-list_faqs.php for FAQs, part of the KDE Community Wiki Site.

by Debian User (not verified)

Hello,

I have no "refer to" links this time. Probably something in your script is broken, Derek?

And in KDE3.2 Alpha2 the display is broken of: "commited a change to kdevelop", the text overlaps defeating readability. Ok in mozilla. Whose bug would that be?

Yours, Kay

by Derek Kite (not verified)

When I prepared the digest, bugs.kde.org was down.

The display bug has been there for a month or so. The tag seems to overlap.

Derek

by cmf (not verified)

Did i read it worng, or is Kaboodle back in CVS?

by Anonymous (not verified)

It's back.

by Alex (not verified)

I thought that there was a controversey about some political comments and the developer packed his bgs and left.

Anywa,y if he's back, welcome abck, maybe we'll see mostfet soon too, at least to see why he's been gone if nothing else.

by Tom (not verified)

It did go straight back in but with a new maintainer. Since it was under the GPL (I think, or at least a similar license that allows this...) anyone can take the source and repackage it themselves. It's no different to Mandrake, SuSE etc. taking KDE and making slightly modified RPMs of it...

by Amilcar Lucas (not verified)

Hi, great review. but you forgot to mention that gideon changed it's name back to KDevelop. This makes KDevelop not play well (read run in pararllel) with KDevelop 2.x.
Therefore this was a big change. The other thing was that KDevelop got it's code restructured.
Take a look at
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-cvs&m=106511212217782&w=2
for more details.

A third thing is that finaly KDevelop has it's API documentation on-line:
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/cvs-api/kdevelop/html/ind...

Thanks
Amilcar

by Alex (not verified)

I loved your comment, very true and eloquent.

In addion to that, please check out this wishlsit I submitted a few weeks ago: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63868

It explains many ways in which KDE can increase uits monetary donations.

by anon (not verified)

There are provisos to put a request for donations on the frontpage as this is a volunteer and non-profit project.

I'm sure the project is more important than any provisos, please reaed the full wish if you haven't.

Hello - anyone know whether the kmail feature of embedding
vim or kate as the default composer editor is still going to be
included into kmail 3.2? The KEditor kpart component along
with the vimpart are already included in kde 3.2, but unfortunately,
I'm still unable to use vim with kmail - which is one of my most
anticipated features for 3.2.

( The 'use external editor' option is available, but it is not what I'm
after. I'm using the latest cvs as of last friday or so .)

Thanks for any status!

I went to the kmail devel list archives and searched around and found this thread,
which answers my question:

http://lists.kde.org/?l=kmail&m=106339162511179&w=2

Ack! No vim/kate for kmail yet! I am crushed...

Apparently the module that will be responsible for this feature, will be called
Komposer - and it's not going to be finished for the release of KDE 3.2...

In case anyone else is as interested in this particular feature as I am, I'm gonna
make a query to the kmail list and see if we could at least perhaps get access to a
patch that we could apply ourselves to get this functionality until it's finally released
as stable.

Beers,

Corey

Here's the response from Zack, the kmail dude who is responsible for this particular
feature:

On Friday 03 October 2003 22:14, Corey Saltiel wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I was really dissapointed (read: super-mega ultra bummed ) to learn
> that kmail 3.2 would likely not include the selectable alternate
> embedded editor option for composing mail - it was THE feature that I
> was waiting for with baited breath...
>
> Anyhow, I understand how things go, and I wish I could help out - but
> I doubt I could be of any use... SO - what I'm wondering is whether
> there is anyway possible of getting a patch or something that I could
> apply for myself that would provide this functionality to me until
> this Komposer interface becomes stable and officialy integrated.
>
> My desire is to finally be able to edit/compose my mail with an
> embedded vim, rather than with the 'external editor' option. I recall
> back around janjuary or so, there was a keditor patch floating around
> that would work with kmail 3.1. Would an updated version of that
> original patch provide a solution, or has the latest codebase changed
> too much? Otherwise, what is the likelyhood of getting/using a
> semi-working Komposer patch?
>
> Thanks alot for any help or info - you guys are doing a great job;
> the new threading works wonderfully, which was one my last issues
> with using kmail as my mailer rather than mutt. The embedded vi thing
> is now the only item on my personal wish-list.

I don't yet having a patch for using Komposer in KMail and KNode.
Probably sometime this month I'll finish the missing pieces of the
Komposer and write the patches to use it in both applications. I'll
send an email announcing when it will be done to let the few willing
test it out. I can't give you a time estimate because I have a lot of
other stuff that has to be finished in time for 3.2 and it's higher
priority right now.

Zack

by Anonymous (not verified)

I'm sitting here with a completely new system (Athlon XP 2500+ based) after upgrading from a pretty old one from 1998 and.. konq still seems to start up slow as hell, and KDE in general does too.

Right now the only thing I have running is noatun, and using my stopwatch, starting up konq takes about 20seconds..argh.. Is that indicative of a serious problem or is it really just that slow for everyone? Just tried to upgrade to QT-3.2.1 and have the same problem (except now text in Konsole is microscopic).

Is it going to be much better in KDE 3.2? I compiled kde 3.1.4 in about 4.5hours and was really pleased, but actually using it doesn't "seem" any faster than using my old shitteron 533. :)

by LMCBoy (not verified)

Something is definitely wrong with your setup. I have an Athlon 1700, and Konq starts in only a few seconds for me.

by Anonymous (not verified)

I think so too. I just tried booting test6-mm4, and was pretty stunned at how fast it started up and restored my session.. Buuut, I had forgotten to compile in my NIC driver, so I did that and rebooted....and am now here, and it's back to slow-as-hell as it was in 2.4.22. No idea why.. ugh

by Derek Kite (not verified)

3.2 is noticeably faster. Especially konqueror startup. Quite impressive.

Derek

My dusty old 400 MHz AMD K6-2 system with 128 megs of RAM starts Konqueror in 10 seconds. I remember KDE having very long start-up times in some versions of RedHat before I switched to Debian. Speed has been acceptable ever since.

There is definitely something wrong there; you must have done something very odd when compiling it, like passing it the wrong CFLAGS maybe? I'd either try and use your distributor's packages, if they exist, or just using the latest version of your distributor's packages, or perhaps getting hold of the Gentoo KDE ebuilds and looking at how they compile KDE to work out how you can do it better.

The only problem I have with KDE loading times now is loading KDE itself initially. From the framebuffer to loading X to loading KDE it takes about 10-15 seconds on my P4 2GHz which isn't too bad, but I'd like to cut it down. I've been experimenting with preloading parts of KDE in my local init script, but I've not had any luck so far :-/

20s? Try prepackaged RPMs (or whatever your distro uses), or maybe try a different distribution or Knoppix.

try con kolivas patches for the kernel (2.4.22). It made a huge difference to me.

by Sad Eagle (not verified)

Check whether your hostname resolves. Startup times that long usually mean network misconfiguration. My P150 laptop can start Konqueror in around 5 seconds with minimal tuning, BTW.

by Anonymous (not verified)

This looks very much like once when I deleted the loopback interface. It happens in Mandrake if you disable the service called "network".

by Anonymous (not verified)

How would one know if they've got this kind of problem / how to fix it?

by Anonymous (not verified)

Run ifconfig in console... (it's usually in /sbin or /usr/sbin). If it doesn't list "lo" then you have a problem.

by Anonymous (not verified)

Ah, thats what I thought. Unfortunately, thats not the problem either...sigh

run ltrace and strace on it. i had a problem similiar to yours and it ended up being fontconfig spending 15 seconds rewriting fc-cache.. i just ran fc-cache as root and it worked fine.

by Greg Brennan (not verified)

That totally worked for me in kubuntu 6.06:

sudo fc-cache

Now xterms come right up instead of clicking the xterm button twice and getting two xterms 5 seconds later. Remains to be seen whether this is a permanent, once-per-login or once-per-init fix.

-Greg

AAAAAARRRGHHH!
Thank you, fc-cache did the trick for me, too (KDE 3.5.4 self compiled).
Suddenly KDE took very long to startup and I had no idea why. Searching the web didnt help till I found this thread, maybe because "KDE slow startup" is not really a specific search token. Maybe reason and solution should be included in some faq?

by Rayiner Hashem (not verified)

You've definately got a problem there. My machine (2GHz P4 laptop) is much slower than yours, and Konqueror starts in about 2 seconds. Check /etc/hosts and make sure that there is an entry mapping your hostname to the loopback device. Thus, if you're hostname is 'foobar', then you should have an entry:

127.0.0.1 foobar

by Anonymous (not verified)

That was my first guess after posting, but isn't the problem.

by anonon (not verified)

I got an Athlon 2500+ system too the other month. To get it up and running quickly, I just went with the Gentoo binary packages for KDE-3.1.x

WROOOM!!

Konqueror cold-started in less than 1 sec. :)

Something really is off on your system. 20 sec sounds like some kind of network timeout.

by Anonymous (not verified)

More interesting especially since I'm also using Gentoo.. Although not with precompiled binaries, but built with the kde 3.1.4 ebuilds.

by Anonymous (not verified)

I had the same problem and managed to solve it.
I noticed that when I was dialed-up the slowness didn't happen, but when disconnected it did.

The difference was that I was running Firestarter firewall when online, but not when offline.

I found I also had running Shorewall firewall from installation and somewhere along the way I had enabled all filtering.

When I disabled Shorewall, KDE apps all started within appropriate times.
So effectively Firestarter was overriding Shorewall settings allowing things to work.
I need to investigate further, but perhaps the font server was being blocked by the firewall.

Cheers.

by Alvaro Segura (not verified)

I've been wondering for a long time why even the smallest KDE apps used to take seconds to start. I have just noticed that during startup of each program, KDE *accesses the network* for some reason (doing DNS lookups, direct or inverse I guess).

When I unplug my network cable, applications take around 20 seconds to start. When I plug it back in they take around 3 seconds (and I see blinking lights in my hub during that).

I have just solved that by adding some entries in /etc/hosts. Now it does not access the net, and apps start in less than a second.

For some reason my system once did an inverse DNS lookup and found that my local IP address (I use NAT) 192.168.1.1 had a corresonding name out there in my ISP's DNS server (say "somename.somedomain"). Now the console prompt and "uname -a" display that name instead of what I manually set in /etc/hosts and other places.

So I added to /etc/hosts:
192.168.1.1 somename.somedomain somename
And it goes nice now!

I have no idea why :-) [I'm a Mandrake 9.1 user an I know there's a known bug regarding this]