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  KDE 4 Set to Make Device Interaction Solid
Developer Posted by Solid Team on Wednesday 04/Jan/2006, @07:45
from the another-state-of-matter dept.
After a lot of hacking behind the scenes, a new initiative to improve KDE's interaction with network and hardware devices has been launched. Solid will provide a robust basis for the dynamic modern desktop in KDE, which needs to be aware of available hardware and networks, paving the way for innovative functionality. Users should see KDE applications taking advantage of Solid in KDE 4, from the most basic Plasma applets and complex applications to desktop-wide awareness. Developers will be able to take advantage of a robust, flexible and portable API and will be integrated into the Plasma engine. It will make use of existing technologies like HAL. Solid will also include a knowledge base providing a way for users to easily provide feedback on incorrect behaviour.

Nobody can be certain yet as to how Solid will be used by developers, but according to Kévin Ottens, Solid project lead, "Solid will be a giant leap for KDE. For example, the desktop will be able to deal wisely with your computer hibernating. You'd want network interfaces to go down and for network-enabled applications to gracefully handle the disconnection; USB devices should be synced to avoid data loss". In the long run we can even imagine turning on a bluetooth video screen and having every multimedia application provide you with the option of remote playback.

Not all of the ideas described so far will make it into KDE 4.0, but with more developers for the APIs, the Plasma engine and the knowledge base web site, much more can be achieved. Application developers are also encouraged to experiment with Solid, which will help it mature faster. If you would like to get involved in this exciting area of the free desktop visit the Solid web site and get in touch with the team.



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Good Title
by Troy Unrau on Wednesday 04/Jan/2006, @09:53
Heh, first thing I noticed was the title play between Plasma and Solid. Neat. Only problem is that we can't use Liquid as a title for anything... silly apple.
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Portability?
by Brandybuck on Wednesday 04/Jan/2006, @10:24
Notice the reverse definition they're using for portability: "Each platform providing the necessary Solid backends will be supported." In other words, Solid does not support platforms, instead platforms must support Solid. This is insane. Solid needs to examine how other crossplatform software has been written. Imagine how non-crossplatform Qt would be if Trolltech had this philosophy and left it up to Microsoft and Apple to do their own native ports.

I fully realize how difficult it is to make a crossplatform hardware/device layer. But when "Solid is specifying the features the underlying system must provide", it's doing nothing more than passing the buck.

I'm hoping they just have their definition wrong.
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yet another layer ?
by polux on Wednesday 04/Jan/2006, @10:54
Hi,
i'm a big kde fan but i'm wondering why there is the need for such a low-level library integrated in a high-level component : the desktop. I have the feeling that solid will be another layer on the top of hal and dbus and that the knowledge base will profit kde users only. I imagine this is not the purpose of the developers but the article sounds a bit like that.

Could you explain the need of implementing such a lib into kde if i'm wrong ? I'm not sure i've understood the whole thing.
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fantastic
by Ian Monroe on Wednesday 04/Jan/2006, @11:06
The plan for Solid appears to be addressing all the weaknesses of media:/. KDE4 is going to freakin' rock.
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Distributions Extinction
by Youcha on Wednesday 04/Jan/2006, @12:21
I dream of a day when all distributions will disappear. Thanks to Solid, we won't even a hardware control center, everything will work perfectly with zero configuration. For example, as I plugged in my Speedtouch USB Modem, KDE tried to copy my configuration from Windows, username, password and provider, but I won't have Windows, so from my local settings, KDE will pick my country by default and ask me to fill in two fields, username and password, also in a list, there is the list of all countries, but because KDE knows where this modem is generally used, it put those countries before any ( Yeah, If I press Ctrl and click on any region of the windows I can have access to very detailled settings ) finally because KDE knows I am not paranoiac and that I use BSD, It will select the right firewall security level.
Thanks to Gas, KDE can guess my artistic preferences from my English style in KMail, the way I type, the applications I use and how often I use my desktop, Gas will select a theme that I would have never tought of !
Solidification is a distro-generator, it will open one text field where I will write "Complete LAMP Server KMines slick theme", Solidification will ask me to confirm the new packages list and configuration and will ask me to add personal files. After 10 minutes, Solidification will have downloaded the packages from a web server and build and installable live-cd ! I will also try for fun "office internet multimedia hobby programming on 512Mb usb key", "My desktop", "Enlightenment desktop", "Media center with all ogg of <my preferred artist>", wonderful !
Thanks to Fluid, my KDE Linux will run as fast as turning on the TV.
Fire is my virtual tutor, it makes me creative and efficient: it helps me to logout when I am tired, to take my medicins, to avoid Slashdot, to organize my self, to uninstall Fortune and to advise me.
Ice will be a programs repository it helps me choose and install the right program for my works.
Happy will be me. KDE is fantastic !
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Editing; SuSEplugger
by Paul Leopardi on Wednesday 04/Jan/2006, @12:33
Solid seems to me to be promising. But the first thing I noticed about the web site is that the text is not as clear or as grammatical as it could be. Perhaps it was written by a speaker of English as a second language. Maybe it would be a good idea for a native speaker of English to volunteer to edit the text.

Could somebody who knows about both SuSEplugger and Solid explain to me the difference in functionality between the two? Also, what is the licensing for SuSEplugger? Could SuSEplugger code be used to speed the development of Solid?
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the knowledge base
by Patcito on Wednesday 04/Jan/2006, @14:47
I understand that the Solid libs needs to be KDE libs and that's great.
But how about sharing the knowledge base with other projects, I think the best way to do this would be to host it on freedesktop or make it available to other projects that use a different backend than Solid. That way more people will be able to send feedback, the knowledge base will grow bigger and so faster. I guess that this will be possible as Solid will be opensource every other projects will be able to implement the Knowledge base API part. But maybe it would be better to organize something about it now with gnome and other freedesktop projects.
What do you think?
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Qt bindings
by ac on Wednesday 04/Jan/2006, @15:43
Is it possible for things like the Qt-DBUS bindings, poppler-qt etc to be moved into kdesupport or equivalent? I really hate having to download svn code from another server just to try out things that are necessary, not optional ;)

Any other suggestions welcome, I'm currently using kdesvn-build to do all the hard work.
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KMail
by Bruno on Wednesday 04/Jan/2006, @17:51
Does this mean kde4's kmail will not try to download my e-mail anymore when I unplug the cable (And WILL download it again when I plug it in)? Same for akregator, ... ?
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I love you guys
by Janne on Wednesday 04/Jan/2006, @23:31
That is all :)
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Suse plugger
by Gerd on Thursday 05/Jan/2006, @02:05
Hope Suse also will contribute code.

I would like to see a real YaSt integration into KDE, so other distributions can benefit from the great progress Suse provided us.
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Sounds Cards
by David Saxton on Thursday 05/Jan/2006, @06:50
This would be perfect for exposing all of the sound cards installed in a computer!

Like (I'm sure) lots of other KDE users, I have more than one sound card installed. So everytime I install a new multimedia application, I have to spend loads of time configuring apps to use the right sound card (which also involves working out the device name of the second soundcard).

With Solid, one could just select the sound card from a nice pulldown list. And there's already code in kmix in kdemultimedia for detecting sound cards on a variety of different systems - which could be moved to Solid.
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Exactly What's Needed
by Segedunum on Thursday 05/Jan/2006, @07:13
I've got to hand it to you all. This is exactly what's needed, and you're 'making it happen'.
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I love Jackit, arts, and other sound daemons.
by paperclip on Wednesday 11/Jan/2006, @12:08
I would like to see NON-KDE apps be able to automatically be redirected "hijack the audio stream) to artsd or jackd without having to use a artsdsp program: Arts and Jackit are great programs, but are often overlooked because people do not like the concept of abstraction. The great thing about them is the redirection of audio input/output which I use for recording all the time. Infact, when both daemons are working well it seems to be more effective than ASIO streams in windows.

Artsd also needs to have some sort of automatic buffer/latency optimization built in, because most of the problem with Arts has to do with system load vs. buffer size.

-Ron
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Device driver API?
by Diederik van der Boor on Thursday 12/Jan/2006, @04:51
I was wondering about device API's.. Right now, the Kopete webcam functions use the Video4Linux API of the kernel directly. Will Solid also provide abstraction to handle such devices with a nice KDE-style API?
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fewe
by fef on Wednesday 03/Jan/2007, @02:05
fewfwe
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cat&lr=
Click to download attachment index.html
1KB (1221 bytes)
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