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  KDE Commit-Digest for 30th December 2007
Developer Posted by Danny Allen on Wednesday 02/Jan/2008, @21:34
from the still-taking-donations dept.
In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Furious last-minute application of polish across the board in preparation for the tagging of KDE 4.0 Final next week. Work towards threading GDB operations support in KDevelop. Support for media players employing the MPRIS standard in the Plasma "Now Playing" data engine, with the import of a Flickr Plasmoid. A style manager, support for Karbon gradients and lots of colourspace work in Krita. Various improvements in the Eigen2 math vector library. Continued progress in the KBugBuster rewrite. Revived support for .tar, .tar.gz, and .tar.bz2 files in Ark. More work on KCabinet, a library to support the MS Cabinet format. A printing framework in Okteta. System Settings moves from a custom view to Dolphin's KCategorizedView. Finishing touches in the Oxygen widget style and colour schemes. Work from the "newssl" branch is moved back into kdelibs. Various unfinished features hidden in Konsole for KDE 4.0. The Trolltech Phonon backends are moved from kdebase to kdereview for KDE 4.0. The unmaintained "regexpeditor" moves from kdeutils to playground/utils. Read the rest of the Digest here.


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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
Nice Progress
by Bobby on Wednesday 02/Jan/2008, @22:02
A very Happy New Year to you all in the KDE team and thanks very much for your tremendous accomplishment with this project.
I did a KDE4 Suse update last night (German time) and all I can say is that the critics will be getting more silent :) It's obvious that you guys haven't been sleeping much over the Christmas season. I am really happy with the progress.

Last but not least, thank you very much for keeping us up-to-date Danny.
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World Wide Commits
by reihal on Wednesday 02/Jan/2008, @23:04
I am very impressed by the increasing number of commits from the US of A.
(Still nothing from Ireland)
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networkmanager
by Thomas on Wednesday 02/Jan/2008, @23:58
I just compiled from SVN... looks good so far. I know, there has been some work on integrating networkmanager into solid... How do I use it? is there already a GUI frontend available? or do I need to install KDE3 libs and use knetworkmanager for the time being?
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Something I really liked
by Diederik van der Boor on Thursday 03/Jan/2008, @00:13
Thanks for a simple scanning application!
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RSS Broken
by Magnus Bergmark on Thursday 03/Jan/2008, @00:16
I don't know if you have noticed, but the RSS feed is somewhat broken.
Each item have a body of "undefined" instead of the real message text. It has been like this for a while.
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Good job, KDE guys and gals!
by Anon on Thursday 03/Jan/2008, @00:50
Although the 4.0 release will likely be rough, it seems there are some people around who are happy to concentrate on all the many, many good things we're seeing, even at this very early stage of the KDE4 cycle:

http://digg.com/linux_unix/10_Things_I_Love_about_KDE_4_RC2

Keep up the good work! And thanks to the people who worked so hard over the Christmas time to get everything banged into shape - a surprisingly high number of commits, considering the season.
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New name for Glimpse
by Darryl Wheatley on Thursday 03/Jan/2008, @01:24
Thanks Danny for another great Digest and KDE developers for your frenetic work at this turning point in KDE history.

Since the developer mentioned they wanted a "less generic" name for the scanning program than "Glimpse", I propose "KangaScan" since Kooka was an abbreviation of kookaburra, another Australian animal. Kanga is from kangaroo, an indigenous Australian word. Or what about "KoalaScan"? An oxygen icon for either name could look pretty exciting.

I was going to propose DrakScan as an alternative, so the person who proposed Drak for Dragon Player can still see their name make an appearance, :) but after googling it, I see that it's the name of a Mandriva program so it's unavailable :(

Are there other ideas? I guess some people will be wanting a non-English name to reduce the "Anglo-imperialism" in KDE's application names. Kangaroo is not English but an Aboriginal word originally meaning "I don't know" (this is what the Sydney Aborigines said when an Englishman asked them what the animal was called), but is now the name of the cute furry marsupials that are Australia's animal emblem. Still, it would be cool to hear other people's suggestions. Propose a name now, or forever hold your peace! :)
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Wallpapers?
by KDErocker on Thursday 03/Jan/2008, @03:14
The new wallpapers are still not commited. Any plans to commit them so we will have a new nice default? I think tagging ist tomorrow so we are running out of time.
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New Oxygen logout icon
by DanaKil on Thursday 03/Jan/2008, @05:27
Hmm, the previous logout icon was much better imho, the new one looks so XP :-/

http://commit-digest.org/issues/2007-12-30/moreinfo/752456/#visual

http://danakil.free.fr/linux/logout.png (XP and KDE)
Click to download attachment logout.png
5KB (5432 bytes)
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We don't need no stinkin' consistency
by ac on Thursday 03/Jan/2008, @06:46
I recently tried a KDE4Live. The good news is that the Live-CD sucks considerably less than it did earlier, the bad news is that for some unknown reason KDE seems incapable of bringing some consistency to the desktop even if it would have reduced the devs workload without any meaningful drawbacks.

Point in case: Sidebars.

-Konqueror got the old one. Tiny tabs and icons, the selected tab is expanded and shows icon+vertical text, so the tabs constantly jump up and down if you switch between them.

-Amarok got its modification of that one. All tabs have icon+vertical text. (Imho that's the best solution but that's not really my point)

-Ocular has an Opera-style bar. But unlike Opera's its icon bar with horizontal text isn't collapsible and (like Opera) you can't adjust its width. (It's a collossal waste of space, and a POS -- but that is also beside the point)

-Dolphin has normal tabs along the bottom and if you place more than 2 items in the sidebar (places, folders, meta-info) you most likely have to scroll through the tabs. You can tile them but that makes the directory tree hard to navigate, or put the meta-info on the right but then you get only a tiny sliver with the actual files and dirs in the middle.

-I'm not sure if there are still apps that use kpdf's old solution, or a simple drop-down menu but I wouldn't be surprised

Do we really need four different solutions? Wasn't the goal to become more usable? Four ways of doing one thing is stupid. It's not even as if they were all specialized for their specific use case.
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"regexpeditor"
by anonymous on Thursday 03/Jan/2008, @13:09
is one of the best KDE apps... sad :(
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Ocular
by tobami on Thursday 03/Jan/2008, @15:15
Two people misspelled Okular as Ocular already. And you know what?, it looks better.
How about another name change Okular->Ocular? For 4.1? :-D
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KDE 4.0 + Compiz fusion?
by Max on Thursday 03/Jan/2008, @16:08
Please make sure that KDE 4.0 integrates with, or works well with Compiz fusion.

Compiz has a long history, and many modules. I'd hate to have to give these up for KDE 4.0 :(

It has to be simple to install (or activated out of the box (depending on hardware)) otherwise it will turn many people away. Users have to be impressed with KDE right out of the box. (include things like: cube rotate, Expose, magic lamp, "cover flow", reflections, etc.)

KDE is already a minority. (distro's are dropping it. :( )
It has to be great to regain it's former glory. Don't skimp on eye-candy.

They way I see it: Eye candy is what makes a person first notice a mate and ask him/her out. Only then the person will discover the personality, intelligence, and stability to stick around and get to know the person (or KDE) more.

Compiz fusion was the reason I finally migrated to KDE + Linux and took 5 clients with me along the way. There just wasn't anything remotely as beautiful on OS-X, or 'gasp: Vista. Now we fell in love and don't want to leave.. :D
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Impressed, no matter what other say!
by Fred on Friday 04/Jan/2008, @02:05
Personally i'm deeply impressed by the state of KDE4 allready. It's simply amazing what a group of dedicated developers, translators, and other way involved people can do, mostly in there free time!

Yesterday, I installed Ubuntu 7.10 (the gnome edition) on some free space on my laptop. This, because this release is said to be the most polished Gnome experience at the moment. I fiddled around a bit, using f-spot, some multimedia apps, and evolution. I was confused allmost all of the time. KDE 3.5.8 is, for me, by far the better desktop. KDE4, in it's current shape is, to me, also better. Sure. there are some things left to be desired, but overall, the look and feel is imho so much better than current Gnome. And this is just the start! Remember, this is v1.0 of the KDE4 series!

When KDE 4.0.0 is released, it will receive critics, i'm sure. People tend to focus on what's wrong, not what's better. I really, really, really hope this will not discourage the people involved to leave in bitter disappointment. Just be prepared for it and keep informing people of the reasons why KDE 4.0.0 was released. I see it as a "developers release", It gives the dev's of third party apps a solid ground to work on to port their apps. I really hope that Gnome users, eager to try KDE4, will not back down when using KDE 4.0.0.

I would like to give all you guys a very big thumbs up for all you've done so far and all you will do in the future. There come's a moment I will get involved. I'm playing with Python/Qt4 now and I like it. Speaking of the future, I can't finish this without at least giving my personal top3 wishlist for 4.1:

1. PIM (kmail needs to support HTML sigs and nice background and that kind of stuff, just to make my boss and my wife happy :-). Make it "cool" again!
2. Konqi. maybe webkit isn't such a bad idea. Give us a choice of render kit (khtm, webkit, etc). I'm working with ampache 3.4-beta right now, and it won't play nice with konqi. I filed a bugreport, but the dev just plainly refused to fix it, because he states konqi is "seriously broken".
3. KNotes should get tomboy like functionality (without mono please :-)

Again. Thanks for all and keep it up!!!
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supporting KDE 4.0's devs
by Tom on Friday 04/Jan/2008, @05:00
Support is here... who should we carry? :)
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KWin4 on KDE3
by Stefan on Friday 04/Jan/2008, @06:20
My best computing experience is KDE 3.5 along with KWin 4 to enable compositing (I have tried Beryl earlier which refused to work even with the right X config). Does anyone have experiences regarding this combination? All I know is that locking the session does not work (unless I replace KWin 4 with KWin 3 before locking).
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Upps, less desktop settings.
by Jesus R. Acosta on Friday 04/Jan/2008, @11:02
Hi everybody,

I'm using kde4daily and I noticed that the desktop is unlikely settings. It seems impossible to maintain a similar appearance to the present and, for example, no way to add applets to the Deskbar or create another (like Mac)

Are there plans to improve this aspect?

Thanks a lot.
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Glimpse
by Odysseus on Friday 04/Jan/2008, @13:23
Hmm, interesting to read aboubt Glimpse and libksane, it was on my todo list for this year to look at something similar, I think Alex Merry had simlar thoughts too (I even wrote a very basic library implementation last year). So a couple of quick questions for the author (forgive me for not e-mailing, I´m on holidy in a net cafe).

1) OCR. Kooka has probably the best OCR interface in FOSS, any plans to include these in Glimpse, or is that too advanced for the Glimpse concept?

2) The use case I most want to see is the following. I can fit 3 or more photos on my scanner at once. XSane allows me to batch queue the scans, but the various parameter levels (brightness, contract, aut-levels, etc) are not recorded separately for each selected scan area, instead the same settings are applied to all queued jobs. It would be great to have Glimpse remember and apply the settings separately.

3) The other use case discussed in the past is a more basic Copier utility, a simple GUI mode that has 3 simple buttons for Save, Copy (i.e. Print), and Fax.

Do you envision libksane replacing libkscan in kdegraphics eventually? I´m glad to see it supports more of the SANE features than libkscan. I´ll have a look sometime soon and see if I have any other suggestions.

Cheers!

John.
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Oxygen again
by kollum on Friday 04/Jan/2008, @15:29
Hey, last week I said oxygen theme was geting nice, and one week later, I don't see any remaining glitch from the past. Good work.

Unfortunately, I can't find how to use oxygen in my to many unported yet KDE3 apps, they look uterly alien.
I just hope next update will bring as much improvements in KDE that it did in oxygen, only litle is missing for me to switch, hope you had time to achieve it ^^

KDE4.nearly0.0 looks so beatyfull and polished, I can't wait for the very anoying bugs to be squashed so I can reliabely use it
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