In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Trolltech-sponsored development continues on Phonon backends. Support for saving to remote URL's in Gwenview. A "Now Playing" data engine and applet, and the train clock returns in Plasma. "Switch Tabs on Hover" can now be disabled, and other refinements in Kickoff for KDE 4.0. Work on a debugger (with a SpeedCrunch-inspired interface) for KHTML. Work to support the most recent release of the Flash (version 9) multimedia plugin in Konqueror. SOCKS support in KTorrent. Device handling fixes in KPilot. More work on music services in Amarok 2.0. Further work on the KChart Flake shape in KOffice. More panorama work, amongst other developments in KOffice. Support for the Bonjour protocol in Kopete. Initial import and development of a MS Cabinet format archive reader. The temporarily-named Video Player, formerly-known-as-Codeine, has been finally renamed to Dragon Player. Read the rest of the Digest here.
Comments
What about creating kio-slaves out of this? I think that would be the best solution.
This is a kind of inconsistent. There was a call to developers to rename apps so that their names reflect their functionality. And now we have a Video Player named Dragon? I don't understand it. And I don't really like it at all.
Where's that call you're referring to?
And as it is with names, one tends to judge their quality from one's own experiences (or 'framing'), so if you like Dragon Player, you might appreciate its name at some point as well. Self-fulfilling prophecies, that's what we do. :-)
What is _much_ more important than the name (that got so many reactions in the first place) is that we'll shortly have a KDE4 port of my favorite videoplayer, and a showcase for Phonon. Thanks eean, you rock!
Kickoff mitigates possible confusions by showing the generic category by default and the specific name only on mouseover.
My favourite video player (Kaffeine) won't make it for KDE 4.0 unfortunately. Kplayer isn't bad but I miss Kaffeine's GUI. I will take a look at Dragon Player, maybe it can serve as a temporary replacement until Kaffeine is ready.
You could try SMplayer. It's Qt (newest version is qt4) gui for Mplayer. Only thing lacking is dvd-menus, but that's more of mplayer's fault. :(
Thanks, I just installed and tried it. It looks very nice and a lot better than kmplayer or kplayer but lack the dvd-menus that kaffeine has like you said.
Why not just use KDE 3 Kaffine in KDE4? It's compatible.
lol
dragon player is a pretty retarded name. Just the name alone will make people think it is a gimmick and not a reliable player. changing names like this will not impress the windows market for kde 4
Well everyone's an armchair expert. :)
Seriously, such comments are pretty pointless. When the Firefox name was suggested for a then-unknown internet browser, it was scorned and ridiculed to no end by many. The rest, as they say, is history.
Not to mention the Wii. :)
I think Sebas is right, if the Wii was stupid we would probably still be making fun of the name.
I love dragons, and calling it dragon PLAYER does make it obvious what the app does. Some app names give me absolutely no clue what the app does.
>> I love dragons
Me too. (I was born in the year of the dragon, but that's not the only reason).
Now I can't wait to see a sweet Oxygen icon for this app. *drool*
> calling it dragon PLAYER does make it obvious what the app does
Not really. It just say, it play something, but not WHAT. It could be audio or video, but also flash, a virtual maschine (remember vmware player), or just some exotic binary-format like a game boy-rom. At least, it could also be some completly different, like a tamagotchi-like dragon-game ;)
It could also be something for young lads with oriental tattoos, who like to play the field :)
yes, it plays dragons.
Do you really want to know why people make such a big deal out of names? Because free software operating systems, as a platform, suck and people are always pointing at the wrong reasons for their failure, when in reality far more important issues are left unsolved.
Such as?
..and filter them? Like this.. StupidFilter thingie?
does the branch of kde 4.0.x will support only bug fixes, or does it accept some minor features ala kde 3.5.x
friendly
you might as well use vista and dump KDE, give it a try and you'd be surprised how much KDE is trying to become like Vista
Poor trolling. Not even remotely informed or effective.
I just can speculate here, but I think the 4.0.x series will only include bugfixes. The main reason why 3.5.x included new small features was because 3.6 was never planned and will never arrive, but the gap until KDE 4.0 needed to be filled. But as there are already plans how to make 4.1 rule the world i don't think such micro feature releases are necessary ;-)
High exceptions for 4.1 should be killed now, Ruling the world will not happen in a release like 4.1, 4.2 or any other, ruling the world needs some more time.
I don't really know where I should ask this question, so I'll just post it here, hoping that someone knows the answer. My current videocard is a bit outdated (GeForce 2), and because kwin compositing looks so extremely amazing, I'm thinking about purchasing a new one. I don't want to spend a lot of money on a new videocard however. My primary concern is that the new card runs kwin compositing very smooth. Is anybody reading this using kwin compositing with a low end videocard? If so, which one, and does it run smooth? I really appreciate any help picking out a new card...
Oh, and I recently (two days ago) built kde from svn, and I have to say I'm really impressed! I even started using kde4 as my main desktop! The only thing I still miss is a kde4 akregator. Does anybody know if people are working on this? Of course I could run kde3 akregator, but compared to all the oxygen beaty it really looks ugly and out of place.
KDE people: you rock!
Oh, and danny: thanks for another commit digest! I'm always looking forward to the newest digest!
I am using an nVidia GeForce 6600 LE with 256 MB RAM and it's handling the effects very well. Though I have to confess that the Kwin 4 effects aren't yet as smooth (and as much) as those of Compiz Fusion but the integration is very good. That's one of the reasons why I will use it instead of Compiz in the very near future.
Another thing: Kwin 4 doesn't like XGL (at least on my machine), it keeps crashing if you enable XGL so you have to use xorg and enable the composite extension in the xorg.conf file. Then you will be cool ;)
Is this with or without the recently added (after RC2) libkwinnvidiahack? I noticed a considerable difference (without is was completely unusable, with it it gets close to compiz, which is still a bit slow for me on my current card).
And I don't really care about all the over the top bling compiz has... I'd much rather have a well integrated, mature window manager which is subtle in it's use of compositing: a little bit of transparancy polish in the interface, and some usefull features like expose are all I want. And kwin compositing seems to deliver just that.
It's RC2 that I am using. It has improved a lot over RC1 but is still not very "smooth". It's quite stable though.
I agree with you concerning compiz, it's really nice but some of the blings are overkill. Like you I would rather a mature window manager like Kwin 4 with well integrated features. Kwin in on the right track and it's future looks very bright on the KDE Desktop.
It's more like nVidia drivers not liking XGL, and since it's able to do compositing directly in the driver XGL it's not needed. Besides XGL was newer a good idea anyway:-)
Like I said, XGL works just fine with Compiz using the nVidia driver but not with Kwin 4, which leads me to the logical conclusion that there is a problem between XGl and KWin 4.
That's kind of correct, but it's because of your nVidia driver. I think KWin autodetects and uses the nVidia driver directly for the composition effects, I guess this creates problems when you also have XGL running. Two xservers trying to access the same hardware etc, not surprising it becomes unstable. My guess is that Compiz in your setup uses XGL rather than the nVidia driver directly, avoiding that particular problem.
I'm running geforce 6200 / 128 mbyte ram and effects are really slow, some of them really unusable. Compiz runs at only acceptable speed (due to high resolution of 1680x1050)
Are you using RC2 or a more recent svn build?
Compiz, and KDE 4 effects work nicely (no noticable lag) on my NVIDIA 6150 LE, with 1280x1024 resolution
Hy.
I don't know exactly what my graphic card is, but it was a not so expansive one 4 years ago for my laptop, an ATI mobility radeaon M7 ( 7500 I think ? ).
It runs Kwin4 effects ok, even if some plug-ins don't work as expected. May be bugs on the kwin front ? don't know, but I read that bluring was not supposed to work on old cards, so I'm not that surprised.
kwin runs quite happily on my integrated intel, now that I have xorg configured properly and I'm not running kde3 in another X. :)
Yeah, the integrated intel units are the best... unfortunately they aren't sold as seperate expansion cards. That would be great: nothing beats open source drivers.
Naa, i used to see things like you, but i ran into the problem that the very nice program MANSLIDE doesn't work on intel graphic chipsets. It's all fine with nvidia and ati but the intel driver just doesn't provide some essential functions needed by the 3D image conversions that MANSLIDE uses. Some say that especially on newer intel hardware the i810 driver is pretty outdated.
So in order to let it run on my notebook it's inside a virtual machine (virtualbox), wich works fine but is a little slow.
The "i180" driver is outdated, the "intel" driver which up-to-date distributions like Fedora are shipping isn't. :-)
Mkay, i did'nt check what ubuntu gutsy uses as default driver for intel graphic chipsets and said it'd be "i810" ... Anyways, if it's "intel" now, the result is still like i described it :-(
Are we going to get a few more updates before the final release? I notice that there haven't been any updates for about a week now, don't know if it was because of Christmas and the weekend or it's a halt.
Whoa - what "Daily Updates" would these be?
I used to get an update of the KDE4 packages almost every day until a week ago. Since then nothing more, don't know what happend. I am using openSuse 10.3 btw.
Oh - I thought you were talking about Daily Commit Digests :(
Sorry I should have expressed myself more clearly from the beginning by referring to the KDE 4 packages seeing that the article is actually the Commit Digest.
It's called Christmas holidays.
A week before release tagging?
please don't tell me you would seriously expect people with lives and families to skip christmas just to fix a few more bugs in KDE.
I would if I could because I had a lot of time this Christmas.
Hey, I fixed a Kompare build failure in the KDE SVN trunk on Dec 23, file conflicts in 2 Fedora rawhide KDE RPM packages on Dec 24 and another RPM file conflict on Dec 25. ;-)