KDE Commit-Digest for 14th September 2008

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: "Shortcut Scheme" support allows creation of shortcut themes (Emacs, etc.) for use in KDE applications. A "Media Player" runner (with support for Amarok 2), more work on panel hiding, and support for text zoom in the "Web Browser" Plasmoid in Plasma. The "Weather Station" applet moves to kdereview. More refinements in PowerDevil, in preparation for a move to kdebase. Lots more functionality in Attica, the Open Collaboration Services desktop client. Start of session support in KDevPlatform (the basis of KDevelop 4). A "McCabe cyclomatic complexity metric engine" in KDevelop 4. Support for image rating (using KRatingWidget) in the interface of KPhotoAlbum. Progress towards real levels in the KPicross game. More work towards Jabber-based network games in KSirK. A "black screen" presentation feature in Okular. Various work in Akonadi and KDE-PIM. Start of the NetworkManager KControl module (for use in System Settings, etc). Incremental scanner support returns to Amarok 2. New plugin to specify the download order of multi-file torrents in KTorrent. Passwords saved per LDAP login (not host) in KRDC, greatly improving the experience for LDAP administrators. An OpenGL demo to demonstrate various parts of Eigen 2. Some work to make KDE application dialogs fit into 1024x600 pixels. Merge of improvements to KFontInstaller. Import of QuickSand, an alternative front-end for KRunner. A proof-of-concept "decibel-kde" library for representing contacts "based on the representation used by Kopete". WLM protocol imported into Kopete. Asciiquarium screensaver moves from kdereview to kdeartwork. Kugar and koshell are removed from KOffice 2. Read the rest of the Digest here.

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Comments

by Debian User (not verified)

Hello,

just curious, how would you then feel if one of the most successful KDE technologies was named "prostitute"? Is it OK to attach positive, harmless means to words describing harmful relationships?

I didn't say I was particularily outraged against the use of the word Slave, although I wasn't aware so far that it comes from Slavic. I just tried to give emphasis that Slavery is not a thing of the past, but of the current times.

As KDE comes from developers in countries unaware of how widespread Slavery is these days, I felt that it's too easily dismissed as an issue. Note how I didn't demand that anybody change his position, I only proposed to consider the available information from Wikipedia.

And China, well. I have this tradition in my family of fighting for Freedom in society. When I was at Linuxtag and learned how proud people can be of a non-free society preferring Linux over Windows, because it allows them to better maintain their non-freedom, I was ashamed.

Allow me that without calling me nuts.

Yours,
Kay

by fabiank22 (not verified)

Well, now YOU are the one who should reconsider his position: Prostitution is a legal business in most countries nowadays, and is in no means "describing harmful relationships". Sure there are people that are being - illegally I might add - forced to work as prostitutes. But the same holds true for nearly any other business. Are saying we should rename "KitchenSync" because people are forced to work in kitchens somewhere in the world?

by Debian User (not verified)

Just consider from wp:Prostitution the following excerpt:

"Female prostitutes are at risk of violent crime,[14] as well as possibly at higher risk of occupational mortality than any other group of women ever studied. For example, the homicide rate for female prostitutes was estimated to be 204 per 100,000 (Potterat et al, 2004), which is considerably higher than that for the next riskiest occupations in the United States during a similar period (4 per 100,000 for female liquor store workers and 29 per 100,000 for male taxicab drivers) (Castillo et al., 1994)"

I think it's legal (where it is legal), because it has been found to be even worse for the women where it is illegal. Where it's illegal, they become exploited (instead of protected) by the police too.

But I didn't consider that it's not a consensus that prostitution is bad, so well I agree it was a bad example.

And the kitchen, no. I am not saying that. But you probably knew that, didn't you?

Yours,
Kay

by Anon (not verified)

I'm sorry but that is just crap.

In my country, New Zealand, prostitution is legal, why because we believe in people having the protection and rights of the law. It was made legal to give prostitutes all the rights that everyone else has in their jobs.

by Xanadu (not verified)

Well, I was going steer VERY clear of this whole relegion thread until I read this:

> When I was at Linuxtag and learned how proud people can be of
> a non-free society preferring Linux over Windows, because it
> allows them to better maintain their non-freedom, I was ashamed.

Why? Why were you ashamed? That whole thought I quoted from you makes no sense to me. You feel ashamed that people are proud that they have A CHOICE in a "non-free society". A choice that they used to not have? The choice to "join" a non-demeaning, free-thinking, global community such as the FOSS (generally) is?

I have no idea what you're trying to say. Perhaps I'm just being dense today.

M.

by Debian User (not verified)

Not the people, the government.

That's a huge difference in a non-free society, actually the definition of non-free is that the people don't matter.

Think Chinese Firewall, Search Result filtering, more "secure" end user systems with harder to defeat measures forced by government.

I was ashamed simply because of that going on, and while Cisco and Yahoo or even Google probably don't care, Maddog might at least not haved cited China as a prime example of governmental adoption.

But then, how sure is e.g. RMS that the Free Software laptop from China he now recommends doesn't contain parts made with forced (child) labor. I am not saying he isn't 100% sure. I just wonder why these things don't matter as much.

Yours,
Kay

by Anon (not verified)

you keep bringing up china, are you racist by chance? Yes China limits what people see, but heck, they aren't the only, America blocks sites as well, and they also monitor everything people do electronically, be it on the net, on the phone, text messages, faxes, etc. And then you go on about child slave labour, and yet you ignore slave labour in the US, or child prostitution in the US. If you are american, clean your own country up before you go on about others.

by Anon (not verified)

I honestly wouldn't give a stuff if a computer technology was named prostitute. My friend was a child prostitute, commonly named a chicken boy, should we ban chickens too? There is a huge difference between the name KIOSlave and Slaves. and it is only when people like you proclaim a link to slavery that you establish such a link that does not exist. And it is when you do that, campaigning on insane PC logistics that you do real harm to people who are doing the real work to end such things, instead of silly little comments against technology that in no way is connected to slavery./

You bring china into a discussion on freedom, if you are american I suggest before you look at other countries you look at your own. Because from my country, I few America as the greatest threat to freedom and peace.

by Vide (not verified)

I'm sorry but this is NOT seriuos. Blaming using words when out-of-context is just being politically correct for the sake of being it. I mean, changing the KIOSlave name will NOT help in fighting slavery, it's just a non sense. It's not spreading the concept that human slavery is a good thing... they are simply not related in any way.

by T. J. Brumfield (not verified)

I believe the NAACP also filed complaints about IDE using a Master/Slave relationship as well.

by JRT (not verified)

The religious right in the USA has complained about the fact that *NIX has Daemons and uses the number 666 to denote file permissions (ignoring the fact that it isn't really Six Hundred Sixty Six because it is Octal).

And so it goes. :-D

by mimoune djouallah (not verified)

Strange I am muslim, but I never felt offended by the name powerDevil, please for the GOD sake, kde is one of the rare communities where the religion, culture, race don't count, so please don't start this game here,

by T. J. Brumfield (not verified)
by Bobby (not verified)

I also believe in God but the Devil serves a very good purpose, otherwise God wouldn't have made him so I am cool with the name
;)

by I'm in love wit... (not verified)

I for one think PowerDevil deserves a name change.

why not PowerSATAN?

i would actually start using the laptop without the iv if i had an animated plasma widget bs with lighting bolts shooting from PowerSATAN's asshole to indicate you're on battery power. that would be great.

by Anon (not verified)

why are you offended? You do realise others will be offended that you want to bring your religion into something that has no rleigious context. Personally I like the name of the application, but hey, I also like Hell's Pizza as well, google it, they make nice pizza, and hey, they just recently brought a man's soul too. LOL

Life is too short to give a damn about what offends people. Oh wow, people were offended by the word slave. Damn,how about a name change to Power Slave Devil?

by Beat Wolf (not verified)

reminds me of a iron maiden album :-) power slave. great album

by Stefan (not verified)

Well. let's call it... the GIMP!

Ok ok sorry. That'd be just too obscene.

by Harry (not verified)

May I propose the next year's award to be handed out to David Nolden? ;-)

For a long, long time he's doing amazing work on the KDE development platform and as a developer I deeply regards his work...

Harry

by Sebastian (not verified)

Hi there. Prior to the 4.1 release it was mentioned somewhere that Plasma will support MAc OS Dashboard widgets. I could not help me finding a way to install/add them to my Plasma desktop. Though it is off-topic, I hope this is the place to find the right audience: Did this feature make it into 4.1 and how can I use it?
Thanks!

by Michael "OSX" Howell (not verified)

It can be done from Add Widgets->Install New Widgets->Install From File in KDE4.1.

by Danny Allen (not verified)

p.s. If you don't want the Guinness but just want to enter the naming contest for "SemNotes", write your entries in this thread ;)

Danny

by Darryl Wheatley (not verified)

How about "Cloud Nine"? (It would have been Kloud Nine in the KDE3 series :P)

by Fri13 (not verified)

"Kugar and koshell are removed from KOffice 2"

What does that mean? Kugar and koshell panels are removed?

by Danny Allen (not verified)

They were applications from KOffice 1.x:
Kugar was a reports generator, and koshell was a kontact-like shell for KOffice applications.

They are not planned to be part of the KOffice 2 release (and they are not maintained), and so they have been removed from KOffice trunk/.

Danny

by Adam Pigg (not verified)

And when kexi gets released it will have kick-ass reporting which should replace most uses for kugar ;)

by anders (not verified)

how can something in kexi replace kugar? kugar was a general purpose report generator, will the report tool from kexi be usable for data from external soures? such as kaddressbook for example, or a csv file?

by asdf (not verified)

hi everyone,

2 short questions:

1. What about a compatibilty layer in phonon for pulseaudio? think of network based audio streaming (interop?). I know, lots of people asked about it, but there was never a sufficient answer (at least, i didn't find it satisfying..) :)
2. is the project with the timeline plasmoid still alive?
are there anywhere more information? read about it months ago, i liked it and it was said that it should be ready for kde 4.2?!

damn, i had a further question, but i forgot it :/

by Jonathan Thomas (not verified)

You can select PulseAudio as a phonon output device. Well, you might have to enable the showing of advanced devices in the configuration module.
Dunno how well that would work out, though...

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

If you use the Phonon xine-lib backend with these 2 (hackish) patches:
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/phonon/devel/phonon-4.2.0-pulse...
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/kdebase-runtime/devel/kdebase-r...
it just works.

I'm currently discussing with some key developers how to best fix Phonon-GStreamer and Phonon in general to make it just work for everyone.

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

> 2. is the project with the timeline plasmoid still alive?

yes, it's still in my backpocket. unfortunately i've been detained with more infrastructure work both in plasma and in kdelibs; i figured by now i'd be free to write plasmoids, but apparently my purgatory is not yet over ;)

by T (not verified)

We sympathize with your desire to be out of purgatory, all while appreciating the remarkable things that are possible with improvements in the plumbing!

by txf (not verified)

Every so often I hear about this and every time I mean to ask about it, but then forget. So ...

What is the timeline plasmoid ? What does it do?

by gttt (not verified)

The links of the 2 first powerdevil screenshots do lead to the commit-digest article again, instead to screenshots? It's not so important, I just wanted to mention it. (using konqueror 3.5.9 here)

by Danny Allen (not verified)

Fixed.

Danny

by asdf (not verified)

ah the questions was about a backup tool. are there any prjects going on on this topic? something like that: http://lifehacker.com/software/featured-linux-download/timevault-time-ma...
https://launchpad.net/timevault
something like this with a well integrated (qt-)gui? or this: http://www.howtoforge.com/creating-snapshot-backups-with-flyback-ubuntu-...
http://code.google.com/p/flyback/
best regards

by richlv (not verified)

is something wrong with powerdevil screenshots ? i can't open them in oepra here (some data loads, but i land on the same digest page).

by Danny Allen (not verified)

Fixed.

Danny

by ac (not verified)

I thought that all of KDE was supposed to work decently with only 800x600 resolution, is that no longer the case?

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

there's a difference between "supposed to" and "what the reality is" ;) these changes are some steps to bring reality a bit closer to what it is supposed to be. nice that people are actually caring enough to put in the work ... something that wasn't always happening (obviously =)

by Thorsten Schnebeck (not verified)

While 600 is nice it does not realy help all of the 800x480 users.
Is it possible to scale a window on demand as a feature of the windowmanager? Another solution can be auto scrollbars it a window is bigger than the screen, again as a feature of the windowmager.
Possible or is this limited by X11?

Bye

Thorsten

BTW
Does anybody know a very small window decoration for kde4?

by Git (not verified)

Why scrolling the window when you can just move the whole window to see hidden parts? Remember that you can drag a window just clicking and pushing ALT (or whatever key shortcut you configure).

by Thorsten Schnebeck (not verified)

I talk about small devices like the well known netbook device class. So you have to use Alt+LMB+Touchpad (EEE touchpad keys are quite hard ;-). I see many dialogs where you have config on top of dialog and "Apply" on bottom. In this case its not very handy to handle "Alt" without a separate mouse.
But having a shortcut that fits a window into the screen could be quite usefull as buttons are big enough to use these also in a scaled view.

Bye

Thorsten

by Thomas Zander (not verified)

just use the keyboard shortcuts then; alt-f3, hit 'm' and use arrow keys.

by mimoune djouallah (not verified)

your work on folderview applet is highly appreciated, now plasma desktop is even better then kde3.5 one,now if some genieus dev add the ability to assign containement to virtual desktop, it will be the best desktop ever on all platform.

thanks really all plasma dev for your work, and aseigo i'am wondering how have supported all those stupid rant about plasma, you simply rock

a happy user of kde trunk

by Anon (not verified)

I'm surprised that no one is talking about SemNotes, which looks really intriguing. Maybe people didn't read the actual article inside the Digest ... ?

Danny - might it be worth, just before the "Read the rest of the Digest here" line, having a line advertising "Featured Articles: Dario describes his work on new power-management system PowerDevil and Laura Dagan describes her work on Nepomuk-enabled note-taking application SemNote" or somesuch? The featured articles, to me at least, are at least as important as the main "digest summary" paragraph and could probably stand to be brought into the limelight a little more, rather than being hidden being a link that needs to be clicked :)

by T (not verified)

I agree, SemNotes looks really promising. Overall, this was another one of those "oh my, what an incredible week" digests. I had to go make a cup of tea to calm down before getting back to real work after reading it.