KC KDE Issue #21

Saturday, 1 September 2001  |  Aseigo

This week's issue of KC KDE is devoted to the exciting events surrounding the start of KDE3 development and the Qt3 porting efforts. Topics include new applications such as Cookbook, KTouch and Kompare; large file support; S/MIME, EMail templates and KNode/KMail integration; advanced web shortcuts; KMenu plugins; new KDE email lists and websites; KRegExpEditor; KWinTV and more...

Comments:

Bug fix - Wouter van Kleunen - 2001-09-01

Shouldn't they remove some bugs first ? Some bugs are realling getting annoying

Re: Bug fix - Daniel Molkentin - 2001-09-01

This is done in KDE_2_2_BRANCH which will become 2.2.1. Hunting annoyances in HEAD is mostly pointless as some code will be entitrely replaced in some places. A dedicated bug hunt should start in pre-beta and beta states here. Greetings, </daniel>

they vs us? - ac - 2001-09-01

On the other hand, if you the user just sit there complaining about "some bugs" and then don't actually take the time to make high-quality bug reports, you really can't expect those "some bugs" to be fixed. Eh.

Re: they vs us? - Wouter van Kleunen - 2001-09-02

Yes, well. As a matter of fact there is a really good bug report, about the bug i was referring to. And the bug was also available in kde 2.0.

Re: they vs us? - Aaron J. Seigo - 2001-09-03

which one? i couldn't find a bug w/your email in it and am curious as to what the bug is.

Re: they vs us? - Wouter van Kleunen - 2001-09-03

some would call it a bug, some would call it a feature: samba in konqueror (the use of smbclient).

Re: they vs us? - Aaron J. Seigo - 2001-09-03

ah, you do know about libsmbclient and the read/write ioslave right? caldera people working on samba are the ones writing that library and also the ioslave. however, they couldn't get it ready in time for KDE2.2. when libsmbclient is finished (which is part of the samba project, not KDE) then konqi can the kind of samba support one would hope for in a GUI filemanager.

Re: they vs us? - Wouter van Kleunen - 2001-09-03

i know. i looked at libsmbclient. Didn't knew it wasn't finished yet. It's just very annoying to try to browse a samba share. They should have left it out, so you can't browse it... and I still don't understand why khtml is used instead of gecko. Well nevermind... We've heard that one before

The cooperation of Kmail & Knode is great news - ac - 2001-09-01

This again shows not only the benefits of the open source development model, but also the great willingness of the KDE developers to cooperate and merge, even when, from an outdated, different perspective one could have said that one side "loses". They are not only great programmers, but also great characters. I only hope the refacturing/rewrite will be fast, and without big troubles, and afterwards the same amount of work will benefit at least both programs - this is great! One little question: I am often amazed by the font & font size choices kmail makes. Sometimes the font is unreadale small, once it was I think 25pt, and sometimes the font is simply ugly. And text bodies from the far east ( guessed from the sender adress ) sometimes dont show up at all. What is the decision making process behind this?

Re: The cooperation of Kmail & Knode is great news - Daniel Naber - 2001-09-01

Sounds like you are receiving HTML mails? You should disbale it and KMail will always use the same font, at least for the Latin1 encoding (don't know about the others).

Re: The cooperation of Kmail & Knode is great news - ik - 2001-09-01

no, same problem here. seems kmail chooses change fonts for change charsets (i have several unreadable mails from japanese people on debian-ipv6, because of the fonts. the mails are text only) another example is: send an appointment from outlook to kmail in ics format (you can do it from the sheduler->send in ics or so). the mail will be fine, but barely readable altough its plaintext. (btw you _can_ share appointments with outlook and kmail/korganizer _now_ in contrary to some people say : save the mail and use this command to add the appointment to your korganizer database: dcop korganizer KOrganizerIface mergeURL <filename>.) it might be needed to strip some headers, but i think a perlscript + filter rule in kmail would make it totally automatic ...

Re: The cooperation of Kmail & Knode is great news - Daniel Naber - 2001-09-01

Do you also sometimes have similar problems with web pages? Then you need to install proper fonts, e.g. a good unicode font. I suggest you search the mailing list archive at http://lists.kde.org, the detailled solution should be listed there (it's a khtml issue).

Re: The cooperation of Kmail & Knode is great news - ik - 2001-09-01

well, i already fixed it a long time ago for khtml (enforce default charset, i couldn't find any fonts that worked), maybe kmail ain't honoring that option ...

Re: The cooperation of Kmail & Knode is great news - Michael Häckel - 2001-09-01

Hi, > well, i already fixed it a long time ago for > khtml (enforce default charset, i couldn't > find any fonts that worked), maybe kmail ain't > honoring that option ... If you really don't like to see the correct characters, then you can select iso-8859-1 in the message menu. Nevertheless, installing appropriate fonts is the better option. Regards, Michael Häckel

Re: The cooperation of Kmail & Knode is great news - ik - 2001-09-01

in case somebody is interested in receiving appointments from outlook users: this script: #!/bin/sh if ps uxwwww | grep korganizer | grep -v grep; then echo korganizer running else kstart korganizer fi dcop korganizer KOrganizerIface mergeURL $1 together with this filter: match all of: MESSAGE contains BEGIN:VCALENDAR MESSAGE contains METHOD:REQUEST execute command: /path/the_script.sh %0 does the job. For security, use the extended options (only apply when blabla)

Re: The cooperation of Kmail & Knode is great news - Martin Wolters - 2002-01-21

I had to use : /path/the_script.sh %1 in the above example (Kmail 1.3.1). Reading KMails manual I would expect %0 is correct, but that wasn't the case. Drawback of the method above: The calendar entry is copied into korganizer without any feedback to the kmail user.

Re: The cooperation of Kmail & Knode is great news - Aaron J. Seigo - 2001-09-01

i agree completely.. there have been discussions going on for the past couple months on the kmail list regarding refactoring the codebase and integrating with knode, etc... i was just _itching_ to cover it in the KC, but i try and stick to a "no vapour ware" policy and don't want to put presure on the developers while they are still kicking ideas around by announcing what they might end up doing in an issue.. so now that they have actually begun the work and bits of the code are showing up, i was very happy to be able to cover it. the kmail/knode developers work very hard on some very non-flashy but extremely important core pieces of software (text msging isn't exactly a buzzword anymore, but who could live w/out email? =).

What capabilities? - Rob - 2001-09-01

...all of the new and improved capabilities in KDE3 months before the rest of the world gets to enjoy it... What are the new capabilities? Could someone elaborate...

Re: What capabilities? - Aaron J. Seigo - 2001-09-02

the exact feature set remains to be seen, obviously. =) Qt3 offers some new possibilities for database access, data-aware widgets, style/theming, text handling, and more. also, since binary compat is allowed to be broken the opportunity now exists for core components to be extended/improved in ways that were not possible during the 2.x series. how all of this will translate out into actual features will be seen when the coding is actually done. perhaps for a rough idea: take the things covered in this issue and, realizing that they represent ~2 weeks of developments (and not every single thing that happened either), extrapolate it out over several month's time. of course, the best way to find out what is happening is to actually jump in and get involved =) of course, future issues of kc kde will strive to keep everyone informed on the various developments as they occur

Be carefully, please... - Alain - 2001-09-01

Good to see some joy to start again in new adventures !... But, please, don't break the existing, especially about KMail and KNode that work very fine and are used by many people... Even, perhaps, keeping a last KDE 3.0 Kmail and KNode, similar to the 2.2 ones (but in Qt3, of course) would be a good thing while starting the new KMessenger and some little desagreements, I fear... About the Cookbook story, I see that there is no decision and that the best KDE apps will remind among the less best in the KDE Apps. It's hard for a end user to use some of these KDE Apps. At first few ones are in the distributions, the user has to go on the KDE Apps site. Here there are many apps, some dead, some very new, many with similar purpouse... And then, when he has choosen, he has to compile. And it fails !... I did it 2 days ago and today, with Kwave and KMyMoney. I have errors in the end of ./configure... So sorry, I use KDE Deskop, I use KOffice, I cannot use the KDE apps. I feel very sorry that such interesting apps are so hard to be used. I don't know what would be a good solution, but I think it is necessary to find a solution. (Ah, about KMail-KMessenger, I hope that in the archiv folders, there will be a "Receiver" column (as in OE and Netscape Messenger). I posted this bug wish some months ago, and It is important, I think, when mixing in a same folder sent end received mails...)

Re: Be carefully, please... - Carbon - 2001-09-02

No, the apps they are referring to is not the website apps.kde.com, but rather a new kde package, just like kdegames or kdeutils.

Happy new KDE package ! - Alain - 2001-09-02

A new KDE Package ? It is a very good new ! But you see that perhaps the name wear some confusion... Think about all the apps that would not be in this package, they are also KDE apps... Thank you very much Asif and Rik about the sympathetical white cursor. I hope it will be an option in the next KControl...

Re: Happy new KDE package ! - Carbon - 2001-09-02

>But you see that perhaps the name wear some confusion... Think about all the apps that would not be in this package, they are also KDE apps... Yeah, perhaps it should be kdemisc or something like that.

Re: Happy new KDE package ! - Alain - 2001-09-03

KDE Extras KDE Plus KDE Tools KDE Rocks KDE Rolls KDE Kool KDE Krunch KDE Jumble KDE Cream KDE Yum KDE Sup KDE Supp KDE Top KDE Yep KDE Adds KDE Cooks KDE Goodies KDE Suits KDE Suite KDE Mix KDE Multi KDE Multif KDE Cakes KDE Bunch

Re: Happy new KDE package ! - Carbon - 2001-09-03

Most of these are pretty good name, except for those that involve baked goods (KDE Cakes?) :-)

Re: Be carefully, please... - Michael Häckel - 2001-09-02

> But, please, don't break the existing, > especially about KMail and KNode that work > very fine and are used by many people... Even, > perhaps, keeping a last KDE 3.0 Kmail and > KNode, similar to the 2.2 ones (but in Qt3, of > course) would be a good thing while starting > the new KMessenger and some little > desagreements, I fear... Nobody spoke here of making KMail and KNode a single application. The whole issue is only about sharing common code in a library. At least up to now no GUI changes are involved. Regards, Michael Häckel

Use White mouse pointer in KDE (OT) - Asif Ali Rizwaan - 2001-09-02

You know KDE looks more beautiful with white mouse pointer created by our KDE developer Rik, on my request. Many thanks to Rik for the white mouse pointer... If you like to see it, just copy this cursor.pcf.gz file to "~/.kde/share/fonts/override" and restart KDE to see white mouse pointer. Have fun :)

Re: Use White mouse pointer in KDE (OT) - Mario Auer - 2001-09-02

Hi! Thanks for sharing with us! Unfortunately, every time I restart KDE, the files in that directory are removed and the file fonts.dir is remade. Do I need to enable some option in order to keep those files? Thanks, Mario

A better Mouse pointer by ME :) - Asif Ali Rizwaan - 2001-09-03

Well, I too have created a mouse pointer, which looks quite nice in Mozilla, Netscape and X in general. To use this cursor.bdf 1. run 'bdftopcf cursor.bdf -o cursor.pcf' 2. run 'gzip cursor.pcf' 3. run 'cp cursor.pcf.gz .kde/share/fonts/override' You can also copy this to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/cursor.pcf.gz, to get White mouse pointer work in X windows along with KDE and for Every user without any need to copy it to ~/.kde/share/fonts/override folder. (well, I could not mail you kmail just ignores your email address.)

left-side logo in k-menu - xasto - 2001-09-02

I have a very intriguing question.. when I look at http://users.swing.be/kdeprint/kicker_ext1.png I see a windows-like system-logo bar.. is this an option of kicker in the cvs-version now, or is it an applet of some kind?

Re: left-side logo in k-menu - Aaron J. Seigo - 2001-09-02

it is indeed an option for the KMenu in CVS HEAD. you can also supply your own images or use the KDE logo that is supplied by default.

Re: left-side logo in k-menu - Asif Ali Rizwaan - 2001-09-14

I requested for this feature in KDE 2.0, and Stephen Kulow very bluntly rejected my wishlist, saying this panel(left-side logo) will look ugly like windows. I am very happy that KDE Team has added this, and hope that they will also add "K Start" a Start button clone with the windows logo changed with KDE's one and keybindings and kicker themes which would emulate Windows Menus like Programs, accessories, etc.,

Re: left-side logo in k-menu - xasto - 2001-09-14

I agree fully on the k-menu matter, I find it also very bothersome that the k-menu button can't be stretched in width.. It's also quite a limitation in theme-creation.. KDE developers shouldn't confuse options that remove limitations (artistical or functional) with things microsoft just happens to have.. I however would't like to see the exact same buildup of the windows start menu, it just isn't very functional and intuitive to my opinion. For example you should be able to make the size of the icons on the main kpanel bigger (like windows has also adopted). Just two sizes would already to the trick.. They need such a features anyway, for the accesibility features kde is lacking currently. The KPanel should get a place in the kicker Settings with all these things..

KDE-Edu? - Carbon - 2001-09-03

Hmm, what are the other two programs in this package?

Re: KDE-Edu? - Aaron J. Seigo - 2001-09-03

khangman, kmessedwords. hopefully the selection expands in coming years =)

At last Bidirectional - Ben-Nes Michael - 2001-09-03

I'm very excited because the new feature in QT3 which will enable bi-directional in KDE, this will take Linux to a new stage in Israel. I hope to stop using windows to write my docs ;) Any one know when the KDE3 will be released approximately ? year ? two years ?

Re: At last Bidirectional - Meni Livne - 2001-09-03

The KDE team is currently hoping to release KDE 3.0 around January 2002. It could get posponed a bit, but I can already tell from what I've seen, that the bidirectionality in the KDE libraries in CVS works quite well. I was able to very easily type in Hebrew from right to left in KWrite and Kate. For more information on Hebrew in KDE, visit http://www.kde.org/il/hebrew/

Re: At last Bidirectional - Bob - 2001-09-04

nir'e ahla li, hevreh ;) toda, bye.

Where is kicq? - Jan - 2001-09-03

Hi folks! I have senn kicq in a previous version of kde, but in kde2.2 it has disappeared! Does nobody work on it? Cheers, Jan

Re: Where is kicq? - xasto - 2001-09-03

I find licq being more than able to handle my icq needs.. don't you? and it's pretty too! Someone should bother creating a pure-kde interface perhaps? currently it's Qt2, underneat (it's skinned anyway)..

Re: Where is kicq? - A Sad Person - 2001-09-03

When building licq, add --with-kde to the configure options.. This will make it use a KDE UI, and will dock into Kicker....

Re: Where is kicq? - xasto - 2001-09-04

exquisit! tnx fo the tip.. :-) why isn't this defaul?? .. ;-)

Re: Where is kicq? - stacker - 2001-10-26

I tried this, won't work. :(

CVS build guide? - john s jacobs anderson - 2001-09-03

Is there a guide somewhere to pulling everything down and building it? (Bonus points if it's Debian-aware.) I'd like to help out with bug reports and what-not, but I phear trying to build the beast without some sort of roadmap...

Re: CVS build guide? - Aaron J. Seigo - 2001-09-03

http://www.kde.org/anoncvs.html as for the arguments passed to ./configure in the kde cvs modules, you may want to add a --prefix= (i use /opt/kde2) to keep it seperate in case something bad happens *knock on wood* (it also makes it easier to do a completley fresh install.. rm -rf /opt/kde2). --enable-final also speeds up compiling quite a bit, though it requires a bit more memory to do so ...

LinuxToday again... - ac - 2001-09-03

They still have not posted KDE KC? They post GNOME KC already.

Re: LinuxToday again... - Aaron J. Seigo - 2001-09-03

well, there isn't a KC GNOME, but i suppose you are referring to the GNOME Summary. i am trying to figure out what is going on w/LT but it seems that since their little internal shake-up occurred it has taken a bit longer than usual to get KC KDE posted. :/

TOO FAST! - jordi - 2001-09-04

In not a developer but i feel that people will expect a lot of improvement of KDE3 over KDE2 but i think that the release date is to early to make a lot of things. I think it should be delayed a couple of months. Another thing, with the QT3 database improvements, wouldn't be easy make kmessenger do vfolders just as evolution does. I like kmail more than evolution but Vfolders rocks

KDE 3.0?? Is it gonna' be fatter??? - Jerry McBride - 2001-09-06

My GOD! I had dearly hoped that more time would be invested in kde 2.xx, before moving into yeat another version number. There's tons of bugs in the current version and... we all got to face the music... it's as slow as an oil taker floating in honey and just as big! My GOD! Fix what you have, first! Optimize the bastard! Make it run something on par with kde 1.1.2 and... maybe... just maybe... I'll actually use the damn thing! It seems to be the trend now days... make it bigger.... make it fatter.... make it slower... KDE2.2... an elephant painted in candy stripes...

KDE 3.0!!! It's gonna be PHAT! - Eric Nicholson - 2001-09-06

Throwin down in tha hizouse, I'm gonna be rockin that big beautiful booty. Aww yeah, it's got a little bi-direction over here, communications integration over there. Phatten 'er up, I'm on top Phatter, Happier, More Productive. KDE 3.0 nuclear physicist in hotpants...