OSNews.com: The KDE 3.2 Beta 2 User Review

Friday, 16 January 2004 | Numanee

Rahul Gaitonde has written a fairly comprehensive review of KDE 3.2 Beta 2 for OSNews based on his 3 week trial. "The target machine - my only computer - is a Pentium II 266 MHz with 384 MB RAM, with an Intel i810E chipset. [...] The first thing you notice when you start up a few apps is - 'Boy, this is Fast!'. KDE 3.2 is significantly faster than 3.1, and certainly way faster than Gnome 2.4 on my machine. It reminds me of the kind of responsiveness that Windows 98 used to give me on this same configuration few years ago (minus the crashes). Konsole opens up almost instantaneously, and Konqueror takes only about 3 seconds the first time. I was afraid that the increase in bloat with every release of KDE since the 1.x series would one day prevent me from using this computer at all with KDE. I'm glad the guys over at KDE have so splendidly allayed my fears." The review has a lot of screenshots and other information on the release. As usual, Plastik gets huge props.

Comments:

Not a bad review but... - brockers - 2004-01-15

A couple of grips: -------------- I can't bookmark individual text/PDF/etc files in KDE's Bookmarks, only folders. If I can bookmark an HTML page, why not any other type of file? This limits its usefulness. Also, Bookmarks and History ought to be available only in Konqueror's Web Browsing profile. -------------- This is wrong. I currently have dozens of text files bookmarked in konqueror. In addition removing them totally from the universal sidebar is just plain stupid. I like being able to open a web-page without starting konqueror separately beforehand,accessing my mount point that are commonly used, remote computer connections over ssh (via fish://user@location.com), commonly used documents, etc.. etc... etc.. Hell the MAIN use of universal sidebar it the dang bookmarks and history tabs!! ----------------- Two words: Drop them. Kaboodle and Noatun are pathetic. They are nowhere as functional as XMMS ----------------- Smoking crack did you say? I understand that most people like XMMS because it is identical to winamp but it has NO WHERE NEAR the features or functionality of Noatun. Period! To say such a thing means that the review has no idea what the features and functions of Noatun are. ----------------- At the beginning of this article, I asked, rhetorically, if KDE 3.2 would enable me to use the command line more effectively. The answer to this strange question is yes. Presenting KDialog. ------------------ Can you say KDE 3.1 Just my .02 brockers

Re: Not a bad review but... - optikSmoke - 2004-01-15

>> ... Presenting KDialog. >> ------------------ >> Can you say KDE 3.1 Can you say "mentionned in the article"? 2 sentences later: "By no means is this new to KDE 3.2 - it was present in 3.1, too." Anyway, kdialog is more useful in 3.2 -- it has some more complicated dialogs, like file dialogs, rather than just "yes/nos", warnings, etc. ---Matt

Re: Not a bad review but... - ac - 2004-01-15

> ----------------- > Two words: Drop them. Kaboodle and Noatun are pathetic. They are nowhere as > functional as XMMS > ----------------- Could not agress more on that, or again move them to kdeextragear. ... Have not tried out Juk, maybe it obsoletes them...

Re: Not a bad review but... - J - 2004-01-15

JuK is a different.. but greatly replaces here any other software capable of playing music...

Re: Not a bad review but... - LaNcom - 2004-01-15

Well, I wouldn't say XMMS was better, but I still agree. I would like to see Kaboodle, Noatun _and_ JuK removed from KDE multimedia, and add Amarok instead. It's small, fast, slick, and it has a good playlist design. For video, maybe KDE should add kmplayer, it doesn't need MPlayer to compile (so it's small and has no external dependencies), as it is the best plugin for Konqueror to play _any_ media on the internet (I haven't seen any media that didn't work,that is).

Re: Not a bad review but... - John - 2004-01-16

Personally, I'd much perfer to see kaffeine in the base distribution it uses the xine libraries which are already used by the xine_artsplugin in kdemultimedia. Just my $0.02

Re: Not a bad review but... - LaNcom - 2004-01-16

Well, kmplayer is a frontend, it supports MPlayer, Xine, ffmpeg and ffserver as backends. It supports recording from a TV-card, streaming (client&server) and acts as a Konqueror plugin for Quicktime, AVI, Real, WMA/WMV, DivX etc. So, the dependencies are not an issue. If Kaffeine also supported MPlayer, I wouldn't care which one goes in.

Re: Not a bad review but... - theorz - 2004-01-16

But it is not nearly as usable as kaffeine. To me having kaffeine for video and juk for music would be perfect. Noatun tries to do to much and ends up being too hard to use. Kaboodle has the right idea, but has a really kludgy interface. Though this is all moot with 3.2 about to come out. For 3.3/4 it would be nice to see a video pure video app created, totem from gnome is a good example of a video player with a good interface. Some of noatun's features like visualizations be put into juk. With this Kaboodle and Noatun could be phased out. Maybe gstreamer will be good enough with their 0.8 release to be a viable media framework to be used in 3.3/4. But all said 3.2 is an incredable release. I am running 3.2beta2 right now and I can say hands down it is the best desktop I have ever used. Thankyou kde developers.

Re: Not a bad review but... - ac - 2004-01-16

What is this Kaffeine you speak of?

Re: Not a bad review but... - Anonymous - 2004-01-16

http://kaffeine.sourceforge.net/

Re: Not a bad review but... - Mike - 2004-01-15

Ummm, he said "functional" not "lots of functions". Look it up in your dictionary.

Re: Not a bad review but... - JC - 2004-01-15

Noatun is really good. The default GUI is horrible but it does work as good as xmms and even more when listenning radios via internet. I agree with the author about Kedit and Kwrite. I use Kedit because it's light to edit a small text file (I don't have to use vi) or Kate to write scripts, programs, but never Kwrite. And you can bookmark any type of files you want. Not only folder or html files.

Right on about Noatun - Anony Guy - 2004-01-15

Amen about the default GUI and icons. I constantly get confused about which button opens the playlist and which opens a file. Some of the worst icon selection I've ever seen. Functionally though, its a pretty solid piece of work.

Re: Not a bad review but... - kosh - 2004-01-16

I happen to like noatun and lot and honestly I very rarely use its gui. What I use is its keyz plugin. From that I can stop,start,pause,change songs, change volume etc all from the keyboard with any application having the focus. The gui I see for noatun is that little circle it puts in the system tray. I have not used xmms for anything beyond playing with it a few times to see if it had the features I wanted for years now and I still see no reason to use it. Sure xmms has a better looking gui but when I just want the app to stay in the system tray who cares about its gui? I just want it to play music and let me get on with coding, testing, debugging etc and noatun does that much better.

Re: Not a bad review but... - KDE User - 2004-01-16

Smoking crack did you say? I understand that most people like XMMS because it is identical to winamp but it has NO WHERE NEAR the features or functionality of Noatun. Period! To say such a thing means that the review has no idea what the features and functions of Noatun are. -- Does noatun require arts to run? If so, it's useless to me. Does noatun utilize XMMS input plugins? If not, it's useless to me. Look, I love KDE, but its multimedia side is so far behind the rest of the desktop that it's embarrassing. I use almost exclusively KDE applications, but I still use xmms and mplayer because they're superior to anything else out there (I use gaim, too, though kopete ain't bad--needs Perl scripting, however). Anyway, the point is, for a lot of us, kdemultimedia just doesn't cut it. Getting indignant won't change the fact that xmms is superior *for us*, for the time being.

feelings of ditto - c - 2004-01-16

I use xmms for exactly the same reason that I use KDE. It doesn't crash and it doesn't hog CPU, which AFAIK (as of versions for 3.1.5) everything in kdemultimedia still does. I've similar hangups with JuK (my 17 gig music collection kills it whilst rhythmbox copes) and even newer kopetes (which will happily hang my entire KDE when network connectivity is bad). I'm not complaining and there's nothing I'm willing to do about it, I'm just saying - the man probably has a point. (Am desperately looking forward to new versions of konqueror, kmail and quanta - by far my favorite linux apps.)

Re: Not a bad review but... - James Richard Tyrer - 2004-01-17

> Kaboodle and Noatun are pathetic. What is the problem here. This appears to be the second reviewer that doesn't understand that one of the functions of Kaboodle and Noatun is to be a fron end for XINE. Will XMMS play Quicktime movie trailers with sound? -- JRT

Re: Not a bad review but... - lazarus - 2004-01-17

But a crippled one. Noatun can't play dvd/vcd, although it should simply pass dvd:// or vcd:// to the xine-lib. They can't play most of the asx, mov, ram urls from the web (kmplayer can also using xine-lib).

rpm - JC - 2004-01-15

> "An upgrade to this beta is a simple matter of 'rpm -Uvh ./*.rpm --nodeps --force'" Lol. Why to use a rpm system if you use --nodeps and --force ?

Re: rpm - Mike - 2004-01-15

I'm using SuSE and do that always for KDE updates and SuSE version updates. You can go into YaST (the SuSE setup tool) afterwards and say: Check integrity and it lists all remaining or new problems. You can solve them one by one which is often far easier than to obey RPM. Because my experience is: RPM sometimes won't install KDE and claims that some apps are not compatible but afterwards everything runs fine. It's all a matter of the order in which you install the packages I guess.

Re: rpm - James Richard Tyrer - 2004-01-17

Hmmmmmmm: "--nodeps" Do you suppose that is how he forgot to install XINE and a lot of other audio and video libraries? -- JRT

please drop kedit - ac - 2004-01-15

Just drop it, users don't want it and get confused by it. And since kwrite is just better (yes I wanna generalize), just drop kedit, or move it to kdeextragear. So the ones who really prefer it can still use it. At least don't ship kde with it. Shipping it bloats kde. Other nice thing, for the windows explorer used people...: Could konqueror show the available space of the current partition in it's status bar? Definately a big + in comfort!! RMB on a file is not really intuitive to find our the free disk space... Or is it and I am on crack?? ;-) Apart of that, looking forward to 3.2, it just seems to rock!! Thanks to all the contributors

Re: please drop kedit - LaNcom - 2004-01-15

IIRC, kedit support bidirectional editing, kwrite doesn't (yet). As soon as kwrite supports bidi, kedit should be dropped...

Re: please drop kedit - anon - 2004-01-15

Yeah, there is a highly experimental-at-this-stage branch of kate called KATE_GOES_BIDI.. As it matures, kedit will get dropped. Hopefully by 3.3.

Re: please drop kedit - cies - 2004-01-16

Sometime kate (and derived apps like kwrite/kdevelop/quanta) mangles my code. I get dubble lines and last-second-indentation-corrections... Never the less i used kate in my own app, and love the features that it comes with.

YUP, drop it - Alex - 2004-01-16

I've never seena difference and that's why I don't use it. I only use Kate, and I also don't know what Kwrite is for, but I think the features of Kedit and kwrite should be merged in Kate. BTW: RENAME KWRITE. it sounds like a wordprocessor.

Kedit - Leon Pennington - 2004-01-15

I think their is a problem with bidi support, and I like Kedit. Its useful for all those little tasks. Kate I use for programming, and I don't like filling up the open pages bar, nor waiting for them to load when I just wanna had an /etc file.

Re: Kedit - ac - 2004-01-15

> I think their is a problem with bidi support, and I like Kedit. Its useful > for all those little tasks. Kate I use for programming, and I don't like > filling up the open pages bar, nor waiting for them to load when I just > wanna had an /etc file. mm ok maybe then kwrite should be fixed in terms of bidi... It has maybe this 1 bug, but many other features over kedit, and it not really slower. Kedit can still be used, and be in kde cvs. It just should not be shipped IMO.

Re: Kedit - Nicolas Goutte - 2004-01-16

Missing right-to-left is not just *one* bug. What would you tell if an editor could use right-to-left but not left-to-right? You would want another. So right-to-left writers have a similar problem and therefore they use KEdit. Have a nice day!

Re: Kedit - me - 2004-01-15

I'm using kate for programming, too, I just have one last problem with it: How can I move the focus between the text-editing window and the builtin-terminal-window using the keyboard? Everytime I have to use the mouse, and I hate it! also, is there a shortcut for going to line x (like :x in vi)? thanks!

Re: Kedit - Leon Pennington - 2004-01-15

Ctrl+g brings up the goto line dialog. Goto configure shortcuts... And go down to Kate->Show terminal And enter whichever shortcut you want.

Re: Kedit - me - 2004-01-16

Thanks for the ctrl+g thingy! about the terminal, I don't want to switch it on and off, but rather have it always on and just switch focus. Is that not possible? thanks!

Re: Kedit - Leon Pennington - 2004-01-16

I don't think so. You could put a wishlist item in the bug database for that.

Re: Kedit - Dieter Bercx - 2004-02-01

I would also like to be able to switch focus between the editor and terminal without using my mouse. I lose way too much time reaching for my mouse every time I want to go in and out the terminal, so instead I use a seperate Konsole and ALT + TAB to it. The only change they need to make is to let the terminal receive the focus when it's shown and return the focus to the last editor used when it's hidden again. This would make Kate perfect ;)

Re: Kedit - Source - 2004-01-15

What we actually need in Kate is a shortcut for commands. Like the ":" in vi and the "Meta-x" in Emacs.

Re: Kedit - Mark Dufour - 2004-01-16

I don't use kate, but wouldn't it be possible for you to use the vim kpart?

Re: Kedit - Rischwa - 2004-01-16

>What we actually need in Kate is a shortcut for commands. Like the ":" in vi and the "Meta-x" in Emacs. Try pressing F7 :) Rischwa

Re: Kedit - john - 2004-01-16

hey!! what can I enter in that command-line? vi-style won't seem to work. What is this?!

Re: Kedit - Haakon Nilsen - 2004-01-17

There seems to be various commands you can use. Just press a key and it will show a list of commands starting with that letter (try s, that gives a lot). I'm not sure how useful this is, it's certainly no M-x ;)

Re: Kedit - Jos - 2004-01-16

Are there any programs in KDE or under Linux that can automatically format C++ code? I was recently using Eclipse for a Java program and it's automatic formatting function is awesome. It saves a lot of time when moving loops and if statements about.

Re: Kedit - Leon Pennington - 2004-01-16

Yep theirs KDevelop, switch on automatic indentation, and set the source formatting how you like it.It doesn't do this for copy and paste yet, so you have to press format source under the edit menu. Works very well all round. Also the auto-completion and Persistant Class Stores more than make up for this. ( PCS Means you can tell it about any h files your using and it will autocomplete with those so it already knows any external function you will use).

Re: Kedit - cloose - 2004-01-16

AFAIK it uses astyle (http://astyle.sf.net) for that. Just in case you don't want to install KDevelop (who wouldn't want that???).

Re: Kedit - Jos - 2004-01-16

I just checked out astyle. It does a lot of nice things, but unfortunately does not do everything well. I like tabs and the author obviously likes spaces, since every option still leaves spaces at some level of indentation. Also there's no option to specify what maximal width you'd like the code to be. And furthermore it does not recognize and reformat const char * string. For example: welcome->setText(QString("") +tr("Welcome to the cube test.") +""+tr("We are going to compare cubes.") +""+tr("Choose the cube that is the same as the" " top cube. You can turn the cubes with " " the mouse. The six squares next to the " "cube are the same as the six sidex of the " "cube.") +""+tr("Click \"Start\" to begin.")+"");</tt> A multiline constant can be fitted to the width of the line simply by moving around the quotation marks. Any formatter that does only one thing wrong is useless, because you'll need to fix something by hand anyway. No disrespect to astyle's auther: obviously formatting c++ code is difficult because of all the different esthetical point of view.

Source of speedups? - steve - 2004-01-16

I follow kde cvs digest and lurk on kde-optimize, but somehow I missed the source of the performance improvements all the reviewers are talking about. Besides konqueror pre-loading, what caused the speedup?

Re: Source of speedups? - Navindra Umanee - 2004-01-16

I have the same question. :)

Re: Source of speedups? - JC - 2004-01-16

better gcc ? better rpm packages ?

Re: Source of speedups? - Rayiner Hashem - 2004-01-16

A lot of the speedups are just due to optimizations in (say) KHTML and other applications. Qt 3.2.x is also perceptibly faster than 3.1.x was. Memory usage is also reduced a bit. I've been using KDE 3.2 for awhile, and its definitely the fastest KDE since 1.x.

Re: Source of speedups? - Derek Kite - 2004-01-16

http://members.shaw.ca/dkite/jan32003.html#Optimizations Ha! I can even quote my own work. There was a similar commit last week. That was one of the speedups. http://members.shaw.ca/dkite/feb142003.html#oKonqueror is another from Safari. http://members.shaw.ca/dkite/apr252003.html#fKonqueror for another micro optimization. http://members.shaw.ca/dkite/may162003.html#oKonqueror Maks' optimization making Konq a usable file manager. http://members.shaw.ca/dkite/may302003.html#oKonqueror and another. http://members.shaw.ca/dkite/jun62003.html#fKonqueror etc. I got to set up an index of some sort for this stuff. If someone wants to look further, http://members.shaw.ca/dkite/backissues.html is the whole list of digests, and one can go from the TOC to the Konqueror sections. Derek (who wishes that he had more time...) ps. maybe someone with authority and power can make these things real links? :)

Re: Source of speedups? - Derek Kite - 2004-01-16

Responding to myself. Yes, I do it all the time. Some of the Safari work included optimizations. I think some work was done on the config management to quicken things up. Can't think of anything else off hand. And yes, it is much faster than 3.1. I had (before things got stable) 3.1 and cvs on my box, and it was painful to go back to 3.1. Of course, things seem fast for a very short time, then my inherent impatience flares up again. But I think the waits are now the transfer speeds rather than khtml. Derek

Re: Source of speedups? - muleli - 2004-01-16

And kernel 2.6 is another source. no konqi lockups.even soffice is usable now

Re: Source of speedups? - Josef Weidendorfer - 2004-01-16

I would say there are simply a *lot* of small optimization which sum up, and if these happens to be in libaries, all apps benefit from it. The question is why hasn't this be done with earlier releases? Of course there will be multiple reasons, but for sure the use of performance analyisis tools to locate the problems should be one. Me as the author of calltree (derived from cachegrind) and KCachegrind would be interested in how many of the optimizations were done on the background of using these tools. Unfortunately I get very little feedback on this, only some of the optimization commits mention cachegrind.

Re: Source of speedups? - Nick - 2004-01-16

KDE doesn't make use of templates does it? The QT Abstract Data Types all seem to use void* at the back end or they did when I last looked at them which was admittedly over 4 years ago! The reason I ask is there's been a recent fix to g++ that means it now picks up the correct specialisation for a given STL container whereas before it didn't. It'd be interesting to see what versions of gcc where used in the review for the 3.1 and 3.2 versions. There have been a number of subtle improvements in both the compiler and the STL shipped with it. Now KDE is pretty much feature complete we can really start work on the optimisation. These should be good times.

Re: Source of speedups? - Leon Pennington - 2004-01-16

I've actually been using KCacheGrind during feature freeze on the stuff I've been doing. I usually don't use software like this all the time, only when I pause. So maybe the next release it will get more mentions.

Re: Source of speedups? - Matthias Ettrich - 2004-01-16

To give you some feedback: at TT, we use both tools frequently. Many of the performance improvements (even more in the upcoming version 4) can indeed be attributed to the availability of those tools.

DCOP - Spy Hunter - 2004-01-16

Can Kuickshow be instructed to start a slideshow with DCOP? If so, it could be made into a service menu item like he suggests in page 3.

Re: DCOP - Carsten Pfeiffer - 2004-01-16

> Can Kuickshow be instructed to start a slideshow with DCOP? In KDE 3.2, yes: id=`dcopstart kuickshow` sleep 1 dcop $id kuickshow activateAction kuick_slideshow Don't know yet, why the sleep is necessary.

OT: disabling some programs - hatsch - 2004-01-16

hello there sorry for my offtopic post, but i would like to know, if there is a way to disable certain programs when compiling kde from source, any gui (or implemented in konstruct (i've never tried this because i use gentoo)) where you can choose which applications should be installed. eg: kde-games: Kasteroids (y) Kbounce (n) ... KPoker (y) ... and so on. kde would be more slick and navigation with k-Menue would be better because only apps needed would be installed..

Re: OT: disabling some programs - ralph - 2004-01-16

You can just export DO_NOT_COMPILE="Things you don't want to compile" and then emerge kdewhatever. Just search the gentoo forum to find out more about this option and how to use it.

Re: OT: disabling some programs - hatsch - 2004-01-16

cool, thank you i will check that out

Re: OT: disabling some programs - Anonymous - 2004-01-16

Or create a file "inst-apps" with the directories you want to compile and run "make -f Makefile.cvs".

Plastik is very nice, but the color scheme isn't - Erik Hensema - 2004-01-16

Plastik is IMHO a very nice looking theme. It however does lack contrasting colors. Everything is gray, and almost the same shade of gray too. On my system I changed two colors and now it looks MUCH better. I have made the title bar of the active window light blue and made the buttons somewhat darker: 'Active Title Bar' is set to #1B7EE2 'Button Background' is set to #D5D7DC Makes the theme prettier to look at and more usable, IMHO. Here is a screenshot I prepared: http://hensema.net/tmp/shot.png

Re: Plastik is very nice, but the color scheme isn't - Romain - 2004-01-16

I double that. Plastik is WAAAAYYYY too gray for me. Your changes are very welcome. I can even begin to like Plastik.

Re: Plastik is very nice, but the color scheme isn't - Malcolm - 2004-01-17

Ohh noo!! The original colours are fine - I do run it on a laptop though. I'm really impressed with the theme and vote it becomes the default for 3.3.

Re: Plastik is very nice, but the color scheme isn't - tetabiate - 2004-01-17

Changing the outline color of widgets makes the theme prettier, here is a screenshot of my plastik theme: http://mywebpage.netscape.com/jlrch2/instant/aboutme.html

Re: Plastik is very nice, but the color scheme isn't - Miles Robinson - 2004-01-21

Personally, I think Plastik looks perfect with the Redmond XP color scheme.

New languages? - Elektroschock - 2004-01-16

Do you know whether new languages can be added in the releases 3.2.x? There still is no internationalization option for nds (DE, NL, DK regional language) support.

Re: New languages? - Nicolas Goutte - 2004-01-16

The KDE translation policy tells that the language must be an official language of at least one country for being in the KDE I18N module. As Niederdeutsch (I suppose that you are talking about this) is an offical language neither of Germany, nor of the Netherlands nor of Danmark, it will never be an official I18N package. (As opposite to Dutch, also of this language familly but official language at least of the Netherlands.) The rule is just to maintain the kde-i18n module at a somewhat acceptable size, as there are many locale languages that are not official. (Just a few other examples for Germany only: Bavarian, Saxonian, Schwäbisch...) I do not know if anybody had tried to start such a translation. (Perhaps you could look in the archives of kde-i18n-doc at http://lists.kde.org ) Have a nice day!

Re: New languages? - anonymous - 2004-01-17

Then why is there a en_GB and a en_US translation? Is the official language of USA american english?

Re: New languages? - Leon Pennington - 2004-01-17

Their isn't a en_US as far as I'm aware ( The doesn't appear to be one in the kde-i18n ). en_GB is Great Britain, and the language is spelled differently than in the USA. Plus there are other differences. Meter and Metre are to different words in en_GB.

Re: New languages? - anonymous - 2004-01-17

Yes, you're right. Of course there is no en_US module but thats because the original messages are written in american style. But on the other hand you proved my point. There is only a en_GB because some words a different or spelled differently. So it's basically a kind of dialect (I'm sure most english people see it the other way around :)). So back to my point, why do we make a difference between british and american english but also disallow to add a dialect for german?

Re: New languages? - anonymous - 2004-01-17

Doh, I just read the message below. Thanks Thomas for the explanation.

Re: New languages? - Thomas Diehl - 2004-01-17

> The KDE translation policy tells that the language must > be an official language of at least one country for being > in the KDE I18N module. There is no such policy. On the contrary: We avoid mere dialects and other "fun projects" but KDE always gave a chance to minority languages that don't get an "official status" in their countries for one reason or another. We want to be sure, however, that every translation is continuously maintained and that there is a real chance to have it completed in the foreseeable future. Minority languages often have a problem with this, simply because there is no big pool of native speakers to attract translators from. This has also been the problem with nds so far but there are still a few people around who want to change this situation. Regards, Thomas

Re: New languages? - Nicolas Goutte - 2004-01-17

Well, for me it sounds very different on what was written on kde-i18n-doc, at least in the past. But if the translation policy has changed, good, I take note of it. Have a nice day!

Re: New languages? - Thomas Diehl - 2004-01-18

No idea why you think there was a change in the policy. Just have a look at http://i18n.kde.org/teams/ which includes languages like Latin, Occitan, Breton (although mostly unmaintained, thus illustrating the problem of "no big pool of native speakers to attract translators from"). Or look at "policy postings" like http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-i18n-doc&m=103233498728247&w=2. Thomas

KDE needs a decent media player (framework) - Jan Vidar Krey - 2004-01-16

Don't get me wrong, we already have a few good ones like noatun and kaboodle. Noatun seems to me like a plug-in toy with a hairy interface, so of those I prefer kaboodle as it has the easiest GUI. But KDE needs a more generic framework for extended funcionality, like streaming. Gnome is in the process of building such a media framework, GStreamer. This can probably be adapted by KDE at some point, but I'd like to point the finger to the VideoLAN project over at http://www.videolan.org/. This is already, and has been for quite a while, a very promising media framework with lots of potential. The VideoLAN client is ported to tons of platforms, it plays most media formats (without any external win32 DLL dependencies), it's pluggable, and extremely powerful when it comes down to streaming (multicast, relaying, multi-protocol, video on demand). The VideoLAN client is based on a generic C/C++ library, so writing a KDE front-end is easy. In fact, it's already done but it's AFAIK not maintained and the GUI isn't the greatest. VideoLAN has a plugin for Mozilla, I'd love to see a KHTML plug-in for integrated Web-TV applications. Well... I guess that's work for KDE 4.0? ;)

Re: KDE needs a decent media player (framework) - Anonymous - 2004-01-17

> Gnome is in the process of building such a media framework, GStreamer. GNOME is not building GStreamer, they are using it (earlier than KDE because they had no other framework before). http://www.gstreamer.net/docs/cvs/faq/html/chapter-general.html#general-gnome

Splashscreen? - anonymous - 2004-01-17

I'm having problems with the Splash screen as well (just freezes on 'starting interprocess communications', and I'm using KDE CVS.