KDE Commit-Digest for 25th February 2007

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Solid gets support for NetworkManager. Support for changing the font colour of the taskbar. File format import work in KVocTrain. More KDE 4 porting takes place in KTorrent. Noatun now uses Phonon as its only backend. Work is begun on refactoring the user interface of Amarok 2.0. The Codeine video player is imported into KDE SVN and ported to CMake, Phonon and KDE 4. Progress in the 'krunner' element of Plasma. KAlgebra is imported into KDE SVN into the playground/edu module. Search improvements in Kate, with a move to the kdesdk module.

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Comments

by personmandude (not verified)

So do you think KDE 4 will turn out to be usable on my 550MHz box, like KDE 3.5 is? Will it be faster? or slower with all the fancy transparent SVG stuff...???

On a different note, the new KGet sounds awesome!

by Sebastian Sauer (not verified)

Performance and speed is an ongoing topic and while I am not sure if the 4.0.0-release will be actualy faster, there stays a lot of time+potential to get it even significant faster then 3.x was/is during it's lifetime just like 3.x.x improved it's performance during the time.
From someone who runs KDE 3.5.5 on his 500MHz+128MB RAM Compaq Armada and it works fine as long as I don't start OOo (but KOffice is there anyway to replace it ;)

by Ben (not verified)

And I thought I was pushing it with 800MHz+378MB ram.

What distro do you guys use? I'm on debian testing.

by personmandude (not verified)

Slackware all the way brotha
I'm using slackware 10.0 with a big mix of newer software, but I'm thinking of upgrading to 11.0 soon. It's compiled with GCC 3.4 as opposed to GCC 3.3, so it should be a wee bit faster....

Well yeah, at the beginning of the KDE 4 journey there was a lot of hype about how performance was going to be improved, etc...
I'm hoping that it actually wil :) :)

by superstoned (not verified)

Well, in some area's, performance will be improved. I guess memory usage can be lower if you disable certain things like strigi's indexing daemon. In any case, you'll have more features for your memory, as Qt4 binaries use approx 20% less memory compared to the same Qt3 executable. And there are more opportunities to use hardware acceleration in KDE/Qt4, so painting might be faster, even on slower hardware without 3D hardware (even 2D could be used better ;-))

by Richard Van Den Boom (not verified)

I really like this video player : starts fast, simple and sensible UI. Just perfect as it is. With Kaffeine for DVB and Amarok for music, this media suite provides everything I need.

by Mark Kretschmann (not verified)

Indeed, Codeine is awesome :)

by Marcus Peterson (not verified)

I agree, the more choice the better. Although I really only use KPlayer mostly due to its stability and its use of MPlayer as the backend, the more cool programs KDE has the better. Hope they all eventually move to KDE 4!

by Ian Monroe (not verified)

Glad you like it. :)

Its been renamed to Video Player. I think its a simple name to go with a simple player. But its ungoogleable, so I'm open to other suggestions. ;)

by logixoul (not verified)

FWIW, Codeine was a name that I liked a lot.
Thanks for your great work :)

by Slubs (not verified)

Codeine was nice, funny pun of Kaffeine?

Too much drugs? What about Vitamine, then? ;)

by Louis (not verified)

I also liked the old name. Just curious, why the change? Worried about drug-related backlash?

by Arend jr. (not verified)

"Video Player" ain't no name!

But what's wrong with Codeine Video Player if you want to make it descriptive?

by Louis (not verified)

How about Adrenaline? That has a feel of excitement that movies commonly invoke. Of course, I don't know how difficult that is for non-English speakers. I still like Codeine better.

by Louis (not verified)

...or you could call it KracK KoKaine ;-)

by superstoned (not verified)

what about Kinine?

by funnyfanny (not verified)

this will be so cool , anyone else read the pdf ?

by superstoned (not verified)

Even saw the presentation, on FOSDEM ;-)

Yes, it's exciting and amazing stuff indeed... Really cool they choose KDE as testbed/first implementation!

by Ben (not verified)

I read it, the desktop search implictions are wonderfull. The shareing meta-data over the web seems to me like a waste of time. That said I don't think its a bad idea, I'm just not intrested in it.

Just so long as its easy to tell KDE to not share metadata over the web I'm happy. Happier if thats the default, or a Kpersonaliser question, that defualts to no. Personal info should never be shared by you're computer without express permission.

One thing I didn't understand though is how is the metadata stored? is there some big database and you check files against it. or is the metadata stored inside every file.

by reldruh (not verified)

I think it's wonderful to have the option of sharing metadata over the internet. One of my biggest pet peeves with every operating system is that I can't sync information between computers. If I add something on a todo list at work, or add a contact to my address book, or any of a hundred other things I do all the time, I want that same thing to appear on all my computers. I've got two computers at home and one at work, and I don't want to put the same information in each one of them. It's time consuming and shouldn't have to be done. Kudos to the kde team for making this a reality. Of course, defaulting to 'no' also seems like a good idea security-wise. It's just upsetting to not be able to do it at all.

by Ben (not verified)

Is a todo list, or address book, actually part of Nepomuck? I've read the specs but only have a shakey idea what their up to.

by Ben (not verified)

I like the implications NEPOMUK has for desktop search. And I'm looking forward to that in KDE4. However I don't have any use for shareing meta-data across the internet, would it be possible to have KDE4 without that part of NEPOMUK installed?

by superstoned (not verified)

Well, it'll probably be in the KDE libraries, but I'm pretty sure you can turn it off ;-)

They still have a lot to do, especially in the privacy area.

by Ben (not verified)

Yeah, this is KDE. I shouldn't worry, I'll be able to turn the middleware part off and just use desktop search.

by personmandude (not verified)

Does this have something to do with the Tenor thing?