In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Continued post-release polishing of Amarok 2.0. Support for conversion between temperature scales in the "Weather" Plasmoid. Initial import of "System Status" Plasma applet, which is renamed "System Load Viewer" (shows CPU, memory, and swap usage). Support for on-the-fly compilation of Plasma data engines with the C# language bindings. Further development of the "BookmarkSync" Konqueror plugin, including additions of autofetch, autosave, and a settings dialog. More refined integration of Wikipedia "place" information in Marble. A QtScript engine to allow creation of games using QtScript in KGLEngine. An experimental "curve brush" added to Krita. Support for the ext4 filesystem added to PartitionManager. More reorganisation of wallpapers in KDE SVN, with a general kdeartwork module cleanup removing IceWM themes, KWorldClock maps, and unmaintained iconsets. PolicyKit-KDE moves to extragear/base. Eigen 2.0 Beta 3 is tagged for release.Read the rest of the Digest here.
Comments
Indeed. Maybe you can go into the xorg lists and tell them how hopeless they are.
I'm sure you will be appreciated as much there for your wisdom and perspicacity.
Have you started writing your report yet?
Derek
"If the devs are not able to detect these bugs that are so obvious and so annoying to anyone who has tried 4.2"
i'm sure you realize that the developers do not have every hardware or software set up available to us that you do. we do not use the software in the same way everyone else does. we don't even use the same builds most people do (we tend to use debug builds, built ourselves from source, from svn trunk/; most people use binaries from releases), etc.
so it is very, very common that others run into issues we have either not seen or not noticed.
if you feel that is hopelessness, then please organize a professionally staffed and stocked Q/A department to do all that work for both you and i.
personally, i'd just as soon see you spend a few minutes telling me what bugs you run into so i can either fix them or let you know they are already fixed.
"down showstoppers in plasma, kded, file opening freezing plasma and thus rendering the system inoperative?"
which showstoppers are these? amazingly, i can neither read your mind nor see your computer from a distance, so you'll have to help us out here.
if by "file opening" you mean "i click on an icon, and it freezes for several seconds before things launch" and you are using nvidia binary drivers, then that's not a plasma bug.
but then, i really don't know what you mean exactly by "file opening". you could mean "when i open a file dialog from a url requester, such as in the settings dialog in the folder view plasmoid". that's a bug in KUrlRequestor in libkdeui and one i plan to fix in 4.3. it's not a trivial issue, unfortunately.
"2 or more knotify bug errors."
which would be .... ?
seriously, if you want a better 4.2, communicate with a bit of clarity. keeping your secrets to yourself doesn't help anyone, including yourself.
I have not had any crashes lately, but in direct response to what you said:
In either KFM or Dolphin, I right click on a file icon and it takes a minute for the dialog to pop up. Yes, I realize that there is something seriously wrong. So, I did a total reinstall of KDE TRUNK and it made no difference.
Does anyone else have this issue?
Don't know if this is a show-stopper, but for me, it means that KDE-4.2 is totally unusable except to play the games.
"In either KFM or Dolphin, I right click on a file icon and it takes a minute for the dialog to pop up. Yes, I realize that there is something seriously wrong. So, I did a total reinstall of KDE TRUNK and it made no difference.
Does anyone else have this issue?"
I've not seen this, nor seen anyone else complain about it. Is there CPU load when you're waiting, or does it look like it's waiting for a response from something and then just timing out?
This happens when an app tries to communicate with the dbus server, fails, times-out, and launches a new server.
I have had that a few times, but I suspect that this is an issue with the server.
Nope, only about 2 seconds on my 1.2 Athlon with a GeForce2 using KDE4.1.87 on OpenSuse 11.1
Time for a new computer I think.
Well, my Athlon is only 1.1 GHz so it is obviously a software problem.
> Does anyone else have this issue?
Not a minute, but a disturbing 3-4 second-long-pause, yes. The sames goes for drag'n'drop of files, where also comes *always* those stupid plasma(?)-dialog of the notify(?)-system, which tells always how stupid it trys to read the target, which grown into a unhealty lag and make at the end every simple action into a longmere nightmare :(
Way away from usable IMHO.
You may have noticed that some of the artwork has been removed from KDEArtWork.
There is a problem in KDEArtWork in that a lot of it was not promptly ported to KDE-4. I guess because either people didn't bother or because there was no agreement on what to do.
I don't know what the new troika that is now running KDEArtWork plans to do, but those of you that like and use that old and ugly artwork better speak up now before it disappears.
I can live without them, only use Plasma stuff ;)
Well then you aren't someone that needs to speak up, are you?
Note that if you use KDE-4 that you can't use the stuff that hasn't been ported to KDE-4 yet, can you?
You do realise they've moved it over to kdeartwork-classic? Or that you can probably add them through GHNS???
Won't help much if they aren't ported.
BTW, where is "kdeartwork-classic"; Google can't find it!
I know it's been said here (and I think on Aaron's blog) that the underlying configs exist for putting KDE4 into a "Kiosk Mode" and/or to just lock down the desktop in general, but, will a pretty GUI for doing it exist for KDE4? The is one for KDE3, it's old and un-maintained, but it works. Is there any future plans to include such a tool for '4, or (at this point in time) will the only way) to lock down a desktop be through hand-editing config files?
Thanx,
M.
Put in this way: all the devs want one, but all are (far) too busy with their own projects. If someone steps up to write one, they will be welcomed with open arms; if no one steps up to write one, then it won't get written. It's unfortunately impossible to be more definite with volunteer-driven development :/
Can somebody teach me to code? i have time and I would love to do something to help the community.
I found the Qt tutorials very good. And before that any c++ tutorial on the web will give you the basics (basically, I learnt c++ by coding my own pet project and reading Stroustrup's book. But style, you can learn by looking at Qt ;) ).
This will take you a couple of weeks.
Then, well... Good luck :)
And have fun
He could also use PyKDE/ Korundum if he finds C++ too daunting :)
First learn C++ (at least the basics), then take a look at http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2007/09/getting-into-kde-hacking.html (basically: Qt tutorials, KDE Techbase Getting Started and tutorials, keep the API for both Qt and KDE handy and find some easy stuff to get yourself familiar with the API's)
Thanks for the tips. I have heard that C++ is very difficult to learn but so was the first step in life. Nothing good comes easily so this will be my New Year's resolution.
Any good book can teach you to code.
"Thinking in C++" is available free on the web.
However, learning to write programs is not the same as learning to code and it is considerably more difficult. It is something that you can really only learn by practice.
Learning to use a GUI toolkit is also something that is not as easy as learning to code. The Trolltech documentation for Qt is probably the place to start. Someone suggested that I purchase a book, but I found it to be what I call an "empty book" -- doesn't tell you how to do anything.
The big hurdle is KDE programing. Although there are now more tutorials:
http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials
they are still a little thin, and the actual API documentation is quite terse and not well indexed.
I'd strongly recommend learning Python, PyQt, and PyKDE. It's a vastly easier to use and learn language for a complete newbie.
There's a couple of books I'd recommend, one free but one for pay. For learning Python in general try the free download at ttp://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/. Then to learn PyQt buy http://www.qtrac.eu/pyqtbook.html .
Good luck!
Thank you for the reply. I guess that's about as "bottom line" as one could ask for! :-)
Thanks, man.
M.