In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Improved drag-and-drop of applets, and enhanced usability using the "Panel Controller" in Plasma. Grouping of notifications in the "Notify" Plasmoid, and continued progress in the "NetworkManager" applet. Animations in the "Pager" applet. SuperKaramba integration into Plasma is revived. More work on theming in Amarok 2.0, with the "Current Track" and "Wikipedia" applets re-enabled. A return to work on the Raptor menu. Initial steps toward a "satellite layer" plugin for Marble, with initial support for molecular editing in Kalzium. Copy-and-paste of vocabulary entries in Parley. "Singmaster" moves functionality in Kubrick. Support for searching the database by GPS position, and "fuzzy searches" (using a user-drawn sketch) based on the Haar algorithm (from imgSeek) added to Digikam. A "start page" is added to Gwenview. More functionality added to Beagle KIOSlave. A "quick reply" function is added to Mailody. Kontact gets a plugin for KJots. An import dialog added to assist in migrating from the KDE3 to the KDE4 version of KTorrent. Full support for the Windows platform in KTorrent trunk. Optimisations in the next-generation tile system of Krita. Work on loading ODF presentation notes in KPresenter. KNewStuff2 moves to Goya for handling and displaying items. Support for AIFF and RIFF audio file formats in TagLib. Initial import of Nonogram into playground/games. libkscan replaces libksane in kdegraphics. kdelirc moves from kdeutils to playground/utils. Phonon moves from kdelibs to kdesupport, "the never-freezing new home of Phonon". Read the rest of the Digest here.
Comments
Hi
don't want to spread FUD but I'm a little.. anxious about the state of Kopete in KDE4x.
Is it still maintained actively?
I mean, lately using KDE SVN trunk I fille dbugs against plasma, doolphin, cervisia, kmail.. all resolved in a matter of days or at least assigned/checked.
I've already filled at least two Kopete's bugs (related to the open jabber protocol, not a tricky closed one) and they are still in "unassigned" status, without a single comment. And they are two bugs that cause crashes/disconnections in Kopete, and I, as a user, have no means to debug them.
So, do I need to worry? Kopete is just crucial to KDE.
"I've already filled at least two Kopete's bugs and they are still in "unassigned" status, without a single comment."
In many cases this depends on the developers workflow, not all developers use the bug database the same way. Some use it more actively than others, so the unassigned status does not equal no activity.
And Kopete is one of those programs with a hig rate of bugreports, making it difficult for the limited number of developers to keep the pace. And I guess by nature some of the bugs are hard to verify.
Looking at the bug statisticks for the last week, Kopete does not look worse off than other applications(Bugsquad activity on Amarok and Konqueror aside).
http://bugs.kde.org/weekly-bug-summary.cgi?tops=20&days=7
"So, do I need to worry?"
No, don't think so. But the bug database for Kopete could need some cleaning up/triage, checking for duplicates and removing no longer valid bugs. I guess the developers would be thankfull for some help in this regards.
It's ported, which is a good start. ;)
Did you include a backtrace? That instantly makes a bugreport more usable, and keeps someone from having to ask you for one:
http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Bugsquad/How_to_create_useful_crash_r...
Paste it directly into your report, to make it easy to look for duplicates.
Its in the top 5 for open bugs, so I think BugSquad will be hitting it soon. The Amarok BugDay knocked Amarok down at least one, maybe more places... I expect a Kopete one can do the same. But you don't have to wait, if you want to help out now, grab a daily or an SVN copy and join #kde-bugs and say you want to learn how to triage.
If you can code, I'm sure they would love to have patches sent to whatever mailing list it is they use.
There's no backtrace... it's a disconnection with a "malformed packet" and nothing more. As I commented in the bug, I would be delighted to help giving more info if asked, but simply I don't know how to provide more info in this particular case:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163264
(ok, I've just provided more info based on recent snapshots)
Technically that's not a crash... it may be as good as a crash for you since its so serious, but its not a crash because the program didn't halt therefore no back trace. Crashes may seem serious but they are actually much easier to fix (usually) than other kinds of bugs (Called "logic errors") because of the back trace. A network error like yours is much harder because it involves a computer we don't control (msn or aol server).
This lesson in computer science was brought to you by the Hamiltonian School of Computer Studies, Ameritech, the Center for Bug Triage, and viewers like you.
Yes I know it's not a crash strictly speaking, although with older revision it did *crash* all Kopete, indeed. Anyway I think that Kopete, if compiled in debug mode, should give more verbose output in case of these logical errors, because maybe the devs are not able to reproduce my error and I cannot send more debug info even if I will (it's in my interest, obviously, I want to send group messages)
(Not a kopete developer but anyway)
Try getting a network capture with tcpdump or better, wireshark while the problem comes so the developers can see what's going on with the connection and all. That should provide all the info probably ...
Is it only me or does the plasma icon indeed looks similar to the Gnome logo?
I can clearly identify the toe prints and the negative of a foot's sole.
To me, it is quite similar to the logitech logo (I have it in front of me right now). More curved, but recognizable.
The plasma logo looks like Mercurial's logo [1], just with more colors and less reflections.
[1] http://www.selenic.com/hg-logo/logo-droplets-200.png
i think it looks like tom green.
wait ......
When I met you in person, I thought you didn't look as much like tom green as you did in the photo... I think you were shaved then... it was at the kde 4 release event in mountian view.
Yes, we took a set of logos from different project and tried to make one that reflects all the different styles of those projects, but merge it into one.
We also thought it'd be a good idea to get the message "desktop to go nuts like shit with" across the line, so we combined it with a cashew and a turd. The obvious downside is that the Plasma logo is now not 100% like the GNOME logo, but goes only 85% that way (same for cashew and turd, respectively). We hope to be able to theme this piece of artwork so that you can have a donut, a sheep or whatever you like.
The logo replaces files on the desktop and configurability to the bone in KDE4. Hope you like it.
heheheh, are you serieus ?
...is awesome. It is fantastic to see the creator of the very successful k3b go on to produce yet another winner.
Regarding nepomuk, I'm wondering is it possible to use a shorter kio name in the address bar instead of (or in addition to) "nepomuksearch:/" ?
e.g. "cat:/" or "kat:/" (in honor of an earlier effort) or "tag:/" or "find:/"
And would you say that Nepomuk achieves similar goals to the now-defunct WinFS and GNOME Storage? I'm trying to explain how it works to an interested friend.
Thanks.
The tagging system is the first visible to the user part of NEPOMUK. The project really goes much, much further than that though. So right now, you're able to find data by their tags. In the future, we'll also dynamically assign tags (for example tag a file as "attached to email by personX", so we would be able to find it in the context of that person as well.
That's all about the semantic desktop, all about getting the computer to understand how human beings construct, deconstruct, find and store information. In the future I hope to be able to find by the following queries:
- That file I received last week, somewhen in the evening
- Photos of animals (and finding my cat)
- Finding email relevant to some trip from people that were with me
- File's I'm coauthoring with personY
- Relevant bookmarks that go with some IM chat
- Emails tagged with some topic
- Recently used in Plasma activity Z
- ...
The key is to make the computer know about the actual content of data and its relationships. Right now, computers know about png being an image and are able to display it. They do not have the concept of content of the image for example, and they certainly couldn't say "This is a cat, humans keep them as pets and cats can be on photos" -> "Here's a photo of sebas' pet cat".
But the tagging is already quite nice, and seeing how it integrates with the rest of the desktop is awesome. :)
Thanks for your reply. This whole system sounds quite futuristic :)
It's a wonderful technology yes but it's far from ready. I activated it on the present KDE 4.1 Beta 1 and it almost brought my system to a halt. Programme start up, moving around in Dolphin, even scrolling in the Browser was as slow as a snail. Nepomuk was consuming up to 70% of my CPU!
I'm so happy. Firefox 3 is finally out.
Participate in the download day and set a Guiness World Record of most Firefox 3 downloads in 24 Hours!!!
_________________
Now a side question:
Since there is a Windows Vista-, a Mac-, and an Ubuntu theme, will there be a KDE 4 theme? Something that will make Firefox look and feel native in a KDE 4 environment?
-Max
This might be of interest for you:
http://blog.vlad1.com/2008/05/06/well-isnt-that-qt/
firefox 3 has always looked native to me in OpenSUSE, which I must say, OpenSUSE 11 is amazing
This one seems to be in an early stage, but looks quite promising:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7574
In the end, the QT-port would be the best solution, let's see how it evolves.
And there are projects to build cross-platform QT/webkit browsers as well, but they are all pre-alpha.
Last, but not least it's still possible that Konqueror will catch up, one day. I haven't tried the 4.1 betas so far - are there noticeable improvements in Konqueror as a webbrowser?
Undo Close Tab and session saving should both, I think, be available in 4.1.
It would really be nice if that theme would reach maturity soon. The Tango theme doesn't look that nice on KDE 4 but I guess it does on GNOME.
I try Konqueror now and then but it's not as good as the Fox - at least not yet. Firefox is very versatile, fast and flexible and it's add-on capability makes it so much more powerful than all the other browsers out there.
If Konqueror had all the features that Firefox has as a web browser then I would switch right now ;)
To me it is not about the features, but the stability. I still did not find any need for firefox addons. And I regularly use Konqueror on daily basis. But still: Suddenly the flash plugin does not work in konqui or javascript (including konqueror) hangs due to some scripting errors. Then I have to use Firefox. I am pretty sure that when Firefox could somehow better integrate with KDE it will become my main choice... Of course I see that progress in KJS and KHTML are made, but ... :)
Are there ubuntu packages?
Try the default FF3 theme with Gtk-Qt-Engine. There are versions for Qt3 and Qt4. They both even use the KDE icons.
Thanks for the tip, it even looks like a native app now :)
Am I the only who noticed that the last few commit-digests are ostensibly for "18th May"? Just thought I'd give a heads up :)
sorry for being off-topic. I just found out how to get KDE4's Windowmanager running with decent speed in OpenGL mode on my slow Intel 945GM hardware. Thought I should share this info, but found no place where to put it.... no wiki, no nothing ;-(. It seems a lot of users are struggling to get all the nice desktop effects running due to difficulties how to set up OpenGL rendering in a way it works with KDE4....
Anyway.. if you own a laptop with intel graphics (e.g. 950) try this in your xorg.conf:
Section "Device"
Driver "intel"
Option "CacheLines" "32768"
Option "DRI" "true"
Option "AccelMethod" "exa"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
EndSection
Section "Device"
[...]
VideoRam 65536
EndSection
btw... just testing KDE4.1 svn.. dear I was so sceptical, but ... OMG I'm speechless.. this is massive... guys, you're amazing. It's beautiful. It's fast, it's slick... everything else feels so oldfashioned now...
Anybody noticed Operas default theme fits perfectly with KDE4.1 ? ;-)
me getting back to alt+tabbing with cover switch effect... drool...
And less than 6 months since the release of 4.0.0! At this rate, it won't be long until there is nothing significant missing from KDE4 that was missing in KDE3, and after that - well, with all the new stuff in KDE4 libs and Qt4.4+, the sky is the limit. Seriously.
thanks really for sharing this info, as i am a sad 945GM user, i tried all thing to make composition works but without much success.
tomas, a stupid question, when you activate composition, did 3d games still works ?
You'll probably want to disable desktop effects before you play games, since graphics performance can be slower with them on.
I'm sad to see that KDE Digest has not run a story yet about the release of OpenSUSE 11. I can't help but wonder why?
Why, I can only imagine that their legions of paid editorial staff are all at the Bahamas!
Why do you think?
zOMG! It's a conspiracy!11!
much quicker in stories about Fedora and Ubuntu. I would expect considering OpenSUSE is one of the major contributers to KDE, that there would of been a more timely released article