KDE Traffic #61 is Out

KDE Traffic #61 has been released, with news about KGhostview, KCalc, KRandr inclusion, Qt 3.2 requirement, KMail, KProcess, KOrganizer L&F changes (before, after2, after1) and more. Now let's just wait for everything but the kitchensync. Anyway, get it here, if you dare. Muahaha.

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Comments

by Sho (not verified)

Quality release of KT; much appreciated.

by Anonymous (not verified)

This is what many developers spend per day on KDE.

by Ian Reinhart Geiser (not verified)

Actually i spend every second of my day toiling at kde in hopes some user will beg me for some pet feature so they wont have to spend the $199 on windows XP...

No really guys its a joke, laugh :P

Please keep in mind KDE is a volenteer effort. People develop when and if they can. If something is not happening fast enough for ou whip out your C++ compiler and pet text editor and go to town. We always love fresh meat!

Cheers
-ian reinhart geiser

by Russell Miller (not verified)

And don't think it's not appreciated. However, that doesn't change the kde-traffic situation.

by foo (not verified)

"I'm cool with having that break. If a user is dumb enough to keep the config dialogs of two KMail's open at the same time, then he shouldn't complain if the second-to-be-closed one overwrites the settings of the first-to-be-closed one. I don't see a need to make that work."

'If a user is dumb enough' - argh, awful.

And also, the dialog boxes should be modal. I HATE dialog boxes that aren't modal - they end up floating around, pissing you off after you thought you closed the main app window.

It seems some developers are dumb enough to make their settings dialog boxes as normal windows.

by Bob (not verified)

"It seems some developers are dumb enough to make their settings dialog boxes as normal windows."

There are certain situations where it is quite handy to not have the settings windows be modal. Take the Gimp for example. The settings dialogs for tool configuration are not modal. This allows you to leave the settings for your paint brush open while still painting. When you want to change a brush parameter you don't need to go to a menu again. Instead you can just click on the already open dialog box and make your changes.

by Ingo Klöcker (not verified)

You cite out of context. We talked about the problem that the user might open several config dialogs in several different running instances of KMail (of course at most one config dialog per instance). It's irrelevant whether this dialog is modal or not because it's always at most modal with respect to that instance of KMail it belongs to.

BTW, Konqueror and other programs which allow several running instances already have this problem today. The user can open two config dialogs in two different instances (for Konqueror the instances have to run on different machines), then make changes in both and then apply the changes in both. I'd be impressed if any KDE program (or any other program for that matter) could handle this situation.

by George Staikos (not verified)

KWallet can! :-)

by Ingo Klöcker (not verified)

Even if two instances are running on different machines? Nice. Not that it would be difficult to watch the config files for changes, but this has to be implemented in KConfig.

by rjw (not verified)

GConf - Gnomes config system does this.

Freedesktop ahve plans to make a DBUS based config daemon to replace it, and use that in Gnome. Hopefully that can be used in KDE too. And DBUS can be used to replace DCOP....

by anon (not verified)

There are no plans to replace DCOP with DBUS either in KDE3 or KDE4.

by ac (not verified)

It's an inevitability. Mark my words that KDE4 will use D-BUS.

by AC (not verified)

Why should it? KDE could also found a desktop satndardization group and declare DCOP to be *the* desktop protocol. And then?

by ac (not verified)

When KDE does it I'll believe it. I also don't see anyone in KDE trying to standardize DCOP while the GNOMEs seem to do a lot of work getting their stuff standardized.

by fault (not verified)

DCOP uses a lot of QDataStream methods to marshal data in a portable way... this is simply not doable (easily) in non Qt applications.

However, even if DBUS is standardized within freedesktop, that doesn't mean KDE will use it. I seriously doubt that dcop will be replaced with dbus in kde4. There might be a bridge though.

by SadEagle (not verified)

1. It's easily done outside KDE applications -- there are even C-only bindings to
dcop in kdebindings. A true issue is versionning/format revisions, but that's solvable.

2. FreeDesktop.org is *not* a standards organization. It can't make standards. If
only Gnome uses something, it's not a standard, period.

by George Staikos (not verified)

Accessing wallets remotely is actually impossible, on purpose. The only way to really do that would be insecure, and would require XMLRPC or similar. This uses @internal design of kwallet though. The external, supported API is very rigid about this.

by Vigster (not verified)

I really love modal dialog boxes on Mozilla when the MailNews component prompts me, for the millionth time, for my nntp login and password. Can't go back to my inbox (at work) and grab the account information. If I close the modal box, the message I clicked on never downloads. Obviously this is the fault of a buggy app but give me non-modal windows any day!

by CE (not verified)

I think they shouldn't be really modal.
They should mostly behave like a normal window, but if they are called a second time, bring back the first window instead of opening a second.
Isn't that mixture possible?

by Anonymous (not verified)

KDE also accepts donations: http://www.kde.org/support/#Money

by Russell Miller (not verified)

And I'd encourage you to make a donation there as well. The KDE project is something which I obviously get behind and would like to see succeed as much as possible.

--Russell

by Apollo Creed (not verified)

About the KMail thread: what is a text index? How does it work?

by Ingo Klöcker (not verified)

It's a full text index which should considerably speed up searching messages which contain some given words.

by Thorsten Schnebeck (not verified)

Hi,

I'm just reading about the new google toolbar for IE:
http://www.google.com/intl/de/help/features.html#calculator

Hmmm, would be a cool option for Konqi

URL: "calc:2*sqrt(2)"

:-)

Bye

Thorsten

by Anonymous (not verified)

It's already implemented as "gg:2*sqrt(2)".

by Grant McDorman (not verified)

Already there:
gg:2*sqrt(2)
returns
2 * sqrt(2) = 2.828 427 12
If you don't like using the 'gg:' prefix, add your own via the Konqueror configuration (Web shortcuts page).

by Thorsten Schnebeck (not verified)

Cool :-)

Already a "tip of the day"? ;-)

by a.c. (not verified)

A useful shortcut that should be in konqi should be Netcraft's hosts.

Search provider name: Netcraft
Search URI: http://www.netcraft.com/?host=\{@}
URI shortcuts
nc,netcraft
charset: default

I use this to look up a host prior to buying from them. If they are running Windows, I will not submit my Credit Card.
Check netcraft ~ a year ago, and you will find that Linux was number 2 server by IP (number 1 by domain) and catching up (should have passed Windows by now).

Yet, MS accounts for almost all stolen credit cards.

I have been watching news.com/Linux today/Slashdot for cracked and closed sites. Whenever they are cracked, I check them out. All have been MS where they involve CCs except for a south african site (of which they claim no CC's were stolen and Playboy about 2 years ago, which was Sun).

Several years ago, I was going to build a site devoted to calculating the likehood of a theft of CC. The early numbers showed that > 99 % chance that MS site would be cracked. Now that MS forbides the mentioning of cracked sites (unless required to by law), it would be worthless. I wish I would have done it back then.

by Zack Rusin (not verified)

Search uri for Netcraft is http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=\\{@}. In any case I just added it to the Konqueror search providers and it's available in CVS. So nc:www.kde.org will assure you that it's ok to buy from us ;)

by Martin Hignett (not verified)

Isn't this the same as RMB|View Document Information? Or at least that seems to include everything you might want to know about the server...

FWIW this is one of my favourite new features in Konqueror for the reasons stated above...

by Zack Rusin (not verified)

No. On Netcraft you get a graph and statistics of the uptime along the server informations.

by a.c. (not verified)

Thank you

by TomL (not verified)

Boy, these two shortcuts are great - the google-math and netcraft ones. Thanks for mentioning them! I've added the netcraft one to my setup.

by Jan (not verified)

Interesting. I didn't know that.
I wonder if there should be something like this should be implemented
in KDE without requiring web access and without opening a browser
window. Alt+F2, 3*5, Enter => dialog box shows 15 would be cool.

by Dimitri (not verified)

Hmm why don't you use Kcalc??? Add a shortcut like Strg-c type 3*5 Enter and voilà.

Dim

by Markus Gans (not verified)

-
kcalc 3*5

Would be a cool shortcut

by Rob Kaper (not verified)

Because Google calculater does more... gg:345g=?oz and gg:21C=?F for example, to calculate weight and temperatures from grams to ounces and degrees Celcius to degrees Fahrenheit.

by dOxxx (not verified)

Is the KMail INBOX still an mbox file? If so, why is it not a maildir like all the other folders can be?

by Thorsten Schnebeck (not verified)

Its up to you: configure mbox or maildir.

Bye

Thorsten

by Jeff Johnson (not verified)

Does any sane person understand the difference? KMail should take whatever is the best.

by Ingo Klöcker (not verified)

KMail does take whatever is the best, namely maildir. The normal user doesn't need to understand the difference. What's your point?

by J.A. (not verified)

Maildir is the best and the default. Mbox is also supported and that is a good thing.

J.A.

by Ingo Klöcker (not verified)

Since KDE 3.0 by default all folders are maildir. But of course mbox folders are not magically transformed into maildir folders. Only new users get maildir for all folders including INBOX.

Quick "Howto convert the INBOX from mbox to maildir". Use at your own risk:
- Move all messages from Inbox to another folder.
- Set the default folder type to maildir.
- Exit KMail.
- rm ~/Mail/inbox ~/Mail/.inbox.*
- Start KMail. KMail will then recreate Inbox as maildir.
- Move all messages back to the Inbox.

by Frederic Jaeckel (not verified)

Howto convert the kmail maildir to mbox format?

How could I convert the kmail maildir's to mbox format?
I want to use a other email client than kmail. How could I do this?

Need help.

F.Jaeckel

by JT (not verified)

Try running Courier Imap pointed at your maildir then point your new client to localhost for imap and copy across...

http://www.courier-mta.org/imap/

by Wayne McL (not verified)

I have 1.8GB email and a courier IMAP server. When I tried to copy my mail from kmail across to the IMAP server, kmail used lots of memory, a small amount of the mail was transferred, and eventually (hours later) I got tired of not being able to use the machine. I tried again from a kmail installation on the same machine as the IMAP server, same problem. I got the same behaviour when I tried to use kmail to copy my mail to a local mbox folder. It looked like if the time was linear and the job was going to complete, it would have taken 30 - 50 hours. I'm looking for another way to get my kmail maildir store into my courier IMAP server. Just copying the dir's didn't work. Any suggestions gratefully received :)

by Rayiner Hashem (not verified)

Thank god they changed the default BG color in KOrganizer. KOrganizer has always been one of the uglier KDE apps. The color change, though, does wonders!

by Alex (not verified)

I have submitted a large number of bugs and wishes http://tinylink.com/?ewUbUepvKK wanted by many people and recently I hav submitted a bug in the View Profile function of Konqueror http://tinylink.com/?TUfocoAgHY

Can someone please validate this in 3.2. Thanks!

by Burrhus (not verified)

I think the pi-button and button-group proposals should be implemented in KCalc. I also think the rest of the features should be implemented in a different, more sophisticated calculator. I have even been toiling with the idea of doing it myself.

I have an old Casio FX-795P. It has a built-in function memory, and a databank. These are the two greatest features ever implemented in a calculator. They work together like this:

You have formulas in the data bank
SPHEREA=4*radius^2*pi
SPHEREV=(4/3)*radius^3*pi
MiToKM=miles*1.609344
PYTHERM=SQR(legA^2+legB^2)

You enter the beginning of the formula name and press "MEMO". The databank shows the first formula that matches. If you don't want that one, press memo again and it shows the second formula...

Once you find a formula, you press "IN" on the function memory and it copies the formula into the function memory. Then you press "CALC" and it prompts you for all the parameters in the formula. Once you've entered the parameters, it shows you the result.

Example:

Type PYTH
Databank displays the Pythagorean Theorem formula
Press
The formula is copied to the function memory
Press
The calculator prompts for the value of legA
Enter 3
The calculator prompts for the value of legB
Enter 4
The calculator displays "PYTHERM= 5"
Press
The calculator loops around and prompts for the value of legA again

You can also write up a formula directly, press and instantly copy it to the function memory. This is such a handy feature, I'm surprised I've never seen it on any other calculator.

by abdulhaq (not verified)

That sort of thing is best left to calculator emulators, of which there are some around. With the benefit of a GUI surely there are far better ways of selecting a formula.

I personally would like to see different modes for KCalc, e.g. Stats/Trig-Geom/Calculus etc., perhaps with an optional graphing facility.

abdulhaq