Kernel Cousin KDE #10 Released

Kernel Cousin KDE #10 has just been released, as usual it describes the latest discussions on the KDE development lists. Topics this week include a new busy cursor implementation, KSpread filter news and the code freeze for KDE 2.2 alpha2. You can find the latest issue here.

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Comments

by jliechty (not verified)

AFAIK, it isn't currently possible to have alpha-blended stuff in X Windows (such as the Windows 2000 mouse pointer, and the fade-out menu selection thingy, which I actually like). But it surely would be very nice, as the shadow on the mouse pointer makes it stand out from the screen, and be easier to find, imho.

by Alain (not verified)

Asif said :
> I strongly feel that KDE should have:
> 1. White Mouse Pointers (with variable sizes)

Yes, a white mouse pointer seems very important for me. It's psychic ;-), I feel that a white pointer is many more friendly than a dark pointer !

> 2. Animated Mouse pointers (busy, etc. actions)

Not important for me. However some Windows users like very much, children too, and it would be pretty...

by Lubos Lunak (not verified)

White mouse pointers instead of the black ones shouldn't be a big problem, I think one would just have to replace default X cursors font.
Animated cursors ( IMHO useless feature, but some users apparently love a lot of eye-candy ) are much more complicated though. X cursors are AFAIK just a two-color pixmap with a mask, nothing more. So to get colored and/or animated cursors some X app would have to simulate it somehow, probably with not very good results ( the busy icon lags behind the cursor when doing remote X, sometimes it lags even locally when the machine is under high load ). Maybe looking at how Enlightenment does its cursor might be a good idea.

We are the flashy icon. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

by Andrew Medico (not verified)

I have to disagree with this. Back when I only used Windows, I heard Mac users talk of the 'ugly white Windows cursor' (the standard Mac OS mouse cursors look, IIRC, much the the ones in X) and couldn't understand what they were talking about. After using X for a while though, I realized the advantages of a black cursor and came to prefer it. On primarily light-colored desktops, the black X cursor is much more visible (due to higher contrast) than a white cursor would be, and therefore is easier to find. Both Windows and KDE have light colored widgets by default and so a darker colored cursor is works best (on all the Windows machines I have to use, I've switched to the black cursor set and have had a much easier time keeping track of the cursor).

If people still want their white cursors, though, it would make sense to add support for cursor sets, probably in a way similar to how Windows does it - as long as black stays as the default ;)

by Alain (not verified)

Andrew said :
> the black X cursor is much more visible

A red cursor is many more visible !!

Eeeh, yes, a red cursor is a good idea... and less sad than a black one... I would like to try...

The better is to give the choice to the user (with edition by Kiconedit). And OK for the black cursor by default, it is the unix habit...

by John Pybus (not verified)

> A red cursor is many more visible !!

> Eeeh, yes, a red cursor is a good idea... and less sad than a black one... I would like to try...

SGI's 4DWM defaults to a red cursor, and it's one of the (very few) things I miss going from SGI to KDE.

I would really appreciate a config option for the cursor colour.

by Melchior FRANZ (not verified)

Just take one of the cursor fonts mentioned below, rename it to cursor.pcf.gz, copy it to ~/.kde/share/fonts/override and restart KDE. Some versions of KDE will overwrite it during startup, so you should either protect it
with "chattr +i" or select "Peripherals/Mouse/Large Cursors" in the Control Center first and then overwrite the font in the override directory with the new cursor font.

http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a8603365/cursor_white.pcf.gz
http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a8603365/cursor_large_white.pcf.gz

These fonts are just inverted versions of the original X-window font and
the large KDE font, so they are subject to the copyright of the original authors. And here's the
obligatory screenshot:

by Melchior FRANZ (not verified)

Damn, where is it? I mean the screenshot. OK, I put it on my homepage:

http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a8603365/cursor.png

by Steve Hunt (not verified)

I don't mean to be a troll. I really don't. However, are cursors the most important part of KDE?

by Thomas (not verified)

Be lucky you have a mouse pointer. I just installed Mandrake's 9.0 version and cannot find the mouse pointer; it was there during the installation. Any suggestions so I can comment on its attributes? Thanks.

by Asif Ali Rizwaan (not verified)

Like the console app menu, I would request for a 'Personal' menu, where the user specific applications should be placed, examples are:

1. Address Book
2. Change Password
3. KDEPIM
4. Task Scheduler
5. etc...

by Rob Kaper (not verified)

You can of course do this yourself with the Menu Editor (K -> Configure Panel -> Menu Editor) but I agree that (re)organizing the panel (and kcontrol) layout is almost a never-ending story.

The Personal menu as you suggest would be very hard. Is a file manager Personal? Is KMail?

But suggestions are always welcome!
(I wonder what happens if/when many third party vendors release KDE applications, will they all make their own menu as well?)

by David Watson (not verified)

What Loki does with their games is just put entries in the Games menu - I'm sort of neutral about this, because it would be nice if there were just a Loki Games menu, so that I'd be able to find those games in with all the KDE games.

Star Office, OTOH, has its own menu.

by Carbon (not verified)

LOL, I believe staroffice still uses a kdelnk file. Ah, soon we will all be using koffice anyways.

by Asif Ali Rizwaan (not verified)

The dialogs and application windows get truncated (go beyond the screen), since the applications are designed for 1024x768+ resolution. By the way it is not the problem of XF86config file.

Please see KDE at 800x600, the window sizes are too big and the dialog boxes look real weird.

KWord's interface also doesn't look neat at 800x600, since the window size is too small. (you can see the difference when you switch to 800x600).

The default kicker menu also look too large (except andrake's) at 800x600.

I don't like big resolution 1024x768+ for normal work.

I request you to kindly do small resolutions a favor :) by adjusting the window sizes and dialog boxes' text/widget arrangement.

Why run at 800*600 theese days? Must look grotty! If you have a computer that is modern enough to run KDE it should really be able to handle 1024*768 at high enough refresh rate.

by Billy Nopants (not verified)

Did it ever occur to you that 1024x768 is too small for some people. I.e people with vision problems. Just saying "Crank it up... your monitor can handle it" may not actually be the solution !

What exactly is too small for you? Fonts can be changed (K -> Control Center -> Look & Feel -> Fonts). I use 1280*1024 and the main font in Konqueror is 5mm high. I can read it from 2m although I normally read it from 0.3m .. 1m.

You do know that kicker can have 4 different sizes, don't you? I recomment you to set it to huge.

The worst problem I have encountered is that the Kwin titlebars don't scale with the font used in them.

by Chris Bordeman (not verified)

Sure, but widgets can't resize, and many application fonts don't use the system sizes.

This "it's you, not the program" attitude is not constructive.

Which of your widgets can't resize? At least on my computer just about any widget can be resized. Toolbars can have several sizes, widgets containing text (buttons, menus, tabbooks, treeviews, ...) can resize if you chagne the font size used in them.

I know that some widgets don't resize well for obscene scaling, like going from size 11 to size 32, but that shouldn't be neccessary when increasing the resolution from 800*600 to only 1024*768. I use 1280*1024 and only have to scale from size 11 to size 16.

If there is I a widget or an application that doesn't scale well or doesn't obey your desktop wide settings, report it at bugs.kde.org. I have done it several times.

And if you want to go back to 800*600 (or even 640*480) now and then, use Ctrl+- and Ctrl++ to zoom in and out. Then you will get a virtual desktop that is bigger than the visible part of it. You can scroll it by moving the mouse pointer. Scrolling works fast, even with my crappy cheap and 2 years old card.

by Chris Boyle (not verified)

I use a very small laptop (Fujitsu LifeBook B142), with an LCD that is only capable of 800x600. I wouldn't change it for a bigger one as I like the portability of it.

As has already been mentioned, kicker's size can be changed. I use 2 "tiny" panels, one on the bottom with some launcher buttons, a news ticker and the system tray, and one on the top with the pager, desktop access button and taskbar.

Fonts can also be changed for just about everything. I recommend removing any -dpi option in /etc/X11/kdm/Xservers, and having a .gtkrc (as opposed to .gtkrc-kde) that sets sensible font sizes.

Suffice to say with a little effort, KDE can be made to look very nice indeed on a low resolution. Here's a screenshot...

by Pablo Liska (not verified)

In the screenshot that you posted there, it is evident that certain kde widgets are just too big and nasty. I love kde's cleanliness and and i like the clean framework of kde. there are two things that i dont like: 1. compilation always crashes and 2. widgets (ie. the menu bar) are too big and take up too much space (even at 1024x 768)

in konqueror (and much worse in opera), i barely get any screen-space left over to see web-pages. compare that to my setup on windoze/iexplore (see attached screenshot at 1024x768 which gives me insane ammounts of real-estate despite having 6 launcher buttons, 1 start button, and 8 appletts docked in the system tray.

Kde could use improvement in this regard (space efficiency). I think it's one of the main reasons that programs like the gimp and xmms use a toolkit other than kdelibs/qt.

by Asif Ali Rizwaan (not verified)

800x600 is a Desktop PC's (windows) standard resolution, and it is a matter of personal choice to use 640x480, 800x600 or 1600x1280 ;)

If you see Windows, its dialogs looks perfect even at the lowest resolution 640x480. KDE should also be perfect at any resolution in displaying dialogs and windows.

Take for example, in your Konqueror, select Settings->configure Konqueror..., now at 1024x768 the window looks good, but at lower resolutions 800x600 (and lower) it just looks ugly.

KDE is not ugly :)

Then how come the display properies dialog in Windows 98 reaches below the bottom of the screen in 640*480?

by Asif Ali Rizwaan (not verified)

The display properties dilaog in windows 98 doesn't reaches below, i have myself seen that by switching to that resolution on a windoze pc. What about KDE dialogs at 640x480?

by Erik (not verified)

There is a setting in Windows that lets you choose between small and large fonts. I guess I tried it with large fonts and you tried it with small fonts. (Windows has other font size settings as well.)

For people with a notebook not capable of viewing 800*600 it is a real problem. I can't see the complete configure-panels of konqueror or the control center. They aren't resizable..

In kde 2.1 they fitted on my screen, in kde 2.2 they are to large and I can't make them smaller..

I hope the kde team will make a patch for this, so I can make happy use of kde again..

Regards,
Chris

Your right. Window's uses 'Dialog Base Units' to calculate the size of it's controls. The reason they do this is so there GUI looks the same under different resolutions. KDE don't do this, they just use Pixel measurements. And they use the same Pixels for all resolution, Which obviously point's to 2 possibilities:

1) They don't want to support 15 Inch and lower Monitors.
2) They don't know what there doing.

Hello everyone, i think my problem is similar so i will leave my question here,
i am using debian linux and i use KDE 3.3 now i am knew with linux, i got sick of windows, still though, linux is hard for me to understand, because my resolution in linux in 1024x740 when i have all windows and programs closed it looks just fine, just as it should with a resolution of 1024x740 however when a window is open for instance mizilla firefox it looks as if still was in 800x600 the same goes for the start panel text boxes everything, so what am i doing wrong, please kind people help me remember though i am very new at this linux world thing.
thank you Dario
and sorry about the grammar is almost 5 in the morning and i need to got to bed

by nuria escalona (not verified)

I have a program for car parts taht the program is bigger tahn the screen i tried to put a higher resolution, but my computer will not go as low as needed. Thanks

by Asif Ali Rizwaan (not verified)

The main menu of kicker, has small icons, if we could have 22x22 or 24x24 icons there then the menu will look more attractive.

Here is the attachment of windows 98's start menu. KDE has better icons so it will look a million times better than windows.

by Lenny (not verified)

Nitpicking: application icons are 16x16, 32x32, 48x48, and 64x64.

by Pieter Philipse (not verified)

Percentages don't matter,what's matters is that there is a choice, no single way is the only way.