Kernel Cousin KDE #11

This week's issue is momentous as it marks the growth of the editing team from one lonesome soul to a whopping two people! Rob Kaper joins the KC KDE effort this week with a summary of the kde-games list. He will also be following the konq-e list which tracks development of Konqueror for the frame buffer (non-X) and the kde-promo list. This brings the total number of lists summarized each week up to an even dozen. Check it out here... (includes coverage on thesaurus support in KWord, fax support in KDE, and much more).

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Comments

by Justin (not verified)

Glad to hear that there is a drive to port KDE 2.x to Qt3. Qt3 will be everywhere soon anyway, and it isn't much different from Qt2 (can any of the developers from the 1.4 era say which is a bigger leap?), so this shouldn't be a difficult task.

I imagine this is to avoid having multiple library versions on the same box? I always thought it was strange how most distros came with KDE 1.x & Qt 1.x, yet Qt2 was included also to run things like Licq.

Is there a possibility for Qt to remain binary compatible now from version 3 and on? Really, what else could they possibly need to add after this? And would it have to break anything if they did?

-Justin

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Speaking of Licq, why or why is the Qt GUI interface so ugly on it?! I'm using Licq from the Mandrake 8.0 packages.

I'm an "micq" person anyway, but I couldn't help but notice that the Licq GUI doesn't look very good, and doesn't look anything like a typical Qt application.

by Aaron J. Seigo (not verified)

the main window of licq is, of course, themable. if you don't like the default, pick another theme. you can also change the icons. i find it very extensible that way.

as for the dialogs, etc.. it seems to take after the windows ICQ client in regard to its layout. and compiling it with KDE support gives those widgets a nice KDE2 sheen =)

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Ahhh, I didn't know there was KDE support. Mandrake should really include that.

I now realize that Licq is defaulting to the Qt Motif style. I had only forgotten how butt-ugly motif was! Or has Qt's Motif look deteriorated while I wasn't looking? ;)

Btw, "licq -style=windows" doesn't seem to work. Anybody know how to force the windows look?

by Sheldon (not verified)

Mandrake didn't include it because (I believe) the KDE support has some problems:

The session management crashes
I suspect that it has a fairly bad memory leak.
(Whenever I run it for a long period of time X crashes).

by Craig (not verified)

I wonder if kicq will be done before kde 2.2 is out? Does anyone know.
Craig

by mg (not verified)

Hello,

could someone tell me or show me a link what the Licq is and how it look like and what the micq is and how it looks like ?

Thanks in advance

cu
mg

by belochitski (not verified)

Check out www.licq.org

How about you post a story explaining why dot.kde.org has been down so long, and when you next expect it to die?

This would be a much more useful site if it worked more than 3 days a week.

by Rimmer (not verified)

I forgot to mention this in my post below.

It's funny but one of the biggest problems with running KDE (versus GNOME) is the slow speed of sites such as dot.kde.org and apps.kde.com. I'm guessing a lot of the problem is me living in Nevada and these sites being in Europe.

Maybe there are some good US sites for KDE software and news?

Rimmer

by Conrad Beckert (not verified)

>>I'm guessing a lot of the problem is me living in Nevada and these sites being in Europe.<<
Nope. They aren't any faster over here in Germany :-( (Neither there is a mentionable differende in speed between European and US Sites as transatlantic links are quite fast nowadays...)

Conrad

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Huh? FWIW, dot.kde.org speed is fine here. I see nothing wrong with the speed. What are the symptoms that you are experiencing?

We were a bit slower than usual when we were being Slashdotted the other day, but nothing that wasn't expected.

by reihal (not verified)

The server is located somewhere south of Chicago.
There should be a mirror i Europe, it doesn't have to be updated in realtime, daily would be fine.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Our hosting server went down and the owner/admin is out of the country on vacation. I finally got the idea to get in touch with his ISP myself, and the support guys over there were good enough to bring us back.

If I remember correctly, the server has a hardware/os crash every weekend, Sunday morning or so. So you could expect a crash then.

a crash every Sunday?
what the hell , are they running Windoze ?

by Chad Kitching (not verified)

Well, according to Netcraft, yes, they are running Windows. Windows NT 4.0, to be exact.
"The site www.sohosnet.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4/Windows 98."
(Don't worry, none of the kde.com sites are, though -- they're all Linux running either Apache or Zope)

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

The problem is not sohosnet, it's our hardware.

LOL!!! They're really running Winblow$ 98 ?!?!?!?!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Can't the owner/admin (Dre I guess) get some help?
The KDE League should support these sites actively, they are very important for PR.

Don't tell me that hardware fails every Sunday morning??? What is this, kind of a joke or something?
Which hardware exactly fails and why don't anybody do something about this?
I am really annoyed about dot.kde.org being down every couple of days. This is not a good for Linux community at all. ;-)

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

I wish people would be a little more understanding. We are all, like, volunteers here, you know? We're doing what we can. We care too, believe it or not.

We *don't know* what exactly is wrong. My *present* *theory* is that the RAID is unstable and bombs particularly when there is high disk activity. This high disk activity happens to be scheduled on Sunday mornings.

So, change the schedule to another day and see what happens.

> I wish people would be a little more
> understanding. We are all, like, volunteers
> here, you know? We're doing what we can. We
> care too, believe it or not.

It is actually a complement when people complain when the Dot is not there, it means that they really love it when it's up and running! :-)

We have had some (software) RAID instabilities at work but that was a long time ago and was actually caused by a kernel bug in 2.2.9 or something like that.

And as said before, there must be a reason for this activity on Sunday mornings. I doubt updatedb would cause a crash but I would indeed check crontab for scheduled events.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

one writes:
>So, change the schedule to another day and
>see what happens.

another writes:
>And as said before, there must be a reason for
>this activity on Sunday mornings. I doubt
>updatedb would cause a crash but I would indeed
>check crontab for scheduled events.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

My dear, but *everybody* wants to be a backseat driver these days! Next time I'll be sure to dole out less of this info/bait. ;-)

by Rob Kaper (not verified)

Just trying to help you with.. watch out for that old lady!

by Miss. Takeshi K... (not verified)

When i frist time read the tittle of this movie (Trun Left Turn Right), i thought it was some kind of Rord storys. Were they tell the person to make a left then trun to the right and then...bla-bla-bla...
then i read the little story lines about it, i think, umm..it's ok!
but when i saw a little per-viwe, dang..this movie hock me right away.
man..my husband Takeshi Kaneshiro is soo danm hot! woow! hahahaha...GiGi is pretty..i like her too, so, im GiGi! lol...
well..like i said, i've never seen a movie that are so realy listice like this moive before.
I like how they set up the movie. where Takeshi and GiGi are living in the same apporment, but still looking all around the world thinking who is their sole mate. And not notice that the person who is next to them is the one.
But the bad piont is that..i havn't seen the whole movie.
ohh..runny out of time..so..take care ppl...

bye,

Miss. Takeshi Kaneshiro (in the future)..lol,
miyu yang

Understanding lol it goes down more than its up. I think people have been understanding. Its making kde look like crap. It time to get your act together. Someone else will start a lde site if you don;t then all your traffic will dry up.

Craig

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Go ahead and start a new site, if it's any good, we will even announce it here for you! We *need* more KDE websites, so why don't you go ahead and do it? It would certainly be a much better and productive thing than all your bitching!

If you can generate more KDE traffic than us, than that would be quite a feat and quite amazing. It would also be quite a good thing for KDE, which would make me VERY happy.

As for your criticism, we're not Microsoft with infinite resources. We're a free software project and we work in our spare time. But I know from experience you won't understand that...

by Craig (not verified)

lol Well i have a dial up modem but i hope someone will. This really sucks to have the dot down 3 days a week every week. If it was so easy why aren't you up seven days a week? It makes it harder to criticize if someone says yes your right its a real problem and we'll try to fix it. Excuses especially lame ones just provoke jerks like me.

Craig

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

So who said we weren't fixing it or that it didn't suck? I thought I made it pretty clear that we were doing our best to deal with the issues? Didn't I also make it clear that the admin was away on vacation? Isn't he allowed some rest from all your crap?

And the easy thing was sarcasm, just to get you to try it for yourself. I'm on dialup too FWIW, doesn't seem to have stopped me from setting up this website. So why not get off your feet and get something done instead of giving lame excuses.

And finally, quit your damn exaggeration. This is the first time in weeks dot.kde.org has been down for so long. Get the facts straight or get a clue.

by Craig (not verified)

And finally, quit your damn exaggeration

lol Ok maybe i exagerated a bit. Your volunteer work is appreciated. I hope your efforts pay off and the site stabilizes.

Craig

oh wait hold that the site just went down again lol.

by Craig (not verified)

Oops sorry for the multiple postings the site went down again when i was submitting this.

Craig

Damn right Bojan, its intolerable, its a rip off, we are not getting our money's worth out of dot.kde.org...

Oh wait a minute, we don't pay for it, and the guys that run it do it on their own time, out of love. Now what were you annoyed about again?

I apologize, I didn't mean to be rude. I know people are not paid for maintaining this site. I just don't understand why for example www.linuxtoday.com (ok, this might be commercial site, but look at www.gnu.org or www.linux.org, etc) or similar sites are never down, while dot.kde.org is down every couple of days. Do their servers run on so much better hardware?

If I were a system administrator of a site that is down so often I would definitely look at it and fix what is wrong (or ask somebody to do it, if I couldn't fix it myself). Otherwise I would be ashamed of myself.

I agree with Rob Kaper, dot.kde.org is my favourite site, I love it when it works and I wish it would always work, because here I can find the latest news about my favourite desktop. Seeing it down for couple of days makes me sad. :-(

by Rimmer (not verified)

Glad to hear I'm not the only one who has had problems with noatun. The version with KDE 2.1 hung constantly for me. The version with KDE 2.1.1 doesn't seem to hang but still has some really annoying bugs (like not allowing only one instance of the player) I'm pretty happy playing my mp3's through arts using XMMS. Still I would like a pure KDE player... I hope the problems get fixed.

Btw... does anyone else think a small interface (with small buttons) would be nice for noatun? There is one small skin currently, but the buttons are so large its very unattractive.

After fixing noatun maybe they could make kppp stop hanging when pppd dies unexpectedly ehehe.

Rimmer

Redhat 7.1 with kernel upgraded to 2.4.4

by KE (not verified)

> After fixing noatun maybe they could make kppp > stop hanging when pppd dies unexpectedly ehehe.

A temporary solution if you have an one-user machine is to make /usr/sbin/kppp setuid root and then make /usr/bin/kppp a symlink to /usr/sbin/kppp. It is a major security gap though.

by Rimmer (not verified)

I thought the problem would be fixed in the next KDE. However, I'm not holding my breath. The only response to my bug report has been another user with a similar problem.

by Jono Bacon (not verified)

Much as I admire the effort going into Noatun, and I am friends with the authors, I am afraid that I have some points to make:

- It was said in the KDE Cousin that bug reports should be made about noatun. Well I have made bug reports to Charles and sometimes Neil and unfortunatly recieved a nagative response. I have either been told to stop complaing or write a patch. Well it is not a complaint but a bug report, and I am spending my time on other KDE related projects.

- The impression I get on Noatun is to make lots of whizz bang plugins and effects. This is great and I admire it...but to be honest...if it keeps crashing I wont use it. The core functionality needs to be stabailised first.

- I know aRts has its problems, but I dont believe it is the main problem with Noatun's issues. aRts needs work, but so does Noatun.

- Noatun is a project with great promise, but I honestly think that until aRts and Noatun are stable enough for release either of them or both should go. At the moment...it seems Noatun should go.

- Finally, I apprieciate what the Noatun and aRts developers are doing, and as a friend and a user I support them wholeheartedly, but unfortunatly we need to face facts.

Good luck. :-)

Jono

by Protoman (not verified)

Well I never get able to play music with noAtum, it crashes every time I open a file. Neither kmidi with dosen't find my midi driver (notice xmms works fine, even for midis)

Anyway the good news are:
http://lists.kde.org/?t=99104529200001&w=2&r=1&n=3

If xmms gets support for KDE I will uninstall all kde-multimedia package ASAP. :))))

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

To add a tinge of fairness to this discussion, Noatun works perfectly fine for me on Mandrake 8.0. So here's one happy user... ;-)

by Jason Katz-Brown (not verified)

I second this, using debian packages.

Jason

by g0 (not verified)

I use it almost constantly to play mp3's and mpg videos (I grabbed my vhs video collection with a capture card) and I must say that It works great.

I can count the number of times it has crashed on one finger!

This is with Mandrake8 and RH7.1 and Debian potato.

by Scott (not verified)

I had problems with Noatun and Redhat for a good while. I switched from Redhat 7.0 (where I had built KDE 2.1.1) to SuSE 7.1 with their 2.1.1. RPMs and my problems went away. Also on my work computer I still use Redhat. Redhat 7.1 seems to work pretty well with Noatun.

-Scott

by KDE User (not verified)

After what seems like years of using Konqueror, I just now discovered that the vi keys hjkl can be used for moving up, down, left, right on a web page!

Oh my god!! How come nobody told me this? This is too cool...

by Alain (not verified)

Yes, there are problems with noatun. It is less functionnal than Xmms. And I feel it is badly (ie too commonly) integrated to KDE. So, I can't use it now... Hope someday it will change...

I have a Html interface to call my mp3, either mp3 or m3u files. With Konqueror, when I put Xmms as the first reader, all is OK. When I put noatun as the first one :
- when I click on a mp3 file, it goes in the noatun playlist, but the current song is stopped. Aaargghhh...
- when I click on a m3u file, Xmms (the second reader) is called... Hmmm..... (instead of adding the content of the m3u file in the noatun playlist, under the current mp3 files)

Also, I think the button in the kicker bar is too light. It lacks parameters to choose what does a left click does, a double left click, a triple left click.. (see "Notify CD player", a windows freeware, very good). It lacks something as KNewsTicker to show the tags of the current mp3 in a child pannel extension. I feel KNewsTicker is very pretty... Something like its button-up may also be good to show the content of the playlist and jump to a file...

I think it is possible to innovate with noatun. Its presence in Kicker is an advantage to explore... For instance remember some bookmarks as in a navigator... A program like Xmms is now closed in his functionnalities, but noatun is young and may bring new ones...

by Asif Ali Rizwaan (not verified)

I loved KDE 2.1.1 on RedHat 7.1; I love RH because it doesn't mess up KDE (Kicker Menus, etc)like Mandrake.

Arts has improved drastically, and my stupid 16 bit SB sound card rocks with KDE 2.1.1 :) Xmms without Arts plugin doesn't sound good.

I really don't know how to convince David Faure for a feature called "Overriding Default HTML colours" like KDE 1.x kfm's "Use Custom Colors" (in HTML pages). He says 'Use a CSS' which I won't prefer. Why good old features are discarded?

by Øystein Heskestad (not verified)

You can disable the Mandrake menu from a pull-down menu in menudrake.

I think "override CSS" should be a feature in KDE too, but the problem with Open and Free software projects is that everyone wants their special feature.
kcontrol is now cluttered with options. The style/theme concept is confusing. It is structured from a developer perspective instead of a user perspective.
Why is 'Allow Moving and Resizing of maximized windows' enabled by default? I can't see why anyone would want this feature at all.

Notatun works fine with my AWE64 Gold in KDE 2.1.1 on both SuSE 7.0 and Mandrake 8.0. Despite functional simulartities between XMMS and Noatun, the extent of the XMMS application can't be compared with the aRts projekt .

by Jason Katz-Brown (not verified)

why would anyone NOT want to be able to resize a maximized window???

:)

Jason

by Troy Unrau (not verified)

lo jasonkb

Try this one on for size...

Make a konsole schema that is totally transparent.
Run konsole full screen.
Using the RMB popup, diable all visible items of konsole.
using ALT-RMB, resize konsole to your desire.
Kill all the icons on the desktop.
Hide Kicker.
Choose a really really nice desktop background.

Presto... you now have a linux console with a kick ass background and AA fonts....

Gotta love being able to resize maximised windows :)

Troy :P