YWAM Information Technology - KDE 4 released - Comments

tried kde4

neo — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 12:23:50 +0000

I finally tried it. Well, I don't really know how to say it but I'm rather disappointed. First of all there had been many things in the System Settings greyed out for (to me) no obvious reason. Not that I expected everything to work perfectly with all the fancy effects, since I know that my graphics card seems not too good supported, but that was a bit unexpected. I couldn't find any screen saver, is that normal?

Then the design, well the buttons on the desktop are so big it's a pain to look at and I couldn't multi select item on the desktop. Overall the design looks a bit Vista-ish, the black panel at the bottom is just ugly in my eyes. The same with the menu. What happened to the good old KMenu? It's clean and easy to navigate while this new thing, you hover some icons and get new stuff to select. Searching through the programs took me a while to learn (maybe I'm getting old?), I simply didn't get it how to navigate that thing, how to go back. Maybe it's just me but I don't think that this *thing* was necessary. It really hurts me to say that, but I had a look at someone's Vista machine once and the menu, even if it was a pain to navigate, was easier for me to understand than this KDE4 menu.
Not that I'm against innovation or think that it's impossible to learn, but I don't think that this new menu is improving productivity.
BTW, the menus in the programs look to me like it's "stolen" from Win95. Well, that was my first thought. The Linux community might hate me for that but I can't help it.

The widgets, as nice as the idea of widgets might be, but why on earth is the clock in the panel a widget? So, I played around with the widgets, added a clock, somehow lost that think (well, can happen when you play with that) added another one, deleted it again and then realized that there is still a clock widget active. So, I thought must be the one I just lost? Deleted that one as well but there was still a clock. So, was I doing something wrong?? I deleted it again and then the clock in the panel (bottom left) was gone.
And to make it short, I haven't been able to figure out how I can get that one back. Add a widget and drag it there doesn't work. So, now my KDE4 is without clock in the panel, great.

After all I guess I'll stick with KDE3.x a bit longer than probably thought, expected, whatever.... The question I keep asking myself is, for how long will they support KDE3? Bugfixes, etc. How long until the KDE programs require KDE4 and are no longer maintained for KDE3?
Well, time will tell. But I hope it will be maintained for *quite a while*.

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo

need to dual boot

neo — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 06:53:33 +0000

Howdy
Ya, Mike, I hear you about the need of having Windows around. The same thing in our office with the accounting program. There are really just a couple or so Windows machines, the rest is Mac. Well, and my Linux of course. I also keep the XP on my laptop just because of web sites.
Anyways, can you imagine how embarrassing that is for our office folks to depend on Windows for the finances even though they only Mac for everything else? I have a good laugh at times when they pull out the Windows machine. But woe to me when something goes wrong with my Linux.... Oh well, but we love each other and we love to tease each other even more.

With your fingerprint thing, well just wait for 8.04, it's only another 3 months and then do it right away. Then at least you have it working for 6 months. ;)

With KDE4 having parallel installed comes one thing to mind. I actually should do that and then ask the Mac guys if they can change the look of their GUI as well. Ya, I know that's cruel. But then on the other hand, this is what we do in the office. Always looking for a way to tease each other.

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo

kicking win off machine and KDE4

Mike — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:16:55 +0000

Gidday mate / Guten tag!

I would love to kick win off my notebook altogether but sadly our base accounting programme (Quickbooks Pro) is win only and WINE does not seem to be able to load it (for me anyway).
I even got my fingerprint security and all the nice IBM thingeys working mostly in Ubuntu 7.04 but that all broke when I upgraded to 7.10. Sometime soon I will get back to setting that up. Probably break again in 3 months when 8.04 comes..... :-)

The resume/suspend is shakey to say the least so I need to remember to shutdown the notebook when moving around - if not I will anyway when trying to restart!

KDE4
As was posted earlier you can install the KDE4 core libraries on top of an existing Kubuntu setup without removing or damaging (I hope!) the older KDE3 standard.
I did that from the instructions at http://kubuntu.org/announcements/kde-4.0.php

And it does look nice! Lots of 'eye candy' and supposed less ram usage too.
Blessings from the north!
Mike

more ati

neo — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 03:02:49 +0000

Hi Mike,
good to see you and sorry to hear about your problem with XP. But what means "as if I had nothing better to do"? Is there a conference and they need you for GENESIS? I thought the rest of the time you are just going fishing?? (That was a joke in case someone didn't get it ;) )

Well, I'm sort of happy that I'm not the only person on the planet who has problems with the ATI's. Gives me hope that I'm not totally out of my mind. Although, I would be the rejoiciest rejoicer ;) if someone would have the magic solution to make these ATI's do what they should do. Anyways, if I remember right my laptops graphic card is even on the Compiz guys blacklist. So, what can I do besides watching YouTube videos about the power of Compiz. haha.

Oh well, ya, Windows... I keep that for exactly 2 things. A) for testing websites and B) for the rare occasion I want to watch a video on my laptop. Since I have this video issue as explained in the other post above. Although, I might need Win as well when I'm going to teach about web development in one of our schools here. The base server is running Windows so it would be good if I have the same program then the one the students are going to use. I guess.
But besides that? I just kicked Win out of my desktop all together. If something happens than at least I know that I didn't pay for the OS. Specially since your definition of backup sounds very familiar. So can't be wrong, ey?

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo

sound, etc.

neo — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 02:17:52 +0000

Hi Kevin,
here's the thing. The Mic itself is working fine, I get the sound out of my speaker, no problem. I just don't get it out through Skype. This is what I find strange. Skype gives me something like 8 choices for a sound input device but none of them make a difference. But I must admit that I didn't really dig deep into this issue...

With the DVD problem, well I have libdvdcss2 installed. I removed it and VLC as well, installed again, multiple times, but nothing happened. Maybe I should do that a view more times. Or even better, I let someone else do it. That reminds me of some go old days when I tried to get ISDN on Win95 to work. I just could get the ISDN card doing anything, uninstalled at least 10 times and tried again. Then my brother in law came over, uninstalled, installed again, I watched VERY closely. He did the 100% exact same thing and it worked right away.
Keeps me thinking.........

With the ATI issue, well as I said. I run the latest software, OS, Kernel... Try to get Vista running on a 2 year old machine that didn't cost a fortune at this time. My desktop is about 2 1/2 years old and cost me 400AU$. The Vista CD is probably scratching itself if it comes close to such an old thing ;)
I might not have all the fancy features but that's something I can live with. It was able to work up to now so I can continue to work without Compiz. But I must confess that it bugs me a little bit that what was working before is not working anymore, namely Beryl. That was the thing that I could silence the Mac ppl with. It just out-fancies a Mac ;)

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo

ATi and laptops/Linux

Mike — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 23:36:50 +0000

After Kevin's post I guess I needed to reply!
(It was good to have some time with you last week Kev!)

I have tried and tried and tried to get my Thinkpad T43 running sweet on Kubuntu and Gnome using 7.10 and some MintLinux mods (or should I say MintLinux with Ubuntu features added back in)

Well, I have not been able to get much working. The ATI Catalyst control Centre loads but I have not yet been able to get the sweet Compiz effects working. I do have animated cursors (?) and small effects working but not much else.

I must admit I have not had too much energy to dig deep into this as the Kubuntu side was the evening hobby project until yesterday when an IBM/Lenovo system update locked me out of winxp!
(Warning to you Thinkpad users - do not update Client Security Software and fingerprint driver just now. The latest update has successfully locked several users out from their drives! - thanks to NTFS support in Linux at least I can get my files out before a reinstall) Backups are those things you do after problems eh!
see forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=54792&highlight=fingerprint+enrollment+update
for my nightmarish situation. I cannot log into windows, even safe mode is blocked! As if I had nothing better to do!

Blessings to all
Mike

ATI, sound and DVD's

KevinColyer — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 17:38:19 +0000

Dear Neo,

There is little hope for ATI at the moment. AMD bought ATI, they have been very good at opening their hardware for Linux drivers. They announced that they would open the ATI drivers too. So that means that in a year or so some good drivers might start filtering through. But I wouldn't hold your breath. So for now it doesn't work well. That is not to say you can't get some 3D acceleration going but for Compiz etc, there are some high level functions that might not work yet.

As for sound - I have not had any problems since the bad old ISA days where you needed to shove a few magic numbers at the sound cards to get a squeek out of them. Pretty much all sound card drivers have worked for me. The key to solving the problem is to find the manufacturer's make and model (not always the same as the vendors make and model.) Finding a driver for that is the key. The lspci command is helpful.

As for DVD, you might need the libdecss library installed. This is the hack that unscrambles the DVD encryption.

Hope this helps a bit! I was pleased to see Mike Stevens is dual booting now into Kubuntu also. He has an ATI driver in his machine IIRC and might want to comment?

Cheers,

Kevin

ati and linux

neo — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 15:38:20 +0000

Hi Kevin,
seems this is our personal communication platform here at the moment. We could as well use email... ;)

Anyways, my desktop has a ATI Radeon 'something' and the laptop a ATI x700 (I believe). It doesn't really play too good together with Linux.
The desktop is without acceleration. At one point I tried the "Restricted Drivers" and everything was black. Gosh, I was so afraid to loose everything but I somehow found out how to reverse that setting. Beryl was working good on that machine, well as good as it could. I'm having a Celeron processor in there. Honestly, it's just not enough performance if you want to have all the new fancy features. But since I upgraded to the latest Kubuntu things actually got worse, Beryl doesn't work any more and even though the microphone itself is working (I can hear it coming through the speakers) but I don't get it working with Skype.
So, I'm somehow hoping to get that fixed with the next release. Hope dies last, I guess.

The laptop has its own issues. "Restricted Drivers" is activated but things like 3D seems not to work or I don't know how to get it work. No Beryl or Compiz. But at least the sound is right. I can't play DVDs, all players say that there is no codec to play the DVD and VLC just quits. Got some issues there with WinXP as well (dual boot). VLC plays on Win but does not play the DVD of any region code. Only the region code that is selected. Very strange.
Also when I boot Linux it takes forever, has a black screen while booting and at the log-in screen it sometimes messes up the display and all I see are stripes.

I heard that ATI wants to make sure that in future are better drivers available but I don't know if that will really help me. Means, I don't know if they will make something happen for the cards I have. So, with Linux it's better to not have ATI but I didn't had a choice. For the desktop I was happy to get "something" (only had on board graphics until I bought that card) at that time I bought the card. The system is just to old to have a lot of choice to upgrade.
The laptop was given to me, so I wont complain about that either. I'm happy to have all that. But I think I will not get all the power of Linux out of these machines in future. Well, in a sense I still get it. I run the latest version of Kubuntu. Vista would not even install on one of these computers.

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo

It is rather spiffing

KevinColyer — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 16:16:11 +0000

Dear Neo,

K3b is one of the hidden gems of the free desktop world, I hope it gets to Mac and Windows soon as it very useful.

OpenOffice menus are a mystery - why the icons are different is anyones guess. If you use the Menu-edit program (right-click on the menu) you can easily change the icons. (and the correct icons are already there...)

I am fairly certain KDE4 is using less memory than KDE3. Any this is one the first release. However, as not all KDE3 programs are ported I have to run that too to get the Network Manager happening so no speed gains in total! Programs start quicker.

As for the desktop effects, if you can't get Compiz working you might never get KDE4 effects working. However, the effects are built in and if 3d acceleration is working then you might have more success than with Compiz. Some effects don't work. Can't get effects working on the laptop I am using but I have a rubbish ATI card and they are not well supported on Linux. However it works well without acceleration. Some of the plasma modules are very nice!

Still roll on the new KDE4 world! I will change when it is more stable.

Cheers,

Kevin

looks great

neo — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:01:09 +0000

Hi Kevin,
I watched that video you linked to, looks really great. I didn't had the time yet to try it myself but I really want to.

What I can't wait for is to see the Apps on Mac, specially K3b. For some reason no one here in the office seems to be really happy with the CD burning software available for Mac. The one software is missing feature X the other one is doing feature Y not right, etc. Maybe K3b will be the solution. Time will tell.
What I never fully understood is why the icons for OpenOffice in the Menu are different than on other platforms. I still hope that this will get "fixed" one day.

But more important are really the improvements under the hood. Eye candy and all that is nice but I can work without all that. Well, in fact I have to cause I can't get Compiz to work on my computer. But that's not really an issue.
From what I read so far KDE4 apparently uses less RAM than KDE3. If that's true that would be absolutely fantastic. Everyone and everything seems to use more and more RAM.

Anyways, are there any words about having it default in the next Kubuntu release? Last I heard was that it will not be included but at the same time no one really wanted to believe that it'll be released in January. KDE4 had too many delays, so seems like ppl lost faith about the January release date....

Besides all that, if Apple is able to keep up? We'll see what the future holds in store ;)

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo

I tried it!

KevinColyer — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:17:26 +0000

Dear All,

Nice to see you all again. Glad to see the Bills are paid again on YWAM IT!

Back to the subject - yes I have tried KDE 4.0 and it is fascinating but I will not be migrating till version 4.1! In the Free software world the aim is "release early and release often" and that is the case here. There are load so of rough edges. But as a preview of what the version 4 series will become it is very cool!

Anyway don't take my word for it have a look: http://youtube.com/watch?v=YrFz7IxXppU

There is also so much under the hood of KDE. But here are my favourites:
* New Sound engine
* New Hardware engine
* Integrated meta data (you can comment and tag ANY file and then search on it later)
* Uses less memory and KDE 4.0 programs start faster (that is obvious right now)
* 3D acceleration for the window manager. No wobbly windows yet but it is well integrated, seems solid and has neat features like ability to make annotations on the screen with the mouse and built in screen cast capture!
* The Plasma desktop widgets have a lot of promise and look rather slick

There is so much there but... there are not all programs ported yet and the is still much to do and optimise etc.

I will be migrating but not quite yet. Let it settle down. KDE 4.0.1 will be better, KDE 4.1 will be incredible. Beyond that only Apple will be able to keep up!!!

What is also best is that KDE 4 is now cross-platform meaning the best KDE 4 programs will soon be able to run on Mac OS and Windows. I can't wait. If you haven't used Amarok or K3b you have no idea what you are missing!

Kevin

KDE 4 released

neo — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 15:07:18 +0000

Friday 11th KDE 4.0 was released. See KDE's announcement here.

Anyone already tried it? Or are you all like me and wait for a while and let the others test and download the fixed version sometime later??

Anyways, as far as I understood it's possible to install both KDE 3 & 4 parallel and you can choose to use either one at will. I might do that at one point. But not just know. I let the others test it first. Or I might be downloading a Live CD and will see how my computer behaves.

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo