Zugschlusbeobachtungen (Entries tagged as kde)

Bye bye KDE?

mh+blog-zugschlus-de@zugschlus.de (Marc 'Zugschlus' Haber) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 13:10:31 +0200

I have been using current KDE since most of my Linux time (having converted over from WindowMaker to KDE 2 back in 2002). But currently, I am seriously pondering to ditch KDE since KDE upstream seems to be wildly decided to kill KDE.

I have accidentally upgraded my desktop box to KDE4 because I missed putting KDE on hold before doing a major sid update after a couple of months. KDE4’s first regression immediately showed itself - the right display doesn’t get any attention from KDE. It just shows up in a grey checkerboard background, it doesn’t have a panel, it doesn’t have a menu, right click doesn’t work. It looks like the only thing one can do with it is dragging windows onto it.

With help of #debian-kde, I quickly found out about this bug in Upstream Bugzilla, which is referred from #529487 and which was marked as Duplicate of this bug in upstream bugzilla, which is one and a half years old and was marked as “severity wishlist”.

Despite the splendid job that the Debian KDE team has done to sort out the KDE4 mess, it looks like KDE upstream has managed to break Dual Head Setups for one and a half years and doesn’t seem to be too interested in providing KDE4 in a way that it can be compared with past versions. This is very sad and will have me shopping for a new desktop environment soon, I am afraid.

Maybe it was not a so good idea to take away KDE 3 so soon and it might have been better to keep KDE 3 in Debian. Maybe it’s time to re-introduce KDE 3 as co-installable packages? I would be willing to participate in this effort as a team member.

Which other Desktop Environments and/or Window Managers should I be shopping for? I’d like to have:

Dual-Head support (preferably with the possibility to switch desktops only on one display, but that’s something that even KDE 3 cannot do yet)
Shortcuts like “gg:search words” or “wp:search words” to immediately open google, wikipedia, the BTS or the PTS
Overlapping windows that are not automatically resized
A terminal like konsole which allows me to have different session in tabs and to send my input to all tabs
A clipboard handler that will automatically pop up a window asking me whether I want to open the URL that I just marked in a browser
Integration with the Debian menu system

The grub drama

mh+blog-zugschlus-de@zugschlus.de (Marc 'Zugschlus' Haber) — Sat, 30 May 2009 15:22:00 +0200

This is a rant. A rant which goes to the grub maintainers, and one that could go nearly identically to many people in the KDE environment or many other open source projects.

I really like grub. I really like grub 0.97 despite that it’s been unmaintained for years and not booting on two of my important machines. I should like grub 2 because its configuration looks more straightforward and for its better features - direct booting of .iso images, from LVM and RAID. But actually, I have learned to hate grub 2 since it is not finished and badly documented, and that its existence is already being used as an excuse for grub 0’s development having stopped years ago (and it being renamed to “grub-legacy” to clearly show that it’s the unloved child) - and things looks like this is not going to change any time soon.

grub 0.97 is the de facto standard in booting Linux, its most prevalent advantages probably being its capability of reading filesystems and its command shell, which allows booting kernels and other software that one wasn’t planning to boot when the system was shut down. There is a small fraction of people who still use lilo despite its disadvantages, for example on achitectures that are not supported by grub, if one wants to have the boot FS on LVM, if one just prefers lilo for non-technical reasons or on systems that grub doesn’t work on.

The last three systems, by the way, that I still run lilo on are Pyramid pizzaboxes with supermicro-made mainboards from 2002, which just refuse to boot if grub is used and the vendor just says that grub 0.97 is still beta and that they do not support grub on their systems: “Use Lilo.”

Grub’s last upstream release, 0.97, dates back to 2005, and upstream has stopped developing this grub release years ago. grub 2, the new way to go, had its first release in 2003, and the last “stable” release that people are supposed to use dates back to februar 2008. grub 2 is clearly a step in the right direction, but there are still bugs, and the most prevalent show stopper against grub 2 is the almost complete absence of any documentation. I have, for example, not yet found good documentation about the new config file format, which is a completely different deal from what we are used to with grub 0. The commands’ manual pages do little more than list the (obvious!) command line options without giving much more information about what the actually do, let alone usage examples. The documentation (which used to be really excellent for grub 0), has been “moved” to a wiki, which has some useful content but cannot keep up with the excellent documentation that grub 0 used to have.

Additionally, grub2 does not seem to have a grub shell which can be called from within the host system, which makes installing grub 2 in “exotic” situations much harder than it used to be with grub 0.

I am also quite disappointed that despite the grub upstream web pages claiming that grub 2 is under active development, the last release is more than fifteen months in the past while there are still so many shortcomings. The Debian maintainers of grub 2 are regularly packaging grub 2 subversion snapshots, which is a good idea in face of upstream’s release policy which is quite different from what’s being told in the wiki. I am, however, reluctant to rely on a development snapshot of a software to boot productive systems.

Guys, you cannot declare a widely used, well-documented software legacy when the replacement is still in a nearly unuseable shape and the docs are hidden in the helpful files named .c and .h. This is simply unacceptable. It’s a drama that the docs are still in such a pitiful shape fifteen months after your last release.

But, grub is not the only free software project that so blatantly scores developer fun over the needs of the end user. I know that it is a boring task to fix bugs and to work around design shortcomings in the existing version of software, and that it is much more fun to hack away on new designs and new code, but dropping old versions before the new version is up to par with the old one is annoying the users and driving people away to other software packages. This applies to grub, a quite low-level program, but also to larger and more complex projects like KDE who has recently pulled the same stunt by dropping development and support for KDE 3.5 while KDE 4 is still missing many many features and KDE 3.5’s stablity, thus driving people (back) to GNOME or alternative desktop environments. This “we give a damn about people who actually use our software, our compilers run without users as well” attitude is a show of disrespect for the user base and makes me very sad as this does indeed show that free software is in no way superior to its commercial counterparts.

Sadly, I do not have a solution for this issue since I know that free software developers are usually volunteers who do not have to report to anybody, and that they do not need to care for their user base. But I hope that people begin to reconsider their attitude and think about what kind of horrible damage is being done to the user base and to free software’s reputation.

Concurrently playing sounds still an issue in 2007?

mh+blog-zugschlus-de@zugschlus.de (Marc 'Zugschlus' Haber) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:27:34 +0100

Dear Lazyweb, which burning hoops need I to jump through to be able to listen to music played by Amarok without having to disable the KDE sound system in Control Panel before?

If I don’t, Amarok complains that it cannot initialize any sound driver."

Sound Interface is the on board Intel AC97 stuff of the notebook, KDE is set to play through ALSA, Amarok plays through xine which is set up to play through alsa, and two alsaplayers happily play concurrently.

Any ideas?

s9y als Partylog gescheitert

mh+blog-zugschlus-de@zugschlus.de (Marc 'Zugschlus' Haber) — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 13:00:00 +0200

Letztes Wochenende war ich auf dem d.t.r.-Treffen in Röhrenspring im schönen Sauerland. Abgesehen davon, dass an dieser Location kein Mobilfunknetz verfügbar war, empfand ich das lange Wochenende als wunderschön.

Traditionell wird auf dtr-Parties ein Partylog geschrieben. Was ursprünglich ein Notebook mit offenem Editor war, ist inzwischen eine von Stefan geschriebene kleine PHP-Anwendung, die den Inhalt einer TEXTAREA direkt in ein Textfile schreibt - was einmal geschrieben ist, kann nicht mehr geändert werden.

Da Stefan diesmal erst später dazustößt, habe ich mir ein paar Gedanken gemacht und ein Notebook vorbereitet, das als Partylog dienen soll. Dabei hatte ich die Idee, aus dem Partylog ein Partyblog zu machen, und habe s9y eingesetzt.

Die Idee finde ich immer noch klasse, aber sie wurde nicht akzeptiert.

Auf einem in der Firma requirierten Notebook (Compaq Armada M700) habe ich mit dem Debian-Installer ein LAMP-System unter Debian etch installiert. Der Installer ist inzwischen verdammt gut geworden. Ich bin wirklich begeistert.

Da es sich ja um ein offline-System ohne “wichtige” Daten handelt, kann ich hier schlusen: serendipity läuft im Apache-Modul als www-data, benutzt den mySQL-Root-Account. Auf dieser Basis ist s9y schnell eingerichtet.

Mit passenden Plugins ist s9y so konfiguriert, dass sich jeder Benutzer direkt selbst einen Account einrichten kann, und für die ganz faulen ist gleich ein Dumpfbackenaccount angelegt. Dann noch etwas an der Optik feilen, testen, tut. Danke, s9y ist auch hierfür geeignet.

Als nächstes gilt es, das KDE so zuzunageln, dass kein großer Schaden angerichtet werden kann. Dank Kiosk-Konfiguration ist das relativ simpel: Über ein GUI kann der Administrator Profile festlegen, in denen man einstellen kann, welche Einstellungen aus /etc/kde-profile geladen werden und welche dieser Einstellungen der Benutzer für sich überschreiben kann. Zusätzlich wird dann jedem Kiosk-Account ein Profil zugeordnet und fertig ist die Laube.

Damit ich administrieren kann, wird KDE so eingestellt, dass ich per User Switching (das man IIRC nur im Kontrollzentrum aktivieren muss) eine zweite, nicht zugenagelte, Session mit meinen Userrechten starten kann, ohne dass die Kiosksession geschlossen werden muss.

Im kdm kann man einstellen, dass der Login für einzelne Benutzer ohne Passwort durch Klick möglich ist. Diese Möglichkeit nutze ich für den Kiosk-User, und konfiguriere zusätzlich einen Autologin für diesen Benutzer. Somit ist der passwortlose Login nur dann notwendig, wenn jemand aus Versehen die Session beendet hat. Innerhalb des Kiosk-Users wird sofort ein Konqueror mit dem Blog-URL gestartet.

Bei der Einrichtung des Partyblogs habe ich viel gelernt. Nur: Genutzt haben es in den ersten zwei Tagen exakt zwei Leute, und beide haben den vorgekauten Dumpfbackenaccount verwendet. Nachdem Stefans Partylog da war, hat sich niemand mehr für das Blog interessiert. Schade drum, ich hab’ das dann schon am Freitag abend abgebaut und weggepackt. Dafür muss ich echt kein wertvolles Notebook offen rumstehen lassen.

Wenn ich bei der Einrichtung nicht so viel gelernt hätte und einen Installation-Report für den Debian-Installer liefern (und dabei auch einen Bug entdecken) konnte, hätte ich mich über die mangelnde Beteiligung geärgert. Aber man kann die Leute halt nicht zu ihrem Glück zwingen, und ich gewöhne mich irgendwann bestimmt daran, nicht mehr grundsätzlich der konservative Bremser, sondern auch mal der innovative Promoter neuer Techniken zu sein. Auch wenn - oder gerade weil - sie nicht unbedingt gewünscht sind.

my notebook pure unstable again

mh+blog-zugschlus-de@zugschlus.de (Marc 'Zugschlus' Haber) — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 13:02:52 +0200

After using the unofficial kde 3.4 packages from alioth for some months, I have migrated back to Debian unstable on the weekend, and my main work machine is now plain sid again. That means that I am running x.org and official transitioned kde 3.4, and can finally report bugs against the official setup again. So, kde and x.org people, brace for impact of bug reports and keep up your excellent work.

Implementing the kde transition on my box meant, however, uninstalling a bunch of packages that are not yet transtioned. kaffeine, my main kde drug, was easily solved by locally building the package against transitioned libaries, and the rest are only packages I can live without for a short period of time.

Maintainers of:

arson
filelight
hotswap-gui
kaffeine
karbon
kcd
kchart
kdirstat
kformula
kivio
komba2
kompose
konserve
kpresenter
krecord
krusader
kspread
ksynaptics
kugar
kwavecontrol
kwirelessmonitor
kword
kxmleditor
openoffice.org-kde
swscanner
wordtrans-kde

your packages need to implement the library transition or they’re going to stay unuseable with current unstable.

I am particularly surprised that koffice has not yet made the transition.

This list has already shortened by three packages last night, so it’s good to see things moving in the right direction.

One other nice episode: For my kaffeine rebuild, I wanted to build libdvdcss locally as well since I had an ancient version installed. I didn’t, however, find the sources for that package anywhere, so I asked aloud “who is Sam Hocevar” in the room without really thinking. Since I happened to be in the “Hack Center” of the Debian QA Meeting at that time, everybody was laughing hard when Sam said “that’s me” from two tables across. Naturally, I had a working libdvdcss and kaffeine a few minutes later. Thanks, guys! ;)