Thoughts on KDE 4.4

KDE 4.4 was recently released. I’ve been a long-time KDE user, but I jumped ship after growing tierd of 4.0 and 4.1. Since I’ve used KDE most of my time on Linux, naturally each major point-release is of huge interest to me. (By the way: I simply refuse to call it KDE Software Compilation 4.4, because that name is just crazy.)

Because I use the best desktop OS/distro in the world, I’ve been using it basically since release-day after a quick upgrade. There’s certainly a lot to like in this release. However there’s also a few things to dislike. I’ll comment on the good things first:

As just about always, the number one piece of software that continue to impress me is kwin. Heavily “inspired” by Windows 7, you can now move windows to half of the screen. I actually have win7 on my netbook with this feature, but I never use it. But with a big resolution like my main-computer has, this is amazing. It’s like a crude tiling wm, but it’s better than nothing! I remember reading about a full-tiling-support patch being worked on, that would be excellent.

General look and a few plasmoids

Aside from that, windows themselves now have tabs. This is something that I keep thinking should have been done a long time ago, and not just in KDE. You have all these browsers, office-suites, whatever implementing their own tabs. So now the problem becomes if one tab crashes the whole program crashes. So apps like Chrome hack it up and make basically their own little mini-wm where each process is a tab. Well, if the wm itself could support tabs on a level such as this, I’m sure we would be without many of these application-implementations. But I digress..

The tabs work well enough in KDE 4.4, however this is the first implementation so there’s a few things I’d like to see in there. First of all I’d really like “ctrl-tab” to work for flipping through them. Of course that would create problems for application with tabs in them, so that means you need a seperate shortcut to go through those. That feels really awkward.

Next is positioning. I’d love to be able to put the tabs on the side of the windows, instead of the top like now. If I could do it on a per-container basis that’d be even better. Last, I think it should integrate with the task manager better; applications that are tabbed together should have the choice to be automatically grouped in the task manager as well.

One of my problems with KDE now is that it just seems slow. I have a Core 2 Duo with an nVidia 280 GTX card, but still the effects aren’t very fast. My fading transition (on fast animation) isn’t smooth at all. One of my annoyances with KDE and other DE’s in general when I first started using it, was that the Alt+Tab menu was so slow to paint, compared to on Windows. I’m not sure if that got fixed after a while in KDE 3.5 or if I just got used to it, but in the 4-series I’m certainly aware of it again. I want the window-list to be there the *instant* I hit Alt+Tab. Exposé present-windows is much quicker. Turning of composition makes it a tad faster (though not fast enough), but kwin’s composition-support is just so beautiful and functional, it’s hard to turn them off..

It seems plasma also liked how Win7 did things; the task manager has a crude implementation of Aero Peek in this version, and I’ll be surprised if it’s not a bluecopy at some point (barring any technical limitations), ala STasks. Also you can now right-click on the desktop and chose “next wallpaper”. It sounds really shallow, and I guess it is, but I like it. I guess that makes me a shallow guy! I miss “delete wallpaper” or something similar though. Perhaps even a “like/dislike” option! (Throw in mysql-embeded to keep track of things and we’re good to go! :=))

When you select “always group similar applications” in the task manager, you get a submenu showing the instances under the icon you clicked. I’d like this to be eitehr adjustable, or just a lot bigger. Like it is now the application-name is cut too early.

There’s a few new plasmoids and a terrible way of browsing through them. The online downloading service for new plasmoids is also kinda bad, or perhaps just broken; you can’t search for plasmoids there, though a search-field is there. There’s a lot of duplicate entries in there as well. When it works as it should though, it’s quite convenient. Plasmoids should also have a way of snapping and lining them up.

I tried changing plasma-themes and getting new ones, but just about whatever I do in there will send plasma-desktop through the roof and crash kwin, so after the 4th crash when my computer became unresponsive for 3 minutes, I gave up.

It’s funny how amarok seems to mirror KDE even though it’s not an official app; 2.0 wasn’t very good, and I still use 1.4, which works a treat. But I figured I’d see how 2.2 was, and it’s certainly getting much better as well! I miss “import to collection” and a few tag-editing things though, so I’m still on 1.4. Another thing is that the plasmoid-interface looks so out of place it’s like they made an effort to make it so. You can disable the view and then amarok actually doesn’t look so bad anymore, but it got me thinking, plasma is like Flash, only on my desktop. It crashes constantly when changing appearance, it doesn’t integrate that well (that is, it doesn’t follow your theme, you have to use a special one for it).. Well, surely it will continue to improve just as the rest of KDE.

None of these things really matter too much, but the notification-system in KDE 4.4 is terrible! If you hook kopete up to it and have a few friends, you’ll soon enough start pulling your hair over it. I don’t know, it seems they try to take too much of a micro-control approach. That’s okay for some people I guess, but I’d really prefer more passive notifications. I don’t think gnome does a terrible job at this on Ubuntuu.

The log-out effect

All in all, KDE 4.4 is nice and I like it. I bet most of my annoyances will be gone by 4.6, but none of them are any dealbreakers right now.. The small touches here and there, like when you log out and a spotligh is cast on the background, or how oxygen colors the application-bar in the top.. It’s beautiful!

Making Archlinux’s pacman go faster

After a while pacman-operations on my computer started getting really slow. To optimize the database and make pacman go quick again, there’s the aptly named “pacman-optimize” which will try to put all the small files in one physical place on your harddrive. For me on ext3 it made a world of difference.

Also, to remove old downloaded files, use pacman -Scc. This basically removes everything downloaded. If you prefer to keep the tarballs of the current version you have installed, and only remove old ones, use pacman -Sc.

Strange kernel panics

I don’t remember when it started, but every now and then when I got back at the computer after leaving it on for several hours, the keyboard-leds would blink and the computer would not respond to anything – in other words a kernel panic. The problem was nothing got written to any logfiles, so debugging this didn’t seem trivial. After reading a bit around, I decided to try adding noapic to the kernel parameters (this disables APIC). This was a few weeks ago and it hasn’t happened since. Apparently the problem is well-known, but notoriously difficult to fix properly since adding “noapic” is much easier for users, and it Just Works.

Making /tmp your own

When I wrote about keeping /tmp contents survive reboots, I really wanted to make *my* stuff survive reboots. TMPDIR to the rescue – adding “export TMPDIR=~/tmp” to the envfile gives me a private tmp dir, and programs like okular with temporary documents will now be able to open that tmp-doc after a reboot.

Wierd errors when running Nagios3

While setting up Nagios3 I got this error: (Return code of 127 is out of bounds – plugin may be missing). I couldn’t understand what it was because I could run check_nrpe manually from the CLI and other plugins (link check_ping) worked fine. After a lot of looking around it turns out (atleast in Gentoo) nrpe places check_nrpe in another directory (/usr/nagios/libexec/) than where the others are (/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/) (and where $USER1 points). So I just made a symlink and Nagios finally worked.

Another thing that isn’t pointed out very well I think is that servers are generally backwards-compatible with clients (but not the other way around). In my case this means running 3.0.6 on the server and 2.12 on the (etch) clients works fine!

Unmerging several packages using wildcards

Easy as pie (once you know it):

cd /var/db/pkg/; emerge -Ca */*PACKAGE*

Keeping /tmp contents between boots on Arch

Although dependancy on /tmp is a bad idea, I still want to be able to recover things like OpenOffice and Okular files between boots. You could probably set up where these programs do temporary storage, but this is quicker; open up /etc/rc.inittab anddelete the line “/bin/rm -rf /tmp/* …”.

This works, however old stuff is now never removed, which is bad, so add a new line there, something like “/usr/bin/find /tmp/ -mtime +14 -type f -exec rm -rf {} \; &>/dev/null”. This will make sure files that are over 2 weeks old will be removed.

And since you don’t delete the directory anymore, there are a few mkdir /tmp/… that will give you a warning during boot – just add “-p” to the mkdir arguments and it will be fine.

How to sync Nokia N73 perfectly with Linux/KDE

Get a new phone.

Hopefully Nokias recent opensource-efforts will start to mean working phones on linux.

Migrating from KDE3.5 to KDE4.2

First, it is possible to just copy your old .kde dir to .kde4. Some things didn’t work for me and anyway it’s a good opportunity to do some housecleaning, so I decided to try and import data instead (and keep the old .kde3 dir in case I need it later).

Konqueror: import bookmarks from 4.2 works fine (bookmarks -> edit bookmarks -> file -> import -> kde2/3 bookmarks, select KDE_35_FOLDER/share/apps/konqueror/bookmarks.xml.

Kaddressbook (contacts): export them in kde3 into one big vcard file, import in kde4.

Kmail: Use the import mail options. I quickly gave up on finding the files for the identities and just set them up again in 4.2 instead.

Kgpg: replaced by kleopatra. Just copied ~/.gnupg over and everything Just Worked.

Kopete: The only thing I wanted over was the history. Copy over the files and directories under ~/.kde/share/apps/kopete/logs/ to the ~/.kde4 dir. In Kopete for KDE4.2 it uses a new MSN-plugin, which uses a different folder for logging. I just moved the logfiles from MSNProtocol to WlmProtocol.

Akregator: I first just used file -> import feeds and found the rss-file under the old kde3 folder. Works well, however I have a few articles marked as important so to get these over I copied the Archive-folder over as well (.kde/share/apps/akregator/Archive), which worked fine.

The other programs just requires minor adjustment and I didn’t import the settings.

KDE 4.2 released!

Theres still things missing though, so I think 4.3 will be better for people who just wants things to work. At the top of my head digicam, krusader and basket, and a few I don’t use anyway like k3b, koffice and kdevelop, is missing. Surely not showstoppers, and anyway you can run the KDE3-version instead.

So some of the programs clearly need more time to reach full potential here, but first of all the whole experience can feel somewhat slow (akregator especially when browsing quickly through the updates) and buggy. Turning off desktop effects can greatly reduce the CPU-usuage, but some of the effects are just so nice to have, it’s hard to do. Buggy because from time to time rectangles will appear on your screen, atleast for me. This is only an issue with desktopeffects enabled. Use ctrl+alt+f12 to switch between a normal and accelerated desktop, that has always gotten me out of various oddities that (rarely) happen. I am getting a new videocard in a while, hopefully that will make things a bit better (although I think my 7900gt card should be more than up to the challenge). I just can’t decide between the ATI/AMD 4870 and NVidia 260.

Also, some annoyances here and there. Some shortcuts have to be set (vol up/down) on each boot for me. Some programs only support one set of shortcuts. Others (like amarok2) still use this old (?) shortcut scheme and try and get around it by duplicating shortkey-entries. For me, konsole usually starts beneath other applications, which is annoying. Amarok2 a few times just stops playing and needs to be started again to work. I used sqlite on kde3 though, and WOW what a difference in search-speed. It’s almost instant now, down from a few seconds before.

Anyway, although previous versions have not been usable for me, this one looks like it is. You are starting to get the kind of easy control over settings you have in KDE3.5 (I wouldn’t be surprised if 4.3 achieves parity here). I’ve had a seperate “playground” partition where I’ve followed KDE4 since pre 4.0. My mainpartition runs KDE 3.5 and I’ve been waiting for KDE4 to mature enough to make the switch. It looks like KDE 4.2 might be it – I’ve been running it for the last week here now. There’s some cool stuff starting to materialize here.

I think the coolest things so far for me in 4.2 vs 3.5 are kwin, krunner, pim-suite, dolphin, konsole and just the general appearance. Digikam looks like it will be very nice, amarok2 works well enough but it still needs time to grow up. The same goes for the akonadi/decibel technologies.

Congrats and thank you to all the involved!