That KDE 4 Again

Peoples……

I must say that KDE 4 is just great.  It has definitely come a long way from where it started so long ago.  I have installed the SVN code as of March 17th (a day before my great spring break trip to CO).  The desktop is fluid and the plasmoids are actually working pretty solidly now.  Also missing are the plasma crashes.  So without further ado……  The screenshot….

In this shoot I have have a total of 6 desktop plasmoids running.  On the left I have the standard analug clock on top with a CPU meter on the bottom with the flickr plasmoid running in the middle.  On the right side of the screen I have from top to bottom the microblogging plasmoid setup for Twitter.com, the RememberTheMilk plasmoid, and then finally a folder view plasmoid to highlight common;y used documents.  I notice there are a few problems with some of the plasmoids.  For instance in the microblogging plasmoid when I make a post it shows up on the list but then even an hour later it still shows it as posted just a minute ago.  The RTM plasmoid crashes when I try to drag and drop the tasks between the priorities more than once, the first one works fine.  As far as the folder view plasmoid goes, it is just great.  The only problem here with this plasmoid is that I do not know how to adjust the grid parameters.  It seems that I should be able to put three icons there instead of two without it going to the next line down.  In addition to that I think that it would be great if you could have totally flexable zoom in that plasmoid.

Now one other thing that I would like to see is some sort of layout tool for the desktop with respect to the plasmoids.  For instance.  On the left I would like to be able to align the three plasmoids by their centers and then even group them so that when I move them around the center align stays the same.  You could set that up so many different ways.  I think that it would be cool.  I think that I should submit that as a wish in the bug database.

So, if yo have not not moved to KDE4, and I know that you are out there….  Just do it!  You will really thank yourself in the end.  Anyway, back to my work….

KDE4.2 (and stuff)

Well,  it has been a while since I made a blog entry and it seems like so much stuff has happened since the 4th.  I will have to spend some time and make some other posts related to these other ventures.  Today I have hit a point where I am very happy with my desktop.  It is the past few days that have been very hard to deal with.  Lets go back to there.  Last Thursday I decided to update my SVN version of KDE.  Version 4.1 had just been released and I should have known that the trunk of the KDE SVN tree would be come very unstable.  When I got into work on Friday I was welcomed by a black screen, no doubt a Plasma problem.  In trying to debug the problem I inadvertently deleted my entire .kde directory.  So then to fix that problem I rebooted with a boot disk, ran reiserfsck to recover the removed files (which was unsuccessfully by the way), and then finally rebooted back in the next morning.  When I booted back in I found that my file system was just corrupted…….

What a deal, one small problem, to a slightly larger problem, to the problem of all problems.  I was forced to do a reinstall.  This took me since then to now to get what I wanted.  A fresh gentoo install using the paludis package manager and an install of KDE trunk from SVN.  What a beautiful system.  It has been a long road to toll but I think that the end result is defiantly worth it.  Here is a screenshot of my desktop.

Here…

What a nice looking system.  I am very excited about what is coming from the KDE developers.  I think that some of their ideas are wonderfull.  In the screenshot above I have just a few plasmoids running, the analog clock and then three folderviews.  Two of the folderviews (for my work) are on the left side of the screen while there is one spanning the bottom for my downloads.  I am running compiz fusion which is handling all the nice effects.  I know that kwin has its own but I think that compiz is just more polished.  You will see that I have no friends in my Kopete window (a great app).  I have the new firefox running with the iFox Graphite (version 3.0.1) theme running.  The background I got from Deviant Art and is called Conquer the World.

The end result is that now I am back up and running.  What a good feeling….

KDE4! I Finally Got There

Well, it is now official.  I am running KDE 4 SVN as of today and I dont think that I will switch back to 3.5.  My poor laptop has been compiling for what seems like an eternity.  I am running Gentoo with the newer Paludis package manager (this is a requirement of the genkdesvn overlay for the live ebuilds)  I think that it is safe to say that it is not yet as polished as the KDE 3.5.x series but it certainly has come a long way since I last looked at it.  There are currently two or three silly hangups for me right now.  The first is the battery applet.  Currently I think that it is showing the battery left in my mouse instead of my laptop battery and there seemingly now way to change which battery it is reporting on.  There is also no way to change the ordering of the applets in the panel.  But that will come soon (I see in 4.2 from the other blogs).  Ok, so now for the required screenshot…..

In this screenshot I have the standard clock applet and trash applet running.  What I think is cool is the KGet applet telling you what your downloads are and the download progress.  That’s right, I am downloading work stuff…  In the lower left hand side you will see three instances of the picture applet which just grabs pictures from a directory at random and displays them.  I have this set to change the images every 30 minutes.  In addition to these applets are two instances of the folder applets.  These are cool.  They allow you to display the contents of a folder in the bounded and color offset regions.  The one on the right has my work CVS directory in it so that I can get to my analysis code quickly and the one on the left is my downloads region.  I can drag and drop from there right into the trash if I want to remove something (or I could just do it the quicker and old school way “rm -f <file>” which I prefer).  Left in the center is the cool krunner program.  This is what pops up when you hit <ALT>-F2 or select “Run Command” from the desktop context menu.  Here you can start to type a command and then all the programs that have that in the name will start to appear so that you can click on them.

One thing that I do have running that is not KDE on the desktop is compiz-fusion.  I just can not get away from it.  I know that KDE4 has its own effects built in, but they are not as polished as the effects from compiz-fusion.  So, in short, for a fun environment to work in I can recommend for the non-newbie user KDE4 SVN + compiz-fusion.

All this is nice and everything, and I really digg it, but to be honest, the first thing I do when I sit down is open a terminal…