KDE 4.3

I made the Kubuntu Jaunty upgrade to KDE 4.3 this weekend. Other than the taskbar looking nicer, and having to reconfigure everything back to the way I like it, I didn’t really notice any spectacular difference yet. The upgrade was also not smooth. I had to remove kdebase-workspace-dev to get the dist-upgrade to complete successfully. Your mileage may vary.

There’s some new options for the desktop wallpaper setting, but “Virus” is pretty lame, and “Weather” does not seem to work at all. “Mandlebrot” is pretty cool, though, if you don’t like to put actual photos on your desktop.

The “Info” icon now has a permanent home on the taskbar, instead of appearing and disappearing based on whether or not you have info to see.

Some new plasma widgets (or at least, ones I don’t remember seeing before) like Pastebin and Remember The Milk.

But all in all, I have no idea why other people are raving about this release.

Oh, and the KDE advanced settings for active and inactive transparency levels on a window *still* doesn’t work…

A Jaunty KDE4 update

A while back I posted that I was giving pre-alpha Jaunty Jackalope a try. I don’t think I ever posted the end result (a short while after Jaunty went beta, the Nvidia driver quit working, so I abandoned ship). I tried Alpha 5 a week or so ago, and couldn’t get past the login screen, but I installed Beta 1 on Monday, and it rocks! Jaunty (Kubuntu, 64-bit) is now my primary box. Part of what makes Jaunty great for me is that the version of KDE4 it uses is far superior to the version Intrepid used (which was so craptastic that I switched to Fluxbox for a few months). I love the fact that I can finally, after years of waiting, use a 64-bit OS without having to tweak anything to make it work.

So I want to also update my opinion of KDE4. Going back to my previous post outlining it’s shortcomings and lack of anything to recommend it…

1. The desktop wallpaper. I can no longer have “centered maxpect” as
   an option. This means that all my pictures too small to reach the edges
   of my monitor stay too small unless I scale them (distorts the image
   aspect ratio) or “scale & crop” them (make them reach all 4 edges,
   and possibly some of the picture is off-screen). Highly annoying, but
   not a show stopper.
2. Rotating (slideshow) wallpaper has no option for how to display the
   image at all. If I want to change from centered to scaled, I have to
   display a single wallpaper picture, make the change I want, then go
   back to the slideshow. Again, an annoyance.
3. Advanced->Special Window Settings->Preferences allows you to
   choose active and inactive opacity levels. Sweet. Too bad it doesn’t
   work at all.
4. Under KDE3, my keyboard volume controls would visibly affect the
   sound level (a graphic would pop up center-screen showing the volume
   level). Gone. In fact, the volume controls don’t seem to affect the
   system sound anymore. They don’t work on Amarok. They do work on
   mplayer.
5. Most of the apps are still KDE3 apps.
6. Most of the plasma widgets are just plain lame (so far).
7. When I click on Logout, Restart, or Shutdown from the K menu, it
   pops up a window asking me if I want to Logout, Restart, or Shutdown.
   This is maddening. I just got done telling you what I wanted 0.1
   seconds ago. Why are you asking me again?
8. The new default K menu blows. Hard. I want my old-style K menu back. They’ve made it super-easy to get it back now.
9. I can add the old-style K menu to the taskbar as a widget, but it
   appears on the right-hand side of the bar instead of the left. There is
   no way to change it.
10. Konqueror is in my “Favorites” on the menu, despite me never using it. Firefox is not, despite me using it all the damned time.

Somebody explained #10 to me, and I guess it makes sense, but I expect something called “Favorites” to automatically populate with the programs I actually use (you know… like that Microsoft OS does with it’s start menu). If I have to manually populate the contents of “Favorites”, what’s the point? I’m just editing the menu…

Now, what do I like about KDE4? Hmm. Hard to say, still. There’s an improved IRC client (Quassel vs Konversation), but I’m not sure if that’s a KDE4 change. More likely a Kubuntu change. The notifications are nice. The Device Notifier is super-nifty. But overall I’m just happy to be getting back to a usable desktop environment. Overall, 4 finally equals 3.5 but doesn’t really surpass it in my mind.

Jauntily Jumping with Jackalopes

After hearing from my friend, KE9Vee, that 64-bit Intrepid is actually usable (as opposed to every other 64-bit OS I’ve ever tried), I decided to do a second Intrepid install, to take advantage of the full capacity of my CPU for the first time ever. And I went with Xubuntu since I’m disaffected with KDE4, and still really don’t like Gnome. But since I couldn’t really tell the difference between XFCE and Gnome, I installed Openbox. It’s what all the cool kids seem to be using, and should be similar to the Fluxbox I used way-back-when (and recently reacquainted myself with).

Shortly after that, I decided that since I’m being all cutting-edge and trying-something-new, I might as well hook up with the alpha-quality Jaunty Jackalope release of Ubuntu. The UDS for this release just ended, so I expect to see rapid changes on this desktop. I’ve changed all my “intrepid” to “jaunty” in /etc/apt/sources.list (with the exception of 5-a-day, which doesn’t have a jaunty repo yet), and I’m running a dist-upgrade in a term window as I write this. Wish me luck. I just really hope the USB optical mouse problem I’ve been having in Intrepid doesn’t follow me to Jaunty.

Update: Crap, I’m scared… dist-upgrade just informed me Jaunty uses LiLo??!? I thought that piece of software was outdated and discarded. I’ve been on Grub so long I can’t recall what LiLo was like. Crossing my fingers this doesn’t hose my whole box…

Intrepid Diablo woes

The most annoying thing to happen to me since upgrading to Intrepid (aside from losing KDE 3.5 to the inferior KDE 4, and having Intrepid somehow trash my Hardy installation) is that Diablo II via WINE no longer works right. If I boot under KDE, I get no sound after the first two intro movies (i.e. none during gameplay). If I boot under Gnome, I get sound, but the game is not stable and keeps crashing. Furthermore, if the game locks up under KDE, the next time I log in to KDE my screen is briefly at the proper (1680×1050) resolution, but then changes to Diablo’s 640×480. Easy enough to correct, but very annoying. I hate upgrades that are worse than the previous version, and so far I’m not really finding anything to particularly recommend Intrepid. I would advise anybody to stick with Hardy at this point.

Head-butted by an Ibex

Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) was launched on Thursday. I downloaded the torrent Thursday night and had some time to install it on Saturday. Since KDE 3.5 is gone from Ubuntu with this version, I was hesitant about doing an upgrade. Instead, I decided to wipe a spare hard drive and install there. Completely separate hardware for a completely separate installation, leaving my rock-solid Hardy Kubuntu intact in case things go South.

So I popped in the Kubuntu 8.10 LiveCD and rebooted. Roughly 80% of the way through the boot process (Ubuntu hides what’s going on behind a splash screen, so I can’t say for sure), my screen goes black. Nothing happens for a while, then my screen goes black & white… No graphics per se, just a bunch of seemingly random white lines are drawn on my otherwise black screen. It stays that way. Kubuntu disk FAIL.

Luckily, I anticipated that I would (still) not like KDE4, and so I also downloaded and burned Ubuntu 8.10. Swap CDs and reboot. Ubuntu comes up, everything looks good, so I install. Reboot after installation, install some KDE apps I can’t live without (Digikam, K3b, Konversation), install updates, install Nvidia graphics driver, reboot. All is reasonably good. I’m using pidgin again, and liking Pidgin’s IRC enough that I decide I don’t need Konversation. I leave the computer for awhile, satisfied with my new system.

When I return, the screen is in power saving mode. I move the mouse and…. I move the mouse and…. I click a mouse button and…. I hit a key on my keyboard and the screen comes back to life. My USB optical mouse is dead. Was working before, now nothing. Now I *can* navigate with just a keyboard, but frankly that’s a pain in the ass. So I reboot. I figure, as long as I’m rebooting, let’s go back to Hardy, because I miss my KDE 3.5 already, and also I don’t have time right now to mess around with installing other things, like medibuntu codecs.

Hardy says there’s a graphics problem. WTF? I haven’t changed anything in Hardy. I haven’t even changed anything on this physical drive. How is this possible? Click the button to reconfigure, and my Hardy comes up… in 640×480 graphics mode. Ugh. Barely usable. In fact, not usable with certain programs (DVD::Rip, I’m looking at you here). I struggle with it a bit, but to no avail. Uninstalling and reinstalling the nvidia-glx-new doesn’t help. Nothing helps. I’ve lost my rock-solid standby system. I’m forced to deal with the Ibex.

So that’s where I’m at right now. Haven’t had a repeat of the USB mouse dying yet, but Firefox is running slow. Especially when I try to save a file. And I’m still baffled how a separate install on a separate physical device could possibly have affected my Hardy. Installed the kubuntu-desktop package before bed last night and will see tonight if KDE4 is any more usable than Gnome.

Google Maps: Memory hog?

I have 3GB of RAM installed and 1GB of swap space allocated. I should never even use any of that swap, much less all of it. In fact, I rarely exceed 1GB of memory usage unless I’m playing a video game (while leaving all my other apps open). So I was a bit surprised today to look at my htop and see that I’m using 1282 MB of RAM and 839 MB of swap. Yikes! In a moment of pseudo-panic, I started closing all my apps down that I thought might be hogs. First Twhirl, then Kopete, Amarok, Ktorrent, Konversation. No noticable change. Killed Firefox, which I know is usually the biggest memory hog short of the games. Still not budging. So then I did the smart thing (when all else fails…) and sorted my htop process list by memory usage. Just one process is the problem:

/usr/bin/X -br -nolisten tcp :0 vt7 -auth /var/run/xauth/A:0-g8tCHi

This arcane little beasty is using 1094 MB res (1993 MB virt) and 0.0% CPU. So now my question is: WTF? What is this, why is it sucking memory? Why am I using swap at all when my RAM is only about 1/3 full? Why? Time to hit Google…
Disappointingly, it seems this bug was reported a long time ago and called “not a bug”. Also found a read-only thread about people having a problem. Digging deeper, I found more bug reports. Seems to be an issue with browsers looking at Google Maps? Will have to test that out.

Gearing up for OLF

Ohio LinuxFest 2008 is coming up in October, which sounds farther away than it is. I’ve never been to OLF before, but I’ve heard great things about it. There’s a “free” admission, which I will probably take advantage of since I’m looking at $150 or more in gas and hotel fees (and that’s with sharing a ride and sharing a room). On the plus side, there’s going to be a lot of local Ubuntu folk there. Jono Bacon is speaking again (I enjoyed his presentation at Penguicon earlier this year), and so is Zonker. Looking forward to a good geeky time, and maybe get some more people doing 5-a-day for Ubuntu (which I’ve been slacking on myself until last night). If you’re going, and want to meet up, give me a shout here in the comments, or the Friday night of OLF on Identica.

When 3.5 > 4.0

I love the KDE desktop for Linux. I’ve been using it ever since 3.5 came out. Maybe even 3.4. I don’t remember. So I was really, really looking forward to 4.0 and all the promised excellence it would contain. Then it came out, and was essentially one big shipment of fail. Developers were quick to point out that 4.0 wasn’t really a finished product. They wanted to get people using it so that they could get feedback. Unfortunately, in the rest of the computing world, 4.0 is a finished release. Sneaking a beta on to people’s desktops by not calling it a beta was a poor decision that put a lot of users off. In fact, I found it completely unusable, with little other than some pretty bling to recommend it (and a boatload of missing functionality to disrecommend it). But every so often I try again (a package updated… maybe everything’s better now?). So today I will enumerate the things I still dislike as of 4.0.3:

1. The desktop wallpaper. I can no longer have “centered maxpect” as an option. This means that all my pictures too small to reach the edges of my monitor stay too small unless I scale them (distorts the image aspect ratio) or “scale & crop” them (make them reach all 4 edges, and possibly some of the picture is off-screen). Highly annoying, but not a show stopper.
2. Rotating (slideshow) wallpaper has no option for how to display the image at all. If I want to change from centered to scaled, I have to display a single wallpaper picture, make the change I want, then go back to the slideshow. Again, an annoyance.
3. Advanced->Special Window Settings->Preferences allows you to choose active and inactive opacity levels. Sweet. Too bad it doesn’t work at all.
4. Under KDE3, my keyboard volume controls would visibly affect the sound level (a graphic would pop up center-screen showing the volume level). Gone. In fact, the volume controls don’t seem to affect the system sound anymore. They don’t work on Amarok. They do work on mplayer.
5. Most of the apps are still KDE3 apps.
6. Most of the plasma widgets are just plain lame (so far).
7. When I click on Logout, Restart, or Shutdown from the K menu, it pops up a window asking me if I want to Logout, Restart, or Shutdown. This is maddening. I just got done telling you what I wanted 0.1 seconds ago. Why are you asking me again?
8. The new default K menu blows. Hard. I want my old-style K menu back.
9. I can add the old-style K menu to the taskbar as a widget, but it appears on the right-hand side of the bar instead of the left. There is no way to change it.
10. Konqueror is in my “Favorites” on the menu, despite me never using it. Firefox is not, despite me using it all the damned time.

I think that’s it for now. It’s mostly minor annoyances (or major annoyances), but when the list of annoyances hits 10 within a half hour of use, and the number of things I like (1: ooh, pretty; 2: Kopete for KDE4) is equally minor, and tops out at 2 even after many days of use, the answer is clear. KDE 3.5 > KDE 4.

UPDATE: Now on 4.0.80 (4.1b1), all 10 of these issues are still present, and I see no new features worth mentioning.

Tweek it

I’ve been on Twitter for a few months now. I have to say, I got addicted. But I’ve also been complaining since almost the first day about the lack of a good Linux client. Tweets to SMS on my cell are nice, except I’m following too many people who like to talk a lot, and I just can’t keep up. The IM client is nice, and works through Jabber/GoogleTalk, but sometimes it just doesn’t work at all, and that is incredibly annoying.

So, being an Open Source kind of guy, I decided I would build the best, most fully-featured Twitter client around (and build it for my beloved KDE, and launch it first on Kubuntu). I’ve been saying that for well over a month. Today, I finally started. Sort of. Not a line of code yet, but I registered the project on Launchpad, I created a couple blueprints of some of my ideas for what the features should be (with more to come!), and I twittered about it and even got my first volunteer to help with the code work. Depending on how things go for me this weekend, I may even get started on the real work.

Help is sorely needed in one domain: artwork! At the very least, I want a cool icon for use in the start menu, on the task bar, etc. Anybody with desire and at least more talent than me (which should be easy) is welcome to chip in.

Gutsy to Hardy upgrade

I installed Gutsy on my test partition, installed the apps I actually use, then copied over my config files and whatnot from my stable partition to make an almost-clone of stable. Changed the fstab to get rid of the horrid UUID that I hate, and then I did s/gutsy/hardy/g on sources.list and dist-upgraded to Hardy. On reboot, no partitions got mounted by fstab. What used to be hda, hdb, and hdc is now sda, sdb, and sdc. Simple fix, but annoying. Why do the device names have to change? What’s the point? I don’t get it.

Also a very minor problem with Firefox. It wanted to upgrade, but didn’t for some reason through Adept Updater. And I didn’t want it to, because for the time being, Firefox 2 > Firefox 3 (which is the new “Firefox” in Hardy). I tried to install FF2, but that failed. Had to upgrade FF first, then was able to install FF2 with no problem.

Anyhow, the rest of the upgrade seemed to go well. I’ll know better by tomorrow if everything’s working, but for now at least I’m enjoying an improved version of Kopete.