Improvements in KDE’s Folderview

One of the most interesting new features in KDE 4.1 is the new Folderview plasmoid. With the release of KDE 4.1 Beta 2 several small improvements.

Folderview is an awesome plasmoid which makes it possible to show the content of a folder on a screen. It also is the first step to say good bye to the traditional way of storing links and folder on the desktop itself. The idea is that files inside the folder “Desktop” are not shown right on the desktop but that in general files from any folder or place can be shown in “containers” on the desktop.
Everyone who ever had to manage – and especially backup – larger computer setups will recognize the abilities of folderview with relieve!

With the first introduction of Folderview the basic functions where there, but several smaller aspects were missing. These have now been fixed in a recent KDE 4 version: it is now possible to simply drag&drop elements between two Folderview plasmoids and the plasmoid itself shows which folder content is displayed.

This screenshot shows the dialog shown when I dragged a folder from the Desktop Folderview plasmoid to the Home Folderview plasmoid. Note the white lines saying “Desktop” and “Home” in the left upper corner of the Folderview plasmoids.

Of course there are still some small bugs – it would help for example to still see which folder I’m dragging while the dialog comes up. Additionally, the configuration dialog to have a Folderview Plasmoid as a full background to simulate the classical desktop experience will have to wait for KDE 4.2 due to feature freezes. But that is a question of time and bug fixing, not a fundamental flaw.

Speaking about KDE 4, as it looks like some of the bugs I run into when testing KDE 4.1 Beta are now fixed in my KDE4Daily virtual image. Ctrl is working now properly, but as it looks like ti was a bug in Qt anyway. The resolution problem is still strange – Aaron mentioned that the effects look more like a bug in kwin and not in Plasma since the windows also behave strange. Ah, the joys of bug hunting.

But anyway, KDE 4.1 is really coming into shape, and I can’t wait to have it working properly here!

Short Tip: Use composition effects in KDE 4 without fancy graphic cards

There is an easy way of enabling KWin’s composition capabilities even if you don’t have the possibility to run OpenGL. In fact, you can even activate composition within a virtual machine like VirtualBox.

Just right-click on a window title bar, choose “Configure Window Behaviour…”, click on “Desktop Effects”, mark the check box “Desktop Effects”, click on advanced options, and choose the “Compositing Type” XRender. Afterwards, most simple effects will just work, but effects like the cover flow window switcher, which require heavier OpenGL, might not work.

You can see more screenshots at Ivo Anjo’s blog post about it. Thanks for the hint, Ivo

Forth and back again – having a look at Fedora 9 and KDE 4.1beta

Recently my distribution of choice, Fedora, published a new version, Fedora 9. This one featured KDE 4.0, and there were also KDE 4.0.80 packages available, and I decided to take a look at them. Unfortunately, I had to return to Fedora 8 and KDE 3.5.9 – but not for long, that’s for sure.

The background

Recently I wanted to try two new “tools” – Fedora 9 and KDE 4.1dev. The reason behind was that both came along with a whole bunch of new features. Fedora 9 promised full disk encryption, a new X-server, PackageKit, a new NetworkManger, Upstart and so on, while KDE 4.1dev promised me first and foremost KDE 4.x. I was still in KDE 3.5.9 because I had to write a thesis during the upcoming of KDE 4.0 and wasn’t able to switch. Therefore I decided to install Fedora 9 and afterwards update the system to KDE 4.80 with packages from kdeforge. KDE 4.0.x wasn’t an option because I wanted to have the KDE 4 PIM suite.

The bad experiences

However, the journey did not went as well as hoped. First of all Fedora itself did not boot up any faster. Of course I know that switching the init system itself doesn’t make the scripts go faster, but somehow I expected it to go at least a bit faster than maybe a minute. But the problems with the new KDE were more pressing: KDE froze X several times (Gnome didn’t), most often when the kerneloops popup tried to tell me something. This happened regularly after only a few minutes, and made the system unusable. I deactivated kerneloops, selinux and other usual suspects, but X still froze after some minutes most of the times.
Additionally, Plasma is not able to enlarge to a new size when for example an external monitor with a higher resolution is plugged in. That is however my daily setup, and must work before I can switch to KDE 4.x.
Last but not least I had two issues with Dolphin: first of all, the Ctrl key doesn’t work as expected. Seems to be a bug in Qt 4.4, but nevertheless, I rely heavily on that feature. Second, Dolphin is quite slow when scrolling through large folders. I deactivated the information panel and it was quicker, but still not as fast as I am used to from KDE 3.5.

I did suspect that these problems could be related with Fedora or were fixed with newer devel versions of KDE, and therefore I switched my system to OpenSuse 11RC with the unstable KDE 4.1dev packages. But all mentioned problems were still present except for the X freezes (not entirely sure about that one).

So, in the end I had to switch back to KDE 3.5.9. There are only few things, mostly corner cases, which keep me there, but these are, unfortunately, existential to me.

The positive outlook

However: the impression I got from just playing around and testing the system was the same I already got from testing it only for minutes in virtual machines or demoing the system at LinuxTag: KDE 4 is awesome.
One of the best examples work-flow wise is probably the new menu. I newer was a fan of menus (Alt+F2 does the job quicker) and wasn’t really interesting in the change introduced with KDE 4. However, just using it for minutes already changed the way I worked. The ability to search through the menu is a nice and helpful add-on and just makes sense today. But the main advantage is the easy and intuitive way of setting favorites. It is a blast once you get the idea behind it and actually try to use it. I got accustomed to it after minutes, that was almost scary.
Also, I’m someone who never uses icons or links to clutter the wallpaper – but the folder view might be a good solution when I have to work with a bunch of files (think of TeX here, or of merging different images or text files). It still has some rough edges and could use a way to have no background at all, but it is definitely on a very promising way.

Besides these work-flow improvements there are of course the improvements within the apps, and the new apps in general: just some days ago I was chatting with a friend about city distances, and right in the discussion she said “so just check it with Marble”. Well, I would like to!
Another application I’m really looking forward to is Gwenview – the KDE 4 version is very, very neat. Also, KDE3’s KHTML engine is a bit notchy at the edges, holey in the middle and has a crack at one side. But KDE 4’s KHTML engine is much improved and is therefore a reason on its own to switch. And I haven’t even tested yet (that means: used in daily live) apps like Okular or the improved Kopete.

So I am very eager to see the above mentioned bugs fixed and will afterwards give it yet another try. I’m already sure that my work flow will be more efficient, and that’s in the end what really counts!

Closing words

Besides KDE 4.1 there is also Qt 4.4: some new apps I would like to test are based on Qt 4.4: Screenie and Arora/Foxkit are just the most prominent examples.
There are also bew 3rd party KDE 4.x applications: while the “usual” programs like Ktorrent, Krusader, digikam, Amarok or Konversation already have KDE 4.x versions or are working at it, there are also some new interesting programs around, like Audex or KGrubeditor.

Having said that all that, I’m still very happy with KDE 3.5 right now. It is still a supported platform which just works as I expect it, as I am used to. It even gets bugfix updates if necessary, for example KDE 3.5.9 was released after KDE 4.0, and I’m very thankful for it.
So I’m totally free to choose what I want – and that’s the most important point!

Short Tip: Searching files and packages

In case you ever compiled anything by hand you might have gotten an error message like this:

make[2]: *** No rule to make target `/lib/libacl.so', needed by `lib/kstyle_qtcurve_config.so'.  Stop.
make[1]: *** [config/CMakeFiles/kstyle_qtcurve_config.dir/all] Error 2
make: *** [all] Error 2

There is obviously a file missing, in this case to compile a specific KDE 4 theme. There are now two ways of searching for the package which contains the file: either through the command line, or through an online package database.

The command line of course depends on the used package manager, here are some examples:

apt-file -x search libacl.so*
urpmf libacl.so
yum whatprovides libacl.so*
zypper wp libacl.so

The -x in case of apt-file makes it possible to use regular expressions. Except for zypper all commands above can be used with regular expressions or show matches if the searched expression is only part of a result (like libacl.so.1)

The package databases depend again on the distribution, but at least for the rpm based distributions there is one common place: rpm.pbone.net. Especially the advanced link is of interest since the results can be filtered by distribution and distribution version.
For Ubuntu based distributions there is the Ubuntu package database, but make sure you use the second entry field. Unfortunately, the database only supports the right file names. Searching for libacl will bring you zero results – which is, to be honest, quite stupid. Gentoo users can try portagefilelist.de.

I am well aware that each distribution has again its own database – but that’s not handy if you deal with different distributions each day. If you now more commands for other distribution tools or other central databases for file/package searches, please leave a comment and I will add them.

The Power of Plasma theming – a gallery of 23 themes [Update]

One of the most often mentioned concerns at the KDE booth at LinuxTag was the question if Plasma would force the user to have a black panel. While we did have a second machine showing another theme to resolve all doubts it showed that not all users now yet the power of Plasma theming.

KDE is well known for the possibilities to configure it just like you want. And Plasma is no exclusion of this rule. Instead, the theming is well documented and there are already many user themes available at kde-look.org.

However, the shots shown below were made with the KDE 4.1 development version, and not all Plasma themes were created or tested for that version. Please keep this in mind and be tolerant regarding smaller issues. Additionally, I picked almost all themes which were offered via the GetHotNewStuff dialog, so there are themes of all types of quality.

But the gallery does indeed give quite a good impression of how flexible Plasma theming really is: it doesn’t matter if you want to include reflections, different colors, decorated borders or different backgrounds – everything is possible.

Update:
I forgot to stress that the shots were made using KDE4Daily in VirtualBox – there was no way to enable funky effects like transparency. Some themes do not look like they should because they are made with such composition effects in mind. So keep that in mind when judging my screen shots of themes like Glassified!