SEO

For those of you who like eye candy this blog has been posted which shows
what the revision 777000 of KDE 4.1 looks like
http://polishlinux.org/kde/kde-41-vi...og-rev-777000/

That blog is a translation to English from a Polish blog post. If you
visit the Polish blog you can see a few more screenshots of KDE 4
http://jarzebski.pl

Richard James
--
If you find yourself suddenly facing a GUI because you accidentally ran
startx, don't panic. Just press the CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE key combo and
you'll quick as a flash be back in your cosy command line where you
belong.

On Sun, 24 Feb 2008 10:34:02 +0000, Richard James wrote:

> For those of you who like eye candy this blog has been posted which
> shows what the revision 777000 of KDE 4.1 looks like
> http://polishlinux.org/kde/kde-41-vi...og-rev-777000/

Thanks Richard,

I had a look and it gave me the same impression I had years ago
when I saw the first presentations of the upcoming Longhorm+Luna,
the first day I thought that was a fake for April fool's day or
whatever and next day, after some people confirmed that was the
real stuff, I just had a vertigo crisis while trying to understand
what exactly they had in mind (er, mind?...), I supposed they were
aiming the market of musical games for under five.

Now I'll suppose that the eye-candy is just eye-candy and the
functions behind will be sharp and useful, unlike most the Longhorn
sequels ;-)

:-)

On 2008-02-24, Richard James <rjames@invalid.com> wrote:
> For those of you who like eye candy this blog has been posted which shows
> what the revision 777000 of KDE 4.1 looks like
> http://polishlinux.org/kde/kde-41-vi...og-rev-777000/
>
> That blog is a translation to English from a Polish blog post. If you
> visit the Polish blog you can see a few more screenshots of KDE 4
> http://jarzebski.pl
>
> Richard James

Your sig:

"If you find yourself suddenly facing a GUI because you accidentally ran
startx, don't panic. Just press the CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE key combo and
you'll quick as a flash be back in your cosy command line where you
belong."

Can't figure out whether you are trying to mislead people or are just
ignorant.

I normally use a GUI. X and a window manager. When I startx 9 windows open with
various applications, from bash to system info to a datebook to an
email client, etc.

I use a mouse to cut&paste all the time.

I can run any X application you can. Including any of the "K" applications.
You don't need to run KDE to use them.

And I run Linux from the command line.

Calling a large collection of apps like KDE a "GUI" is simply not accurate.

KDE/Gnome and such, are BUILT on a GUI. It forms their foundation. But
GUIs existed long before any of those monstrosities did, and exist
quite independently of them today.

Some of the advantages of what I call ODE, the Other Desktop Environment,
are that I save massive amounts of system resources for better purposes,
Have a much simpler and more stable and secure system, and I can run
almost any Linux/Unix box in existence whether it has X or not or KDE
(etc.) or not.

Tom

--
calhobbit (at) | Artificial Intelligence:
gmail [DOT] com | When the real thing just won't do.

Tom Newton wrote:

>
> Some of the advantages of what I call ODE, the Other Desktop Environment,
> are that I save massive amounts of system resources for better purposes,

like posting endless, stupid drivel on usenet.

> Have a much simpler and more stable and secure system,

because, as we all know, logging in exclusively as root is an excellent
security practice.

> and I can run
> almost any Linux/Unix box in existence whether it has X or not or KDE
> (etc.) or not.

No, you cannot. What you can do is login as root, play with bash (badly),
and screw things up. You have demonstrated this repeatedly by posting a
series of poorly thought-out, lame ideas that you like to call ODE. ODE is
not a system. It's just you self-stimulating. You really should not do
that in public.

--
Old Man

Playing with the ODE will make you go blind.

Tom Newton wrote:

> Some of the advantages of what I call ODE, the Other Desktop
> Environment, are that I save massive amounts of system resources for
> better purposes...

a) Please quantify the amount of resources you save.

b) what are the better purposes upon which you expend these 'saved'
resources?

--
Two Ravens
Tom Newton, surely the William Topaz McGonagall of
alt.os.linux.slackware!

On Sun, 24 Feb 2008 10:50:21 +0000, loki harfagr wrote:

> Now I'll suppose that the eye-candy is just eye-candy and the
> functions behind will be sharp and useful, unlike most the Longhorn
> sequels ;-)

Tried to answer this last night but I was having trouble getting all the
facts and it got too late. Anyway it looks like I might have to eat my
hat here.

On the surface plasma just looks like a silly toy. SuperKaramba on
steroids right? But if you look deeper into the issues behind some of the
design changes made in KDE 4 you will see the ingenious bit of it.

Why isn't KDE 4 just KDE 3.99 + 0.01? Why chuck out all the old code and
write the new stuff? The reason for doing so was to rebuild the system on
a better base. Here is a quote about why Kicker is replaced by plasma.

"So why was kicker dropped and something new created instead of just
improving kicker?
The reason is that kicker was already broken years ago: the code was
hardly readable, and new introduced features often introduced bugs and
problems at other places. Also, kicker was as flexible as a mountain:
several projects which aimed at adding a cool new feature to kicker in
the end copied the code base and started to rework it on their own - they
forked kicker. And that would not have been necessary when kicker would
have a better design for such improvements. But kicker was created for
KDE 2.0 (!), at a time when no one would have thought that some years
later applets would be embedded in the panel as well as in the desktop.
Or that there are indeed several ways to provide panel functions and not
just the 90s like static attempt (think of MacOS like approaches, etc.).
In contrast, KDE 4 will have a long life cycle, and therefore all code
must be maintainable for a long time - and for other developers."
http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2007/1...ns-for-design-
decisions/

So as we can see, Kicker is old, it is hard to add new functionality to
it. In fact the trio of the Desktop, Kicker and Kmenu are things that
have just been slapped together. By rebuilding them on a single platform
"plasma" it increases customisability and ensures that code is more
maintainable. If you don't like the Kmenu in 3.5 what can you do? Write a
new one? In KDE 4 you could probably download several different versions
and plug them into the panel as you wished. The first few plasma widgets
don't make much sense because they are just tools to show other
developers how to do things. Later widgets will be more powerful. You
will get things like a lot better system process monitors, because with
plasma those things are easier to write and easier to modify. So if you
have something you are monitoring like web site traffic (on another
server) you can make a plasma widget that displays the stats, you can
then stick that on your desktop or in a panel/bar.

Also plasma has other uses, Amarok being a example of this. Developers
are able to leverage some of the functionality of plasma into their own
applications.

"we've decided that for amarok 2.0 we want to emphasize what used to be
called the "context browser" in amarok 1.x speak. we decided to break out
the context browser into its own central widget... and have re-used
libplasma to implement it. this allows us to use all the goodness from
plasma with minimal effort (there is of course some tweaking required).
as we do not depend on kdebase, we are currently svn:externing libplasma
in our amarok tree and linking to it internally. I understand that
post-4.0 (4.1 maybe?) libplasma will be broken out into its own separate
library, and we will be able to depend on that.

using plasma we get to use gorgeous svg-themed applets, the clean and
flexible applet/data engine architecture, plus many smaller but no less
important features."
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/...ification.html

Of course that is just plasma there are many other changes in KDE 4.
Strigi, Phonon, Akondai, Decibel, Solid, Sonnet and WebKit.

Richard James
--
If you find yourself suddenly facing a GUI because you accidentally ran
startx, don't panic. Just press the CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE key combo and
you'll quick as a flash be back in your cosy command line where you
belong.

On Mon, 25 Feb 2008 08:13:56 +0000, Richard James wrote:

> On Sun, 24 Feb 2008 10:50:21 +0000, loki harfagr wrote:
>
>> Now I'll suppose that the eye-candy is just eye-candy and the
>> functions behind will be sharp and useful, unlike most the Longhorn
>> sequels ;-)
>
> Tried to answer this last night but I was having trouble getting all the
> facts and it got too late. Anyway it looks like I might have to eat my
> hat here.

Don't worry, that was an edible hat, mostly matze and colored sugar ;-)
I was essentially joking about the look but was quite confident the
system behind was way more than meet the eye, the KDE couldn't keep
on much longer with the old b0rken base (as you detailed).
Anyway, thank you for the extensive answer, it was much better than
my jokes!

> On the surface plasma just looks like a silly toy. SuperKaramba on
> steroids right?

Right, especially since Karamba never made the grade and sucked
resources like a cousin from Vista that may have looked silly :-)

> But if you look deeper into the issues behind some of
> the design changes made in KDE 4 you will see the ingenious bit of it.
>
> Why isn't KDE 4 just KDE 3.99 + 0.01? Why chuck out all the old code and
> write the new stuff? The reason for doing so was to rebuild the system
> on a better base. Here is a quote about why Kicker is replaced by
> plasma.
>
> "So why was kicker dropped and something new created instead of just
> improving kicker?

That is good news, really friggin good news!
I'll stop my post here, I have no point to add here but I'm
sure I'll give the KDE 4.1 an extended try-out and my daughters will
certainly give a good crash-test at it as they are much more involved
in "effectively working eye-candy with a function" while I'm a bit
more inclined in my old days to prefer effectiveness ;-)

Afterall I'm using parts and apps from KDE (kmail,quanta,amarok) which
I like (though the tendency of these to change the looks and settings
while not giving full settings control is somehow tiring), in case
the stuff you described is 9/10 true I'd be really interested as it
may well be the days we've at last got rid of the puny "desk top"
metaphor and we'll be on the highway of relational functions databases!

> b) what are the better purposes upon which you expend these 'saved'
> resources?

IRC, Konsole, kedit

On 2008-02-24, Two Ravens <two-ravens@operamail.org> wrote:
> Tom Newton wrote:
>
>> Some of the advantages of what I call ODE, the Other Desktop
>> Environment, are that I save massive amounts of system resources for
>> better purposes...
>
> a) Please quantify the amount of resources you save.

''Massive'' == ''greater than zero''

> b) what are the better purposes upon which you expend these 'saved'
> resources?

Wasting time trolling alt.os.linux.slackware of course!

--keith

--
kkeller-usenet@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us
(try just my userid to email me)
AOLSFAQ=http://www.therockgarden.ca/aolsfaq.txt
see X- headers for PGP signature information

Followup set to comp.os.linux.setup.

On 2008-03-07, Richard James <rjames@invalid.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Feb 2008 02:54:41 -0800, Tom Newton wrote:
>
>>> Richard James
>>
>> Your sig:
>>
>> "If you find yourself suddenly facing a GUI because you accidentally ran
>> startx, don't panic. Just press the CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE key combo and
>> you'll quick as a flash be back in your cosy command line where you
>> belong."
>>
>> Can't figure out whether you are trying to mislead people or are just
>> ignorant.
>
> Actually my sig is designed to piss you off.

I knew that. You know more about computers than I do.

> Seems to be working just fine.

Not at all. I was just happy to have another opportunity to educate
the newbies in this area.

It was much appreciated.

> Note I have a new sig guess who that is meant to piss off?
>
> Richard James
>
>--
> "Slackware" an African word meaning you don't have any people skills.


Patrick Volkerding? Hundreds of millions of Africans?


Tom

<snicker>

--
calhobbit (at) | The Truth will set you free:
gmail [DOT] com | http://www.sethcenter.com