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painless upgrade from KDE3? Too many problems...
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Hi,
I'm using KDE since SuSE7 or so and I admit at I was never overly happy with any desktop other than OS/2's WPS ...until SuSE10.0 arrived and KDE3 worked reliably and convenient for me. I gave up to ask for a desktop that I would consider "logical" or "intuitive", but KDE3 was at least simple enough and it did what I want. I think I don't expect too much from a desktop. I've seen many upgrades to 3.5 and 4.x on several different machines and always thought that I'm lucky that my own machine is still able to run 3.0. After an unavoidable migration to new hardware I am now forced to do this step at an unconvenient time. And despite 20y+ of computer use including driver and GUI programming, 10 years of KDE use and much more linux administration experience than I like to have I suddenly feel like a computer rookie! I tried to understand the background of the hard cut between KDE3 and KDE4 which may have caused a rewrite of many things from scratch or forced underpowered projects to die, but i think a change of the QT libraries cannot explain the change to a completely different desktop look&feel. My personal impression of KDE4 is currently "not useful", and I'm really frustrated that even small&everyday tasks became complicated. I've been digging around for hours and hours searching for answers, but I'm lost and running out of time. I wish to have a sheet-anchor with KDE3 running in openSuSE11.3 until all the other stuff works. What do I miss, what's wrong, and how can I solve it? - kworldclock was the first thing I missed on the desktop. I tried a lot to get it and install it, but it seems that both tool and sources went to Nirwana. Too sad. Does anybody know a replacement? Any idea if it isn't just a few hours to make it run again in KDE4? It doesn't seem to be an overly complex program... Why and where did it disappear? - konqueror image viewer: to be honest, this thing is almost everything I ever wanted from konqueror. I'd never come to the idea to copy&paste files or start programs from anything else but a command line. But the image viewing plugin was doing exactly what I want. It's gone? Why? I didn't find a suitable replacement yet! I installed 10 different image viewers for KDE4 and none of them can do the same or even better. It's worse...they all look almost the same. If KDE4 is new and fancy just as new as wide-screens are...why the h**l are thumbs displayed at the bottom and not on the left, reducing the available size to a minimum? It makes me angry that 10+ programs seem to use the same pre-cooked widgets from a QT library (at least that's my guess) and don't seem to care about usability. For the time being I use EyeOfGnome but I can't say that it makes me happy. - on my old laptop I had to fight with hardware bugs firmware bugs which made WLAN with DHCP hard to use. Nevertheless, I managed to get it running. I've seen a knetworkmanager in a SuSe11.2 or so on one laptop which seemed to work very well even with hot spots. Seems to be history. On my laptop with SuSe11.3 I now end with a graphical root login (sic!) to start this managing thing and another KDE session as user to hook up on roots network connection. I don't know how much time I spent with editing dbus files, setting suid-bits, reading here, updating there, configuring there... Nothing works unless I login as root! That's a great security plus, really :-S I think it already took a week to figure out I was looking for the wrong applet name to start. But no matter if I use knetworkmanager or nm-applet, it doesn't work unless I'm root. I can't even tell if that's a KDE related problem, but one comes with the other: what is dbus good for if it stops applications from running with no solution around? And I guess it's not an option to uninstall dbus, right? - while searching for alternate image viewers I found some neat programs I wanted to try. For all of them I failed. They appeared to die few years ago, and I suspect that the hard cut in KDE4 is the reason. Was imgSeek a good program? any experience? I guess I have 100000+ pictures...the idea to find particular ones by drawing a sketch is very appealing. Too sad I can't try it out. - I use NX intensively. I never had any problem until running it from a KDE4 environment. Key mappings may change from one second to the other with no apparent systematic behind. Adding alternate keyboard mappings and changing them in case of problems can temporarily fix it, but it's no longer in a usable condition. Since I rely on remote connection to servers over internet, KDE4 makes it very hard to work from my laptop. That's almost a show stopper! The few comments around similar problems didn't reveal a solution. - that said...QT3 and KDE3 reached a solid state. even if it's not maintained anymore, there shouldn't be so much to maintain? Isn't it possible to have some compatibility layer? There are many programs asking for fortran77 libraries and nobody dares to let them die  Why KDE3 had to die so suddenly?There are more things to complain about...menus I can't reach because they disappear when I move the mouse (by luck there are hotkeys listed in the popups), repaint errors which may or may not be KDE4 bugs, desktop freeze on stretching windows (by fortune I hit the right button to make that problem disappear...just don't ask me which)... I'm sure someone documented somewhere how to use it. Just pressing F1 doesn't do anything (wasn't that a standard for "help"?), and internet seems not to be the place where I can find concentrated information on this stuff. Is there already too much information around, or not enough? KDE4 seems to be way too complex, and that eats valuable time. I appreciate any hint to make me happy with KDE4. However, I worry that there are so many deep problems that the easier solution may be to run a SuSE10 VM :-S bye |
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Registered Member
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KDE4 has seen me leave KDE for Gnome. With sadnness, hopefully KDE4 gets back to a easy to use and functional DE. With out all the useless stuff added. There is always Trinity, but I can't see it being more than a dead end.
It's hard to say I have a desktop I like anymore. I have even thought about moving back to winxp! And post this from an xp box.  Says it all...
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Registered Member
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Marble is a good worldclock alternative. It can work both as an standalone application and desktop background.
The rest of the post is not really clear what you got and what you want. Gwenview (image viewer) and Konqueror (documents shell/browser) are in a very good state. I don't know how is NetworkManager being used today in KDE desktops but I hear it has good support. A good alternative is Wicd (no phone support). For GUI: http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Wi ... ent=132366
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Administrator
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Konqueror's inbuilt image viewing works fine here. The previous/next image navigation controls are missing however.
To enable it you may need to change a setting. Open Konqueror > Settings > Configure Konqueror > File Browsing > File Assocations. Click on "image" in the tree listing. Make sure "Show file in embedded viewer" is selected. In terms of image viewing in a seperate application, you probably want Gwenview (part of kdegraphics) or Digikam (more photo management though, and part of extragear) Which graphics driver, and version of KDE do you have? Did you do a direct upgrade on top of your KDE 3 home directory?
KDE Sysadmin
[img]content/bcooksley_sig.png[/img] |
Registered Member
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It should come as no surprise that after years of using the same interface that it takes some extra adjustments before you get as comfortable with KDE4. The latest KDE 4.5 with OpenSUSE works great for me, and even comparing it to when I used KDE 3, I think its better in almost every way. You may be upset that everything isnt setup exactly how you like it right away, but I think you'll find that KDE4's flexibility is better than any other system out there right now. Also, the visual changes are amazing. KDE couldnt continue as a relevant operating system with KDE3's old graphics, especially when competing with Mac and Windows newest shiny and gradient looking systems. If you feel like the system is getting bogged down, go into the settings and disable the desktop effects, that what I did and KDE still looks great. Give it some time and I think you'll start getting used to the new changes. Just make sure you use a good distro. Initially I was using Kubuntu and KDE4 and it was so slow and package handling so **** that I hated KDE4 until I tried out OpenSUSE's version and Ive been using it ever since.
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Registered Member
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I'm not familiar with this program. Have you tried the world clock plasma widget? What specific features do you need?
Digikam supports thumbnails on the side (or floating). At least in 4.6 so does gwenview, but I am not sure if that is new or was in earlier versions.
I'm running 11.3 and don't have this problem. You should be using plasmoid-networkmanager, not knetworkmanager. There should be a separate plasmoid-networkmanager package you need to install. knetworkmanager is no longer supported, plasmoid-networkmanager is better than knetworkmanager ever was. You also need to make sure in YaST network settings that you are using networkmanager and not ifup or whatever the root-level network manager alternative they use.
First, dbus is very similar to dcop, which KDE3 used. They have the same benefits and the same limitations, except dbus is cross-desktop while dcop isn't. dbus should not prevent you from doing anything, though. The question is whether the particular features needed are available. If worst comes to worst you can always use the gnome version of networkmanager, but that should not be necessary if you use the networkmanager widget.
digikam has this feature built-in. A lot of programs died because their features were integrated into existing programs so they no longer served any purpose.
There is a huge amount to maintain. Linux is a rapidly-changing target. The solid (KDE 4 hardware interface people) spent much of the KDE 4.5-4.6 period just switching KDE from the old Linux hardware stack (HAL) to the new one (udev, upower, etc). Changes in things like gcc need to be dealt with. Further, the KDE 3 code base was extremely brittle and hard to maintain.
If anyone has an interest in maintaining KDE 3 they are welcome to do so. In fact some people are, it is called the trinity project. But there is really little interest, almost all attention is focused on improving KDE 4. There is really not that much man-power available, it would take quite a lot of resources to properly maintain KDE 3, resources that most feel would be better used fixing problems and improving features in KDE 4. Developers are free to work on whatever they wish, and clearly almost all developers think their time would be better spent improving KDE 4.
That shouldn't happen, and I've never seen it myself. Did you submit a bug report?
What graphics card and driver are you using? Did you turn off desktop effects?
Works for me, are you sure you didn't change the shortcut?
Ask questions here, and kde's userbase is a good place.
I personally find pretty much everything in KDE 4 easier and simpler to use than the KDE 3 counterpart. However, KDE 4 is not KDE 3. If you try to use KDE 4 as KDE 3 it will not work that well, because KDE 4 and KDE 3 is different. You need to take some time to learn to use KDE 4 as KDE 4 and not try to shoe-horn your KDE 3 workflow into KDE 4. There were a lot of things in KDE 3 that were really pointless, complex, or inefficient, but KDE 3 users got used to using them. With KDE 4 a lot of effort has been put into make things easier, simpler, clearer, and more obvious, but that means some of the old, inefficient approaches no longer work. Different does not automatically mean bad.
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
-NASA in 1965 |
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Registered Member
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Hi,
first of all many thanks for all the valuable comments  I'll need some more time to try everything.I played again with Marble and after some time I found the right map which indicates the daylight...but still I didn't see how to get the current time at an arbitrary place. I got GPS coordinates, inhabitant number, live satellite images  and much more...just not the time. What I'd like is a map with some large cities such as Tokyo, KL, Paris, Lima, NY, ... and the current time there.Clock plasma widget...no clue. I have a clock in the taskbar, most likely it's that widget? It doesn't tell me its name. At random it showed kind of a menu with some extra data. I couldn't figure out how to make this list appear again. Well, configuring the "time zones" did something...but something different than expected. I extected a quick change of my own timezone, but now it actually shows the time at the selected places if I'm patient enough to wait for the popup. It's a beginning! For konqueror, I think it lost all capabilities with images. Yes, it can display one if I click on it. But it doesn't show the exif previews, it doesn't show the thumbs in a sidebar, and as pointed out the controls to move to another pic are missing. GwenView was a good tip. It now works similar to what konqueror did before, just that the thumbs are on the right side...I can live with that. It appears to be much slower than konqueror despite of much more computing power on the new laptop. I guess it doesn't use the exif thumbs but calculates previews. I'll try to see if I can change that. Moving through the pictures is a bit nasty...the cursor moves just in the arrangement of the thumb icons...it's not possible just to scroll linearly through all the pictures if I use multiple columns. I usually have 3 columns to get an exposure series in a row. Ok, but that's an issue for a bug report. I'll look at Wicd. It seems to use the ifup services. I was surprised that it's not in the repositories. About the knetworkmanager, nm-applet, plasmoid-networkmanager: what a surprise! I don't know how long I've been searching for a solution, but the plasmoid thing never crossed my way. And just as wicd, it's still not installed despite I meanwhile installed almost everything  That's really a documentation issue. About my "new" laptop...it's already some years old but I never used it due to glossy screen and terrible ATI graphics driver (mob. radeon hd3400). Now, after some years, the dust on the screen makes it possible to see the desktop and the driver became somewhat better. Finally I can suspend and mostly also wake up, at least if I log out of the root session before. Sure, I disabled almost all desktop features. One disabled feature caused the freeze when rescaling windows. I think I re-enabled display while resize/while move to fix it, but that makes trouble with some elderly programs. The volatile menus are from the taskbar (however it's called now). Most likely it's related to the auto-hide feature. I'll try to dig deeper... thanks again! |
Administrator
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The worldclock widget for the plasma desktop does exactly that ("Weltzeituhr" in german). You can add it via "add new widgets" ("Miniprogramme hinzufügen") and drag it to the desktop. It looks nearly exactly like kworldclock before. |
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Registered Member
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No, it is called "World Clock", it has a map of the world with daylight/night on it and a clock on the center with a city name. You can then put your mouse over various cities to see the time there. It will tell you the name of the city and the local time.
Probably be hovering my mouse over it or clicking on it.
I suspect you didn't change the time zone, you added an additional time zone to the clock. It always includes "Local" as a time zone, but you can add other ones. What you need to do is check the time zone, then below that set "Clock defaults to:" to the time zone you want to show. You can also set multiple time zones in a single clock and cycle between them using the scroll wheel on your mouse.
Did you follow bcooksley's instructions?
KDE caches previews, so this should only be a problem the first time you view a picture. Digikam is faster yet because it stores the thumbnails in a fast database.
I am not sure I understand.
It doesn't matter what sort of interface you use, ifup is a root-level tool, you will not be able to manipulate it as a normal user. You need to change the yast settings, as I explained.
It's in the KDE:Extra repository, but I would not bother using it until making sure you are not using ifup and making sure you are using the networkmanager plasmoid (it still appears as a system tray icon, but it uses plasma to give it more capabilities)..
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
-NASA in 1965 |
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Registered Member
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huh? I didn't see that before. Well, thanks to my good eyes I can confirm that it looks very similar to kworldclock. Just  how can I make it larger than 5x10mm??? There is really some text written, I can see a 1 or 2 pixel large noise when I move the mouse over the map. I tried to open it as a program...or find a menu item to enlarge it...or to add another panel and enlarge that...but I couldn't change the map size. What did I miss? Is it possible to run it as a normal application, not bound to a panel?
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Registered Member
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not really...not reproducible
Yes, I went to these settings before and double checked. There are not many options to check, and the suggested settings were already there. I don't like an app to store separate thumbs somewhere. I use many scripts for automated image processing (may run a few days on a server). In a sequence of steps, same file names will look different over time and a huge amount of useless thumbs would eat my disk space. I really don't want any undesired actions if my server already recreated the EXIF thumbs and they are available on a USB disk which holds the pictures.
previews can be shown in a 3xN matrix. If I use the left/right arrow keys I'd expect to go through all images...similar to reading a book line by line. Instead, the program stops at the end of one line if I use "right". To go to the next image in the sequence I have to do "down" and 2x "left" which is a bit strange.
Well, while writing this I'm happy to have an ethernet cable  In a list of 10 repositories in yast2 there was no plasma-network thing. So I first decided to try wicd. After figuring out that it also needs an urwid package I could install it, change yast to ifup, and voila...the wicd started. Just...I don't get a connection, not even as root. Couldn't find out yet why. It seems to accept the encryption key, I get an IP, but then the connection seems to be shut down again. After some unsuccessful tries I gave up. Then I searched for the KDE-Extra repository and added the following two to get the plasmoid stuff: /http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Release:/45/openSUSE_11.3 and http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Extra/openSUSE_11.3_KDE_Release_45/ After selecting the plasma-network stuff I was bothered with a dozend conflicts which should have made me suspicious... I checked them and made a "vendor change" for them...restarted network...now there was another widget which also couldn't connect. I rebooted...ok, now KDE is history. Popup about "could not start ksmserver"...and segfaults in /var/log/messages. By luck I installed other window managers before. However, in any case all 3 network tools failed to run as normal user. wicd asked for a root password which didn't help. The others, if started from command line, all complain about dbus problems. Even starting in a superuser shell doesn't work. dbus is not my friend  Of course I reinstalled dbus meanwhile...with no effect. I'm pretty clueless how to get this thing work. I guess first I will get rid of the KDE45 repositories and revert to the other openSuSE packages to get KDE back. About dbus...or why now even the knetworkmanager-kde4 stopped working...no idea. |
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Registered Member
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Ufff back again after enforced downgrade to the DVD packages...but also back again with knetworkmanager-kde4 and root login  I guess my main problem is dbus. I'll try a new installation in a VM and compare the results...
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Registered Member
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There is no need for compatibility layer. Just install KDE3 from KDE3 repository. I wonder, if it so difficult to just write "opensuse kde3" in google? Here is the first search result: http://en.opensuse.org/KDE3 And to install the minimum KDE3 desktop you have to just click here: http://software.opensuse.org/ymp/KDE:KDE3/openSUSE_11.3/kdebase3-session.ymp |
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Registered Member
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Well, at least one good news  After another half day I figured out how to avoid the 2nd KDE login as root. It was not possible to start knetworkmanager from a superuser shell, not even the cnetworkmanager worked for me. But starting it with "kdesu knetworkmanager" works...I can connect! I never heard before about this kdesu command and I have no clue what it does beside asking for the root password...Now it would be nice if the knetworkmanager would be started automatically in such a way. |
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Registered Member
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Some points. 1. I do not see how gradients are so "newly-looking". Maybe for mid-90s when some people had 256-color graphics smooth gradients would look modern but not now. I'd rather prefer textured controls like in KDE2. 2. You said about "KDE3's old graphics" as if it was unable to support the beloved gradients. This is not true, just take a look at Domino theme for KDE3 which is somewhat similar to Oxygen. 3. You said about newest Windows systems as if they were something good. It is known that Windows Vista was considered a fault and many uses moved to Linux because of it. You understand "being competitive" as just repeating anything. This is bad approach - to be competitive you at least should not repeat mistakes. 4. Windows keeps compatibility with oldest Windows versions in terms of API, it also keeps the most features introduced in earlier versions and allows the user to choose the classic look and feel. This is unlike KDE4. That's why Windows is so competitive. |
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