- a KDE version for distributions (99% of normal and stupid PC users looking for simplicity and efficiency)
- a KDE version for clever developers able to understand cool features for the future.

Ah, yes. With that attitude, you'll lead KDE down the path of amazing success blazed by Stallman with Gnu Hurd!

GaHillBilly

bcooksley wrote:Note that in the future KDE functionality, especially in KDE PIM will be severely reduced if Akonadi is not present and functional. This will become more evident in KDE 4.4 and 4.5.

This will be counteracted however by PIM applications removing their internal protocol implementations and becoming lighter in the process.

I'm a Gentoo user and recently upgraded from 3.5.10 to 4.3.3.
In your /home/username directory you'll find a file .xsession-errors.
In case of problems this file will usually tell what is wrong.
With kde-3 this file was at the most 1KB in size after running some time.
In kde4 it grew to 40 50 KB.
Needless to say that searching for a message concerning a problem is no fun with such a large file.
In gentoo you have a plethora of tools concerning your install.
So I used "equery depends" to find out what programs depend on nepomuk.
I then changed the useflags to -semantic-desktop and reinstalled what depended on nepomuk and removed nepomuk.
Akonadi was never installed because I didn't install pim.
Don't need it.
I rebooted and everything runs as before except this.
I now notice that .xsession-errors contains the following line:
Could not find 'nepomukserver' executable.
So I still have to tell kde not to start nepomuk.
But where do I find the config.file to disable nepomuk?
Thanks in advance.
Gerard.

Edit:I removed some files in ~/.kde/share that had nepomuk in them and now the message doesn't show up anymore.
Everything runs a lot faster now.

I am currently interested in running kontact without the rest of kde... especially without semantic desktop elements and the like.

Disabled it in systemsettings and I get a warning on every kontact start that it is not running. I know! I disabled it on purpose! *annoyed* Because I dont need it.

Hmm, strange.

Nepomuk is not required in any released version so far.

I will be needed for some address book related functionality in the upcoming release (KDE SC 4.4), but not for any earlier ones.

Cheers,
_

I'll totally use it once it is working. Who knows, maybe the way I work with my computer will change with working semanthic searches and all, but right now I have not seen anything that makes me happier than locate, find and grep.

Strangely, I get this notification that some features will not be available. And I am totally ok with that. However, I'd love a 'please don't tell me again untill next release' checkbox on a notification like that on something I use every day: kontact.

But I shure like where things are headding.

Looks like Akonadi will be forced on Kmail users and with it Nepomuk.....

They have big $$$ from industry and big governement - no surprise they have that pushing power. Is the KDE project being hijacked by IBM SAP and the EU?

Easy to go the next step: to turn nepumok into an all knowing little utility that could chat to "insert relevant secret service here".

Can anyone confirm nepomuk is clean? Anyone really thoroughly checked all the lines?

hansrast wrote:They have big $$$ from industry and big governement - no surprise they have that pushing power. Is the KDE project being hijacked by IBM SAP and the EU?

Ahem... Can you back these statements with some proof? Otherwise they're just a way to flame and/or induce FUD. Doubt is not proof of anything.

I have amd athlon 1800+ on via kt266, with 256MB, yes it is ancient.

anyway, yesterday I debian dist-upgraded KDE to unstable release(4.x)
Why would I need all this stuff?? nepomuk, akonadi, akgregator etc...
They trashed my system when it started.
Plus they require MYSQL to be installed, in addition to VIRTUOSO DB server??? plus I can't get rid of libsqlite dependency - why would I ever need sqlite, and still they push it into my throat!

Akregator is an optional application, doesn't start unless you deliberately instruct it to. Akonadi will only start if it's services are required, which is probably caused by Plasma's clock. Assuming that unstable 4.x = trunk, then right click on the clock > Digital Clock Settings > Calendar. Untick "Show Events".

Finally, due to the resources of your system being constrained, i'd also recommend disabling Nepomuk completely, go to System Settings > Desktop Search.

Hello everyone,

I find this thread one of the best (including the first post) on this forum, regarding to the Akonadi and Nepomuk. The internet is full of the questions like OP placed, well over a year ago.

Yesterday I dist-upgraded to Squeeze and after several attempts to kill Nepomuk and Akonadi I realize I should rebuild most of the KDE packages to make them useable. Why should I use Virtuoso? And additional instance of MySQL server (well, some people do not need it at all)? And why, after using computers for 30 years, navigating in terminal, my CPU should spend 30-50% running services useless for me, eat gigabytes of my memory for indexing, and produce hell lot disk I/O on my desktop/laptop/netbook just to find out I use a vCard file resource for all my contacts in KAddressBook? Do I need all of that for inviting my colleagues to a teleconference and share a file with them?


This is probably not a right place to ask this, but please, make KDE thin, and usable for an average sysadmin again. Forget 99% desktop users. If there are no geeks around running KDE, who will advice them? You loose them soon, because Vista is faster.

Correct behavior is not to die, but not to offer a service if you have no prerequisites. Did I mention kaddressbook does not even complain after removing Akonadi? Correct behavior would be not to offer possibility to have a resource using it, I'm using files which I sync over IPsec with family, colleagues and friends. I'm lucky to have these files, because my address book, calendar, etc. were all empty after migration.

Do not architect the KDE to depend on services like Akonadi or Nepomuk. Use them if available, but do not complain if somebody wants to use only kpdf, or kile and nothing else.

After using KDE almost 10 years, I now seriously think about switching to Gnome, even I rather hate it...

You don't need to activate indexing, this is just one of the sources for semantic data.
Basically a recovery of the information lost due to it not being saved in the first place.

As for Akonadi, it was explicitly designed to run on demand, thus only running if the user's session contains something that actually uses it.

As for MySQL, well, it is one of several available backends for Akonadi's relational data, chosen as the default because at time of choosing it was the most reliable and scaleable one.
A software vendor can choose to change the default (e.g. Gentoo changed to SQLite), a sysdamin or skilled user can do so via configuration.

As for Virtuoso, I don't know, you'll have to wait for someone from Nepomuk to read the question. I distantly remember that the previously used backend (Redland if I remember correctly) was too slow and an sufficiently fast alternative was based on Java and thus problematic to ship for distributions.

Thanks for your answer.
Just a note: I do have a backups, of course, so my data are not lost. The upgrade/migration failed to import old contact lists twice. I have fixed it by a guest based on lenny, exported old data, and imported to squeeze. Then I started to "play" and remove unwanted/unneeded stuff...

anda_skoa wrote:You don't need to activate indexing, this is just one of the sources for semantic data.

This was the first one, the locate command does the job well, grep and glimpse too. But may be not for others.

anda_skoa wrote:As for Akonadi, it was explicitly designed to run on demand, thus only running if the user's session contains something that actually uses it.

That's good. I do run some apps from outside of kde, so auto-loading prerequisites is important. I even like the possibilities offered by Akonadi; it's fine, well engineered, offering services for many applications around. It's a glue between the PIM. The size/speed can be tuned with back-end’s as you mention, and possibly the defaults improve in future to consume less memory and CPU time.

I would be very interested in some statistics. Who has so many contacts and calendar events that they need to be stored locally in an independent SQL server?

I think that an average geek or the 99% non-geeks do not need it... (This may be the Debian fault as the vendor, which chosen the build options and shipped the package).

The big companies do have big contact lists - but they are stored on directory servers designed for it. Not on the desktop. Looks like Akonadi (with all other apps/daemons like nepomuk etc) is on a best way to became a hammer on an ant.

I do understand the importance of meta-data and the need to store, organize, filter, or notify about changes. What I do not like is strict dependency off applications on it. KAddressBook should work without Akonadi; now if I remove Akonadi, it does not even start.

So now I run Akonadi to tell KAddressBook name of the vCard file. Isn't it funny?

Let's rather go back to original question... is it possible to get rid of these architectural pieces, without recompiling the KDE?

Matej wrote:I would be very interested in some statistics. Who has so many contacts and calendar events that they need to be stored locally in an independent SQL server?

I am not sure I get this. Which independent SQL server?
As far as I know there is currently now Akonadi backend connector (Akonadi resource) for accessing an SQL server.

Matej wrote:The big companies do have big contact lists - but they are stored on directory servers designed for it. Not on the desktop.

I am not sure what you are trying to get at here either.
That a file or directory based contact storage cannot be able to store big contact lists?
Because this might not be practical with single vcard file containing all contacts but I am pretty sure one can easily manage several thousand contacts if each contact is just one file in a directory. No modern filesystem should have a problem with that.

Matej wrote:I do understand the importance of meta-data and the need to store, organize, filter, or notify about changes. What I do not like is strict dependency off applications on it. KAddressBook should work without Akonadi; now if I remove Akonadi, it does not even start.

I guess it is a matter of taste. Of course the application could start and the not being able to do anything useful (since it doesn't have any data to display).
Would probably need some usability testing to see if not starting or just sitting there empty is easier to understand for "out of order".

Matej wrote:So now I run Akonadi to tell KAddressBook name of the vCard file. Isn't it funny?

KAddressBook is not concerned in anyway with how contact data is stored, so I am not sure what you mean with name of vCard file.
This is handling creating, display and manipulation of contacts totally independent of where they are physically stored.
The respective contact resources/connectors take care of that.

Matej wrote:Let's rather go back to original question... is it possible to get rid of these architectural pieces, without recompiling the KDE?

When KDE libraries or applications have been built with certain features enabled, they are of course assumed to be present at runtime as well.
One can't just remove any library and assume the runtime linker will not care about symbols not being available.

Cheers,
_

You can reduce the weight of Akonadi/Nepomuk. First, head to System Settings > Desktop Search and untick "Enable Strigi Desktop File Indexer".

Second, run "kcmshell4 akonadi". In the resources list shown, make sure to remove the duplicates which are likely present due to the several repeated upgrades which failed. Ensure you don't remove the one which contains your data (or alternately, remove them all - and reimport your data)

Third, if you already run mysqld locally for other things, create an account and database for it then enter those details into Akonadi Server Configuration (after unticking Use internal MySQL server - and clearing the Options field)

Alternately, you distribution might have made SQLite available. Whilst not as performant and not recommended in some cases - you may find it better.

Fourth, log out of the KDE environment and remove ~/.kde4/share/apps/nepomuk. This will give you a fresh Nepomuk database - which is unfortunately required for Akonadi to provide search. It should reduce the amount of memory used by Nepomuk.