Just noticed two strange problems in Kcontrol (revision 959292, using KDE 4.2.2. and Qt 4.5.1, but may have been there earlier too). Someone else wondered why the icons are so large, and this may be partially the same issue - only that I only get a large icon for _some_ modules. Only two to be exact, and neither is shipped with KDE as default.

They look fine in the left-hand treeview, but not if they're displayed in the right-hand view. The sizes look very odd...

Look at these two screenshots to see the problem:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3364/347 ... 31b2_o.png
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3360/347 ... ed3d_o.png

Thank you for reporting this Kryten2X4B.

The problem was that KIconLoader could not locate the desired size, so it grabbed the nearest one it could find. I have now fixed this by ensuring that too small / too large icons are scaled to fit, in revision 959300.

bcooksley wrote:The problem was that KIconLoader could not locate the desired size, so it grabbed the nearest one it could find. I have now fixed this by ensuring that too small / too large icons are scaled to fit, in revision 959300.

Awesome! Looks a lot better! I'm not sure if this is related to the fix, but after updating to 959301 I only get a questionmark-icon for the font-installer. And I could have sworn I had another icon previously.

Hmmm. I can't think of why that would happen. Does the normal icon display itself in System Settings?
Does it affect all places the icon is displayed in KControl4?
'kbuildsycoca4' should find the icon again.

bcooksley wrote:Hmmm. I can't think of why that would happen. Does the normal icon display itself in System Settings?
Does it affect all places the icon is displayed in KControl4?
'kbuildsycoca4' should find the icon again.

Let's see...it looks like it should in systemsettings yes.
And it doesn't affect all places in KControl4 either. It looks like it should when kcontrol
is configured for icon-view. In tree-view, it looks like it should in the treeview but NOT in the righthand panel.

That's the only icon this happens for btw, and using kbuildsycoca4 does not help. I get the same behavior both before and after (and with reboots in between as well).

Hmmm.... I can't reproduce the issue, it works fine for me.
Does it happen under a new user?

Just a notice to all those following KControl4, in preperation for the move to kdebase, it has been renamed to System Settings. It is not affected in functionality in any way.

bcooksley wrote:Hmmm.... I can't reproduce the issue, it works fine for me.
Does it happen under a new user?

Yes, it happens under a new user as well. I also updated again to see if it had been "accidentally" fixed (currently revision 960073) but no luck there either.

This is what it looks like:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29319276@N ... 2/sizes/o/

Sorry, but have been unable to find out why that is happening. I can only speculate that KHTML is unable to find the icon referenced by KIconLoader, which I use to retrieve the path to the icons.

In other news, KControl4 ( now called System Settings ) has been moved into KDE Workspace and can be found at:

Code: Select all

svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/systemsettings/

Note that you will probably need to checkout the top level, configure there then just compile System Settings:

Code: Select all

svn co -N svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/ kde-workspace
cd kde-workspace
svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/systemsettings/
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$(kde4-config --prefix)
cd systemsettings
make

Woohoo!

I tried out the new KDE4 System Settings in the latest KDE4-UNSTABLE LiveCD from openSuSE.

What was the reason to introduce a configuration dialog for KDE System Settings? System Settings itself is a configuration dialog, so now we have a configuration dialog for the configuration dialog. This is silly, particularly considering that this embedded configuration dialog contains only two items to configure. I also think that, as a general rule of thumb, modal dialogs are bad and should be used sparingly.

For changing a way of displaying lots of items, like between tree view, icon view, list view aso., the most common solution seems to be to offer either an icon with a pop-down menu (used in Konqueror 3.5 and Windows XP Explorer) or a purely text-based selection pop-down menu (like in GNOME Nautilus). Or you could change it in an application menu bar or even within the general context menu.

There are many other desktop environments to learn from how to make a good design and how to provide good usability, including the old, beloved KDE 3.5. Why do KDE4 developers so often insist on doing everything in another, weird way, different from the tried and tested ways of all other desktop environments out there? This is a problem of the FOSS desktop in general and not confined to KDE4. GNOME has many oddities, too, which often make me despair and think, what on earth are they smoking?

The problem was two fold:
1) Adding them both to the toolbar would cause clutter.
2) Using a drop down menu like help would be a possible work around to the above, but it would require dynamically creating the actions and keeping track of them. Not to mention it will be harder to allow future restrictions based on the Kiosk framework.