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KDE4 - 'Allow programs in desktop window' option missing

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yorthehunter
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Hey everyone,
After a day and a half of non-stop forum/mail list/Help doc reading, I have come to the conclusion that I need help. I stumbled upon a post on another board (http://fixunix.com/debian/434663-kde4-root-tail.html) in which the user was pointed to a non-existant mail list. After subscribing to what I thought was the nearest match to the list mentioned, I figured I would also post here to increase my odds. I apologize if this has already been covered elsewhere, and in such an incident I ask for a simple kick in the right direction.

My situation :
I am trying to get root-tail to work and display properly so I can display custom system information on the desktop for our testers/developers that do not know how to find it. However, I cannot get it to work with plasma no matter what I try, yet I was able to get it working on kde3 by using the checkbox for the 'Allow programs in desktop window' option. I am simply unable to locate the kde4 equivalent of said option (if one exists), or if using such programs in kde4 is now considered an act of lunacy.

Am I missing something completely obvious, or can anyone shed some light on a poor brain in the shadows?

OS in question - SLES 11 (base and sp1) 32 and 64 bit

any/all assistance is welcome and appreciated
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Hans
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The mailing list has changed name to plasma-devel, but it's probably better to ask here or in #plasma on freenode anyway since plasma-devel is for development-related topics.

As for your question, unfortunately I don't have a good answer. As far as I know this would be possible with a wallpaper type (one that lets an external application to draw the wallpaper), but I don't think anyone's been working on such a thing.


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Kryten2X4B
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yorthehunter wrote:Am I missing something completely obvious, or can anyone shed some light on a poor brain in the shadows?


I seem to recall a post on a blog quite a while ago that anything that attempts to draw directly to the X-root-window (such as root-tail or xsnow) have no chance to work within KDE4 (probably because it's considered an act of lunacy...). Unfortunately I don't remember the technical details of WHY though, but it seems you're out of luck.

As a sort-of workaround, you could add the following widget to the desktop as large as you need it to be, and then set it to execute whatever commands you need on a regular basis (presumably tail...). http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Co ... tent=84523


OpenSUSE 11.4, 64-bit with KDE 4.6.4
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google01103
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maybe one of these will suffice?

http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/On ... tent=68923
http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Km ... ent=124134

Ksystemlog would be great if you could request the developer to make it a bit more customizable and run without root privledges http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/KS ... tent=23761 but it's a great log viewer


OpenSuse Leap 42.1 x64, Plasma 5.x

yorthehunter
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Yeah, it seems I got the same answer from the plasma-devel mailing list as well. Aaron did however have another alternative other than the suggestions here though that I have just started to beat my head on. I'm sure I will be able to get one of these solutions to perform the task I am looking for, and my gratitude goes out to those penguins and lizards smarter than I willing to lend assistance.
=]


Thanks for all the responses, and if anyone is interested here was the response I got from Aaron on the mailing list :

for various reasons, we don't support drawing on to the root window. from the
perspective of a system like plasma, it's a broken idea by design.

however, we DO ship a plasmoid that does the same thing: File Watcher. if you
need something that tails the output of commands, i believe there's a plasmoid
that does that as well, but i'd have to go looking for it.

if you users are using KDE SC 4.4 or above, you can even add it to their
current desktop setup using a javascript update script:

http://techbase.kde.org/KDE_System_Admi ... pScripting


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