Slowly migrating to KDE4

Recently the debate about KDE4 has reemerged with a lot of people complaining heavily - either their pet feature is not yet (re-)implemented, or they don’t agree with some fringe design decision, or something else is not exactly the way they like it. I could understand people had mixed feelings about 4.0, but now it’s getting out of hand in my opinion, while 4.1 won’t match KDE 3.5 in every possible respect, the improvements during the six months since 4.0 release are incredible - very promising prospects for 4.2 and I don’t even dare think about 4.3 - oohwee.

I’ve been running KDE 4.0 on my ancient Pentium III Compaq bricktop, since before it was released, and recently upgraded to 4.1 beta. I’ve also just played my first songs with Amarok2 on it, had a look at K3b and KOffice2, things are rapidly approaching a usable level. But this doesn’t really count as migration, as I rarely use this bricktop, and almost never do anything remotely productive on it.

I’ll definitely complete migration to KDE 4.1.x for my workstation when openSUSE 11.1 is released in December this year - at the very latest. Being a huge fan of KDE3 I’ll surely miss it, but there’s no use in clinging to the past - for the good of KDE and the free software desktop in general, it’s getting time to move on.

So far I’ve begun a slow, gradual migration of my workstation, from within safe and familiar KDE3 - moving to KDE4 components one step at a time.

I’m using KDE4.1 beta KWin with effects enabled (yes, in KDE3. seli made this very easy to do). I could never get along with Compiz for more than a few minutes at the time, but now I’ve used kde4-kwin for more than a week, virtually without a single issue. While it doesn’t have as many or as extravagant effects as Comiz, it does have the useful ones (scale windows, desktop-grid and such) and also wobbly windows and some pretty switchers.

I’ve also begun using a number of the great KDE4 applications as defaults for their respective jobs - using Okular for PDFs, KDE4 Gwenview for image viewing, using LoKalize for translations, Dragon Player for video, KTorrent, Marble, KDE Games… steadily adding more KDE4 apps to the bunch. Of course I’m using Oxygen icon theme for YaST2 and Firefox

I’m lovin’ it…

The low down on openSUSE 11.0

openSUSE 11.0 will be released this Thursday (June 19). As I’m writing this my laptop is updating from rc1 to the gold master, as I happened to come across a mirror that had the 11.0 repositories accessible a bit prematurely. So I guess it’s time to write a little about 11.0. It’s a rather monumental release, but I’ll try to give a brief overview of what everyone should know about the new version.

Media layout
The non-live 1-cd was dropped. What remains is the DVD with KDE 4.0, KDE 3.5, Xfce, text/server installation, FVWM2, GNOME, etc. The DVD includes translations, Adobe Flash, Sun Java and some other proprietary packages.

Installable LiveCDs with KDE 4.0 and GNOME are also available. These are 100% free software, with the exception of wlan firmwarez. Only English and German language available, other languages can be installed manually later of course.

Installation
The (DVD) installation was made much prettier, faster and shorter/simpler.

One controversial decision was to use the same password for the normal user account and the root account by default. If you don’t want this behaviour look out for the checkbox.

Despite being simplified the openSUSE (DVD) installer is still more powerful and customizable than the installers of most comparable distros. Allowing users to add and remove software, do very advanced partitioning etc. The liveCD installer is a little less powerful.

Package management
Huge improvements in this area. Package managment with YaST2 or zypper is literally 10-15 times faster than on 10.3.

But that’s not all. YaST2 was ported to Qt4 and the software management module has been polished a lot. It’s now also possible to access the repository management from within the software management module.

Zypper saw a ton of improvements, including new features like support for local and http RPMs, but most notably the new ‘zypper dup’ feature - which performs an online dist-upgrade, meaning you’ll be able to upgrade openSUSE 11.0 to 11.1 without downloading media.

openSUSE updater was ported to KDE4, and now supports using packagekit as a backend as well as libzypp.

KDE

KDE 3.5.9
The familiar and stable KDE3.5 is available on the DVD and via network installation. Not much has happened here since 10.3 - but it does sport some exciting new features like KNetworkManager 0.7, now supporting static IP setup, using multiple interfaces at once and more.

KDE 4.0.4
The impressive openSUSE KDE team have worked hard to make KDE 4.0 as usable as possible. Among other things they have added support for moving applets in the panel and desktop icons work better compared with vanilla KDE 4.0. The controversial toolbox/cashew can be hidden with a non-gui option.

It includes KDEPIM 4.1 beta (KMail, KNode, Akregator, KOrganizer etc.). These beta packages will be updated to final as quickly as possible.

By default it uses the Aya plasma theme. If you want the official KDE default black theme it’s just a couple of clicks away.

My involvement
Apart from beta testing, mailling list and IRC participation etc. I’ve also been involved in a few other ways.

Jan, Ib, Martin and myself made sure openSUSE was 100% translated to Danish for the 3rd time running. Unfortunately rumours abound that a mistake has been made between the release candidate and the gold master meaning that the installation slideshow will appear untranslated

The Oxygen icon theme that I put together for YaST2 is now a part of the distro, and is even used by default in KDE4.0 installations.

opensuse-xgl-settings, the Kommander script that I used to maintain will not be updated for 11.0 - at least not by me. AIGLX will be enabled by default on openSUSE 11.0 and KDE4 KWin effects as well as improvements in KControl regarding window manager selection makes the script obsolete from my point of view.

No rose without thorns
While openSUSE 11.0 is definitely an impressive release, there are a number of potential issues. No release is ever perfect, and with much new stuff comes the risk of new problems.

Most people should know by now that KDE 4.0 is only suitable for early adopters, fanboyz and forgiving users, but I’ll repeat it once again. While the openSUSE KDE team have done very impressive work, they’re not magicians. Demanding users should opt for KDE 3.5. Other strategies worth considering are:

• Installing KDE3 and KDE4 in parallel which mostly works seamlessly
• Upgrading to KDE 4.1 which will become available via the openSUSE Build Service when it’s released in late July - the betas are already available for the adventurous.
• Wait for openSUSE 11.1 which is planned for December 2008 already, and will come with 4.1.x

While KNetworkManager has interesting new features as mentioned above it seems to cause some problems for quite a lot of people, myself included (bcm4306 card). If you can’t get it to behave you can consider using YaST2 for your configuration or nm-applet.

Firefox 3 beta is included. It should be pretty stable, but many extensions are not yet available. Firefox 3 final should be available via official online update very shortly after 11.0 release.

The ath5k driver is used for Atheros cards. It’s still immature, if you have problems with it, consider blacklisting it and installing the legally questionable blobby madwifi packages provided by the community.

That’s it from me. Remember to have a lot of fun with openSUSE 11.0!

Download via http and seed via bittorrent

So, you don’t think bittorrent download is fast enough for the openSUSE 11.0 betas? This is a very common complaint. On the other hand you wish to help take some of the load off the mirrors, and you like the protection that bittorrent offers from corrupted downloads.

I’m here to tell you, that in this case you can pretty much have your cake and eat it too. Here’s how:
(I’m using KTorrent, the workflow should be similar with other clients such as Azureus):

1a) Download your desired iso via http/ftp.

1b) Download deltaiso and apply it to your iso for the previous development release.

2) Get the corresponding torrent, but stop it immediately (right click -> Stop).

3) Move your complete iso to the folder created in step 2), overwriting what’s there. If you have applied a deltaiso you need to make sure that new iso is named exactly as the iso in the torrent.

4) Right click the stopped torrent, and select “Check Data Integrity” from the context menu.

This will check that your http download/applydeltaiso was successful. If the download/applydeltaiso was corrupt, you should only have to re-download the corrupt parts, meaning you won’t have to do another full download.

5) When the integrity check is finished you start the torrent (right click -> Start), and it’ll start seeding away.

You have now achieved the following, in a few simple steps.
* Fast initial download via http/ftp
* Verification that the download/applydeltaiso is not corrupt
* Helping openSUSE and mirrors by making bittorrent download faster for others
* Better karma

Novell from an openSUSE perspective

The relationship between openSUSE and Novell is pretty difficult to describe. Ideally openSUSE should be viewed 100% as a community project, where the people employed by Novell, who do the lion’s share of the work, are also seen as members of the openSUSE community on the same level as volunteer contributors. This works out pretty well, and keeps improving further. The volunteers and the Novell employees working on openSUSE generally get along great and in a very productive way.

But sometimes you wonder if the parts of Novell that are _not_ involved with openSUSE is friend or enemy. Every now and then they do something that really hurts us. It happens so often that the IRC community has come up with a name for the phenomenon - Novell Entropy Department (NED). The following examples spring to mind:

• Novell threatening to drop KDE from enterprise products a few years ago. This was extremely harmful to openSUSE’s credibility with KDE users, and still causes confusion to this day about where openSUSE stands on the matter of desktop environments. Remember that SUSE has and had a very KDE dominated user base.
• Forcing ZMD+friends onto SUSE Linux 10.1 while being completely immature. The harm that this did to openSUSE’s reputation simply cannot be exaggerated, and recovery is still far from complete.
• The Microsoft deal. While I think most criticism of the deal is without real substance, there can be no doubt that all the bad publicity has done tremendous harm to openSUSE. At least the situation could have been handled with more sensitivity towards the free software community - including Novell’s own employees.
• Novell marketing people such as Ted Haeger[1] and Justin Steinman repeatedly saying openSUSE is just “bleeding edge for geeks and enthusiasts” and Justin Steinman even stating very publicly that Ubuntu was the best choice for Dell/consumers.

The latest such surreal incident happened yesterday. Suddenly the Novell login page, which is among other things used by tens of thousands of openSUSE contributors to access bugzilla, had gotten a completely useless Adobe Flash animation. It doesn’t matter if you’re a free software zealot or a pragmatic techie - useless Adobe Flash animations causing huge CPU load when you’re trying to enter bugzilla is going to piss you off. After a storm of protests the Flash animation was quickly removed, but it makes you wonder how this can happen in the first place. Even for a company that likes to position itself as “mixed source”.

In all fairness Novell do a lot of good in the free software community. Employing hundreds of developers, GPL’ing YaST2, opening up SUSE development for the outside world, sponsoring Akademy, Guadec, being corporate patrons of KDE etc. One of the latest good things that Novell did was hiring Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier as a community manager for openSUSE. Part of his job is communicating feedback from the community to Novell - it is an important task indeed.

[1] UPDATE: In trying to get my point across I did Ted Haeger some injustice. I knew full well that Ted Haeger is no longer with Novell. And actually I’m only aware of him “dissing” openSUSE on one occasion - and him and Erin did apologize for it on the following episode of Novell Open Audio, after having the error of their ways pointed out to them.

Oxygen for YaST2 II

Two weeks ago I announced that I had selected a bunch of Oxygen icons to replace the Tango icons used in YaST2 by default on openSUSE 10.3, and thus make YaST2 look better and integrate better with KDE4.x.

I must have struck a nerve, because a lot of things started happening fast.

Someone took similar steps to have Oxygen artwork in SaX2 (SuSE advanced X11 configuration).

Marco [daemon] Michna decided to write a themeselector module for YaST2 during Novell Hackweek II, which was last week.

Martin Lasarsch packaged version 0.1 of yast2-theme-oxygen, to work nicely with the themeselector.

Gpant started working on his own theme and in the process creating some great icons, which also fit nicely in my theme.

Today I announce version 0.2 of yast2-theme-oxygen. It’s now more polished, it’s available as an easy and clean to install RPM, using 1-click install, you can now easily switch between the Tango theme and Oxygen using the themeselector module. It’s more enjoyable all around.

Thanks a lot to all involved.

Oxygen for YaST2

openSUSE 10.3 uses Tango icons by default in the YaST2 setup tool. A poorly maintained Crystal theme is also available. Neither solution is really acceptable for me, especially not since migration to KDE4.x.x is slowly starting. So I’ve done something that I’ve been contemplating for a while - that is making a selection of Oxygen icons as a replacement for the Tango icons. It’s called yast2-theme-openSUSE-oxygen.

It’s still pretty rough, in true KDE 4.0 fashion I released it real early. If it turns out that other people are interested, I’ll probably polish it, and enhance it as more Oxygen icons become available, and perhaps also package it as an RPM.

Big thumbs up to the Oxygen artists, I’ve spent some hours staring at their icons in the last couple of days and I’m still very impressed.

UPDATE: As expected it turns out that I hadn’t considered quite a few things in the initial release. Here’s an Oxygen-theme for SaX2 that someone made to fill at least one of the gaps.

Gift shopping

This year I did some christmas shopping in the newly available openSUSE shop.

For my father, who’s also a happy openSUSE user most of the time, I got a t-shirt and a coffee mug. For my nephew/niece due to be released by the end of March I got a cap and a shirt. And for myself a coffee mug, a black hoody and some stickers.

Next time someone asks what to buy for a person who has everything the answer is simple - openSUSE merchandise!

openSUSE and desktop environments

When GNU/Linux distributions provide both KDE and GNOME, it’s usually very clear which desktop environment (DE) is recommended, gets the most developer attention, etc. However there seems to be some confusion about where openSUSE (previously SUSE Linux) stands with regards to DEs. It’s been about a month since openSUSE 10.3 was released, and most tests and reviews seem to focus on GNOME. The Linux Action Show podcast even went as far as saying something along the lines of “openSUSE is obviously a very GNOME centric distribution”. Of course most reviewers are new users who don’t follow the openSUSE project closely and admittedly the situation is a little complicated, so you can understand they’re confused. This is my attempt to explain what is what. I’m a community person and thus don’t have to worry about corporate policy. I’m also a KDE user but I will be as objective as possible.

First things first, openSUSE has no default desktop. If you get the DVD the installer will force you to actively choose which DE to use. You can also download KDE or GNOME single CDs respectively - which again forces you to choose.

KDE in openSUSE
In 2003 Novell acquired the German GNU/Linux distributor SUSE. Historically a very KDE centric distribution, with a very large KDE userbase and community, with most developers also using KDE. openSUSE is still primarily developed by these people in Germany and Czech Republic. Former openSUSE project manager Andreas Jaeger uses KDE, and his successor Stephan Kulow is a very high profile KDE developer. SUSE still employs more high profile KDE developers than any other distributor. Novell are corporate patrons of KDE, and silver sponsors of Akademy.

openSUSE provides excellent service for KDE users. A stable and polished KDE, which is furthermore enhanced with components developed by openSUSE such as Kickoff menu, KNetworkManager, Sysinfo kioslave, Kerry beagle-frontend, KPowersave etc. Build service repositories provide lots of goodies - newest KDE applications backported to shipped KDE version, newest KDE3 builds, snapshots of KDE4 that are updated weekly, at least.

A survey done for openSUSE 10.2 with >27.000 openSUSE users participating, showed 71% using KDE and only 22% using GNOME. Naturally, this vast majority of KDE users also affects testing and the availability of online help and support. Currently kdedevelopers.org is running a survey about which distribution provides the best KDE, which openSUSE is leading at the time of writing.

GNOME in openSUSE
In 2003 Novell also acquired Ximian - a GNOME company with some high profile GNOME developers. However most of these guys have little or nothing to do with the openSUSE project. People like Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza take no part in the development. Their focus is steadily on SUSE Linux Enterprise where most development and marketing is centered around GNOME. Maybe this is why some people seem to automatically expect that the same thing goes for openSUSE. Novell also sponsor GUADEC, and various GNOME-related projects such as Banshee or Beagle.

Lately there have been improvements as for GNOME in openSUSE - both with regards to features and organization. There’s now a native GNOME updater applet, there’s YaST-gtk providing better integration with GNOME than YaST-qt. The slab menu and gnome-xgl-settings developed for SLED10 are of course part of openSUSE now. These things are mostly still rather immature though. GNOME also has some build service repositories providing latest stable versions and also unstable. They’re having frequent IRC meetings to improve things etc.

Final words
I hope this post has helped make things clearer. To sum it up, openSUSE puts a lot of emphasis on both large DEs, and it would probably be wrong to say it’s centered around either one, but a significant majority of its developers, active community members and normal users prefer KDE.

YaKR (Yet another KDE4 Review)

Since the release of KDE 4.0 beta 3 there’s been a lot of talk about KDE4, it even got mentioned in Danish mainstream computer media. So I thought I’d share my thoughts too.

I installed KDE 4.0 beta 3 on openSUSE 10.3 using the packages provided by the openSUSE KDE maintainers. Here’s the screenshot.

Stephan “Beineri” Binner’s openSUSE based LiveCD KDE Four Live is also available witk KDE4 beta 3+.

Besides testing beta3 I’ve also been following KDE4 pretty closely as users go - not following svn or devel mailinglists, but trying to keep up with the goings on. And I have also tried out some earlier builds.

Expectations
The first thing you need to understand about KDE4 is that it uses a little unconventional versioning scheme. It’s similar to the one Microsoft uses for Windows, so most people should be fairly familiar with the style. “Beta3″ actually means “early alpha” by usual standards, and 4.0 “final” will mean it’s actually a “tech preview” for the avantgarde to try out in real life. After a “service pack” or two, we can finally really judge the product (KDE 4.1/4.2).

This is actually not meant to be a rant against KDE, I believe in “release early, release often”, and I think it’s very important to get a release out there, to really get some traction going for KDE4 - but it’s also very important to adjust people’s expectations, or a lot of people will be extremely disappointed by KDE 4.0. Beineri already explained about KDE4 != KDE4.0 long ago, but I think it doesn’t hurt to remind people. Now that expectations are hopefully aligned with reality, let’s continue.

Platform
Most of the KDE4 development so far has been in the libraries. Not very visible to the user in the short term, but in the mid to long term I’m convinced that Solid (hardware), Phonon (multimedia), Sonnet (spellcheck), Akonadi (pim), Decibel (chat) and so on will help the creation of great applications to the immense pleasure of users and application developers alike. Considering that KDE3 is already excellent in this respect, the implications of a much improved KDE4 is almost scary. Not to mention all the goodness of Qt4 - such as great svg. Oxygen (icons, window decoration, widgets), will be a huge improvement. Note that my screenshot does not have oxygen widgets nor windeco, and the icon theme is not yet complete. While this all leads to very high expectations, in many ways it’s too soon to judge.

“User experience”
Some things are visible already though, and disappoint me. I thought that the most common complaints about KDE3 would be taken care of, but judging by beta3 this is not the case, au contraire. I noted at least three issues that I think are disastrous, no less.

Common complaint 1: “KDE gets in my way, it’s obtrusive, there’s too much going on”
What does KDE4 do about it? Well, it puts sound notifications on kwin events like opening, maximizing and minimizing windows. Konsole spews popup notifications left and right. Of course these things are configurable, but defaults are immensely important. The rule should be to “disturb” the user as little as possible, unless he asks for it.

Common complaint 2: “The panel takes up too much of the screen”
What does KDE4 do? It makes the panel even bigger (I didn’t pull out kruler to measure, but it’s certainly not smaller).

Common complaint 3: “KDE(3) is too much like Windows (XP)”
What does KDE4 do to combat this widespread misconception? It makes the panel look very much like the panel in Windows Vista. I know the artist says it’s purely coincidental that he happens to share tastes with Microsoft artists. But it’s still a bad idea - I think so partly for selfish reasons, I’m sick of hearing people say KDE is Windows-like, and now it looks like I’ll have to listen to it for years to come.

Apps
Not many of the applications are really anywhere near ready yet, but the few that are usable are mostly very nice. I was never a fan of the decision to replace Konqueror with Dolphin as the default file manager, but maybe it makes sense from a strategic point of view, maybe Konqueror is pearls for swine. But Konq in beta3 seems rather limited, having only one viewmode (dolphin-part), I think I have around 10 different view modes in KDE3-Konq. I hope this is a temporary situation, and that Konq will return to at least KDE3 level in 4.1 or 4.2. On a positive note the default toolbar setup for web browsing in Konq seemed very neat. The KDE4 games are very nice looking, always been a fan of kmines, and it’s great - though I miss the smiley face that was there in earlier KDE4 versions.

When KDE4 development began I was very worried about the prospects for KBabel which I more or less depend on for translation work, as it wasn’t maintained actively. Ironically, today it’s replacement KAider is one of the most usable KDE4 apps, and I’ve already used it for “production” a little bit.

KOffice2 released an alpha concurrently with KDE4 beta3. It also looks very promising. I especially enjoy that the KWord UI is starting to resemble Krita, making the suite more “uniform”, and simply making KWord look way cool. So far I haven’t tested the fruits of the Google Summer of Code ODF-project, but certainly ODF support, and compatibility with OOo must have improved significantly.

Conclusions

• KDE 4.0 might be nearing release, but KDE4 has a looong way to go
• With all the library work done and Qt4, there’s an amazing (unrivaled?) platform for desktop and application development available
• Developers need to be more careful about defaults. Do not let the default settings annoy people, for crying out loud
• Usable applications are still scarce, but many of them are looking very promising

opensuse-xgl-settings and konvenientSUSE

opensuse-xgl-settings is now released for openSUSE 10.3. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s just a very crude Kommander-script for KDE users that automates the steps required to enable Xgl+Compiz, selecting which compiz plugins to load, install and enable Compiz Fusion, disable Xgl and such, in a graphical way.

I don’t exactly recommend Xgl/Compiz for daily use - but if you want to check it out it should be easy with opensuse-xgl-settings.

konvenientSUSE is another Kommander-script that I have done for openSUSE 10.1 and 10.2. It will not be updated for 10.3 since it’s obsoleted by some new YaST modules - namely Community Repositories and One-click-install.