admiral0's blog

KDE Rant

admiral0 — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 17:37:21 +0000

KDE technology haters should stop reading here .

This is a rant about my issues with KDE (probably many other users out there have bumped into these like me) that made my rage literally explode this weekend. Let’s start with the annoying fact that made me write this rant.

KMail 2 and its akonadi backend

Don’t get me wrong. I love akonadi, it’s a beautiful piece of technology and very important in KDE. When KMail swithced from its old backend to akonadi it was unusable. I had all my accounts (3, if you are curious) set up for imap and, well, i had a *LOT* of crashes. I couldn’t go on like this and moved to thunderbird even if it’s a punch in the eye concerning looks in KDE. I promised myself that i would retry KMail 2 when it would be more stable.

Some weeks ago, my laptop’s installation ‘sploded and i was too lazy to fix it (aka had too much crap on it even to bother) and i decided to give gentoo a spin. So here i am with a fresh kde 4.8 install and here i go:

emerge kde-base/kdepim-meta

All ok, i set up my 3 accounts (2 pop and gmail as imap). Love it. The integation is awesome, background email check is awesome, my life is awesome. I put also some filters for the mailing lists i ~~follow~~ lurk. 1 week ago i mysteriously start loosing emails from my first pop account (the second one is less active and i didn’t notice). So i presume it’s KMail and send me a mail from gmail. Mail arrives in couple of seconds. I decided it’s some ISP fail and live with it for a couple of days. Then, this saturday i decided to emerge thunderbird to test an extension i’ve seen. For the curious ones:

?[admiral0@deimos] [/dev/pts/2]
?[~]> genlop -i thunderbird
 * mail-client/thunderbird

   Total builds: 1
   Global build time: 50 minutes and 5 seconds.

   Info about currently installed ebuild:

   * mail-client/thunderbird-11.0.1
   Install date: Sat Apr 14 14:13:03 2012
   USE=" -bindist -gconf -+crashreporter -+crypt -+ipc -+lightning -+minimal -mozdom -+webm"
   CFLAGS="-pipe -march=native -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wno-return-type -w -mno-avx"

All mails arrive to me safely! So here it goes:

My face when trying thunderbird

Alternatives Integration

So you’d expect that now i’m all warm and squishy inside because i’ve got my system working all right. Wrong!

Mozilla team did an awesome job with firefox 11 and thunderbird 11 on linux. Finally they use freedesktop.org specification for notifications and prevent me from killing myself when a download finishes or mail arrives. Yay for mozilla team! What about kde’s side?

KDE has an awesome framework for desktop search and data sharing between applications. Akonadi can store/retrieve/make available bookmarks, mails(but it fails), calendars, todos and so on. So i would expect a resource to get firefox’s bookmarks, and another ones pulling data from thunderbird. Are there any like these?

Other annoyances

There are some things in the day-to-day life that could be made better but no one cares enough. It seems that performance/reactivity issues in KDE are addressed when they bite back. Like nepomuk. Nepomuk was never active for me until Sebastian Trueg started hacking and profiling. Now nepomuk is active on all of my installs. There are many places where profiling is needed. Some examples:

kickoff – Clicking on the button presses it (i mean graphically) and it freezes plasma till menu is loaded. Pretty annoying.
kde startup – i presume it’s a lazy startup, because when the loading screen goes away, 5-10 secs pass before i can do anything useful.
kwin – when using another wm *everything* feels faster.

So i ask myself, where is the usability team that was so active in the 4.0 era? Most usability fixes are done by software’s own developers, and that’s why “looks fine to me” is the actual motivation for keeping/modifying UX. Result?

when applications open first time, user is like “wth is this?!” because window is too little for the contents and some labels don’t even have space to display.
till current git nm plasmoid had hardcoded text color in labels (so half of the labels had black text in dark color scheme)
use obsidian coast/zion colorscheme and open kmail.
no “clean” plasma themes besides ambience and aya. (both not shipped by default afaik)

What will i do?

I can do very little other than complaining. I know only some parts of powerdevil and akonadi API, so:

I’ll continue work (i’ve left behind) on vgaswitcheroo action for powerdevil and try to do a firefox bookmark resource for akonadi (i’ve had some fails with QSQLITE and need a way to debug that)

Switchable patch submitted

admiral0 — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:47:38 +0000

Well, this action is done. I’ve added 1 thing to it, the ability to cancel a switch. The usual screenshot:

Now, let’s give tribe (chakra installer) some love.

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Switchable Graphics almost ready (patch available)

admiral0 — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 23:31:02 +0000

After some talk with dario (cool guy btw), i’ve changed some things in the management of switchable graphics and it’s almost ready for inclusion in KDE.

Here are the things that stop me pushing code for review:

code cleanup (i just cleaned it up from debug swears )
astyle run (if i submit this, kde dudes laugh in my face)
2 icons, 1 for switchable graphics and one for gpu.
translations?

For those impatient to try it even if it may eat your hamster alive:

git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kde-workspace.git
cd kde-workspace
wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5225087/0001-Added-switchable-graphics.patch
git apply 0001-Added-switchable-graphics.patch
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ..
cd powerdevil
make
sudo make install

And here goes the result

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Switchy 2

admiral0 — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 14:39:29 +0000

As i said in the previous post, good news are coming.

Switchy is a solution that already works for switchable graphics, but it’s somewhat clumsy to use. To have it running successfully you have to edit fstab and add entry for debugfs. Also it’s fully manual(did not integrate with any DE).

Well here is the future:

In case you’re asking i’ve got almost working code that handles everything automagically, mounting debugfs included. Code needs a lot of polishing and some bits for the 2 options to work. But how do they work?

If action is enabled (first checkbox) the unused graphics card is powered off on profile activation. (DONE)

You can select the gpu to activate on profile activation. This performs a lazy switch. That means that if you have to restart X11 the switch is performed after logout, otherwise switch is performed silently.

If “Propose GPU switch” is checked, on a switch that requires logout/login a notification is fired proposing a logout.

So switchy 2 will be basically the same in the UI, but will use the new interfaces.

I’d like to thank drf that showed me how KAuth and PowerdDevil work, and now i’m back to coding.

PS. I got accepted in QtonPi Device Program. SDK for archlinux will be there soon.

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I’m back

admiral0 — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:51:31 +0000

After 1 year of silence i’m gonna blog again.

Not that i did nothing this time:

Wattson plasmoid
Switchy (Shortly news)
Some minecraft tests (hopefully i’ll release something soon)
I am now a Chakra Linux dev

Expect fresh news soon

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admiral0 — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 09:27:24 +0000

I have made some tests comparing mesa and gallium code for my ati card. Well, classic mesa definetly looses as doesn’t render textures right. For example frogatto doesn’t run under r600c, but runs well under r600g. Urban terror has no textures and 56fps with r600c, with r600g it gives me a nice GPU hung(it’s a regression, i had it running *with* textures some weeks ago). And finally i can play ut2004 with my powerful ati card. Wow finally!

Thoughts on network management

admiral0 — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 07:05:11 +0000

Managing network is not easy from computer’s point of view. There’s little automagic to do. But most folks don’t get it and try to automate the hell out of it.
We have the Network Manager example of how NOT to do a network manager. It fucks up what you do in console, does a lot of stuff without even telling you wtf is it doing. Otoh it has good support for 3g dongles and has a neat interface in gnome.

So what should a network manager do?
* Connecting to wireless
* Connecting to 3g
* Connecting to Vpn
* Sharing connection(ethernet, wireless)
* Setting up a quick local network (gaming, lan parties)
* Choosing default route
* Choosing global dns
* Notify about network changes (disconnected, connected from console and so on)
* Wireless link in gui

So if you’re wondering, they’re all features i plan for netcfgfx, and this network manager won’t be archlinux only. Stay tuned

Aggiornamenti Identi.ca del 2010-10-16

admiral0 — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 21:59:59 +0000

double the gun, double the fun… #
@desaparecido !drivel segfaults to me #
drops dead… #
Mono addons for git, quote:
well, we already have “git, only slower”
it’s called mercurial
so there’s no demand for git# #
@mpwoodward then you’ll get kicked in the head when noticing unity’s slowness. (i own too a 1000HE). easy-peasy is the way. #
@mpwoodward you need to clean after install. remove CShit(libmono) and install shotwell instead of picasa (winelib app makes tux sad) !linux #
@mpwoodward easy-peasy installs picasa instead. If on 10.10 try 2D launcher in efl, gorgeus but not complete. #
@titanioverde unfortunately such “geniuses” exist. #
What is simplest distro for netbooks? (My gf will use it so no archlinux/gentoo). Netbook with slow graphics so no 3d please (no UNR) !linux #
@hardisk what is special about it? #
@titanioverde honestly i see no future in chrome Os and jolicloud #
@headphonica hehehe, if i put that my gf gets really angry… she doesn’t enjoy minimalism #
@imag1narynumber salix looks nice indeed. I’ll give it a try. #
@nsmadlinx lol, mepis was the distro i used when i approached linux #
@titanioverde i think they depend too much on connectivity and rely on cloud sw. #
@titanioverde i find meego aproach social but clean enough if you are not always connected. No chrome for me #
@waltercool they are shitting their pants because openoffice is free and oracle wants to put money in it #
@titanioverde i don’t like ubuntu/debian. try meego, linux foundation is behind it. #
@titanioverde exactly. Meego is hosted by lf and a trademark of linux foundation. #

Bot Love

admiral0 — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 08:19:09 +0000

[12:10] <1> about some things, but most make me sad
[12:11] <1> mostly the stuff that is known for a loooong time and vendors still ignoring reality
[12:11] likeusing reader while there are a lot of poppler-based open readers?
[12:12] s/likeusing reader/like using adobe reader/
[12:12] <+infobot> admiral0 meant: like using adobe reader while there are a lot of poppler-based open readers?
[12:12] infobot: <3
[12:12] <+infobot> I love you. <3
[12:12] <1> that’s only half of the truth

Grim Wepa

admiral0 — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:13:25 +0000

Hello people. Recently i found a very nice program for pentesting, it’s called grim wepa. I started it and it works.

Really nice. It looks like this:

But I don’t like GUIs that reinvent everything so i fixed the iwlist issue that grim wepa had with archlinux and removed fancy graphics (i set Gtk look and feel). Here is the result with my GTK theme:

So if you want it, here is the patch. apply to grim wepa 1.1 alpha.