Slashdot Mirror

When Windows 2000 came out here, the French version was several months behind...and it was more Parisienne French instead of Quebecois French, which was what was promised.

But what is the difference with linux here? As far as I know, kde-francophone consist mostly of French people (from France) and the translation of the 2 months old kde 3.2 is not finished yet.

Have uncle bob have his root password in the "KWallet Password manager", because it so more convenient...

Make Konqueror use some KPart plugins or KIOslave
like those for cmd or apt-get,
have a web page that "FORCE" the user to say "YES",
launch apt-get or cmd with sudo and do some damage.

Another way would be to fool the user to enter his root password.

Don't worry experience shows that people are easy to trick.
Just think about how many people have all those junks like weather thingy,
internet time synch and similar.

And for those not realising VBA on KDE is replaced with JavaScript,
KJSEmbed can do enough harm via DCOP,
if misused properly much like VBA can do on Windows, so please.

I never said that it's not convenient,
much more like VBA was convenient on Windows or WScript for such matter.
The 'real' problem is educating 'dummy users' who just install, click, accept anything on their box,
if they do it on Windows... don't worry they will do the same thing on Linux.

People who don't apply security patches for Konqueror or the Linux Kernel will be as
problematic as those who don't apply 6 month old
security patch on Windows and that still get CodeRed infected.

I know Linux tends to release patch faster and such, but for 'dumb uncle bob' that might
not save him from some worms that exploit some bug in some Linux applications.

Let's assume there's a root exploit bug in Konqueror or X11 or KDE.
Let's assume there's a patch.
Let's assume user bob, don't know what's a patch, he ask neighboor's X once every 6 months when his in trouble or things get screwed up.
Let's assume some guy wrote some rootkit exploitable program for that bug as a "convenient" example NOT to be used.
Let's assume some ScriptKiddie find that webpage and say cool, let's make some worm, just to look cool at school among his geek friends.
So, he write some worm make use of KJSEmbed, DCOP or whatever he might find
and send the thing as an innocent HTML attachement to a bunch of people randomly.

Guess what happened?

But yeah Linux can't get virus...
it's just more tricky to trick people out, but not impossible.

So, think twice!
You can have easy-to-use, features or security, pick any two.

The Red hat KDE is out dated, and is tweaked by red hat. A large amount of problems have been solved in later versions of KDE. I recommend you try the KDE that comes with Mandrake 10 community edtion. HUGE amounts of usabillity bugs have been fixed, and if you still find some, then report it, saying what is wrong, and how it can be fixed. I have helped fix usability problems in KDE, so I know what I am talking about. Both KDE and GNOME developers are bending their back to breaking point to fix usabillity bugs, its just that not many people are aware of this fact. Check kde-usabillity. You are welcome to join in, since you seem to understand the problems to be solved.

The Red hat KDE is out dated, and is tweaked by red hat. A large amount of problems have been solved in later versions of KDE. I recommend you try the KDE that comes with Mandrake 10 community edtion. HUGE amounts of usabillity bugs have been fixed, and if you still find some, then report it, saying what is wrong, and how it can be fixed. I have helped fix usability problems in KDE, so I know what I am talking about. Both KDE and GNOME developers are bending their back to breaking point to fix usabillity bugs, its just that not many people are aware of this fact. Check kde-usabillity. You are welcome to join in, since you seem to understand the problems to be solved.

You'll need to get KDE 3.2 / you can configure the panel using the "Configure Panel" prefs.

You will also need the Baghira Style and Decorations from themes.kde.org

And the Icons ...
The rest is just creative tweaking..

Have Fun ;)

Nick ...

You'll need to get KDE 3.2 / you can configure the panel using the "Configure Panel" prefs.

You will also need the Baghira Style and Decorations from themes.kde.org

And the Icons ...
The rest is just creative tweaking..

Have Fun ;)

Nick ...

This is what SCO license demand letters were meant for.

First, I admire Daring Fireball in all of it's pedantic glory. Maybe he is just trolling for April 1st.

OSS software is not always easy to use - there are plenty of OSS developers and users who understand this constant plight. This article doesn't seem to recognize that. Gruber always paints with a broad brush and it is hard not to be offended by what he is saying and implying in this article.

Good user interfaces result from long, hard work, by talented developers and designers.

Check this Gruber - Gnome, KDE, Easy Software (CUPS), Freedesktop, Mozilla, Ximian, Trolltech, Activestate, IBM, Sun, Redhat, SuSE, Novell, Mandrake, Debian, Open Office, Apple, and on and on, ALL have talented developers and designers on board. Some are paid, many are not. All of them write, package, repackage, extend, design, evolve, sell services around or just use OSS software. Even if the print setup on Alan Cox computer was too difficult for anyone, it was written by a talented developer and probably looked over by a talented designer somewhere later. It just didn't work this time around. So we move on. We re-examine it. I promise you we didn't need Alan Cox to tell us it needs improvement. Alan Cox is not OSS. Alan Cox problems do not reflect everyone's problems. Certainly not my co-worker who's CUPS install does autodiscover. It even connected to my amazing Apple Powerbook's shared printers running off... CUPS.

There are plenty of failures in OSS usablity. They are being fixed fast (release). The fast (release) is complimented by the fast (performance) of Linux. I use OS X everyday, don't tell me it is more responsive than Linux and it's OSS on equal hardware. You don't have enough proof to refute mine, I don't have enough proof to disprove yours. OSS is also more than just cheap software, it's cheap software that runs on cheap hardware (more on this below). And it will be good. I think it's good right now. Novell and IBM thinks it's so good right now they are rolling it out, company wide.

Talented programmers who work long full-time hours crafting software need to be paid. That means selling software. Remember the old open source magic formula - that one could make money giving away software by selling services and support? That hasn't happened - in terms of producing well-designed end user software - and it's no wonder why....

For example, look at how much Mac OS X has improved in the last three years alone. Even if desktop Linux is improving - and I do think it is - it's improving at a much slower pace than Mac OS X....

Mac OS X printing implementation was built on much of the same software as Alan Cox Fedora install. This is the panacea of the OSS business model - quality free (libre) disparate software, glued together by intelligent programmers. Further I don't understand Gruber's point of view - Apple is making money off OSS and the developers are getting paid. The support and services might be in the form of support software which may not be what the kind of support he was thinking of... but it's still services and support.

This isn't to say desktop Linux isn't growing in use. It is, and will continue to. But it's growing at the bottom end of the market - cheap $400 computers from Wal-Mart. That's a market where software usability is not a key feature.

I'm sorry but Gruber is wrong. It is a key feature in that market - according to Linux developers. Maybe not Apple developers and maybe not Microsoft developers. However, to many, many, many OSS developers, usability importance doesn't scale with price. That's a disgusting, exclusive statement by Gruber.

Like those perfectly useless applets for your system tray like knotes, which has been part of the 'bloat' often attributed to KDE...

oh, btw, from the review on ArsTechnica:

Our favorite new applet by far is the Post-It note-style applet, which lets you paste notes to yourself on your desktop (much like the Post-It notes that decorate many a monitor's front), and remains sticky between sessions.

Building a complex application from source is not trivial. Not only must the application be compiled, but the tools used to build it must be built. Unfortunately, OpenBSD, the tools, and the application are all evolving, and often, getting all the pieces working together is a challenge. Once everything works, a revision in any of the pieces the next day could render it broken. Every six months, as a new release of OpenBSD is made, an effort is made to test the building of every port on every platform, but during the development cycle it is likely that some ports will break.

In addition to having all the pieces work together, there is just the matter of time and resources required to compile some applications from source. A common example is CVSup, a tool commonly used to track the OpenBSD source tree. To install CVSup on a moderately fast system with a good Internet connection may take only about ten seconds -- the time required to download and unpack a single 511kB package file. In contrast, building CVSup on the same machine from source is a huge task, requiring many tools and bootstrapping a compiler, takes almost half an hour on the same machine. Other applications, such as Mozilla or KDE may take hours and huge amounts of disk space and RAM/swap to build. Why go through this much time and effort, when the programs are already compiled and sitting on your CD-ROM or FTP mirror, waiting to be used?

Of course, there are a few good reasons to use ports over packages in some cases:

• Distribution rules prohibit OpenBSD from distributing a package.
• You wish to modify or debug the application or study its source code.
• You need a FLAVOR of a port that is not built by the OpenBSD ports team.
• You wish to alter the directory layout (i.e., modifying PREFIX or SYSCONFDIR)

I read sci.crypt regularly, even if I don't post there. Granted, Tom comes forward as someone who has certain attitude problems (yes, I'm willing to go on record saying this) but the library is still a marvelous piece of work. It's not like we haven't seen controversial personalities in this field before. Also, LTC is nothing but a simple building block, and you can actually verify its functionality and integrity by running the algorithms against any known and verifiable test vector sets. (Locating these is left as an exercise for those interested.) Memory checkers such as valgrind and NJAMD can be used to ascertain that the library routines themselves work without memory flaws. (Especially dangerous when working with crypto, we wouldn't want to overwrite wrong data...)

The API is consistent, even if at times the need to return error codes means that the amount of bytes processed is written to a passed argument. And indeed, as another poster said, LTC is damn pretty and easy-to-use crypto library. Most of all, it's trivial to use only the parts you need and embed those to any program you're writing.

Qt is not GPL for Windows & several other platforms.

No, but it is free for non-commercial applications.

Konqueror and Mozilla share the gecko rendering engine, which is a desperately needed step in the direction of the open source community focusing on depth, not breadth, in choices (applause).

They don't actually. Konqueror uses KHTML, which is a pretty nice HTML engine (Apple chose it over gecko for Safari). As both engines are very nice, I guess either the OSS community isn't taking desperately needed steps or we got enough people to work on a few implementations of things at the same time and make them good.

Having used both browsers extensively, I think the latter is true.

But what should it be, a whole new library based
on the best from Gnome,
Kde,
Gnustep
Enlightenment Foundation Libraries
and Tao elate
implimentet in Ocaml ??

I sure the KDE project will be disappointed to hear that their free widget toolkit has mysteriously had a charge added to it.

Oh, and on that note: there will always be a Free Qt.

Wrong. http://dot.kde.org/1073668213/

MSFT claims that an additional cost of using OO is that it doesn't come with an email client, unlike Office (Outlook), so 'customers may incur a licensing cost associated with buying an email application'. I think it is noteworthy to point out that there are many free email clients, notably Evolution and KMail on Linux, and Mozilla Mail, Scribe, Mahogany, and YAMM for Windows/cross platform.

We've moved on from the days of 'skip intro.'

Like dcop?

To that I'd like to add that KStars is great planetarium program, and Celestia is just an awesome program in general.

One vote goes to KimDaba. I have never used such a tool on Windows and I don't know if there is any. There probably is. But anyway, it's okay at least for your points 0, 1, 2, 4.

brrzzt! wrong!
You're looking at the HEAD branch, where all the development is going on.
Nobody cares to translate that because messages can change until they are "freezed" in the developement cycle.

Try this:
http://i18n.kde.org/stats/gui/KDE_3_2_BRANCH/index .php
There you can find Chinese translated at an 85% and Japanese over 90%, the languages you mentioned.
In fact 23 languages are over 85% completed which is impressive for a non-paid project considering there are 61000 messages for each language to translate, the tiny marketshare, and the relatively few speakers of some of the translated languages.

Excellent point about KDE. Just adding that you can even translate KDE apps to whatever you want on your own using a GUI app called KBabel. I also disagree that Microsoft is way ahead in internationalization - it's not. Most areas I had experience in like adjusting keyboard layouts, application support for international characters has been generally more consistent on my Linux systems than XPs.

Yea, and in typical volunteer FOSS fashion, of the 79 language teams, 11 have done enough work to be considered useful. Chinese and Japanese, the two most important, are only half translated.

You can bet the 35 Office XP localizations are a bit more polished. That's what profit can do for you.

KDE maintains statistics on the 79 translations for the current development branch.

A vague unsupported statement by an AC moderated to +4 ..... But hey, MS astroturfers like to shoot fast and make a lot of noise, so I guess I'm starting to get used to it. Anyways, when was the last time you used KDE?
FYI: KDE now supports 49 languagesand the list is actively growing. On an other note, I seem to recall a story just recently about Microsoft refusing to update Microsoft Office for Hebrew on the Mac...

To be honest, however, from what I've gathered the GNOME people have been far more influenced by Apple than KDE.

And finally - when you come down to it, it's a file selector, there;s not a whole lot innovative you can do with it. The KDE file selector doesn't look overly different from the Windows one, so really, is it any surprise that GNOME follows a vaguely similar line?

Jedidiah.

To clarify:

The purpose of this foundation is to guarantee the availability of Qt for free software development now and in the future.

[...]

Should Troll Tech ever discontinue the Qt Free Edition for any rea- son including, but not limited to, a buy-out of Troll Tech, a merger or bankruptcy, the latest version of the Qt Free Edition will be released under the BSD license. Furthermore, should Troll Tech cease continued development of Qt, as assessed by a majority of the KDE Free Qt Foundation, and not release a new version at least every 12 months, the Foundation has the right to release the Qt Free Edition under the BSD License.

The KDE Free Qt Foundation

Ever hear of something called "bug fixes"? Bug as in "glitch in the coding that won't compromise my box but will be annoying"?

What is the difference between KDE 3.2.1 and 3.2.0?

Not much, but that's just you ;)

It takes less time to get a random high-asvab grunt up to speed on a windows NT based system than on a linux system.

"Sir, the guy we pulled in after the 6 shop got bombed is saying 'what the fuck is this %> stuff all about?'"

I have it on Gentoo

So it just finished compiling, eh? You know 3.2.1 is out, right? :-)

Except helping in KDE Quality Team or supporting it in various other ways there is a simple thing you can do within a couple of minuts which really help: write an email!

Start one of the many good KDE applications, go to the "help menu" and click on the "about box"->"authors". Pick one or two of them and write them a short email telling them how much you like their application and that you really appreciate what they are doing for us, the open source community.

It's easy and makes them very happy to hear from satisfied users--normally they just hear about it when something is wrong and sending some nice words really keeps them motivated. Thanks.

And with this new release a new flood of bugs coming in

Please double check when reporting a bug that it really isn't a duplicate. Also be sure to send in backtraces only if you have compiled with debug information. Every bad bug report just costs the developers valueable time which is badly needed for all the features coming with 3.3:

If you want to help with an even better 3.3 your help in the KDE Quality team is welcome!

And with this new release a new flood of bugs coming in

Please double check when reporting a bug that it really isn't a duplicate. Also be sure to send in backtraces only if you have compiled with debug information. Every bad bug report just costs the developers valueable time which is badly needed for all the features coming with 3.3:

If you want to help with an even better 3.3 your help in the KDE Quality team is welcome!

And with this new release a new flood of bugs coming in

Please double check when reporting a bug that it really isn't a duplicate. Also be sure to send in backtraces only if you have compiled with debug information. Every bad bug report just costs the developers valueable time which is badly needed for all the features coming with 3.3:

If you want to help with an even better 3.3 your help in the KDE Quality team is welcome!

And with this new release a new flood of bugs coming in

Please double check when reporting a bug that it really isn't a duplicate. Also be sure to send in backtraces only if you have compiled with debug information. Every bad bug report just costs the developers valueable time which is badly needed for all the features coming with 3.3:

If you want to help with an even better 3.3 your help in the KDE Quality team is welcome!

i18n.kde.org

Yes, there is a project for Esperanto. It is only 40% complete though, so go and help!

3.2.1 has been out since 29 February. Check here. And yes, there have been no changes to KDE_3_2_1_RELEASE since then. What ? You don't know how to use CVS or CVSup ? hahaha.

The KDE version is "kfmclient exec <file>"

For most of the other stuff you can use KDialog. See this KDialog tutorial for details.

I really shouldn't get involved in this, but Gnome does and always has used a nice clean theme by default. like this. Those "muddy colors" were configured by the reviewer, including the uglyish Noia-warm icon set which is (ironically) a port of a KDE icon theme.

By comparison, KDE looks like this by default. In my opinion the Keramik theme is offensively ugly. The default 3.2 theme is quite a bit better, although the window decorations are an XP ripoff.

Now, maybe Linux doesn't want to be as "dumbed down" as OS X--fine. But until Linux is able to be run for day to day operation without the use of the CLI at all it will not gain mass marketshare acceptance.

There's quite a bit of inter-operability work going on at freedesktop.org. There's a lot of shared specifications and software there. Plus there are software libraries that both DEs use that aren't listed on FDO, like libxml2.

The KDE folks have also worked on some Qt-GTK toolkit inter-operability stuff. See also:

GTK-Qt
Ditto
Glib/Qt main loop integration

amongst others.

There's quite a bit of inter-operability work going on at freedesktop.org. There's a lot of shared specifications and software there. Plus there are software libraries that both DEs use that aren't listed on FDO, like libxml2.

The KDE folks have also worked on some Qt-GTK toolkit inter-operability stuff. See also:

GTK-Qt
Ditto
Glib/Qt main loop integration

amongst others.

There's quite a bit of inter-operability work going on at freedesktop.org. There's a lot of shared specifications and software there. Plus there are software libraries that both DEs use that aren't listed on FDO, like libxml2.

The KDE folks have also worked on some Qt-GTK toolkit inter-operability stuff. See also:

GTK-Qt
Ditto
Glib/Qt main loop integration

amongst others.

You're a liar! You mean this? Where does it talk about "buggy shit"?

Please point me to 3.2.1, because I can't find it. How could Mandrake've used if it isn't even out yet.

According the the release plan it should be almost there:

Sunday February 29th, 2004: Preparing KDE 3.2.1
KDE 3.2.1 tarballs are generated and uploaded to the packagers. Announcement roughly a week later.

But it's not there yet.

Please point me to 3.2.1, because I can't find it. How could Mandrake've used if it isn't even out yet.

According the the release plan it should be almost there:

Sunday February 29th, 2004: Preparing KDE 3.2.1
KDE 3.2.1 tarballs are generated and uploaded to the packagers. Announcement roughly a week later.

But it's not there yet.

> What projects (software or otherwise) are
> out there that would benefit from more
> involvement if only they had the publicity?"

I think the problem is that projects that are useful and popular get as much developer help as they need, whereas those projects that aren't getting helped are usually in that situation for good reasons.

For example, I work on a clunky little DOOM map generator. I wrote it as a way to a) generate very simple maps and b) learn about bitpacking in Ruby. So the fact that it only gets 3 downloads a day is fine - it's serving its purpose.

If you want to help a popular open source project - Open Office or Mozilla or some such - a way to do it might be to download Valgrind and find a memory leak or two. Submit a couple of patches and you'll be doing lots of people a favor, and you'll probably get mad props from the project you're contributing to for getting some grunt work accomplished.

Even KDE 1 looked a lot more like Windows than like CDE, at least by default (screenshots). Their goal might have been replacing CDE, but obviously not by emulating its look and feel (unsurprisingly, because the look and feel is one of the things many people dislike about CDE). XFce is pretty CDE-like, but a lot younger than KDE AFAIK.