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Eyes on Karamba
An anonymous reader writes "dot.kde.org posted an interview with Hans Karlsson, the author of the now pretty popular KDE clone of Samurize, Karamba, which is responsible for the recent craze at kdelook.org. An interesting interview well worth a read which shows that even today most open source programs still start as tiny hobby projects after all."
Kinda offtopic, but does anybody know if there is a KDE theme to approach aqua? I would like to give something like this a try, if possible.
"most open source programs still start as tiny hobby projects after all." but if you've installed Karamba, it still very much feels like a hobby project. It's cool, looks great, and easy to program with PERL, but the installation is still very much a work in progress.
Link to the Karamba screenshots. The site seems to be rather slow, however.
eyekaramba!
Would it kill the submitter to mention what the program actually does? Is there no "editor" at /. who knows what an actual news blurb looks like? Christ.
"Karamba is a KDE program that can display a lot of various information right on your desktop. Karamba uses the same 'fake' transparency effect that e.g., Konsole can use."
Ah, everyone's constant search for better eye candy to fill their desktops...
I just installed Super-Karamba this morning and I am fiddeling right now around with the Slashdot theme to make it nicer looking on my screen.
Karamba is really cool! I downloaded SuperKaramba due to its Python support and I plan to write some plugins for receiving automatically Mailing list notifications. Should be trivial as far as I can tell.
I think something like this was overdue for a long time and it rivals the Active Desktop from MS Windows.
-- Stephan Richter
I compiled Karamba once and....quickly uninstalled it. Sure it looks nice but I never found it particularly useful. It takes up a lot of desktop space and really is nothing more than a very beautiful way to waste your system resources.
For example, one of its features is the ability to read headlines from news sources such as Slashdot. While its nice to see the headlines right on your desktop, how useful is it? If you want to read the whole story you have to fire up a browser anyways to read it. So whats the point?
Sidebars such as Karamba need to be more useful than just show information. There needs to be a way for a user to interact with the information presented to them. Until that happens they will remain pretty much useless (and off my desktop).
Did anyone else misread it to say "Eyes on Karma"?
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Is that a Cinco de Mayo joke? :D
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
I can't reach that link right now but from my recollection, isn't this program very much like the Microsoft "Active Desktop" feature from years back which pretty much bombed among the users?
You could just install both, seeing as how it's a great idea to have libraries of both. It's nice being able to switch every once in a while.
Maybe, but... /. on you are they?
a little caffeine goes a long way.
Nobody's actually hurting you or forcing
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hans Karlsson didn't invent anything new. He ripped off the idea from here.
He probably just recognized that is was a copy/paste job of the same post he made back in September.
Check out SuperKaramba
Description: SuperKaramba, based on Karamba, is a tool that allows anyone to create and run simple interactive applets on the KDE desktop. The applets, which are defined in a simple text file, can optionally be augmented with Python code to make them interactive. Current widgets vary from simple news headline displays to complete custom replacements for the KDE panel (Kicker).
There is no "official" ebuild for gentoo yet (that I know of). Look here:
...
...
...
Hmmm... well, it looks like we killed kde-look. But still, there is a posting of an ebuild for gentoo there from a couple weeks ago. I installed it and it compiled fine.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
For those of you who don't know the details:
Karamba is a semi-clone of Samurize. SuperKaramba is a version of Karamba I'm working on that adds python scripting and lots of other enhancements. Most of the cool (in my opinion) themes require SuperKaramba. But I wish the Karamba guys the best of luck and hope we can work together to accomplish our goals for both programs.
The website for it is http://netdragon.sourceforge.net
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
(super)Karamba is avalible in gentoo as a (masked) ebuild. Find it in x11-misc.
Apple's legal team is notorious for sending cease and desist letters any time someone copies the look of the aqua interface.
.:diatonic:.
Don't need any dates... I'm married... :-) :-) :-)
and don't live in my parents basement...
and don feel the need to put others down on slashdot
This looks very much like konfabulator for os x.
but if you've installed Karamba, it still very much feels like a hobby project.[...] but the installation is still very much a work in progress. I disagree. Installation is the ususal ./configure && make && make install procedure. I don't know if the parent actually tried karamba, but it worked just like any other open source project. Not only that, but it also works great and hasn't crashed since the first day that I've used it.
Michael Jahn
"most open source programs still start as tiny hobby projects after all" Of course they do. Ask Linus! BTW, Karamba is a fun little addon as well. :-)
"but if you've installed Karamba, it still very much feels like a hobby project.[...] but the installation is still very much a work in progress." I disagree. Installation is the ususal ./configure && make && make install procedure. I don't know if the parent actually tried karamba, but it worked just like any other open source project. Not only that, but it also works great and hasn't crashed since the first day that I've used it.
Eyes on Karamba? Ay, Caramba!
This goes to show you that software development is alive and well!
This space for rent.
Being "married" on Everquest doesn't count.
Hope this helps.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The only major difference being that one actually has the choice of what to put on their desktop, not some mega corporation that only wants to "push" a bunch of silly adds down our throat...
Does anyone else remember "Active Desktop"? The premise is almost exactly what Karamba is. It gives the user the ability to display disparate information that is streamed to the computer over a network connection directly on the desktop, underneath applications.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Link I installed it after seeing it @ KDE look site. Kinda cool and installed without an issue in RH8. There is a PIC of my desktop in the above link.
Julius Caesar - Act I, Scene i: "What mean'st thou by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow!"
You could just install both...
;-). X on its own has been building all afternoon so far...
Well, yeah, but since it's a 400mhz iMac I don't fancy building both
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
There is a site that has free access to the /. stories in the subscriber section. I found it just by looking through google.
Ripped off? As in 'stole'? Or as in took an idea and ran with it like nearly every programmer on the face of the earth does?
No, you actually are the one controlling what's on the screen with AD, not MS. I actually used AD for a while on my laptop to keep a personal simple task list as an HTML page. It actually worked pretty well, but I stopped using last summer and never started back up, and last semester I switched to an old PDA. (this semester, I did nothing :P)
AD could have been cool, but for some ungodly reason MS set things up so that if you use it, it made the desktop an actual IE window, so it refreshed slow as fuck (and therefore made the system seem amazingly slow when trying to move around windows) And it also made any scaled background images quite ugly by using nearest neighbor interpolation rather then bilinear filtering like the 'standard' background display.
It was quite stupid.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Ah, Linux, dontcha luv it?
How bizarre would it be if this means that developers finally find a reason to settle on a Linux VM (that's Python) as part of creating kewl desktop themes?
Who needs a strategic plan anyway? And would Dotnet be enjoying more success if it offered semi-transparent weather reports?
How can one software project show that "most open source programs still start as tiny hobby projects"?
It's not the look, it's the Apple logo. Maybe you should read the article you link to next time...
" "Apple clamped down on these hard -- again, rightfully so. But Apple has never blocked the creation of entirely original themes that did not contain any Apple trademark images. In the past two years since the release of these banned Aqua themes, dozens of original themes have been released by artists without any letters from Apple," Coyle says." -TFA
Look at any themes site. There are hundreds of OSX rip-offs out there, and the only ones that get C&D letters from Apple are the ones that use trademarked logos.
0 1 - just my two bits
You need too emerge sync bro.. the ebuild is in /usr/portage/x11-misc/karamba, but it's masked (at laest for me) as of right now. I just forced it and it seems to work fine though..
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
And for those who want to foster more cross pollination (in either direction), I present...
:)
Konfabulator!
I know, the K makes it look KDE... it isn't
GPL Deconstructed
In addition, many of the modules rely on other scripts that need to be installed separately, so often you need to install/upgrade multiple components for each window gadget you want.
but again, it does work well as long as you're reasonably adept at unix-like configuration.
You need too emerge sync bro.. the ebuild is in /usr/portage/x11-misc/karamba
Oh... I hadn't realized that. I had manually added it a week or so ago. I guess I should emerge that one so updates will be a lot easier. I do run ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86", but it still wasn't available when I had the time to try it out.
At any rate, thanx, man!
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Just FYI, rather than rebuilding from scratch you can just let portage know you installed it by using the --inject option with emerge.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Not trying to be a troll here or anything. But this program is really just something that looks nice in the screenshot, but is not really useful.
I actually installed KDE last week, then Karaba and fiddled with both of them. The interesting thing was that I found that I could attach menu entries directly to the panel, like the "drawers" in CDE. But all they really were is just "links" to the regular menu items.
Anyway here's what I really liked about KDE:
1. Konqueror: its damn fast!
2. graphics: KDE is overall pretty nice, and I absolutely LOVE the BeOS style window theme.
Did not like:
1. No way to put a system monitor in the panel
2. Stability: Konqueror seems to crash a couple times a day, sometimes locking the X server! (Probably because I compiled w/ -03 optimizations).
Anyway, I found that gnome supports the drawers better than KDE does! Drawers are definitely the most efficient UI design I have seen. WAY better than the "start menu" where everything springs out of one button. The fact that you can even have sub drawers is pretty cool.
To summarize:
Karamba = pretty, not useful, wastes resources
Drawers in Gnome = useful, somewhat pretty
You mean, how bizarre would it be if a de facto standard virtual machine emerged as a result of massive Karamba hacking? Sounds pretty good to me; it beats the living crap out of a de jure standard imposed by the likes of Microsoft, Sun, or the FSF.
Billy Joewel.
Oh yah, active desktop, didn't that evolve into some wierd interface called XP? I kept trying ctrl-alt-backspace but shucks the shit just wouldn't go away so I nuked it with a dd, and reformatted type 83.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
I like bananas.
aye carumba!
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
Eyecandy masquerading as something useful. That's all Karamba and Samurize are. Oooh, you can have your uptime in a glowing semitransparent throbing blob thing on your desktop, which you can stare at for hours and hours...
Shit like this is for stupid faggy riceboys.
(This is -1, Flamebait not -1, Troll)
Here's a quick question I haven't been able to find an answer to: What happens is I run an Eterm session on top of this? If the background continues to update, and do it's thing behind my text session, I'm going to have to change my shorts.
Anyone know? I haven't been able to find anything (yet)...
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.