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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."

16 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Not to be complaining by joeflies · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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.

    1. Re:Not to be complaining by prla · · Score: 1, Informative

      Actually I found the source compilation process to be pretty easy. I used the latest source (v0.17) and the only problem I had was not having lib-fam0-devel installed. Perhaps it might get to be a little problematic with an older system, with older libs. This here is a Mandrake 9.1 system with some stuff from Cooker.

      There's a link to a quick howto by a Karamba user in the project page here which eases the (supposed) pain of installing this.

  2. Re:KDE Themes by program21 · · Score: 3, Informative

    From what I remember (some ways back), Apple was sending C&D letters to people making Aqua theme clones. While I'm sure there are some out there, it's doubtful they'll be too mainstream, I would think.

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  3. Re:KDE Themes by Gyorg_Lavode · · Score: 2, Informative

    go to kde-look.org and look around. They have at least 1 or 2 very good aqua themes.

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  4. Screenshots by Cee · · Score: 5, Informative

    Link to the Karamba screenshots. The site seems to be rather slow, however.

    1. Re:Screenshots by Adam9 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Maybe this will help.

  5. Another example of /. idiocy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."

    1. Re:Another example of /. idiocy by AndroidCat · · Score: 5, Informative
      I went to the Samurize web site but that's not much help: "The current version of Samurize has expired!" Okay... So I downloaded the zip and looked at the docs.

      Information - What is Samurize?

      Short description:
      Samurize is the successor to the quite popular program CureInfo. It is a system monitoring utility with some pretty awesome configuration power. The configuration program is separated from the client for minimal memory usage. For the moment Samurize is in beta state. This means: Bugs can and does exist, all optimitions have not yet been done.

      The program it self displays almost any kind of information right on your desktop/taskbar and homepage (server/taskbar version is in production).

      So, I guess it displays stuff. *sigh* I doubt I'll dig further as the video requirement is probably out of my range "Geforce 1 or better (needed to for hardware supported per pixel alpha blending)".

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  6. Re:KDE Themes by xanadu-xtroot.com · · Score: 4, Informative

    does anybody know if there is a KDE theme to approach aqua?

    What "theme" are you asking about? Icons? Window Decorations? Widgets? Colors?

    There's a couple Mac-sh clones for icons, there's a few different ones (and a few of thoses) for the Window Decorations. And there's always Good ol' Mosfet's Liquid for the widgets. And there's a ton of color themes too (Mosfet included one or two in his Widget theme as well).

    Just go to KDE-Look. You should find everything you need or want.

    And depending on your distro, there's brobably RPM's, DEB'd, EBuilds, whatever for most of the stuff there. I personally use Gentoo. There's a LOT of EyeCandy that's made it's way into the Portage tree. If you're on RH... Well... They've never been too KDE friendly, but I'm sure there's some other stuff that will work on the system from rpmfind.net, should you feel that compiling is too great of a task.

    --
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  7. Old news... by NetMasta10bt · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

  8. SuperKaramba by ageitgey · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

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  9. Gentoo ebuilds avalible. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    (super)Karamba is avalible in gentoo as a (masked) ebuild. Find it in x11-misc.

  10. Re:Active Desktop by Obiwan+Kenobi · · Score: 3, Informative

    The difference is this doesn't rape system resources and it doesn't force web-only content. Active Desktop on a late 1998-1999 system (around when IE4 was released) would slow even the best machine to a crawl.

    You can also use different languages (perl and python, from what I gather) to output/input information. Pretty neat stuff.

  11. I actualy used active desktop once by autopr0n · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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    autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
  12. Re:This just smacks of "Active Desktop" by Kaa42 · · Score: 2, Informative

    C'mon, it's just a web page, you can put anything you want on your desktop using Active Desktop, it you can't find it you can always write your own stuff.

    • Want the latest slashdot headlines? Use ECMAScript and MSXML do pull down any RSS feed and render it (I've been doing this for 2 years).
    • Want useless stats about your computer (diskspace, cpu usage, memory) use scripting (FileSystemObject etc) or use COM to read from Perfmon, using COM in script is insanely easy.
    • Wanna check your POP/IMAP mail? Again use COM from scripting

    Since it's a webpage you can embed any content you like in ways of graphics and text, even Java applets or Flash. And you can use any scripting language that the browser supports (granted it's a little limited by default).

    The only bad thing about Active Desktop is that it was launched and promoted as something far less than it is.

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  13. My experience with this program! by gratefully+dead · · Score: 2, Informative

    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