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Eyes on Karamba

Posted by Hemos on from the bad-puns-ahoy dept.

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."

94 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 RoLi · · Score: 1
      In CSS, you wouldn't even get the chance of installing it at such an early stage of development.

      It's just a matter of time until somebody (other than the author as he doesn't want to) writes a nice graphical config-tool for it.

    2. Re:Not to be complaining by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      I thought your TLA was AFU until I realized you were talking about Closed Source Software, not Cascading Style Sheets.

    3. 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.

    4. Re:Not to be complaining by Black+Perl · · Score: 1

      and easy to program with PERL

      Um, this may be true, but it's designed to be scriptable in Python.

      --
      bp
    5. Re:Not to be complaining by Azureflare · · Score: 1

      Hmm, did you actually install it? Sure, it didn't tell you beforehand that you needed libfam-devel, but that's fairly obvious from the error messages. Oh, and I admit, the fact that by default the executable was put into /usr/local/kde/bin (on my install anyway) was a little odd, but you can change that during the build process. Perhaps you could give some details as to what happened to you? (I have nothing to go on, since it worked fine on Mandrake 9.1 after I installed libfam-devel and moved the executable from kde/bin to bin/)

  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.

    --
    This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
  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.

    --
    I do security
  4. Screenshots by Cee · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    1. Re:Screenshots by advocate_one · · Score: 2

      The site seems to be rather slow, however.


      what do you expect... they've just been slashdotted... He has to pay for his bandwidth. You could at least go through paypal and make a donation... or else done the decent thing and mirrored that page instead of just linking to it.
      --
      Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
    2. Re:Screenshots by Adam9 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Maybe this will help.

  5. Re:KDE Themes by advocate_one · · Score: 1

    why don't you go and search on KDE look for yourself...

    http://www.kde-look.org/

    --
    Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
  6. I'll go ahead and say it.. by Nate+Fox · · Score: 3, Funny

    eyekaramba!

    1. Re:I'll go ahead and say it.. by JabberWokky · · Score: 1
      You were not required to say it, as that is what the author implied with the title of this story.

      What's worse is that the author was punning with "Eye". This guy couldn't even get the quote, "Ay caramba!" correct. Even I may be off, but I know for certain it's not "Eyecaramba".

      (ObOffTopic - How do I do an upside down bang in X? I kñöw móst còmbos.)

      --
      Evan

      --
      "$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
    2. Re:I'll go ahead and say it.. by tuffy · · Score: 1
      Under Red Hat 9, you can find all the key combos in: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose

      Other X11 systems should have a similar file for translations.

      --

      Ita erat quando hic adveni.

  7. 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)".

      --
      One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
    2. Re:Another example of /. idiocy by CriX · · Score: 1

      I hate when bugs does exist.. >:-( !! hehe

      --
      Moderation: +1 pwnage
    3. Re:Another example of /. idiocy by dna_(c)(tm)(r) · · Score: 1

      No, Bugs Bunny doesn't really exist, hate to break it to you, he's just an animation.

    4. Re:Another example of /. idiocy by salmo · · Score: 1

      The Geforce1 requirement seems a little off. I've been running it for a little while on my Win2k box that has a PIII 500MHz, 576MB of RAM, and a TNT2 card. I don't play games, espcially not on this machine. It's my apache on winders test box and I use Samurize to tail my access.log and error.log on the screen.

      I dunno, I've consistently been about 3-5 years behind in terms of graphics cards, but my machines tend to run faster and more stable than gamer friends I know with their suped up (and super expensive) PCs. I still love my Matrox Millenia II's. No driver problems on any platform, great fast 2d, and no 3d support to speak of (I think they sold expansion cards or something). But like I said, I don't really play games, they get addictive and I have stuff I have to get done.

    5. Re:Another example of /. idiocy by gilesjuk · · Score: 1

      It's an eye candy thing, displays CPU, Mem, Web news etc...

      But it is also being used to create icon docks and other things.

  8. Eye Candy by geders · · Score: 3, Funny

    Ah, everyone's constant search for better eye candy to fill their desktops...

    1. Re:Eye Candy by mniskin · · Score: 1, Funny

      Yeah, I kinda dig the eye-candy. I figure that looking at my desktop all day entitles me to that little indulgence :).

    2. Re:Eye Candy by incom · · Score: 1

      CPU envy?

      --
      True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
  9. I first saw this news item from Karamba... by srichter · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:I first saw this news item from Karamba... by Angry+White+Guy · · Score: 1

      Karamba: The desktop is no longer where you just store your stuff!

      And Active Desktop was a horrible waste of cpu cycles. Why even bother asking us if we wanted to restore active desktop everytime it crashed? Just do it!

      --
      You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
    2. Re:I first saw this news item from Karamba... by AndroidCat · · Score: 1
      it rivals the Active Desktop from MS Windows

      Ah, that's tells me everything I needed to know, thanks! (Heh, I should talk. I've got an off/on project that uses MS Agent [talking Clippy] to do the same kind of things. Damned if I'd ever use it, but it's fun to work on.)

      --
      One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
    3. Re:I first saw this news item from Karamba... by Ponty · · Score: 4, Insightful

      To think that I was under the impression that the desktop was the thing I never see (save a 1mmx1mm blue corner at the bottom of my screen) under my hundreds of windows.

      I really don't understand why people want to use their desktops for pretty pictures or, worse, interfaces. Don't they have windows open?

    4. Re:I first saw this news item from Karamba... by SubtleNuance · · Score: 1

      I will, at times, have all my windows minimized save the one im working in. If I need to see items in two windows, they are less than fullscreen and overlapping in some strange way... but i cant stand having to flip between windows to find what Im after.

      ive actually got part of my desktop showing except when emailing/surfing.

    5. Re:I first saw this news item from Karamba... by Kong+the+Medium · · Score: 1

      I second this emotion! I installed Karamba 0.15, found it incredible and very Eye-candy. But then i realized I, will never see it, because all my windoze are maximized and strg-tab is my friend. So it's there on my HD, gets update on apt-get upgrade and i use it to get Ahhhs and Ohhs from my friends :-)

      --
      ... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
    6. Re:I first saw this news item from Karamba... by oever · · Score: 1

      This is the reason why Microsoft abandoned Active Desktop and puts all widgets in the toolbar now (see Longhorn screenshots).

      --
      DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
  10. Karamba by Necrotica · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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).

    1. Re:Karamba by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      How about going straight to the story you like? This is VERY flexible in its final form.

    2. Re:Karamba by advocate_one · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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).


      so you're expecting other people to develop your content then??? the whole point of Karamba and Super karamba is that you are given the tools to do it your way. Use other peoples themes as a base, but you have the basis to customise it exactly as you want. Don't dis what has been done so far, it gives excellent examples for others to use. Just blame yourself if you can't find a use for it.
      --
      Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
    3. Re:Karamba by AndroidCat · · Score: 1

      Well I suppose if it can display headlines from Slashdot, it could be useful for jumping in with that FP. :^)

      --
      One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
    4. Re:Karamba by Psiren · · Score: 1

      Just blame yourself if you can't find a use for it.

      If someone doesn't have a use for a program, I don't see the need to blame themselves for it. All to often there are solutions looking for problems. I'm not saying this is one of them, but I agree with some of the points the guy was making.

    5. Re:Karamba by fault0 · · Score: 1

      > 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).

      Heh.. that's pretty much the goal of SuperKaramba. Interactive Karamba sensors.

    6. Re:Karamba by JoeWalsh · · Score: 3, Funny

      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?

      I agree with you. I've never found a use for headline display programs. As you pointed out, you still have to fire up your browser if you want to read any of the articles.

      What we really need is a service that downloads whole articles to the desktop. Something that, when run, would go out to Slashdot and download all the articles from the front page. Maybe with some checkboxes on which additional categories you wanted stuff downloaded from (Apple, YRO, etc.)

      And then, it could be expanded to download stories from other sites, like cnn.com and nytimes.com and so on. That would be cool.

      I should go start a Sourceforge project for this thing. But what to call it? Let's see . . . it sort of turns the web into a broadcast experience, so maybe "Broadcast?" No, that's not quite right.

      Oh, I know! It's like broadcasting, but it's point-to-point, so why not call it "Pointcast!" Yeah! What a cool name!

      Welp, I'm off to start my pointcast.sourceforge.net project. I sure hope no one beats me to this great idea, though!

    7. Re:Karamba by fault0 · · Score: 1

      > What we really need is a service that downloads whole articles to the desktop

      You can already pretty much do that with Karamba.

    8. Re:Karamba by Necrotica · · Score: 1

      so you're expecting other people to develop your content then??? the whole point of Karamba and Super karamba is that you are given the tools to do it your way. Use other peoples themes as a base, but you have the basis to customise it exactly as you want. Don't dis what has been done so far, it gives excellent examples for others to use. Just blame yourself if you can't find a use for it.

      As a matter of fact, yes I AM expecting other people to develop content for me. They are the developers. I am the user. I have no interest in working on this project. It is the developers job to make an application both appealing and useful to the user. As I pointed out, the Karamba developers have done half of that. The application is appealing yes, but useful no.

    9. Re:Karamba by Necrotica · · Score: 1

      The topic is Karamba, not SuperKaramba. As I have never used SuperKaramba I cannot comment on it. But my previous comment regarding Karamba still stands. Although it is nice to look at its effectively useless for me.

    10. Re:Karamba by fault0 · · Score: 1

      But SuperKaramba is Karamba, not something completely different. It is simply Karamba... plus a python-based API in top of it.

    11. Re:Karamba by jacobito · · Score: 1
      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?

      The point is that, instead of reloading the Slashdot home page all day, you only have to fire up your browser when you see a headline that piques your interest.

      I've never used Karamba, but I find RSS news aggregators (for example, Straw or Netnewswire) quite useful in this regard.

    12. Re:Karamba by swillden · · Score: 1

      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.

      There needs to be a way for a user to interact with the information presented to them.

      You mean like clicking the headline to jump to the article?

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
    13. Re:Karamba by bergeron76 · · Score: 1

      Erm, how about as a "preview" of what's happening around you? I use it to display FoxNews.com headlines, weather images, syslogs, slashdot, etc... When I see something that intrigues me I fire up the browser, or Eterm or whatever. It's much more functional than just some silly backround picture of your kids.

      Granted, you still have to load the browser, but rather than doing it "just to see what's on slashdot", you can decide if there's anything interesting before doing so - As such, I think your arguement defeats itself, and shows how helpful this tool really is.

      --
      Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
    14. Re:Karamba by topher1kenobe · · Score: 1

      heh, pointcast rocked. :)

      --

      yadda

  11. Misread by schnits0r · · Score: 2, Funny

    Did anyone else misread it to say "Eyes on Karma"?

    --


    -------
    Support Indy Music. Buy
  12. Eyes on Karamba? by JHromadka · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Eyes on Karamba? by graveyhead · · Score: 1
      Is that a Cinco de Mayo joke? :D
      No, it's Cinco de Mayo Ware (tm). You only download it on the fifth of May, install it and have aliens and toasters and other assorted weirdnesses jumping around your desktop until midnight. Then you uninstall it and never speak of it again.

      That's how my Enlightenment experience went, anyways ;) and this thing is totally reminding me of the first time I saw E.

      Seriously guys WAY over the top on the eye candy there. It's almost as bad as the new slashdot games section.
      --
      std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
  13. Active Desktop by baywulf · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    1. 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.

    2. Re:Active Desktop by bad_sheep · · Score: 1

      I installed Karamba sereral weeks ago, and sorry, but at home, Karamba loads my CPU up to 100%... I suppose the bug has been corrected :)

      But I agree, I love the concept !

  14. Re:Looks excellent! by 13Echo · · Score: 1

    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.

  15. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 4, Funny

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  16. 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.

    --
    I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
    I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
  17. 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).

    1. Re:Old news... by Mitchell+Mebane · · Score: 1

      Thank you for mentioning SuperKaramba, I was about to do so myself. Karamba is old news. I quote from here:

      I had a talk with the author of super-Karamba about this..

      The original karamba is dead.. the author did all he wanted to do with it. All new development will be done in SuperKaramba.. Next major version (0.18) will have taskbar support :)


      SuperKaramba really moves Karamba beyond just displaying info on your desktop. Here's a snippet from the front page:

      Here are just some examples of the things that can be done:

      * Display system information such as CPU Usage, MP3 playing, etc.
      * Create cool custom toolbars that work any way imaginable
      * Create little games or virtual pets that live on your desktop
      * Display information from the internet, such as weather and headlines

      The possibilities really are endless!

      If anybody has ever used ObjectDesktop for Windows, some of this is bound to seem familier... since OD was one of the things I liked best about Windows, I am really glad to see this project.

      --

      The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
      --Aristotle
  18. Re:Looks excellent! by xanadu-xtroot.com · · Score: 1

    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.
  19. 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

    --
    Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
    1. Re:SuperKaramba by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      For those of you who don't know the details:

      You didn't include any details.

      What does it do and why should I care?

      More eyecandy? Or something more useful?

    2. Re:SuperKaramba by nuintari · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Why didn't you call the super version "Aye Karamba?"

      --

      --Nuintari

      slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.

    3. Re:SuperKaramba by Drakonian · · Score: 1

      Yeah but what does it do?

      --
      Random is the New Order.
    4. Re:SuperKaramba by mabinogi · · Score: 2, Funny

      do?....

      what is this "do" you speak of?

      --
      Advanced users are users too!
  20. Re:KDE Themes by Elendil · · Score: 1

    And the funny part is that now, people who use X11 and KDE on their Macs running OSX would love such a theme, which would give their desktop a unified look...

    Thanks again, Apple :-(

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

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

  22. Karamba by futuresheep · · Score: 1

    "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. :-)

  23. See??? by Tsali · · Score: 1

    This goes to show you that software development is alive and well!

    --
    This space for rent.
  24. What does it DO ? by billstewart · · Score: 1
    Necrotica's comment is the first thing I've seen that says what Karamba actually DOES, and even it's only kind of suggesting.
    • "It's like FOO and BAR" doesn't help - they're also apparently new projects, and neither of them clearly say what they do on the first page of their websites.
    • "Summarize information" is a vague hint - what kind of information about what? Necrotoca's article provides some example, which helps.
    • is the canonical useless Slashdot description of something - I want to know what the something DOES. If it's supposed to be an eyecandy-manager for something else, fine.
    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
    1. Re:What does it DO ? by billstewart · · Score: 1

      I clicked a bunch of links. They were pretty much *all* useless :-) The things he's trying to imitate are a bit less vague about what they do, but not by much. Normally when I'm posting a flame about this, I include a brief description of what the thing actually *does*, but it's pretty hard to tell even from poking around their site for a few minutes looking at links that fail to load screenshots very well.

      --

      Bill Stewart
      New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  25. This just smacks of "Active Desktop" by cnelzie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?
    1. Re:This just smacks of "Active Desktop" by hey · · Score: 1

      And ActiveDesktop was MS's answer to Pointcast

    2. 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.

      --
      .oO Kaa Oo.
  26. Re:KDE Themes by Ponty · · Score: 1

    Unified look, but awful usability. I'd rather have the programs that work totally differently also look totally different. A half-assed bitmap does not a UI make.

  27. Link to mu mu mu my Karamba by k_stamour · · Score: 1

    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!"
  28. Re:Looks excellent! by FyRE666 · · Score: 1

    You could just install both...
    Well, yeah, but since it's a 400mhz iMac I don't fancy building both ;-). X on its own has been building all afternoon so far...

    --
    Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
  29. 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.

    --
    autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
  30. Portable apps come to Linux by alext · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?

  31. Re:konfabulator by bad_sheep · · Score: 1

    "K"onfabulator... with a such name, it could be part of KDE :)

  32. Flawed logic by lightspawn · · Score: 1

    How can one software project show that "most open source programs still start as tiny hobby projects"?

  33. -1, Tired anti-Apple troll by Cid+Highwind · · Score: 1

    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
    1. Re:-1, Tired anti-Apple troll by diatonic · · Score: 1

      Perhaps you should read the paragraph after the one you quoted...

      As Coyle details in an editorial on his site (www.resexcellence.com/hack_html_01/04-23-01.shtml ), this policy changed in April. Shortly after ResExcellence added its first theme for the Mac OS X, Coyle received a letter from Apple lawyers. Ultimately, Apple was placated by a few modifications ResExcellence made that were unrelated to the Mac OS X theme, but others did not get off so easily. In particular, Apple came down hard on MacThemes, providers of the open-source ThemeMachine editing tool used by many of the theme developers.

      .:diatonic:.

  34. Re:Looks excellent! by xchino · · Score: 1

    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.
  35. For those interested in the competition... by 2nd+Post! · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
  36. source compilation is easy by joeflies · · Score: 1
    the thing I'm referring to is that Karamba configuration isn't integrated into the KDE control panel, so each applet needs to be customized by editing the code. So while it's eye candy for KDE, it's not yet integrated into KDE

    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.

  37. Re:Looks excellent! by xanadu-xtroot.com · · Score: 1

    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.
  38. Re:Looks excellent! by xchino · · Score: 1

    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.
  39. Re:KDE Themes by Elendil · · Score: 1

    They released an X server, working in rootless mode. Although the X clients open their windows directly on the OSX desktop, they do not share the Aqua look. Each X toolkit (Qt, GTK, Athena, Motif...) has to provide its own look (or theme when it's possible) and Apple forbids anything that might look like Aqua.

  40. 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

    1. Re:My experience with this program! by r00zky · · Score: 1

      1. No way to put a system monitor in the panel

      1. If you only want cpu usage + memory usage + swap usage, try adding an applet called "System Monitor" (panel menu | add | applet). If you need any other info try KSysGuard applet, this one can display from CPU temperature to network data... anything you want. Both come with the standard KDE distrib, one is in kde-addons the other mmm dunno... kde-admin maybe?

      --
      I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
  41. Billy Joewel by elluzion · · Score: 1

    Billy Joewel.

    ...Now if only it could verify the spelling of your Kazaa downloads.
  42. Active Desktop Evolutionary History by ratfynk · · Score: 1

    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!
  43. Re:KDE Themes by curious.corn · · Score: 1

    Unless of course you get hold of a qt3 built for mac that translates widgets to aqua (like the win build). Commercial license though...

    --
    Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
  44. carumba by Unominous+Coward · · Score: 1

    aye carumba!

    --
    "Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
  45. What does it do behind Eterm or the like? by bergeron76 · · Score: 1

    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.