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."

Comments

Not to be complaining

[joeflies]

"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.

Screenshots

[Cee]

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

Another example of /. idiocy

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

Re:Another example of /. idiocy

[AndroidCat]

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)".

I first saw this news item from Karamba...

[srichter]

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.

Re:I first saw this news item from Karamba...

[Ponty]

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?

Karamba

[Necrotica]

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).

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:KDE Themes

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

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.

Old news...

[NetMasta10bt]

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).

SuperKaramba

[ageitgey]

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