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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."

6 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.

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

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

  3. 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.
  4. 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).

  5. 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).