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KDE: Breaking the Network Barrier
comforteagle writes "In this month's KDE: From the Source, entitled Breaking the Network Barrier George Staikos takes us on a walk-through of KDE's desktop networking protocol handlers in the vein of sftp:// webdav:// and a few really nifty ones I wasn't aware of like info:/ perldoc:/ and tar:/. The entire KDE desktop environment is decked out like this, and as George puts it, 'Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X have a long way to go to catch up with the robust, transparent functionality that KDE has provided since version 2.0.'"
a walk-through of KDE's desktop networking protocol handlers in the vein of sftp:// webdav:// and a few really nifty ones I wasn't aware of like info:/ perldoc:/ and tar:/
Good thing the Christmas Island people have made it safe for the goatse:/ handler.
Trolling is a art,
I'm sorry, but to me that bit just reduced a potentially informative article to yet another trivial Slashvertisement.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
My favorite one of course is pr0n:/. But for some reason I get buffer a overflow error - anyone know why? Anyone get pr0n2:/ working yet?
playing catch up game to MS and OSX.
Oh wait..
Timang tinggi tinggi
parang sudah asah
alang alang mandi
biar sampai basah
After all, KDE isn't the only popular open GUI toolkit for Linux.
Not to be a nervous-nellie, but isn't adding more networking/protocols to the desktop just asking for more hacking problems?
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
For every one geeky thing that OS X can learn from KDE, there are fifty things that KDE can learn about design, usability, polish, and consistency from OS X.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
The one thing that I do not like about it, is how long it takes to boot. Windows (and probably mac, never really used it) have linux/kde beat for loading times. I really wish there was a distro that could integrate kde into the booting process rather then boot linux then kde - like back in the dos/win days...
spend money here
The entire KDE desktop environment is decked out like this, and as George puts it, 'Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X have a long way to go to catch up with the robust, transparent functionality that KDE has provided since version 2.0.'
And the entire Windows OS is decked out with enough user friendliness for most people to use, and, as I put it, 'KDE has a long way to go to catchup with the userfriendliness of Mac OSX and Windows.
Windows, as much as everyone hates it, is still more user friendly than KDE. If they'd spend more time on user friendliness and less on robust (aka confusing, complex) features, they'd find more people willing to try it out.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
This is one of the things that has impressed me most about KDE. The protocol handlers can make working with some of these protocols a piece of cake.
Also worth noting however, is the DCOP system integrated into KDE. The protocol handlers and DCOP can and do make a powerful combination.
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
catch up with the robust, transparent functionality
I think they need to work on the apparent functionality on the Konqueror application before taking a pat on the back.
that is a great protocal that adds so much functionality to my windows machines while i browse.
till MacOSX and KDE get that, you can hardly call them ahead
now if they had perl:// well, i think that speaks for itsself.
That didn't take long. I was thinking that I would have to scroll down more then one page to see that garbage.
KDE is pretty damned easy to use and consistent too, it's just that not all applications are written in QT, just as not all Gnome apps are written in GTK. So, you get some apps that don't fall in line with the look and feel of the rest of the OS.
So is the way of the Linux desktop right now, and you can't single out KDE for that.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I'm a regular MacOS X user. And I love MacOS X, but there are some things that I miss about KDE. I try to follow KDE's progress even though it is not my desktop of choice these days.
The network transparency of KDE is brilliant. I'm not sure where the holdup for OSX is, but I would kill to be able to open a location with cmd-k, fish://user@myhost
I suspect that for Apple to add these bits would require some OS level work as well as some finder work. I hope they'd take that opportunity to update the finder to be a cocoa application. (As a side note, the Finder continues to bother me. My Mac savvy friends and I joke that the Finder, Mail.app, and Quicktime teams are Microsoft moles trying to take Apple down from the inside).
Anyone have any speculation as to why Apple hasn't already done some of the truly nifty network protocols? They've already got a finder view for FTP (which, unfortunately is dog-slow). Still, Apple has proven itself as a very agile software company. They've got a track record for adding features correctly and quickly, but the lack of an SSH handler is baffling to me.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
I thought this was pretty boring until I read this part:
Being able to do all of these things from a web browser is definitely a nice parlor trick, but in reality it's not a very easy way to use a computer. The real power of these protocol handlers is unleashed when they're used within various KDE applications. Any of these protocols can be used from the KDE file dialog, allowing files to be opened from or saved to any protocol!
I must say, as much as I don't really like KDE, that's really slick, and potentially very useful. Nice job guys.
(I'll even withold bashing and pro-gnome comments for the sake of sanity)
Remember, this is KDE, so you should spell it Krap
MS has had this ability to define protocol handlers and binding them to special applications since at least 98SE where I first used it for a custom print application. In fact I think the format and concept is a Internet RFC somewhere.
Doing it in Windows was as simple as deffing two registry keys.
Now KDE has made good by adding more handlers, but it's still applications that are being called. I can easily define a notepad:/c|/test.txt handler. Nothing special.
RTFA... This has nothing to do with which application to launch to deal with a specific file. You are thinking of file associations.
The KDE feature discussed here is a compatibility layer that allows users to treat a files located elsewhere as if it is on the local disk.
Instead of having to use sftp to download a file from a site, or wget to download a file from the webserver or even evolution to download a file from the mail server, you can just use one common interface for all files reguardless of their storage or access method.
This means a tighter and more consistent user experience.
SO there!
I have had occasion to look at the source code for Konqueror
I guess that makes you special. Last time I checked it was open source.
the bits I had to work with were complete and utter crap
Good thing you posted an example, so no one thinks you're just trolling.
Tell me how in gnome (or windows explorer for that matter) that I can connect to an ssh server for seamless files transfers?
a mac OSX zealot sais that 'open source has no innovation and just steals stuff from OSX/Windows'. There is tremendous innovation in open source. So much that users don't have time to explore.
But OSX has Aqua theme. Right.
Last time I checked, you could have any application take control of any protocol handler in OS X, even ones you've made up yourself, by simply adding a child to an array in an XML file located in the app's package. This actually caused the problem where a virus could auto-download a file to the user's hard drive and run the program via a url accessing that protocol to launch the app without the user's knowledge. Apple fixed this by making a dialog coming up the first time a file or URL accesses and app but I still think it was a dumb idea to link the internet and local applications in such an insecure way.
How about a box with the url, the app being called, "Allow" and "Deny" buttons and a checkbox to make the setting stick? Even then it's a bad idea. All it takes is one dumb app to compromise your system at user level. Launching these apps with guest permissions? Does KDE do these things? Why brag about such a dumb feature?
I don't get why it is useful to be able to type devices:// or whatever. For some of these protocols the ramifications are totally unclear: if i'd type pop3://myserver/mymailbox would that actually download my messages and effectively erase them from the server? The useful protocols are covered in Win(XP) very well, including the most useful (not mentioned in the article) : webdav over https.
... are doomed to reinvent it!
Huh? Did you even read the summary?
.bat on the end of your shell scripts) it's about transparently accessing different namespaces.
This is *not* about file extensions or otherwise (Unix has done this right since day one, which is why you don't need to put
Windows and OSX are a long way from this. They just about understand http, and even then on at the application level.
No, Windows and OSX do not have a long way to go, but KDE is obviously JUST catching up to the idea of determine what application to open up based on such data!
I was under the impression that KDE used something similar to Gnome's VFS. Meaning it doesn't launch a webdav client when you open a webdav:// url, it uses a VFS module to do it.
This is very different than what you are talking about. This allows applications to open and save files to webdav, afs://, smb://, ftp:// just like any other file.
For instance, I could write a daap:// handler that allows any application to open iTunes music shares just as if they were regular local directories.
Unfortunately, the article is slashdotted, but I am not sure you know what the hell you are talking about. They are talking about network protocols integrated in all applications and you're talking about metadata? HUH?
Can you open the save dialog in MS Word and save your document on a remote ssh server via the fish protocol without doing anything special? Who's playing catchup again, huh?
This is vaguely reminiscient of the old Unix maxim, "Everything is either a file or a process," except that now KDE calls everything an URL.
/dev/extensions/audiocd/track1, /dev/extensions/sftp/, /dev/extensions/webdav, and so on? This type of a trick would have allowed these extensions to be used in any app that recognizes the file system, not only KDE type apps.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the old way of doing this be something like
What was the reason for not implementing these as devices?
Why must KDE be riddled with 'K's everywhere?
The project seem less serious with the silly naming scheme.
This is what made me stop switching back and forth between GNOME and KDE and finally settled on GNOME.
GNOME just feels overall more serious and polished.
In short:
No.
In long:
No.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
The innards may well be crap. If it works, who cares?
I've looked at a lot of code in my time and I'd rate 1% of it as actually 'good'.
It's particularly tragic when people 'update' perfectly good apps with a piece of unmanageable spagetti.. I tend to just keep my distance when that happens.
...yet.
Microsoft won't see any need to add new features as long as it's users don't find out, and it's market share remains 90%-ish.
Once it DOES feel threatened though, it'll pour resources and add all the features to it's OS that it thinks will maintain it's dominance. (think Mac/Windows, Netscape/IE, Java/C#).
But it'll probably ultimately fail this time. I'm a Windows fan, but I'm realistic: Linux will win in the long run.
This all seems reminiscent of the design flaw of integrating a web-browser into an OS. Granted it's only certain protocols which are built-in to a desktop interface (as I gather, site seems to be crawling). Can anyone more knowledgeable comment on this?
Um, What're you talking about? The thing described in the article has nothing to do with figuring out what application to use to open up a file. It has to do with network transparency in the user-interface. Eg: I can't open up MS Word and save a document directly to a SSH account, but I can do that in KWord. Neither OS X nor Windows have this very useful feature.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
can one "cat perldoc://someuri/perldoc1" ?
if not then it is at the wrong layer to be "transparent"
plan's approach of a unified file system approach is far more transparent
a daemon runs and serves the appropriate files in the namespace as regular filenames
cat
grep bunny
etc.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
If only it would load faster and not randomly lag on me while I am using it, it would be great. No thanks, fluxbox and gnome work just fine for me. On the upside it makes the move from windows comfortable, load times and all!
gnome-appletse ssionn - toolsd esktopm e-themesn -themeo me-mag
g nome-mime-data
gnome-python
gnome-build
gnome-s
gnome-commander
gnome-speech
gnome-commo
gnome-spell
gnome-control-center
gnome-system
gnome-cups-manager
gnome-terminal
gnome-
gnome-themes-extras
gnome-doc-utils
gno
gnome-games
gnome-user-docs
gnome-ico
gnome-utils
gnome-keyring
gnome-vfs
gn
gnome-webkit
gnome-media
gnomemeeting
gnopernicus
gnome-panel
This means a tighter and more consistent user experience. But when Microsoft does it w/ Office, Explorer, Windows Media Player, and Internet Explorer, the FOSS people cry foul?
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
Is the age-old question of 'does it belong in the kernel'. OSX's webdav and FTP client support accessable from the finder, the analogues to KDE's FTP and webdav protocol plugins, are in reality implemented in the kernel as a filesystem implementation, making them useable from *every*single* application running on the box, not just the ones linked into a particular application framework (KDE). The OSX implementations are truly remote filesystems, upon which I can 'cd', and 'vi' myself into oblivion.
But the downside is that these 'fancy' network filesystems are comparatively sparse relative to KDEs. And we're still waiting for, oh, say, webdav over SSL support (making it actually worthwhile for an intranet filesystem solution).
IF OSX could have retainted the 'filesystem drivers as userspace processes' mantra of the microkernel design philosophy, then we could have the best of both worlds. Especially if we could retain, say, HPFS, FFS, etc. as kernel resident drivers for efficency .
Subject says it all.
I'm a singer-songwriter who uses KDE. What do you think of these lyrics? 1.verse:
United states of mind in troubled times
I couldn't find a better life, couldn't find my way inside
Laughter and sirens song, in here I belong
I couldn't tell right from wrong; where is this all coming from
I built a wall inside, out of a lie
An now I'm comfortably blind, to what goes on outside
chorus:
Here, in a world of my own
Everything's confused, harmlessly untrue
Here I can almost live and forget you
It is all unreal, in this world of ideals
Even the illusions seem so clear
2.verse
So hard to understand an unstable man
But I'm doing all the best I can, to leave this no-where land
Sorrows are easy to hide, in states of mind
Then all of a sudden I'm fine, and everything's allright
chorus:
Here, in a world of my own
Everything's confused, harmlessly untrue
Here I can almost live and forget you
It is all unreal in this world of ideals
Even the illusions seem so clear
bridge:
But I still like it, maybe
Now and then
Life, not so crazy,
With any kind of sense
But only in here I get to see you again
And sometimes I feel you
And sometimes I meet the real you
chorus:
Love, everything's confused harmlessly untrue
Here I can almost live and forget you
It is all unreal in this world of ideals
Even the illusions seem so clear
I remember when I recently tried webdav://mywebsite I was pleasantly surprised in KDE.
I just recently installed "ubuntu" (gnome 2.6).. which I must say is a really nice looking slim UI/theme. All around good distro.
But does gnome have integrated webdav support? I would think they'd be on the ball to mimic any lil kde features that pop-up.
--Zaq
Windows has supported custom URL protocols for at least 5 years now, if not since the inception of Internet Explorer. It's a simple registry setting that an app may add during it's installation. Several applications already make use of this, such as mirc:// and ms-help://.
This isn't new or exciting, and Windows already has and uses this.
The terminology idiot suits you well. You complain about 6 years olds retarded freats jizzing in their pants and yourself you behave even worse.
open up a blank tab in safari and type:
x-man-page://some_command
where some_command is the command you want to see. I get a man page in a terminal. In fact for any given URL registered on my box, I get the Right Thing(tm) happening.
I use the Default App pref pane (http://www.rubicode.com/Software/) and thus have pretty fine control over what happens when various URLs are clicked/activated. Well, I can't make new ones, something about the craptacular IE vestiges that control URLs by default, maybe, I'm not sure; but it seems trivial to get around this.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Like what kind of catching up? Like this?
KDE on Mac OS X
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
Reading comprehension ain't your strong-suit, is it? With regards to network-transparency, Windows and Mac *does* have a long way to go. Window's FTP functionality barely works. Meanwhile, I regularly use KDE's network transparency to work with my university account over SSH. I can just save directly to a virtual SSH drive, instead of saving on disk, then transferring, or e-mailing it to myself or whatever.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Geez... thirteen comments in and nothing positive to say about what the guy had to say. The fact of the matter is that on built in network transparency, KDE has no equal.
You don't really appreciate it until you use it and then forced to work without it. I present a real world example: a colleague wants some help with the IE CSS scrollbar colors. I open up KWrite, the "simple" text editor, select "Open" from the "File" and plug in the FTP url, with embedded password and all, into the open file dialog. A half a second later I was browsing their directory structure point-and-click in the open file dialog. I find the ".css" file and open it in the editor. I then make my simple changes and hit CTRL-S. The file was saved and uploaded back onto the web server in one simple keystroke combo. And that was it. Mind you all of this was done in KDE's most trivial of text editors and this feature is part of the desktop architecture meaning all KDE apps can employ this feature.
Try doing something like that with the default install of Windows/MacOSX/Be/whathaveyou. And that was the simplest of examples of the network transparency within KDE.
And that's just the network transparency aspect of it. The KIO architecture allows for some really amazing features on the local side as well. If you don't already know about the audiocd:/ slave then look it up or even use it. It will blow your mind.
Don't just take my word for it. Try it before you bash it. Please.
Some people would call such functionality within the desktop 'bloat'. I think before anybody says that, they first need to get themselves into the modern age. As the article mentioned, I find the fish:// handler to be one of the most oft-used handlers. Sure, I could scp remote files to the local machine, but it saves a lot of time to simply use fish:// in the file dialogs and such.
And it works *great* in Amarok, my audio player of choice. I no longer have to keep porting around my mp3 collection: I simply fish to my server and play them from there -- from anywhere. The only downfall, is that I need to force it to go to the next track after it gets to the end of a track, instead of automatically doing so, but it's a minor compared to the above ease-of-use.
Us computer geeks like this because we think of things as networks and protocols. However, the rest of the computer users don't. tar:/ is no more intuitive than double clicking on the .tar file and opening it.
Saying Windows and MacOS has to catch up implies that these are feature people want, or would want if given the option. I think treating compressed files like folders like they already do is more intuitive and makes more sense. I think they got a little carried away with this.
For example?
I'm anxious to try some of protocols at home using Mozilla. While I assume several ppl will argue that Konqueror is an incredible browser I quickly gave it up when I learned it was showing some website incorrectly that were using certain CSS. Prehaps they've addressed to these problems in the last KDE 3.3.1 upgrade.
Some aim to please, I aim to tease.
The network transparency of KDE is brilliant. I'm not sure where the holdup for OSX is, but I would kill to be able to open a location with cmd-k, fish://user@myhost
afp://user:password@hostname_or_atalk_name/direc tory/
This also works for WebDAV (apple has been a pioneer in the use of WebDAV), SMB (windows fileshares), ssh+scp, etc. yes, you can open an ssh session from Connect to Server in the finder.
Windows has also had similar capabilities for quite a while. I really fail to see what's new and exciting about KDE, save that it supports more tutti-fruity URI's.
Methinks the KDE boys just don't know OSX, because it took me 10 seconds to find this info via google, and I know I've found it on info.apple.com before. Really, folks- both OS X help and info.apple.com are excellent for learning about the OS.
Please help metamoderate.
No, but being about to type sftp:// into a browser does make KDE more network-transparent than OS X, which was the point of the article! God, I like OS X myself (like Classic even more), but the special moron task force of the Mac user community is really out in force today!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Why does Microsoft need to catch up? Anyone can write an Asynchronous Pluggable Protocol (the handlers for different url monikers). I've written two of them for different applications I've written. It's a great way to tie browsers to HTML not stored on a web server.
mk-its: is used in the HTML help system, and ms-help: is used with the MSDN, and there are probably a few others that most people have never heard of.
But like I said, why is it up to MS? Anyone in the open source community could write APPs for Windows to add this kind of functionality if there were a demand for it, so I suspect there's little or no demand for it.
I've been through some KDE code myself (not Konqueror, though, but the code in question is in KIO, not konqueror), and the code quality is very good. It's not as good as Qt, which is pristine as the virgin snow, but pretty good nonetheless.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
MAD's Alfred Neuman?
Let me know when it's included in a kernel module, and I can use it from all my programs. Until then, it's just more crap in a bloated set of non-standard user libraries.
Like what? The only thing I can recall recently is the "shell://" URL handler, which is a way to execute arbitrary commands. That is a bad idea, and as far as I know, KDE has no equivalent.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
... because their framework sucks bad ass ...
However you'll have little need to keep rebooting your box with linux/kde as opposed to the instability of windows. A (vastly) more stable OS is a good tradeoff for a slower boot time (since the days of OS/2); any (little) time you "waste" booting is more than offset by the several times you'll have to reboot windows in the same day.
This means a tighter and more consistent user experience.
Because I can now use it from all my applications? Like Mozilla, bash, PINE, Java Swing applications, in the save-file dialog box of any video game, my Perl scripts, and everywhere else?
No? Well, then we have a very different idea what "consistent" means.
Virtual file systems have been around for a while, and they are useful: there really is little reason why something like WebDAV or even NFS should have to go through the kernel--it can be handled more efficiently in user code. But as long as they are implemented as part of these desktop environments, they are not used by enough software for users to actually rely on them.
What is needed is for the Gnome, KDE, and libc developers to get together and talk about how to unify this functionality, break it out completely from the desktop environments, and integrate it (via hooks) into the kernel I/O and stdio functions in the standard library. But I suppose hell will freeze over before that happens.
I don't like this trend of assigning custom URL handlers to things based on file format. That's what MIME types and file extensions (outside of HTTP) are for. We now have the feed:// handler implemented in several environments -- why? It automatically assumes HTTP, and in that case, why not just send a HEAD request to find out the format? Custom URL schemes are breaking the purpose for which they exist: indicating what protocol to use to fetch the resource, not the function of the content of that resource.
Signature.
What with all the problems that surfaced with the Windows shell:// handler this summer, shouldn't we have a healthy amount of skepticism about the security implications of protocol handlers that do more than simply display data?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Reading comprehension ain't your strong-suit, is it? With regards to network-transparency, Windows and Mac *does* have a long way to go.
You mean Windows and Mac DO have a long way to go.
Do your reading comprehension have a long way to go?
Take off every sig. For great justice.
Maybe I'm not grok'ing what this is all about, but why is networking/browsing integration in Windows BAD (IE's file://, explorer accepts http:// and \\server support, etc.) but GOOD in KDE? Aside from the "this is Slashdot and that's the way we are" responses, mind you...
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
mc (midnight commander) supports fish, and it runs anywhere, even on console. tasty! less filling!
"While I assume several ppl will argue that Konqueror is an incredible browser I quickly gave it up when I learned it was showing some website incorrectly that were using certain CSS. Prehaps they've addressed to these problems in the last KDE 3.3.1 upgrade."
I believe they have. Konqueror on my 10-month-old KDE desktop has some quirks, but the latest Konqueror renders pages famously on my friend's gentoo box (which is completely up-to-date with KDE).
In fact, I'm often pleasantly surprised when I design a table-less CSS website, and both Safari and Konqueror render it pixel-perfect.
Mozilla has the about:about pseudo protocol
that gives you a list of all the other protocols.
Since KDE has so many (the article said 75) they need an easy why to get list.
SSH+SCP would be really nice. fish:// on the other hand, is shear brilliance. It uses Perl on the server side to do some things that are not possible with just SSH+SCP. Those are great fallbacks, but fish:// is innovative. But, I'd be happy with just SSH+SCP. As far as I can tell, it doesn't exist in OSX.
This brings me to another annoyance with OSX: It doesn't tell you when it doesn't know about a protocol. I can tell my OS X 10.3 machine to connect to a server. For a URL I type in "bogusprotocol://foo@foo.foo". The Finder tells me, "Connection Failed. No response from the server. Please try again."
WTF? I'd prefer something like, "You moron, you've just typed in a protocol name that doesn't exist." Please don't say, "Sorry, but we couldn't connect to this perfectly valid URL because the host wasn't available."
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
haha! i wrote that shit up there i'm a crzy motherfukcer. haha wazzup shlashturds! learn to code and shit!
Then use Konqueror, and KMail.
The only way to get this across every single application is to include it at the filesystem level. First, the KDE developers aren't kernel hackers, so they probably don't have the expertise to write such an extension.
Second, even if they did, it would probably incite a giant debate in the Linux kernel mailing list when they presented it (like with Reiser4), and the net result would be that it wouldn't be in anyway. So it'd be a bunch of patches and you'd have to use a special kernel to use KDE, which would be awful.
The KDE developers aren't going to rewrite every single application out there to use their functionality (and if they did, people would complain because pine depends on KDE).
In other words, don't choose to use a hodgepodge of programs, and then complain that it works like a hodgepodge of programs.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
i continue coding once i am finished up with your mother and your sister.
Has anyone got perldoc working?
Windows Explorer: http://www.mkssoftware.com/images/ScreenShots/scrn -vsftp-02.gif
these are clients. This is like adding an ftp client, or a normal e-mail client, or a straight browser, or.... Basically, the only security risk is that more code was added. But that is common with adding an new functionality. The nice advantage of this is that a new app can get well tested code, and of course a common app can gain a new protocol.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'll just flip the two statements around here:
... followed by ...
George Staikos takes us on a walk-through of KDE's desktop networking protocol handlers in the vein of sftp:// webdav:// and a few really nifty ones I wasn't aware of like info:/ perldoc:/ and tar:/.
Now, you can call me paranoid, if you want, but just look at the number of errors that are related to this kind of hadling prtocols. While it is really nice to have all these protocols accessible in one common and uniform manner, this also looks like a road to Microsoft-like hell. It only takes one bug in one of the protocol handlers and one "link" embedded in HTML document to wreak havoc over application, desktop or even worse complete user profile.
While I do like the KDE environment, I just can't use it. I don't think that kind of close integration between desktop and network can be a good thing. Not yet. Having a desktop like this means that I have to avoid using any native KDE (KHTML) functionality including HTML document thumbnails in Konqueror as file manager, and Konqueror as a web browser. This suddenly lands me in a situation where I HAVE to use alternative (most likely Gecko based) browser that is not integrated with KDE in any way.
It is nice to go in the direction of component integration, but in this "protocol" case, I simply don't belive in integration safety. It is a step forward not to have complete computer hosed because of one bug in web browser, but I don't think I would like to see my desktop and/or profile hosed because of it either. Too much integration leads to too much danger for my data. All backups aside, I simply don't like doing restores. They take ages, and prevent me from browsing Slashdot. I just think KDE team managed to find another excuse for me to stay in AfterStep environment. It doesn't have many bells or whistles, but it is truly rock solid.
Anonymous Cowards Unite
Maybe I don't understand this 100%, but this seems to me a massive potential security hazard.
It's not difficult for me to imagine a web page link manipulating one of those weird protocol handlers in a way that lets remote code exploit it in the same way that several crackers have with a few of MSWindows' extra protocol handlers...
I use KDE (posting from KDE on FreeBSD, actually) and Windows extensively. Your response reeks of the same sort of bias you're complaining about.
> Using Windows is an exercise in frustration for me
That's a fair statement, but it doesn't mean Windows is unuseable or inherently frustrating. It just means that you personally are uncomfortable with it. I would guess you don't use it much, if you are that frustrated with it, because the behavior is very consistent and predictable. Yes, there are quirks, but after using Win2k for several years, I'm aware of the majority of them...and guess what? I'm pretty happy with how Windows works.
> not being able to change it to some sane
> behaviour is even worse
Windows can be tweaked quite a bit, although not nearly as much as KDE/Gnome desktops. However, "sane behaviour" is completely in the mind of the user. As far as I'm concerned, Windows behavior is completely "sane." It may not be the most efficient, or what I'd prefer, but it makes sense once you understand it. A lot of people believe that mouse/keyboard is a horrible interface design, but once you understand how it works, it seems "sane." I imagine the same is true of whatever desktop you use.
KDE's desktop is fine, although it does have some quirks that I find annoying. For example, I like to click on icons, then use "delete" or "F2" to rename, etc. But clicking on the icon once launches it, so I end up using the right-click+ rename or something similar. Is this "sane" behavior? Yes, but it is annoying when you aren't used to it. The same is true of many Windows quirks.
"Sane behavior" is in the mind of the user, which is largely shaped by which OSes and Desktops the user is most familiar with. I'd argue that because Windows is less customizeable than KDE, it's actually more consistent, and thus more "sane" for the average user. For the most part, I can sit down at anyone's windows box and things will work as expected. Linux boxes are a different story.
I'm a power user, and I like being able to customize. But I learned a long time ago, after using Win89/Win2k/KDE1,2,3/Gnome1,2/Mac OS9,X and a few other desktops that "sane" behavior doesn't even exist. Some desktops are harder, some are easier, but the most relevant thing is what you are used to. Of course a desktop can be made ridiculously hard to use...I'm not arguing that. But I don't believe Windows is one of those desktops. I use it all the time for development, browsing, email, word processing, and it works fine. I'm aware of its limitations and I work around them...just like I do with KDE.
-Dan
> Then use Konqueror, and KMail.
Note that some KDE applications are NOT location independant such as KNode which doesn't allow you to do 'disconnected operations': if memory serves you have to use a different application for this..
So while the location independance features of KDE are nice, they are far from being good.
Re: Breaking the Network Barrier / KDE: From the Source (Score: 0)
/smb/host/video/clip1.mpeg and kde would automagically mount it as such until nothing has accessed for a timeout. then, when navigating @ smb://host/video and you open-with mplayer, kde sends mplayer the local mount path and opens it!
by Anonymous on Oct 29, 2004 - 02:28 PM
the real accomplishment will be the ability to have these protocols mounted so that NON-kde apps can access these resources. mplayer cannot use the smb:// i/o so you cannot play video files on a remote samba share using this method.
if kde would be smart enough to allow you to mount the location represented with the open-with command that would be great.
smb:/host/video/clip1.mpeg would translate to
THAT would be cool.
The innards may well be crap. If it works, who cares?
The poor sod who's been given the job of making the innards do something different, that's who cares. Never mind, I got paid several times as much as I would have earned for doing the same job on a decent code base, because it took me several times as long to make it work and I wasn't daft enough to quote fixed price for working on code like that!!
This may be useful for LANs, but I'd never use this to open a file from work to home, for example. I use KDE every day, but the absolute frustration that develops when you are in the middle of any network-requiring operation and the network goes down is not worth the stress.
Usually, I find a way to do what I want easily and with a local copy, and I do it that way. Once you have an easy way to synchronize things (like with rsync or a script that pushes/pulls files from anywhere), you'll end up with less pulled-out hair and even a backup copy to boot.
KDE is sooooooooooo gay!
For some reason, FTP never works well with KDE. It works fine if you have an anonymous login, but I have never been able to get it to open any of my other three ftp storage locations. 80% of other programs work PERFECTLY with them, and the other 20% can be tweaked until they do. Unfortunately, I can't even easily tweak the options for KDE so it will let me work with my files.
Considering that FTP is absolutely ancient, extremely widely used, and a mostly solved problem, this is rather sad.
I have a laptop with a wireless card. One thing I find really annoying about KDE is that it will *always* try to do networking stuff if it sees a network there, even if the network doesn't fully work. Thus when my laptop is in a zone where it can pick up a wireless signal, but the wireless network is firewalled off in such a fashion that I can't really use it without a password, then KDE takes an amazingly long time to do *anything*. I launch even a simple terminal window and it takes several minutes to appear. And no, the system is not under load, and the text console works just fine, and other desktops like enlightenment or gnome work just fine. Only KDE seems to get really, really lagged when it sees this partial network connectivity - which given the method used by the university that employs me to handle their wireless network, is a situation that comes up on the campus *constantly*. (The way they do it, since they want any J. Random Student to be able to use it, but they don't want non-students and non-staff to use it, is to let any card connect without a key, but then there is a firewall that can be reconfigured on the fly that prevents you from getting out past the transmitter hub by default. The only site it lets you see is a website that has the login/password for your student or staff account. If you login correctly, then it reconfigures the firewall on the fly to let you through to the rest of the internet.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The problem is this: My app's users are not Unix-literate and therefore cannot be expected to use the command line. But my users need to use a (non-KDE-aware) helper application to convert files and store them on a Samba server.
KDE's nifty handlers let them easily log in to the Samba server and see the target directory just fine... but there appears to be no way to tell the helper app to save them directly to that folder, because there is no way to specify the Samba directory via a file requester.
I thin what I really need is a nice friendly GUI front end for the "mount" command, so that my users can have their Samba server's directories appear in the regular old filesystem tree. MacOS does a great job of this (the Samba folders automaticallyin a directory called "Volumes") but KDE/Linux apparently does not.
Can anyone suggest a good solution to this problem?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I've always liked most of KDE's network transparency (you can see my other post for a comment on FTP) and always wished someone would make a KDE Shell. Imagine being at the shell prompt and just typing webdav://at.random.location and changing directories straight into the webdav server, seamlessly.
Since the KIO stuff already converts everything into a directory-style format, this should be possible; perhaps it even wouldn't be too difficult to put together.
Whatever the case, it would be cool to have the KDE suite of technologies available system-wide, even when I can't get X going.
Is it really a good thing to blur the lines of what is on your PC and what is on the network? MS made a big push for this when they decided that explorer and iexplorer would be interchangable. If you don't have to specifically start a network aware app then how can you tell what resources should be treated with more care?
Apple is doing this stuff (e.g. you can mount WebDAV servers), but Apple is doing it right by integrating network resources into the real VFS layer so that all applications can access them. KDE's I/O slaves are not real filesystems and are not accessible by all applications.
s e+ Gateway
Not necessarily.....
http://kde.ground.cz/tiki-index.php?page=KIO+Fu
There was a project called Fuse, (File system in User SpacE) that aimed to make a kernel module that would let linux users actually mount anything that the KDE I/O Slaves can handle. This seemed like a great idea to me; it would let non-KDE apps and the command line have access to all those networked devices. But the project seems kind of dead:
http://kde.ground.cz/tiki-index.php?page=KIO+Fuse+ Gateway
Does anyone know what happened to it and if there are any other projects that would do this?
But do they have the expertise to write a user-mode NFS server that uses the protocol in question as the back end? There'd still be some platform-dependent crap to do the NFS mount (probably using a port other than 2049, if the platform's NFS client supports that), and there might be some file systems where that doesn't work all that well, but it might work well for many of them.
Unfortunately, NFSv2 and v3 don't have "open" operations, so read/write file systems might be a little painful if the file system protocol is oriented towards copying entire files, as you'd probably want to implement writing by writing to a local copy of the file and writing the file back to the server when it's closed. NFSv4 might help, although that'd help only on OSes with NFSv4 clients mature enough for that purpose (Linux's might be; I think Solaris 10 will have a v4 client which might be; there are v4 clients under development for the BSDs, although I don't know whether they'll end up in OS X at some point).
For access to tarballs, zipballs, and the like, read/write access would be tricky, as you easily can't update individual files in place. If you offer read-only access, a user-mode NFS server would probably work.
I don't know why Apple didn't include something like fish:// -- it's sheer brilliance (much like Exposé is brilliant). I briefly considered writing a protocol translator for her laptop so Finder would think it was accessing SMB shares when it was really using ssh. Instead, I've decided to just go with Fugu. It does the job -- I just really miss the integration. :(
Please do.
Correct, although...
...that doesn't mean that suffixes aren't needed at all on UN*X - try calling a C source file "foo.f" and see how eager GCC, for example, is to compile it:
At the desktop GUI level, some UN*X desktops, such as KDE and, I think, Gnome (and possibly CDE and others) don't require suffixes in many cases, as they do file-style file type determination by looking at the file's contents, and give the file the right icon, launch the right application when you click the file, etc., but whether that behavior can be attributed to "Unix" is another matter. At least one UN*X desktop is mainly suffix-based and doesn't do that sort of "look at the file contents" file type determination, although I guess if the file's on a file system that supports resource forks and the resource fork has the right type and/or creator code it might work.
Umm, no, OS X definitely lets you add handlers for arbitrary URL schemes, and I infer from what others have said in replies to the original article that Windows does so as well. They don't have an IOSlave equivalent, but, at least in OS X, I'd be inclined to implement that as a user-mode NFS server, which means it'd be more general than an IOSlave, because it'd be usable by all applications, not just KDE applications (see, for example, OS X's mount_ftp, which I think might work through a user-mode FTP server with an FTP client as a back end). If possible, I'd be inclined to do it with a user-mode SMB server in Windows, although that might be less likely to work on port other than 139 or 445 (and thus less likely to run without interfering with any standard SMB server running on the machine).
...and ctrl-x probably works in a lot of them as well.
And, given that Qt switched in Qt 3 to the closest thing to a standard way of handling the PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD selections in X, and that a number of other toolkits, including GTK+, have always done that, it would probably work even between applications using different toolkits in most if not all cases.
I.e., bitching about copy-and-paste in X11 is getting a bit old, at least for complaints about it not working at all, even for text. Perhaps for non-text formats there needs to be a bit more work in the toolkits and applications, but, as I remember, the selections mechanism in the ICCCM does have a mechanism to register data types and to have a recipient of data find out the types in which data in a selection is available, so they can choose the "best" type (e.g., it might be available as rich text or plain text, so that a word processor would fetch the rich-text version but a terminal window would fetch the plain-text version).
The Windows FTP functionality I typically use works as well as the FTP functionality I typically use on most UN*Xes, including OS X, but that's because it's the same functionality I use on many of those systems, although OS X, at least, uses Luke Mewburn's ftp program other than the traditional BSD ftp program that Windows and at least some other UN*Xes use. :-)
As for OS X, it supports transparent FTP access from the command line - try man mount_ftp.
That's so insulting.
Want to get specific, you old troll? Studies have shown that there's no significant difference in "usability" when measured in terms of getting things done or user perceptions. When you consider how much more you can get done with KDE out of the box, I'm not sure how anyone could say that Windoze was more usable.
Some obvious improvements to usability from KDE include:
So there you have it. What exactly does Winblows have to offer the "average" user again? The same user can do all of that and much more with KDE's excellent programs without any additional trouble or cost. Complex != difficult or expensive. The proof is there for anyone who would check out Knoppix, Mepis, etc.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Go stand at a military base gate and wave people through. Granted, your /. time will go down, but, one has to make sacrifices.
Oh wow, I had no idea. Does that mean I can split an IE window and drag and drop remote files to my desktop by sftp? Can I open Word and then use it's file open dialog to manipulate a file on a remote computer via sftp? No? Oh well, at least Windoze users can get at all 1.44MB of information on my floppy real easy. Now that's useful. Sometimes, when there's no macrovirus on the floppy, it's more secure than M$'s webdav (the second link google comes to is a security problem) too. What would anyone expect from something that works through IE. Useful and well implemented, thanks for the tip.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
-William Gates.
...protocol handlers in the vein of sftp:// webdav:// and a few really nifty ones I wasn't aware of like info:/ perldoc:/ and tar:/. \
tar:/. eh?
Can I get feather:/. too?
It's garbage because it's off topic and very typical of a Mac zealot to say something like that.
I admit, you don't sound quite as unresonable as some Zealots, but you did post that just the same. The article nor slashdot post wasn't about usability, it was about resource transparency.
And to proclaim that KDE is "ugly and clunky compared to OS X or even windows" - such an objective thing say that you can't just preach it like it's fact. Personally, I feel too confined in OS X. It's okay I guess, and I like the shadows under the windows, but I find the interface to be unyeilding and stubborn. KDE is prettier then Windows I think, and it functions very similar to Windows. And I think the Windows UI is very usable, it works for me.
Just because your preference is MacOS doesn't mean that KDE or Gnome are worse.
My KDE desktop is clean, it's fast, and very accessable. I really don't see how I can ask for much more than that at this point? The rest is on the horizon, and with the rate that OSS progresses it won't be long before there's no more arguement against it.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
...you're an idiot. Go read the article. This isn't about applications using handlers, it's being able to access things through a secure, universal scheme rather than having to re-implement their own POP3 or IMAP or SFTP or whatever protocol handler.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
*goes to arbitrary application*
*types in FTP address*
*browses his FTP server*
Problem solved.
Internet Explorer is integrated into the shell.
Anybody who uses the new(er) file open dialog boxes has access to this.
Oddly enough I remember thinking a few years back that it'd be a good idea if I could access my FTP from a file save/open dialog box.
For whatever odd reason the save dialog box CANNOT access arbitrary URLs, not too surprising, I guess their file save routine doesn't want to deal with going over various odd network types.
Not that this make KDE "light-years" ahead, a few days of coding perhaps.
Oh, and IE is extendable, all those different protocols can be tacked on by third parties.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
"'Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X have a long way to go to catch up with the robust, transparent functionality that KDE has provided since version 2.0.'"
Is that the same sort of "transparent functionality" that everyone here slams Microsoft for? You know, the one that prevents removing IE because Explorer is part of the desktop?
I can't wait till the first vulnerability makes use of all that "transparent functionality". That will just be another submission I make that won't be accepted.......
KNode is a newsreader. It uses the news protocol. Why would it need disconnected operations? It doesn't have anything at a filesystem type level where the kioslaves would be useful.
The features are very good. You're just a twit.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Windows Explorer: http://www.mkssoftware.com/images/ScreenShots/scrn -vsftp-02.gif
It's good that you didn't just post an example of some random 3rd party commercial software to illustrate the powers of Windows Explorer. That would be fucking lame.
http://kde.ground.cz/tiki-index.php?page=KIO+Fuse+ Gateway
Get out of the 1990's, its called .NET
I'm not talking about the BSD ftp program Windows uses. I'm talking about the FTP support in internet explorer that's phenomenally slow even over a high-bandwidth link.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
No, because "we" did it right.
Windows' handling of ftp:// would be much more impressive if I could actually save the files I opened, though.
Neat and all, but can you tell me how I save onto ftp:// ?
How can anybody who begins his article with "you're an idiot" get modded UP?
...like that provided with emacs ?
KDE's almost caught up!
Windows already has URL handler extensions.. why do you think cutting&pasting ed2k:// links work for Windows users?
"The entire KDE desktop environment is decked out like this, and as George puts it, 'Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X have a long way to go to catch up with the robust, transparent functionality that KDE has provided since version 2.0.'"
LOL. Is this guy serious? Mac OS X has a long way to catch up with a rag tag open development project? I'm sorry, but some times the lure of open source really clouds the judgement of some people.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
I have a bit of a problem with only remembering the bad, so when I get sick of the Window Manager or App that's currently annoying the crap outta me I usually switch back to the worse alternative, forgetting all the reasons as to why I stopped using it in the first place.
One thing that got me a few weeks ago was how inconsistant the UIs of Windows and OS X are when you're using a broad enough range of different Apps. They still look mighty pretty with the right theme, but when it comes to consistancy they're not lightyears in front of GNOME or KDE any more. Both projects have played catch up very well.
% mkdir
% ls -dF
Apple has the privilege of only having one VFS layer. There is no such single layer that KDE could rely upon, since it runs on quite a few distinct operating systems.
In my mind there are two ways to look at it. You've presented one way: KDE must have this feature, and if the OSes won't provide it, then KDE must provide it in some suboptimal way.
The alternate approach is to say that mounting a fish or whatever is a feature that belongs in the OS, and if a particular OS supports it, then KDE will get that for free. If an OS doesn't support it, then KDE won't have that feature when running on that OS.
While fish is by far my favorite... i also like.
kamera://Canon Powershot 200/IMG_0243.JPG - i can attach it straight to an email from the camera. Not to mention i can run kuickshow to do slideshows straight from the camera like it were a local disk.
tar://somefile.tar.gz/contents - look write inside tar files
I wish TrollTech and KDE would join the rest of the C++ community and use a trailing underscore convention for their class member variable names to distinguish them from local function variables.
This is hilarious. The parent post is one of the most informative commments in the article thus far and is still scored at 0.
Why? Typical slashbot mentality. OMG KDE HAS TITE NETWORK INTERGRATION IT LEAVES WINDOWS AND OSX IN THE DUST!!!!!!! WAIT WHATST THAT WINDOW$ HAS BEEN DOING THE SAME FOR YEARS? SHUT UP!!!!!
> KNode is a newsreader. It uses the news protocol. Why would it need disconnected operations?
..
Because it can be usefull for the user? Especially when you have a payed metered connexion.
Well I find that saying 'KDE break the network barrier' and at the same time knowing that it isn't true for the news reading, for me it's pure bragging
KDE sometimes break the network barrier would be be more accurate!
The phrase 'hater' is a childish one.
Nobody is saying this stuff isn't useful, they're saying it's useful enough that you'd want to make it available for all apps, rather than just those that use KDE.
This should be a FDo project, not a KDE one.
This is indeed a wonderful feature of KDE, just yesterday I discovered someone created a rio600:/ kioslave which allowes me to easily drag and drop music to my player through konqueror. The best thing about this package is that it works on top of a command line program rioutil, but it's so transparent you won't even notice. I love it.
It also allows me to edit text files directly on a remote ftp server, without having to go through the usual and annoying download-edit-upload-test-process. Just save and (in my case, for web development) refresh the page in your browser.
fish://user@host is the KDE feature that I use the most. It is easy, gets the job done, and I can use the protocol with any KDE program (like Quanta Plus - web dev tool)! If you have ssh access, use fish in place of webdav or sftp.
tar:/ is a nice feature also.
...only you need to run it through kioexec, example: "kioexec cat http://slashdot.org/" or similar.
KDE is rather configurable. Want the menubar in the app under the titlebar, like Windows? Fine. Want it at the top of the screen all the time, like MacOS? You can do that, too. You can configure what sort of clicks in which areas of the window do what with regards to window management (eg doubleclick the titlebar to shade, or to maximize, etc.). That's just two examples, but pretty much all of KDE is like this. It's the epitome of 'highly configurable, with sane defaults'.
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
What's the difference between Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer? I thought they were the same thing and something to be avoided.
Manipulation of remote files via sftp as if they were local is exactly what Konqueror does. That, combined with horizontal and vertically split windows makes it very easy to inspect and move files securely around your network or the world. Having the same capabilities in other dialogs makes it easy to do the same thing from within KDE applications. Yes, that's a native and default behavior.
The coolest thing about it is that it's all there by default with the average distro and there is no additional set up work required. Every machine on your network and every user has it if you use any modern distro. Webdav sounds interesting, but less flexible and more laborious.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
People have, to one extent or another. Putty has the rudiments of ssh for Windoze. It's hard, however, for them to make a file opener for something dumb like Word or have their services work transparently with Windoze Exploder.
It's not that there's not a demand for these services, it's that the demand has been met outside of Windoze. Microsoft has been so hostile towards all other developers and their own customers that there are few people willing to port stuff into their legacy junk.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If you insist on powering down and you want your desktop to come up a little faster, run Window Maker or Fluxbox. You can still run all your KDE stuff in them.
Booting is only a problem on systems that require you to turn your computer off regularly. Windoze, which goes unstable in a day or two, is one of the worst offenders. I waste much less time sitting down at systems that are exactly as I left them, with my work neatly laid out in multiple virtual desktops, and connections to other computers live and well. I can contrast this with time wasted on a daily boot of Windoze 2000 and launching of five or six applications to look up stuff that I need and the time to remember what the heck I was doing the day before. Loaded down with AV and other corporate junk, it would take five or ten minutes to boot and I'd spend the time getting coffee. The lost placekeeping took much longer to recover. I don't even want to think about what a PITA it was to arrange any of that work on w2k's crappy little single screen GUI, that was more waste.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That's the way it really works but it's mostly transparent to you. When you open something with sftp://filename, it really makes a local copy to /var/tmp/kdecache-username/krun/number_filename. If, you have really sad networking, you don't lose your work. When you close the editor, the changed file is coppied back to the sftp location. In theory, any application can do the same thing when the file is launched from Konqueror. The advantages of this over ssh -X are speed, for small files, and some network toughness. The disadvantages are that you have to have an editor on your local machine and do without the processing power of many computers.
At home, I use ssh -X so that I get processing speed and a wider choice of applications from machines that are customized to various tasks. Coppies of work are stored on my cable gateway. When I'm away from home, I use Konqueror to get those coppies in a secure and editable way. For the rest of the world, and those times I'm forced to use Windoze, I run a http server for read only access to the same information.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Well, I guess mac OS X doesn't have a framework called URL Mount that lets you hit command-shift-g in any standard (or non-standard if you do things right) open or save box and type a URL beginning with smb, ftp, afp, etc and let you save files there. It's good that hitting command-shift-k doesn't bring up a listing of local servers you can open and save documents to as if they were local. It's good that ssh:// and telnet:// and sftp:// were all in my head. The ability to add new protocols and file systems is there too. Not quite sure how imap:// would work but if you know, please tell me. Oh, you want to talk about using certain local abilities like CD encoding transparently in your apps? Why don't look at the quicktime framework, free for any app to use. You wanted to do it via URL? Why? That doesn't even make sense, especially if it's for developer use. Messages offer way more flexibility. I guess if you wanted you could add functionality to the audo CD framework so that copying files didn't result in AIFFs but MP3s, but that seams like a really bloatware-ish idea. Oh, and this is always helpful in OS X too. x-man-page:chmod
Slashdot butchered that last link: Chmod Man page
What trash. It strips the slashes.
x-man-page://chmod