Slashdot Mirror
KDE Running on Mac OS X
GeoffP writes "AppleTalk Australia is running a story on running KDE on Mac OS X. For those that don't know, KDE is a graphical desktop environment used to access your computer's files. Finally, Mac users have a free (as in speech) approach to their filesystem."
Does the poster even realize this is simply the X server with KDE running as a client app? its not like they've replaced the nice, flashy GUI with KDE. They've just compiled and run it! Look, I can run Ethereal on OS X. Look, I can run *name unix app* on OS X. Good grief.
Cemil.
This has been possible for a while now. It's quite easy to set up if you use Fink. You can even set it to use apple's own built-in X11 instead of installing XFree86.
http://fink.sourceforge.net/news/kde.php
A native KDE port for OS X has existed since the end of 2003.... http://dot.kde.org/1073009304/
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
But when you take a screenshot in OS X you don't have to select and drag a box around the window you want as this author has done.
Press Apple-Shift-4, which changes your cursor to a cross-hairs, this lets you drag a box on any part of the screen and the contents are dumped to the desktop as a screenshot.
But! then press spacebar and the cursor changes to an icon of a camera, now click on the window you want to take a screenshot of, and the screenshot will be of that window only, pixel-perfect to the border.
So it looks like this and results in this.
I switched "temporarily" from OS X to Linux/KDE after a water spill fried my iBook. This was about 8 months ago. I haven't bought the replacement iBook (yet?) mainly because now I can't live without KDE's network protocol integration (sftp , webdav, smb, ftp, ... everything is supported!). I can transparently access folders with the (file browser, editor, image viewer, etc. etc. ) in multiple servers, seamlessly. OS/X is seriously lacking in this area. A native KDE port would be a useful addition. Better yet would be OS X itself natively supporting the most widely used network protocols. Tiger was a big dissapointment in this respect...
It was Wolfgang Pauli: "This isn't right, this isn't even wrong."
a ng_pauli.html
Reference: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/wolfg
"Place me in the company of those who seek Truth, but deliver me from those who believe to have found it."
Agreed, Apple's X servers for Panther and Tiger work fine with KDE, and I get to use nice applications like Konqueror (because Finder doesn't do sftp:// and Kate alongside my Mac apps. I'd suggest people stick with Apple's X server.
It's a good article, but it could be summarised in three lines:
1) Install Apple's X server from your OS X CD
2) Install fink from fink.sourceforge.net
3) type "sudo fink install kdebase3"
Follow me
for those who don't know how to do that :
in the terminal go to the folder you want to create the sym-link and type for example
Or simply from any directory
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
I'm running a mish-mash of Gnome components ranging from 2.6 - 2.12 with fink.
... except for the bloody retarded keyboard shortcuts and lack of a usable alt-tab.
Darwinports also has a gnome and KDE distribution for X11 on Mac OS X.
The Gnome stuff has been a bit crazy recently, what with the menu files changing file formats and everything.
Why do I run Gnome? Simple: consistent keyboard shortcuts. On my iBook, I have too many different inconsistent ways to get home, end, pg up and pg dn - some use Fn+arrow, others use the command (apple) key. In Apple's terminal app, it's all backwards - you have to press shift+apple+arrow to get home/end, but for pg up/dn you just use apple+arrow, whereas on Linux/Solaris you use shift+pg up (which would be shift+Fn+pg up on this iBook). WTF?
Don't even get me started on the Finder's utterly, utterly useless "alt-tab" - what a pointless piece of crap. You simply _CANNOT_ switch windows with it, only applications! Great, you can switch focus to the most recently used window in one app or the most recently used window in another, but there is NO FUCKING WAY you can change amongst those app's windows without using the mouse and going to the "window" menu or using "expose" (all involve several distracted seconds on that bastard touch-pad mouse thing).
More frustratingly, apple+arrow in Apple's terminal switches between terminal windows - which is great - but I am either expecting this behaviour to get me home/end (like using apple+pg up/pg dn does), or trying to use apple + left/right arrows to switch windows in some other application that does not mimic this behaviour!
NeoOffice/J uses Fn+arrow for home/end, but Mozilla etc. use apple+arrow. Then apple's terminal uses shift+apple+arrow...
I still don't even know how to skip over words in a line of text (in Linux/windows it's ctrl+arrow, but this does nothing in most mac apps).
Sigh... I never thought I'd see the day... resorting to a gnome desktop instead of Finder. Finder has some great aspects to it; its network shares are reliable and good, and after I've installed the virtual desktops 3rd party app I feel mostly at home
It's a bloody nightmare for keyboard users. Please stop trying to make me use the touchpad... argh
Or there's the beautiful "open" command: open /etc/
("open" does whatever doubleclicking on its argument[s] would do. eg, if it's an application it launches it, if it's a document it launches the owning application and opens it, if it's a directory it opens it in a Finder window. It's one of the great examples of gui/cli synthesis that osx does uniquely well. Much like pbcopy/pbpaste: cli interfaces to the clipboard, something I wanted in linux for years.)
Which ones are missing? (Other than read/write FTP, and sftp, which are already known to be missing.)
The biggest one is the kioslave accessible as "fish://" which uses ssh and standard UNIX utilities (ls, rm, cp, etc) on the remote system to implement remote file access. Very secure, very convenient, very slick. Less important ones include imap, pop3 and mbox. Believe it or not, it's very handy to be able to browse a random mailbox without having to configure it in an e-mail client. Others I've used from time to time include finger, ldap, and nntp, not to mention all of the non-remote kioslaves like camera, fonts, gzip, bzip, man and all of the non-file kioslaves like vnc, rdp, mailto, news, print, applications, etc.
Of course, Mac OS X has ways of accomplishing all of the same tasks, but having gotten used to being able to get an any of this functionality so quickly and easily in KDE, I find OS X a little cumbersome to use.
-- End of on-topic post. Beginning of off-topic post. --
However, my *biggest* beef with OS X (this is an unrelated plea for help from anyone who knows) is that I cannot find a way to set up remote "raw" printers on OS X. I have a Linux print server, and I want CUPS on OS X to simply deliver Postscript to the CUPS server on Linux and let the Linux box render and print it. I can use the CUPS web admin interface on the Mac and set up the raw printer queues, and I can print test pages to them, but no OS X apps will print to them. I just get a generic error message (which I'd post but I don't remember it and I'm 2000 miles from the Mac at the moment). I found that I can sort of "trick" it, by using the Mac printer configuration interface to change the printers from raw to "Generic Postscript Printer" and then printing a document. What comes out of the printer is the raw Postscript, so this isn't useful, but then if I use the CUPS web interface and change the printer type back to raw, it will work properly! For a while. Then OS X seems to discover that I've tricked it and starts giving me error messages again.
Actually... it just occurred to me that I should try lying to OS X and telling it that those print queues are actually Postscript printers. Apple Laserwriters or something like that. Hmm.
BTW, the motivation for letting the Linux box do the rendering is twofold. First, the Mac drivers for one of the printers (HP Photosmart 7260) do not support printing to a remote printer. Not only that, but I think the drivers on Linux produce better-quality photos than the HP drivers for Mac, so it's actually better to get the Linux box to print stuff than to attach the Photosmart directly to the Mac. That one really surprised me. Second, the Linux box is much faster and I get the printouts faster when I can get the Postscript to printer-native-language translation done there.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Log in as >console (either by enabling type in user to log in or by going to the login within and hitting the left arrow, then option enter (I think)). Log into an account when it prompts you. Type startx.