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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
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.)
Actually with Finder and the 'alt-tab' issue, this too drove me mad, until a kind soul told me about the Apple+` shortcut, that's the Apple key and the grave accent key (just below the ESC key on my PC keyboard and on the bottom left of my Mac keyboard). This switches between multiple windows of a single application and saved me much gnashing of teeth.
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.
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