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Awesome Multimedia Technology Heads for KDE
An anonymous reader writes "Linux Devices is reporting on a cool new multimedia technology that's slated to be incuded in KDE 4.0. The two key components are Phonon, a central hardware configuration database said to free multimedia applications from the need to configure hardware, and NMM (network-integrated multimedia middleware), a distributed multimedia architecture whereby multimedia content can be readily shared among networked devices and even 'handed over' from one device to another. Potential NMM applications include networked multimedia home entertainment systems, distributed and parallel media processing applications, distributed streaming servers and services, communication and control systems, and large-scale multimedia installations such as video walls, according to the article, which includes some interesting photos and diagrams. Phonon and NMM will be demonstrated at LinuxTag, May 3-6, in Wiesbaden, Germany."
You want to run KDE without kwin? Brilliant! Next up: Running Linux without that pesky kernel.
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how does kbattleship bloat KDE?
KDE consists of kdelibs + kdebase. Everything else is optional.
In fact, if you want to run an individual KDE application without the desktop environment, then even kdebase is optional.
If you try to install all of the packages that the Debian KDE maintainer has decided are part of "KDE", then what a suprise, you get ALL of them.
The big heap of dependencies you listed are 90% individual KDE applications that you are completely free to install or not.
If that is difficult, then that is an issue with the packaging of KDE on your distribution, not an issue with KDE itself.
See if there is a "kde-base" meta package you can install - if you do that, you'll get the much smaller set of applications that comprise the core of KDE, and then you can cherry pick the other applications that suit your needs.
Advanced users are users too!
ill be waiting for the 4.0 RC 1 so i can help get rid of the bugs :)
XML - A clever joke would be here if
only if you install libmad and libcrazy
Installing KBattleship in Gentoo, with no previous KDE packages installed, would give you three things: kdelibs, libkdegames and kbattleship. If the dependency system on your Linux distribution tries to pull in more, bug the package maintainers.
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
foo@bar:~$ sudo apt-get install kbattleship
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
kdelibs libkdegames everything
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Um, that's _exactly_ what is happening. NMM is a middleware layer, under KDE, for gnome, and non-kde-or-gnome apps.
Phonon is just the c++ wrapper to make it easy for kde apps to use the middleware layer.
Bad article (or summary). Phonon is an API a KDE app will use to do sound/video. Phonon is really just an abstraction layer. You can have an arts backend, alsa backend, gstreamer backend, even a windows backend. It's only purpose is to make audio/video easier for KDE developers and make it easy to port the whole thing to another system. It's kdelibs material, sure. But I can't see it being used by a Gnome app, they already have gstreamer (which can do arts, esd, alsa, oss, windows, etc too).
"But I'm still right here, giving blood and keeping faith. And I'm still right here."
It's about networking and device discovery. While you need UPnP to find everything, it doesn't mesh the media playback, etc. seamlessly. NMM is more analogous to DirectPlay and probably HAS a backend for UPnP or can easily enough. If you'd have read up on what NMM was, you'd know this, though...
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