Category: Mandriva

Smolt in Mandriva

Posted on by Frederik

Some time ago, I introduced a package for Smolt in Mandriva Cooker. Smolt is a tool developed for Fedora which collects information about all your hardware and submits it to a central database. On the smolts.org website, people can view all hardware entries and indicate which one is working OK for them. The database is also coupled with a wiki, where extra instructions can be written to get the hardware working. Smolt is used by default already for some time in Fedora and also in OpenSUSE.

To install the Smolt package in Mandriva 2009.1, run urpmi smolt or use the graphical software installer to install the smolt package. There is also a smolt-gui package, but unfortunately this graphical front-end has not been updated recently anymore and because of that it’s missing some crucial features. You can use it to submit your hardware profile, but the GUI will fail to communicate you the password you need to indicate which hardware is working on smolts.org. To get this password, you need to use the command line tool smoltSendProfile. smoltSendProfile will show you all information that will be sent, and after your confirmation it will submit this hardware profile to smolts.org and it will give you the URL and password needed to edit the information.

It’s also a good idea to update the information in the database now and then, for example when you change some piece of hardware in your system, update your OS and/or start using a new kernel. The smolt package adds a cron script in /etc/cron.d/smolt which will update your hardware profile once a month. However, it is not activated by default. To activate it, edit the file /etc/sysconfig/smolt and set ENABLE_MONTHLY_UPDATE=1.

Updating to Mandriva 2009.1 (Cooker)

Posted on by Frederik

Today, the server running this website was update from Mandriva 2009.0 to 2009.1 Cooker by running urpmi –auto-select –allow-suggests with the Cooker mandriva-release package installed. All in all, the update went very smoothly. There was one file conflict in some KDE 4 related packages and I had to restart Apache 2 by hand because a httpd reload done when the awstats package was installed, failed because of the changed glibc. After the update I also removed KDE 4 because I don’t use it. Actually, it’s only extremely exceptional that I use X on this system (it’s mostly running headless), but it’s good to still have GNOME in case I have a problem with my laptop. I did not yet reboot the system; actually it is still running a 2.6.24 RC kernel with an uptime of more than one year. In the not too distant future, it’s possible this system will be migrated to a KVM virtual machine, so then it will definitely get a new kernel.

Last week-end, I also updated my parent’s system to 2009.1 Cooker. Actually, this system was still running Mandriva 2008.1 with KDE 3.5. Here I removed KDE too, and I installed GNOME. I consider KDE to be less stable than GNOME in general and I’ve heard all too often “feature X will only be done in next KDE 4.x release”, that it’s becoming annoying (e.g. just today I read that root support for System Settings was once again delayed to a later KDE release). So far, I haven’t received any complaint worth mentioning, so it seems the migration from KDE 3.5 to GNOME went very smoothly.

So if you are thinking of switching to Cooker, now is a great moment to do it. The OS is very stable, and the last little bugs are being ironed out. Personally I am not suffering from any showstopper bug anymore at this moment. The most annoying thing I’m seeing here, is that the second display is not switched off automatically if it’s disconnected while the machine is suspended and I have my serious doubts this will be fixed soon because Xorg’s bugzilla seems like a blackhole to me… Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to switch it off by hand by using GNOME’s screen resolution applet. All in all Mandriva 2009.1 will definitely be a much better release than 2009.0.

Call for testers for new hplip package (HP printer drivers) in Mandriva

Posted on by Frederik

I just submitted hplip version 3.9.2 to Mandriva 2009.1 Cooker. If everything goes fine, this package will probably be available in a couple of hours, depending on the mirror you use. This version should bring many bug fixes to the QT4 interface (which was still experimental in previous hplip versions) and adds support for some new HP printers.

In this package, I also merged lots of patches and changes from Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu. Most important, this includes some changes in the way permissions on the device are set. It would be good if as many people as possible could extensively test this.

Make sure that your computer system is completely up to date Cooker (run urpmi –auto-update as root before) and make sure you have these packages installed: hplip-3.9.2-1mdv2009.1, hplip-hpijs-3.9.2-1mdv2009.1, hplip-gui-3.9.2-1mdv2009.1, foomatic-db-hpijs-20090208-1mdv2009.1 and foomatic-db-engine-4.0-0.20090316.1mdv2009.1.

You can configure your printer by running the command hp-setup. What needs to be checked, is that the printer works in any case: when you boot your computer while the printer is plugged in, and also when you only plug in your printer after you have started your computer. The same thing for scanning, if you have a multi-functional HP printer with integrated scanner. It would also be interesting if people could test the fax functionality of hplip (in the applications menu Tools – System Tools – HP Sendfax).

If something is not working, run the hp-check -r command as root, and post the resulting hp-check file to a bug report on Mandriva’s bugzilla, including detailed information about your printer configuration and what exactly is not working. You can add my e-mail address fhimpe@mandriva.org in CC.

Updated system to 2009.1 beta/Cooker

Posted on by Frederik

Yesterday, I updated my system at home from Mandriva 2009.0 (with lots of personal backports, such as GNOME 2.24.3) to Mandriva Cooker, which rougly corresponds to beta 1 now.

I used urpmi to do the update. There were a few problems. Luma and anjuta2 still needed a rebuild (for new python 2.6 resp. binutils), so I submitted new releases of these packages to the repositories. Then the python 2.6 update would cause removal of some python packages, because the update of the python-devel packages was not done smoothly by urpmi. I submitted a a bug for that problem.

All in all, it’s a nice improvement over 2009.0. My system feels much more responsive now. I could remove the work-around I needed before to get snappy 2D X performance with my NVidia graphics card, and also Firefox and other applications seem to work more smoothly.

Evolution was still slow when using my slow IMAP server, but I could improve things a lot by cleaning up my IMAP mail folders a bit. Liferea, in the past my favourite RSS reader, still remains unusably slow in the 1.5 branch, which is probably caused by sqlite and which is a known problem. GNOME’s screensavers are broken and the invisible CPU frequency applet problem is back. The volume mixer is not working anymore if you don’t use PulseAudio, which is a rather notorious problem. GNOME’s Desktop icons are a bit smaller now. You also should not trust GNOME’s calculator, because it seems to give erroneous results. Compiz currently is also rather broken for me: Emerald is very unstable and gtk-window-decorator only displays a grey area instead of a the GNOME window decoration.

When enabling speedboot, I had the problem that X was started before dkms had rebuilt my NVidia drivers and it seems the powernow-k8 module (which I configured in /etc/modprobe.preload), was not loaded. I’ll need to verify the latter problem, and report those two problems.

KDE 4.2 seems to have improved over the previous versions. The fact that a folder view can be used as the desktop, finally brings back the feature we are used too from all other desktops, including previous KDE series. I also noted that kscd is still as ugly as before. However, I’ll probably remove KDE completely from my system soon. I don’t use it anyway, except for taking a quick look at it like now, and I have the feeling my bug reports (mostly about missing features and usability problems), don’t lead to much fixes anyway.

Apart from those mosly smaller problems, the OS is already very usable for me, even with the 2.6.29-rc5 TMB kernel which I’m using.

Various things

Posted on by Frederik

A bit of various things I quickly want to write something about:

Mandriva (1)

Mandriva decided to end the contracts of at least Adam Williamson, Mandriva’s community manager and Oden Eriksson, maintainer of the Apache, MySQL, PHP stack and other related packages. I’m disappointed to see that all the trouble Mandriva has gone through during the past years, still has not ended yet and that people who play such an important role for the distribution, have to leave the ship now. This has triggered a heavy reaction from the community now, with a public letter to the CEO being written, an online petition and people deciding not to spend money anymore to Mandriva, but instead spent it on other free software projects.

While I totally agree with the support for and the solidarity with the people who are victim of these cost cutting, and while I think that this definitely was not the smartest move from the management, I’m not sure these actions are really a good idea. I fear that it’s only a matter of time, until the big sites will start to pick up this story, resulting in yet more negative publicity for the distribution, which will definitely not help preventing this kind of trouble in the future. I can already imagine the style reactions this would provoke on Slashdot: “Mandriva is dead, I left them years ago for X”, “Does anybody still care about Mandriva?”, “Now competitor X can hire them!”,… Now of course, if the management had not decided to end the contracts of these people, this would never happen… Actually I was doubting for that reason if I really wanted to post this here on my blog, but on the other hand: this blog is not that popular anyway, so, it won’t make it worse than it already is :-)

I’m not too sure what to expect from Mandriva in the future. The lack of manpower has always been a problem, and this will only become worse now. Especially seeing that most Mandriva employees are currently working on OEM stuff, and almost the whole Cooker distribution is now maintained by the community. Even big updates like KDE 4.2 beta, X.org 1.5 and others, are almost entirely being done by the community. While there is nothing wrong with a community based distribution (I’m thinking of Debian), together with those contract endings it gives me the feeling that the community is more and more seen as a cheap way of distribution development for the benefit of the company.

Mandriva (2)

Today a broken Evolution update was released as an official update for Mandriva 2009.0. It’s disappointing that there are not better QA procedures to prevent such a major breakage. Packages were just being uploaded to the updates repository, while these updated package did never get even the most basic testing. These kind of serious problems together with the many other annoying and sometimes major problems in 2009.0, make that I really cannot recommend this release for normal computer users. KDE 4 is too unstable and unfinished (even the 4.1.3 update does not fix that. The first time I started KDE after the update and clicked on the Mandriva menu button in the panel, plasma crashed…), even GNOME has annoying flaws (the gnome-screensaver-dialog hang when the screen is locked is a major annoyance for me, because I hit this problem numerous times a day), OpenOffice.org is still an RC version with known and fixed bugs,…

Hifi stuff

Speaking about music, it’s really time that I get some decent hi-fi gear, because my old stuff is actually crap and barely works anymore. I need a stereo amplifier, tuner and a pair of loudspeakers. I’m tempted by the Focal Chorus 816V speakers, which seem to get positive reviews, together with a Marantz amplifier (I have some experience with them, and like them a lot). I was thinking of a Marantz PM8003, but I don’t think it’s yet available here, and I really need something now. Either I could get the older PM7001 KI, or just the PM7003, about which I read some positive comments on a Dutch forum. The Denon PMA-1500AE could be yet another alternative. I’m not sure about this yet, so if anybody has any comments or experience, you’re welcome :-)

Last week I ordered the tuner already. It’s a Marantz ST7001 DAB tuner. While I’m quite skeptical about the quality of DAB (160 kbps MPEG 1 Layer 2 defnitely cannot be CD quality), and DAB reception quality could be difficult here (it’s very realistic that there will be drop-outs in the signal now and then, so maybe I’ll need to try with a better antenna), I can always fall back to plain FM with this system.

Using KVM on Mandriva 2009.0

Posted on by Frederik

Introduction

My new Dell Latitude E6400 laptop, is my first system which support hardware visualization. It also has 4 GB RAM, making this an ideal machine to start experimenting with KVM, the kernel based virtual machine system which is now integrated in Linux itself.

In the past I had already used different virtualization systems. VMWare Server is annoying because you have to rebuild the kernel modules by hand each time you install a new kernel and it’s not Free (as in Free Speech). Virtualbox handles the modules rebuild nicely thanks to the use of DKMS in Mandriva, but always randomly crashes on an assert, making it totally unusable for serious work. Also it does not really include a server mode, where virtual machines just run in the background. Xen is especially nice if you have a system which does not support hardware virtualization and you just want to run a paravirtualized Linux in it. However, the host system (Dom0) needs to run a very specific kernel version (normally version 2.6.18, although Debian has a 2.6.26 based one now). OpenVZ is nice for lightweight Linux server containers (some kind of chroot on steroids), but is not a complete virtualization solution.

Because KVM is built into the standard Linux kernel, this means there won’t be any problems with kernel modules which have to be installed separately. It’s a complete virtualization system which means that you can run all kind of operating systems on it, like for example also Windows. KVM is evolving very quickly and its performance and features are constantly improving. Thanks to libvirt and virt-manager, it also has a nice GUI front-end which make configuring and managing virtual machines very easy (libvirt and virt-manager also include support for Xen and OpenVZ, but I don’t know how well that works).

Installing and using KVM on Mandriva 2009.0

Before installing KVM, it’s important to verify that the CPU on your system has hardware virtualization support. Start up a terminal, and run


$ cat /proc/cpuinfo

If you have an Intel CPU, you should have vmx in the flags. If you are using an AMD CPU, you should have svm.

It’s best to use KVM, libvirt and virt-manager from Mandriva’s backports repositories. The versions included there, are the most recent ones, and fix a few problems which made networking not work out of the box with the ones included in the standard repositories. So start up the Mandriva Control Center (Tools – System Tools – Configure Your Computer), and in the Software category, launch the media sources configuration tool and enable the Main Backports and Contrib Backports sources by checking the checkboxes.

Before we install the necessary packages, it’s necessary to make a change to udev’s configuration file to prevent the virbr* and vnet* virtual ethernet devices and bridges being configured automatically by Mandriva’s configuration tools. To do so, edit the file /etc/sysconfig/udev_net and add virbr* and vnet* to the BLACKLIST_ALL line if they are not there yet. The line should look like this:

BLACKLIST_ALL="ppp*|ippp*|isdn*|plip*|hso*|lo*|irda*|dummy*|ipsec*|vmnet*|wifi*|
wmaster*|br*|vbd*|vtpm*|vif*|ax*|nr*|rose*|bce*|scc*|virbr*|vnet*"
Then install the kvm and virt-manager packages with the graphical software installation utility or with urpmi. Some extra dependencies will be installed, such as dnsmasq-base, libvirt-utils and python-virtinst.

After the installation, make sure that the libvirtd service is running. You can use the graphical tool in the Mandriva Control Center in the category System – Manager system services, or you can run “service libvirtd status” to verify whether it’s running and “service libvirtd start” to start it.

Now start the Virtual Machine Manager from Tools – Emulators. Choose File – Add Connection and set up a Local QEMU connection. Double click on the localhost/qemu connection in the virtual machine manager, and enter your root password. You can now create new virtual machines by clicking on the New button. To use KVM, choose a fully virtualized system, and choose KVM as hypervisor. If you want to run Mandriva 2009.0 or later in a KVM based virtual machine, you can probably choose Linux as OS type and Ubuntu Hardy as OS variant, because that should give better performance than the generic options.

I currently have Windows Vista and Debian Lenny running in KVM. It works very fast and very reliably. The only problem I encounter, is that sometimes I cannot switch back from my Windows virtual machine to my host system: the mouse and keyboard cannot leave the VNC window anymore and also the Ctrl-Alt keystroke does not release the mouse pointer. The only solution is to shut down the Windows system.

Mandriva Linux 2009.0 on a Dell Latitude E6400

Posted on by Frederik

Introduction

A few weeks ago the hard drive in my Apple Powerbook G4 which I was using at work, had died. As this machine was already a few years old, it was already planned to be replaced soon. The hard drive crash only accelerated things a bit.

I wanted a not too heavy laptop with 14″ screen and a high resolution (1440×900) screen and an Intel CPU of the latest generation (style Core 2 Duo P8400/P8600/T9400). Lenovo’s Thinkpad T400 with such a high resolution screen seemed to be difficult (impossible?) to find here in Belgium currently and generally Thinkpads are rather costly here. HP’s Elitebook 6930p did not seem to be shipping in Belgium yet. So in the end, I chose a Dell Latitude E6400. Also a big advantage of Dell, is that I could easily choose in detail which features I preferred, while you are limited to standard models with most other brands.

Specifications

So here are the specifications of the Dell E6400 machine I have now:

  • Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 (2,26 Ghz, 3MB cache)
  • 4 GB RAM
  • Intel G45 chipset graphics card
  • DVD+/-RW
  • 160 GB hard drive
  • Intel based 1Gbps Ethernet
  • Intel WiFI 5300 wireless card
  • Bluetooth
  • SD card reader
  • SmartCard reader
  • Firewire, eSATA, USB, VGA, DisplayPort outputs
  • Dell Simple E-Port docking station

Mandriva Linux 2009.0 on Dell Latitude E6400

On my Powerbook I used Debian Testing (Lenny), because it supports the PowerPC architecture very well and is very stable. I was very pleased with this distribution. Even as a desktop OS, I personally liked it much better than Ubuntu. On this new machine, I decided to install Mandriva because it permits me to follow Cooker if I want and also permits me to create and use custom packages more easily (I’m not too experienced in creating DEB packages).

Installation

I did a network installation of Mandriva 2009.0 x86_64 edition, which I started with a CD burnt from the boot.iso file which can be found on every Mandriva mirror in the install/images directory. I had some trouble in finding a reliable mirror at first, but once I found one, the installation itself went fine. If you are installing from a CD or DVD set, be sure to install all available updates at the end of the installation. By the time you are reading this, this might solve some of the problems I encountered with the just released Mandriva 2009.0 and which I will discuss here.

X lock ups

Once the installation had finished, I booted Mandriva for the first time. Unfortunately, every time as soon as the X server started up, the machine completely locked up though. In the end, this turned out to be a problem with the Intel X driver. A fixed version is currently available in the main/testing repository. If you are suffering from this problem, in the boot loader press F2 with the Mandriva line selected, and then add 3 at the end of the kernel line, in order to start the linux system in console mode. Log in as root, and run

# urpmi http://ftp.free.fr/mirrors/ftp.mandriva.com/MandrivaLinux/official/2009.0/x86_64/media/main/testing/x11-driver-video-intel-2.4.2-7mdv2009.0.x86_64.rpm

to install the fixed driver from testing. Then run

# init 5

to go to init lever 5 (graphical mode).

Speaker noise

Another problem was that as soon as the sound drivers were loaded, a loud noise came out of the speakers. To fix this, open the volume control in LInux, and deactivate the Analog Loopback 1 and 2 switches (in GNOME, you will need to click on the Preferences button first, and check the checkboxes next to Analog Loopback 1 and 2 to show these switches). I also completely muted PC Beep because even on the lowest level, the console beep was still extremely loud.

Kernel choice

Because my laptop has 4GB of RAM, the installer decided to install kernel-server instead of kernel-desktop. However this is not needed if you installed Mandriva’s x86_64 edition. To check whether you are suffering from this problem, run

$ uname -a


If it installed the server kernel, you can install the desktop kernel by running

# urpmi kernel-desktop-latest


The desktop kernel will give you better performance and battery lifetime than the server kernel. Another alternative is kernel-tmb-desktop-latest, which I had also good experiences with.

If you installed Mandriva’s i586 edition, you will need the server kernel to support 4GB of RAM. That’s why you really should try to install the x86_64 edition if you have that much RAM.

Intel VT

Because I want to make use of the Intel VT (virtualisation features in Intel CPUs), I went in the BIOS (press F2 when the Dell logo appears when starting up the machine) and enabled these features. After that, Linux became extremely unstable. Kernel oopses happened during start up, in some cases completely locking up the OS when booting. I could fix this by adding intel_iommu=off to the kernel command line. At the boot loader, again select the Mandriva 2009.0 line and press F2 and add this option. To make this permanently, start up the Mandriva Control Center (“Configure your computer” in the program menu Tools – System Tools), go to the Boot category and choose “Set up boot system”. Click on the next button, and then for all Linux kernel, click on Modify and add intel_iommu=off to the Append field.

Wireless and Bluetooth

After the installation, be sure to also start up the drakroam wireless utility, in order to make it install all needed tools to use the wireless networking card because the installer did not install these by default. To use the wireless network card, don’t forget to enable the wireless functionality with the wireless kill switch at the right side of the laptop. I have the impression that it’s best to make sure this is enabled at boot, otherwise the wireless does not always seem to work when enabling later on.

In order to use the Bluetooth, I had to install the gnome-bluetooth package myself. For KDE, you will need to install kdebluetooth4. The pin can be set in the text file /etc/bluetooth/pin.

Other things

Currently I have not yet tried the SmartCard and SD card readers and I did not succeed yet in setting up a dual screen configuration with a flat panel connected to the VGA output on the docking station. For some reason, xrandr only permits me to use a 640×480 resolution on the external monitor, possibly because it seems to ignore the Virtual lines I added to my xorg.conf. I’ll need to investigate this a bit more to find out what is really going wrong here. Suspending the machine also seems problematic: when I tried this, the machine locked up completely when it resumed.

I did not buy this laptop with the integrated webcam, however according to what I read on the Internet, it should also work out of the box with Linux kernerl 2.6.27, which is used by Mandriva 2009.0.

Conclusion

All in all, I’m pretty satisfied with this laptop. The specifications are nice and the price we got from Dell was nice (much cheaper than the standard prices on the Dell website). The biggest disadvantage of this laptop is that parts of the casing seem to be made of cheap plastic. It does not feel as sturdy as a Thinkpad or HP laptop. Time will tell whether that’s a real problem. The most important things can be get working with Mandriva 2009.0 without too much problems and I guess I will find solutions too for the remaining bits in the near future.

Links

Distrowatch: Mandriva is the winner distribution of the first half of 2008

Posted on by Frederik

“Distrowatch.com called Mandriva 2008.1 (Spring) “the distribution that found the best balance between features and stability“. Compared to Fedora 9, Ubuntu 8.04 and OpenSUSE 11.0, “once again, Mandriva seems to be a winner here, earning high marks from both the reviewers and the users on various forums for its 2008.1 release”.

It’s a great thing that an authoritative site like distrowatch.com is recognising Mandriva’s work lately. Still, it’s extremely difficult to pass this message to the public with all the (in my opinion greatly exaggerated) Ubuntu marketing and hype…

KDE 4.1 beta 2 bug status

Posted on by Frederik

This week-end, I installed KDE 4.0.83 also known as 4.1 beta 2. Here’s a quick round-up of issues I reported:

Looking at the bugs of previous weeks, those are fixed now:

So in total, this means 4 out of 31 bugs reported during the last two weeks are fixed now. Unfortunately, most other bugs did not see much progress at all: either they are considered as feature request for KDE 4.2 or later, either they are completely ignored, either the only progres is that the developer says it is working for him, even if I can easily reproduce these bugs. I could not find the feature “folder view widget used as desktop”, which is really needed in my opinion, so it seems indeed that this is only a KDE 4.2 feature, as was suggested in an earlier comment on this blog. Together with all other bugs/feature requests for Plasma I reported, I am still convinced that Plasma is not mature enough today to be used in a production environment by non-geeks.

KDE 4.0.82 beta testing report

Posted on by Frederik

This week-end I upgraded my KDE 4 test installation to KDE 4.0.82, which is now included in Mandriva Cooker. Time to follow up on the bugs I reported last week and to take a deeper look at Plasma, the new desktop concept introduced in KDE 4.

KDE 4.1 desktop with Dolphin

Plasma

The good news is that the Folder View widget, which is used to display desktop icons, has been fixed so that right clicking on a file now gives a meaningful menu. So finally you can easily trash or rename icons in the folder view widget or execute other common actions for normal files.

However, the more I use KDE 4, the more problems I see with this whole Plasma thing. Especially the Folder View widget is problematic, not only because of bugs, but especially because the whole thing works rather counterintuitively.

In other desktops (including KDE 3.5, GNOME and XFCE), icons can be placed on the whole desktop surface and those files and application launchers are saved in the ~/Desktop directory. KDE 4 takes a radically different approach. All items on the desktop are Plasma widgets. Plasma widgets can be small applications (like an RSS readers or a clock) but also file and application launchers and they do not correspond with a file in ~/Desktop. To circumvent this limitation, the folder view widget was created. It’s actually a widget which shows all the files in a certain directory. By default, a folder view widget showing the contents of the directory ~/Desktop is added to the desktop. This creates a highly confusing situation:

  • Because the contents of ~/Desktop is not shown over the whole desktop but only in a widget, files in ~/Desktop can only be shown on a limited area on the desktop.
  • All widgets get some sort of transparent overlay over the desktop wallpaper. In my opinion, this looks ugly. It creates unnecessary complication, while it is not aesthetically pleasing to my eyes, because it ruins the background too much.
  • There are now two different ways of creating items on the desktop: either by creating a separate plasma widget which represents a file or application launcher, either by putting the file or application launcher in the the ~/Desktop directory.

Because of this fundamental change and some bugs which worsen the situation, very strange things can happen:

  • Moving files or applications to or from the visible desktop folder view widget does not work at all,
  • Move a file from KDE’s program menu to the desktop, outside of the folder widget. A Plasma widget representing the program is created at the location where you dropped it, however it only shows the “broken” icon. The application name is ellipsized to three letters. At the same time the icon is also added to the folder view widget, so there are now two desktop icons…
  • I could drag and drop a Kopete avatar image file to the desktop, so that a Plasma widget was created. There was no way to copy or move this file to another location any more, so I could access it somewhere with my file browser…
  • When moving a file to the desktop, in the past this moved the file to ~/Desktop, so you could easily find the file there in all applications. Now the file is not moved anymore, but a Plasma widget linking to that file is created. That means that in applications, you can’t find the file anymore in ~/Desktop, although the file is shown on your visible desktop.

Even with the impossibility of dropping files on the folder view widget and the double icons when dropping outside the folder view widget fixed, the two different type of icons on the desktop, will be very confusing for users. At work there are users who are constantly using the desktop for saving files. If there does not come a complete rethinking of the way the desktop is implemented in KDE 4, I am planning on migrating these users to GNOME instead of KDE 4, because this Plasma thing will cause too much support interventions because ueser won’t find their documents anymore.

Half of the Plasma widgets are still not working for me. The most widgets, only show a grey area when I drop them on my desktop and I still could not add the Show Desktop widget to the panel.

Changing the size of a Plasma widget neither is very intuitive. You have to click on the resize icon which appears normally at the left upper side of the widget (but this can be the right side too, if your widget is near the left side of the screen!), and then the widget will be expanded or reduced around the centre of the widget. This is of course very annoying if your widget is already near the side of the screen, as this means you’ll probably have to move the widget too. I don’t understand why the same idiom of resizing and moving application windows was not reused.

Other problems

There has not been much progress in my bug reports of last week. Most remain unanswered or only have got a “I can’t reproduce” answer. Most promising for the moment is the KMail text encoding bug, where I was able to find some more information about the circumstances which trigger this problem. Let’s hope this helps in fixing the problem soon now. The slowliness of KMail’s message list is getting more and more annoying too. Actually already in folders with only a few hundreds message, the slowliness is noticeable. Speaking about slowliness, Konqueror’s KHTML web browsers also feels very sluggish today, compared to Firefox 2 and 3. Scrolling with the mouse scroll wheel often feels sluggish, as does the loading and rendering of complex pages. Konqueror’s KHTML on my Athlon 64 3500+ feels much slower than Epiphany/Webkit on my old PowerPC G4 laptop. It’s unfortunate that GTK+ and QT/KDE Webkit are still not really ready for production use.

List of today’s new KDE bugs:

Update 15 June 2008: two new bugs related to the Plasma desktop problems: