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3807 discussions

LXDE and Xfce: The other desktops
by Darrell Anderson 20 Dec '11

20 Dec '11

Over the past few months I have read several articles like this: http://www.h-online.com/open/features/LXDE-and-Xfce-the-other-desktops-1392… I'm not sure Xfce is a cholesterol free desktop or that LXDE is ready for prime time with non geek users. Yet I am sure that Trinity is receiving little comparative press coverage. I'm not calling for a marketing campaign, but I would like to request all team members focus on making R14 the best release yet. To me that means three goals: * Eliminating many, many paper cut bugs. * All packages build with minimal fuss. * Provide an improved web site. The paper cut project never got off the ground. Paper cut bugs discourage non geek users. They don't care or want to understand the nuances of programming or why something fails to function as intended. Paper cut bugs are a public relations nightmare. People vote with their feet. :( Struggling to build packages is a good way to ensure little exposure because the desktop then is not available to users. A significant portion of the discussion in this list is build issues. Simple things like autotools looking for Qt4 rather than Qt3 are frustrating to non geeks. Remember that until Trinity is provided as a regular prebuilt package option in most distros, end-users are left to build the packages on their own. That means the wiki needs attention too and should be revised for non geeks. We have been discussing web site changes and a possible RSS feed. Those plans likely will fall into place shortly. :) Despite what reviewers declare, I don't see Trinity "competing" with KDE4 --- or GNOME. I see the "competition" as Xfce and LXDE. I use the word "competition" in a friendly, comparative way. Long-term we should be asking ourselves questions such as whether there is anything those desktops do better than Trinity? Is there anything those desktops do that Trinity does not? Trinity does not have to be at the top of all comparison lists, but should look favorable all around. There is one thing those two desktop environments do better than Trinity: start and exit faster. I don't know whether that observation merits an enhancement request. While I agree too much discussion is wasted on the topics, I'd like to think both can be improved in Trinity. In the article I linked the writer mentions that "One developer in China has ported LXDE to a device with 128 RAM, 400 MHZ CPU." How does Trinity perform with such hardware? I have PI and PII machines sitting here with 256 MB of RAM. I have run 3.5.10 on those machines for several years and 3.5.10 is, well, sluggish. I suspect my problem is the video cards in my machines and I haven't fully tested yet. Yet I am guessing Trinity will fare only a tad better than 3.5.10. The author also quoted somebody as saying "if Windows 98 and XP work quite well on old machines, why does my Linux desktop need a 1.0 GHz CPU + 1GB RAM?" I agree. I think Trinity can be a significant player in keeping old hardware running. If LXDE is going to be touted as ideal for that kind of hardware, then is that a topic for discussion for Trinity too? One thing Trinity does well is conform to the traditional desktop model that most users are accustomed. That means users familiar with Windows. I never have had a problem with Linux desktops continuing that model and to me, the original 1969 desktop model derived in the PARC labs and copied by Microsoft and Apple developers still works wonderfully well today. Not to mention that Trinity is far more configurable than Xfce and LXDE. There are several distros focusing on being lightweight or fast. The simple message of that focus is many users do not like bloat but they also do not want to deal with the "crippled" world of window managers only. In the end, will distro maintainers offer Trinity as an option because Trinity satisfies such goals? If Trinity is easy to build, will Trinity be offered as an alternate desktop in major distros too? Opportunity is waiting. Let's strive to make R14 a desktop reviewers want to review and praise. :) Darrell

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Qt3 legal issues?
by L0ner sh4dou 19 Dec '11

19 Dec '11

Out of curiosity? Isn't Qt registered trademark of nokia? I found this on qt4/nokia page: "Nokia, Qt and their respective logos are trademarks of Nokia Corporation in Finland and/or other countries worldwide.".

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A Standalone Konqueror
by Calvin Morrison 19 Dec '11

19 Dec '11

Hello, I've seen many calls for a stand alone Konqueror. I have seen people who do not want to use KDE3 anymore, but desperately miss their beloved Konqueror asking for it. What do you all think about creating just a Konqueror tarball for the releases, and push it out to package maintainers? Frankly Konqueror is the best manager around, I think we might as well get people hooked on it :) Calvin Morrison

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Adding Trinity to Linux From Scratch
by Bruce Dubbs 18 Dec '11

18 Dec '11

I am starting to do the development/testing needed to add Trinity to Linux From Scratch, replacing KDE3. Right now I have a couple of issues I'd like to get clarified. First, I notice in the dependencies directory, there are several packages: dependencies/arts dependencies/avahi-tqt dependencies/dbus-1-tqt dependencies/dbus-tqt dependencies/tqtinterface I have no problems with arts or tqtinterface but I don't see the other three mentioned anywhere. Are these packages required for Trinity? If so, at what point are they required? We do have instructions already in LFS for D-Bus and avahi libraries. Second, I have had some problems building kdelibs. There were no problems following the instructions for qt3, tqtinterface, or arts, but there were many places in building kdelibs where I had to edit a link.txt file and add -lX11. I am fairly new at using cmake so I'd like to know if there is a way to add this automatically. My installation of xorg is a little non-standard because the files are in /opt/xorg, but there are appropriate symlinks at /usr/X11R6 and /usr/include/X11. I didn't seem to have a problem with include files. It would also be useful to know how to set -L/opt/xorg/lib, but that is not critical because I can do essentially the same thing by export(ing) LIBRARY_PATH. I'll note that LFS has a policy of not using development versions of packages, so for now we need to be able to work with trinity-3.5.13. Thanks for your help. -- Bruce Dubbs

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Embedded viewing
by Darrell Anderson 17 Dec '11

17 Dec '11

One thing I have noticed about Konqueror 3.5.13 is embedded viewing is the default for just about everything. I prefer to use the external app rather than the KPart embedded viewers. When I migrate a KDE 3.5.10 profile to TDE none of those settings remain. I'm thrown back to the embedded viewers. Is there an easy or quick way to reverse this default without having to manually reset them with each mimetype of app that is opened? Darrell

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How to tell automake where to find TQt/Qt3
by L0ner sh4dou 16 Dec '11

16 Dec '11

I already asked but no-one replied to me. Is there any way in which I could tell automake (./configure) for which version of TQt or Qt should it look, or where to find them? In my system it keeps detecting TQt4 and thus is searching for Qt4. Both of them aren't present on my system, since I have clean install, only with Qt3 and other trinity deps. It is crucial to me, since without solving this problem I cannot continue on building trinity components, nor I can continue on creating PKGBUILDs for Arch. My distro is Archlinux and I'm building from 3.5.13 tarballs.

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Autotools package builds
by Baho Utot 16 Dec '11

16 Dec '11

I need some help with the autoconf packages. When building it finds qt3 and tqtinterface but it keeps failing on linking QString and QWidget. So I think it is missing some library. What is weird is that all the libraries are in /opt/trinity/lib and /usr/lib. ldconfig.so.conf has those paths. What library are these in. Thanks

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"Keywords" field in .desktop files
by Florian Müllner 16 Dec '11

16 Dec '11

Hi everyone, we are currently in the process of standardizing a new "Keywords" key in the freedesktop.org desktop entry spec[0]. Apparently KDE used to use a slightly different variant (using commas instead of semi-colons as separators) before it was prefixed with X-KDE. It was agreed that the differences are too minor to matter in practice, but as the Trinity desktop still uses the non-prefixed variant, it seemed like a good idea to make you aware of the spec change anyway :) Regards, Florian [0] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2011-December/012173.html

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Canonical location for sources packages
by Laurent Dard 16 Dec '11

16 Dec '11

I'm talking about trinity in blfs-dev list. Maybe Trinity will be included in BLFS book. (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/) Problem is it needs a stable long-term official reference to sources. (http and/or ftp) What are the good ones? For example, I found these are valid links for Qt but will they work for some years? http://ppa.quickbuild.pearsoncomputing.net/trinity/releases/3.5.13/dependen… http://mirror.its.uidaho.edu/pub/trinity/releases/3.5.13/dependencies/qt3-3… ftp://mirror.its.uidaho.edu/trinity/releases/3.5.13/dependencies/qt3-3.3.8.… Is there a "canonical" ftp site? -- Laurent Dard

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Konqueror Extensions
by Darrell Anderson 15 Dec '11

15 Dec '11

I'm hoping this is not a bug but a case of my poor memory. In Konqueror, one of my user accounts shows a search bar to the right of the location bar.: http://humanreadable.nfshost.com/trinity/konq-user1.png Another user does not show the search bar: http://humanreadable.nfshost.com/trinity/konq-user2.png Both users show an rsync plugin button from the kdeaddons package. I have no idea how to enable or disable either the search bar or the rsync button. I'm not commenting on the merits of the tools, just the inability to enable (show) or disable (not show). I thought perhaps the solution was in the Configure Extensions menu option, but nothing happens when I change the check boxes. Neither option appears in the Configure Toolbars menu option. I hope I'm missing something obvious! Darrell

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