Hi!
This is an extensive objection by a KDE4 developer against marketing and promoting KDE3 and/or Trinity.
I would like to see what can you say in response as it seems he expresses quite common sentiments of distributions developers towards
KDE3.
He also links an extensive article in German in a respectable Linux journal named "Trinity - desktop with no future ".
The machine translation is here:
http://translate.google.ru/translate?hl=ru&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.f…
On Friday 11 November 2011 17:19:01 Ilya Chernykh wrote:
> Hi!
>
> This is an extensive objection by a KDE4 developer against marketing
> and promoting KDE3 and/or Trinity.
>
> I would like to see what can you say in response as it seems he
> expresses quite common sentiments of distributions developers towards
> KDE3.
>
> He also links an extensive article in German in a respectable Linux
> journal named "Trinity - desktop with no future ". The machine
> translation is here:
>
> http://translate.google.ru/translate?hl=ru&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2
>Fwww.freiesmagazin.de%2Fmobil%2FfreiesMagazin-2011-09-bilder.html
I could be wrong, but, I get the impression that there is the
realisation by the KDE people they have made a mistake ! In doing so
alienating lots of its users !
--
Best Regards:
Baron.
--
Best Regards:
Baron.
--
Best Regards:
Baron.
Does Trinity team want a role of an upstream for KDE3?
Is seems that as you claim Trinity is a totally new product you do not want such role.
In that case I will request removal of KDE3 from the next openSUSE release.
I do not want to be attacked for including software with no upstream.
Hello,
The kdelibs/qt3 combination I built (from the stable sources) has a
security hole: when the dynamic loader loads libkdecore.so, the
libmng.so.1 is first searched in a directory in /tmp, which could
potentially result in a local root privilege escalation if there are
suid binaries which depend on kdelibs on the target system.
Even without suid binaries, on a multi-user system one could gain
another user's privileges by letting them load a kdelibs-using binary
while a forged libmng is present in the /tmp directory (and usually
can't be deleted by a regular user because of the sticky bit in /tmp).
The build script I use does
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$TMP/build-qt3/qt3/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
(actually Calvin Morrison's PKGBUILD does the same thing).
Perhaps this hack has a relation with the issue, but anyway Patrick
Volderking (the creator of Slackware) mentions in his old build script
for Qt3 (when KDE3 was in Slackware) that building Qt3 in /tmp gives
****, and his script builds qt3 directly on $PREFIX/lib{,64}/qt (or qt3,
depending on the exact script). But I'm not sure this is compatible
with all distribution policies… as another means of avoiding /tmp, the
gcc Slackware build scripts which use /$(mcookie) as a temporary
directory.
Are official binaries affected by the issue ? I don't know Debian/Red
Hat building procedures at all and then I have no idea of the answer.
Hi Brian,
Interesting personal history you shared!
As much as I enjoy tinkering with computers, I get very mad when anything gets in my way of being productive. Therefore I am very much in the group of people who see computers being a tool --- the means to an end.
I don't know that I can help. For several years I have sheltered myself in Slackware, which is not known as a "mom and pop" friendly system. Although some time ago I started a series of essays about finding an operating system for older computers, I have not continued that journey. I would like to renew that journey this winter.
A big challenge with what you ask is defining your audience. A basic bell curve more than likely would show most users wanting only the basics. There always will be computer-challenged people who, no matter what anyone does to help, will never understand anything they do or think they want to do. Then there are the power users, both smart and non-smart. The non-smart ones can take anything apart but can't fix their mess. They always call somebody to help.
Mostly though you are focusing on the people in the middle of the bell curve. My struggle is not so much selecting a distro. Even Slackware, if preinstalled and configured by a subject matter expert, can serve the purposes of these people because all of them want basic point-and-click access to applications. The majority of computer users do not care about how everything runs underneath.
The challenge is older hardware can't deal with the modern internet. Back in the mid 1990s a 486 machine running Netscape 3 or 4 had no problem surfing the primarily text based web. Today too many web sites use JavaScript and Flash. Even if those two features are disabled, most older hardware still can't surf the web. The limited RAM and video cards on these old machines can't render a typical web page fast enough to be suitable. Running flash on these old machines is hopeless.
If a user does not need the internet, then the older hardware runs quite well with the traditional apps of yesteryear: word processing, spreadsheets, etc. Anything that requires serious video rendering will bring these old machines to their proverbial knees.
I have Slackware 12.2 and KDE 3.5.10 installed on two such machines: a Pentium I and Pentium II class machine. Startup speeds of any app is slow but tolerable. Using an app is acceptable after the app is started. I can improve desktop speed a bit by using a window manager such as IceWM, but I still need to start and use apps, which tends to be slow. The moment I try to surf the web, even with images disabled in the web browser, the systems show their age immediately.
In short, the problem is not the operating system but the hardware.
I don't know an easy answer. What is the minimum specs that allow surfing the modern internet in an acceptable manner? Are such users willing to accept that they can't watch online videos? Are they willing to accept that a dial-up connection means they can't download videos or receive such videos as email attachments?
Perhaps the answer is to use nothing less than a Pentium III class computer. If I find the time this winter to return to my "old hardware" project, I should find one or two of those types of computers to experiment. The PI and PII machines can't deal with the modern internet. That said, anybody still using dial-up probably never would notice because the connection speed is more of a bottleneck than the computer. I wonder whether I can rig up a way to simulate that kind of connection speed and then test my old hardware.
If we get past the hardware questions, which distro to choose? Any Ubuntu based system, regardless of hardware or desktop environment, will kill any old hardware. That includes Mint. Forget about cloud-based distros such as Peppermint because the hardware and connection speeds used by such people can't deal with the overhead.
Otherwise I probably would stick with a Debian based system because of the size of the repositories for additional software.
Puppy is an interesting possibility and one I wish I had more time to investigate.
Which desktop environment? None of the new desktops will work on older hardware, such as KDE 4 or GNOME 3. Those new desktops require 3D acceleration hardware. That leaves Trinity, Xfce, or LXDE. To me, LXDE remains too experimental and likely would frustrate many mom and pop users. A window manager approach would work, but only if highly customized by a subject matter expert. Regardless of which desktop is chosen, everything would have to be preinstalled.
Therein lies the real problem which no Linux based distro developer has solved: creating a system that mom and pop users with old hardware can use. The Puppy people might be close.
As far as I can tell, the only solution is select a distro and then customize everything. Guess what? At that point you have created your own distro and must face all of the related support headaches of such a project.
Any such project requires serious usability testing. Somebody like you or me can tinker and find a solution. Most mom and pop users can't --- and won't.
I wish I had a simple answer. :)
Thanks for stopping by.
Darrell
Tim,
I mistakenly sent a private email to the list. Classic brain fart. :)
Nothing in the email that embarasses me, but please delete the message from the list.
Thanks much!
Darrell
I'm trying to build the 3.5.13 packages from the tarballs. I keep seeing the following error:
checking for Qt... checking for pkg-config... /usr/bin/pkg-config
configure: error: Qt (>= Qt 4.3 and < 5.0) (library QtCore -lQtGui -lQtNetwork -ltqt-mt) not found. Please check your installation!
I looked at the logs, configure, etc., but I don't see anything obvious.
What is the magic trick?
Darrell
All,
Just a quick reminder that the Trinity source repositories (but not the
packaging repository) remain FROZEN at this time while I complete the SVN
to GIT move and get all of the support systems up and running again. All
new account requests should sent AFTER the repositories have been thawed.
Also, please remember to remove the nightly build repository lines from
your /etc/apt/sources.list file. Within the next few days the contents of
that repository will become highly unstable and in all likelihood
uninstallable as well.
Now is the time when all developers should be combing through the bug
tracker and fixing bugs, uploading their patches to the bug report as
attachments.
Tim
Tim,
How do you want to coordinate getting binary packages for Slackware 13.1 to the Trinity web site (http://mirror.its.uidaho.edu/pub/trinity/trinity/slackware/)?
I still have to perform some basic usability teesting and make another pass of ensuring I can build all packages without errors, but I expect to be able to make binary packages available Rool Soon Now.
Like the 3.5.12 packages for Slackware 12.2, I would like to provide one big tar.gz file as well as individual tar.gz files.
I will need to write download instructions for the Trinity download page (http://trinitydesktop.org/installation.php).
Thanks.
Darrell
Hey folks,
I really need help with this. kdevelop is the only package I can't build.
Slackware 13.1.
Log:
http://humanreadable.nfshost.com/trinity/build_logs/kdevelop-3.5.13-i486-1-…
Apparent problem:
cc1: error: tqt.h: No such file or directory
The path to tqt.h is available. See the environment variables at the beginning of the log. Also the log shows other parts of the build are finding tqt.h.
Thanks much!
Darrell