tde-devels

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3819 discussions

thiel@wporg.com
by Darrell Anderson 10 Nov '11

10 Nov '11

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

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Oops
by Darrell Anderson 10 Nov '11

10 Nov '11

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

2 1

configure: error: Qt (>= Qt 4.3 and < 5.0)...
by Darrell Anderson 10 Nov '11

10 Nov '11

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

3 11

SVN-->GIT move
by Timothy Pearson 09 Nov '11

09 Nov '11

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

4 4

Slackware 13.1 Binary Packages
by Darrell Anderson 08 Nov '11

08 Nov '11

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

2 1

kdevelop 3.5.13 won't build
by Darrell Anderson 08 Nov '11

08 Nov '11

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

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ksensors?
by Arnaldo Russo 08 Nov '11

08 Nov '11

Congratulations to everybody involved in making the 3.5.13 release happen! I just tested it on a lowly Intel Atom based PC running Scientific Linux 6.1 (using the RHEL6 rpm packages from the official TDE repo) and it works great so far. Just one thing: I couldn't find ksensors, did I miss it or is it really not included? It's my favourite KDE3 panel app. Also since I enjoy packaging (and I do have experience building rpm packages) I will probably still continue to attempt to build TDE 3.5.13 from source as rpm packages for EL6. I guess my humble contribution to TDE will be bug reports whenever I find a problem building the rpms from source.

5 11

Cannot compile qt3 on Arch.
by L0ner sh4dou 08 Nov '11

08 Nov '11

I cannot compile qt3 from git (pulled yesterday) on clean Arch install. Log: http://paste.pocoo.org/raw/504642/ My arch is clean install, with only xorg installed. From what I see in the log it complains about freetype/config/ftheader.h which is present in my system in /usr/include/freetype2/freetype/config/ftheader.h The best thing is I tried to compile qt3 on different virtualmachine with the same system (clean arch with only xorg), it gave me the same error, I reinstalled whole xorg, rebooted and then compilation went smooth. I configured qt3 with -no-ipv6 and -v flags.

3 5

debuild package kdebase-trinity fails
by Petri Airio 08 Nov '11

08 Nov '11

Hi all! I'm trying to build the kdebase-trinity package on ubuntu 11.10 64bit machine. Did follow these instructions: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/20 1) apt-get source kicker-trinity 2) apt-get build-dep kdebase-trinity devscripts build-essential fakeroot 3) go to source dir and: debuild -us -uc Compiling itself goes well without errors but when doing .deb packages comes this error: make: *** [binary-predeb-IMPL/kcontrol-trinity] Error 2 dpkg-buildpackage: error: fakeroot debian/rules binary gave error exit status 2 debuild: fatal error at line 1348: dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -D -us -uc failed Is there something I'm missing / doing wrong ? br, Petri

1 0

Can't build kdevelop from 3.5.13 tarball
by Darrell Anderson 07 Nov '11

07 Nov '11

Slackware 13.1. Log: http://humanreadable.nfshost.com/trinity/build_logs/kdevelop-3.5.13-i486-1-… Thanks. Darrell

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