The Linux Experiment

What does KDE offer for instant communication with your co-workers and friends? Kopete steps up to be your all-in-one IM solution.

Kopete

Kopete provides a KDE integrated instant messaging experience that aims at reducing the number of other instant messaging clients you need to run simultaneously in order to stay in touch with your friends. Rather than running a client for Yahoo Messenger, Facebook chat and Windows Live Messenger, you can instead fire up Kopete, add all of your accounts and take advantage of a single unified interface for all of them. This drastically reduces the on-screen clutter.

Kopete supports a lot of different networks!

The process by which you actually configure all of these accounts is also very straight forward. In fact the first time you start Kopete up (and every time thereafter that you wish to add a new account) you get this nice little interface that helps walk you through the process.

Adding a new account

Once through that easy process you are taken to the main Kopete interface screen where it allows you to view your online friends and, of course, chat with them.

Main contacts screen

Not that it should come as any surprise to anyone familiar with KDE but Kopete also supports quite a bit of customization. You can adjust any of the standard settings that you would expect (i.e. auto-away time out, ‘now playing…’ song statuses, etc.) as well as the general look and feel of your conversations.

With this much customization you’re sure to find something that works for you

While I don’t have much bad to say about Kopete I should point out a couple of its more obvious deficiencies. For one Kopete has no Skype support. Skype is fast becoming one of the most popular instant messaging platforms and its absence is a bit disappointing.

Secondly Kopete varies from being just an acceptable, somewhat decent instant messaging client to being a great instant messaging client, all dependant on which IM network you are using. What I mean by this is basically that Kopete is designed to be a very generic IM client  in order to support as many networks as possible, and that’s fine. However because of this design choice it rarely excels at being the best IM client for networks which handle more than just simple text messages. There are many times when the official client for a given IM network will support many more features than Kopete.

Neither of these should deter you from using Kopete (or at least giving it a try). Like all of the other applications I’ve written about in this series, Kopete offers a KDE feeling and integration to your day-to-day applications and for some people that could be far more worth while than having 100% of all features.

Update: as pointed out in the comments this application is actually now known by the name KDE Telepathy. Sorry for the confusion.

More in this series

• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part I: Rekonq
• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part II: Kontact
• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part III: KTorrent
• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part IV: Amarok

Ready to rock out with KDE’s premier music management application? Let’s rediscover our music with Amarok.

Amarok

I have to start by first admitting that I’ve actually run Amarok once or twice in the past, but sadly could never really figure it out. This always bothered me because people who can figure it out seem to love it. So I made it my mission this time around to really dig into the application to see what all the noise was about (poor pun intended).

Rediscover Your Music

Starting with the navigation pane on the left hand side of the screen I drilled down into my Local Music collection. For the purposes of testing I just threw two albums in my Music folder.

The navigation panel

Double clicking Local Music opens up a view into your Music folder that lets you play songs or search through your artists and albums.

Local media list

When you play a song the main portion in the center of the application changes to give you a ton of information about that track.

Automatically pulls lyrics and other information from the web

This is actually a pretty neat feature but also has the downside that its not always correct. For instance when I started playing the above song by the 90s band Fuel I ended up getting shown the following Wikipedia page about fuel (i.e. an energy source) and not the correct page about the band.

I don’t think that’s right…

Placing a CD in the computer caused it to appear under Local Media (although under a different section). Importing tracks was very straight forward; simply right-click on the CD and choose Copy to Collection -> Local Collection. You then get to pick your encoding options (which you can deeply customize to fit your needs).

Pick your encoding format and go

For Internet media Amarok comes loaded with a number of sources including a number of streaming radio stations, Jamendo, Last.fm, Librivox.org, Magnatune.com, Amazon’s MP3 store and a podcast directory. Like most other media, Amarok also tries to display relevant information about what you’re listening to.

Internet Radio on Amarok

There are loads of other features in Amarok, from its excellent playlist support to loads of expandable plugins, but writing about all of them would take all day. Instead I will wrap up here with a few final thoughts.

Is Amarok the best media manager ever made? To some maybe, but I still find its interface a bit too clunky for my liking. I also noticed that it tended to take up quite a bit of RAM (~220MB currently) which puts it on the beefier side of the media manager resource usage spectrum. The amount of information that it presents about what you’re currently listening to is impressive, but often times when I’m listening to music I’m doing so as a background activity. I don’t foresee a situation where I would be actively watching Amarok in order to benefit from its full potential as a way to ‘rediscover my music’. Still, for at least its deep integration within the KDE desktop, I say give it a try and see if it works for you.

More in this series

• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part I: Rekonq
• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part II: Kontact
• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part III: KTorrent

Welcome to another edition of The apps of KDE 4.10. This time around I’m going to be touching on the KDE BitTorrent client KTorrent.

KTorrent

KTorrent represents KDE’s take on what a BitTorrent client should be. It presents a relatively standard interface that reminds me a lot of other fully featured BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent and Deluge.

The main KTorrent interface

Being a KDE application it is also one of the more fully customizable BitTorrent clients out there, although not to the scale of some of the advanced menus seen in Vuze. It allows you to customize various options including things like encryption, queuing options and bandwidth usage. It also benefits from using a bunch of shared KDE libraries. When I checked its memory usage it was sitting at a respectable 16MB which makes it not the leanest client but certainly not the heaviest either.

Settings menu

Similar to Deluge, KTorrent supports a wide array of plugins which allows you to really tailor the program to your needs. In my testing I didn’t notice a way to browse for new plugins from within the application but I’m sure there are ways to add them elsewhere.

Plugins

I have to admit that I actually went into this article expecting to have a lot more to say about this application but the bottom line is this: it does exactly what you expect. If you need to download torrent files then KTorrent might be for you – and not just if you’re running KDE either. Perhaps its because KTorrent covers the bases so well but I actually can’t think of anything that I dislike about it. It’s a solid application that serves a single purpose and what’s not to love about that?

More in this series

• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part I: Rekonq
• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part II: Kontact

Continuing on where I left off last time I decided my next order of business would be to set up my e-mail accounts and calendar. KDE provides a number of different, more or less single purpose applications to handle all of your personal information management. For example e-mail is handled by KMail, RSS feeds are pulled in via Akregator, calendars are maintained through KOrganizer, etc. Each of these applications could easily be reviewed on their own, however there is yet another application provided in KDE, Kontact, that unifies all of these distinct programs into one. For the purposes of this article I will be treating all of these as part of Kontact as a whole but will still try and focus on each individual component where needed.

Kontact

The first time you start Kontact

The first time you start Kontact it automatically starts an “Account Assistant” wizard that walks you through setting up your e-mail accounts. This brings me to the first embedded application: KMail.

KMail

The first item below summary on the left hand side of Kontact is Mail which makes it, in my opinion, the showcase application for Kontact.

Kontact’s sidebar

Mail is actually powered by the KMail application which at this point is very mature and fully featured.  Setting up an e-mail account is relatively straightforward although I do take issue with some of the default settings. While some are personal preference, for example I prefer to start my e-mail reply above the quote instead of below it, others are just plain strange. For instance by default KMail won’t display HTML e-mails, only plain text e-mails, supposedly in the name of security. Insecure or not I think consensus says HTML is the way forward.

“No HTML for you!”

Following in the standard KDE tradition KMail is crammed full of customization and configuration possibilities. For instance you remember that reply above/below the quote thing I mentioned above? In most other e-mail clients this is a simple combobox or switch, in KMail however you can configure everything from the location of the quote to the position of the cursor.

Composer Settings

KMail also takes spam filtering and anti-virus to a whole new level. You have your choice from any compatible installed spam or anti-virus applications (i.e. SpamAssassin, ClamAV etc.). This gives you some flexibility if you find one works better for you than another.

A typical view of KMail

Finally, on the security front, KMail integrates with the KDE Wallet system to securely store your account passwords and also supports OpenPGP and S/MIME e-mail encryption and signing.

KAddressBook

Next up is Contacts, this time powered by KAddressBook.

Contacts can store a lot of detail

This is a pretty straightforward application and so I don’t have much to say about it other than it allows you to store a lot of information about a given person (from regular details like e-mail and websites to location and OpenPGP keys). It even generates a fancy little QR code for your contacts.

An example contact

KOrganizer

For Calendar/To-do List/Journal functionality Kontact makes use of the KOrganizer application. Like KAddressBook this program functions exactly as expected which is not a bad thing. You can create events, send e-mail invitations and get alerts. It supports multiple calendars and is very functional.

Look! A calendar!

The journal feature is kind of neat but I’m not sure who would actually make use of it on a regular basis. Perhaps I’m not the target market for it.

Dear diary…

Akregator

If your thing is RSS feeds look no further than Akregator. I personally don’t normally use RSS feeds all that much but I know those that do are very addicted to it. Add to that the recent shutdown of Google Reader and this might just be your cup of tea.

Showing some feeds

As RSS readers go this one is also full of options. You can even configure a sharing service, such as Twitter or Identi.ca, if you happen to stumble across an article that you wish to spread.

Popup Notes

Last on the list is Popup Notes powered by KNotes. This is basically a sticky note application that lets you jot down little random thoughts or reminders. There isn’t a whole lot to this one.

Take a note

Conclusion

So how does Kontact stand up at the end of the day? I like it. It does an effective job at unifying all of the different features you may need without making you feel like you need to pay attention to any one of them. In my use case I mainly stick to e-mail and calendar but in my limited time playing around with Kontact I have very few complaints.

Is it better than the alternatives like Thunderbird or Evolution? In some ways absolutely, in others there is still some work to be done. Outside of mail, calendar and RSS feeds the remaining functionality feels a bit lackluster or, at worst, simply there to round off some feature list bullet point. Thankfully this is something that could be easily remedied with a bit more attention and polish.

Give Kontact a try and let me know what you think in the comments.

More in this series

• The apps of KDE 4.10 Part I: Rekonq
  

It’s been a while since I’ve used KDE, however with the recent rapid (and not always welcome) changes going on in the other two main desktop environments (GNOME 3 and Unity) and the, in my opinion, feature stagnation of environments like Xfce and LXDE I decided to give KDE another shot.

My goal this time is to write up a series of quick reviews of KDE as presented as an overall user experience. That means I will try and stick to the default applications for getting my work done. Obviously depending on the distribution you choose you may have a different set of default KDE applications, and that’s fine. So before you ask, no I won’t be doing another write up for KDE distribution X just because you think its ‘way better for including A instead of B’. I’m also going to try and not cover what I consider more trivial things (i.e. the installer/installation process) and instead focus on what counts when it comes to using an operating system day-to-day.

Rekonq

The default web browser in the distribution I chose is not Konqueror but rather its WebKit cousin Rekonq. Where Konqueror uses KHTML by default and WebKit as an option, Rekonq sticks to the more conventional rendering engine used by Safari and Chrome.

This is not Rekonq, it is Konqueror

Rekonq is a very minimalistic looking browser to the point where I often thought I accidentally started up Chrome instead.

This is Rekonq

From my time using it, Rekonq seems to be a capable browser although it is certainly not the speediest, nor does it sport any features that I couldn’t find elsewhere. One thing it does do very nicely is with its integration into the rest of the KDE desktop. This means that the first time you visit YouTube or some other Flash website you get a nice little prompt in the system tray alerting you of the option to install new plugins. If you choose to install the plugin then a little window appears telling you what it is downloading and installing for you, completely automatically. No need to visit a vendor’s website or go plugin hunting online.

Like most other KDE applications Rekonq also allows for quite a bit of customization, although I found its menus to be very straightforward and not nearly as intimidating as some other applications.

The settings menu

I did notice a couple of strange things while working with Rekonq that I should probably mention. First off while typing into a WordPress edit window none of the shortcut keys (i.e. Ctrl+B = bold) seemed to work. I also found that I couldn’t perform a Shift+Arrow Key selection of the text, instead having to use Ctrl+Shift+Arrow Key which highlights an entire word at a time. At this time I’m not sure what other websites may suffer from similar irregularities so while Rekonq is a fine browser in its own right, you may want to keep another one around just in case.

Browsing the best website on the net

While I haven’t found any real show-stoppers with Rekonq, I still can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something. I don’t know how to describe it other than I think I would feel safer using a more mainstream web browser like Firefox, Chrome or even Opera. But like any software, your experience may vary and I would certainly never recommend against trying Rekonq (or even Konqueror). Who knows, you may find out that it is your new favorite web browser.

I’ve decided to try and upgrade my LFS system to the latest version of KDE (4.7.3 as of the time of this writing) and correspondingly needed to upgrade phonon-backend-gstreamer. Unfortunately, following the previous version’s compilation instructions provided this nasty message:

[ 4%] Building CXX object gstreamer/CMakeFiles/phonon_gstreamer.dir/audiooutput.cpp.o
In file included from /sources/phonon-backend-gstreamer-4.5.1/gstreamer/audiooutput.cpp:22:0:
/sources/phonon-backend-gstreamer-4.5.1/gstreamer/mediaobject.h:200:38: error: ‘NavigationMenu’ is not a member of ‘Phonon::MediaController’
/sources/phonon-backend-gstreamer-4.5.1/gstreamer/mediaobject.h:200:38: error: ‘NavigationMenu’ is not a member of ‘Phonon::MediaController’
/sources/phonon-backend-gstreamer-4.5.1/gstreamer/mediaobject.h:200:69: error: template argument 1 is invalid/sources/phonon-backend-gstreamer-4.5.1/gstreamer/mediaobject.h:262:11: error: ‘NavigationMenu’ is not a member of ‘Phonon::MediaController’
/sources/phonon-backend-gstreamer-4.5.1/gstreamer/mediaobject.h:262:11: error: ‘NavigationMenu’ is not a member of ‘Phonon::MediaController’/sources/phonon-backend-gstreamer-4.5.1/gstreamer/mediaobject.h:262:42: error: template argument 1 is invalid
/sources/phonon-backend-gstreamer-4.5.1/gstreamer/mediaobject.h:263:45: error: ‘Phonon::MediaController::NavigationMenu’ has not been declared
/sources/phonon-backend-gstreamer-4.5.1/gstreamer/mediaobject.h:317:11: error: ‘NavigationMenu’ is not a member of ‘Phonon::MediaController’
/sources/phonon-backend-gstreamer-4.5.1/gstreamer/mediaobject.h:317:11: error: ‘NavigationMenu’ is not a member of ‘Phonon::MediaController’/sources/phonon-backend-gstreamer-4.5.1/gstreamer/mediaobject.h:317:42: error: template argument 1 is invalid
make[2]: *** [gstreamer/CMakeFiles/phonon_gstreamer.dir/audiooutput.cpp.o] Error 1make[1]: *** [gstreamer/CMakeFiles/phonon_gstreamer.dir/all] Error 2make: *** [all] Error 2

To fix this issue, make sure you have the latest GStreamer and phonon-backend-xine installed. Then I followed some of the advice from this KDE forum topic.

If, like me, you installed Qt into /opt/qt, create a symbolic link into the qt directory pointing to your system’s latest version of phonon. For later success with kde-runtime, create links to the libphonon libraries in /opt/qt-4.7.1/lib to your recently compiled /usr/lib64 versions (adjust paths to /usr/lib on 32-bit systems):

# mv /opt/qt-4.7.1/include/phonon /tmp
# ln -snf /usr/include/phonon /opt/qt-4.7.1/include/phonon
# cd /opt/qt-4.7.1/lib
# rm -rf libphonon*
# ln -snf /usr/lib64/libphonon.so libphonon.so
# ln -snf /usr/lib64/libphonon.so.4 libphonon.so.4
# ln -snf /usr/lib64/libphonon.so.4.5.1 libphonon.so.4.5.1
# ln -snf /usr/lib64/libphononexperimental.so libphononexperimental.so
# ln -snf /usr/lib64/libphononexperimental.so.4 libphononexperimental.so.4
# ln -snf /usr/lib64/libphononexperimental.so.4.5.1 libphononexperimental.so.4.5.1

Then rerun the compilation process for phonon-backend-gstreamer and voila, no more errors. (You’ll probably still have more issues to work out, but this gets past the phonon-backend-gstreamer blockade.)

Hi Everyone,

Now that I have a relatively stable environment, I just wanted to write an update of how things went, and some issues that I ran into while installing my desktop environment.

No Sound

Not that I was expecting anything different from LFS, but I had no sound upon booting into KDE. I found this quite strange, as alsamixer was showing my sound card fine. One thing I can tell you, is that alsaconf is a filthy liar. My sound is now working, and it still says it can’t find my card. I’m not sure how I got it working, but here are a few tips.

• Make sure your sound is un-muted in alsamixer.
• Check your kernel to make sure that either support is compiled in for your card, or module support is selected.
• If you selected module supprt, make sure the modules are loaded. For me, this was snd-hda-intel.

Firefox and Adobe Flash

I’m not going to go into too many details about Firefox, as Jake covered this in his post here, but I’d like to note that installing Flash into Firefox was quite easy. All I had to do was download the .tar.gz from Adobe, and do the following:

tar -xvf flash.tar.gz (or whatever the .tar.gz is called)

cd flash

cp libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins (make sure plugins is created if it does not exist.)

KDE Crash On Logout

The first time I tried to logout of KDE, I noticed that it crashed. After doing some investigations, I found a solution here. You want to edit your $KDE4_PREFIX/share/config/kdm/kdmrc to reflect the following:

[X-:*-Core]
…
TerminateServer=true

What’s Next?

I’m actually not sure what I’m going to do next. I suppose I should get VLC running on the system, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. I now have a working web browser, flash, and sound, which should be fine until I can get other things working.

Graphics Drivers

Continuing where I left off in my previous posts I now had a somewhat working desktop but a few things still had to be done. For one I am running this on my laptop and while the open source radeon drivers are actually pretty decent they’re just not quite good enough when it comes to power management. Thankfully the Linux closed source drivers are up to the job.

After reading through these two sites I was able to install the closed source drivers and get full control over my graphics card. To be perfectly honest I’m not exactly sure what steps got me to this point but I do know it was a mixture of the two sites.

Wireless Networking

After careful consideration I had come to the conclusion thought I had bricked my wireless. Worse yet after following the guide here (even the parts specific to KDE) I just couldn’t seem to get it to work. Thankfully I stumbled upon this guide which instructed me to install networking components for KDE. Apparently once I had installed this package all was good.

Flash

Flash was actually incredibly easy to install. All I had to do was enter the following command in a root terminal and then restart Firefox.

emerge adobe-flash

Java

Another big install was the official Oracle Java JRE and JDK. To install just the JRE run the command dev-java/sun-jre-bin. If you want the JDK as well then run the command dev-java/sun-jdk. The only weird part about this was that this package is now considered restricted. To work around it simply download the bin file from Oracle and place it in /usr/portage/distfiles before running the command.

More to Come

There is still plenty more to do, like install LibreOffice and figure out why my computer currently can’t play audio CDs. I am however thankful that at this point I am at least a bit better off than some other fellow Linux Experiment participants.

My Desktop So Far

The high CPU load was because I had just finished compiling a bunch of stuff

Do your GTK applications (i.e. Firefox) look like something designed in the 90′s in KDE? I think I can help you.

I installed the latest Firefox, (not the one in the screenshot, I stole this.) and was very disappointed to see something like the following:

Tyler pointed me to the Gentoo guide here, which helped me find out which packages I needed.

If you install Chakra-Gtk-Config, and either oxygen-gtk or qtcurve (make sure to download the gtk2 theme), you will have better looking GTK applications in no time. Note that there are probably tons of other GTK themes for KDE4, these are just some suggestions to get you started.

That is much better.

kdebindings

Are you running into the following problem when compiling kdebindings? Well, you’re probably not, because you picked a saner distribution than LFS, but here goes anyway!

ASSERT failure in QList::at: “index out of range”, file /qt/trunk/include/QtCore/qlist.h, line 456
/bin/sh: line 1: 7841 Aborted (core dumped)

From http://old.nabble.com/Smokegen-core-dump-td30797484.html, you can fix this with a patch to indexedstring.cpp:

--- generator/parser/indexedstring.cpp.orig 2011-02-23 22:12:38.695255708 +0100
+++ generator/parser/indexedstring.cpp 2011-02-24 02:36:09.035361151 +0100
@@ -195,12 +195,15 @@
}

QByteArray IndexedString::byteArray() const {
+  qDebug() << "strings()->size():" << strings()->size() << ", m_index:" << m_index;
if(!m_index)
return QByteArray();
else if((m_index & 0xffff0000) == 0xffff0000)
return QString(QChar((char)m_index & 0xff)).toUtf8();
-  else
+  else if (m_index < strings()->size())
return strings()->at(m_index).toUtf8(); /*arrayFromItem(globalIndexedStringRepository->itemFromIndex(m_index));*/
+  else
+    return QByteArray();
}

unsigned int IndexedString::hashString(const char* str, unsigned short length) {

I ended up removing the first qDebug() line before the if statement as I don’t need my compiler to be that chatty – I just need this package to compile properly. Reconfigure and attempt to make with:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$KDE4_PREFIX \
    -DKDE_DEFAULT_HOME=.kde4 \
    -DSYSCONF_INSTALL_DIR=/etc/kde4 \
    .. &&
make

kdebase-runtime

You can patch away your problems if you run into the following message:

[ 39%] Building CXX object kioslave/nfs/CMakeFiles/kio_nfs.dir/kio_nfs.o
In file included from /sources/kdebase-runtime-4.6.0/kioslave/nfs/kio_nfs.cpp:21:0:
/sources/kdebase-runtime-4.6.0/kioslave/nfs/kio_nfs.h:33:21: fatal error: rpc/rpc.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.

First, get libtirpc installed to make this work, but then again, you could have just guessed that you needed it, right?

Used under Creative Commons NC license from zhenech

There are some LFS-specific instructions to follow before libtirpc will compile:

• Unpack glibc-2.14.1
• In its directory, execute:

  mkdir -p /usr/include/rpc{,svc}
  cp sunrpc/rpc/*.h /usr/include/rpc
  cp nis/rpcsvc/*.h /usr/include/rpcsvc

• Compile libtirpc with ./configure --prefix=/usr && make && make install

Then from Sourcemage, linking to an old Bugzilla installation:

diff --git a/kioslave/nfs/CMakeLists.txt b/kioslave/nfs/CMakeLists.txt
index b973a73..6556769 100644
--- a/kioslave/nfs/CMakeLists.txt
+++ b/kioslave/nfs/CMakeLists.txt
@@ -3,8 +3,8 @@ set(kio_nfs_PART_SRCS kio_nfs.cpp mount_xdr.c nfs_prot_xdr.c )

 kde4_add_plugin(kio_nfs ${kio_nfs_PART_SRCS})

-
-target_link_libraries(kio_nfs   ${KDE4_KIO_LIBS})
+include_directories(/usr/include/tirpc)
+target_link_libraries(kio_nfs   ${KDE4_KIO_LIBS} tirpc)

 install(TARGETS kio_nfs  DESTINATION ${PLUGIN_INSTALL_DIR} )

Once this is complete you should be able to get kdebase-runtime compiled.