Saturday, 9. February 2008, 15:06:45
KDE4, opensuse, KDE
This week I have take my time to testing the new KDE4 desktop. I used the KDE4 Live CD 1.0.1 from
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php/KDE+Four+Live?content=57117. The system was booting fine. Now I tried from openSUSE the new Installer, how starts with one click on it. In under 20 minutes the openSUSE 10.3 KDE4 desktop was complete installed and updated.
New applications, "sweep" it's like Linux program kleansweap how is now integrated in KDE4. If found a new Game, desktop widgets, and some cool stuff more.
The problems with ATI's fglrx driver catalyst, looks like it is solved.
Under the "Hood". The speed from KDE4 is really awesome. It uses less RAM and the applications fire up right by the way. It's better the KDE3 and Gnome 2.20.x but not like XFCE Desktops,
Saturday, 29. December 2007, 04:54:28
Flash, Konqueror, opera, KDE
...
The reason why the latest Flash doesn't work originally appeared to be its new support of some Mozilla XEmbed-based extensions to the plugins API (funny thing about that link is, it says that it finally makes it work with Opera, while in fact it's exactly the opposite). After adding XEmbed support to Konqueror, it still didn't work. The page about the XEmbed extension has demo code hardcoding a hard dependency on Gtk2, so maybe adding Glib2 eventloop support will make it work? After all, the Flash system requirements page mentions this (well hidden in a footnote, if you look close enough), but not really, tough luck, even though the DiamondX testing plugin already works. Do you know what a ballistic approach to debugging is? You either hit, or you don't. Here next hit is that this Flash version doesn't handle properly repeated NPSetWindow() calls, which however happens to be the case with Konqueror. So finally, does it work? Well, kind of, if you don't mind it crashing everytime you leave a page. And it crashes in XtRemoveTimeOut() (incidentaly, a function that should not be called by a Gtk2-based plugin). That's been already taken care of as well - it's enough to give Flash the user agent string from Firefox, suddenly, no crash (I have no idea how Maksim managed to find this out - probably involved sacrificing chicken or something).
So, when can you expect the latest Flash to work with KDE? I have no idea.
Yes, I know a Flash developer contancted kfm-devel somewhen in the past asking about XEmbed support. That still doesn't make debugging Flash any less painful, which is why the workarounds for it will take unknown time. It also doesn't change anything about Adobe not really giving a damn about Konqueror or Opera, if they could suddenly drop backwards compatibility (even though the code is probably still there, if it can still call XtRemoveTimeOut() and crash on it).
