Kde4 On The Pandora

[Tor]

We already know that KDE4, and even KDE 3.5 will run just fine on Pandora. They both run on the Nokia omap2-based N8x0 devices and those using it seem to be very happy about it.

 

[sindbad]

Kde will have a mobile version in time. Cool things like auto-hiding widgets depending on window size, SVG everywhere and complete independence of any layers below Qt and kdelibs make it quite feasible. The ram usage is already quite a bit below gnome and it's only getting better.

 

[foft]

This might help it run better, if memory is the concern... http://code.google.com/p/compcache/. A compressed ramdisk as a fast swapfile.

Uh... If you pause for a moment and think about what you just said (RAM disk on a system with limited RAM with no upgradability...) you'll see that it won't help much...

Compressed RAM disk though. Its better than having to use virtual memory on the SD card or the OOM killer stopping all your apps. Anyway I've not used it, but it does seem to be targetted at devices like this.

 

[AireTamStorm]

I'm sorry, but that's so completely wrong it's not even funny.
...
KDE4 may be a better solution in the future, but as of right now, it is not ready for anything that is not a Desktop PC.
PulseAudio? What planet are we using Linux on? OSS is officially deprecated, JACK isn't exactly a competitor, and everyone is gravitating towards ALSA now that most distributions are enabling dmix / dsnoop by default. KDE4 on mobile devices is much more functional than Ubuntu Mobile, as Solid now encompasses KIO, which has slaves for pretty much every protocol you'd ever need. Even if KDE applications are the only ones using KDE libraries, thats how it has always been, and that is what makes KDE applications uniform in feel and functionality. A KDE application will not care if you're reading or writing a file to the local filesystem, a Windows share, or via bluetooth to a phone or other handheld.

Even if Phonon does not have much adoption yet, its featureset is clearly superior through well thought out integration of all the other libraries. It takes less code to play a video over the network with Phonon than it does with gstreamer or any other media library. Why? All of that integration. Gnome has no equivalent, it just happens to use a bunch of libraries to get things done rather than a single library that unifies them all.

 

[Svartalf]

Compressed RAM disk though. Its better than having to use virtual memory on the SD card or the OOM killer stopping all your apps. Anyway I've not used it, but it does seem to be targetted at devices like this.

Compression kills your speed advantage (You eat CPU cycles or DSP ones doing this compression and decompression) and you eat up some of your precious system RAM to accomplish it (both for handling the compression and decompression and for storing things...)- RAM you could better use for applications and display usage. There's a reason they do this stuff to a separate storage. It doesn't work the way you think it does.

I should know, I'm one of the early pioneers in embedded Linux use (One of the first commercial installations, handling something over 10k of parking fees and vending gates for vehicles moving up to 55 MPH through the gate each day at DFW International Airport...) and have been at this game for well over a decade in the Linux space.

 

[Tor]

KDE4 may be a better solution in the future, but as of right now, it is not ready for anything that is not a Desktop PC.

You obviously didn't bother reading the thread.. I already posted that KDE4 already runs (although partly) on the Nokia tablets. If it runs there, it will run on the Pandora too, only faster.

Quote from InternetTabletTalk:

"Once I get kde4 running well enough to give a reasonably stable interface, I'll release an image for you all to play with. Interestingly, even in this broken build, kwin/kde4 are running extremely fast, and so I don't think that there will be a problem with resources. And, as long as we don't enable opengl (in kwin, etc...) ram usage should be fairly reasonable."

That was from the very first posting about the KDE4 port in December 2007. Things have moved in the right direction since then. Notice btw. the part about speed and resources..

It's currently only partly ported though, that's not because of size or resources, it's more about available system calls and other build issues. The long-since-ported KDE 3.x version is more mature in this respect.

Some screenshots:
http://internettablettalk.com/forums/showp...mp;postcount=37

Since the above, Nokia has actually handed out a hundred or so (IIRC) free N810 devices to KDE developers. This seems to have paid off already:
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3624

BTW, you are of course correct in that Hildon (the Nokia UI for maemo), among others, use GTK+. And I'm happy enough for that, because I'm a C programmer. But QT (C++ API and thus not for me) is available for maemo, and Nokia will provide both GTK+ and QT in future versions for their tablets.

The point is, if anyone wants to run KDE4 on the Pandora there's nothing stopping them. And there's no reason to believe that it shouldn't be a pleasant enough experience.

 

[tazg]

I don`t see why not, KDE 3 is running fine on less powerful handhelds, and 4 uses less memory

A real Gnome desktop is a lot lighter then most people realize, it's just that Ubuntu has given everyone an impression of they're 3 trillion background processes as the norm for Gnome

...and this isn't also true of KDE? The fact is, both are bloated in terms of size, but both can be trimmed down. KDE happens to be designed more modularly and QT is faster. These are the basic facts, despite the plethora of misinformation spread by gtk loyalists.

 

[atomicthumbs]

The last time I tried KDE4, it was broken in many ways. I'd prefer 3.5.

 

[sindbad]

The last time I tried KDE4, it was broken in many ways. I'd prefer 3.5.
You must have tried it quite a long time ago

 

[jellmoo]

The last time I tried KDE4, it was broken in many ways. I'd prefer 3.5.
You must have tried it quite a long time ago

I dunno, I tried it just a few weeks ago and ran into some trouble. I experienced 2 crashes while working with a USB drive, and later had the entire menu system vanish, leaving only the background. I had to switch back to GNOME to fix it.

It's a shame because I really liked KDE 4. It looks great and when it runs, it runs like a charm. Unfortunately, it does seem to be less stable than 3.5.

 

[sebt3]

and in processor usage for the fancy effects?
Most stuff in the code is interger based, so no fpu work...On maemo(n8?0) gl output is disabled (no GL there by the way). But as all the main KDE devs now have their own n810 be sure that it will fly high

KDE4 is much better suited than Gnome TBH- it has alot of connectivity libraries and things that are non WM-related that make it by far the most attractive option out there (Phonon, Solid for starters). I'd consider installing the KDE4 libs as an absolute must, but using the window manager may take a little trimming here and there. I hate to potentially stir things up, but even in its fairly beta stages KDE4 is already at a point far out of Gnome's reach in terms of real feature sets .

+1

I dunno, I tried it just a few weeks ago and ran into some trouble. I experienced 2 crashes while working with a USB drive, and later had the entire menu system vanish, leaving only the background. I had to switch back to GNOME to fix it.

It's a shame because I really liked KDE 4. It looks great and when it runs, it runs like a charm. Unfortunately, it does seem to be less stable than 3.5.

Change your distrib, kde 4.1.2 is rock solid on my debian SID here. Even my girlfriend use it (she is not exactly techsavy) and love it for the ease of use and stability.

I'm realy looking for kde4 on my andora1: . I bougth it just because I was certain that it will rock solid. The main point of kde4 was to be able to scale up/down. Now that the main kde dev have a n810, they are working to know if kde4 (as a plateform) is as scalable as they though it to be.
As a big hint here, nokia bougth trolltech, and is now hiring kde&plasma devel. What do you think this company have in the back of it's head ???
Nokia still sell cell-phone as main business. It's competition is Iphone and Android. So their real next product will be n900 (which will have be phone). It's already known that they are using the same chip as the pandora.

Are you still thinking that kde4 will run slow and won't be usable on such form-factor ?

 

[benjiro]

The last time I tried KDE4, it was broken in many ways. I'd prefer 3.5.
You must have tried it quite a long time ago

It was recent here ( KDE 4.1 a week or so after the release day ). I was planning to test KDE ( using gnome at that time ), and i ended up first installing KDE 3.5, and then the KDE 4.1 packages.

Tried KDE3.5 for a hour or so. Switched to KDE4.1, after a few hours, started to use KDE 3.5 again.

- Crashes ( several )
- Strange behavior at times with the widgets.
- Less flexibility. Remember, that was with only 1 hour of KDE 3.5 under the belly. So, if a total KDE newbie like me can see the difference between both versions in such a short span on time.
- Worked on my nerves with some of the default "vista" newbie friendliness. Oa, the menu ( i know, can be disabled ).
- Slow ( Nvidia bug ... wieeee ).

And i'm still using KDE3.5. And when i switch to KDE 4, its going to be KDE 4.4 or 4.5 before i do. In my eyes, at this moment, KDE 4 is a step back from KDE 3.5. And i'm still a KDE newbie ( switched from gnome ), so thats saying a lot.

 

[mali]

Here is a link to KDE in action:

http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/s...ead.php?t=23961

And BTW, that guy preordered a Pandora, so be prepared to see cool stuff

 

[jellmoo]

Change your distrib, kde 4.1.2 is rock solid on my debian SID here. Even my girlfriend use it (she is not exactly techsavy) and love it for the ease of use and stability.

It might be the distro, as it was Linux Mint at the time. Still, I never had any issues at all with GNOME, nor when I tried KDE 3.5.

I definitely liked the ease of use of KDE 4 though. And it configures really nicely. I'm not sold that it would work great on a screen the size of Pandora though. Not that GNOME would be all that much better... I have a feeling that ROX might be worth a look at though.

 

[Vorporeal]

The last time I tried KDE4, it was broken in many ways. I'd prefer 3.5.
You must have tried it quite a long time ago

It was recent here ( KDE 4.1 a week or so after the release day ). I was planning to test KDE ( using gnome at that time ), and i ended up first installing KDE 3.5, and then the KDE 4.1 packages.

Tried KDE3.5 for a hour or so. Switched to KDE4.1, after a few hours, started to use KDE 3.5 again.

- Crashes ( several )
- Strange behavior at times with the widgets.
- Less flexibility. Remember, that was with only 1 hour of KDE 3.5 under the belly. So, if a total KDE newbie like me can see the difference between both versions in such a short span on time.
- Worked on my nerves with some of the default "vista" newbie friendliness. Oa, the menu ( i know, can be disabled ).
- Slow ( Nvidia bug ... wieeee ).

And i'm still using KDE3.5. And when i switch to KDE 4, its going to be KDE 4.4 or 4.5 before i do. In my eyes, at this moment, KDE 4 is a step back from KDE 3.5. And i'm still a KDE newbie ( switched from gnome ), so thats saying a lot.


Two things to keep in mind - 1) The nVidia bug is not a fault of the KDE developers, it's a problem in nVidia's driver that they haven't fixed yet. 2) KDE4 is now at 4.1.2. I'm sure there are MANY improvements over 4.1.0; you might want to give it another try. 3) There are guides online that tell you various changes you can make that will get rid of a bit of the graphical niceties in KDE4 (some of the compositing/transparency, I think), but mostly solves the speed bugs due to the nVidia driver issues.

With those in mind, you might want to give it another try.

 

[benjiro]

Two things to keep in mind - 1) The nVidia bug is not a fault of the KDE developers, it's a problem in nVidia's driver that they haven't fixed yet.

Think Nvidia fixed it. Latest driver out a few days ago:

Nvidia Linux Display Driver 177.80 ->
* Improved support for RENDER operations with the same source and destination; this should performance in some situations, e.g. when dragging Plasma applets in KDE4.
* Improved GPU video memory management coordination between the NVIDIA X driver and OpenGL implementation; this should improve performance with e.g. the KDE4 OpenGL compositing manager.

With those in mind, you might want to give it another try.

Until all the kde application i use under 3.5 get fully released under 4.x, thats not going to happen. Amarok, Krusader etc ( all still in alpha, or beta ). There needs to be a added value to upgrade. Just like Xp -> Vista, if the added value is to small, its better to stick with the old, and stable, until the new has added value, and the same stability. But, thats just me

 

[javaJake]

Delete me.

 

[absolofdoom]

PLEASE don't start a gnome vs. kde flame war... People like different things; just accept it and move on. Kde developers and Gnome developers have both worked really hard to create something they and others can be proud of; if you shoot one or the other down, you're gonna tick someone off. I don't know if you intended to go after kde or if it was just intended as constructive criticism, but you might want to turn it down a notch.

EDIT: Took out quote of javaJake at his request.

 

[sdedalus83]

I have a feeling that ROX might be worth a look at though.

ROX on XFCE is awesome. For something with limited hardware and a small screen, that would be a lot more appealing than Gnome or KDE, at least in their standard, desktop oriented forms.

 

[javaJake]

PLEASE don't start a gnome vs. kde flame war... People like different things; just accept it and move on. Kde developers and Gnome developers have both worked really hard to create something they and others can be proud of; if you shoot one or the other down, you're gonna tick someone off. I don't know if you intended to go after kde or if it was just intended as constructive criticism, but you might want to turn it down a notch.
You're right. Thanks for the heads-up.

I've deleted the contents of my terribly off-topic, argumentative post, and I hope a moderator or absolofdoom will clean up the rest.