Uber Geeky!

I’ve been gradually catching up with a lot of the rants on the net with respect to KDE3.5 vs. KDE4. Some less sane than others. I came to the debate quite late it seems, and it’s something I’m not pleased with even having to care about to tell the truth. Suddenly now I find my self having to understand the developers philosophies and getting to know some of the more vocal egos on both sides of the fence. After grasping a better idea of what’s happened, I don’t think I’ll ever be completely sold on KDE4. But after reading some more compassionate words on the topic today, I think I’ve finally come to terms with the situation.

In the KDE developers defence, I don’t think it’s possible for complete overhauls of software to ever be embraced whole heartedly by the userbase. Particularly not right away. I will continue to resent the fact that Kubuntu took up KDE4 so soon. I liked KDE3.5 because it was a work of art, but also because it was fully functional and intuitive for anyone who is used to MS Windows. At that time I couldn’t understand why Ubuntu picked Gnome for the flagship considering KDE3.5 was so much more suited winning over the users afflicted by Bug #1. My first impression when KDE4.1 was thrust upon me was of some retarded mutant desktop environment from a future that I don’t care to participate in. KDE4 turned my entire desktop experience inside out!

I’m not going to pretend that I’m not a stubborn person. I like to work in a particular way which I’ve refined over years, dating back to MS DOS and Windows 3.1. I switched to Linux because some of the more restrictive and intrusive features in Windows Vista had well and truly crossed the line as far as I was concerned. I wanted to get back to a basic desktop without all the useless eye-candy. KDE3.5 was the best fit for me at the time.

I’m quite busy as well. I soon learnt with Linux distro’s, every time there is a distribution upgrade to postpone it for at least a month and ensure I dedicate a couple days after it to get myself settled back in. With KDE4 it was more like a couple of weeks of pointless frustration. Wrestling with KDE4 just proved to be too much hassle for me at work and I’ve now fully switched over to Gnome. I found it easier to customise to my liking than KDE4. At home I’m still on KDE4.2 because it doesn’t matter so much if I’m spending 6 hours trying to figure out how to customise the desktop theme in vein, and I still hold out for a glimmer of hope that the developers may resolve some of my issues with it.

KDE4 is not easy or intuitive to use. I don’t like this widget based desktop paradigm and I don’t understand how it’s useful in anyway. Most of the time my desktop is hidden by windows anyway. I have to wonder if KDE4 was ever designed for using or if it’s just for looking at. KDE4 is a contradiction in my eyes. To be a desktop environment which gets in the way of letting users do what they want, yet to do so in the name of flexibility is bizarre. It makes me anxious and I don’t like it.

I still see KDE4 as the lavalamp of the desktop environment world. It chews a lot of power and looks pretty, but it’s not all that useful. You also have to be careful about touching it because you might get burnt. I have a feeling it’s the new development philosophy that’s flawed, but I can’t quite put my finger on what that flaw is as yet. I think I’ve reached a turning point in my thinking about KDE4 now though, and I find my self walking peacefully in the opposite direction.

Just a quick follow up. The plans to maintain my KDE3 addiction worked, but it wasn’t a smooth ride. I don’t recommend it for anyone who isn’t keen to tinker. During the KDE3 installation some packages wanted to overwrite KDE4 files, which caused all sorts of issues with my package manager. I had to use dpkg to force a couple packages to install before I could remove the KDE4 ones and then re-installed the KDE3 ones just to be sure. I ended up culling a fair few of the default KDE4 packages to make sure I didn’t have any more problems like this. I can still login to KDE4, but some of the nicer stuff like Compiz is gone.

I had issues with Compiz in particular, there are problems with the latest nVidia drivers. The latest Compiz has a workaround for this, but it’s not available for the KDE3 version. I found the simplest solution was just to switch back to the 177 driver version and then it was all good.

So yeah, I recommend just switch to Gnome, or try KDE4 on Jaunty and enable the folder view desktop. It seems like pointless overhead to me, the folder view is just a full screen widget. Note also that it doesn’t span screens, so if you have a dual screen setup and you want some icons spattered on the second screen you’re out of luck. KDE3’s days are numbered so eventually I’ll have to face reality and move on. I’ve prolonged it for about another year now I reckon, but eventually I’m going to have to face the music.

I wanted to post this sooner, but the recent Word Press update broke my WYSIWYG. Luckily it was just a javascript conflict with one of my plugins, some people had much worse issues with the update. Still it’s embarrassing since I was just bragging to my mate the other day about how fantastic this application is, particularly the update management. Bloody updates, they are the bane of my life!

While searching around to find out why-oh-why I’m not allowed to have files on my Desktop in KDE4 (and hopefully how to re-enable it), I found this… http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/05/no-more-desktop-icons-in-41.html

This looks to me like the root of the problem. This KDE developer, in all his infinite wisdom, just simply ripped out the code that supports file icons on the desktop. Apparently it just doesn’t look nice to him or something. Too bad if you don’t like the whole widget based desktop experience, this guy has just forced us to either take it up or switch to Gnome. Suffice to say, when I read his article I was fairly taken aback by the action.

In all fairness though, he doesn’t see it the way I do. Yes, this post was originally fueled by rage. I quickly changed my initially confrontational title of this post to something a little nicer. Aaron’s intention appears to be to create a more flexible experience for the user (by culling features?!?). My tinfoil hat keeps telling me it’s really just a Microsoft conspiracy (joking of course).

One of my machines was recently updated to KDE4 via the Kubuntu Intrepid distro upgrade. I’ve been using it everyday, but I haven’t been liking it. The version that came with Kubuntu Intrepid is not nearly mature enough. Personally, I love KDE3 and I’d like to stick with it as long as possible. I don’t need the new Plasma features and many old features seem to have been dropped. Thankfully, I found this… https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Kde3/Jaunty which should allow me to keep my systems up to date without having to touch KDE4. I’ll try the process out tomorrow on my work Kubuntu 8.04 machine.

Update:

You can re-enable the normal desktop behaviour in Jaunty simply from a desktop right click menu. But not Intrepid. In Intrepid you could try editing $HOME/.kde/share/config/plasma-appletsrc replacing plugin=desktop with plugin=folderview, but that didn’t work for me.

Another Update:

You can’t drag and drop your icons on to multiple screens. It only works on the primary because it’s still some kind of crappy complete waste of resources full screen widget.

This morning I finally decided I couldn’t stand Evolution any longer. I started using it as my mail client at work because we have an Exchange mail server and Microsoft doesn’t make a client for Linux (surprise, surprise). I’ve never worked at a place that uses Exchange, so I’ve always just used Thunderbird for mail in the past. When I got here, this was my first serious experience with Outlook, and I started to get a bit hooked on some of the calendaring niceness. When I got my new Workstation and ditched Windows for Kubuntu I was looking for something that could integrate best with Exchange.

Evolution seemed the most attractive option because it has a plugin for exchange integration called evolution-exchange. You can install directly from the Ubuntu repositories. Basically it’s a scraper for the OWA (Outlook Web Access) web interface, and generally it works really well. I’ve been using it for about 5 months now, but there are just a few things I can’t stand about it that made me decide today to bin it.

1. Password manager is broken and has been for about 12 months it seems. No one cares to fix it. You have to type your password in each session.
2. A bug with the Evolution/Nvidia/Compiz combination of packages causes the cursor to leave garbage on the screen when you use the cursor keys in a new mail message.
3. HTML support sucks, the development community seem hell bent against it.
4. It can’t handle contacts with “>” in the name, which is a convention we use to keep mailing lists at the top of the list. This character will cause it to generate invalid mail headers, destroy the html layout of the email and makes me look like an ass, especially when sending announcements to groups like “>ALL STAFF”.
5. Occasionally the evolution-exchange plugin cache gets corrupted and you loose random mails, but you wouldn’t know unless you check occasionally in OWA or Outlook. You have to delete the whole cache and download them all again.

I was prepared to switch back to using Outlook in a virtual machine, but before doing so I decided to check first to see if there was any possible way to get Thunderbird to read Exchange calendars. Thunderbird has an extension called Lightning that adds Outlook style calendaring integration. The latest release is 0.9. Last time I used Thunderbird I think I had to get the development version of 0.8 in order to get enough working features to call it functional (appointment invites used to be very buggy in the 0.7 version). Version 0.9 has come along way, everything seems to work great… except still no support for Exchange calendars unfortunately. Your calendar is maintained locally or in some 3rd party web calendar that uses a non-proprietry protocol. Not quite good enough.

Then I found DavMail. It’s a gateway that basically does the same as the evolution-exchange plugin. This thing acts as a webservice making data available from Exchange via standard protocols by scraping the Exchange OWA interface. It maintains separate user sessions, so you really can set it up as a server side service, possibly even installed on the mail server itself.

A ray of hope! But would it work?

I had enough problems getting Lightning installed to tell the truth, and that’s just a plugin for Thunderbird! Turns out the link on the Mozilla site was no good for 64bit Linux OS and I had to jigg about with the URL to find the actual release for me. DavMail is a totally unsupported package though, the one thing going in it’s favour is that it’s Java based, so it should just work right? Well lets find out.

They have a deb package ready for me to download. I attempt to install it but I’m missing the dependency “libswt-gtk-3.4-java”. Oh boy, looks like it’s using ugly Swing for the UI. Well, looks like my Kubuntu Hardy distro is a bit behind the times now because the best I could find was a package called “libswt3.2-gtk-java” (yeah, I love the way they switched naming conventions too ^^). I installed that anyway and then just used dpkg to force it to install. It created an icon in my start menu under “Internet” and then seemed to work perfectly, connect to OWA no worries, all was good. Except now my package manager is going boonta because I’ve got a “broken package”. I can’t find the chill button so I uninstalled it for now.

How do you downgrade a dependency? Well this method worked for me…

dpkg -e davmail_3.2.0-1_all.deb
cd DEBIAN/
nano control
tar -czvf control.tar.gz *
mv control.tar.gz ..
cd ..
ar r davmail_3.2.0-1_all.deb control.tar.gz
mv davmail_3.2.0-1_all.deb davmail_3.2.0-01_all.deb

When editing the control file I changed the dependency from “libswt-gtk-3.4-java” to “libswt3.2-gtk-java” and also changed the version number to 3.2.0-01 so as not to conflict with a real version. The deb installer GUI detected something was wrong and wouldn’t install it, but “dpkg -i” worked like a charm. This is probably totally the wrong approach to take to my problem, but I don’t care. While I can sort of understand why Gnome developers might think Swing is cool, I can’t believe the libswt-gtk project can possibly have achieved much in two minor versions that would break compatibility. The latest 32bit Ubuntu has the correct version so most people wont have to care about this at all.

Now I’m rock’n with Thunderbird and Exchange! Without too much tomhackery even. So I settle back in with my old friend, so many features I’ve missed. The fantastic rich text editor (well actually it’s really basic, but light years a head of Evolution). The simplicity of theming it. I toyed with installing an Outlook theme and trying to get it to look and act exactly like Outlook. You can choose which IMAP folders to subscribe, so I picked Inbox and all it’s sub-folders, Drafts, Sent and Deleted Items. Now it’s easy to configure Thunderbird to put your sent mail into the IMAP Sent folder, but you still have the default Thunderbird Trash folder which you cannot easily convert to the IMAP Deleted Items folder. I found out you just have to edit user preferences to change the name. Searching on the net, people are always talking about editing some “prefs.js” file. I always just change the welcome page in Thunderbird to about:config, it was one of the first things I did when it was installed. This allows me to edit my preferences in the exact same way as you would in Firefox. In this case I just added the property as specified, restarted, and it worked like a charm.

I also hooked up the address book to the Exchange Global Address LDAP and then just tweaked the LDAP settings so it finds contacts a little quicker. One thing I notice is that the compose window only completes local addresses and not LDAP addresses. There had to be a fix for this.

With the power of about:config I searched for ldap and quickly found the settings that looked most useful…

• ldap_2.autoComplete.directoryServer
• ldap_2.autoComplete.useDirectory

The first one needed a quick search to figure out the syntax but the second one was just a boolean. Once that was done I had the same, if not better, contact auto-completion as I had previously with Evolution and Outlook. Game over, Thunderbird/Lightning/DavMail wins!

Update May 20, 2009 at 12:45 pm: Set mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new to true, otherwise Thunderbird doesn’t check for new mail in your subfolders. This can be a problem if you have any Exchange mail filters running.

Update May 26, 2009 at 12:58pm: http://www.trustedbird.org/tb/Multi-LDAP here’s an addon that’s showing the easy way to configure LDAP addressbook lookups. Install that addon if you would like to search multiple LDAPs.

Tonight I spent some time looking around for places that sell Linux Netbooks again. Amazon had quite a few good deals, that sadly wouldn’t ship to Australia.

In the country I only found a few outlets. Penta and YouPrice are selling the 901 model with 20GB SSD for I think one or two hundred dollars more than what they are worth these days. I seen some people selling the Acer Aspire One with Linux. No one is selling the top end Netbooks with Linux here.

I remember seeing the prototype for the Touch Book a while back. Looks like they are just about ready for the market. I think I’ll hold out for these to hit the shores. Fingers crossed they don’t have Windows support by the time they reach Australia, the distributors wont order the Linux model if the current state of the market is anything to go by. More than likely we wont even see these before someone else releases a knockoff with Windows on it. Then I’ll be out of luck for sure.

Update: Actually it wasn’t the Touch Book prototype I’d seen, it was the Crunch Pad. However, I think the Touch Book looks a little superior with it’s detachable keyboard. Both are rather sexy!