Arch quickie, stable KDE 3.5 distro and Plasma
After toying around with KDE 4.0.0 I would have to say that openSUSE’s LiveCD is superior to Kubuntu’s though in the long-run Kubuntu will certainly give openSUSE competition. YaST rocks but Kubuntu isn’t bad with its simple Ubuntu philosophy. Adept could seriously do with some work though but if you are like me, you’ll contend with zypper in openSUSE and apt-get in Ubuntu. I’d like to see Adept include an estimate of time remaining when downloading packages like Synaptic and YaST do just to fill that tiny void of uncertainty. When I do updates I often have to leave the PC on for a while and it helps to know how long its all going to take, especially on slower connections.
Then I attempted to reinstall Arch. Unfortunately I chose the wrong time with Pacman 3.1.0 being a little buggy and 3.1.1 in the works to fix the bugs. I experienced a bug with dependencies and I cannot decide the what the bug finally was because when I downgraded to Pacman 3.0 using Don’t Panic, I received another error. You can wait a little and install KDEmod4 if you use Arch and don’t have it already. I did install KDEmod (i.e. the KDE 3.5.8 version) for a couple of days. Speaking of Arch, they’ve also released their monthly newsletter of 2008 which features an interview with Judd Vinet, which is a great read if you’re an Arch fan like me.
I had decided a while back, to arm myself with a stable KDE 3.5.x distribution for my own stability as well as to recommend to others. Now, PCLinuxOS takes the best of Fedora and openSUSE through its rpm package system and Ubuntu through apt-get and Synaptic. It then provides a really fast K Desktop Environment with a quick boot speed, great hardware detection and easy setup. With the MiniMe 2008 version out, I decided to download it and install only the applications I use or may need to use regularly. At the moment, all that’s left is to make the LiveCD after having downloaded the packages.
Its a long six-months to go before we can witness the true power of KDE 4 with the 4.1 branch. During that time, the developers will really be at it and you can follow their experience at the Planet. Amidst all the posts in the blogosphere on KDE 4.0.0 not being ready and Plasma being unstable, I found this one which provided a very simple, clear explanation of Plasma for you to understand and realize why we can only use a fraction of its true potential at the moment. Its even going to have support for OS X Dashboard widgets in the future so we can take advantage of a plethora of widgets already available. It seems I just missed a useful update to Plasma by a day when I removed openSUSE to install and configure PCLinuxOS. The multiple lines of buttons feature from Kicker in KDE 3.5 can now be used with Plasma’s panel. Aaron Seigo said:
the multiple lines of buttons works automatically, of course, with no configuration needed. new lines appear as space becomes over used. it works nicer than what we had in kicker, really, and it’s all still animated and what not. yummy goodness. you may also notice the “only show tasks on the current desktop” option is back …. i’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we end up with task grouping and what not.
Yes, it looks like they’re really accelerating development and it can only be good, right? Finally, I’d just like to randomly add that I’ve found a solution to my friend’s problem of not having an IM client in Linux with MSN Messenger’s features like offline messaging and custom emoticons. KMess does that and I even included it in my customized PCLinuxOS setup which needs to be made into an ISO now that I’ve finished downloading the packages.
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