KDE 4.3 in Squeeze, what did they DO???
 

Initiated by a crash of my hard disk in my main machine I decided to install Debian Squeeze.

Squeeze comes with KDE4 desktop. What a mess! I can accept to learn how to use a different user interface, but I cannot accept to loose speed or functionality.

- Window resizing is slow as on a PIII-400 MHz with a 1998 graphics card.
- The mouse pointer has doubled in size, this feels like typing with boxing gloves. Choosing the classic pointer only works in the configuration screen, but not as soon as you start to work.
- The panel colors are black, dark gray and light gray, and changing these does not work as advertised. Welcome to our new Funeral theme!
- The mouse pointer and whatnot looks fuzzy and unsharp. There is an option to in graphical effect to sharpen the screen elements. What? First using processor time to fuzzyfy it, the again to apply sharpening? No wonder this desktop has a syrupy feeling. The graphics effects do not work anyway despite of a correctly installed accelerated NVIDIA card.
- Worst of all, Quanta has magically disappeared. Yeah, I installed Kompozer, but that is no match.

What did the Debian maintainers do?? Breaking a good working system is something new for me in Debian. (I know it is not Debian's fault the KDE4 is what it is, I am just disappointed that it has been included)

Anyway, typing this message is the last thing I'll do in Squeeze. Tomorrow I have to strip the disk clean an install Lenny again. Downgrading is never a good idea.

jlinkels

It sucks having to by a new machine. oh well puppy Linux is still around. But KDE4 on a new Machine is just such a cool thing.
kde3 is great to.

What vga and what driver are you on? I had some color issues when I used vesa (of xorg 1.6) for my 3850.

Fglrx is known to have slowdown issues with kde4.

Hardware is GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8x. I use the nvidia driver NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.13. No mention is made of Fglrx.

Edit: I have been browsing on the KDE forums, and yes, the NVIDIA drivers have problems, as it seems these are driver bugs and not KDE bugs. Nevertheless, that doesn't solve my problem. Apparently the NVIDIA drivers were good enough to resize a window in KDE 3.x, but not in KDE 4.3.

jlinkels

I have a house full of these machines (AMD 1700+, 2800+, etc). I don't want to get the Vista experience and that is exactly what I am getting now. Apart from the speed there is still that funeral color scheme, the lack of Quanta and the fuzzy overall look.

jlinkels

I am sorry you are having problems with your machine. I ran GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8x. with the same driver and did not have any problems the only problems I had with KDE4 in slackware 12.2 current and 13.0 current was my machine was old and slow.and low on ram so I upgraded.
I have no clue what that means. I have not dealt with windows for many years.
I will tell you there are some things you have to edit your xorg in order to get your affects to work.
the other thing that old agp card is pretty old 1990's stuff.
other wise if you do not want to use 3D stuff the drive in the kernel works very good with that.
theses should be added on to your xorg for your old card.
give it a try.
down load quanta for kde3.5.9 and compile install it. install the kde3-compat from the repository. first.

when i trying to login to linux "suse v11.1" server by using tightVNC from windows Xp client i get this msg error 'could not start kstartupconfig4.check installation'
how i can debug this error ? thank you

Lucky guy! The good news I honestly never worked with Vista. The bad news is that sometimes I have to support people who have Vista on their computer and expect me to help them because they think I have knowledge about it.

Anyway, thanks for the pointer. When I am t home tonight I'll try that and report back.

jlinkels

I read somewhere else that this would be possible. There seems to be no basic incompatibility between Quanta 3.x and KDE 4. On the other hand I have never been able to compile a Qt application succesfully. Hopefully things have improved during the last years and is it succesful now with this clean system.

About 'old' stuff etc. Yes, it is a bit old. However I was always very proud that I could run Linux on older systems, while my Windows colleagues were confronted with systems getting slower every day. Recently I installed KDE 3.5.9 on a 600 MHz Celeron, and that was very succesful without any indications of sluggishnes.

I simply can't stand that KDE4 runs slower on this machine (AMD 2800+) than on this (really!) 1998 machine.

jlinkels

well I learned how to use the device manager for M$ years ago look at M$7 still the same.Box of bugs.
Quanta is actually kde development the name has been dropped I run slackware and kde development is a standard feature. so install kde4 development packages and see if you like it.And I have said out of all my testing distro's slackware 13-current has a very smooth interface. it is a little slower with desk top effects in enabled

you sound like me a year and half ago. If desk top effects is enabled it is up to your GPU to pull the weight. not your cpu .so get a nice agp card.

Thanks a lot about the pointer to the site with NIDIA settings. Surprisingly graphic effects are enabled now, and the desktop runs smoother as before without those effects. The colors in the panel also have improved and titles are readable now.

Of course with this GPU "running smooth" is relative. But I have a more powerful card around (unfortunately?? also NVIDIA) and I will try KDE4 with that more powerful card.

Now with the effects working properly KDE4 *is* beautiful. If the developers has only implemented a frugal very basic ultra low-resource scheme, still using Qt4 I am sure there would have been a lot less complaints.

Let me see what results I get from recompiling some needed software packages.

The comments in this forum (and in the KDE forum) certainly helped to get a better experience, so thanks for that.

jlinkels

hi all i need to your help
there was a shut down in electricity causing to shut down in my linux server and i want to view my old log file what is the command which allow me to do this
thanks

Moaaz,

It is best to either search for a related thread on this site or Google.

Alternatively you can post a new thread that will allow people to answer your question more quickly as you will be able to choose an appropriate subject line for the thread, for example: "How do I view old log files"

Google is probably the best place to start, search for "log file suse" and the third hit may help you.


Regards