Splitting the KDE tree
 

Hi,
Just to make things nice and simple, is it possible to split the kde tree and place all games+toys+educational (and their libs), extra artwork and extra players in kde-extra?
On current those take up about half of all the packages in the KDE tree.
I don't know about other users here, but I never install those and checking slackpkg install-new takes forever just to filter those out.

What about blacklisting them by name?

just because you didn't install all of them doesn't mean that the system have to follow your preferences
I also don't need all of the KDE packages, but i can simply remove what i don't need...

Who said anything about having to follow? It was just a suggestion, and I am sure that there are enough users who might like it as well (after chatting about it with a few of them).
And I do black list what I don't use at the moment, but things might change in later releases and my blacklist is long as it is.

I agree that the current (14.0) state of KDE tree is a mess. The prevoius (13.37) was much clearer but i understand that the change was introduced by the upstream. Still, splitting to something like KDE_CORE/KDE_EXTRA is a good idea in my opinion.

Over the years KDE has gone from a relatively compact (or at least as compact as a full-boat window manger/utility kit/whatever you call it) to a behemoth; all things to all people.

With addition of the "evil twins," (akonadi and that other one that I can't remember the name of right now) a few years ago, the use of which I have never understood nor want to, KDE more or less lost me for good. Switched to Xfce (which does have some problems, but I can live with 'em).

However, KDE does include some nice utilities -- KPPP, K3b, KPatience (I play 4-suit Spider when I'm waiting for stuff or bored).

I'm one of those no-eye-candy types. Black screen, 10-11 "launcher" icons, GKrellM running on the far right side of the screen, that's it. Anything that forces me to reach for the mouse is outta here. Most of what I do is done in a terminal window, browser (Firefox), mail (Thunderbird), sometimes OpenOffice (gota document stuff). Other than that, I just don't have a need for all the folderol.

Oh, yeah, I use Tellico, a really nicely done collection manager (I keep track of about 2,000 books, a bunch of DVD's and some other stuff), and it's a KDE application so gotta have it.

So, when I install Slackware, I install everything (not the language packages, though), select Xfce as the default window manager and just ignore KDE bloat so I can use some of what it offers. Disk drives are multi-hundred-gigabytes, basically who cares. I keep an eye on GKrellM and note that both cores on this box mumble along at 1%-3% on average (they run a lot higher when KDE is running, though) and, you know, why load up a processor for meaningless eye-candy and overhead indexing (or whatever the heck it's doing) when locate works just fine? Stripping it down, why bother -- lot of work for no practical gain, methinks.

It's really a case of to each his own.

Hope this helps some.

Nepomuk Strigi? Sounds like a villain from a Bond film, or summat. They seem less troublesome in the later releases than they did at first (I'm using Alien Bob's 4.10.5). And they can be disabled in System Settings.

Yes! That's the one! But, hey, "less troublesome" is still troublesome, isn't it? Kinda like a little bit pregnant. And why should I be required to disable the dammed things in the first place? This isn't Microsoft after all.

Just a personal peeve. To each his own, eh?

+1.
I do pretty much the same thing, plus I like Gwenview. IMHO, it is the best Linux based viewer currently available. Easy to use, has an attractive interface, and just two clicks will load an image into The GIMP if it needs editing.

Those are the "Evil Triplets," akonadi, nepomuk and strigi. I don't even install akonadi and disable nepomuk. strigi you have to leave alone or some things in kde won't work or work properly.

I disabled it before it had a chance to become troublesome. ;)
KDE is still my favourite, but I do log into other DE/WM's now and then for a change.

I gave KDE 4.10.5 a spin and appreciated most of it. I like the idea of a no-nonsense, one-app-per-task KDE desktop that eventually replaces KDE's Rube Goldberg apps like KMail, Amarok and KTorrent by some more lightweight stuff like Thunderbird, Audacious and Transmission. Let's see, if I can find some time for experimenting after Slackware 14.1 comes out, maybe I'll build an extra "Microlinux Enterprise Workstation" with tagfiles and the odd rebuilt package and put it on my repo.

Evil Twins. LOL

Use to think that. Now I use them. While I could be wrong, I suspect some have not tried the evil twins recently. Nepomuk has improved by leaps and bounds. I find it quite useful now. I use a couple of Akonadi enabled programs too with without problems.

The problem with splitting the tree, it affects all of us. While I don't use all of those Games, Toys and Educational programs I do use some of them. I also have KDE programs installed that are not part of the tree. I could choose to remove some of those KDE programs I don't use. I just don't see a valid reason (for me at least) to remove them. I have the space, they do not bother me or affect daily use of my computers. I also like to run from a stock Full Installation of Slackware, I find it make things simple.

In regards to the 'evil twins', they did have severe performance problems in the early 4.x days (probably enough to give 4.x its early bad reputation), but starting at around 4.5 they massively improved. Now I'm running 4.10.something, and I don't ever notice them doing anything that hogs resources. All in all KDE 4 has turned out very nice.

As to the topic, I would also like to see a split KDE tree for Slackware. Yes you can blacklist individual packages, but that gets tedious, especially when you're working on a fresh install with no backups.

How, that is, in what way do you find them useful?

Thanks.


It only took what,four or five years?

True. However, the problem with deselecting all games, toys, etc is that it is no longer that clear from their names what is a game and what is an important KDE component.

What drove me away from all this akonadi based stuff is its use of a database in my home directory as a datastore. I use incremental file backups on my home directory and having one big datastore (been a while but I think it uses 2x 64MB files) just doesn't work with incremental backups. 1 byte changes and you end up backing up 128MB. I suppose I could exclude those files from the backup, but then you still need to find a way of backing-up the data they contain. I suppose it's pretty much the same kind of issue that 'mbox' mail had until maildir came along and put each message in an individual file.

This has always been one of the few drawbacks of the Linux & FOSS biosphere: application names. Software like "Word" or "Toast" is eloquently named, so a user will immediately know what it's good for. Compare that to "K3B", "Heimdal", "Anjuta" or similar names.

I just took a peek in current's kde/ directory, and the first idea that comes to my mind is a suggestion that the KDE developers be less hypocrite and opt for strictly random names. So future KDE versions should look like this:

:D

Or:

actually, when i install the system, it is fairly easy to deselect thins, as there are short descriptions of each package in the installer. If i want to install KDE later using slacpkg, then... well, it gets more frustrating. Wouldn't it be nicer if slackpkg install also provided the short description of the packages?

Well I was referring more the Nepomuk Server than the Akonadi Server.

I find Nepomuk useful in doing content searches on my home directory using Dolphin. It reasonable in terms of speed and it does the job. I can trim down where it does it indexing which speed that process up, I never see it indexing outside of the first time. I think by default is select you home directory, I narrowed that down since many of my directories do need to be indexed. A based included at Documents (mostly LibreOffice/MS Office docs), Pictures, Videos and my Claws Mail store.

you can basically see the package names in your desktop menu. This mostly apply for kdegames and kdeedu

Sure you can. once you have them installed. The thing is, if you want to skip them when you install KDE, it's gonna take some effort. Not a big deal, anyways... :)

yes, even i don't remember all of the packages... i tends to install everything and remove it later just to be sure i don't remove or skip important package

As do I willysr, I have a script that does it for me. It goes over all the games and educationals inj the menu, gets the executable's name, checks the package name from slackpkg file-search and produces a nice and VERY long list of stuff I can remove.
Is it the best way? There is no such thing.
Does it keep stuff I probably do not need? Probably, but I have the space.
Am I left with all sorts of stuff that works in the background which I never ever use? Sure, but I have new hardware and enough RAM, and one could argue hat in 4.10 it works rather well in the background and doesn't use all that much RAM anyway.
All I was suggesting is that Games, Toys, extra media applications and backgrounds will reside in kde-extra. After all, if it makes sense to have all of those useless (from my POV) packages in one place, why not have l10n packages in kde as well and let the user select whats needed at installation time?

OK, I started to work on this last Friday. The result will be something between Slax and AlienBob's desktop. Binaries will be available for 14.0 (32-bit and 64-bit).

http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/M.../ChangeLog.txt

Nothing usable yet, but you can check the progress. :hattip:

Hi kikinovak,
Will look it up when its more stable.
Thanks,

kikinovak,

I know that anyone prefers to work on stable release. SalixOS has released (14.0.1) a KDE version based on Slackware 14.0: http://forum.salixos.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=4809

But because release of 14.1 version isn't so far way, maybe it's more interesting working to be prepare to next version, I think it can be some how a way to contribute to -current and help the next release.
You have mention Slax project. They are currently working in KDE 4.10.x version:
http://ftp.linux.cz/pub/linux/linux-...ax-7.0-sources

Keeping the good work! thank you :cool:

Phew. Today was a 14-hour marathon of reading and writing SlackBuild scripts, compiling and testing. So far I have built a minimal KDE from scratch, with only Dolphin and Konsole. Menus are empty otherwise. Desktop effects, semantic desktop search and indexation are disabled (though it's possible to reactivate everything of course), and with this configuration, the empty desktop takes no more than 175 MB RAM, so it's quite light. If you're curious, I've attached a screenshot of the work in progress. On the left monitor is my main Xfce desktop. The right monitor shows the new minimal KDE 4.10.5 running in VirtualBox. BTW, everything is built on 14.0 stable, not on -current.

Applications will be added in the course of the week. The only showstopper is my upload bandwidth. Some of the tarballs and packages are quite big.

A big warm "thank you" to the following people for inspiration and good ideas:

• Eric Hameleers a. k. a. AlienBob
• Tomas M, the Slax maintainer
• The BLFS (Beyond Linux From Scratch) project
• George Vlahavas and the Salix team

This is fun, actually. :)

A short report from the KDE-Lite front.

So far I have a quite usable and trimmed down KDE 4.10.5 desktop running on Slackware 14.0.

• kde-baseapps is built without Konqueror.
• Firefox is the main browser and replaces Konqueror.
• Thunderbird and Lightning replace KMail and KOrganizer.
• Pidgin replaces Kopete.
• Transmission replaces KTorrent.
• Audacious replaces Amarok and Juk.
• SMPlayer replaces Kaffeine and Dragonplayer.
• Applications are "full-featured", e. g. K3B is built against a full ffmpeg and makes use of vcdimager and transcode under the hood. Likewise for Audacious and SMPlayer, (re)built against a full set of multimedia libs and codecs.
• All GTK2/3 applications are nicely integrated using oxygen-gtk{2,3}.
• Applications are also carefully integrated into KDE's menu structure and making use of Oxygen icons when their own icons are too ugly (like Apache Open Office).

I'm already using this on my main workhorse PC, and I really like it. KDE 4.10.5 is very stable, and I can definitely forget the nightmare of early 4.x versions. There are still some rough edges and some missing bits. I'll complete this in the days and weeks to come, do some testing, write a little HOWTO, and then you can test-drive it.

This is looking really good.

Is it possible to trim kdeartwork and kde-wallpapers as they take up 211M, which is a huge part of the total download. If you are trying for one application per type, then perhaps you should only have one theme/look.

This would be an advantage for those people, like me, who have a very slow broadband connection.

samac

You should try qbittorrent instead of transmission. It is fast, efficient and integrates nicely with its Qt interface.

Also take into consideration that your MLWS contains several packages which can not be distributed to all the world due to patent rules (faac, lame) or for which you do not have the right to re-distribute binaries (jdk, webcore-fonts), or officially branded binaries (firefox, thunderbird). You may have to consider a policy to apply to mirroring these packages.

Eric

While I try to trim the desktop in regard to functionality, I'm not exactly desperately aiming for reduced space. In my experience, users like to have a choice of wallpapers and themes, since this is the first thing they change on their new systems.

This being said, MLWS will work nicely without these packages installed. And yes, I'm planning to define a default look that's not dependent on these packages.

Thanks for your suggestions, Eric. I'll give QBitTorrent a spin, though I admit I'm a die-hard Transmission user. It's just perfect in terms of usability. Plus, it integrates nicely with Oxygen GTK. Last but not least, my users love it.

I know about problematic packages and patent rules. My policy with that can be resumed in the austrian word "Wurscht" (a slang word, literally "sausage"), which is untranslatable in other languages, and even germans outside of Bavaria don't quite get the sense. It's sort of a non-offensive and smiling way of saying "I don't care" (or even "I don't give a ****"), and at the same time seeking a consensus with the other person, who is more or less supposed to say: "You're right, this isn't worth caring about". It's really a whole one-word-philosophy, which might also explain the huge mentality gap between Austria and Germany, even though we're neighbours.

On the other hand, if mirroring these packages on taper.alienbase.nl is a problem for you, I perfectly understand, Eric. By the way: I don't host Firefox and Thunderbird packages anymore, since 14.0 switched to ESR. I only have a couple of language packs. As for jdk, I'll probably follow your suggestion and move to the open substitue for the next release.

BTW, you'd be suprised what users complain about. A while back, after I migrated several public libraries from Windows XP to Linux (CentOS 5.x), the library personnel complained that the new system contained no Minesweeper and Solitary card game. Of course, the problem could be easily solved (yum -y install gnome-games), and everyone was happy.

:D:D:D
these are the essentials for every office!

BTW, if you want go give it a spin, you can basically use the MLED documentation. Everything named "MLED" simply becomes "MLWS": scripts, repo URLs, etc.

Once you've installed all the packages, check out ChangeLog.txt for updates.

Enjoy!

Off topic: You can say "Wurscht" even outside Bavaria - maybe not every person in every federal state will understand it, but at least in regions of Nordrhein-Westfalen (Ruhrgebiet, Westfalen and Rheinland) everyone will understand you if you say it. Since it is off-topic, I guess it is wurscht in the end ;)