Performance

Overall, I deployed the successive KDE versions showing up during the Fedora 12 life-cycle on 4 computers. What struck me the most compared to Gnome is how diverse the experience was. Gnome + composition feels much the same on each machine, you don’t really notice a big difference in terms of performance if you have an integrated Intel chip or the latest ATI graphic card.

Due to KDE’s higher usage of composition features (and nobody wants to run KDE without composition), it was much more a hit or miss situation. On 2 of my computers with ATI Radeon HD 4550 + the open source driver, KDE was just unusable. Ironically, KDE feels the fastest on integrated Intel chips. Even there, the kickstart menu opening behaves strangely sometimes, it feels sluggish the first 3-4 times you open it; you can see it open “transparently”, then redraw the real menu content on top of it 0.5 seconds later.

I’m well aware that it’s probably a driver issue and not KDE’s fault, but what end-users see is simply a slow desktop…they don’t want to know why it’s slow. Installing ATI’s proprietary driver probably helps, but as ATI seems to only release new drivers following the Ubuntu release cycle, we are out of luck.

Usability and complexity

Usability is what I was the most concerned about. As with every new environment, you have to get used to the tools it provides. Here I have to thank the Fedora KDE SIG for quickly migrating to new KDE versions, I could really see a better user experience at each release. All my initial complaints were addressed, which speaks for itself regarding the huge work they (and upstream) do.

What is really nice compared to Gnome is to have only one task bar/panel (like in Windows). On modern 16/10 and even more on 16/9 displays, it gives you more space for your programs. It feels cleaner. After some weeks, I found replacement programs and usage tricks for everything I was doing in Gnome, no problems there.

All the features constantly integrated to KDE also make a huge difference once you learn how to use them. Take tabs merging in KDE 4.4 for example, it’s just genius. KDE is filled with these great little tricks, the only problem is to even know that they exist and learn how to use them.

Fortunately, they do a good marketing and information job, have a look at http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.4/ for example.

What I had the most problems adapting to is the file browser…renaming files is a pain for example. I just can’t get used to it; it breaks any convention set by any other desktop environment. It’s all nice and shiny in demos, but in a production environment I just wanted to shoot myself sometimes. I don’t know if I’m using it wrong, but damn…6 months. Ok, I agree that you don’t spend your whole day in the file browser.

On a lighter side, what I also don’t like are the tons of different programs installed by default with KDE, all of them having different icon artworks and styles. It feels bloated with a diverse patchwork of software from the beginning and I somehow have a psychological problem with that

What now?

I installed Fedora 13 with KDE and the file indexing feature is now enabled by default, which is nice. So, will I stay with KDE for Fedora 13? No. Let me explain why…

• First of all comes the performance problems mentioned above. It’s just not usable due to the drivers’ composition support. Working with a slow GUI is a no-go for me.
• Regressions. During all the different KDE updates I got, there was some kind of regression or big modification in the way a specific KDE feature works. It seems that this is the way KDE does its development, but I’m not sure I want these changes during a Fedora cycle.

Don’t get me wrong, KDE is very cool; it’s perfectly usable and nice on a machine which can give it good performance. I want to love it and will definitively give it a try at each new version; I’m pretty much convinced that at some point it will replace my Gnome desktop, just not yet. It’s just not as polished as Gnome right now.

What I could see during my 6 months with KDE is a very fast moving community which listens to their users, bringing innovative concepts to the desktop environment. I’m still convinced that the only way to give KDE a fair shot was to “force” myself to use it. I really tried to use it from a “naive” point of view without prejudices.

As I often use this feature, I wondered how to get it back…Anvil on #fedora-fr pointed me to the System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts configuration window; it’s amazing how many shortcuts I wasn’t aware of exist in there.

This feature is simply available by pressing Ctrl+Alt+D.

Some months ago, I wrote a post about “Configure the KDE Dashboard to behave like in OSX“; the options to configure this have now been moved to System Settings > Desktop > Workspace. Simply select “Show an Independent Widget Set” in the drop-down box and you are done in KDE 4.4.

To have a better understanding of the whole platform, including GTK+ programming that we are not going to use, Nokia has a series of good videos:

• Get started with Maemo 5
• Introduction to the QT Mobile Platforms

Scratchbox

When we installed the SDK yesterday, I told you that a lot of files went into a /scratchbox repository. For the sake of clarity, it’s a good idea to explain what Scratchbox is. Directly stolen from Scratchbox’s website we can read that “Scratchbox is a cross-compilation toolkit designed to make embedded Linux application development easier. It also provides a full set of tools to integrate and cross-compile an entire Linux distribution.”

The N900 has an ARM Cortex-A8 processor and we are developing on x86, that’s why Scratchbox is used…cross-compile our code to the ARMEL target so it’s deployable on the real phone. In the SDK, Scratchbox is used as a completely autonomous Linux system living in /scratchbox; so all the packages that we are going to install in this OS won’t affect Fedora in any way.

Repositories management in Maemo 5

As Maemo 5 is “just” a modified Debian, so it is using the same tools to manage packages: apt and friends. As with any Linux OS based on packages you can add repositories to get software. In Maemo 5, the repository structure is exactly what we had before Fedora 5/6: a “base” repository managed by Nokia and “extra” repositories managed by the community.

So…repositories. By default only a couple of select repositories related to the SDK and Nokia’s proprietary binaries are enabled. What we want is to enable the community “extra” repositories so we can play with other applications. It’s managed exactly like in yum: edit a text file and update the repository list.

The first thing to do is to login to Scratchbox:

[Steven@x301 ~]$ /scratchbox/login
Welcome to Scratchbox, the cross-compilation toolkit!
Use ‘sb-menu’ to change your compilation target.
See /scratchbox/doc/ for documentation.

Now edit the repositories list, the links to the extra repos are available on http://repository.maemo.org. We are going to add extras only, add extras-testing and extras-devel at your own risk…. Note that “fremantle” is Maemo 5′s name:

[sbox-FREMANTLE_X86: ~] > vim /etc/apt/sources.list
#Extras
deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras/ fremantle free non-free
deb-src http://repository.maemo.org/extras/ fremantle free
#Extras Testing
#deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras-testing/ fremantle free non-free
#deb-src http://repository.maemo.org/extras-testing/ fremantle free
#Extras Devel
#deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/ fremantle free non-free
#deb-src http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/ fremantle free

Now update apt’s local cache:

[sbox-FREMANTLE_X86: ~] > fakeroot apt-get update

Install QT in Scratchbox

At the moment, QT 4.5 is the default version shipped with the 1.1 firmware, QT 4.6 will come with the 1.2 firmware release as far as I know and it contains many changes to be better on Maemo. If you want to play with QT 4.6, you can install it from extras-devel, we are going to stick with 4.5 at the moment. The installation is dead simple:

[sbox-FREMANTLE_X86: ~] > fakeroot apt-get install libqt4-gui libqt4-dev

Deploy your first QT application in the emulator

I’m not going to start a QT course here, but there is a lot of online material available for that including the first edition of the “C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4” book. I have ordered the second edition on Amazon and it’s really great.

So, let’s create our first QT application, compile it and run it on the emulator! You may have noticed that the SDK also installed an “sbhome” directory on your desktop. This is your user’s home directory in Scratchbox. So it’s a filesystem the Maemo 5 emulator has access to…that’s why it’s a good place to store your QT projects. Go to this directory and create a HelloWorld folder. Create a “HelloWorld.cpp” file with the following content in it:

#include <QApplication>
#include <QLabel>
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
QApplication app(argc, argv);
QLabel *label = new QLabel(“Hello World”);
label->show();
return app.exec();
}

Thanks to QT, these lines will magically generate a complete GUI application. Our source code is ready, now we need to create a QT project from it and compile it. For this, we need to be in Scratchbox:

[Steven@x301 ~]$ /scratchbox/login
[sbox-FREMANTLE_X86: ~] > cd HelloWorld/
[sbox-FREMANTLE_X86: ~/HelloWorld] > qmake -project
[sbox-FREMANTLE_X86: ~/HelloWorld] > ls
HelloWorld.cpp  HelloWorld.pro
[sbox-FREMANTLE_X86: ~/HelloWorld] > qmake
[sbox-FREMANTLE_X86: ~/HelloWorld] > ls
HelloWorld.cpp  HelloWorld.pro  Makefile
[sbox-FREMANTLE_X86: ~/HelloWorld] > make
g++ -c -pipe -O3 -g -Wall -W -D_REENTRANT -DQT_NO_DEBUG -DQT_GUI_LIB -DQT_CORE_LIB -DQT_SHARED -I/targets/FREMANTLE_X86/usr/share/qt4/mkspecs/linux-g++-opengl -I. -I/targets/FREMANTLE_X86/usr/include/qt4/QtCore -I/targets/FREMANTLE_X86/usr/include/qt4/QtGui -I/targets/FREMANTLE_X86/usr/include/qt4 -I. -I. -o HelloWorld.o HelloWorld.cpp
g++ -Wl,-O1 -o HelloWorld HelloWorld.o    -L/usr/lib -Wl,-rpath-link=/usr/lib -lQtGui -lQtCore -lpthread

Now run the emulator GUI from your desktop and run the program from Scratchbox:

[sbox-FREMANTLE_X86: ~/HelloWorld] > run-standalone.sh ./HelloWorld

It works! As you can see, QT has done quite some magic for us: the application already looks like a native Maemo 5 application and has a close button!

Next

In the next article, we are going to create a Debian package for the ARMEL target and deploy the application on the phone. Then we will have completed the development chain overview.

Currently, the applications are mainly written using the GTK+ toolkit but the phone also provides QT 4.5/4.6 support. As QT will be the default toolkit for Maemo 6 (and for a lot of other cool reasons), it makes sense to develop new applications directly in QT.

I had some C++ and QT courses at school some years ago, I thought that it would be fun to pick it up again and try to develop a little application for the N900. This is the first article of a series explaining how to set-up an entire QT development environment for the N900 on Fedora, program a little “Hello World” application in QT, generate packages for this application and finally run it on the real phone.

Installing the Nokia N900 SDK

Note: Some months ago, Gerard Braad already wrote an article about installing the beta SDK on Fedora, but things have changed since then and not everything explained on his page still works (Gerard, if you are reading this, the comments on your site are also broken), this is more or less an updated and extended version of his article with my own experiences.

For convenience, we assume that the SDK will be installed on a 32-Bit Fedora 12 system with SELinux disabled (it installs files all over the place). It is possible to run the SDK on 64-Bit systems with some tweaking but it’s absolutely unsupported.

So, let’s start by installing the N900 SDK provided by Nokia…It’s available directly from their website and corresponds to the current 1.1 firmware (version 2.2009.51-1). Nokia provides a nice GUI installer for the SDK in form of a Python script. Unfortunately it is targeted at Debian/Ubuntu systems and won’t directly install on Fedora.

We need to change 2 lines in the maemo-sdk-install-wizard_5.0.py script for it to install on Fedora:

Line 2449: cmd += sb_installer_fn + opt + “-s ” + SB_PATH
Line 2504: cmd += “%s -d -m %s -s %s” % (sdk_installer_fn, self.__sdk_inst_m_opt_arg, SB_PATH)

Alternatively, you can directly download a modified script from here if you trust me . We also need to install some packages with yum so satisfy dependences in the installer and later for development:

$ su -
# yum install kernel-(PAE if you have it)-devel gcc-c++ PyQt4 Xephyr
# chmod +x maemo-sdk-install-wizard_5.0.py
# ./maemo-sdk-install-wizard_5.0.py

The installer should start. Select a custom installation, then it’s a matter of clicking “next” a couple of times and wait for it to download and install all the required files…

When the installation ends, you will have a complete N900 emulator and compilation environment installed in /scratchbox and two icons on your desktop to launch the N900 emulator and access the online SDK documenttion. If you try to run the emulator now, it will fail…we have to do some further changes.

Edit /usr/local/bin/start_xephyr.sh and remove the “-kb” option from the Xephyr startup script, then run “/scratchbox/sbin/sbox_ctl start” as root or put this line in your /etc/rc.local file to have scratchbox startup automatically at boot time.

Now you should be able to run the N900 emulator by clicking the “Maemo 5 SDK” icon on your desktop…

At this point, you are pretty much up and running with a basic N900 emulator! In the next article, we are going to install QT 4.6 in the emulator, add some repositories and launch our first QT program!

Le programme complet est disponible sur le wiki de l’association.

EDIT: since KDE 4.4, options have been moved!

In OSX, the Dashboard is a “layer” you can superpose to your normal desktop. It’s activated by a button on your keyboard or by moving your mouse to an edge of the screen, so you can access it very quickly. On the Dashboard, you can drop little applications called Widgets, as you can see on the picture below. When you quit the dashboard, all these little widgets are hidden and don’t clutter your normal desktop.

OSX Dashboard I have stolen from Google Image

In Windows Vista/7 you can also add Widgets (called Gadgets), but they simply live on your normal desktop as far as I know. In KDE 4.3 there is a mix of both worlds; there is a Dashboard “layer” similar to what you find in OSX, but all the Widgets are also visible on you normal desktop when you quit the Dashboard view, so it’s cluttered.

Since KDE 4.3 (as far as I know) it’s possible to configure KDE’s Dashboard to behave exactly like in OSX, but the option to configure this is pretty well hidden…let’s see how to activate it in Fedora 12.

First, go to your upper-right corner and click on the little icon to manage your Widgets (it’s called the cashew), select “Zoom Out”…

You will be presented with the following screen, click on “Configure Plasma”…

Now activate the “Use a separate dashboard” option…

To quit the environment, click on the “Zoom In” icon under the desktop picture…

You are done, now you can activate your Dashboard (Ctrl+F12 or a configured screen corner) and throw little Widgets there…they won’t clutter you desktop anymore!

KDE 4.3 Dashboard under Fedora 12, looks quite similar to OSX

]]> http://www.alphatek.info/2009/11/01/fedora-configure-the-kde-dashboard-to-behave-like-in-osx/feed/ 2 http://www.alphatek.info/2009/11/01/im-giving-kde-4-a-shot-in-fedora-12/ http://www.alphatek.info/2009/11/01/im-giving-kde-4-a-shot-in-fedora-12/#comments Sun, 01 Nov 2009 09:05:27 +0000 Steven http://www.alphatek.info/?p=475 For many years, I have been an exclusive Gnome user for a couple of reasons:

• Its interface is pure and usable (aka. the nazi interface)
• It’s usable directly with the default Fedora installation, no tweaking needed
• Many of the UI ameliorations for PackageKit, NetworkManager and a ton of other small improvements have hit Gnome recently, thanks to all the major Linux distributions using it as their default desktop.
• I’m too lazy to try something else

So what’s wrong with Gnome? Well, nothing. I’m perfectly happy and productive with it, but there is also this shiny thing called KDE looking at me with sad little puppy eyes.

I know that the Fedora KDE SIG has worked very hard to propose a quality desktop experience in KDE, so I want to give it a shot for the Fedora 12 cycle…As usual, my mind put up a fight and refused change; what if I don’t get all my usability tools back? what if KDE was buggy? what if it was slow?

The only real way to give KDE 4.3 a fair shot was to reinstall my laptop with the Fedora 12 Beta DVD, only with the KDE desktop environment…so that’s what I did a couple of days ago. After the initial reboot, I found myself swimming in a scary world of unknown concepts. Here are some candid thoughts and problems I faced as a new user:

• In the default theme, the text under the icons on the desktop is black with a white halo. This is almost unusable as soon as you have a dark-ish background; so I switched the colour from black to white, like in Gnome.
• One feature I use everyday at work in Gnome is SSH Menu. It turns out that you can also save SSH bookmarks and group them in folders in Konsole. In the current version, you can’t open whole SSH groups though…it’s an already fixed bug so I guess that it will come in the next update.
• By default, file indexing and searching isn’t activated, and if you try to activate it via the GUI you will get an error. I found an explanation here and have rebuilt the soprano-backend-sesame2 RPM for Fedora 12 x86-64 if someone is interested.
• At each login, I have to unlock the keyring for the NetworkManager applet to be able to connect to WiFi networks, that’s annoying.
• To get an “usable” desktop for my work needs, it took 5-6x more time to configure the interface than in Gnome, there are LOTS of options everywhere.
• If like me you installed a standard Fedora (Gnome + GDM) and the added KDE, you may notice that your laptop doesn’t go to sleep when you close the lid. To resolve this problem, I had to switch from GDM to KDM as explained on the wiki.

Once tweaked, I’m pretty happy with KDE 4. The composition performance feels faster than Gnome + Compiz, and much better integrated.

It still doesn’t match all my needs but it’s very close to being as usable as Gnome…right now, you can feel that it isn’t as tightly integrated and tested with Fedora as Gnome is. Some things like special function keys on my keyboard work in Gnome and don’t in KDE for example.

Grab it on the Adobe Labs page and follow my instructions on this blogpost to install it. these instructions are valid for Fedora 10, 11 and basically any 64-Bit Linux OS.

So it was the perfect opportunity to look for another application…it turns out that Banshee is now a really great and mature product (if you don’t mind installing the Mono stack). It supports smart playlists, automatic cover art download, dynamic music library update, videos using the gstreamer back-end, online radios, podcasts AND an automatic synchronization to my Nokia phone! Wooohooo…the only drawback in comparison to Rhythmbox is that it doesn’t act as a DAAP music server.