Experiences with KDE-CVS at LinuxWorldExpo

[Martijn Klingens]

On Sunday 03 November 2002 00:25, Kurt Pfeifle wrote:
> Clearly KDE currently isn't ready for the task. Or, maybe *I* am not.
> I know there was (is?) this project group working on a "kiosk" mode.
> I am not aware about their latest status. Maybe someone can point
> me to a website and name people who are experts in this. But there
> clearly was not much expertise on this subject amongst the KDE
> developers and KDE power users present in our team at LWE. I think
> for anybody who wants the advance of KDE on the Linux/Unix desktop
> this is one of the key technologies we need. (It might not be the
> most fun to hack on this stuff for most developers).

There is a mailing list for the kiosk stuff, kde-kiosk at kde.org. It's a very 
low-traffic list at the moment, but nevertheless especially the archives are 
already a nice resource for people who want to admin more than one or two KDE 
systems. It's not only about kiosk stuff, there are also people subscribed 
who have large-scale KDE 2.2 installations _currently_ in production.

The main kiosk developer is Waldo Bastian, so when his ADSL is finally up and 
running in France you could ask him for more info. Preferably through the 
kiosk list so it ends up in the archives.

Lastly, there's the README.kiosk file in kdelibs/kdecore in the source tree. 
The kiosk framework got quite a few useful additions for 3.1.

> * KDE needs to have an easy to configure desktop in "kiosk" mode.
> * KDE needs to have an interface to draw the user configuration
>    for each user from a database (where each single application
>    allowed or denied for a user is defined).

These items are not there yet, at least not in the way you describe.

> * KDE needs utilities which make it easy for an administrator to
>    configure, roll out and run 1000 user desktops (a "lost" configuration
>    must be restored within a minute or less).

Using normal unix tools this is easy to achieve, but there are no KDE 
frontends that I'm aware of available yet.

> * KDE need at the same time to retain the flexibility to have all
>    these 1000 settings different (for different needs).

That's the user's home dir. The $KDEDIRS system caters for almost all of this.

> * KDE needs to be able to serve the same user profile to a users
>    wherever he logs in (a different physical machine, but the same
>    desktop and user profile).

This is achieved by having the home dir on shared storage, like NFS. This has 
always been the traditional way to do it, and currently is the only way that 
really works and is proven to work.

I've been thinking about other ways, but it really doesn't make a lot of 
sense. Using something more secure than NFS might be an idea, but whatever 
option you pick, it does end up with shared storage on the unix level, well 
outside the KDE realm. I don't think KDE has much to do here.

> -----
> * 2 *
> -----
> * the many blue colors in the icons make them look too similar.
> * people didn't like the all-in-blue icon for "home" at all (it
>    also turns round if zoomed by 180 degrees which they regard as
>    a bug).
> * if konsole, konq (web browser), konq (file browser) and kcontrol
>    were open at the same time, no-one was able to find their minimized
>    icons in the kicker without heavy delay.
> * even 5 minutes of "exercising" didn't help -- people often had to
>    hoover the mouse over the icons to wait for the tooltips to pop
>    up before they decided to click, or they often maximized the wrong
>    window
> * I asked a few people (from whom I knew are using KDE for years) to
>    pen konsole, kcontrol and konqueror. Most did by using minicli and
>    typing in the commands. However, when they were asked to maximize
>    again they were stunned: they  were all looking for a "black icon"
>    for konsole and a "green icon"...

Exactly my problems. Even after quite a few weeks I am still clicking randomly 
clicking on file manager windows, konq browsers and konsoles in the taskbar, 
and sometimes even when starting them through kicker. The new konsole icon is 
beautiful in style, but the choice of colours is very poor. If the terminal 
is black it would be a *lot* better. Likewise, the globe of the Konq 
webbrowsing icon could use green continents, instead of being all-blue...

On the whole I like the crystal icons a lot, they are definitely of extremely 
high quality and generally very usable too, but these two icons stand out 
negatively if you ask me.
-- 
Martijn