KWin - non-KDE apps - taskbar - showstopper?

[Dr. Juergen Pfennig]

On Tuesday 27 July 2004 10:46, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> Hello,
>  I recently noticed fullscreen in MPlayer didn't work very well, and I had
> to change fullscreen handling a bit to fix it. KDE apps should be
> unaffected, and I'm quite convinced I got it right even for non-KDE apps,
> but since apps developers are very inventive at new unexpected ways of
> doing things, please test your favourite non-KDE fullscreen app and
> complain now rather than after

Lubos, I am using Mplayer in a software project, maybe the following problem 
is related to that fact. The 2nd part of this mail is for you (and not 
directly related to the problem described in part 1):

-------- 1st part: a very severe bug in KDE 3.3 -------

I have a strange problem with KDE 3.3 that could be related to a non-KDE app 
(otherwise other people should have the same problem?).  The bug causes the 
taskbar applet to show a single entry like "X   " and nothing more. But I 
believe that the X stands for Ksmserver? In my setup (SuSE rpms 19.8.2004 and 
24.8.2004) the problem shows up after working a while with a fresh KDE (and 
with .kde folders being migrated from 3.2 also). It can be "recovered" for a 
while by removing the taskbar applet and adding it again. The "fix" does not 
survive the session - at next login the "X  " is back - immediately after 
startup. The bug makes it very unpleasant to work with KDE 3.3.

-------- 2nd part: kwin and mplayer work nicely together -------

Thank you Lubos
Very inventive - yes ... Sorry answering your mail so late. The simple answer 
is: mplayer 1.0pre5 works great with KDE 3.3 - A very nice feature is that 
the full-screen mode is not "hard" - you can get KDE windows on top of the 
mplayer window and that is very good. I run a little DVB (digital TV and 
Radio via Sat/cable or terrestrial broadcast) project that recommends mplayer 
(although xine and kaffeine are supported), see 
http://www.j-pfennig.de/zapdvb/news.html for info. The software includes a 
set settop box mode that boots a (SuSE) Linux under runlevel 4 into a 
half-initialized KDE. The KDE startup is reduced to:

$KDEDIR/krootimage $ZAPDATA/tvout_boot
$X11DIR/xsetroot -cursor_name left_ptr
LD_BIND_NOW=true $KDEDIR/kdeinit --no-kded --suicide +kcminit +knotify
$KDEDIR/kwin &

The GUI  of that project is still based on kdialog (ECMA script in future), if 
the user wants he can get a full KDE session. Otherwise it's likely that 
mplayer is used in full screen mode. This all works great, and I wanted to 
give you just a little feedback what inventive people can do with your window 
manager.

Jürgen