[kde-freebsd] KDE4-Packages Test Result

[Hannes Hauswedell]

Hi everyone,
after not having been able to test area51 I thought I could at least give the 
new packages a try.
First of all, thanks for the porting efforts, I am sure its a lot of work and a 
pain at times.

I am running FreeBSD7 and installed the binary Pkgs as described.
Here's my observations:

PERFORMANCE:
- the overall performance when desktop effects are turned off feels very 
good, i.e. the overall desktop feels very responsive: applications boot fast, 
alt-f2 app-choser is fast; typing and spellchecking is fast, switching 
desktops and minimizing windows is fast etc.
BUT:
- when desktop effects are turned on, the desktop is really slow. As soon as 
an effect is used (minimizing, transparency or wobble), the fps go down to 3 
or 4 (from about 60 in "idle")
-  even with effects turned off resizing plasma-widgets is not possible in real-
time (I resize and wait at least 5 seconds before something happens).
[I know these problems have been reported for nvidia-cards, but I am using 
an intel-GMA, that works flawlessly otherwise. I have 1GB of Ram and a 
CoreDuo at 1.66Ghz...]

other performance issues:
- konqueror is slow on opening new tabs. I think that was reported already.
- the desktop takes quite long to boot up.
- if you klick "find files and folders" in the old-style menu, it takes about 20 
seconds to start
- in regular effects-off-mode kded4 uses around 13% of my cpu, is that 
normal?

SOUND:
My sound doesn't work. Using the xine-backend lets juk and dragon play 
media, but I just don't hear anything. Switching the backend while running 
dragon or juk, crashes the application. Both dragon and juk won't play any 
media when gstreamer is selected as backend.
Note that when using xine manually and manually choosing OSS as sound-
output, xine works flawlessly. Is there no way to configure the backend 
manually to use OSS? If that isn't possible (although I don't see why it 
shouldnt) and autoselection fails, should the xine-phonen-backend for 
freebsd be patched to *allways* use OSS?

General Bugs + Application crashes:
- Plasma wont remember any settings and I always start out with an empty 
desktop, no panels. This wasnt the case when starting kde first-time, but it 
is now and its quite annoying.
- Trying to install a plasmoid via khotnewstuff2 crashes the entire desktop (or 
maybe only plasma, but I could fix the situation)
- Kmail crashed once, but not reproduceably
- kde completely crashed once on exiting.
- konqueror crashes quite often because of different issues, konqueror also 
tries to repeatedly restore a session although an instance of konqueror is 
already running that has that session restored. kio-http randomly crashes to 
the point where I have to restart an instance of konqueror to get http working 
(it tells me that the http-protocol handler is incompatible or sth.like that)


And then there's all sorts of little bugs that probably are not freebsd-
related, but I'll count them up, in case you think differently:
- Trying to put the locationbar in the maintoolbar crashes konqueror
- starting with empty tab in konqueror is bugged, the tab-bar and the tab 
arent shown correctly (entering an address solves the problem though).
- kopete and jabber dont work (that was reported IIRC)
- if you turnoff menubar in konqueror and switch to a different tab it 
reappears...

Hm, I think thats it for now. If you need more information let me know (I am 
subscribed to the list).
Thanks for you efforts, hope to be of more help in the future...

Greetings
Hannes