[kde-linux] KDE3 Apps to KDE4?

[Duncan]

David Baron posted on Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:24:03 +0200 as excerpted:

> I would love to graduate from KDE3, free up some space!
> 
> What might I still use from KDE3?

> Ksensors -- there is a plasma data-engine available for making a
> plasmoid to replace this but has a zillion items in it! Could set up a
> stupid/simpler one by parsing the output of the sensors command line.

This one's the major reason I bothered to reply at all.  Take a look at 
the yasp-scripted plasmoid on kdelook.  It can do all you mention and 
more, as you can display the STDOUT of any arbitrary command, so anything 
you can script or program to output to STDOUT can be displayed in text, 
plotter, or bargraph format.

I took quite some time creating scripts for it that I use.  I mailed them 
and a screenshot to the author, with the scripts now shipping with it, 
and a screenshot of all eight scripts running, available as well.

yasp-scripted (watch the link-wrap!)

http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Yasp-Scripted+(Systemmonitor)?
content=109367

Similar but a bit more complex is super-karamba, the themes of which 
plasma now supports directly.  Ultimately I may upgrade to that, 
especially since yasp-scripted seems to be almost a karamba-lite, with 
very recognizable similarities, but super-karamba was a bit too complex 
to start out with developing my own theme, and while there's many themes 
available on kdelook, none of the ones I could find matched my needs 
directly, so I would have had to develop my own theme.

If you want something simpler, more "user level", consider "the 
application formerly known as ksysguard", aka "system monitor" in kde4.  
(Unfortunately, "system monitor" is way too generic to properly identify 
it, as there's all sorts of "system monitor" plasmoids as well, but 
there's unfortunately no plasmoid to replace the ksysguard kicker applet 
from kde3.)  The caveat there is that "TAFKAK" continues to have serious 
customization bugs on kde4 -- it saves customizations and reloads them, 
but then refuses to use what it just reloaded, overwriting all the 
configured min/max etc values with its own defaults.  Maybe by kde 4.4 or 
4.5, it'll be actually workable as a general system/sensor monitor...

> Guarddog -- this is an understandable firewall builder for iptables.

YMMV of course, but I've always found such tools either too limited for 
my needs, or less understandable than directly configuring iptables 
itself, using the command-line tools that ship with it.

So I do my own firewall config using the native iptables, iptables-save, 
etc, command-line tools.

> Recoll-applet -- I am not using this applet now but something like this
> is needed for us diehards that are resisting nepomuk (all those daemons
> bog down kde4). A plasmoid and a runner simply running recoll and
> parsing its stdout like the qalculate applets and runners do with qalc?
> Should not be overly difficult--might try to do them using the qalc ones
> as templates?

No nepomuk here (indeed, with only a very slow redlan native code backend 
and the Sesame2 backend based on Java, and with iced-tea being the only 
reasonable freedomware Java-VM implementation and it still being 
relatively immature especially on anything other than 32-bit x86, the 
issues are... complex... but with the new faster native code 
"Virtuoso" (sp?) backend hopefully available for 4.4 in February, that 
may change), but I'm not familiar with recoll either.  However, I've 
never found those search indexers particularly useful (vs. the hassle) 
for me anyway, and in fact have no locate or similar system even setup, 
here.  If I need it, grep works reasonably well for reasonably focused 
searches, and I normally have at least /some/ idea where the target data 
is at, so that's generally good enough.  Well, that and the package 
management tools I have installed, for searching the package repository...

> Kdevelop -- a premiere app!! When, o when? Been using netbeans for C++
> as well as Java (can do ruby and php as well).

As you probably know, there's a kde4 version under development.  I don't 
have it installed as I'm not a developer, but I know people using the 
live version.  Someday there'll be a release, but I'm not following it 
closely enough to know the roadmap/timeframe.

> Rosegarden -- one of the more mature Linux sound apps but tied to kde3
> and will not work, at least by me, in kde4. WIP "thorn" will be qt4, no
> kde4 deps.

That's not my area, but Rosegarden is indeed a major sound app, so I 
agree this is a valid issue for a lot of folks.  But your mention of the 
WIP "thorn" being qt4 is already way more info than I knew, so I've 
nothing to add there.  If you know the timeframe, however, please post it 
so I can keep it on file, as I do know a number of folks who'd find that 
information useful.

> Kisa -- cute live spell checker/search interface. Was ported but with
> all the bugs intact. No new version for a while now.

I've no idea on that one.  I use the native aspell based functionality, 
supplemented with online googles (generic sense, onelook and wikipedia as 
well as google included) where desired.

> KDE interfaces for boinc (works in KDE4) and flightgear (works, but
> out-of- sync with current fgfs).

Haven't the foggiest.  Not my interest at all.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman