[kde-linux] K3b

[Duncan]

Louis Hinman posted on Wed, 04 Aug 2010 15:23:41 -0400 as excerpted:

> I am running KDE 4.2.4 on Slackware 13.0.  I downloaded
> debian-505-i386-netinst.iso, and tried to burn it to a CD, using K3b.
> 
> However, I find that when I open K3b,  the spinning icon that shows that
> it's using the CPU never stops.  If I select the .iso file, the Burn
> Image window reports "File not Found".
> 
> Any thoughts?

I'm not sure this is your problem, but it's worth checking.

k3b requires that hal be installed and hald running in ordered to properly 
detect the CD/DVD devices.  Hal is deprecated and systems are moving to 
udev detection or other alternatives (policy-kit, etc) as appropriate, 
directly, rather than using hal, but even kde 4.4 and the recently 
released k3b 2.0 require it for some functionality, including, it would 
seem, CD/DVD device detection.

I run gentoo here, and they omit the k3bsetup component, which checks for 
and allows the user to fix device permissions issues, etc, because Gentoo 
handles those a different way.  But by default, k3b will run a sanity 
check and the setup component at start, checking this sort of thing, and 
popup a message with suggestions for fixing issues, if found.  Without hal 
and without the k3bsetup component, k3b starts, but doesn't detect any 
devices.  It's possible that with the component, but without hald running 
as a system service, the detection routine goes into an infinite loop of 
some sort, thus the continued spinning icon, and that the burn image 
window error is referring to the CD/DVD device file, not found as it's 
trying to use hal to detect it and hal isn't running, not the ISO file.

Meanwhile, I finally switched to kde4 with 4.2.4 myself, so I know whereof 
I speak in this regard.  4.2 is a year and a half old now, and was still 
incredibly buggy.  Personally, I didn't and do not consider kde 4.2 even 
worth the 4.0 version label.  It's early beta quality at best, more like 
late alpha.

But each six-month release version, 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4 (with 4.5 to 
release this week, I believe, very soon in any case), has been 
**DRAMATICALLY** better than previous versions, with the monthly micro-
releases (4.2.4 being the fifth and last in the 4.2 series, including the 
initial 4.2.0) fixing bugs within the minor release, but being far more 
incremental in nature.

As such, 4.3 was the first one I'd call usable even at a beta level, or 
recommend even for the so-called "early adopters" (in which I include 
myself, since I'm always running the testing version of my distribution, 
if not unmasking stuff not even in testing yet, and running packages still 
in the overlays, not in the main tree yet, and compiling from live VCS 
sources isn't unusual for me either), let alone normal users.

4.4 reached a decent release candidate level, reasonably functional and 
without many serious bugs, but still needing a bit of polish.  It is my 
hope that 4.5 will finally reach what I'd call a decent .0 release level 
-- what /should/ have been labeled 4.0.

Given that, I'd SERIOUSLY suggest upgrading to a kde 4.4, because as I 
said, the 4.2.4 version you're running is simply so hopelessly buggy as to 
not be worth troubling yourself with unless you're a masochist, 
particularly now, with not only 4.3, but 4.4 and soon to be 4.5 (maybe 
it's already released and I haven't seen the announcement yet), released, 
with at least 4.3 and 4.4 each being so dramatically more functional and 
less buggy than the previous, that it's not even funny.

Of course, for all I know, that's what your Debian install ISO was 
intended to be for.  If so, it's possible you'll need to use something 
else, possibly the command line cdrdao/cdrecord/wodim, to get it burned.  
(From what I read of Slackware, using the commandline apps shouldn't be as 
unreasonable a request as it might be for, say, an Ubuntu user.  Slack 
guys are at least supposed to know what a manpage is, I believe.  Not that 
there aren't command line literate Ubuntu users, but...)

-- 
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