[kde-linux] I finally started on KDE4.. Problems with Samba, Dolphin and Folderview

[Duncan]

Bogus Zaba posted on Mon, 31 May 2010 21:30:01 +0100 as excerpted:

> I guess you would say I am not an early adopter, but I finally upgraded
> my Slackware 12.1 with KDE 3.5.10 to Slack 13.1 with shiny new KDE
> 4.4.3.

As I'd contend that kde4 is only with 4.4 now at what would ordinarily be 
a release candidate state, you're still a reasonably early adopter. =:^)

> Slackware has a reputation for providing packages pretty well as their
> developers intended with minimal customisation so I assume I am looking
> at a plain vanilla version of KDE 4.4.3.

Slackware is much like Gentoo, my distribution of choice, in that regard. 
=:^)  Differences with upstream tend to be in things like install path, so 
it fits the distribution, and such things as patches to allow compiling 
against newer library versions (or system libraries instead of bundled 
libraries), with more recent gccs or on less mainstream platforms, or to 
allow a user to choose CFLAGS and the like that might have been, contrary 
to community practice, hard-coded in the original.  And of course the 
usual security patches, before upstream cuts a new release with the 
security patch included, etc.

> Having missed out on much of the pain reported on this list I feel I
> have cheated a bit, but first impressions (after the inevitable hour
> spent asking myself "where is this / that?") are very positive. The
> minor questions below show that I have not discovered much that is wrong
> or even just not to my liking.
> 
> Biggest problem so far is with the samba

I don't do samba so will skip that question entirely...

> Small Dolphin problems : (a) When you ask for a "split" view, how do you
> know which of the two panes is the "current" pane - ie to which pane
> will operations such as "previous", "next", "up one level" apply when
> you click icons on the toolbar. The panes look identical to me - am I
> missing something really obvious ?

FWIW, I don't use dolphin that much myself, preferring the curses based mc 
(in a konsole window when in X/KDE) for sysadmin type tasks (because such 
tasks may include fixing a broken X, and I find it just works better for 
me to use the same tools consistently), and gwenview for graphics based 
user tasks (non-graphics based user tasks are again mc).  So I'm not as 
intimately familiar with it as some may be and I too could be missing 
stuff.

But IMO you're right, here.  I don't think split pane support is actually 
that mature yet.  krusader is the traditional kde split-pane file manager, 
and I think the dolphin devs expect people to use either it or konqueror 
for more than trivial split-pane tasks, at this point.  ...Or to simply 
use multiple dolphin windows.

However, provided the split-panes are browsing different directories, 
opening the terminal panel (view, panels, terminal) does provide a clue, 
assuming your shell prompt includes the PWD (present working directory, as 
a slack user you no doubt know that, but other readers may not), because 
its path stays synced with that of the current pane.

Alternatively, get used to quick-clicking the desired pane before invoking 
a pane-specific action. =:^\  As you specifically mentioned clicking icons 
in the toolbar, you're obviously using the mouse, so once you train 
yourself to quick-click the desired pane before clicking an action... tho 
honestly, I'd probably simply use konqueror/krusader or multiple-dolphin-
windows were it me.

BTW, as a previous kde3 user new to kde4, you may find yourself more 
comfortable with konqueror (or something else other than dolphin) for file 
management anyway, and appreciate this hint about a setting which you may 
not have yet discovered:  kcontrol[1], default applications, file 
manager.  Here, I have dolphin, konqueror, and qwenview, all three, 
installed and available as named options.  Presumably, if krusader was 
installed, it'd be a named option as well.  So while dolphin's the 
default, you're not stuck with it if you don't want to be! =:^)

> (b) What does the "Filter" do under
> the main file listing. I thought I would be able to type "*.ogg" to see
> all the ogg files, but pretty well whatever I type in there makes all
> the files disappear from the listing. Have I totally misunderstood what
> this is for ?

While that's what I thought too, you're over-thinking it.  Don't think 
shell-style wildcards (or regex either! =:^).  Forget what you "know" 
about computers, dumb yourself down a notch or two.  Think "contains".

IOW, try ".oog" instead of "*.ogg". (Presumably you don't have a file with 
the "*" character in the name, so the moment you type that, everything 
disappears.  Like I said, forget what you "know", dumb yourself down a 
notch or two... or three or four or fifty, and it suddenly makes perfect 
sense! =:^)

> Finally a small question about folderview on the desktop. I have created
> a folder view of a folder into which I have put some links to apps. I
> call one (for example) "Firefox" but on the desktop the icon is labelled
> "Firefox.Desktop" . Any way of removing the unwanted ".Desktop"
> extension ?

That's a feature, not a bug! =:^)

Actually, it's a security feature.  Seems that a couple years ago, someone 
tried adapting to Linux the old cracker technique of exploiting "MSWormOS" 
shortcuts, which don't show their extensions so can be used to trick 
unwary users into clicking what they think is a text file, to run what is 
actually a malware executable.  The similar X/freedesktop.org standard 
filetype is *.desktop files, and they found to their horror that it was 
equally possible to exploit these files to trick unwary users into running 
stuff on Linux.

The adopted solution to this security problem is that now, in any context 
other than an app-launcher context (for kde, the kickoff menu and various
app-launcher plasmoids are app-launcher context), in PARTICULAR, in a file 
management context where files of unrestricted generic type are shown 
(which naturally includes folderview plasmoids), *.desktop files, as 
others, show their COMPLETE name including extension, thus avoiding any 
possible confusion about filetype, hopefully making it difficult enough to 
trick unwary users into mistakenly clicking such files that
X/freedesktop.org systems never become "LinuxWormOS", via *THAT* 
particular method, at least!

So indeed, it's a feature.  You could of course patch it out for your own 
system, if desired, but I doubt you'll find any responsible person 
recommending it.

Meanwhile, the hubbub about that discovery was about the time of KDE 
3.5.9, IIRC.  At least the 3.5.10 update happened AFTER it, and in theory, 
should have contained a similar fix for kde3, especially since it was a 
security fix.  However, I'm not sure that anyone at kde was still focused 
enough on kde3 to care, so whether it got such a fix or not, I really 
don't know.  (FWIW, I ran 3.5.10 for a bit myself, and was aware of the 
security issue, but don't believe I ever tested it after that update, as I 
was soon enough focusing on fixing 4.2's brokenness enough to actually 
make it usable enough for me to run.)

> Thanks for any help. Generally I have to say that I am not tearing out
> my hair in the way that I thought I might be - no doubt due to the good
> work of the early adopters / testers.

=:^)  Tho like I said, /you're/ the early adopter.  Provided kdepim and 
the akonadi switch doesn't break things too much, 4.5, as actually 
predicted by some pundits before 4.0 (I was too optimistic at that point, 
and didn't get it until about 4.3), should finally be what would 
ordinarily be a decent x.0 release, quality-wise.  So since you're 
adopting it before that, you too count as an early adopter, coming in at 
what can best be described as the release candidate stage. =:^)

The folks that were running it before the beta-quality 4.3, including me, 
weren't early adopters.  Rather, they fell into two classes, the ones that 
seldom change anything from the defaults and were thus reasonably happy 
with the default functionality in 4.0-4.2, which actually worked 
reasonably well as long as you had reasonably capable graphics and didn't 
stray too far from the default settings, and the... for lack of a more 
appropriate description, flat-out masochists.  I'm definitely in the 
latter class.

----
[1] Aka systemsettings aka personalsettings, the kde 4.5 preview 
screenshots seem to indicate they've at least gotten enough sense to 
rename it personalsettings for 4.5.  That's still waaayyyy too generic and 
doesn't pass the googlability test like kcontrol does, but at least it's 
more accurate than systemsettings, when it's not systemsettings but 
normally user-specific and kde specific settings.

-- 
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