[kde-linux] Very ugly image in X root window.

[Duncan]

James Tyrer posted on Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:58:56 -0700 as excerpted:

> Do I understand correctly that if you open a konsole and:
> 
>      killall plasma-desktop
> 
> that this image doesn't show up.  I currently have >= 4.7.3 built from
> source by hand -- actually, I use scripts but I wrote the scripts.

I've been busy and haven't updated anything at all since the first, so 
still have kde 4.7.2 here.

But no, killall plasma-desktop gives me a totally black screen, with the 
various windows (including my superkaramba monitor and the two claws-mail 
systray icons, which pop-up in little individual icon windows if there's 
no systray for them) superimposed, the black screen possibly being the 
result of that setting in the startkde script that we discussed up-thread.


FWIW, thinking about upgrades, I'm considering trying the 4.7.8x or 
whatever 4.8 betas that should be coming out right about now, instead of 
bothering with the rest of 4.7.  The techbase 4.8 scheduling article says 
it should be released November 23, which is still a couple weeks away, so 
there's a bit of time left it looks like, but I've seen a couple asegio 
blogged posts on 4.8 development, etc, as covered on phoronix, and from 
there on lxer, the feed of which I subscribe to in claws-feed (the claws-
mail instance I have setup with the feed-read plugin), and I'm thinking 
about it.

If you recall, I built the last 4.6.95 or whatever 4.7-rc2, and ran it a 
week or two before doing the full 4.7.0 upgrade after it came out, and 
that went well, so...

Now that I don't have anything akonadi or kdepim to get screwed up, and 
with firefox my default browser and all the semantic-desktop stuff 
compile-time-opt-outed, the functionalities of plasma, kwin and konsole 
are the worst risks I'm taking running the betas, no worries about losing 
a decade plus of mail or not being able to properly login to my bank's 
website, and if worse comes to worse, I can revert to my previous kde 
version, so I'm freer to run the betas than I have been.

Plus, since 4.5, with a couple of noted exceptions in 4.6 and the 
akonadifying of kdepim that ultimately forced me to jump to claws-mail 
after nearly a decade on kmail, kde4 has actually made it out of the 
alpha and beta stages for releases that it was in earlier in the 4.x 
cycle, and my customary stability level is upstream beta to release and 
distro development versions, so the betas should be right up my alley.

Alternatively, I may switch to the 4.7 "live" ebuilds here locally, 
pulling directly from (mostly switched over now) git, since that's a 
stable branch now.

The third alternative would be to wait for 4.7.80/4.8-beta1, and then 
switch to the 4.8 branch at that point, since it'll be well into 
stabilizing by then.  (Oct 27 was the soft feature freeze, Nov 3 the 
dependency freeze, yesterday the 10th was soft message, soft api and hard 
feature freeze, the 17th is supposed to be beta-1 tagging, the 23rd 
beta-1 release, and the 28th documentation freeze, all for 4.8.)  By 
beta-1, features are hard-frozen and messages and api are soft-frozen, 
and the risk of totally broken updates goes way down.  Thus, but for bugs 
that I can test and report on, if beta-1 is acceptably functional to cope 
with the raw edges, I should be able to safely run 4.8 branch and watch 
as those sharp edges get polished down for release.

In any case, I'm not sure I'll actually ever run 4.7.3 or later actual 
releases in the 4.7 series, as when I do update, it's likely to be to one 
of three: 4.7 live-branch, thus getting fixes before they're even 
released, 4.8 beta-1 and the pre-release path, or post-beta-1-4.8-live-
branch.

-- 
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