[kde-linux] KNotes Migration Tool: ARGH!!!!

[Alex Schuster]

James Tyrer writes:

> I really don't care if (some of) the developers hate me because I am
> too much like Steve Jobs.  I was born that way.  I just think that
> this stuff should work correctly before it escapes into the wild
> instead of being like Ebola -- a nightmare for users.

I feel with you :)  Although I prefer to not phrase this like I feel. To
be honest, KDE 4 is the greatest disappointment in my computer life. It
still feels beta to me, there are so many small bugs and annoyances, it
feels so untested. And then there's problems like this one - I really
miss my notes.
Baloo (Nepomuk replacement) is another thing. It was indexing for days,
then I tried to stop it somehow by excluding ALL folders Nepomuk was
indexing, but till I had some process running for days until it stopped.
Feels like years ago, when KDE was indexing all ma data over and over
again, never ever stopping.

Some problems might come from me using Gentoo and often fresh versions
of KDE. But I also had problems on simple installations running
OpenSUSE, where plasma-desktop used to crash regularly. I once set KDE
up together with a Windows user, and it was really embarrassing, we
found so many small problems.

But I'm hooked, and want to stay with KDE. I really want the
flexibility. Window rules for example, like mplayer starting per default
on all virtual desktops, borderless, on top. The possibility to group
windows together. I tried Gnome 3 and was very disappointed.

I don't use Kontact any more due to unusabililty. maybe I should find
more replacements for things like KNotes. Or even use another desktop
environment, with my beloved kwin as window manager.

Anyway. It's open source, so I can't be angry. I'm sure the developers
do their best. Seems like they had way too high ambitions, and
underestimated how big a task this KDE 4 project would be. But it's hard
to know tis beforehand. Maybe they also expected mor efunding, I believe
in the KDE 3 days more devs were actually being paid for their work. So,
I'm thankful for their work, and just hope it will become mature
eventually. But then, I fear that the same trouble will start again with
KDE 5.

> What am I supposed to do with the: KNotes Migration Tool?
> 
> It said that it would take a quite a while to run.  Well, it has
> been running about 6 hours (AMD 4400+) and it has eaten _ALL_ my
> alarms from KAlarm.  There were pop up error messages to go with
> that, but it now appears to be doing nothing but hanging on to a very
> small amount of CPU time.  The last line in the message window is:
> 
> Root fetch finished
> 
> The button to close the window has not activated and I have no idea
> what the little window is for.  Drag help doesn't work (why is it
> there?) <F1> doesn't produce any help.
> 
> Is it safe to kill this? or should I let it run for a few days? :-^)

Apparently it's not doing anything any more, so I'd kill it. Try to
start it manually then (knotes-migrator --interactive), maybe it works
tis time. I doubt it, this utility did not work for me, too.

Next you can try to remove the KNotes Akonadi resource and re-create it.
I'm not on my Linux PC right now, there is some GUI utility for this.
There's also akonaditray, which can launch it.
remove your knotes resources, create a new one, and point it to the
location of your current knotes. For me, it is
~/.kde4/share/apps/knotes/notes.ics - you can open it in a text editor
and verify it has the correct content.
For some people, this helped. Not for me though :)  I don't know how to
get them back. I'll set up a fresh user account, start KDE, and try to
import this file from there, then I'll see if it can work at all on my
system. I hope it's some glitch in my config, maybe because I always
updated since I started with KDE 4.2, and it just needs a start from
scratch. Some people suggested this to me. Feels like Windows, doesn't it.

	Good luck,
	Wonko