Konqueror 5.0.97 issues

[Duncan]

Jerome Yuzyk posted on Sun, 17 Jun 2018 11:34:00 -0600 as excerpted:

> [Konqueror 5.0.97 on Fedora 28 updated just this morning]
> 
> Because of a disk crash I had to replace my /dev/sda which previously
> had Fedora 25 on it. Fortunately I keep /home on /dev/sdb so I installed
> Fedora 28 on a new /dev/sda and all appears to go well.

FWIW sysadmin's first rule of backups:  How much you value your data 
isn't defined by arbitrary claims, but by how many backups you consider 
it worth having of that data.  No backups simply means you're defining 
the data to be of such low value it's not worth the time/trouble/
resources necessary to do that backup.

So no problem.  Simply switch to the backup of your fedora 25 install and 
you should be back in business.

Of course if you didn't have one, that just means you didn't define the 
value as high enough to have that backup, and you still saved what was 
most important to you, the time/trouble/resources that would have 
otherwise gone into making the backup, had the data been worth more to 
you.  In that case you gotta live without, reinstalling what's currently 
available, apparently fedora 28 at this point.

> Except for Konqueror in 3 annoying ways:

FWIW I left konqueror behind back in the kde4 era, when it became very 
evident that it wasn't getting timely security-fix releases suitable to 
usage for online banking, etc.  The kde devs were treating it more like a 
toy than a browser where security actually mattered, and that simply 
wasn't suitable for my primary browser usage.  And once it was no longer 
my primary browser it was just easier not to bother with it at all, so it 
was soon uninstalled.

Never-the-less, I can answer certain aspects of your questions, anyway, 
and hopefully be of at least some help with that. =:^)

> 1. I can't open more than one instance from the K Menu or the Quick
> Launcher anymore.
> 
> Using either of those just opens the one already-open Konqueror, even
> across Desktops. Links opened from KMail do open in a new window, but if
> Konqueror window crashes, it takes the all down.
> 
> Totally the opposite of what Konqueror has done forever. That instance-
> independence is one of Konqueror's greatest features and why I still
> prefer it for all my commodity browsing.
> 
> Using System Activity (Ctrl-Esc) and searching for Konqueror shows me
> the single konqueror process and one more more (they seem to be reaped
> down to 0 eventually) "http.so" processes, something I've never seen
> before.

Assuming you're running a full plasma desktop, those http.so processes 
are very likely to be plasmashell updating whatever online resources you 
have configured in various plasmoids, picture-of-the-day (potd) 
wallpapers, etc.  That's what they are here, as I said, without konqueror 
even installed, so they're unrelated to it.

Note that due to the way tcp works, even after the update completes these 
processes will normally stick around for a little bit (typically 
minutes), allowing the tcp socket that was used to close properly.  If 
you run netstat -4 -6 (or the newer appropriate command, ss I believe, 
but I'm familiar with and use the older netstat) in a konsole/terminal 
window, it should list the still open sockets and their state, and with 
the -p option, you'll get the program that's using them as well (tho 
you'll need to run netstat as root to get full program info).  Netstat 
will also show the host connected to, which will likely give you a hint 
which plasma resource was being updated by that connection.

Alternatively you can use something like htop to list the open files of 
the http.so process and see the open sockets among them, there, tho it'll 
be harder to find them among all the other open files that way.

Regardless, once the tcp socket that was used for the resource update 
completes its normal shutdown process, the http.so process that invoked 
it should go away as well, that being why those processes go away 
eventually.

Meanwhile, FWIW, for a still kde-based konqueror-web replacement, you 
might wish to try falkon, formerly qupzilla.  It's QtWebEngine based, 
with qtwebengine in turn being qt's modern webkit-based web-content 
module, which is kept much more current (and security-updated... at least 
if your distro keeps reasonably current qt, some distros don't) than the 
now deprecated qtwebkit.

https://www.falkon.org

I personally prefer a fuller-featured, multi-threaded and webkit-
extension compatible browser like the mainline chromium (chrome's 
freedomware version, which I run now) or the newer "quantum" firefox 
(which I used from when I switched from konqueror until recently, but why 
I switched from it can be another post if you're interested), but it 
appears you're interested in something a bit lighter and kde-based, and 
falkon does fit that quite well, but as I said IMO should get better 
security support than konqueror due to its qtwebengine base, which gets 
that support.

> 2. Even though I have "Open links in new tab instead of new window" set,
> and "Open new tabs in the background" un-set, middle-clicking on any
> link opens a new tab in the background.
> 
> This actually looks like a bug. Setting "Open new tabs in the
> background" actually makes them open in the foreground as before.
> 
> Dolphin seems similarly afflicted.
> 
> 3. I used to use kfmclient openProfile FileManagement to use Konqueror
> for file management since I always found Dolphin wanting and having to
> use it now finds it still wanting. Apparently that's not available
> anymore.
> 
> Is there any way to get my old 2-panel (tree on the left, list on the
> right) Konqueror file manager back?

If you've never tried krusader, you might give it a try.  It's a kde-
based twin-panel "commander style" file-manager, not quite like konqueror 
since traditional commander style has a file window on each side and you 
do operations between them, but you may well either find that works for 
you as well/better, or that you can configure it as you like.

The advantage of something like krusader is that because it's not a 
default part of kde-plasma (that being the desktop environment and its 
regular components, now, in kde/frameworks/plasma/apps5, not just 
plasmashell, as was the case in kde4), it's pretty much just the people 
that like it that use it or care about it, meaning it's out of the 
mainline development focus and doesn't have the constant pull on it to 
"do it 'properly'", whatever changing definition of "properly" might be 
in vogue at the moment, that the mainline stuff like dolphin and (less 
so) konqueror have on them.

Meaning unlike the more mainline/default stuff, krusader should continue 
to "just work" pretty much as it always has.

The one worry about such a thing would be that it gets far enough from 
mainline that it loses enough of a following to keep it viable, and it's 
dropped, much like superkaramba, for instance.  Fortunately, from what 
I've seen, krusader has a reasonably loyal following and enough devs to 
keep it viable, as it continues to be so from kde3 era, thru kde4 and now 
kde-frameworks/apps-5.  I've no reason to believe that's likely to 
change, tho if you're worried about it, you might wish to check it out 
more thoroughly, perhaps checking for a developer list and asking there, 
etc.

Tho FWIW I've never used krusader myself, but that's because I spend 
enough of my time in the CLI to prefer mc (midnight commander), a 
terminal-based "semi-gui" commander-style file manager, since I can use 
it pretty much the same at a text login or in a konsole/terminal window.  
I do actually like the two-panel "commander" file-manager concept, and 
would probably prefer krusader if I were more comfortable with a full GUI 
than at the CLI and with the mc "semi-gui".

(Basically, here I use mc when I'm doing admin-hat file-management tasks 
or just editing/managing text files (admin or user) or for sound-media 
files (user), and gwenview when I'm doing image/video-media user file 
management tasks, and there's not much else I deal with, so dolphin's 
"good enough" for the trivial gui-needing stuff that remains.) 

> And a follow-on: Where do Konqueror settings live these days? I've
> accumulated a few konquerorc files over the years/Fedoras. For that
> matter, how can a fella tell where KDE settings are these days? Are
> there reference docs of some sort? I could do a bunch of date
> comparisons, but a reference would be handier.

As a rule of thumb, anything kde5/plasma5/frameworks5 related, including 
modern konqueror, should use the XDG-standardized locations for both 
settings and data, honoring the XDG_* set of environmental variables if 
you wish to place them elsewhere than the default.  For user settings, 
that's under ~/.config/ by default, with corresponding system settings 
(that the user settings normally override) in /etc/xdg.  There's also the 
application data locations, ~/.local/share and /usr/share by default.  As 
mentioned, however, the XDG_* vars, in this case XDG_CONFIG_HOME, if set, 
will change that default (from ~/.config).

There are indeed reference docs.  What you're looking for is the 
administration guide.  Unfortunately, I just looked at kde.org and while 
I quickly found links to the user-focused documentation and the developer-
focused documentation, the power-user/admin-focused stuff wasn't so 
easily found as a direct link, at least that I could see! =:^(  But I 
know it's there as I've used it before!

So trying it from a different angle... googling kde environmental vars... 
looks like it's on userbase now...

https://userbase.kde.org/KDE_System_Administration

In particular, look under filesystem, xdg hierarchy.  There's also the kde 
hierarchy page, but that's mostly kde4 stuff and thus now outdated.  
Meanwhile, if you want more on the xdg stuff, there's a link from there 
to the xdg specifications pages on freedesktop.org, too.

-- 
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