Plasma UI issues on a fresh suse 11.4 (and ideas towards solving them)

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Tuesday, May 31, 2011 22:56:37 Richard Moore wrote:
> I did a fresh install of suse 11.4 yesterday, and the result was less
> polished than I would have hoped. Here's what I spotted and some
> suggestions for addressing them:
> 
> After a few things had launched, knetworkmanager vanished. I know in
> retrospect that it was simply that the notification area got too big
> and it was hidden. The arrow indicating the hidden icons is currently
> too difficult to spot unless you know what it is, perhaps it could
> flash when it is initially created (possibly with some animation that
> things are moving there) so that people will know to look for it (i
> didn't). Alternatively, perhaps simply changing the colour of the icon
> would help - I think my confusion was a result of thinking the arrow
> was simply another app sitting in the status area.
> 
> Once I couldn't get access to knetworkaccessmanager, I tried launching
> it from the command line and got no output and no visibility. I'm
> guessing it's a kuniqueapplication so it will only run once. notmart
> suggested a fix here would be to make the notifier status 'notify'
> when newInstance is called.
> 
> The next issue I hit was a wifi problem (the root cause was not KDE's
> fault in anyway) unfortunately it wasn't handled well by the GUI
> either. The first issue was poor diagnostics - I didn't get a gui
> message that a firmware blob was needed, and instead had to look in
> /var/log/messages. I suspect this is an underlying NetworkManager
> issue. Installing the blob didn't fix things (not KDE's fault either)
> but I did start to get lots of popup notifications from
> KNetworkManager. Unfortunately whenever I tried to use the context
> menu to access it and see what was up, another notification would
> appear, and in the process cancel the menu. This was incredibly
> frustrating. I'm not quite sure how we can handle this, but perhaps a
> strategy similar to the one used by syslog of reverting to 'repeated X
> times' might be a good idea.

I think most of it is fixed by using the network management plasmoid instead 
of knetworkmanager, though I don't think it'd help the firmware issue.

> One thing I must say is that I do like the new icons for the status
> area, it no longer looks like it was designed by a lover of hawaiian
> shirts.
-- 
sebas

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