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

[Richard Moore]

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.

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. :-)

Cheers

Rich.