Observations on KDE 4.2 in wip

Hi all,

I thought I'd share some observations about KDE 4.2 in wip, in case
anyone's interested to know.  Overall, my experience has been positive.
Thanks are due to Mark Davies, who's clearly the "KDE guy" for pkgsrc.

The wip/kde4 TODO file says: "Does this work with native X11?  Only
tried with modular-xorg. (no it doesnt) there appear to be some build
issues with native xorg.  Does this work on netBSD < 4.0?"  This might
not be news to anyone, but I can attest that it builds fine with the
native xorg in 5.0_RC1.  (That is, I have no idea if any of the few
glitches I'm seeing are due to xorg interactions, but by and large,
everything's working.)

There are some minor issues I've encountered to date.  (I checked the
TODO file to see if any of these things were mentioned, but I didn't
see them.)  Nothing I've run into is a "show-stopper" for me.

- Every time I hit Alt-F2 to use KRunner, it crashes almost right away,
and dumps core.  (I haven't checked to see why, yet.)
- The Akonadi service tries to start itself and fails every time, e.g.
after I try to use KRunner or Kopete.  (It seems very descriptive in
its error message.)
- The "new" mode start menu simply doesn't work for me.  It draws an
initial outline of a window on the screen and then never fills it in.
Switching it to "classic" mode works fine (which I prefer anyway).
- The Plasma component occasionally randomly crashes and restarts
itself, but other than the mild annoyance factor, this seems to be
harmless.

I might also mention that if one has existing config directories left
over from KDE3 under their home directory (or Gnome bits in the Desktop
directory, for that matter), there are some other little negative
interactions that can occur, e.g. the icons for applications show on
the task bar, but the names don't, or icons in the default desktop
Plasmoid will all show question marks.  Clearing out those directories
fixed things for me.  (I see the TODO file also references the idea of
migrating some of this data.)

Regards,

Dave



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