Stefan aka Noneus

I recently decided to use Kde4 again. I ran in a problem with phonon. It didn’t use my dmix setup. Well I got it working. Phonon detects devices with a new alsa command in the asound.conf called ‘hint’. Here is my new /etc/asound.conf and ~/.asoundrc:

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "dmixer"
}
pcm.dsp0 {
type plug
slave.pcm "dmixer"
}
pcm.dmixer {
type dmix
ipc_key 1024
slave {
pcm "hw:0,0"
period_time 0
period_size 1024
buffer_size 8192
rate 44100 #many new cards are 48000 only
}
bindings {
0 0
1 1
}
hint {
show on
description "Onboard Soundcard"
}
}
ctl.dmixer {
type hw
card 0
}

On the lines 25-28 is the part so Phonon find it. Now you can setup Phonon with your new sound device. It has to be on top for all outputs. (I had to set all of them separately.)

So I finally was curious what the KDE-team has done over the last weeks and build KDE4 from svn again. The frist thing I noticed is, that archlinux is already geared up for the kde4 release. All dependencies, which don’t come in the extra-repository, are now in testing. So I didn’t need to build these. After a few hours everything was up. I logged in and well. After 1min trying the desktop I found out the desktop itself (with the plasma-panel) is still in beta-state at best. So I wen to the systemsettings application to configure KDE to my liking. First thing I looked up was keyboard-shortcuts since there weren’t any to configure the last time I tried. Now there are. But not really many. And I still can’t bind the Windows aka Meta aka Super key properly. But hey. That’s not a showstopper for me. So after I set everything to my liking I started applications that didn’t work that well in my previous KDE4 tries. First up was Kopete. I had one crash I couldn’t reproduce but other than that evrything seems to work fine. One major thing in my previous KDE4 tries that was failing was konqueror. It randomly crashed. Now it’s pretty solid. Haven’t had crash yet. (I sort of expect one.) All the other apps, that I use, bundled with KDE work with no issues.
Next up was a big one for me: Amarok. I still remember an Amarok developer saying something like: “Oh we will be release ready for KDE4.” He even said they will finish 1 month early. And is that so? Not really. Amarok is pretty much unusable. I hope they get the rest of the stuff in quickly.
Well to summarize. Some apps are pretty much done and are ready for the 4.0 release on January 11th. But so much is not. They are calling stuff a “Release Candidate” which cleary (from a user perspective) is barely beta. I really want to point out: “from a user perspective” As Aaron Seigo stated on the Linux Action Show it’s called “Release Candidate”, because the underlying libraries are in a rc state. They did it so people start porting their apps. I think this move is wrong. You can call it rc if all if is rc. Not just the underlying libs. But hey. Why am I complaining? I didn’t contribute a single piece of code to the KDE project. So I just hope they get most of the software in good shape for January 11th.