Kde4 On The Pandora


mazza558

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If it was cut down a bit, KDE4 would be pretty nice to see on the Pandora. For everyone who doesn't know about KDE4, this is what it looks like:

imagefolders2.png


It looks very flashy but is/will be about the same as gnome in terms of memory usage.
 
Etinin said:
It'll run but will probably be too slow.
read the comment...

"It looks very flashy but is/will be about the same as gnome in terms of memory usage."
 
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Lord_Doku said:
Etinin said:
It'll run but will probably be too slow.
read the comment...

"It looks very flashy but is/will be about the same as gnome in terms of memory usage."



That's what the are still aiming for. The reality is that it is still highly bloated in comparison to Gnome. Also, don't compare raw KDE4 with Ubuntu's Bloated Gnome. A real Gnome desktop is a lot lighter then most people realize, it's just that Ubuntu has given everyone an impression of they're 3 trillion background processes as the norm for Gnome.

KDE4 is still missing in a lot of places. It has a long way to go before it is a good DE for Laptops even. It is possible, but not very practical. The biggest problem is that the Solid Interface, which basically takes over for NetworkManager and Kpowersave is not yet complete. Until that is worked out, you're better off with Gnome or KDE3, which is still a very good DE.
 
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Lord_Doku said:
"It looks very flashy but is/will be about the same as gnome in terms of memory usage."

and in processor usage for the fancy effects?
 
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Lord_Doku said:
Etinin said:
It'll run but will probably be too slow.
read the comment...

"It looks very flashy but is/will be about the same as gnome in terms of memory usage."


ok... and why do you refer to gnome?
I'd say that some kind of kde4-light may be possible. A lot of KDE dev's have a n800 and seem to be very interested in porting kde4 to small devices. Still, it's all for the maemo-platform AND it has not come to an usefull stage.
 
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I think KDE and Gnome are both quite bloated (besides not liking the design philosophy of the latter) and nowadays I use XFCE on my Core 2 Quad box.
 
Lord_Doku said:
"It looks very flashy but is/will be about the same as gnome in terms of memory usage."
I think that KDE uses a lot more memory. The new KDE4 has lowered its memory usage, compared to KDE 3.5, but its still to early to use permanently in my opinion ( I'm new to KDE, but i found the KDE 3.5 series a much more stable, complete, and faster then the 4 series ).

For remote servers with a nxserver on them, i always use gnome.

But, for all intensive purposes, gnome, kde, are things we don't really need. Whats needed is a simple lightweight shell. Lets be honest, how much to you "use" your shell. Gnome, Kde are the full desktop in a box. And they to heavy for the Pandora ( especially in memory consuption )..

Because your going to need every MB you can spare. One of the reasons i find it a pity that a 256MB Ram version is not possible. To be honest, i have yet to see a answer to my question from a while back. How much the 256MB version was going to cost? And how many people will drop off if the price difference is 30$ more or so?

From what a remember, i saw prices for the OMAP somewhere between 40 and 60$, so, lets say the price almost doubles. Is 400$ that bad for a 256MB version?

With a 256MB version, full shell's like KDE, Gnome with all the bell's and ..., memory is going to be less of a factor ( and you have some spare memory for caching ). But, thats how i see it.
 
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Etinin said:
Benjiro, a 256MB version of the OMAP wasn't available when the Panda was being designed.
Heuu, the amount of memory of the OMAP has nothing to do with the design. The OMAP 128MB and 256MB versions are both pin compatible and require no extra design effort ( memory is on the OMAP itself ;) ).

From the threads that i can remember, at that time there was no 256MB version in production, then again, the 128MB version was also plagued with the NEOS bug. Most of the prices where speculation.

One thing i wonder about, the next batch is going to be around March 2009 ( aka, from there on, its going to be a more steady production ). So, what if its the 256MB version is out, and the price difference is not that big? Speculation yes...
 
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You can't just go to TI and say: HEY, WE NEED THAT 256MB VERSION OF THE OMAP IN ONE WEEK!, waiting for mass production of such a version would've caused further delays.
And a 256MB isn't coming any time soon as we don't want a split community. Besides, it would suck for us pre-orderers who gave our money without even seeing the final product to actually end up with a crippled version of the Panda.
 
Etinin said:
pre-orderers who gave our money without even seeing the final product to actually end up with a crippled version of the Panda.
Yea I can see that because I've felt the same way on a different subject that involved 1st batchers getting something special and just becuase I didn't have the money to buy a 1st batch I am left out. I'm sure the 1st batch handhelds will be slightly different than the 2nd batches so why do they need even more reward? Anyways I agree with you (even though I'm a 2nd batcher who would love to have extra RAM).
 
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KDE4 is much better suited than Gnome TBH- it has alot of connectivity libraries and things that are non WM-related that make it by far the most attractive option out there (Phonon, Solid for starters). I'd consider installing the KDE4 libs as an absolute must, but using the window manager may take a little trimming here and there. I hate to potentially stir things up, but even in its fairly beta stages KDE4 is already at a point far out of Gnome's reach in terms of real feature sets .
 
Benjiro said:
Because your going to need every MB you can spare. One of the reasons i find it a pity that a 256MB Ram version is not possible. To be honest, i have yet to see a answer to my question from a while back. How much the 256MB version was going to cost? And how many people will drop off if the price difference is 30$ more or so?

From what a remember, i saw prices for the OMAP somewhere between 40 and 60$, so, lets say the price almost doubles. Is 400$ that bad for a 256MB version?
It'd be a bit more like $450-500 more like. It's out of reason for what we're trying to accomplish as a community. It's not that it's impossible- it's impractical.

Moreover, after having futzed with KDE and GNOME on an eeePC, the UIs we're discussing here are mostly impractical for a handheld device. They're geared for desktops and need some serious alterations of thinking to get them usable in a handheld (Think Maemo for the Nokia web tablets as a basis of thought... They accomplish a gorgeous UI with the same resources as we're using on the Pandora with an OMAP2...).

QUOTE

With a 256MB version, full shell's like KDE, Gnome with all the bell's and ..., memory is going to be less of a factor ( and you have some spare memory for caching ). But, thats how i see it.



And the old salt here thinks it's not so hot of an idea, really. The UI's aren't tuned for handhelds- they're designed with desktops and ONLY desktops in mind. While I think the 256Mb would be nice and help make a few more titles and applications possible, it's not needed and would be overkill, really.

foft said:
This might help it run better, if memory is the concern... http://code.google.com/p/compcache/. A compressed ramdisk as a fast swapfile.

Mark


Uh... If you pause for a moment and think about what you just said (RAM disk on a system with limited RAM with no upgradability...) you'll see that it won't help much... ;)
 
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AireTamStorm said:
KDE4 is much better suited than Gnome TBH- it has alot of connectivity libraries and things that are non WM-related that make it by far the most attractive option out there (Phonon, Solid for starters). I'd consider installing the KDE4 libs as an absolute must, but using the window manager may take a little trimming here and there. I hate to potentially stir things up, but even in its fairly beta stages KDE4 is already at a point far out of Gnome's reach in terms of real feature sets .

I'm sorry, but that's so completely wrong it's not even funny. The ONLY people really using Phonon and Solid are the KDE4 people. NetworkManager has done a very good job of doing what it does. For Power Management, the SuSe guys lead that road with their pm-utils, which has also lead to the usage of cpufreq over powernowd. Audio is moving by default to PulseAudio. They don't even stand a chance in that realm considering how fragmented that area is with OSS,ALSA,Jack,etc. KDE4 is TRYING to make their wrapper DE agnostic, but it's not likely, because the real people in charge of the hardware level userspace utilities take care of the hard stuff.

Let's also not forget that Gnome is far farther in the embedded world. You know what Hildon is? It's set of Embedded GTK Widgets, but is code compatible with GTK+, which in essence means that if you can code it for GTK+, it will also compile with Hildon. Guess who use Hildon? Maemo, Moblin, Ubuntu Mobile. All these development groups submit their work back upstream to Hildon and Gnome Mobile. All 3 also plan on switching over to Gnome Mobile and then customizing that for their own setup as it matures. In essence, the Maemo, Moblin, and Ubuntu Mobile devs are helping to develop Gnome Mobile.

You're also forgetting that Phonon and Solid are not even at a level capable of supporting today's laptops. In order to get stable Power Management and Network Management in KDE4, we have to resort to, you guessed it, knetworkmanager and kpowersave, both of which are KDE3 apps, which load KDE3 libs in a KDE4 environment, that already has KDE4 libs loaded.

KDE4 may be a better solution in the future, but as of right now, it is not ready for anything that is not a Desktop PC.
 
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It would work, but I'm not sure why you would want to. That's not the kind of interface you'd want on the Pandora.

Which is making me wonder, what kind of interface are we even going to get...GMenu2X honestly doesn't seem like what I was hoping for. The mockup we saw way back when would be nice.
 
just for the record : it IS possible.
I have KDE 3.5 running on a sharp Zaurus with far lower specs compared to the pandora.
It's not very usefull, more a thing for showing off.
Most KDE-apps are designed for screens with a minimum resolution of 800*600. And KDE seems to make it's own temp-files and have it's own way of saving "opened" apps and files which makes you loose connections after suspend-resume (at least on the Zaurus).
As for storage : the base system (kdebase, kdelibs) of kde 3.5 takes up some 135Mb (stripped, no man, no docs, no extra backgrounds, ...). I wouldn't recommend this for the default OS of the pandora, but you can sure run it from a second OS you keep on SD.
I'd prefer iceWM as default (light, fast, customizable, low memory usage, not much space needed to install) but I'm happy with xfce (though it has become a lot heavier lately)

Just my $0.02
Have fun,
Chero.
 
Well obviously it couldn't be done by the time Pandora's released, but maybe by 4.3/4.4 the memory usage should dip below Gnome.
 
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