Autostart in Plasma 5

In the past few days as I got more and more annoyed that git pushes and svn updates and commits were always asking for my ssh key password I looked at what the current status of plasma autostart is. When I set up my plasma 5 environment I copied all the scripts that were in ~/.kde/Autostart to ~/.config/autostart thinking they would "just work" there, but it turns out they don't. My needs are simple I only had two .sh bash scripts in there, one for running ksshaskpass to ssh-add my ssh key. The other to launch synergys on login. Both scripts showed up in the autostart kcm, but neither was getting launched at login time.

Digging a bit in the code of kinit and klauncher I found that when it looks at ~/.config/autostart it only looks for .desktop files. It turns out this comes from an xdg spec for autostart scripts. Ok, simple enough, so I removed my synergys.sh script and in the autostart kcm created a new autostart item that launches synergys for me at login time. Works like a charm.

Next I went to look at ssh-add using ksshaskpass (there's a kf5 port of ksshaskpass in kdereview now by the way, which works pretty well and has some small improvements from the kdelibs4 version). For one thing, files that aren't .desktop files in ~/.config/autostart aren't getting launched, because klauncher doesn't even look at them. To fix this the autostart kcm was modified to not show these anymore.

The other question then is where should plain bash scripts be put that users and sysadmins used to put into ~/.kde/Autostart ? One solution is to put them into ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/ . This is what I did here with ssh-add.sh and that works fine. The only thing to note though is that these are sourced, not executed, and they are sourced before plasma has started, so they can set environment variables and such if needed. This may not be ideal for scripts that need to talk to running services, so we may need to add something to ksmserver to launch scripts from ~/.config/ksm-autostart or something like that. There's a bug about it here https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=338242 already, so don't file new bugs about this issue.

Plasma themes via KHotNewStuff

hi again, Anyone out there notice the "New Themes..." button in configure desktop dialog got enabled today? It allows easy access to all the many (7) plasma theme's early adopters have added to kde-look.org. I added the functionality (3 lines of code, and a providers url from Frank to add to the knsrc file) then used it to download all the themes.

Here's the mandatory screenshot:



A couple small problems so far. The so-called themes, aren't all really themes. Pink bunnies is really just a widget style, so needs a whole theme to make it work right (shouldn't be hard to do), and for some reason downloaded slim-glow and ozone don't appear in the drop-down, while Akoma, Aya, and TiComb do (maybe we only scan capital letter folders). Also, heron unpacks without a folder for itself, so maybe wait for the author of that one to repack it into a heron folder before trying that one.

Otherwise, enjoy!

P.S. the above screenshot was taken on my work pc which is not using goya, in case anyone was wondering.

好久没有寫 (haven't written in a while)

It's been a while, so I appologize in advance for the long post. I've tried to include screenshots to keep you interested ;-)
Edit: for some reason everytime I try to add an image to blogspot it replaces my whole post entry with the image tag. I'll post the images in another entry if you want to see what I describe.

We fixed KNewStuff2 a bit, enough so that it works ok for kanagram, khangman, klettres, etc. (I think it still needs some love, but it's functional at least). I guess this means I need to get kanagram l10n-kde4 translations of data files packaged and ready for kanagram to be able to download them. I should probably also convert the translated files to kvtml 1 format and pack them up for kde3 kanagram users to grab (had a request for the spanish ones already via e-mail).

Then I realized I hadn't tried kttsd in kde4 yet (I'm not blind yet, but use kttsd to listen to irc while working so I can chime in on any interesting conversations). Oliver Goffart (Gof) was able to get kttsd stuff into knotify right away when we noticed it was not going to quite work in the state it was in. It was ported to kde4 a number of times incrementally as kdelibs changed, but the last time was a while ago. Now it's functional, but has some audio issues (maybe Phonon related?)

Also noticed on the krush techbase page, someone mentioned an issue with kmouth, so I tried it and found something else interesting. In the startup wizard there's a page with a KLanguageButton and a QLabel "&Language", but for some reason when you try to set the languagebutton as the buddy of the label, Qt designer doesn't do it. Neither does QLabel::setBuddy(languageButton) work in code, not sure why this is, but most of the items in kde "Buttons" category in the designer don't work as buddies for some reason. Anyone with inside knowledge or that wants to figure this bug/issue out is welcome to it. I couldn't find any attribute on klanguage button or any others that might be the culprit, but I only looked for a bit.

Then moved on to look at all the great things going on in Plasma. Kudos to all those that built such a nice framework, and it's only going to get better from what I hear. I tried to fix some xinerama issues in it last week, but didn't get too far, was able to get background image configuring ui into place (though the static image one is temporary until Ruphy gets api for packages done, etc.)

Tonight Mwoehlke came back around and was able to fill in some of the effects slots in the colors kcm code, and explain what needed doing for the rest. It's functional now, but still needs some minor fixes like loading and saving of effects with the color scheme files, etc. I think now that that's working some of us (especially myself) can finally understand what kcolorscheme actually can do. Oh and apply color scheme to non kde4 apps should work now also.

Playing with kde4 is so much more enjoyable thanks to all the great work put in recently on krush days and bug fixing in general. This really is an exciting time for us to all band together and fix bugs in preparation for release.