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me too!
But, please, think that we also exists! (n770 poor users....)

KDE Compile Help

I have now twice to compile kdepim and fails on certmanager

undefined reference to Kpgp


Did you alter the source, am I missing a step, how did you get past that? kdepim is the only thing I can not get to compile??

KDE? LOL.

It's certainly a cool hacker exercise, but i hope everyone reading this understands how pointless it is for tablet/PDA end-users.

If you already do, you can skip the rest. If you don't, read on...

1) A windowmanager for a PDA shouldn't require more than a few MB of space. (The n770 root fs sits compressed on 128MB flash). KDE needs hundreds of megabytes (currently 800MB).
2) PDA apps should start quickly. KDE apps take several seconds to start on my Pentium III 950mhz.
3) PDA apps should be small and efficient, requiring kilobytes or at most a couple megs of RAM. KDE apps gobble tens of megabytes of RAM.

So what kind of PDA/tablet device would be suitable for KDE? The root filesystem should have a couple of GIGAbytes. The processor should be in the 1GHZ x86 class. RAM should be at least 256MB. And the display should really be at least 1024x768, since a number of KDE apps don't even work at 800x600.

This is certainly an interesting project for KDE fans. But to any n770/n800 end-users reading this, read and grok this: Some software is horribly inefficient, running ten to hundreds of times slower than optimized software. Some software is horribly bloated, requiring tens to hundreds times more space than an efficient implementation. The proliferation of incredibly powerful PCs has led developers down the path of ignoring compactness and efficiency, simply because they CAN. On a PDA/tablet, you can't ignore compactness and efficiency.

I've been programming since the days of 8-bit computers, and i've seen more than a handful of efficient PDA and PC windowing environments starting with the original Mac and Atari ST and Apple's Newton, all of which fit into a couple hundred kilobytes. Maemo ships with a functional, optimized, decently compact WM. KDE is, by comparison, horribly, disgustingly bloated.

This is not really a dig against KDE per-se. It definitely brings a lot of good desktop features to linux and provides a vast and powerful framework to application developers. But KDE on a PDA is like a hippopotamus on a motor-scooter.

Its not a PDA doofus!

And KDE runs fine, so don't knock it before you try it. I love being able to use konqurer to attach to windows shares or use fish for linux. KDE on n800 is awesome. Could KDE be optimized for N800, absolutely. Is that what I did absolutely not, but it is completely possible, and welcome from my perspective. But I have a Internet Tablet not a pda! Additionally you do not have to use Kwin (Which is the window manager). , you can use openbox. But Kwin is not horribly bloated as you say, and has very usefull tools as far as window managers go.

<flamebait>I hear a volunteer to re-write all the unique and desirable KDE applications (e.g., digikam, kformula, kmail, karbon14, kplato, kivio, amarok, lyx, syntext serna, bookreader, kdenlive, musescore, kraft, to name a few; see kde-apps.org for more) to be optimized for PDAs.</flamebait>



Seriously though, I may be new here and not quite understand the board dynamic yet, and I know this thread is several months old, but your comment seems unnecessarily negative/discouraging. It looks like penguinbait and kkito have both done some impressive (and useful) work. If you don't find it personally relevant, then perhaps you can contribute an alternative instead of just poopoo-ing someone else's efforts.

The reality is that KDE has been around for years and wasn't made with the intention of running on micro platforms (although the N770, N800 are anything but...). However, imagine if the KDE took off on Maemo. Given a large enough adoption, this might encourage KDE (and third-party application) developers to keep smaller-screen, lower-memory, slower-CPU platforms in mind and take the appropriate optimizations.

Without someone willing to take that first step, none of that will even be possible.

At the very least, exploring what's possible is fun and enlightening and I commend anyone for not only taking the initiative to try it, but to be kind enough to share the experience with the rest of us.

Strictly imho, it's still not a good idea. You either design a platform to provide a good desktop experience, where you target a mouse and a keyboard and you design so that you can take advantage of the extensive available processing power, graphics and storage capabilities etc.

OR

you start from a mobile optimized platform, with mobile optimized, in this case touch screen - no mouse, no keyboard - designs and use cases, with limited technical capabilities and create designs that work best in such a device.

I really don't think you can have both in one. One size does not fit all. For KDE developers to "take smaller-screen, lower-memory" devices into account it then means that they cannot really create - at least easily - designs that would then take advantage of the capabilities of the desktop device. And vice versa. And just taking the desktop experience and just trying to squeeze it down to a smaller mobile device really doesn't work, in almost way that you look at it. There are several good examples of that already.

Take it from someone who runs KDE on N800 on a daily basis, it is possible, it does run well. Does everything fit on the screen, not all the time, luckily there is kpager to move windows around to get to everything. Obviously, this is not optimal, but there has been no effort to optimize it. Selecting specific KDE levels and porting the entire suite for use on IT is a welcome and great idea. Nobody is expecting KDE developers to jump on board and rewrite KDE, but nothing is stopping us from doing it.

I agree with mbogosian, why you gotta be hating??

I heartily second what mbogosian said. There are some of us who would like to experiment with alternative interfaces, if nothing more then because we can. And, if these folks want to put forth their hard earned time to provide this alternative to us slackers watching from the sidelines, I am for one am extremely grateful. Please keep up the good work! And remember its this kind of free thinking that got us Linux in the first place