dax918

The KDE 3.5 version has been discontinued by its author a long time ago so unless someone locates where these bugs are the answer will be never I'm afraid. The truth is that only a limited handful of people are interested but none of them can cooperate with the programming needed. - Oct 04 2008

Hi, I don't truly understand to which particular borders you are referring to, (I can think of at least 3 of them) here's how mine used to look
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=72811. I used to tweak the code a lot, so basically that is as thin as it gets. For the moment I don't have access to a linux machine to test the code properly so all I can give you now are some pointers, I rewrote parts of the code so is now different to the one available here. But you don't need to rewrite anything, just find some values and adjust them, it is a trial and error approach but is not complicated, search for a client directory and a file named dominoclient.cpp, here are the most relevant lines:

namespace Domino
{
const int titleEdgeTop = 3;
const int titleEdgeBottom = 1;
...
const int titleGradientHeight = 15; // original value was 10
const int bottomBorderHeight = 8;
const int borderWidth = 2; // original value was 5

Try those settings first, edit, compile, test, uninstall, edit further if necessary. I still could be missing something here, like I said I haven't worked on Domino for a while, but everything revolves around those variables, thankfully the author named them properly. Hope this helps. - Aug 21 2008

Hi Rob, the original author is no longer involved on Domino but I worked on a port for a couple of months. Porting the decoration was pretty much straight-forward, but the style has proven to be quite a challenge. A real though one. I tried my best but doing things properly takes a lot of time and knowledge I don't possess. Unless some C++ programmer with good knowledge of QT4 gives me a hand there won't be much progress on that area I'm afraid. I'll skip KDE 4 till 4.2, if someone manages to create a template/base I might be able to build the code on top of it and speed things up by then. Details, I can do, but the overall structure is too complicated for me. - Aug 02 2008

A quite different output than I expected I'm afraid, I just posted a message to see if another FreeBSD user can assist you. - May 13 2008

There's a FreeBSD group here btw,

http://www.kde-look.org/groups/?id=18

I sent a message to the admin perhaps he knows what's wrong. - May 13 2008

I honestly don't know much about KDE on FreeBSD but, what is the previous output of ./configure?

Any FreeBSD users that can assist him? - May 13 2008

Sorry but I need more details, why are you using checkinstall? Linuxfever made a .deb package if that's what you are looking for.

http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=74031 - May 06 2008

Sorry for the delay. All credit goes to Michael Lentner, he's a very good coder. You also made a good suggestion, but are you talking about KDE 3.5 or 4.1? The latter replaced kicker and for the moment all I had with plasma were frustrating experiences, they also changed the plasma libraries so I have to look at it in detail again to see what changes need to be done. - May 06 2008

I was not familiar with this issue nor this program. I did a search trying to locate the root of the problem and I found a lot of statements such as these ones:

Quote:

Considering the number of features it has, Domino is already optimized. There's not much (actually nothing) I can do. I did also a search about Oxygen and CPU usage,

Quote:

The KDE devs seem they have trouble with these issues too, needless to say, I neither possess their knowledge of the internals nor the resources at their disposal, so I'm sorry I won't be able to help. I also won't visit this site for a while like I posted recently, so I'm sorry I can't provide further assistance. - Mar 30 2008

Perhaps you can help me, have you tried KDE4? Is this problem reproduceable with Oxygen too? Any other styles show the same problem or is it just Domino?

- Mar 26 2008

Hi, thanks for your comments

Quote:

You're a lucky guy, I had to reinstall KDE4 plus dev dependencies over 10 times in 2 weeks. Looks stable (relatively) on the surface but whenever I need to install or upgrade a core library everything falls apart. Too many crashes and annoyances for the moment so I'll wait for 4.1 myself.

- Mar 15 2008

Hi, thanks! I'm afraid I don't have that theme anymore, most of it was hard-coded, (that's how the default domino actually looked to me). In case anyone is still interested, recently I published some basic instructions on how to customize Domino on that page.

http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Domino?content=42804
- Sep 20 2008

Also, if you know some C++, the KDE4 port of Domino could definitely use your help. - Aug 20 2008

Hi!, sorry for the delay, it seems these notifications are filtered as spam. They are a mix of two iconsets, one of them is called Noiro, I posted the links here http://ultradax.deviantart.com/art/Desktop-2008-03-28-81132664 - Aug 20 2008

I think that the most remarkable example is MenuetOS, an operating system built entirely on assembly, also intended to assembly programmers
http://www.menuetos.org/. I tried it last year and submitted a report of my processor. It may not look much at first but it's certainly promising, it is always nice to see this kind of programs, it reminds me of the way Linux started. Second, fasm, probably the best compiler right now, http://flatassembler.net/examples.php, Third, masm, it comes with a bunch of mini-programs but just for windows. They have a fixed position against the GPL/HLL that put me off, they don't let you release your code with that license. So Fasm is the way to go, however it's too complicated for me, I can't get the language. - Aug 03 2008

Also, most of the gui problems on W32 are related to bloated libraries, I've seen pretty nice applications built on assembly that can surpase the console performance by far. An average 1MB C++ application can be done with just 100kb of compiled Assembly, you can barely notice it, the load is minimal. The actual problems are that the window console is pretty much useless compared to a proper shell, you can't pipe or do any complex stuff, it got stuck in the 80s, and also low-level languages are very very hard to grasp properly. I tried to program assembly both on Linux and Windows with not much luck. - Aug 02 2008

It can be done, it requires a bit of imagination and memory management. I don't know about newer versions of getright but it used to handle a 1000 download queue list without problems, even on my old 64MB pc. It reads a plain-text file only while downloading, pretty much like wget, you just have to make sure to give it a little time to clean-up the queue if you don't have a fast connection.

for (int i=0; i<500000; i++)
{
// new string url + append i
// copy string to clipboard
// wait 2 seconds
// getright adds it to the queue list
// if (i mod 500==0) then wait 60 seconds and resume loop
// by then there's enough room to keep adding more
}

This way only a limited portion of RAM gets used. This same procedure applies to any other download manager capable of clipboard monitoring such as KGet.

I used to have a spare old hard drive, which is now pretty much pointless because is only 3GB, not enough for modern needs. :( - Aug 02 2008

Their Desktop finder works fine, but obviously only a limited number of previews show up. - Aug 02 2008

Alright, I'm back, sorta. Colourlovers has a public API, I'm sure you can make good use of it, a script to select only the colors you like, filter results and so on. - Aug 02 2008

Well, there's no need to use wget, if you can manage to copy the url to the clipboard somehow, programs like getright can download it automatically. Not that it matters at the moment, my W32 partition crashed, but to be fair is a hard drive issue. The MBR is damaged, partly due to leftovers of constant boot crashes and allocation errors I had thanks to the KDE team and their revolutionary desktop. There's a partition that got corrupted and I cannot access using any of the known methods, I previously freed 6GB, good enough to install Hardy but neither PartitionMagic or Gparted let me add or remove partitions unless I format the disk first. I'm writing this using the Ubuntu liveCD, the HD is readable so I can reinstall an OS temporarily and start burning disks, I think I need at least 20 DVDs to clean up everything. What a mess, this is going to take me forever, I apologize if it takes me longer than usual to catch up with messages. - Jul 25 2008

Hi again!. Yes, I like colourlovers and I visit it often, I have an account there but I haven't had time to publish anything yet. Personally I still prefer to make my own colors, I only 'color-picked' a handful like Aesthetic2 and the distros colors, the rest was built from scratch. I don't have access to a shell for the moment, not to mention other things, so I have to save it for later but I'm curious, what do you use all these colors for? You seem to be interested in all this stuff too, I thought it was just me :) - Jul 25 2008

Alright, I'll try again. I was saying that also because of the Fluxbox port, something obviously doesn't work but without feedback is hard to know what. - Jul 13 2008

Hi there, I wanted to try them but I'm having some trouble downloading it, folders seem to be empty. I know for experience that one shouldn't upload anything unfinished here, the more updates the lower the rating, people will vote bad and if is below the average it will get ignored. Also, the license I included here was just for my schemes, you should include in yours that you're in fact the author of the ports and the python converters to give everyone proper credits :) - Jul 12 2008

Besides, if I were against the variety concept I would have made one scheme not 220 :D - Jul 10 2008

Alright! You're on a roll! I haven't seen that kind of enthusiasm in quite a while. I'll update the description to include that link. :)
- Jul 10 2008

Strange, I don't understand why the tarball looks different to the one I uploaded, I wonder if anything else is different. Anyways, I added a standard license with a link to this page, just link back here, that covers it all. Your credit is very well-deserved, it may look like a simple script but I'm pretty sure it took a while to code it, plus I'm also sure that a lot of Gnome and Fluxbox users will be very grateful. You see, I know I sound like a broken record, but that's the kind of unification I always ask. Is not a bad thing, now everyone can use them it can't get any better than that. :D - Jul 10 2008

Very interesting project, I always missed the color configuration while using Gnome. First time I heard of it. A norm would be awesome, at least between KDE3 and Gnome, KDE4 schemes are quite different, I think Gnome will benefit greatly. This is the kind of project I like. - Jul 10 2008

Some distros have a specific purpose like GParted and it's ok, people have different needs but at the end of the day I don't think anyone needs 350 to choose from. I think we overall agree, I'm not against the number per se, but I would appreciate a higher level of integration, some type of common standard between them and the kernel. Instead of starting another distro why not improve something that already exists and people use so everybody can benefit from it. Anyone can make a distro nowadays but some pretty nice tweaks RedHat possess to tune up the kernel are completely nonexistent in other distributions. I had a problem last year and I didn't want to install a server just to be able to record 5 of hours of audio with 1GB of RAM, a somewhat trivial task. All audio systems, phonon, esd, oss, alsa, etc, are redundant if I cannot adjust the shared memory size and everything ends up getting cached. I still haven't found a distro that allows me to do that properly and I asked everywhere, I even tried a kernel patch made by Con Kolivas with no luck. Linus had said publicly that the large number of distros is inevitable and he likes it that way so that's the way is always gonna be. Like I said I'm not against diversification but the Linux desktop really could use a couple of extra hands. - Jul 10 2008

Sure, no problem at all, the GPL license is a bit ambiguous, I should have chosen CC Attribution/Non-commercial/Share Alike 3.0, is closer to my position but it is too late to change it. Thanks for porting them to Gnome, I really appreciate your work and I'm glad you found them useful! :D - Jul 10 2008

Oh yes. I want a 'super-uber-mega' Linux. And I could easily say *Solaris, *BSD, Haiku or Hurd. I see incredible talent wasted on dead-end projects constantly. To begin with, I don't understand why there are so many distros, especially when differences among most of them are not substantial, they're mostly aesthetical. Too many people working on distros and packages, that manpower could easily contribute to other neglected areas. I want unification as much as possible. People reject that term because they inmediately associate it with Windows or Apple, but generally speaking is not a bad thing. Once you have a stable base you can tweak it and customize it as much as you want. But you do need a base, it makes things a lot easier and definitely lowers the knowledge bar. My skills are limited so basically I can only contribute to existing projects with bits and pieces here and there but nothing substantial unfortunately. Perhaps I'm just being utopic but imagine all the people involved on OSS working on a single OS. I don't think I'll see it happen, too much disorganization and division, but it is indeed a powerful thought. :) - Jul 10 2008

Yes, it makes sense. I have a dual boot due to some problems with wine and other applications but KDE 3.5 overall is a better desktop. However I deleted my 2 KDE4 partitions (Hardy and trunk) and won't try it again for a long time. I'm a short fuse with these sort of things.
- Jun 02 2008

Thanks. Yes, it is complicated, unfortunately you can't provide an all-in-one improvement ready for everyone. There's no such thing as a guideline/standard thus some styles override certain settings while others don't, an issue still present today (KDE 4). It would be awesome if it were possible to program a conditional plugin somehow, something like:
if ((KDEStyle==domino)&&(KDEDecoration==domino)) {textcolor=white;buttontextcolor=COLORSCHEME_COLOR;}.

I always enjoyed the level of customization KDE has, but I think it would be even better if you could connect everything with a .msstyles type of file (style+deco+schemes+fonts) and from that point on, customize it as much as you want, plus quick and effortlessly create new styles. XP has hundreds of styles at your disposal basically because you don't need to be a programmer to be able to create one. In fact, you need to be a really good programmer and learn a lot of the QT framework to do such a thing properly on KDE. It can take several months, in the meantime an average windows designer can create 3-4 styles per month that look far better. This is the type of improvement I always requested, a possible long time benefit that is also relatively easy to achieve. I don't mean to sound rude but things like plasma mean little to me, especially when proper priorities such as proxy support are still unattended, so I won't expect this anytime soon. - Jun 02 2008

Thanks for your support. I really appreciate it. Sorry for the late response. - May 11 2008

Yes, is 100% good old KDE 3.5, nice, lightweight and easy to achieve, no Beryl, Compiz, no nothing.

Style/Deco: Domino. From top to bottom, right to left:

Kicker.
Semi-transparent, 24 pixels height, with 14 virtual desktops + thumbnail preview.
Configure panel -> Appearance -> Enable transparency
Configure panel -> Taskbar -> Appearance -> For transparency.

Kmenu.
Open home/USERNAME/.kde/share/config/kickerrc, go to [menus] and add this entry: MenuEntryHeight=-1 if you want to remove the icons. You can load it with a right-click anywhere on the desktop by doing this:
Configure panel -> Taskbar -> Actions -> Show Operations Menu

It also looks thinner because Domino lets you remove unused space (Kcontrol -> Style -> Domino -> Configure -> General -> Indent menu items.).

Desktop.
Configure Kdesktop -> Background -> Advanced Options -> Text color -> #000000 and enable shadow. This way you can achieve the glow/halo effect. It works better with light backgrounds. The font is FreeSans 7.

Konsole.
Semi-transparent. (Konsole -> Settings -> Schema -> Transparent for MC.)

Audacious mp3 player minimized.

I think that covers it all, if you have any question just reply. Thanks a lot for re-posting your message here so everyone can read it, sometimes it takes me a while to catch up with messages. - May 11 2008

Hi, I could but it wouldn't be of much use to anybody since I'm using a custom coded Domino. Nevertheless, a similar effect can be achieved by going to General -> Button height adjustment -> -5px. This makes buttons a lot thinner, even thinner than polyester's. I hope that's what you were looking for. - Mar 28 2008

Both the decoration and the style are Domino. - Mar 27 2008

Hi, you're everywhere aren't you? ;) I simply adjusted Domino

Kcontrol -> Style -> Domino -> Configure -> General -> Indent menu items.

IIRC, it can be adjusted even more. - Mar 27 2008

Hi, you're everywhere aren't you? ;) I simply adjusted Domino

Kcontrol -> Style -> Domino -> Configure -> General -> Indent menu items.

IIRC, it can be adjusted even more. - Mar 27 2008

Good work!, I think it looks pretty elegant, very nice indeed. - Aug 02 2008

Thank you for your comments. Yes, we are all newbies at one time or another. Sometimes I want to do stuff but I can't find documentation anywhere, that's disappointing. - Aug 02 2008

At the end of the day I'm just another guy trying to make a living, interviews consist basically of "1.Do you use X product? and 2. Show us your work.". It doesn't matter if you can do the same with gimp because you have to integrate to an existing working group, and most of them use adobe. I'm not one of those lucky few that get paid to work on FOSS projects full-time so, sadly, I had to go back to the reality. At least is a good thing to see that my work inspired someone else to continue it, it wasn't a work in vain. - Jul 15 2008

I'm currently stuck with a XP only machine that is not solely mine to dispose of, I even had to remove my Linux partitions a couple of days ago because I was running out of disk space, so go figure, until I can afford a separate hd I have to use Windows, If wine could handle adobe products better it would have been the other way around. I got the hardy cd but nowhere to install it, ironic isn't it. - Jul 14 2008

Great work, I added a link to this page too. Can't wait to try them! :) - Jul 10 2008

I voted good, I also vote good whenever I see that happen. I don't post here (kde-look mostly) anymore, and removed most of my stuff, I got tired of the 'I couldn't care less' attitude the admins show. - Jul 15 2008

The rating system is misleading here. When my schemes were only 4, rating was 84%, when they were 75, 81% and after the final update 79%. Now rating is 84% again, so go figure, 4 schemes, 220, it doesn't really make a difference here. - Jul 15 2008

I haven't had the chance to try them yet so I got to ask this to someone else: Why do they have such a poor rating here? They don't display correctly? It's a pity. They look good on the screenshots, any other extra setting is necessary? Wrong category? I'm sure the author will appreciate some feedback. - Jul 12 2008

I just updated the description to link to this page too. Thanks again! :) - Jul 10 2008

Good to see someone who liked my wallpaper :) - Mar 13 2008

Thank you, that makes two of us ;) - Mar 12 2008

I agree, it has potential. I only came across one issue, if I apply the decoration before the style I get a green titlebar. It only happens once, right after you install it. I'm using Kubuntu Hardy KDE4 alpha, that's the only problem I found. By the way, I looked at your code, I don't think is horrible as you described it :)

I'm also testing QT new features, if I manage to do the things you asked, I'll glady share my code with you.

Regards - Mar 11 2008