I’ve recently found out that Lancelot was the default menu in Linux Mint.

How did I found it out? Thanks to this bug report which states that it was a showstopper for Linux Mint 10 to use Lancelot as default. The good news is that the bug was fixed in a matter of minutes after reporting.

The bad news was that nobody from the Mint even tried to notify me of anything. How does anyone expect bugs to be fixed if those are not reported?

From my point of view, this should have followed the following algorithm:

1. Mint: Noticed a bug and they decided it was a showstopper for Mint 10 release
2. Mint: Report a bug (either by mail, IRC or BKO) stating that they would need it fixed for the release
3. Ivan: Fix the issue, commit to SVN (now GIT) and send a patch directly to Mint peeps

Would this be too much to ask?

If you have this problem, please file a bug report for the distribution you’re using. I’ve already sent a mail [1] to kde-packager mailing list, but it looks like some distributions’ packagers don’t really follow that list.

I don’t get why the kdeplasma-addons is compiled on a separate system (or virtual machine) compared to libplasma and plasma and with a different set of installed libraries.

[1]

Hi all,

It have come to my attention that in
some distributions (no need to specify
which) Lancelot is compiled without the
support for compositing while the
plasma is composite-enabled.

While compiling Lancelot, you should
ensure the presence of libXcomposite,
libXrender and libXdamage development files.

Cheers and thanks in advance,
Ivan

First I would like to point out that there are two new Plasma themes on kde-look. Well, at least two *my* new themes. Or to be even more precise, there is one new theme and one old that is new. Or new that is old. Or one theme… OK, I’ll stop now.

One of the themes is Spoons, which is now named Spoons Original, and is currently the oldest Plasma theme in existence (that’s why I couldn’t really say that there is a new theme on kde-look).

The other one is a sibling, possibly the younger sister of the aforementioned. The reason I have never used Spoons as my theme (as my Plasma theme, that is – it serves perfectly as the theme for my blog) is that it is too bold and eye-poking. So, the slimmer one was born. This is the first theme that I think could replace Slim Glow on my computer.

The main difference between Slim Glow and Spoons Lite is that the former helps the widgets on the desktop to be placed on the sidelines – not to draw attention, while the later helps them to be in focus, but still not to be too invasive.

Qt 4.5 and Lancelot

There have been issues when running Lancelot on systems with Qt 4.5 (or 4.4.4 snapshots) installed. Mainly, the Applications section was empty. Or, rather not empty, just appeared as it is – you could use the keyboard to /blindly/ browse the applications. It is now a thing of the past (at least when 4.5 is concerned – haven’t tested 4.4.4). It is now fixed in trunk and it works for all testers at bugs.kde.org.

The interesting thing is that L behaved differently when compiled against 4.4 and ran under 4.5 than when compiled under 4.5.

Qt bug

Fortunately enough, while fixing this, I’ve found a hack that I made a long time ago to bypass a Qt bug that I forgot to report when I initially encountered it (before KDE 4.1 was released). So, I’ve sent the report to the Trolls and I hope it will not go in the ‘we intended it this way’ pile.

Lancelot news

Apart from fixing bugs related to the Qt 4.5, there are some new cool things in Lancelot and its theming mechanism. I will leave it for some other time since this post is already a long one. And I need to make screenshots first.

So, stay tuned.

p.s. And merry new Lenny


01 class SomeClass: public QFrame {
02 Q_OBJECT
03 public:
04 SomeClass(...);
05
06 private:
07 class Private;
08 Private * const d;
09 };
10
12 class SomeClass::Private: public Ui::SomeClassBase {
13 public:
14 Private(SomeClass * parent)
15 : q(parent)
16 {
17 /* ... */
18 }
19
20 const SomeClass q;
21 QBasicTimer timer;
22 };
23
24 SomeClass::SomeClass(QWidget * parent)
25 : QFrame(parent), d(new Private(this))
26 {
27 d->setupUi(this);
28 /* ... */
29 }


Compiled and ran this, and everything just stoped working. The instant I called:

SomeClassi * sc = new SomeClass();
sc->show();


Program just stopped doing anything. (and it took me some time to realize that it is not doing anything, and not only failing to show the widget)

I went on to discover what the problem is – commenting out parts of the code (obviously, the snippet above is not the whole code) to see what is causing the issue, and nothing seemed to be the problem.