trinity-devel@lists.pearsoncomputing.net

Message: previous - next
Month: December 2011

Re: [trinity-devel] Running Trinity, KDE 4, and KDE 3 Concurrently

From: Darrell Anderson <humanreadable@...>
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 12:31:20 -0800 (PST)
> > Do we want to bother with making sure KDE3/Trinity can
> sit on the same PC?
> > KDE
> >
> 
> No.

Do we want to support running both concurrently? I agree, no. Yet there is one important reason to run both: KDE3 remains the baseline to which we know when TDE is working incorrectly. For example, my recent threads and bug reports about the Kaffeine DVB OSD.

A check list of cautions will help people run both in order to use that baseline for testing.

Currently I am dual booting KDE3 and TDE with mirror partitions of my base Slackware 13.1. Dual booting is, um, annoying. I have a couple of user accounts dedicated to testing. Installing TDE on my primary system would allow me to test under the exact same conditions without rebooting. I have a virtual machine with TDE installed, but I can't test everything there --- such as the video issues I discovered with the proprietary Nvidia drivers.

I need to run both with reasonable safety. Hence my desire to encourage some conversation about the topic.

I think there is no problem with the packages as I built everything with a $PREFIX of /opt/trinity. To avoid environment variable conflicts, I can write some snippets in my testing account's .bashrc to test when to remove KDE3 or TDE environment variables that get sourced from /etc/profile.d. As a testing account I can avoid conflicts with ~/.local by not modifying the menu and so forth.

My testing account does not use KMail. I login in from the command line and therefore would avoid conflicts with differing KDMs.

I have not migrated completely to TDE because until recently, several significant bugs had remained unresolved from before 3.5.12. Fortunately, recently I found solutions for most and have submitted patches.

Yet I'm the slow and cautious type. :) The other day I considered moving to TDE full time and then I run into more bugs like the Kaffeine DVB OSD glitches, the Nvidia driver conflict, and of late, my inability to build KOffice.

I use KMail with my primary user account and won't migrate that account to TDE until I'm comfortable I have the other significant bugs out of my way because as I mentioned, the indexes in KMail get reworked in TDE. Although I can back out of the KMail reindexing, doing so is a nuisance. :)

A check list of cautions is needed to avoid conflicts with KDE4. For example, I don't know how to avoid both environments from conflicting because both use ~/.local. I have not done any testing, but I wonder what happens when TDE KDM is used rather than KDE4 KDM. I suspect using the TDE KDM to run KDE3 will cause problems.

I admit I don't test for KDE4 conflicts because, um, well, I stripped KDE4 from my system. :) I did that last year when I rebuilt KDE3 to run on Slackware 13.1, and now that I am close to moving to TDE, despite building all packages for /opt/trinity, I have no real desire to install any KDE4 packages. I really do like the KDE3/TDE environment and that is why I am involved here. :)

Darrell