One last, good look at KDE 3 Part 2

By EricMesa

- 2 minutes read - 419 words

Some little updates on my KDE experiment.  First of all, I run an rsync script semi-daily to backup my home drive to an external hard drive in case the main one fails.  It’s already happened to me once before and I was really glad to have had backups.  However, as you can imagine, this is a huge drain on my computer’s resources while the backup is being performed.  Since I have it running from a cron job so that I can just forget about it, I tend to forget when it’s set to run and I get really annoyed if my computer starts slowing down and I can’t figure out why.  So I put a wall command into my script.  This sends a message to all terminal emulators and everyone logged into the computer via terminals or ssh.  Usually in Gnome I can only see the message if I happen to have Gnome termnal open.  However, KDE does something very awesome and useful.  Here’s a screenshot:

KDE Wall Info

That is REALLY useful if you want to send info to all users and they happen to be in a GUI without any terminal emulators open.  Say, you are administering the household machine and want a message to appear for the kids to see.  So kudos there, KDE development team!

I’ve also found KDE 3 to be much, much more stable than I remember it.  I think the last time I seriously used it before it got messed up by my Compiz Troubles, it wasn’t yet in the KDE 3.5 series, so it used to crash a lot.  But now it hasn’t crashed on me once.

So far my biggest complaint is that Kopete seems to lack one bit of functionality that Pidgin has - namely the ability to remain connected to AIM when Away for long periods of time.  Now, it may be the case that Kopete is doing the right thing and that Pidgin is violating AIM protocols or something.  I don’t know because I haven’t used the AIM client for about five or so years now.  But, even so, I wish Kopete would not disconnect from AIM whenever I am away for a long amount of time.  When I leave an away message for a number of hours, as opposed to just signing off and shutting down Kopete, it’s because I want to collect messages from friends who may be on while I’m off and will drop me an IM to say, “hi”.

Other than that, I’m thoroughly enjoying KDE.