KDE Look Part 4: Fixing things with a little help from my Friends


Sure, it’s a tired and cliche phrase, but hurray for the wisdom of the crowd.  I’ve received comments on identi.ca, twitter, and in the comments here with answers to nearly all my problems with KDE.  Let’s see if I can get them all to work.  First off, I was told that my problem with Konversation not getting my password in time to keep me from being signed into the fedora-unregistered could be solved by setting the password as a server password.  Alright!  That worked!  woohoo!  Before I’d had it set to just run the /msg identify command.

Second, getting Facebook to work in Kopete.  Kofler, who also contributed the tip above, linked me to some pages.  I decided to try this one first.  Essentially you add a jabber account with the username of yourfacebooklogin@chat.facebook.com and uncheck everything in the connection tab.  yourfacebooklogin = your profile’s URL (minus the facebook.com part).

For Akgregator, I wanted to be able to see each of Dan’s posts inside Akgregator without launching a tab.  Going to the advanced setting of his feed worked in getting it to load.  However, it did not load videos.  To do that I had to load it in a separate tab.  So it somewhat works.  If it’s text-only then you’re good.  Otherwise….perhaps there’s some other setting to tick?

This next one’s a bit tricky.  I had to hunt all over bugzilla to figure it out.  In the summary page of Kontact I would see my TODO items duplicated.  It would also print with duplicate TODO items.  In the actual TODO page it was not duplicated.  WTF?  My clue was that when I added stuff to the TODO list it had two resources listed.  So there were bugs from KDE 3.x where you had to delete duplicate entires in ????$HOME/.kde/share/config/kresources/notes/stdrc.  But there was not a duplicate entry for me.  So I finally found this bug that explained it.  Comment #9 had the instructions I needed.

There were two of these.  Delete the one that's not bold
There were two of these. Delete the one that's not bold

And then it worked!  Yay!  I’ll be sure to report back here if it doesn’t survive a reboot or something like that.

Another thing I mentioned last time was that it seemed at though having my dynamic playlist only look ten songs ahead seemed to mean I could come up with duplicate songs.  In the week and one half that I’ve been using Amarok I’ve had two songs come up twice.  That’s not too bad considering I’ve heard somewhere between 75 and 125 songs in that time.  (Based on my daily avg on last.fm and my knowledge of how much I’ve been using it in the past 10 or so days)  I ended up coming up with the following solution, I used a proportional bias with playcount equal to zero and set it to 80%.  Why not 100%?  I wanted to see how things were affected by me going through more and more of my playlist and leaving Amarok with less and less new songs.

Amarok 2 Dynamic Playlist Proportional Bias
Amarok 2 Dynamic Playlist Proportional Bias

I wanted to add another stipulation so that it would also tend to favor my most recently added songs.  That way I could have more of a chance of hearing stuff I’ve just added to the library.  Unfortunately, that did not appear to be a condition I could match against.

Well, that takes care of all the problems I was having so far.  Thanks to everyone who responded in the comments and on identi.ca.  I *did* find a bug with the TODO list where it can’t print more than one page worth of TODO items.  That is very annoying.  However, someone’s already filed a bug on it.  I just added a “me too”.  It didn’t seem to have much work on it.  Perhaps no one else prints their TODO lists but the two of us?  (Or at least no one with that many tasks)  Next up I’ll be taking a look at how KOffice stacks up.  With the big American Thanksgiving holiday coming up I probably won’t get to it until Monday, but I’ve already done a lot of the background work ahead of time so perhaps it will be up before then.


3 responses to “KDE Look Part 4: Fixing things with a little help from my Friends”

  1. One important thing w.r.t. the change I made to the playlist in Amarok. It is not preserved across restarts of Amarok. If you want to save all your biases, you need to click the save icon and save it.

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