KDE Running on Mac OS X

GeoffP writes "AppleTalk Australia is running a story on running KDE on Mac OS X. For those that don't know, KDE is a graphical desktop environment used to access your computer's files. Finally, Mac users have a free (as in speech) approach to their filesystem."

Good article

[huwr (627730)]

A neat article.

However, I can't think really why you'd want to be running KDE on Mac OS X when you already have such a neat (IMHO) interface. I suppose it's good for a laugh, too.

Re:Good article

[DenDave (700621)]

Well there are some aspects of KDE which are not possible under OSX without significant tweaks or non-free software. For example, the browser, Konqueror will go everywhere, even below the "unseen line" of OSX and yes, you can tweak finder to go there to but not without non-free software and even then, you'r stuck with finder's interface.

You can have a variety of io-slaves under KDE allowing great integration with a variety of network services, yes we can do alot of that with OSX but again, interface and third party add-ons... (webdav over ssl???)

Furthermore, KDE is a development environment in itself and many developers will be happy to see that they can work two in one!

I am impressed that it works, I have tried many times to get Fink and the gang working with Tiger and I have borked on each and every occasion. So reading the australian exploits with expectation!!

Re:Good article

[by Anonymous Coward]

I switched "temporarily" from OS X to Linux/KDE after a water spill fried my iBook. This was about 8 months ago. I haven't bought the replacement iBook (yet?) mainly because now I can't live without KDE's network protocol integration (sftp , webdav, smb, ftp, ... everything is supported!). I can transparently access folders with the (file browser, editor, image viewer, etc. etc. ) in multiple servers, seamlessly. OS/X is seriously lacking in this area. A native KDE port would be a useful addition. Better yet would be OS X itself natively supporting the most widely used network protocols. Tiger was a big dissapointment in this respect...

Re:Good article

[Guy Harris (3803)]

I haven't bought the replacement iBook (yet?) mainly because now I can't live without KDE's network protocol integration (sftp , webdav, smb, ftp, ... everything is supported!). I can transparently access folders with the (file browser, editor, image viewer, etc. etc. ) in multiple servers, seamlessly. OS/X is seriously lacking in this area.

Yeah, it really sucks that OS X lets you transparently access folders over FTP with ls. It'd be much better if it did it with ioslaves, so only KDE applications could transparently access them.

(Yes, I know that ftpfs is read-only. Implementing it as an NFS server, so that the FTP back-end has no way of knowing when an application is finished writing to the file, makes it difficult to support read/write access. And, yes, I really have accessed an FTP server with ls, egrep, etc., and yes, it was convenient.)

And the same goes for WebDAV and SMB (although WebDAV uses a gateway VFS rather than using NFS, so it does know when a file is closed and can upload its contents if it was written to, and smbfs is implemented as a kernel-level VFS and supports reading and writing). Unfortunately, there's no sftpfs, but, if there were, that'd be a lot more UN*Xy than doing it with an ioslave.

BTW, your Linux box probably has an smbfs, too, so you can access SMB servers from the command line as well as from KDE apps. (Or does KDE do the right thing on systems with smbfs/cifsfs, and just mount the damn server and let the underlying UN*X do the work?) Somebody might have implemented ftpfs, etc. with userfs, so you might have them as well.

Better yet would be OS X itself natively supporting the most widely used network protocols. Tiger was a big dissapointment in this respect...

Which ones are missing? (Other than read/write FTP, and sftp, which are already known to be missing.)

Re:Good article

[bani (467531)]

the problem with the way osx does ftp though, at least through finder, is that it mounts it as a filesystem, and when the remote ftp site goes out to lunch it sometimes takes osx with it. it also makes it impossible to parallelize tasks to a single remote site. the way ftpfs does it, everything gets serialized and blocks. a slow remote ftp site will make finder slow to a crawl.

ftpfs also groks an extremely limited dialect of ftp, it gets easily confused by various ftp server software that kioslave (or mozilla, camino, etc.) doesn't have any problems with.

no, kioslave really is the best way to do it.

Re:Good article

[Midnight Thunder (17205)]

the problem with the way osx does ftp though, at least through finder, is that it mounts it as a filesystem, and when the remote ftp site goes out to lunch it sometimes takes osx with it

This actutally a big issue that needs to be fixed on MacOS X, and it is not just limited to FTP. Any network mount that goes off-line causes the Finder and any other open/save dialogues to block. In certain cases I have been gone 15 minutes and I still see the color-wheel spinning.

Re:Good article

[swillden (191260)]

Which ones are missing? (Other than read/write FTP, and sftp, which are already known to be missing.)

The biggest one is the kioslave accessible as "fish://" which uses ssh and standard UNIX utilities (ls, rm, cp, etc) on the remote system to implement remote file access. Very secure, very convenient, very slick. Less important ones include imap, pop3 and mbox. Believe it or not, it's very handy to be able to browse a random mailbox without having to configure it in an e-mail client. Others I've used from time to time include finger, ldap, and nntp, not to mention all of the non-remote kioslaves like camera, fonts, gzip, bzip, man and all of the non-file kioslaves like vnc, rdp, mailto, news, print, applications, etc.

Of course, Mac OS X has ways of accomplishing all of the same tasks, but having gotten used to being able to get an any of this functionality so quickly and easily in KDE, I find OS X a little cumbersome to use.

-- End of on-topic post. Beginning of off-topic post. --

However, my *biggest* beef with OS X (this is an unrelated plea for help from anyone who knows) is that I cannot find a way to set up remote "raw" printers on OS X. I have a Linux print server, and I want CUPS on OS X to simply deliver Postscript to the CUPS server on Linux and let the Linux box render and print it. I can use the CUPS web admin interface on the Mac and set up the raw printer queues, and I can print test pages to them, but no OS X apps will print to them. I just get a generic error message (which I'd post but I don't remember it and I'm 2000 miles from the Mac at the moment). I found that I can sort of "trick" it, by using the Mac printer configuration interface to change the printers from raw to "Generic Postscript Printer" and then printing a document. What comes out of the printer is the raw Postscript, so this isn't useful, but then if I use the CUPS web interface and change the printer type back to raw, it will work properly! For a while. Then OS X seems to discover that I've tricked it and starts giving me error messages again.

Actually... it just occurred to me that I should try lying to OS X and telling it that those print queues are actually Postscript printers. Apple Laserwriters or something like that. Hmm.

BTW, the motivation for letting the Linux box do the rendering is twofold. First, the Mac drivers for one of the printers (HP Photosmart 7260) do not support printing to a remote printer. Not only that, but I think the drivers on Linux produce better-quality photos than the HP drivers for Mac, so it's actually better to get the Linux box to print stuff than to attach the Photosmart directly to the Mac. That one really surprised me. Second, the Linux box is much faster and I get the printouts faster when I can get the Postscript to printer-native-language translation done there.

Re:Good article

[Octorian (14086)]

One thing I'd like to see is a HOWTO on running X11 as the native GUI system on MacOSX in place of Aqua/WindowServer/etc. Of course one could always run raw Darwin on the machine, getting most of MacOSX device support advantages, but that would be an unreasonable pain for people who want the two environment to co-exist once in a while, and/or not do a complete reinstall.

Re:Good article

[goMac2500 (741295)]

Log in as >console (either by enabling type in user to log in or by going to the login within and hitting the left arrow, then option enter (I think)). Log into an account when it prompts you. Type startx.

Re:Good article

[Onan (25162)]

... and yes, you can tweak finder to go there to but not without non-free software...

Hm. I'm missing the non-free software involved in typing "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE".

I am impressed that it works, I have tried many times to get Fink and the gang working with Tiger and I have borked on each and every occasion.

Really? I guess I don't know who all the gang are, but I've been using Fink and Tiger together since the day Tiger was released, without even actually needing to upgrade it.

Re:Good article

[FidelCatsro (861135)]

Oh I should also add to that You can also create sym-links from the terminal so you can access the folders .
for those who don't know how to do that :
in the terminal go to the folder you want to create the sym-link and type

ln -s /etc

for example

Or simply from any directory

ln -s /etc /*path*/

Re:Good article

[Onan (25162)]

Or there's the beautiful "open" command: open /etc/

("open" does whatever doubleclicking on its argument[s] would do. eg, if it's an application it launches it, if it's a document it launches the owning application and opens it, if it's a directory it opens it in a Finder window. It's one of the great examples of gui/cli synthesis that osx does uniquely well. Much like pbcopy/pbpaste: cli interfaces to the clipboard, something I wanted in linux for years.)

Re:Good article

[boaworm (180781)]

Well, you could run the X-server rootless, and integrate KDE applications with your Aqua ones. That's pretty useful from time to time, you can run Konqueror, Kopete, Koffice, KMail and such.

Why you would want to do like in the article, run X in a small window, is hard for me to understand though...

Re:Good article

[jaavaaguru (261551)]

Agreed, Apple's X servers for Panther and Tiger work fine with KDE, and I get to use nice applications like Konqueror (because Finder doesn't do sftp:// [ftp] and Kate alongside my Mac apps. I'd suggest people stick with Apple's X server.

It's a good article, but it could be summarised in three lines:
1) Install Apple's X server from your OS X CD
2) Install fink from fink.sourceforge.net
3) type "sudo fink install kdebase3"

Goody?

[SultanCemil (722533)]

Honestly, this is just a silly post.

Does the poster even realize this is simply the X server with KDE running as a client app? its not like they've replaced the nice, flashy GUI with KDE. They've just compiled and run it! Look, I can run Ethereal on OS X. Look, I can run *name unix app* on OS X. Good grief.

Re:Goody?

[KiloByte (825081)]

Hey, many many years ago I've ran Quake on ancient IRIX workstations. Oh wait... it was over X with the actual binaries running on a Linux x86 box. Oh, and I'm running KDE on Windows right now (Cygwin X server, of course, on a machine at work)! Hey, come, lookie, KDE for Windows!

How exactly running an X program over X can be considered a port? It just works as it should, but there is nothing special to it.

Re:Goody?

[SpectreBinary (913950)]

Choice I suppose. If you ever needed a few KDE apps, then here's a solution. If you ever spent your time 50/50 in OS X and KDE, this is the best way to go - if only fink were a little more up to date with KDE packages in a consistent sense.

One of the parts omitted from the article was a demonstration by Si, the guy who wrote the article, of a KDE desktop running on one monitor and OS X running on the other - both controlled by the same G4. For him, it works well and documenting how it was done just makes se

Erm... Why?

[eericson (103272)]

Ummm... If I wanted to run KDE, why would I buy a Mac? I mean I love my Powerbook, but I know the Pentium M systems are faster, cheaper, and (if my experiences are the rule not the exception) more reliable.

Re:Erm... Why?

[fiftyfly (516990)]

Ummm... If I wanted to run KDE, why would I buy a Mac? I mean I love my Powerbook, but I know the Pentium M systems are faster, cheaper, and (if my experiences are the rule not the exception) more reliable.

Simply put... you wouldn't. At least not what the poster is sugesting. OTOH running something like konqueror natively without an xserver (not yet possible) would rock as the finder simply sucks.

Re:Erm... Why?

[rlanctot (310750)]

/puts on flame retardent suit

This just in! Mac OS X users can now poke themselves in the eye with a fork. When contacted for comment, the fork manufacturers said "We got no idea why anyone would want to poke themselves in the eye with a fork, but we're all for it! Anything that increases fork sales is a plus for us. Vive la Liberte!"

This is not news

[spiralscratch (634649)]

This has been possible for a while now. It's quite easy to set up if you use Fink. You can even set it to use apple's own built-in X11 instead of installing XFree86.

http://fink.sourceforge.net/news/kde.php [sourceforge.net]

Re:This is not news

[Knome_fan (898727)]

Read again, they used X11.
So this really isn't news and this really isn't newsworthy.

news ?

[Tsiangkun (746511)]

*yawn*

I guess I should write up my tutorial on how to run fluxbox on OS X, and my follow up, setting environment variables to allow Terminal.app to interact with the X server.

Re:news ?

[SpectreBinary (913950)]

I guess I should write up my tutorial on how to run fluxbox on OS X, and my follow up, setting environment variables to allow Terminal.app to interact with the X server.

Do it. Don't put down documentation on any process that others might not have done - there are many MANY people who might not have the experience to come up with the solution on their own, but who may benefit from it.

The attitude that writing documentation on the simple stuff is pointless is the reason so many man pages, web pages, FAQs and howtos on open source software sucks dog nuts.

Not everyone is geek enough to know how to do some of the cool things - that knowledge comes about for those of us who are geeky enough to enjoy learning the ins and outs of everything for its own sake. Other people, the majority, need to see how something can work when set up well before they'll accept it.

{app} Running on {platform}

[by Anonymous Coward]

{magazine} {country} is running a story on running {app} on {platform}. For those that don't know, {app} is a {category} used to {verb} your {noun}. Finally, {platform} users have a {adjective} approach to their {noun}.

Re:{app} Running on {platform}

[tktk (540564)]

{magazine} {country} is running a story on running {app} on {platform}. For those that don't know, {app} is a {category} used to {verb} your {noun}. Finally, {platform} users have a {adjective} approach to their {noun}.

This article is the biggest dupe I've ever seen!

Re:{app} Running on {platform}

[grammar fascist (239789)]

{magazine} {country} is running a story on running {app} on {platform}. For those that don't know, {app} is a {category} used to {verb} your {noun}. Finally, {platform} users have a {adjective} approach to their {noun}.

That would be teh BESTE APRIL FOOL'S JOKE EVAR. And link to Google searches - for "app," "platform," "category," "verb," and "noun."

That'd be WAY too clever for Slashdot - but I can dream, can't I?

Re:{app} Running on {platform}

[hcdejong (561314)]

In our day, we used to have to {verb} our {noun} manually, using a {obsolete device} and a hand-cranked {platform}. And we liked it that way. You {pejorative} have it too easy with your {adjective} {app}. With all this newfangled technology, {verb} is becoming a lost art.

That's totally awesome

[by Anonymous Coward]

BTW, in other news, you may want to check out this neat page [mysuperblog.com] (with pics!) where I describe how I retrofitted my Toyota Camry to be drawn by horses. The gas mileage I get now is astounding!

What's you hay mileage?

[Rhinobird (151521)]

Do you get 40 furlongs to the bushel?

WHY?

[by Anonymous Coward]

KDe, for all it's open source goodness, isnt a superior system to what OSX has. I dont get why you would bother - OSX is a delight to use.

Re:WHY?

[Fred_A (10934)]

Um, well, I might be in a minority there, but I find KDE (or Gnome for that matter) to be much more comfortable to use than the Apple UI.

I use my iBook daily nowadays, and the interface on my other machines is much more comfortable. Now the Apple interface is much nice than Windows, but I still like the X based ones better. Just being able to send a window at the back, or having sloppy focus... Or proper virtual desktops (although the little gadget that adds that on the Mac does help quite a bit). In the en

Exactly what was missing

[EachLennyAPenny (731871)]

AT LAST a userfriendly GUI on Apple plattforms.

Sorry, could not resist.

Talk about old news...

[God of Lemmings (455435)]

A native KDE port for OS X has existed since the end of 2003.... http://dot.kde.org/1073009304/ [kde.org]

Damn...

[Hurricane78 (562437)]

... i already tought about inventing a game where the guy with the baddest "article" posted on slashdot gets the most points, but *damn*! You already won before it even began!

Introducing our new format...

[NMerriam (15122)]

Slashdot: News for PHB and Marketing Drones.

Slashdot: Buzzwords arranged in an almost sensible order.

Slashdot: Computer News for People New to Computers

Re:Introducing our new format...

[One Childish N00b (780549)]

Slashdot: Computer News for People New to Computers

Ever think there are different levels of geekdom? I'm a music geek first and foremost, and a computer geek second. I didn't know what Fink was, yet I've been a Linux user and casual Sourceforge browser for nearly 3 years and an OS X user for almost a year. I found this article useful even if you didnt, just for novelty value rather than anything else.

Just because you already knew how to do something, doesn't mean everybody does. If this was a PC World 'How to Switch on your Computer' article, you might have a case, but this is a site for all geeks, not just computer geeks; all reasonably smart people - people likely to enjoy this site - should know how to turn their computer on, but not all of them are going to know about something like this, which they might find useful for any number of reasons.

Rant over. I just don't like people who assume just because something is of no interest to them, or simple to them, that it's boring or obvious to everyone else.

I liked this article, it's something I might try out when I've got a few hours to spare. You can read something else if you want.

Thank you, slashdot, for enlightening me as to this smart bit of kit. Keep it up.

Free (as in speech) doesn't mean better...

[node 3 (115640)]

Finally, Mac users have a free (as in speech) approach to their filesystem.

1. KDE has been running on OS X for many years now.
2. cp, ls, mv, etc are open source, and have been available on OS X since the beginning.
3. KDE is nice, but I didn't buy a Mac so I could run KDE, I bought it so I could run OS X.

Which isn't to say it's not good to be able to run KDE if you want, just that I've never heard someone lament, "oh, that only there were some form of free (as in speech) approach to the filesystem on my Mac".

Totally off-topic

[Biotech9 (704202)]

But when you take a screenshot in OS X you don't have to select and drag a box around the window you want as this author has done.

Press Apple-Shift-4, which changes your cursor to a cross-hairs, this lets you drag a box on any part of the screen and the contents are dumped to the desktop as a screenshot.

But! then press spacebar and the cursor changes to an icon of a camera, now click on the window you want to take a screenshot of, and the screenshot will be of that window only, pixel-perfect to the border.

So it looks like this [pax-europa.com] and results in this. [pax-europa.com]

Amazing!

[msormune (808119)]

Now you have a possibility to change your already unified and quite well designed Mac user interface with KDE! Now you have the freedom to make a really bad choice!

Yuck

[catdevnull (531283)]

Yikes. That's really ugly.

Now, if someone can get Vista working on MacOS X.... (ducks and takes cover)

Re:Yuck

[iphayd (170761)]

We already had Vista running. We called it Jaguar, though.

Reasons for using KDE/Gnome on OS X w/Finder

[csirac (574795)]

I'm running a mish-mash of Gnome components ranging from 2.6 - 2.12 with fink.

Darwinports also has a gnome and KDE distribution for X11 on Mac OS X.

The Gnome stuff has been a bit crazy recently, what with the menu files changing file formats and everything.

Why do I run Gnome? Simple: consistent keyboard shortcuts. On my iBook, I have too many different inconsistent ways to get home, end, pg up and pg dn - some use Fn+arrow, others use the command (apple) key. In Apple's terminal app, it's all backwards - you have to press shift+apple+arrow to get home/end, but for pg up/dn you just use apple+arrow, whereas on Linux/Solaris you use shift+pg up (which would be shift+Fn+pg up on this iBook). WTF?

Don't even get me started on the Finder's utterly, utterly useless "alt-tab" - what a pointless piece of crap. You simply _CANNOT_ switch windows with it, only applications! Great, you can switch focus to the most recently used window in one app or the most recently used window in another, but there is NO FUCKING WAY you can change amongst those app's windows without using the mouse and going to the "window" menu or using "expose" (all involve several distracted seconds on that bastard touch-pad mouse thing).

More frustratingly, apple+arrow in Apple's terminal switches between terminal windows - which is great - but I am either expecting this behaviour to get me home/end (like using apple+pg up/pg dn does), or trying to use apple + left/right arrows to switch windows in some other application that does not mimic this behaviour!

NeoOffice/J uses Fn+arrow for home/end, but Mozilla etc. use apple+arrow. Then apple's terminal uses shift+apple+arrow...

I still don't even know how to skip over words in a line of text (in Linux/windows it's ctrl+arrow, but this does nothing in most mac apps).

Sigh... I never thought I'd see the day... resorting to a gnome desktop instead of Finder. Finder has some great aspects to it; its network shares are reliable and good, and after I've installed the virtual desktops 3rd party app I feel mostly at home ... except for the bloody retarded keyboard shortcuts and lack of a usable alt-tab.

It's a bloody nightmare for keyboard users. Please stop trying to make me use the touchpad... argh

Re:Reasons for using KDE/Gnome on OS X w/Finder

[elfasi (301055)]

Actually with Finder and the 'alt-tab' issue, this too drove me mad, until a kind soul told me about the Apple+` shortcut, that's the Apple key and the grave accent key (just below the ESC key on my PC keyboard and on the bottom left of my Mac keyboard). This switches between multiple windows of a single application and saved me much gnashing of teeth.

Lower Low Coming Soon...

[CaptainPinko (753849)]

Is this an all-time low for a slashdot article? I can't imagine how it can be beaten.

Simple, it'll be duped shortly.

Re:STUNNED!

[nihilogos (87025)]

I believe it was Feynmann who said

"That's not right. It's not even wrong"

Some statements are so bizarre that they defy comment.

Re:STUNNED!

[qubex (206736)]

It was Wolfgang Pauli: "This isn't right, this isn't even wrong."

Reference: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/wolfga ng_pauli.html [brainyquote.com]

Re:STUNNED!

[commodoresloat (172735)]

It's pretty bad. I had KDE running on my OS X system back under 10.2; how is it news now? For a while I was just logging in to >console and starting kde so there was no OS X -- but I came to my senses and now I use OS X exclusively. Either way though it's not news -- this artiKle is Komplete Krap.

Re:WHY???

[Aqua OS X (458522)]

Aqua goodness, brushed-metal goodness, unified tool bar grayish-ness, the new iTunes post brushed-metal dark grayish-ness, etc. Basically, whatever shinny inconstant interface turd Apple thinks is cool this month.

And yes, I realize the irony of an Apple interface rant coming from some a-hole who's screen name is "Aqua OS X" ;)

Re:Hasnt anyone tried out the latest Enlightenment

[lightyear4 (852813)]

..how does enlightenment push an envelope? Simple. It puts some complex and attractive eye candy where, for all intents and purposes, it was never meant to be. That is to say, it pushes the limits for X11 and the unices. X11 was designed as an extremely lightweight graphical windowing system for terminals over a network, not for graphics intensive aqua-esque-sexiness. For unix users who have lived for years in minimal graphical environments, its a very new development. Apple struck a home run with Aqua using brand new innovations, yet Enlightenment accomplishments are on running on top of a 25 year old graphics subsystem. Interesting in context, dont you think?