KX Studio 12.04

[wolftune]

Thanks, Thad! I'm making things work on my end and learning, but I'm concerned about things being clear and documented enough for students and beginners. I like where you're going with things and I'd be up for contributing to documentation at some point… I guess after I feel like I have enough knowledge.

[Thad E Ginathom]

This was the qtconfig tweak.

The trouble is that I can't remember if I needed to do this for KXStudio tools. Anyway, one day I'll be running virtualbox, which is there that particular MATE-forums thread started.

I've seen falkTX say that most Linux is enough the same that we ought to be able to get stuff to work. In all practicality, though, he's not going to be able to test everything in every combination of every flavour, so support has to be limited --- which is where mutual support kicks in.

Mostly, I just listen to music, which doesn't make me much of a tester, but I hope every little counts.

[wolftune]

What about the other way around?
I'm finding that gtk+ apps have one big problem on my KXStudio 12.04 system: they all use a dark KXStudio color scheme even though I changed the KDE color scheme. This is a big problem with some apps because the font color is unreadable. Essentially, I need a way to tell my KDE system to change the color scheme of gtk+ apps which are somehow set dark like KXStudio…

[Thad E Ginathom]

You might try a different approach to installation. I don't want a heap of KDE stuff, and I don't need quite a few of the things (a lot of plugins, as a non-musician, for instance). The KXStudio installation methodology I have followed is (in principle if not in detail) the one described in this thread:

KXstudio without branding and KDE.

I also turned off treating recommends as dependencies, both with command-line and Synaptic (it's an option in the preferences screen). That gives one a great deal more control

Having got the basics (Jack, cadence, basic audio and video stuff) installed, all working within the themes and desktop stuff that is my existing desktop environment, and without changing it with that KXStudio-Welcome theme option. You can then pick, choose and "shop" to your heart's content in the repositories for what you need or want. And hey, even a non-musician likes to make weird noises with synthesisers, or experiment with plugins that can be used in media players. I end up with a heap of stuff --- but none of it changes the look and feel of my personal screen. To you, it is the tools of the trade and the instruments of creativity, but you've probably noticed that even the least skilled can't keep their hands off the keyboards in a music shop, and here (Linux) it's all free

I'm still working, day to day, with 11.04, so there's only so far I can go when talking about 12.04. I may not even change until something comes along that won't work with 11.04. As FalkTX is developing for 12.04 and up, I guess this may happen sooner rather than later. This change-for-change's-sake and lack of backward compatibility seems to me to be the big problem with the Ubuntu philosophy.

[wolftune]

Thad, that is all well said, but I actually like KDE at this point. And I am a musician. I like KXStudio, and am using mostly KDE stuff overall. I just want to be able to change the color scheme for gtk stuff within KDE because I want to use a few programs that are gtk…

[wolftune]

@wolftune: To change gtk themes while running KDE (and after setting theme to KXStudio), delete this file:

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~/.kde/env/gtk2-engines-qtcurve.rc.sh

Then go into the kde systemsettings, appearance, gtk+ theme, and re-select the theme you want to use.
Re-login and it should work, I think...

That didn't quite work. It just lost the settings and was just default gtk look without any control. What I had to do was instead edit that file to say "export GTK2_RC_FILES=$HOME/.gtkrc-2.0-kde4" instead of "…kxstudio"
Then the system settings could actually do something. However, only the QtCurve theme actually uses my color scheme (which is "Lucky Eyes", which I find most pleasing on my eyes). I wanted to use Oxygen, and so I tried installing gtk-oxygen and oxygen-molecule, and while those worked for the widget look, they only used the default color scheme. I wish I could have the Oxygen widgets with whatever color scheme I choose and work across Qt and gtk apps. Oh well. I'm sticking with QtCurve for now because colors are more important to me than widgets. I think editing the theme files I could get what I want, but it's not worth it as I looked at the files and the settings aren't obvious enough to me. I think it ought to be easy enough for all the widget styles to still use the KDE global color scheme though, in principle.

Anyway, it seems to me that there's no reason for KXStudio to set the gtk2-engines to go to some other file named kxstudio. It could still go to the kde4 file, thus allowing system settings control, and it could just set the system settings to the KXStudio themes…

[wolftune]

Fair enough. And anyway, I'm getting to really understand what stage things are at and why people around here have the priorities they do. It makes sense to me. This stuff about colors is minor. The Cadence stuff, and the issues I was discussing elsewhere about latency, those are higher priorities for sure. Thanks again for all your work! I hope I can continue learning enough to be of help with documentation and whatever else I can do…

[Thad E Ginathom]

Thad, that is all well said, but I actually like KDE at this point. And I am a musician. I like KXStudio, and am using mostly KDE stuff overall. I just want to be able to change the color scheme for gtk stuff within KDE because I want to use a few programs that are gtk…

My last install was the most "controlled" yet. Follow more or less the same procedure, but leave in the "recommends" and you will get your KDE stuff. Of course, if you have KDE desktop to start with, then I'm lost

What I have found, with Ubuntu, is that adding stuff is easy, removing it is sometimes not, so I find it best to start with less and build up. A super-powerful Synaptic would have been nice, with rollbacks and stuff, but given Ubuntu's desire to be quasi-commercial populist, they prefer to give us a shopping mall instead.

[wolftune]

by "a super-powerful Synaptic" do you mean something other than the Synaptic package manager program that exists? I.e. are you taking about a hypothetical dream or are you saying Ubuntu ought to use Synaptic instead of the Software Center?
In KXStudio 12.04 which is KDE, Muon stuff is pretty nice. It's easy to see a history and remove things. And there's an easy command for removing unnecessary packages…

[Thad E Ginathom]

by "a super-powerful Synaptic" do you mean something other than the Synaptic package manager program that exists? I.e. are you taking about a hypothetical dream or are you saying Ubuntu ought to use Synaptic instead of the Software Center?

Yes and yes . I'm dreaming about how an enhanced Synaptic, as an adminstrator's tool might have been. Software Centre is just shopping-mall stuff

In KXStudio 12.04 which is KDE, Muon stuff is pretty nice. It's easy to see a history and remove things. And there's an easy command for removing unnecessary packages…

OK, pleading guilty to not having given KE a fair chance! Also, Synaptic is quite powerful, and certainly individual packages can be administered. Plus, of course, there is always the command line.

I guess that KXStudio must have been born under KDE? It's one of its accomplishments that it runs in other DEs too.

[Jasy]

I wanted not to release this post yet, but since it may help you getting started, here it is:
Hands On KX Studio
The Section about Cadence may be usefull for you, since it describes the problems i had myself with the jack configuration. Also you may check the configuration once in a while, i noticed, that sometimes the configuration is not saved or is resetted. You can also click on the Screenshots to show them in full size.

Thanks for the guide but i couldn't manage to make it work.
In the System Checks the "user in audio group..." is not connected.

Here is the jack log after a reset: http://wildeffect.com.sapo.pt/Jack%20logs

[amsel]

So you didn't add yourself or your username to the audio group?

Thanks mad.ax, this is a nice topic to have here.

In case you might missed them, the 12.04 release notes are here:
http://kxstudio.sourceforge.net/Documen ... leaseNotes

Note that Cadence is the app responsible to do all the system checks for you. Obivously it needs to be coded that way, so I'm happy to receive reports on how to tune the system even more - so that I'll add such check in Cadence.
(The 'Cadence' tool is currently being rewritten and should be out soon as beta1. In the meantime the version in the repos is outdated)

to add yourself to the audio group, a simple 1 command-only I use is:

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sudo addgroup `whoami` audio

The "whoami" does the trick by telling your username.

Keep up the good work!

Should help, if that was the case.

[wolftune]

This is NOT a priority issue, but I'm still curious about things regarding color schemes in KXStudio…

So, I successfully got the oxygen-gtk theme to use my color scheme, I just had to edit the files related to the theme to change from "oxygen" as the color scheme to the scheme I wanted (LuckyEyes).

However, some gtk apps, like Firefox, GNU solfege, inkscape, GIMP, and others all successfully use my desired colors and theme. However, others, such as Cheese, Abiword, are wrong (and I'm not sure if Ardour is wrong too or is overriding things in its own way). These look more like the KXStudio color theme. Now, maybe these apps just aren't integrated as well into KDE, but they must be getting the color info from somewhere, since these colors are not the defaults for those programs! So I would like to figure out where they are pulling their color info from and figure out how to override that and get a scheme I want.

See this:

bad color scheme in AbiWord in KXStudio

gtk-bad-color.png (30.34 KiB) Viewed 1662 times

[wolftune]

Just to be clear: I'm not trying to make everything gtk looking, I'm trying to get everything to look like Oxygen in KDE. I'm using the straight KXStudio install with KDE. And anyway, the gtk apps are successfully using oxygen widgets, they just aren't using the right color scheme — well, as I said before many are but others are not. I played with qtconfig and nothing seems to be changing, even after log out. Anyway not a priority, but thanks.

[wolftune]

The theme I'm using overall is Oxygen, and for gtk, it is oxygen-gtk. This is consistent in Firefox, GNU Solfege, LibreOffice, and more. The screenshot is not LibreOffice (LO is fine!), it is AbiWord. So it seems that some programs are correctly checking with the KDE settings while others are not — but these others are checking with something (otherwise, why would they be black with white text like KXStudio?)

I found some stuff in gconf-editor that looks promising… I'll see…