LinuxMusicians

falkTX wrote:

danboid wrote:I have a couple of suggestions for tweaks to the default power settings, maybe for the next release?

On AC power, I like to disable all screen dimming and automatic messing with your screen after so long and set the laptop lid to just turn off the screen when its closed rather than putting the machine to sleep, as is currently the default.

That makes sense, BUT as always, changing some GUI stuff does NOT work.
You really need to put that in your head.

Incidentally, I care about energy efficiency and want others to as well. I don't support screen-dimming turned off when AC is plugged in. It is totally reasonable that your screen should turn off and not waste electricity when you aren't using it!

EDIT: btw, with the new KDE 4.11 you can now click the battery icon and disable power management.
When that is off, the screen never dims or the machine sleeps. That is what you want, right?

This is not since 4.11, this is as long as I have ever used KDE, since at least 4.6 I think, probably long before that. It works simply enough. The preference can be set to show the battery icon all the time in the sys tray even for desktops, thus this option to turn off power management is always readily available.

However, this is an incomplete solution as it requires users to remember to turn it back on, especially if they are not on AC power.

The real answer is Caffeine: https://launchpad.net/caffeine
Problem there is, development has stalled and it is the single program that has been crashing for me since I updated to kernel 3.11

Caffeine, when working fully, can automatically disable power management just at certain times. For example, I had it set to disable power management whenever guitarix or VLC were running, and it is supposed to also detect the running of Flash videos, but that didn't always work.

I really wish that Caffeine would get fully updated to work correctly and reliably and then be packaged with KXStudio. It's the true solution here.

I'm regretting having chosen to use the KX themes during install now.

When I was giving feedback on a prob caused by too dark a shade of grey text used in KX installer earlier in this thread (or it could just as likely be in the thread for the previous test release) it seems this problem also affects both FireFox and qtractor (and likely many other Qt apps) and I can't really use them now without changing the colour of the fonts.

In qtractor, you cannot read the track details such as its name, channel number or instrument its using in its main window and you also can't read the names of plugins added to tracks in the mixer because of the text colour.

I frequently can't see what I'm entering into text boxes under firefox because of the same dark grey text on a black background problem.

A good example of a site I struggle to use due to the KX theme font colour issue is http://packages.ubuntu.com/ - I can't see what I'm entering!

falkTX wrote: There's a lot of workarounds around the web, I'm using a custom chrome.css file and userstyles.

The world is not ready for dark themes (or any non-white themes anyway), I can't stop blaming Windows and MacOS for this...

The user shouldn't have to be hunting for workarounds to get a usable browser. I suppose they could re-install without the themes or just nuke their firefox settings?

Could you remind me how we set the Qt themes again please? qtconfig seems to have disappeared - thats what I thought it was.

Here's a screenshot of what a qtr track looks like with the default KX themes applied.

Do you know which font(s) I'd need to change the colour of to fix this F?

Dan, these compatibility problems have been the case for the whole time KX has used dark themes. They are the primary reason I'd been pushing to include the option for the themes I've developed. I have a darker-grey theme that is still compatible with everything, still has lighter overall windows. I was hoping that would be included, but I didn't want to insist on it being priority.

Essentially, I'm trying to compromise by getting at least darker and otherwise nice and simple but more compatible.

Anyway, this discussion has obscured my points earlier about Caffeine. I don't expect anything, but I'd like to make sure you folks at least note and understand that issue.

Cheers

falkTX wrote:Good news, the really-possibly final 12.04.3 ISOs are ready, now uploading....


.....@totalchaos: Please check if the no X/kdm after install bug is fixed, thanks very much!

I am on it

1. re: qtconfig, I think KDE settings take care of that, right? (under System Settings, Application Appearance, Colors, Scheme...)

2. (slight digression) I see what's going on with QTractor... in the code, near the top of qtractorTrackList::drawCell, it uses pal.midlight as the basis for current track's text & background color. Qt docs say light/midlight/etc are only intended for button bevels. These are derived from Button background color, you can't theme them directly. They happen to work with light themes but dark. So yeah, this needs a QTractor fix; the KXStudio theme is ok.

That said, I consider themes a waste of time. A bunch of apps look like crap with dark themes, web pages don't respect system themes at all, and the world's gone over to web apps and bright themes. It sucked for 5 minutes when I woke up at 3:00 this morning but it's mostly bearable and definitely better outdoors. I guess what I'm saying is, I won't complain if falkTX decides to ditch his theme and the Welcome Screen's theme-tweaking scripts.

Probs uploading the 64-bit ISO F? The currently uploaded file is only ~300MB.

ITS ALIVE

I just installed KXStudio 12.04.3 on an old and ridiculously slow hard drive, so if it works here, it f*ing works. I also tested the new 3.11-lowlatency kernel. It work fine too.
I can test the 64bit one later too.....

I am so positively surprised to see my user in audio group by default

falkTX wrote:I know that some people don't like dark themes, but the contrary is also true. Some users, like me, can't stand white ones...
As for compatibilities with other apps, it's them that is broken not the theme. Both Gtk and Qt provide the developer direct access to the users color scheme, some just are lazy and ignore it.
Same things for web pages sometimes, web devs sometimes set a custom whitish background color but ignore to set the text color...

I know I like dark too. Devs are lazy because color seems trivial and superficial, then once you get down into details (eg. CIELAB) it's like "I ain't got time for this!" I mean, Qt basically treats everything as a Window, Textarea, or Button. Need more colors? You're on your own, and you *will* screw up. Anyway, sorry for polluting the forum with this stuff, I'll stop now

Yes yes I will send Rui a bug report or maybe a patch if I find a solution. Normally I'd procrastinate but I'm writing my first Qt app and I need to figure this stuff out! And......I just downloaded your latest ISO so I'll try this in KX...

64bit one is working fine too.

Tested the new 64bit ISO in a VM... no problems.

This time I tried NOT using the KX theme... hahahah, what a mess. Huge fonts etc. So I tried to enable the KX theme through System Settings, but couldn't easily figure that out (I don't normally use KDE) so I re-ran kxstudio-welcome, did it that way, logged out and in. Much better. Now I see why you created that, falkTX

I've tried installing the latest 64-bit version using E2B now and I'm happy to say I've not found any major issues. USB audio is still broke for me with this latest 3.8 kernel but we expected that. I'll be updating the manual shortly and to include a guide on how to install different kernels and get them to boot by default for this reason. I'll be making a few other edits or small additions to the manual so that it reflects the fixes and changes contained within the new release.

I expect F hasn't made any changes to his themes since the last test release? If not, then I'm now very glad that KX doesn't default to using the KX dark themes offered by welcome, which I'd not actually tried installing and hence using properly until yesterday. Normally I couldn't care less about themes and colours but when it actually flat out breaks key apps like qtractor and Firefox, the line has well and truly been crossed and this experience has made me realise how bad decisions in this area, sorely neglected by myself, can effectively break your distro. I'm sorry for not having tried installing the themes sooner!

I would advise those wanting a dark desktop theme to avoid choosing the KX dark themes in KX Welcome but instead install without the themes then find 'Workspace Appearance' in the KDE system settings and switch to the Oxygen KDE desktop theme. However, I prefer the Plastik Window Decorations over the Oxygen set personally.

(F: I tried deleting both .kde and .qt yesterday but that was not enough to fix qtractor and KDE's visuals - there was still streaks of black everywhere and everything looked broken. Is there anyway to undo the KX themeing without a reinstall?)

The only other minor issue I have found with the new KX so far is the uneccessary daemons I mentioned (gpsd, etc.) are still getting loaded by default but including ondemand now too, it would seem to be so on my install anyway. After stopping the ondemand daemon getting loaded at boot, my CPU gov is now defaulting to performance, which is what I want most of the time. Anyway, thats not a big deal really as you've now included the cpu indicator and I was happy to see the default user getting added to the audio group now - that was a nice surprise and great to hear its working for Totalchaos now too!

Excellent work falkTX!!!

I tested it for real (not in a VM). Didn't install to disk, just noodled around with my guitar. No immediate problems with my ART USB, surprisingly.