Restoring legacy components

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 3:12 AM, Goh Lip <g.lip at gmx.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Jan 2011 09:45:15 +0800, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> This is probably a stupid question, but hey...
>
> Heh heh heh....:)
> Liam, I don't have issues with HAL or its replacement and I don't use 9.04
> (too much problems with KDE4.0) so I'll skip that and let others reply, but
> I'll comment on the splash....

I have been trying KDE again in the last couple of days. So many
people on Sounder say it's better than GNOME.

I installed a fresh copy of the latest SUSE, OpenSUSE 11.3, on a spare PC.

It's sluggish, but then, I have long felt SUSE was rather lardy...

But recent playing-around with PC-BSD 8.1 led me to think that one of
my niggles with KDE4 had gone away: that horrible floating "desktop"
window. KDE 4.5 in PC-BSD has actual desktop icons, finally restoring
basic 1984-level functionality to KDE4.

Not on OpenSUSE, though.

Is it possible to set KDE4 to show icons on the actual bl$%dy desktop
and not in some wretched floating plasmoid
sort-of-filer-window-but-not-quite thing? I do not like all the cr$ppy
floating gadgets or plasmoids or plasmids or whatever they're called -
frankly, I'd like to just turn them off altogether, but I don't think
that's possible. The default icon theme in SUSE KDE 4.4 is also crass,
ugly and as childishly amateur-looking as ever, but that is probably
fixable.

I Googled it but the advice - pretty poorly-worded and vague as it was
- said right-click in various places and then to either choose menus
that don't exist or to go into a dialog box and choose options that
don't exist.

I'd like to like KDE, honest I would. I was a big fan of KDE1. But 4
just repels me on sight.

>> Is it possible to manually re-install components that Ubuntu has
>> abandoned and moved away from?
>>
>> E.g., the old splash screen. I don't like Plymouth. On my machines
>> where it works, there is a long, pregnant pause before it kicks in,
>> followed by a very short splash screen with 4 dots that tell you
>> nothing about how far bootup has progressed. I'd like the old one
>> back, with an actual useful, informative progress bar.
>
> There is no need to do re-install or modify any component; just remove the
> "splash" on the linux line of the grub menu entry and that's it. Also note
> some people want to see the progress/systems loading and for that, you can
> also remove the "quiet" too.

That just gets you a text-mode bootup, doesn't it? I am not averse to
that, but I'd like my old progress bar back, really. Flashing dots
convey no information other than "I'm doing something but I won't tell
you what or how far I've got". Whatever person thought that was an
improvement needs a slap.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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