Harsh J

Being a KDE user has its ups and downs. The ups are that its beautiful, has a very wide and usable range of applications, updates often for bugfixes, and is generally very customizable. The downs are a few – with the Firefox+GTK integration being one of them. It makes your browser look UGLY! Of course, there are Qt-friendly browsers like Opera and Konqueror, even Arora, but these hardly work well with many sites, especially those of Google (Wave, for example). I’m not gonna delve into that subject, since this post is about using Firefox on KDE 4 (version 4.3.x).

You might have heard of the GTK engine that themes for Qt, known as gtk-engine-qt on most distributions (or with -kde4 suffix, if thats how they’ve integrated). This helps all GTK applications look great on KDE by providing *near* native look and feel. So I install that and smile, happy that my entire K Desktop is as I want it – dark, without gloss and perfectly usable with certain plasma widgets. That is until I notice my Firefox simply does not close itself when asked to, and hangs instead.

At first one would think its due to a plugin, or an extension, probably something added on that is causing it to hang when its supposed to terminate. Even the KB article at Mozillazine supports that fact. Perhaps its a popular reason, but I tried and it didn’t solve the issue for me. I jumped a few steps out of frustration and went on to move my .mozilla directory to a different name, just to see if it was a profile-related issue, and it still refused to close, driving me mad having to `killall firefox` it each time since it always hung at exit. So I switched to Opera and used it with horrible colors – Pages appeared normally as they would be rendered but the forms and other things just didn’t go well with my dark color scheme (Eclipse), making it appear like the image below, unreadable and thus untypable upon.

The browser’s great otherwise, its fast and very customizable, but I couldn’t make any changes to these colors. I suppose one can achieve it by writing their own userstyle.css file but that is too much work. Used Opera until today, when I finally found this (pretty old) bug in the gtk-engine-qt project tracker. Uninstalled gtk-engine-qt and lo, all was normal again, closed fine and opened fine. Re-installed all plugins and extensions, and said bye-bye to Opera.

All I now miss is a native-looking dark theme with Oxygen icons, as my K Desktop contains. I’m making do with the Black Stratini theme as of now, it’s beautiful but I like the Oxygen icons better. 440 words for just the choice of browser on a dark theme, tch.

Finally got around to re-installing ArchLinux onto the new PC and it was a long irritating week with GRUB errors, FS corruption, etc..

I must’ve caused the GRUB 22 error by extending a logical partition on Windows via its Disk Management tool, after deleting another. I tried fixing it with whatever solutions I could find, including reinstalling the whole bootloader but it seemed like the partition table itself was misaligned after the change. Both of my linux partitions turned Primary and thus the issue. So it came to the time of Reinstallation #1.

This next time I ran into an FS corrupted error after performing the entire net-install again; no idea how that happened and none on fixing it manually either, which was what it kept asking me to do. So I popped the disk back in and let it do an install again, bleh.

This time it went well, I installed KDE 4.3 as well overnight and it was done. Except that nasty HAL and PolicyKit issue that makes your blood boil even on the currently non-existant planet Pluto. Its the one which keeps giving you Permission Denied errors (accompanied with the type of Policy and the auth_admin_keep_always messages). I remember fixing it once before on Ubuntu 9.04 by writing my own /etc/PolicyKit/PolicyKit.conf XML file but that didn’t work out well this time and I had to use KDE’s System Settings – Advanced Tab – PolicyKit Authorization applet to let it grant my user proper permissions. The following screenshot describes what I applied to all items under the HAL’s storage section, and it did the work. For automounting on login, I had to add a simple entry to HAL’s policy files giving it a true hint. Messy work, but it’s finally over!

The next issue I faced was that the music player on KDE, both Amarok and Juk, had long delays before it began playing a file, or between tracks. Plus, I couldn’t even seek the files in it. The solution, I figured, was simple – To switch Phonon (The multimedia framework of KDE/Qt) from its GStreamer backend to XINE. Installed the newer phonon-xine backend and it was done as well. Although I read that GStreamer is much more mature than XINE today, this will have to do until.

That sums up this week, I guess. Besides the ongoing internal tests of course, that’s a whole new post that doesn’t need to exist.

P.s. Windows 7 impressed me. I must be losing it.