At Grafikon we have been running an Unix based XPP system for around 20 years. Over the years we have been using the following Unix flavors:
- System 5 based Xyvision proprietary OS
- Dec Ultrix
- Sun Solaris
For many years our operator were used seeing a rather bland Solaris CDE desktop environment (following many years of the Ultrix CDE desktop).
More recently we changed our Solaris XPP servers to Linux based servers. Not for the fun of it, but mainly because of the price/performance advantage the intel based platform was offering.
But when you move to a Linux platform, you have an important choice to make: what desktop environment will you run? The main contenders are:
- Gnome
- KDE
(lucky for us CDE was a no-go, although it does exist)
Alvin, our local Linux expert, is an avid KDE user. So the choice was made to use the KDE desktop environment and by the time we were ready to make the switch to the new environment KDE 4.1 was released.
Here is how a KDE4.1 desktop might look like:
(as with all desktops, you can spend the rest of your life adapting it to your liking)
As you can see, one of the new big features in KDE4.1 is support for transparency. A feature you can also find in the lastest Mac OSX and Windows OS versions.
Up and till now, I tend to think of those ‘features’ as toys and eye candy, invented and imposed by marketing departments in lack of ‘real’ new features or in order to slow down our machines.
But ho, wait. Roger Pecceu actually found an application for it that involves the XPP software.
You might not know Roger, but Roger has been working on our XPP system for some 20 years now and never ceases to surprise me with novel uses of the system/keyboard shortcuts/X-menu buttons.
The task at hand was to verify that the newly installed V8.2 system did produce exactly the same results as the old V7.3 system.
Nothing could be easier for Roger…
Roger has known the days of film and in those days it was quite common to superpose 2 pieces of film in order to see where the differences were.
So Roger came up with an electronic version of this ‘old’ process.
From his Ubuntu/KDE4.1 workstation he logs in into the XPP 7 system and the XPP 8 system. He then simply opens the 7.3 version of the job and the 8.2 version of the same converted job. And then…he simply overlays both windows.
What could be simpler!
| Here is the work in progress |
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| And here the process is completed |
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Can you see where the 2 versions do not match?
(hint: formula near the bottom of the boxed text)
Well there you have it, what was a toy and eye candy turned into a real production tool.
Or how to teach our new dog (KDE4.1) old tricks…
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5 users commented on " How to teach a new dog old tricks "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackKDE has certainly come on since I last used it. Looking rather nice now.
“Up and till now, I tend to think of those ‘features’ as toys and eye candy, invented and imposed by marketing departments in lack of ‘real’ new features or in order to slow down our machines.”
You wouldn’t be talking about the unloved and much derided “all skirt and no knickers” OS called Vista/Windows 7 would you?
On another “alternative to M$” note, have you seen that the latest version of Open Office (3.2) now provides support for *.docx, *.docm
More info here:
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.2/#general_file
Hedley,
As you can see from my post, not only MS is suffering from this ‘me to’ disease. Transparency started with the Mac O/S, then quickly followed by MS and has now reached the KDE folks. But then again KDE has always been the more frivolous kid in Linux land.
Nice to see Ubuntu in use, even if it is with KDE. I am a Gnome-ite for a variety of reasons. We too can do transparency of terminals that would do the same thing. This is a really neat use of a “virtual light box”. For those of you not old enough, there was a time when I would have laid one output page over another on a light box to see whether the pages matched. This was back in the ancient days of a Varityper system.
Just want to add that we are currently running KDE 4.3.3 and that KDE 4.4 is just out.
Below is a screenshot of the KDE 4.4 Plasma workspace.
Note how even the taskbar in the bottom of the screen is transparent!
I believe that the transparency settings are due to compiz and so not depending on KDE. I will check that later this week.
I have been a Fedora user for ages but last week moved my private laptop to Ubuntu and it works wonderful. Soon I will install it on my desktop machine and will test the transparency. I have my laptop looking like a Mac, including the dock (and yes you can spend hours getting a nice desktop display).