GNOME != Fedora [LWN.net]

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 4, 2011 21:18 UTC (Fri) by RCL (guest, #63264)
In reply to: GNOME != Fedora by aseigo
Parent article: Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

KDE made some dubious decisions as well, although not necessarily UI-related. Its current push for Semantic Desktop is one of them - years (of CPU time) will pass before this project bears fruit, if any at all.

I am not in position to complain, though - these days, running free software (and not being otherwise involved in its development) is basically participating in someone's experiment or PR campaign - akin to using free email or reading free (and ad-filled) newspapers.

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GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 4, 2011 21:40 UTC (Fri) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] (15 responses)

Plasma Active One is built around the semantic desktop technologies and would not work without them. i'd call that "bearing fruit".

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 4, 2011 22:07 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (13 responses)

Well, I still don't understand WHY I need a semantic desktop at all.

My KDE taskbar doesn't work correctly on KUbuntu 11.10, but I can share it over the network (what for?!?!). KDE 3.5 had wonderful multi-desktop support but now I not only have multi-desktop, but multiple activities each with its own widget set.

Then there's a question of usability. Nepomuk allows me to reassure myself that all my music is in ~/Music, but there's no way to find which program uses a certain keyboard shortcut.

So, what are the use-cases for the whole 'semantic desktop' thingie? I have yet been able to find one.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 5, 2011 12:27 UTC (Sat) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link] (10 responses)

My KDE taskbar doesn't work correctly on KUbuntu 11.10

What do you mean by "doesn't work correctly"?

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 5, 2011 13:08 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (9 responses)

Probably "it doesn't do what I want, and I can't find out how to change it!".

KDE is busted for me, too, in some respects - it's not network transparent! I have an old system I use as a terminal.

Log in over xdm, and I get NO notification window. And mounting comes back "only root can mount this device". WHY? That's important to me because I switch between computers and would like my experience to be identical!

Cheers,
Wol

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2011 0:08 UTC (Sun) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (4 responses)

The "bug" you describe is by design--local console users are allowed to mount removable devices, remote users are not. This is enforced by PolicyKit, not KDE. It seems like a reasonable default to me, though obviously not suitable for everyone.

Placing the following text in a .pkla file under /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/ should allow you to access removable devices via the udisks service (as used by recent KDE versions, or on the command-line via "udisks --mount $dev") regardless of whether you are a local or remote user:

[udisk Permissions]
Identity=unix-user:$your_username
Action=org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-mount;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-check;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-lsof;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-eject;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-detach;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-change;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-luks-unlock;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-inhibit-polling;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-set-spindown
ResultAny=yes

Note that the org.freedesktop.* action IDs are all on one line, with no spaces. Replace "$your_username" with your actual UNIX username. The first line is just a label; feel free to change it.

See also pklocalauthority(8) or <http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/polkit/pklocalauthority.8...>.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2011 3:13 UTC (Sun) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link] (3 responses)

It looks like someone has been drinking a little too much Java there...

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2011 6:07 UTC (Sun) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (2 responses)

Are you referring to the format of the configuration file? The INI format, predates Java, of course, and the reverse-DNS naming convention is standard in many situations where unrelated organizations must provide unique IDs. So far as I am aware there is no Java code in any of these components.

It would have been helpful of the action names were grouped a bit better; you can use glob patterns, but the org.freedesktop.udisks.* actions are a mixture of normal user actions (e.g. "mount removable filesystem") and things which should require administrative privileges (e.g. "manage the LVM subsystem" or "lock encrypted LUKS devices unlocked by other users"). I didn't see any obvious combination of positive glob patterns which would be sure to select just the normal user actions, short of listing them all. Renaming the actions enabled by default for interactive sessions to something like org.freedesktop.udisks.safe.* would have allowed for a much more compact configuration, but I realize that has its own issues. Groups, or multiple Action= lines, would be nice. Perhaps the ability to filter actions based on a glob pattern plus the current Result* settings ("allow all udisk actions which this user could use in an active session"). Or at least some (documented) way to break values over multiple lines.

There used to be a GUI for configuring PolicyKit permissions, but apparently no one's updated it for the PolKit-1 redesign.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2011 16:32 UTC (Sun) by ABCD (subscriber, #53650) [Link] (1 responses)

There is a GUI for KDE at least, called "polkit-kde-kcmodules-1" upstream (but it hasn't actually been released yet). In Gentoo, we package a snapshot of this repo dated 2010-11-27. This GUI integrates itself with the rest of KDE System Settings.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 7, 2011 20:26 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Thanks all of you for the info.

And I run gentoo :-)

iirc it used to work the way I want, until a recent KDE update dragged in polkit, consolekit, etc etc. Then I started swearing ... :-) part of the trouble is I haven't got the knack of finding the docu - whether I can't think of the right keywords for Google or not I don't know.

Cheers,
Wol

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2011 8:08 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Nope, just a simple bug - buttons with window names become squashed as if the taskbar is overflowing.

Additionally, windows are added to the _right_ side of the taskbar, not to the left (and no, I don't have Arabic or Hebrew locale set).

I've reported it, but no result so far.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2011 23:38 UTC (Sun) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (2 responses)

There is a good reason that doesn't work. Device Notifications are only sent to the user on the local console attached to the machine, not to remote users. There is no way to reliably and consistently handle notifications or access to devices in the remote user case, what would the system do when there are multiple remote users? Even if there is only one user logged in remotely, the first of N remote users shouldn't behave differently, that would be very weird in a multiuser environment

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2011 23:59 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

what do you do if there are multiple remote users? you notify them all of course.

sending notifications to all users, local or remote is something that has been done for decades on unix systems.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 7, 2011 16:22 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Many if not most of the hardware access that is appropriate for a local console user, to network, audio, and storage devices is not appropriate for remote users. The OP was asking why they couldn't change local device settings when logged in remotely. There are certainly cases where we want to send a notice to all logged in users but for many of the desktop notifications related to local hardware you probably don't want to broadcast them to all users and you probably don't want all users to have automatically privileged read/write access when plugging in a removable drive for example. It's a much simpler default policy to just draw a line between local console users and remote.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 5, 2011 15:06 UTC (Sat) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (1 responses)

Sometimes you need to use the final version of something before you see why it is handy. E.g. smartphones. They've been calling various phones smartphones, while the only thing they could do is e.g. bluetooth and a calendar. Now loads of people cannot live without them.

I expect semanic desktop to be similar. Added value atm is low (it seems, don't use KDE), in future: everything it provides would be considered normal by the users and if you don't have it your phone/pc is just ancient.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2011 8:12 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I could see potential in smartphones long before iPhone. Implementations were lacking, but the possibilities were there. I don't really understand what is the endpoint of the Semantic Desktop.

I kinda like KDE visually, especially compared to GNOME3 [S]hell is. But that semantic desktop fixation is killing me.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 4, 2011 22:08 UTC (Fri) by RCL (guest, #63264) [Link]

We will see whether there are actual advantages provided by it - hopefully Semantic Desktop (a misnomer?) will fare better on _tablets_ than on desktop proper, where I am not aware of anything that would justify paying Nepomuk tax.

If you could point me to a comprehensible and practical use case of Semantic Desktop/Tablet features, I'll gladly be educated.