From the Dot: “Welcoming in the new year is People Behind KDE bringing us one of the little known stars of KDE development. Sebastian Trüg is the man behind one of KDE’s most successful applications, K3b. Read the interview to find out how K3b started, what KDE needs to conquer the world and what keeps Sebastian motivated to work on the premier CD burning application.”
Seb,
You mentioned something about porting K3b, can you elaborate more?
I would assume that he meant porting from Qt3 to Qt4, though I’d LOVE having K3b available in OS X. (I’m currently using Toast, but I’m not a big fan of it.)
He obviously meant porting to Qt4 and nothing else.
Thanks guys – I’m a mac user now, and never thought about QT4!
I’d love to see a native build of some KDE apps to the Mac platform. I really miss Konqi.
First off, I love K3b. Not to say I’ve actually tried Serpentine or Xcdroast or GraveMan (probably should if I want to make statements like this), but compared to my option on Windows, Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 (Basic), K3B is so much better it’s not even funny. No, I don’t feel like shelling out the money for Nero.
I do miss the feature to change the track gap size that was in the 0.11 series. I know why he removed it, but I’d point out I have some professional audio CDs that have no gap (or close to it). I hope it comes back. Mind you, I do like the (apparently) new ‘hide first track in pregap’ feature. I’ve had fun with it.
@nighty5: I think by “Porting K3b” he means “Porting K3b to Qt4/KDE 4”. I dunno, KDE 4 is intended to be portable to other OSes so maybe it would work on Windows.
Edited 2006-01-02 17:59
I dunno, KDE 4 is intended to be portable to other OSes so maybe it would work on Windows.
Probably not since cdrecord and the other command line tools for which k3b is a frontend do not work in Windows.
Actually, they are.
According to the OSSwin project (http://osswin.sourceforge.net/),
# CDRDAO [GNU GPL]
# CDRECORD
# CDRTools Win32 binaries [GNU GPL]
# Cdrtools with SPTI
are all available for Windows
Perhaps, then, a port is more than possible?!
“I think once we have a general-purpose package format which allows the user to easily install additional stuff we are good to go: konquer the desktop world!
”
Well, he just hit the nail on the head. Good to know that some KDE developers know that somehow, in some way, Linux needs to figure out how to do this safely and securely, while still allowing the level of control and openness that makes Linux, well, Linux…
Oh, and who doesn’t LOVE K3b?
http://autopackage.org/
We do. But we’ll probably have to have four before people will believe one of them is good enough.
I suspect the problem with different package systems is that every distro (nearly) has its own requirements for what it wants to do, and thus different package management systems. RPM probably can’t do lots of things apt and portage do, and apt and portage at the very least track things differently… and they are, of course, not the only ones out there. Klik, pacman, pup-get, dotpup, zeroinstall, autopackage, whatever Lunar Linux uses that I can ALMOST remember
I think in order to get one package manager you’d need to create a format that encapsulates everything other package managers use, and then find a way to overcome NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome.
“RPM probably can’t do lots of things apt and portage do, and apt and portage at the very least track things differently… and they are, of course, ”
RPM works in a different level from APT. If you want to compare the tools compare it with DPKG. If you want to compare the formats compare it with .deb formats.
APT itself has been ported to using RPM and has been available for years. It is however currently not under active development anymore. If you want a auto dependency resolver in RPM, you can use Yum in Fedora and other systems for example.
K3B is the only program from KDE I could never live without. It’s one of the best programs ever written for Linux. Gnome simply has no counterpart, although I much prefer to use K3B in Gnome than using Firefox, Thunderbird, and Gaim in KDE.
Edited 2006-01-02 20:32
I have to say that K3B is the best CD burner I have used on Linux. I run Gnome desktop but K3B is the only KDE program I use regularly since the Gnome burners weren’t as nice and easy. I works everytime for me and it is very easy to use with a clean UI.
Edited 2006-01-03 02:23