Well, I’m very glad to announce the release of M1 (milestone 1) version of Lancelot. This is not a 1.0 version, but the significance is that this is the first one meant for public use. This also means that the “don’t file bugs, this is pre-alpha software” era is now over. So from now on, bugs.kde.org is your friend.
M1 (the revision number 843716)
The menu is in a good shape, and is quite usable. The main feature highlights are:
No-click application browser
Integrated KRunner
Parts of Lancelot on the desktop - drag a list section (Places, Devices…) right onto the desktop
M*
Milestone releases regard only the KDE 4.1 branch of Lancelot (although the trunk is developed in parallel). I’ve decided to make a couple of them before 1.0:
M2: More powerful Parts applet. Ability to add the application browser and search box to the desktop
M3: Contacts section. I have hoped that KDE 4.1 will bring full switch to Akonadi and Decibel, but, since it didn’t happen, I’ll have to use the d-bus interface to KMail and Kopete.
M4: The configuration interface for the menu (now only the launcher applet can be configured)
1.0 (M5): The final polished version
The “one-oh” version will be the final version for KDE 4.1. After that, only the trunk will be developed, and the versioning will return to normal 1.x, 2.x… (most probably in sync with KDE releases)
I know that I’m being a bit boring, but I just had to write another post. While everyone is writing about Akademy, unfortunately I am not going this year and I have to focus my mind on something else (to avoid jealousy). That is the main reason Lancelot has been improved this much in the past week or so. :)
Today’s topic is the great return of the Parts applet. As you can see in the screenshot, my desktop has two different lists from the Lancelot menu - favourite applications and storage media.
There isn’t a pleasant way of adding those to desktop yet (you would need to edit the plasma-appletsrc file to get them), but soon it will be a matter of Drag and Drop, or right click -> “Add to desktop”.
You get a three blogs in one since I’m to lazy to write them separately:
Theme
First of all, just to say that I’ve started making a new theme that would fit with the Plasma’s default. It is inspired by the proposed new look for Kickoff (by Davide Bettio - http://www.uninstall.it/kickoff_mockup.png). It looks like this at the moment:
To be honest, I don’t like it, but it fits more with the default Plasma theme. If there is anyone willing to modify it so that it looks more, well, appealing, just mail me, and you’ll get all the help you need :) This version will be in the SVN tomorrow (the 4.1 branch).
Categories versus one button
This comment by Beojan decided what will be the default: _ I object to making “sections in panel” the default.
I think GNOME works with that method because they have a textual description. If all you have are Icons, a new user would find it hard to understand what each of the icons mean, so they would find a single icon, where it is obvious that it launches the menu, with sections inside,which have textual descriptions, easier than having seperate icons for each section.
I have to agree with this - by making the categories shown in the menu by default, the user gets the information of what categories exist. Later, it could be changed to my preferred behaviour.
Compilation issues and crashes.
I’m happy to announce that the compilation issues that were related to Xlibs are now gone. I was linking the Parts applet with the application, and then, it wanted to be linked to Xlibs that are not needed for the applet. Side effect is that now the applet .so file is much smaller.
In other news, the crashes that were occurring during the application browsing are history. At least, I haven’t seen one in a while :) (if you encounter one, please notify me)
Since there were a couple of reported problems related to L installation, I decided to write a small how-to. The most peculiar thing was that ‘make install’ didn’t install any binaries. Thanks to the help of Jone Marius Vignes, the problem was hunted down and killed :)**
Prerequisites
Subversion client
Python >=2.5 (needed only at compile time)
Qt4 and KDE 4.1 or trunk development libraries (kdelibs and libplasma)
Enter the directory that contains the source code (cd lancelot), and do the following:
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=`kde4-config --prefix`
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release
$ make && make install
If you plan to send me backtraces of crashes, install the KDElibs, libplasma and Qt with debugging symbols, and replace ‘release’ in above script with ‘debugfull’.
Alternatively, if you have the KDE development environment set up according to the article on the Techbase, just enter the source directory and type cmakekde
Almost there
Now just restart Plasma and add the Lancelot applet to the panel or desktop, or wherever. If the menu doesn’t show up when you click the applet, visit this link Lancelot FAQ: Troubleshooting
First of all, Lancelot development is now branched to KDE 4.1 compatible development and trunk. It needed to be done since there already are API changes in libplasma, and I want L to be in shape for 4.1 too. The 4.1 compatible code is located in /branches/work/lancelot/kde4.1-backport/. It is a bit misleading name - ‘backport’ - since the main development happens there, and then, changes are copied to the trunk. I’m updating the trunk on every major change so it still is the latest development release.
In the other news, the Favourites section works perfectly. When you start Lancelot for the first time, favourite applications will be loaded from Kickoff, or if there is no kickofrc file will be populated with default set of applications. If you want to add or remove an application from the Favourites, just right-click it. Although this looks like a trivial change, there had to be a couple of big improvements under the surface - Lancelot had no support for context menus before this :)