Evil Home Stereo

I remember a time when I tuned quite regularly into music TV like MTV and VIVA (and Onyx which I never actually liked). Most the time not to watch it actively but to have some background music on long hack nights. Some times I even actively switched into some shows which could happen to be quite fun to watch. Like Fast Forward with Charlotte Roche or Mixery Raw Deluxe when it was still moderated by MC Rene. The latter even though I’m not really a Hip Hop fan. Oh, and of course the Anime on VIVA.

But at some point, it all went down.

Have you ever noticed that stupid icon “Java Web Start” the JRE throws on your desktop if you install it on Windows? Have you ever tried it instead of deleting it immediately? The idea behind it is quite nifty though nothing really new. If you click on a so-called JNLP file (”Java Network Launching Protocol”), an application is loaded on your box and can be started immediately. Something like Java Applets on speed. Or An Administrator’s Worst Nightmare, I’m not sure.

Whatever, out of interest I tried to use it on my KDE box. And it didn’t work (of course). The Installation Guide offers a short guide for Mozilla (or better: Netscape). It’s actually so vague that it also applies to Konqueror (use the File Associations options).

Instead of following the step-by-step guide (and probably miss some details) you can also just install a small desktop file to $KDEHOME/share/mimelnk/application — the KDEHOME environment variable defaults to what the command kde-config –localprefix tells you. If you want to install it system-wide, put it into the subdirectory application below the directory the command kde-config –install mime –expandvars gives you. I guess you might have to run kbuildsycoca afterwards (restarting KDE will definitely help).

As GNOME and KDE share the same syntax for desktop files, it should be possible to use that file on GNOME, too, but I have no clue where you have to put it.

After ages finally a new blog entry… and still no comments possible. Sorry guys, I suck, but vi is the easiest blogging tool to set up.

Whatever, this post is a reply to Aaron Seigo’s last posting (I first started to write it as a comment on his blog but blogger.com’s comment functionality sucks and I missed my vi). Under the title “konsole vs xterm, or proof that KDE is not bloated” he writes:

[...] I explained to [somebody who complained about konsole's assumed bloatedness] that since konsole allows multiple tabs one avoids the overhead of multiple instances of the same app when running multiple sessions; having an equal number of xterms would be “heavier” for some value of N sessions. [...]

Yeah Aaron, for the usage case you quoted, Konsole might be indeed less a hog than xterm et al. And I actually always have some Konsole with a bunch of tabs open somewhere.

But I also have the habit to open up “one shot” shells for commands I just quickly hack in; like looking up man pages (the startup time of kio_help is even worse than Konsole) or some shell commands to try out. Those I normally open via minicli or a (better: the only) symbol I have in my Kicker. Much quicker than locating first the collected shells, change focus and open up a new tab.

Multiple konsole windows also have the advantage that you can spread them over several desktops.

So in those cases the footprints of all the Konsoles probably add up, at least for the short time they run. But that’s not so bad, I have enough memory in my box.

What’s worse is the startup time for a single new konsole instance; just compare the numbers:

mss@otherland ~ $ time xterm -e bash -c exit

real    0m0.363s
user    0m0.032s
sys     0m0.018s
mss@otherland ~ $ time konsole -e bash -c exit

real    0m2.148s
user    0m0.872s
sys     0m0.153s

I must admit that all my KDE is compiled with full debug enabled which makes it a bit sluggish sometimes, but comparable numbers to the above I get on the boxes at my university’s labs which run a standard SuSE install. So guys, please get down those frickin startup times KDE apps generally show. (Or maybe I should try prelink one day?)

But you know what? I use Konsole instead of xterm anyway — for the features it offers I have no problem waiting a few jiffies for a new shell. And these times are already much too hectic anyway…