KDE-Integration

Revision 8 as of 2008-08-06 16:31:14

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Please check the status of this specification in Launchpad before editing it. If it is Approved, contact the Assignee or another knowledgeable person before making changes.

  • Launchpad Entry: edubuntu-kde

  • Packages affected: ltsp-server

Note ltsp parts have moved to LtspKdeTools

Summary

Ensure KDE has the same LTSP and Edubuntu support as Gnome has.

Rationale

People want to use Edubuntu functionality with KDE, we should fix the various issues that currently make it hard to do that.

Use Cases

Augustin wants to roll out Kubuntu to all the schools in his country, he uses an LTSP server and KDE to give students a lovely user experience.

Scope

Fix LTSP for KDE, add a new seed.

Design

Create a new seed, branched from the edubuntu seed, called edubuntu-kde. This will replate the Gnome packages with KDE equivalents and create a new meta package edubuntu-kde-desktop,

LDM, the login manager used by LTSP needs a graphics theme made for edubuntu-kde and a greeter frontend made for Qt 4. LDM greeters are made as loadable modules and use no non-standard widgets, just a button, text field and a full screen background. Currently it is implemented in python but ldm-improvements will port it to C to remove dependencies so we should make a Qt version in C++.

LTSP-FS needs to be changed to create virtual devices in HAL rather than /media. This will be done with hal-set-property. This is specified in ltspfs-virtual-hal-devices.

Pulseaudio is responsible for sending audio over the network. It creates a default Alsa device and works fine under KDE but is not detected by KMix. It is also not detected by amixer and is likely a bug in Alsa which we should work with upstream to solve.

Edubuntu documentation needs to be updated to explain that KDE is available as an option.

Thin client manager is an application run on the teacher's server to control the LTSP clients. It is a GTK app and needs to be ported to Qt 4. It was designed with a separation between backend and frontend so is ready for porting to Qt 4. The student-control-panel.glade file needs converted to an equivalent layout in Qt Designer. student-control-panel.py needs a Qt equivalent file which interfaces with the UI and the backend using the same methods as the current GTK frontend.

ltsp-manager is an application to change settings for the LTSP setup. It has not been designed with a separation between backend and frontend so there is probably some code which can be refactored to make it easier for new frontends. It writes out configuration to an ltsp.conf file. ltsp-manager.glade needs ported to a Qt Designer equivalent and a Qt version of ltsp-manager.py created to interact with that and the ltsp configuration file.

kio_media needs an option to not show the Safely Remove option for drives mounted over LTSP-FS. This is done as a small patch to nautilus in Gnome and we will make an equivalent patch for kio_media.


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