Re: GNU IceCat KDE

[Giuseppe Scrivano]

Hi Leo, nice job!

Cheers,
Giuseppe



Leo Rockway <address@hidden> writes:

> Hello everyone, 
>
> [beware, very long email ahead]
>
> I'm a KDE user and I was trying to make GNU IceCat integrate better with my 
> desktop environment. I had heard about the openSuse patches that seemed to 
> accomplish this so I looked for them and proceeded to patch the sources and 
> compile xulrunner and GNU IceCat. I probably did this some 8 or 9 times 
> (yeah... I'm not kidding). There was some sort of bug that prevented me from 
> doing make install on GNU IceCat (the bug wasn't on GNU IceCat itself -or at 
> least I don't think it was-, but on the patched sources). But at least the 
> compilation was working (even if I couldn't make install) and I got to try 
> this integration.
>
> The supposed benefits of these patches are that you get a nice KDE dialog 
> when 
> you have to pick a file (as in "file > open"), KDE proxy configuration, 
> buttons on the right side (Gnome has them backwards!) and I think that was 
> about it, but I'm probably forgetting something.
> I managed to get some of these things to work. The proxy part was a complete 
> failure and I had to ditch that patch because it made the compilation fail. 
> The things that worked weren't worth all the effort of compiling, but I 
> figured that if I found a way to automatize this, then there could be 
> binaries 
> for KDE available in GNUzilla. The sad thing is that these patches break a 
> lot 
> of other stuff: "save as" doesn't work anymore (some problem with 
> openDesktop, 
> according to the debugging console), and the "save image" option is missing. 
> I 
> found that the benefits weren't enough to outweigh the problems.
>
> But I didn't give up. On my search for an integrated GNU IceCat KDE I found a 
> couple of addons and configurations that would help you make your GNU IceCat 
> look almost as a native app.
>
> The first step is getting the Oxygen theme [0] which is GPL. This theme has 
> the particularity of changing your "about" image for a nice picture of Kongi 
> with the Firefox panda... which is unacceptable for us! So I decided to work 
> on my GIMP skills (yes, I use GIMP and not Krita... so what?) and I came up 
> with a nice logo for GNU IceCat KDE [1]. To replace the Firefox branding just 
> look for the "preview.png" and "about.png" files in your ~/.gnuzilla folder. 
> If you have more than one of those files, just look for the Konqi one. Konqi 
> is LGPL, so this nice image I put together is freedom compliant.
>
> Okay, next thing is to get some GNU IceCat and KWallet integration: Just go 
> get the addon for KWallet [2] and be happy. This addon is GPL (I wish that 
> kde-look and kde-apps specified the version of the licenses...).
>
> The last addon that I'm going to introduce today is called PlasmaNotify [3] 
> and it's perfect to replace those ugly GTK boxes for beautiful KDE Plasma 
> notifications when your downloads are completed. This addon is GPLv3, but I 
> had to contact the author to find that out because I couldn't see it anywhere 
> else [4] (just look at the comments).
>
> And, for the final touch, you can still have nonGTK file chooser dialogs 
> without patching GNU IceCat sources! They are not KDE file choosers, but they 
> are good enough (they look like the OpenOffice.org KDE integration, which is 
> very Qtesque). I found this out in the Oxygen theme page at Mozilla: Enter 
> "about:config" in the address bar, look for the 
> "ui.allow_platform_file_picker" key and change its value to "false".
>
> If you follow all these steps your browser will look really pretty [5]
>
> Sorry for the long email, hopefully it will be worth it to make some KDE 
> users 
> happy =]
> Enjoy your GNU IceKat!
>
> Namaste,
> Leonardo
>
> ps: I just realized that the name of this list is "bug-gnuzilla" and none of 
> these were GNU IceCat bugs!
>
> pps: I'm having some ISP problems, so if the files on 
> http://leorockway.com.ar/icecat/ are not available, try again later.
>
> [0] http://kde-
> look.org/content/show.php/Oxygen+KDE+%28Firefox+Theme%29?content=117962
>
> [1] http://leorockway.com.ar/icecat/icekat.png
>
> [2] http://www.kde-
> apps.org/content/show.php/Firefox+addon+for+kwallet?content=116886
>
> [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/12196
>
> [4] http://www.andreas-demmer.de/2009/05/31/plasmanotify_-
> _firefox_spricht_plasma/comment-page-1/#comment-365
>
> [5] http://leorockway.com.ar/icecat/final.png