Concerns about Konqueror

[Eric Weir]

I'm getting pretty comfortable with Konqueror, though I'd prefer it was simply a file management application. A couple of things I just noticed today concern me, though.

My Kubuntu system is networked with the Windows system from which I'm transitioning. I do as much as I can on Kubuntu, but there are some things I can only do on Windows at this point. So, e.g., I may write something on the Windows machine, then go to the Kubuntu machine and Konqueror and use OpenOffice to format and print the document.

But today I found that when I access a Windows folder from Konqueror it doesn't update the folder, i.e., the new file doesn't show up, even if I leave the folder and return.

I've solved the problem by going to the Windows machine and using Windows Explorer to do what Konqueror couldn't do. I don't know what's going on here, but from my newbie/nongeek perspective this looks like a pretty serious shortcoming/flaw in Konqueror.

The other thing I noticed is that files show up with times that are about two and a half hours ahead of the system time.

I imagine there'll be somebody out there who'll speak up for Konqueror and explain this to me.

[A humorous bit of serendipity here: When I spellchecked my post before posting it, the spellchecker -- this Kubuntu spellchecker! -- kept suggesting that I subsitute "conqueror" for "Konqueror."]

Regards,

[dibl]

Re: Concerns about Konqueror

though I'd prefer it was simply a file management application

That's all I use it for -- you don't have to use it for anything else.

But today I found that when I access a Windows folder from Konqueror it doesn't update the folder, i.e., the new file doesn't show up, even if I leave the folder and return.

This sounds like a caching issue -- the same thing happens in Windows, if you have a folder open in Explorer at the same time that you save a new file in it with Word or something. You have to do a "View>Refresh" to get the new file to show up. I'm away from my Kubuntu system, but I'll bet there's a way to do the same thing with Konqueror.

I've solved the problem by going to the Windows machine and using Windows Explorer to do what Konqueror couldn't do.

I seriously doubt this is truly necessary -- btw, what is it that you do with Explorer to fix it?

The other thing I noticed is that files show up with times that are about two and a half hours ahead of the system time.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm. What time is it on the Windows machine, vs. the Linux box?

I imagine there'll be somebody out there who'll speak up for Konqueror and explain this to me. [A humorous bit of serendipity here: When I spellchecked my post before posting it, the spellchecker -- this Kubuntu spellchecker! -- kept suggesting that I subsitute "conqueror" for "Konqueror."]

I'm not that crazy about Konqueror, to be honest. I'm old-fashioned enough to think Krusader is a pretty decent file manager.

Dolphin, which is the default file manager in Gutsy, seems to be fine as well, if they'll get the residual bug or two out of it.

Canonical being, errrrrr ..... British, kind of explains some of the spell-checking "features" in Kubuntu. You might say their understanding of the language "colours" the rules of spelling.

[Uber Nooblett]

Re: Concerns about Konqueror

I've had just one issue with konqueror really and thats the fact that when moving something to a removeable USB memory stick or my mp3 player, to complete the write, I have to 'safely remove hardware' which doesnt always occur happily.

[dibl]

Re: Concerns about Konqueror

I have to 'safely remove hardware' which doesnt always occur happily.

Actually, you should do that in Windows too. Here are a couple of related points to ponder:

- FAT32, the most common filesystem on thumb drives, is a poor performer, in terms of reliability. Did you notice that Microsoft ran away from it 10 years ago, for hard drives? Any journalling filesystem, including NTFS, is more reliable than FAT32.

- Linux, in my experience, does a better job of reporting that there has been some damage to a filesystem on a thumb drive or removable memory card. Windows seems to happily accept the potential corruption -- until it's too far gone to recover. So, always "safely eject" and don't pull the device before the little blinky light stops blinking, if you care for your data.

[Eric Weir]

Re: Concerns about Konqueror

This sounds like a caching issue -- the same thing happens in Windows, if you have a folder open in Explorer at the same time that you save a new file in it with Word or something. You have to do a "View>Refresh" to get the new file to show up. I'm away from my Kubuntu system, but I'll bet there's a way to do the same thing with Konqueror.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

...btw, what is it that you do with Explorer to fix it?

I don't fix it. I just use Explorer instead of Konqueror, e.g., to copy a file from the Windows system to the Kubuntu system, or vice versa.

The other thing I noticed is that files show up with times that are about two and a half hours ahead of the system time

.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm. What time is it on the Windows machine, vs. the Linux box?

The Windows machine is always several minutes+ behind. I think the onboard battery is running down. What concerns me is that the times Konqueror reports, e.g., regarding when a file was last saved, is always a couple hours + ahead of the system time.

I'm not that crazy about Konqueror, to be honest. I'm old-fashioned enough to think Krusader is a pretty decent file manager.

Dolphin, which is the default file manager in Gutsy, seems to be fine as well, if they'll get the residual bug or two out of it.

As long as I understand how to avoid the problem I was complaining about, I think I prefer Konqueror to Nautilus. I've never tried it, but I've heard good things about Thunar.

Canonical being, errrrrr ..... British, kind of explains some of the spell-checking "features" in Kubuntu. You might say their understanding of the language "colours" the rules of spelling.

Hmm. But isn't KDE German? Is Kubuntu, "errrrr..... British" or German? Whatever it is, you'd think Kubuntu wouldn't suggest "conqueror" for "Konqueror."

[blobfish]

Re: Concerns about Konqueror

This sounds like a caching issue -- the same thing happens in Windows, if you have a folder open in Explorer at the same time that you save a new file in it with Word or something. You have to do a "View>Refresh" to get the new file to show up. I'm away from my Kubuntu system, but I'll bet there's a way to do the same thing with Konqueror.

If there is a menu entry, it isn't obvious to me. There is a reload button or F5.

[Fintan]

Re: Concerns about Konqueror

You might say their understanding of the language "colours" the rules of spelling.

Dible, they invented the language and they can color it any way they want

As for kde being "German" well, that is true to a point. I don't know how many developer are German, Indian, North American, English or Spanish but Konqueror is not a word in any dictionary whereby "conqueror" is. Have you ever tried to spell check instead of spellcheck "kubuntu"??

So much for linguistics.

If you are using samba to network between your win amd linux machines, then it does take time (samba is slow) so I don't think it is really a K(c)onqueror issue as such. Maybe you should have a look at your smb.config file and / or post a thread on the samba forum.

Why your konqueror does a time leap of two hours? Maybe we should ask CERN, they are playing with that kind of stingy stuff.
Is you linux machines clock showing the right time? Windows was never on time so I won't go into that.
Afaik linux takes its time from two places: the bios or the net (if it is set up to do that) and has two formats. UTC:
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time)
and GMT+ or GMT-.
So if your linux is set to UTC then you will get "time warps".

As long as I understand how to avoid the problem I was complaining about, I think I prefer Konqueror to Nautilus. I've never tried it, but I've heard good things about Thunar.

Nautilus is gnome, thunar is xfce (i believe) and as dible pointed out dolphin is the default in gutsy kde and will be with kde4. I think you can install it under feisty as well. I am not sure so don't quote me.

[Snowhog]

Re: Concerns about Konqueror

Setting UTC or local time

When Linux boots, one of the initialisation scripts will run the /sbin/hwclock program to copy the current hardware clock time to the system clock. hwclock will assume the hardware clock is set to local time unless it is run with the --utc switch. Rather than editing the startup script, under Red Hat Linux you should edit the /etc/sysconfig/clock file and change the ``UTC'' line to either ``UTC=true'' or ``UTC=false'' as appropriate.

Setting the system clock

To set the system clock under Linux, use the date command. As an example, to set the current time and date to July 31, 11:16pm, type ``date 07312316'' (note that the time is given in 24 hour notation). If you wanted to change the year as well, you could type ``date 073123161998''. To set the seconds as well, type ``date 07312316.30'' or ``date 073123161998.30''. To see what Linux thinks the current local time is, run date with no arguments.

Setting the hardware clock

To set the hardware clock, my favourite way is to set the system clock first, and then set the hardware clock to the current system clock by typing ``/sbin/hwclock --systohc'' (or ``/sbin/hwclock --systohc --utc'' if you are keeping the hardware clock in UTC). To see what the hardware clock is currently set to, run hwclock with no arguments. If the hardware clock is in UTC and you want to see the local equivalent, type ``/sbin/hwclock --utc''

[dibl]

Re: Concerns about Konqueror

I was just playing with Konqueror a little bit, and noticed two things:

1. I must confess, I don't find anything analogous to the IE "View > Refresh". But I also haven't really experienced the phenomenon that was described, where semething doesn't show up.

2. With Samba running, I attempted to copy a file from my Windows XP system to the Linux side, and it seemed to go fine until I clicked "paste", and then I got a "Could not read smb://dibl's doc ..."

@Fintan, what does this mean?

[Eric Weir]

Re: Concerns about Konqueror

2. With Samba running, I attempted to copy a file from my Windows XP system to the Linux side, and it seemed to go fine until I clicked "paste", and then I got a "Could not read smb://dibl's doc ..."

I had a similar experience. When I tried to drag and drop files I would frequently get a "Clip board is empty" message, which really puzzled me. I tried copying and pasting, and as best I can recall, it always worked.

Since, however, I've found that drag and drop works a little differently than on Windows. You don't tell it whether you want to move or copy in advance. You just drag the file to the new folder, and when it gets there a menu will open up with the option to move or copy, plus some other options I haven't paid attention to yet. Haven't yet had any weird experiences doing it this way.

When I discovered this I assumed it must be common knowledge to Kubuntu/KDE people.

[Eric Weir]

Re: Concerns about Konqueror

If you are using samba to network between your win amd linux machines, then it does take time (samba is slow) so I don't think it is really a K(c)onqueror issue as such. Maybe you should have a look at your smb.config file and / or post a thread on the samba forum.

Thanks for the suggestion. Right noow, though, I wouldn't know what to look for, probably not even what I was looking at. But maybe after looking a post to the samba forum would generate some enlightenment.

Why your konqueror does a time leap of two hours? Maybe we should ask CERN, they are playing with that kind of stingy stuff.
Is you linux machines clock showing the right time? Windows was never on time so I won't go into that.
Afaik linux takes its time from two places: the bios or the net (if it is set up to do that) and has two formats. UTC:
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time)
and GMT+ or GMT-.
So if your linux is set to UTC then you will get "time warps".

Sounds like that could be the explanation. I'm a real newbie, not intimidated, but not much of a geek. Just want to use the damn computer. How do I find out? And once I've found out, how do I coordinate the times -- assuming this is the explanation?

[Eric Weir]

Re: Concerns about Konqueror

When Linux boots, one of the initialisation scripts will run the /sbin/hwclock program to copy the current hardware clock time to the system clock. hwclock will assume the hardware clock is set to local time unless it is run with the --utc switch. Rather than editing the startup script, under Red Hat Linux you should edit the /etc/sysconfig/clock file and change the ``UTC'' line to either ``UTC=true'' or ``UTC=false'' as appropriate.

Oops! I wasn't paying attention. This answers the questions I asked Fintan. And it's very clear. As I say, I'm not a geek, but I think I can do this.

Thanks,

[Fintan]

Re: Concerns about Konqueror

Thanks for the suggestion. Right noow, though, I wouldn't know what to look for, probably not even what I was looking at. But maybe after looking a post to the samba forum would generate some enlightenment.

@eric: You could open K->system configuration->date-time and have a look at the time zone line underneath the choice panel. If it reads something like "new york-UTC" you are on UTC time. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find

/etc/sysconfig/clock file

I did have a similar problem on my mepis test install and found a solution here:
http://mepislovers.org/forums/showth...3573#post83573

I hope that helps.

2. With Samba running, I attempted to copy a file from my Windows XP system to the Linux side, and it seemed to go fine until I clicked "paste", and then I got a "Could not read smb://dibl's doc ..."

@Fintan, what does this mean?

@dible: This is just a guess but do you have a firewall running on your windows machine?

[dibl]

Re: Concerns about Konqueror

I THINK I have turned off all the firewalls on the Win XP machine. There are at least three ways to go at this problem:

1. Control Panel > Security Center > Firewall

2. Control Panel > Windows Firewall (darn it -- this was indeed set "On" -- perhaps this was the problem)

3. My Computer > Network Places > View Connections -- right-click connection, then "Change Firewall Settings"


OK -- reboot Windows and restart Samba and we'll see if anything is different. :P


EDIT: Nope.

[Eric Weir]

Re: Concerns about Konqueror

To see what Linux thinks the current local time is, run date with no arguments.

To see what the hardware clock is currently set to, run hwclock with no arguments.

My system clock and hardware clock report the same times -- updated today here in the states to standard time, i.e., the end of daylight savings time.

And today, Konqueror is reporting the same time as the system. Not sure that's in the same situation that it was reporting a different time earlier. I'll have to monitor it.

Thanks for the instructions, Snowhog, and you, too, Fintan.