Comic strip widget on KDE problem

Dilbert comic has stopped updating itself months ago and “Get new comics” gives me “There was an error loading data providers.”

I’ve manually downloaded Garfield strip that has the same structure - content folder with “main.es” file and a separate “metadata.desktop” and I extracted it into the same folder where Dilbert resides in:

/home/“user”/.kde4/share/apps/plasma/comics

But it doesn’t register with the widget itself.

Where can I fix this? Is there some file that tells the comic strip widget where to look for comics? is there a way to fix “data providers” error?

Is there an up to date Dilbert provider somewhere? I would happily write a script myself if I knew where to start and where to put it.

I’m on 11.2, KDE 4.3.5, btw.

Oh, and if writing a comic strip script (a bit of a tongue twister) means getting a new image from the publisher, reformatting the link, writing it into a new file and serving it to anyone who’s interested, I guess I can do it with PHP, and I have an access to a server already, not particularly fast and powerful but it should be ok for one silly Dilbert strip.

Maybe what has happened is that kde-files.org (which serves up the comics)
has upgraded to work with KDE 4.4 unfortunately leaving you behind … if
its important to you, you could try upgrading to KDE 4.4.

Or maybe just the one you are trying is broken, try some of the others from
http://kde-files.org/index.php?xcontentmode=685

No, KDE upgrade is not the problem - just a few meters away, on the same home network, another 4.3.5 gets its “Poncho” just fine.

BUT, now that you’ve mentioned it, I’m afraid of trying to test any new comics for that machine, too - what if it gets the same “data providers” error and I lose it completely!

On kde-files.org the latest comics still ask only for 4.x.

They might have updated the “list” to work only with 4.4 but I hope there’s a way to bypass it altogether and download and add comics manually.

However, it’s more likely that something is broken on my end rather than kde-org cutting off all their non 4.4 users.

Remove the plasmafiles from your ~/.kde4/share/config folder, and rebuild the desktop appearance. This looks like some remains of older plasma configs conflict with newer ones. This was needed to get my son’s comic widget back to work.

No luck, there are four “plasma…” files in that folder, I renamed them all, re-logged in and they were all rebuilt, desktop was clean but when I tried to add comic strip widget it came up with the same loading providers error.

Dilbert was pre-selected in the dropdown list, btw. That ‘memory’ wasn’t erased when I renamed those four plasma files in kde4/share/config folder.

I just had a thought - what if the problem lies in DNS resolution for the comic strip server?

Here in Thailand we have some local mirrors and it could be that applications depending on opensuse/kde servers get redirected to mirrors and sites that don’t carry the same content, or whose url translates into different IP addresses depending on the country and that causes widgets to fail.

If that is the case, then what is the working IP address of the comic strip server and where can I set it manually, bypassing DNS resolution altogether?

I always have similar problems with repos, changing addresses from “download.opensuse.org” to 195.135.221.130 in Yast usually does the trick.