Planet KDE

I had a realization yesterday. I was on my way home, after class, and it suddenly hit me: it’s 5:30pm. And the sun is still shining.
Winter is over. :)

So now it’s spring, and soon it will be summer, and you know what that means – summer of code! :)
Actually this blog post comes a bit late – If you’re a developer, you should have already put your project ideas up on the wiki, and if you’re a student you should already be talking to developers and reading those wiki pages to find a project that interests you. Still, it’s not too late to start – today google announced the list of accepted organizations. This didn’t really affect KDE – it’s a pretty safe bet that google will accept us – but for students who aren’t sure where to start, there’s now a nice list. :) Of course, I still say KDE’s the best community to work with ;)

So if you’re a student, and you haven’t figured out what you’re doing this summer, get moving! :) GSoC is one of the best possible ways to spend a summer. :)

oh, and lydia has put together a cool flowchart to show all the important deadlines. :)

This is a junior job for all of you that want to get started in KDE development and don't know what to do, kdesdk/poxml is a set of tools used to convert KDE xml-based documentation to po (translator friendly format) and back. They are still using Qt3Support, that is not bad per se, but is not good either.

Doing the port should be straightforward if you have some Qt experience and read the docs on porting form Qt3 to Qt4.

Of course i'll be there to help and review the final diff, so what are you waiting for?

Being an avid biker, I often find myself assembling nice tours for upload on my N810. Usually that involves designing a round trip with Google Maps, downloading its .kml file, converting this to .gpx with the help of gpsbabel, copying the converted file to the N810 using scp and finally opening it in Maemo Mapper. Although working reliably, this process is tedious and cumbersome: The route is calculated on TeleAtlas data by Google and displayed on OpenStreetMap tiles in Maemo Mapper.

Ideally I want to use Marble instead; Prepare a route on my desktop PC, export it to my N900 (which replaces the by now broken N810) and have Marble on the N900 guide me on the tour. Admittedly it may be a long road to have that working smoothly, but the journey is the reward

Moving on in this direction, I committed some code earlier this evening that adds reverse geocoding support to Marble’s new Online Routing feature (SVN trunk only). Those on the bleeding edge can now search for an arbitrary number of placemarks and calculate a route between them. Kudos to the openrouteservice.org team whose service we can use, the openstreetmap nominatim author for the great search and reverse geocode service and of course all the OSM mappers collecting the data.

Beware the fine print, though: Routing is limited to Europe currently and some obvious features in Marble are yet missing — showing a route summary, print support, import/export of routes to kml/gpx. Last not least the code is young and not tested by too many people yet (please change that). I am happy to receive feedback and bug reports.

Other news say that KDE was accepted as an organization in Google’s Summer of Code. By happy coincidence the KDE ideas pages lists a project Marble To Go with me as the mentor. If you think you are eligible for doing a Summer of Code project, maybe that one is for you. Give it a thought!

In the good tradition of finishing with some demo material, here is a short screencast to satisfy the “no pic, no care” crowd Best watched fullscreen.

Routing in Marble using openrouteservice.org from Dennis Nienhüser on Vimeo.

If neither embedding the video nor the Vimeo page does work for you, use this page instead, please.

Hello KDE Comunity, my name is Vitor. I’m almost (if I have some luck xP) finishing the CS course of the University of São Paulo – Brazil.At the university I’m a member of the Sanca Livre, a group dedicated to the spreading of  Free Software, which currently act by the promotion of training courses, talks and travels to events related to Free Software.

On the academic background, I got some experience on robotics, genetic algorithms and FPGA’s, besides the plain CS course. At the professional side, I work on automotive realtime systems (lots of assembly and low level stuff).

My first contact with Linux and and open source in general was quite some years ago, using the Conectiva (a brazilian distribution, now known by the name Mandriva). Since then, I’ve been using it in servers, but it was just in the last few years that I really began using it as my main desktop system, and since then I’m more and more involved with Free Software as a developer.

In the past, my contributions were limited to small patches and bug reports. I always spent a lot of time reading technical articles about many projects, notably from KDE 4 serie, but had never seriosly developed for any of them. So I began to talk to Tomaz, in order to bring him to my university as a teacher for the Qt training course he blogged about some time ago. It was talking to him that I decided to publish a personal project (it’s hosted in the KDE playground -> utils -> kpws), and develop it as an open project, marking my first serious work on the Free Software community. Besides this project, I’m planning to find something to work on related to Plasma and KDE Games.

KDE Personal WebServer, or kpws, is being written to provide a easy way to transfer data from KDE to any device connected to the same network, without relying on any OS specific software/protocol. This is achieved by means of the HTTP protocol, which is natively supported by anything having network connectivity.

Screenshot1

The idea is to handle as many mime types as possible, so that the user can drop anything (files, folders, plasmoids, text, and so on) there, and the software will create a page to render the relevant content to the client, or in case of files, simply send it as a simple download, making it instantly accessible on any device with a browser.

At the state, there’s no drag and drop support, it can only share files/folders, and the ui is… well, a bit ugly. The code was done to support many types of objects, so it shouldn’t be so hard to make it share other things.  There’s however, many work to be done on the integration with KDE, UI beautification and a lot of polishing on the core classes, so I’m gonna write another post showing the technical side of the project.

I’m looking forward to work with you, guys, and would like to thanks Tomaz by all the support, motivation and of course, the Qt course this weekend.

I read an interesting blog this morning Freedom vs. The Cloud Log where Glyn Moody interviewed Eben Moglen. Eben Moglen was General Council of the FSF for 13 years and helped draft various versions of the GPL. He talks about the implications for software freedom caused by the rise of services in the 'cloud' where your data is owned by the service provider, and the fact that they don't usually release the code of their applications that run on the servers.

With the recent ownCloud initiative, the KDE community is doing something about the problem, by allowing you to have your own data stored in a variety of types of places of your choice, so that it is independent of a particular machine. It gives you a option of putting it on a host providers machine, or on you own network - somewhere where you personally are in control of it.

I had been thinking of getting some sort of home server, that was always connected to the internet, to use as a music server. The Apple Mac Mini running either Mac OS X or Kubuntu (like I run on my small laptop) seemed to be the best bet. Most servers are still really big and ugly with noisy fans, and not really suitable for running in your living room. The Mac Mini is one of the few attractive and quiet options, but it is quite expensive.

When Eben Moglen talked about how we could construct a distributed infrastructure peer to peer style, instead of client/server as used by Facebook and the like, he mentioned a small ARM based server called the 'SheevaPlug'. That got me thinking, and I went off googling for everything I could find about this tiny server the size of a wall wort power supply. It turned out that there is a new model called a GuruPlug which has additional features like WiFi, eSATA interface for cheap fast hard disks, and an SD slot. The more I thought about it, the more fun the idea sounded. There are so many things you can do with one of these little servers.

So I just went ahead and ordered one. The basic server was 91.47 euros, a JTag board for debugging was another 26.82 euros, and shipping by FedEx was a bit pricey at 49.76 euros. The total cost was 168.05 euros, which is actually quite a lot relative to how much a cheap netbook costs these days. I'm sure in a years time you will be able to walk into a computer shop and get them for more like 50 euros or so. I think these things will be subject to Metcalfe's Law where their usefulness will rise according to the square of the numbers of users. If Eben Moglen is right we should be able to undermine the efforts of authoritarian governments, such as China, the UK, Australia, France and so on, by going completely peer to peer with strong encryption and cut off the government snoopers from invading our privacy and stealing our civil liberties. So for reasons like that, I think my 170 euros, plus a bit of my time will be a good investment.

KDE has once again been accepted as an org for GSoC. Yay! This means we’ll once again be welcoming a bunch of great students into our team to make KDE software rock this summer.

So what to do now?
If you’re a student who wants to take part in GSoC this year: Go and check out the ideas page and pick one you like or come up with your own idea. Then get in touch with the team working on the program you want to contribute to over the summer. Work with them to write a kick-ass proposal and then hopefully make it reality this summer. To keep up with all things GSoC you can also subscribe to the kde-soc@kde.org mailing list.

If you’re a potential mentor: Go and check out the flow chart below. It has everything you should need to know about how we’re doing GSoC this year. Then go and subscribe to the kde-soc-mentor@kde.org list. Further announcements for mentors will be made there.

If you have any questions please join us in our IRC channel #kde-soc on freenode or send an email to the kde-soc mailing list.

Recently , about 2 mounths ago I designed 3 splash screen for amarok 2.3 , but because I didn’t start my blog that time I couldn’t publish my splashes so i published them only on amarok web site (here) .after selecting this splash for amarok 2.3 , finally tonight i found time and deside publish my splashes officialy here , on my blog for public showing and use for customing your amarok splash screen… I hope to select these for Amarok 2.3.x

Download All Free Layers Of Splashes…

P.S: these days im working on Chakra Artwork for new release (Alpha 5) and also being ready for Persian New Year that called Norooz (in 20 March)….

Also I have many idea for KDE 4.5 Artwork , I hope to contribute with KDE Artwork team and nuno pinheiro

A bit overdue, the first release of Braindump is available. It has been a while since I announced the project of making a tool that gather allow to dump your thoughts into an electronic form. For those who have forget (which is probably most of you), Braindump is a collection of whiteboards on which you can put your notes, whether text notes, or drawing. It is entirely based on KOffice technologies. Which made Braindump quick and easy to develop, and it makes it very small, around 8000 lines of code.

I have been delaying that release because I wanted to make a video of Braindump in action, and have been too lazy to make one until now. On that video I first create new whiteboards, then I demonstrate how to add shapes, manipulate them, and finally the different layout:

I you look at Braindump development history, you will notice that over the past six months the development has been really slow, there are a few reasons to that, the first one is that most of the development is done by other people than me in the KOffice repository, the second one is that I feel that Braindump is already doing exactly what I want, with a few glitches, but as a geek I tend to live happily with those…

That said there is a couple of features I want:

• Search (and replace)
• Tagging, but then someone else (yeah again) is doing the work for me in KOffice
• Auto-growing text shape
• A solution to this problem: (almost) each time I create a new whiteboard, the first thing I do is to add a text shape. So I wonder about either having always a permanent text shape in the background, or always add a text shape when creating a white board.

I am also starting to be curious about ownCloud, since personally I find it to be the right direction of cloud computing, so I would probably be interested in the possibility of storing whiteboards on an ownCloud server. Lets see how it evolves.

If you have other ideas, do not hesitate to mention them, who knows, if I find them interesting, I might go on and implement them !

Download Braindump 0.8.0, this release will work only with KOffice 2.1.x, from now on I will work on porting Braindump to the upcoming KOffice 2.2.

Last month I did a presentation on the concept of redundancy in a human factor related seminar at university. As most participants were non-IT people and using Windows I felt like promoting Free Software without making it “too loud”.

So I came up with the idea of putting a rubber stamp “Created with Free Software” onto the front slide. I found an Inkscape tutorial on rubber stamps to get me started.

This is the result:

On the the front slide:

To get the stamp appear at that very place can be a little tricky. Feel free to inspect the slide sources, particularly redundanz.tex.

By now there is optimized PNGs

• in 4 colors (original/red, gray, white and black)
• in 4 sizes (88×28/59, 120×38/81, 180×57/121 and 300×95/201)
• rotated or not (0° and 25° counter-clockwise)

and SVGs respectively. In case you need PDFs: Inkscape converts well on the commandline:

inkscape --export-pdf=out.pdf in.svg

To see them all please visit the “Created with Free Software” page of the FSFE. Please make use of this stamp whereever you see fits. If you have photos or screenshots of the button in action please comment here.

Please join promoting Free Software!

Just in case you haven’t noticed, I uploaded the full resolution pics of Tokamak 4 on my Flickr account:

Get this, and much more, totally uncensored, at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ruphy/sets/72157623502131953/

Huzzah, time to use another Ultravox song title in a blog post. What’s that you say? Mid-80s music references indicate a midlife crisis? Right. But for the first time in my life I’m in Austria for non-skiing activities, and I’ll be doing a little workshop today on Free Software licensing, copyright assignment, business alignment and whatever else I can cram into a few hours and which the participants are interested in. Afterwards, I’m looking forward to meeting some of the Austrian Fellows of FSFE and - who knows - gazing out over the Danube.

This is something that has been on my todo list for a while now, so I figured I would crowdsource it…

In october, I acquired a Netgear WGR614v9 Wireless G router as an emergency router for ABLEconf 2009’s foss game day. It got the job done, but after that was basically useless because I had a much nicer (Busybox/Linux-based) D-link DIR615 Wireless N router. I spent quite a while trying to get the pesky netgear to properly act as an access point to bridge the computers that I have upstairs with the d link downstairsto no real avail — the only real useful guide, is NetGear’s knowledge base, which doesn’t address the creation of a wireless bridge, only a wired one (which I don’t see the point of but… )….

At the fedora marketing fad, I acquired some really cool hardware to try to play with. Unfortunately the device isn’t wireless enabled. Because of the way my network is laid out, everything in the upstairs of my house is on a wireless connection, including my parents’ desktop. So, this device cannot be used with my network architecture as it is.

I think I also have a Linksys WRT54Gv5 that could be used in place of the NetGear, but that is, at the moment, a fun looking brick, so I’d have to resuscitate it.

Any help/howtos is much appreciated.

=-=-=-=-=
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Sandro has broken the news, and I am very glad to join him and talk about our little event. And I am also glad to blog again after several months of baby sitting :)

First, a bit of history: during the last months of 2009 we talked about a KDE sprint in Brazil, as a way to foster the local community and also because it is currently too expensive to fly all of this people to events in the US and Europe all the time. We reasoned that we could continue to send people (a few at a time) to the sprints and events, but something local was needed to care for the growth of KDE in Brazil.

Also, we did some discussion in order to identify the needs of the community, and what prevents more participation in the global project. As most of you have seen in the planet, there are people here working in projects related to kdegames, kdeedu, amarok, kdepim, plasma, kdevelop... But some of these contributions are developed in parallel, and only after much effort (and hand holding from the veterans down here) we manage to integrate them effectively into trunk. One of the issues identified is the language barrier, which is something we have to work with, but should not prevent participation in one form or another. There are others (documentation in portuguese, revamp of the local site, establishment of a local promo team) that are already happening, but could benefit a lot from a concentrated effort, such as a sprint. We have a very good presence at the big events here like fisl and latinoware, but these are venues where it is difficult to sit down and actually work together, like we can do in sprints or hacking sessions.

With all of the above in mind, we found a nice solution: Akademy-BR. An event for the local community, with the majority of content in Portuguese, and structured as a super-sprint. We will have three days of events: one day of talks, one day of unconference, and lots of hacking sessions in between. It is not only for developers: promo, translation and website teams will also be there to work together on br.kde.org, and also to refine our plans for having the best possible KDE presence in fisl 2010 and LatinoWare 2010, among other venues. The dates chosen were April 8, 9 and 10.

We are following on the steps of Akademy-es (thanks to the spaniards for pioneering local Akademies!), but using the sprint format as our discussions appear to suggest that this produces the best result when community-bonding is needed (working on smaller, focused groups, mixed with talks and planning) . The goal is not to only TALK about KDE, but to actually sit down and work together on the various individual projects, lifting the barriers that prevent people from contributing more directly to trunk, usually due to lack of confidence or lack of information on how to do so. In the process we hope to convince people to help maintaining KDE code, mainly in edu and games, as this is very much needed.

I mentioned that we have dozens of people working on KDE in Brazil, but we are all scattered geographically and sometimes only meet once a year if at all. So our initial goal for this sprint was to have in-between 12 and 18 people. However, just the initial call for action on the kde-br mailing list already produced more than 30 people signed in (in 3 days), and this does not count the brazilians that were at Camp KDE, or the guys from iNdT. Due to concerns regarding organization, budget and venue capacity we had to limit this first edition to 30 people (and a half), and I think we achieved a good mix of old and new blood, developers, designers, web and promo people, men and women. And at least one baby is confirmed as well, if you are wondering about the half person mentioned. The list of confirmed atendees (in portuguese) can be found here.

The location is very near Salvador, Bahia, at the NE part of Brazil. This is where the LiveBlue group (from Sandro and Tomaz) is located This proximity will save us a lot in transportation costs. Salvador is also a well connected city, with direct flights from most capitals in Brazil, which makes air travel cheap from other areas of the country. Sandro also scouted a very good location, a hostel that we can use to both sleep and host the event, at a very reasonable price. LiveBlue will be doing the hardest part regarding organization, and I am very glad this group exists and very happy for the work they are doing (and have already done) for KDE in Brazil.




My personal goals at the event are related to KDE Games and Edu: I hope we can get some developers up to speed with their contributions, and assemble local teams for projects with the intention of working with the bigger KDE Games and Edu community. Suggestions are welcome, as we are now in the process of closing the structure of the talks and setting up the pre-event coordination, which is done via the akademy-br mailing list (thanks to sysadmins for that).

In closing, many, many thanks to the e.V. members and to the board for their help in setting up this event. I hope we can make it a success and produce high quality work that will jumpstart several projects for the growth of KDE and FLOSS in South America.

Two days ago the KDE Plasma community announced that they are providing a live image of the Plasma Netbook Reference Platform. They provide this image to make it easy for all interested developers, users, journalists and geeks to check it out, work with, talk about and and improve it. The reference image is the result of an KDE effort utilizing the openSUSE Buildservice and it’s based on the openSUSE distribution.

What does that mean for us the openSUSE community? First of all it makes us very happy and proud. And we think it proves once again that the openSUSE projects’ distribution and its tools have the level where they stand the production pressure which comes with this kind of use cases. The Plasma Netbook Reference Edition is a lot of code to build and has many potential contributors, testers and users. Enabling people to fullfil these jobs can not be done with some script found lying around on the internet. It requires a high level of experience, professionality and stability in development and operation of the toolchain. We always have these factors in mind and many hands and brains produce high quality products reproduceably. We have the build engine, the collaboration tools, notification systems, download infrastructure and the distribution on this level. For the KDE Plasma Netbook Reference Edition we can provide the tools to build the packages and the distribution image plus the linux distribution neccessary to test the interactions between the UI and the rest of the hardware on a netbook system. That way people can experience a whole system, which is way more useful than testing the UI in isolation.

But what is most important, many people in the community are around who wholeheartedly work on achieving these great results while having fun. Again, we are proud that the team selected our distribution as a base and our tools to work with. Thank you guys for your trust. It is a great move for all, the users, KDE and openSUSE.

The Qt 4.7 Tech Preview has been released a while ago, and we’ve gotten a lot of requests to package it for the N900.

Read on if you want to live on the bleeding edge

Amarok 2.3.0 has just been released but the Amarok team is already working hard on the next release. Shortly after mainline opened for feature commits I pushed a feature that will hopefully result in the next Amarok release being based on user feedback even more than 2.3.0: LikeBack integration.

What is LikeBack?

Short answer: a client-server system for gathering context-related, anonymous and immediate user feedback.

Long answer: described in a blog post by Valerio Pilo, KMess developer.

Pics worth more than 1K words (hint: the icons in the top right corner):

As I’ve read, LikeBack was originally developed for BasKet Note Pads and ported to KDE4 by KMess developers.

In Amarok the LikeBack bar is enabled by default only for testing releases i.e. git builds and betas. When the user has a good or bad experience, or gets an idea for a feature, he can click on one of the icons in the top right and submit a message. With LikeBack we gather comments of the types “like” “dislike” and “feature idea”, single and short suggestions, not discussions or bug reports. Bugs are still handled through the usual dialog that takes the user to bugs.kde.org, a system much better suited for bug tracking than LikeBack: this also means that if we receive something like a bug report under the guise of a “dislike” through LikeBack, we will have to consider it invalid.

The feedback we have received so far (several dozen comments in half a week) is quite positive, no insults yet (yay!).

LikeBack is available in Amarok’s git mainline (and in git/nightly builds if your distro provides them) as of a few days ago (*not* in the 2.3.0 release), so feel free to give it a spin and let us know what you think, either through LikeBack or the usual channels.

Filed under: Amarok, KDE Tagged: Amarok, KDE

Hello everyone,

The KDE Brasil community is happy to announce the first official Brazilian KDE meeting – Akademy-BR 2010.

As a consequence of an increasing Brazilian participation in KDE projects related to coding, artwork, translation, and promotion, some efforts have been doing last years in terms of travelling for Qt/KDE talks and courses, supporting new contributors, and leveraging the KDE presence in events like FISL and Latinoware. We’ve seen a number of regional KDE groups appearing in Piauí, Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais, formed by amazing guys who are already doing some contribution to KDE. Previous in-person meetings in FISL and Latinoware, where focus was driven to talks, booths, and user group sessions, have demanded the organization of an official KDE Brazilian meeting devoted to some short talks and basically focused on hacking (that includes artwork/translation/promotion) sessions.

Akademy-BR 2010 will take place in Praia do Forte (Fort Beach), a pleasant and small touristic village near Salvador – Bahia, from 9th to 11th April. We are thirty participants from distinct Brazilian states staying for three days in the Praia do Forte Hostel and doing our best to make KDE contribution more accessible to newbies, to narrow friendships, to make KDE applications rocking, and to plan our expectations for KDE in Brazil during 2010.

I would like to anticipatedly thank KDE e.V. for the financial support, the other Live Blue guys for helping in the arrangements, and Mauricio Piacentini, Helio Chissini, Fernando Boaglio and INdT guys for making Akademy-BR a reality !

That mentioned, it’s just left for me to say:

Within KDE our applications and platforms are divided into “families” (no, idea what the correct branding is for these). In trunk these are: kdeaccessibility, kdeadmin, kdeartwork, kdebase, kdebindings, kdeedu, kdeexamples, kdegames, kdegraphics, kdelibs, kdemultimedia, kdenetwork, kdepim, kdepimlibs, kdeplasma-addons, kdesdk, kdetoys, kdeutils and kdewebdev.

I have now started to to automatically run some of my scripts against each of these on a monthly basis. For now I am only running three scripts. The example output for KDE PIM in February is below:

WhoWhat: You know, the green blobs showing who commited in a given week.

Plots: Produces a plot showing the commits and commiters per day during the month.

Network: Produces a graph showing who has worked with whom. The closer two nodes are together, the more they worked together.

Over the next couple of months I will add further scripts to this automation. In particaular I will add in my scipt for identifying the comminters that projects are reliant on and a new script I am developing which automatically generates a commit digest.

I will only ever be publishing the results for KDEPIM, KDEPIMLIBS and a few other paths in SVN. If you have an interest in getting the results from the other “families” or another path in SVN, please let me know by dropping me an email or leaving a comment to this blog post. All I ask is that, if I send you these images on a monthly basis,  you take the time to publish them publicly somehow. These are all done for the benefit of KDE after all.

Image by Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester


As I am finding myself in a similar situation as my fellow Amarok developer Nikolaj Hald Nielsen is currently in, I figured that doing something similar as Nikolaj did could make sense.

To sum it up, I have been working as a software consultant for quite a while. Having my own small company (Kretschmann Software Consulting - KSC), I have mostly worked as an independent contractor doing software engineering. Recently I have worked for Gibson Guitar Corporation, and more recently for Collabora Ltd. In my free time I work on Amarok, a Free Software music player.

I am specialized in C++ development with Qt, and I have been an active member of the KDE community for a long time. Further on, my special areas of interest include Software Quality (finding and fixing complicated bugs), GUI Design and Usability, and Multimedia.


If you are a company that would like to work with me, please contact me at kretschmann@kde.org for getting my full CV.


Thanks

Last night the Kraft team was releasing the second beta for Kraft 0.40. A second beta is needed because meanwhile KDE 4.4 was released which comes with the Akonadi based addressbook. That is a big change compared to the old addressbook with a large impact on Kraft. Parts of Krafts addressbook integration had to be rewritten. The Akonadi addressbook interface in the KDE Pimlibs feels like not really being complete yet. With large address books for example, this version of Kraft might show performance gaps.

While being over that, the Kraft setup assistant got another change compared to beta 1. It now additionally asks the user to mark his own address which is stored and used in the document generation. That helps to ease the configuration even more for new users.

I would really appreciate some testing of the beta version if you are interested in this kind of software. Please report bugs back to the Kraft user mailinglist.

A source package can be downloaded from the Sourceforge project page. Binary packages for recent openSUSE distros with upgraded KDE to version 4.4 are available from the Kraft Beta repository from the Buildservice. I can not provide (K)Ubuntu packages this time unfortunately because there are no KDE 4.4 packages for (K)Ubuntu in the Buildservice yet.