Yesterday nokia gave away 300 pre-production n900 devices to all attendants of this years Maemo summit in Amsterdam (in the form of a six months loan, after that they'll have to go back to Nokia). I'm also attending, so I also got one. Deciding what the first thing to port to a new device is is always hard, but in the end I figured that something with plasma might be nice.

After spending an extra week after GCDS hiking around on La Gomera (another one of the Canarian islands), I finally got home and had time to process some of the photos I took during the desktop summit, so you can go ahead and take a look at them in my gcds gallery on my smugmug page (so if anyone needs a smugmug referral code you can also ping me).

After quite a while of not doing much maemo related, I finally found the time to build a bit more up-to-date kde packages for maemo. I've now uploaded kdelibs, kdepimlibs and kdebase from KDE 4.2.0 (more modules will follow), and also the just released koffice 2.0beta6 (unfortunately no kspread yet, as I couldn't get it to compile with the old gcc version in scratchbox).

It is of course a bit late to announce, but this sunday (february first), there will be a KDE 4.2 release party in The Netherlands. Everyone is welcome to join us at De Commanderie van Sint Jan in Nijmegen, starting from around 14:00.

Until now I've always been using my own built Qt packages when building KDE packages for maemo. Initially because the Qt packages in extras-devel where missing some vital parts for KDE (mainly SSL support I think) but after that because I just had them installed, and it worked. But now I wanted to change this, and use the extras-devel provided Qt, as in theory that shouldn't matter, after all they are build from the same sources, with nearly identical configuration. As it turned out, this was actually quite a bit harder than I thought it would be.

As KOffice is supposed to be a lightweight office suite, I figured it would be nice to see how well it would run on maemo based devices. Thanks to Thomas Zander who replaced a lot of the double usage in koffice with qreals it was quite straightforward to get koffice to compile and packaged. Well, for the most part that is, I didn't manage to get kspread to link as apparently the old gcc version I'm using has some problems with inner classes in templated classes and duplicate symbols. After fixing some trivial issues, I could install koffice on maemo and run it:

During the last couple of days I've been working on trying to get parts of kde packaged for maemo, to make development for others easier, and after some struggles, I finally succeeded in doing part of this. Most of this isn't available yet in the official extras-devel repository, because getting it to build in the buildsystem there would probably be quite some extra work, but I've uploaded the binary packages to my own repository.

Since Nokia will be giving 100 n810 devices tomorrow at the Embedded and Mobile day at Akademy, I thought it would be a good idea to describe a bit how you can get KDE working on your brand-new device. Since it is already quite some weeks ago I first did this, I might be missing some crucial steps, so if you have any questions after reading this/playing with your n810, feel free to ask me, I'll be at Akademy for the entire week.

Continuing my efforts to get a decent KDE based system on a maemo based device, this week I've worked on getting sound to work. As maemo uses gstreamer for its media, my first attempt was to use the phonon-gstreamer backend. To get the phonon kcm to build without having xine installed (as I couldn't find any xine packages for maemo) I had to hack around a bit in some cmake files (why are the only options "no multimedia at all" and "multimedia with xine", and is there no "multimedia, but with a different phonon backend" option?), but I got it to compile.

As a next step in my SoC project this week I've worked on getting Plasma to run on a maemo based device. Getting KDE compiled for this platform provided some new challenges, mainly caused by the old compiler used by its SDK (gcc 3.4.4), but apart from some compiler issues I didn't have many problems to get it to compile.