Flat things are good. I'm at Tokamak 5 in Nijmegen, the KDE sprint where we plough a deep furrow into the future of the Free Desktop and sow KDE seeds that will grow into exciting, novel interfaces and make the stuff we already have even faster and more reliable.

So what about the flat things I mentioned? We've just guzzled our way through a stack of pancakes of geological proportions, produced for us by pancake-flipper and KDE allrounder par excellence Adriaan de Groot. Other good flat things are tablets (I won't call them 'tablet computers' in case I sound old fashioned), which are in evidence here in a variety of makes and models. We're working on several things that will make KDE on tablets as easy and fun to consume as Adriaan's pancakes.

I'm here for a few days to make KConfigXT, KDE's proven automatic configuration persistence layer, work with user interfaces programmed in Qt Quick, and to support the Plasma Active work going on in the openSUSE Build Service with my geeko skills.

Did that get your attention? Good, it was supposed to. Now get back to making KDE 4 rock in whatever way you are able and resist the temptation to put 'KDE 5' in your blog title to get some clicks. KDE 4 is not going anywhere in the foreseeable future because GNOME just increased their major release number.

I'm feeling very lucky today. Why? Because in a few hours I'll be getting on a plane to Bengaluru, India and attending conf.kde.in. Pradeepto has been asking me for years to look outside the cosy confines of the US-Europe Axis of KDE, and thanks to my role in the openSUSE Boosters team, this has finally become possible.

I'll be giving a talk on contributing to KDE in the openSUSE project and a long talk/practical workshop on using the openSUSE Build Service as used by openSUSE, Novell, Dell, Intel, Nokia, Broadcom and Cray, to spread free software: your own, update existing software on openSUSE, or package for it and for many other distros at one go. But mainly I'm looking forward to meeting the people who make up a whole side of KDE. So if you haven't made up your mind what you're doing next week, how about coming to the RV College of Engineering in Bengaluru?

Like many others,

PS: I'm bringing a load of openSUSE loot to give away, so just look for the guy staggering under the huge carton!

I couldn't resist snapping as many KDE folk at the openSUSE conference as I could, and editing them together into: a short video.

If anyone can tell me how to embed in kdedevelopers.org or enable the download of the OGG version from blip.tv, let me know!

Next week is openSUSE Conference week! I'm using both my openSUSE and KDE blogs to remind everyone that we're having a pre-conference meetup at 6pm for the KDE team before the real conference begins at Barfüßer in the Nuernberg old town. Remember a morning of keynotes is only fun if you have a thumping hangover from microbrewed beer (and if you're a keynote speaker, from local schapps too)! If you are attending the conference or if you are just a friend of KDE in the area, please join in.

If you add your name to the wiki I'll have an idea how big a table we need, I've provisionally got space for 20.

Will

Yes, this is basically a job ad. The openSUSE Boosters team is expanding again (when will it ever stop?) and we're looking for another member. If you want to work full time on Linux, enjoy the idea of building a community around the distribution and think you have the right skills why not apply and have the chance to work with me, Lubos Lunak, Stephan Kulow, Klaas Freitag and many other people you know from the KDE and wider Free Software scene?

Today openSUSE 11.3 is released, concluding 8 months of intense and enjoyable work. This release has been especially enjoyable for me, as it was the first openSUSE release where the community KDE team really took the driving seat and made decisions about what to include, updated packages and intensively tested. Instead of just being a slave to a feature list this release, I was more occupied in enabling, advising and reviewing others' contributions. I'd like to say "Excellent work!" to the whole openSUSE team here in Nuremberg, Prague, the rest of Novell and to every openSUSE contributor who has tested milestones, reported bugs, learned how to use osc and build.opensuse.org and made a difference.

By our recent standards, openSUSE 11.3 is a conservative release; it doesn't have bleeding edge features shoehorned in at the last minute by product management or novelty for its own sake. Instead it's what a Linux distribution should be: a careful composition of the all the newest stable elements from upstream. The KDE SC 4.4.4 that we ship is now stable and feature complete, by most accounts, and contains many tweaks and upstream patches to be an elegant, good-looking but also stable and usable desktop. I hope that it will provide its users a lot of pleasure and utility, inspire many of them to jump on board at the openSUSE project, and others to explore all the possibilities and smoking hot new stuff available in the openSUSE Build Service.

Oh and in case you wondered why I wasn't at Akademy in Tampere, here's why:

After 9 months of enjoyable and intense work, our daughter Anna was released a couple of weeks ago. At the moment she's quite unimpressed by computers, desktops and operating systems, but I hope that Free Software will be of benefit to her life as it already is to millions around the world.

Did you know every app built with KDE 4 can save files as easily to a FTP server or a remote computer using SSH as easily as it accesses your local hard disk? You should! This is a feature that I take for granted since it was introduced in the days of KDE 2.0, but it's easy to forget that the majority of KDE users only started using it since then.

A few of our community people got together and wrote this thorough overview of network transparent file management in KDE at the weekend. Cookies to them for writing it and even if you think you are an old KDE hand, give it a read - I didn't know about the handy protocol selector in Dolphin, and that let me discover the settings:/ protocol - now I can access my Settings directly in Dolphin.

KDE Developers may have noticed that the developer documentation server at api.kde.org is down. This is due to a hardware failure which will be recovered next week. That need not put the brakes on your work though, since if you have the source code on your system you can build the API docu locally yourself, as HTML, as man pages, or as Qt Assistant help files to view in Qt Assistant or Qt Creator.

Read all about it on techbase: http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tools/apidox

Aaron, Sandro, moofang, Shantanu and Diego have been hacking up a Plasma storm lately on the Javascript bindings for Plasma and the Plasmate builder tool. Since good code is running code, and running code is a lot easier when somebody else builds it and packages it, I've updated the Plasmate packages in KDE:KDE4:Playground to 0.1alpha2 and have updated the javascript bindings in our KDE SC 4.4.1 packages to include Aaron's latest errata - no need to update yourselves.

So it's even easier to take part in the Plasma Javascript Jam Session competition now.

And while you're at it, how about completing the loop by using our kde-obs-generator to package your plasmoids and make them available on kde-look.org, so others can start to download and improve them directly in Plasmate? Free Software virtuous circle FTW!