A slight delay of my flight from Düsseldorf to Graz gives me time to recap the awesome time at the Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin.

Having been part of the programme committee I was looking forward to see at least a small subset of the talks live, though I hope I will have the opportunity to see many more once the videos have been processed and are available online.

Selecting talks hadn't been easy, both because of the huge amount of proposals we've received and because deciding on suitable topics for such a wide range of attendees is no piece of cake either.

I think the session I liked most was the lightning talk style collection of presentations of our communities' GSOC students and GNOME's women outreach program interns. Not only did they often take on difficult challenges, they all showed amazingly sophisticated solutions.

I also found it extremely encouraging that these programs seem to strengthen and even expand the diversity of our communities. I mean, sure, GNOME, KDE and other Free Software projects are international by design, with contributors from many countries. But due to various reasons the bulk of people are usual from North America or Europe.
So seeing so many students/interns from Asian, Latin American and Eastern European countries was one of my personal highlights of these summit. I hope that the incredibly high percentage of women in this group of presenters indicates that we are on the right path to improving our rather embarrassing track record in making our female peers feel welcome in our midst.

Hi,

the KDE buildsystem BoF/meeting/whatever you want to call it/ will be Monday, at 8:00 PM (i.e. in the evening) in the restaurant/cafe St.Oberholz:
http://www.sanktoberholz.de/?page_id=13

According to Claudia they are used to geeks sitting around and discussing :-)

The address is
Sankt Oberholz
Rosenthaler Straße 72a
10119 Berlin

Places are reserved for us on my name (neundorf).

St. Oberholz should be 15 to 30 minutes walking from here.

In addition to usual chatting about whether and how is Kexi utilised under KDE I would like to hear about others, what in the context of the Desktop Summit means GNOME users.

So, to make it short, I'll be also in Berlin at the Desktop Summit, from Saturday to Wednesday evening.

So if you have wishes, questions, want to contribute to the KDE buildsystem or CMake, just look around for me :-)
There'll be a KDE buildsystem BoF . If you want to attend, please enter here when it is suitable for you in this doodle poll .

What will we be talking about there:

• modular kdelibs
  

KDE and Gnome together again - the Desktop Summit this year will take place in Berlin, Germany, from August 6 to 12, 2011. It will be one of the biggest and most interesting Free Software conferences in 2011, and Berlin is also always worth a visit. You have seen the announcement, and the web site at http://desktopsummit.org, but you might be asking yourself how you can register, where to submit your talk, and how you can help with the preparations. Read on.

KMag used to zoom into part of the screen got just today an additional mode: Follow Focus Mode. That means that kmag can now follow either the mouse pointer or the keyboard cursor.

Video of KMag with 'Follow Focus' mode

Extending for example KWin's full-screen zoom plugin can be done with something like;

QDBusConnection::sessionBus().connect("org.kde.kaccessibleapp",
    "/Adaptor", "org.kde.kaccessibleapp.Adaptor", "focusChanged",

Qt on ARM is, literally, a sign of certification ;)                             

Thanks to Trolls for the opportunity of getting certified at Akademy!

As already mentioned, I have this certain tool in works that can do various magic when it comes to creating packages, especially for people who have no idea how to do them themselves. And since

too, and on Wednesday I have scheduled a slot for demoing the tool and helping people who'd like to create packages of their software, I've worked on implementing and improving various features that make it more interesting:

• Besides the obvious CMake support, there is now also support for autotools-based software. Autotools stuff is harder to process then CMake (funny, I remember not being very impressed by the move to CMake, but going back now made me wince here and there), but it's already pretty usable.
• Which means that even though the tools is called kde-obs-generator it can handle non-KDE stuff too. For example I have GEdit, Gnumeric or GOffice (why aim low, right?) in my testing project, and while none of that finish the build completely yet, it just needs handling more of the autofoo trickery. I guess the tool is about to need a better name.
• There's QMake support too, kind of. However, if you use QMake, you probably want to switch to CMake anyway.
• The recommended way of use is setting the build service project in a way that presents a more unified build environment, with macros and package name substitutions automatically taking care of distribution differences. This results in the .spec files being quite clean and easy to read. But there is also a mode that doesn't require this setup and builds directly in normal openSUSE, Mandriva and Fedora repositories (and Ubuntu, but that's already different enough from the rest). It means of course that the .spec may have a bunch of %ifdef's and manually written macros at the top, but it works.
• A consequence of this is that it is also usable for creating normal openSUSE packages. If the project build only for openSUSE, the resulting .spec is more or less a normal openSUSE .spec file. I've already watched few times Pavol and Michal explaining packaging to people who would like to learn it, and I couldn't help wondering how scary it has to be for some of them, getting a full .spec file explained line by line on how they need to write it manually. Well, for the next time the introduction part can be greatly reduced to just "run this tool, if it works and you're happy with the result, that's all then".
• There is also the bonus even for somebody who knows how to create packages. It's still nice to have the .spec generated automatically, including all the build requirements (if they are already in the database), the file list and so on. Everything I have posted at kde-apps.org for the last several months has up-to-date binary packages too, and it's almost boring to create them.

So, whoever would be interested, just talk to me at Akademy or come to the Wednesday session and I'll try to help you getting your stuff built and answer any questions (except for the two questions about blue hair - really, people, I've heard both of them already enough times, can't you get at least a bit innovative :) ?).

Hi,

this year I'll be again at Akademy, for me it will be the third time after Dublin and Mechelen. I'm already looking forward to meet all you KDE guys again :-)

Another thing: on Tuesday, there'll be a BoF about Continuous and Nightly/Daily building and testing of KDE on the various supported platforms: http://community.kde.org/Events/Akademy/2010/Tuesday.

As you are hopefully already aware, the deadline for this years Akademy Call for Papers is approaching quickly. You have until Friday, 23 April 2010 to get all your proposals for talks, lightning talks, workshops and BoFs in.

So start writing and get all your abstracts/proposals in on time!