Kubuntu Outcomes from Precise UDS

Hacking between sessions, Quintasan, fregl, afiestas

The Ubuntu Developer Summit was in Florida again for a week of sessions, specs, work items, discussions and mouse burgers. We had a lot of useful Kubuntu sessions and came up with a long list of things to do over the next six months.

The list of specs gives the work items, our Todo list for the Precise cycle.

In Kubuntu Precise Packaging we discussed what we should package for the forthcoming LTS release. Whereas Ubuntu Desktop will not be upgrading to the latest Gnome we decided that upgrading to the latest KDE releases is safe enough for an LTS. There's no new library version coming (because of KDE Frameworks 5) and some packages such as Kontact really need the latest version. We're looking forward to formal releases from Calligra, qt-at-spi, Plasma Networkmanagement and more. Integration of bluetooth keyboard on boot and Oxygen-gtk3 should make some use cases smoother. There are also grand plans to make awesome ninja scripts which will automate a lot of the Software Compilation packaging which would allow us to focus on testing and assurance rather than the boring stuff of updating changelogs.

Chat and beer in the evenings, agateau, afiestas, claydoh, rbelem

In Kubuntu Precise Defaults we want to look at low-fat settings by default for low powered machines, we'd like to get LightDM up to scratch for KDE and use that by default and we'll consider using KDE Telepathy instead of Kopete (but only if it's really ready).

Being a Long Term Support edition what we care about is Quality. So our quality sessions looked at ways to ensure no new problems creap in and old problems get squished out. We'd like to be part of a KDE papercuts initiative that David Edmundson has recently suggested.

In the Muon spec we have some fixes to our shiny new package manager. And is that the sound of Ubuntu One being ported to PyQt I hear?

Kubuntu Active is the name of our morning exercise programme and also hopefully a new variant of your favourite distro focused on tablets and low powered consumer devices featuring the shiny Plasma Active.

Finally we have important fixes to CJK, to Samba filesharing and to Qt Accessibility.

All together a nice little package. Should be a fun six months. Do come along and help us make it happen, we're in the #kubuntu-devel IRC channel.

Group Photo: Frederik, Lynoure, Clay, Michel, David, Maco, Luke, Jonathan, Rodrigo (missing Alex for some reason, but he's in this one.

Now I'm off on a little adventure and self improvement exercise as I move to a little bit of France in the Antillies pour parler Français, see my personal blog Moving to Guadeloupe for the story.

French Rum in my new home