Alexander Neundorf 

Dirk Hohndel talked about his experiences with QML and Kirigami at LCA 2019: Producing an application for both desktop and mobile I think that's quite useful for us as feedback from somebody who is not directly part of the KDE community. Read More

Hi, there is a new book on CMake (there are not many): Professional CMake - A practical guide. I haven't read it yet, so I cannot say more about it, but I guess it should be useful. Read More

In the last days I had to deal with loading plugins via dlopen. I learned so far already a lot about symbols on Linux. I expected, that if I have an executable, and load a plugin into it, that the stuff inside the executable (i.e. object files and static libraries) won't be used to resolve missing symbols in the plugin. But that's wrong, by default, all symbols are visible, and so all the symbols in your executable are visible to a plugin. I didn't find the relevant blogs or mailing list entries from the KDE devs, back in the KDE2 days when all the plugin-infrastructure was added to kdelibs. But also others had to find out: http://hacksoflife.blogspot.de/2012/12/static-libraries-and-plugins-global-pain.html Read More

Are you looking for a C++/Qt/Linux developer job in Germany ? Then maybe this is something for you: Sharp Reflections I'm looking forward to hear from you. :-) Alex Read More

Sorry, for posting this on blogs.kde.org, but I think it might help a few people out there having the same problem. So, if you want to get webex working on a 64bit Linux system, basically all you have to do is make sure that all necessary 32bit libraries are present. 64bit firefox with 64bit java are ok. When you join a webex session, a directory ~/.webex/ is created. On my system there is a subdir 1324/ in it, and in this directory there are a bunch of 32bit ELF plugins, named *.so. Run ldd on all of them, and check which shared libs are not found, and install them (the 32bit versions). Once I had done that, desktop and application sharing worked for me. It seems you can ignore the missing libjawt.so, everything seems to work fine without it. Read More

You are a student, you would like to contribute to an Open Source project, and get paid for it ? Then I may have something for you. At my job at Fraunhofer in Kaiserslautern we are using the CDash testing server for testing the software we develop - various different High Performance applications for Linux clusters. Read More

Since I don't have an account to reply there http://blog.rburchell.com/2011/12/why-i-avoid-qregexp-in-qt-4-and-so.html, I'll do it here. Recently somebody benchmarked regexp libraries as potential candidates for use in CMake. Short version: PCRE was not exactly much faster than what is in CMake, re2 and TRE were magnitudes faster: [cmake-developers] Re: slow regex implementation in RegularExpression. This is the home of TRE: http://laurikari.net/tre/about/ Read More

Welcome to the third part of this small series about new stuff in CMake 2.8.6, following the first and the second part. Most non-trivial projects, whether built with CMake or something else, depend on multiple other packages, which can be either optional or required. In CMake-based projects all these packages are searched using the find_package() command. Read More

After introducing the automoc feature in my last blog, here comes the next part of this series. More will follow. The new --find-package mode of CMake Typically, in projects which are built using autotools or handwritten Makefiles, the tool pkg-config is used to find whether and where some library, used by the software, is installed on the current system, and prints the respective command line options for the compiler to stdout. Read More

Starting with version 2.8.6 CMake supports what is known as automoc, i.e. automatic handling of moc when using Qt4. As you know, when adding signals and slots to a class using Qt, this source code (typically the header) has to be processed by the moc preprocessor. This invocation of moc during the build is what we are talking about. Read More

Hi, you like KDE and you want to support it ? Here's an easy way to do it: The german bank ING DiBa is giving away 1000 Euro each to 1000 associations. Selecting the 1000 winning associations is done via voting. So, if you vote for the KDE eV there, we have a good chance to be one of the winners :-) Read More

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 :-) Read More

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 . Read More

I'm back now (since two weeks already) from the KDE Platform sprint in Randa and I have to say it was great. Randa is located very nice in the Swiss mountains, next to Matterhorn, and very well suited not only for KDE sprints, but also for cycling (I had my bike with me there) :-) Read More

Until last week I was still running good old Slackware 12.1 with KDE 3.5.something. I had skipped Slackware 13.0, because it had still no support for virtual screens in X/xrandr, and the KDE 4.4 in Slackware 13.1 crashed a few times while playing around with it. So I stayed with 12.1. For building current KDE, it doesn't matter what desktop you're running, so that was fine for me. Read More

Just a short cmake tip today... You probably know that with "cmake -DSOME_VARIABLE=foo" you can give variables to cmake. Now, sometimes, e.g. if the wrong version of a package has been found, e.g. a wrong Qt, you want to remove the wrong entries for Qt from the CMake cache again (because otherwise cmake doesn't search again). Read More

Hi, just to let you know, our friendly buildsystem developers from Kitware are progressing on their plan towards world domination ! ;-) While their main offices are in the US, in beautiful upstate New York, they recently opened their first office outside the US, in Lyon, France, where e.g. their main CDash developer is located. Read More

Hi, I thought since others are announcing jobs here, so I can do that too :-) So, here we go: The Competence Center for High Performance Computing at the Fraunhofer ITWM in Kaiserslautern has open positions: https://jobs.fraunhofer.de/Vacancies/57538/Description Read More

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 :-) Read More

Hi, KDE 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4 all required at least CMake 2.6.2. I'd like to know how much "pain" it would be to increase this requirement for KDE 4.5 to CMake 2.6.3. Read More

KDE will be moving to git, Qt has moved to git, recently also CMake moved to git. So, it's time to start using git. ...until now it really looks so complicated, compared to cvs/svn. In cvs/svn it was easy: local working copy, remote central repository, just one step away. With git this is about three steps away: local working copy, stash, local repository, remote repository. You always have to be aware of where things are. Read More

I haven't blogged about my development activities for some time now... So here come some news. We released KDE SC 4.4. There were no really big new features in this release buildsystem-wise. Nevertheless it was enough work. PolicyKit support has been added, which was quite some work, and all the new Strigi/Soprano/Nepomuk/Raptor/... stuff, which is still quite confusing for me, and which broke our buildsystem during the 4.4 cycle for a few weeks. But we got that sorted out too :-) Read More

Hi, Bill from Kitware just announced that the CMake tutorial from the "Mastering CMake" book is now also available online. If you're interested, have a look. (Btw. their new blog also contains other interesting reads, e.g. about open science etc.) Read More

Now finally yesterday I installed OpenSUSE 11.2 on my notebook (this one). Installation went very smooth, and it seems all the hardware components were recognized automatically, 3D graphics, even WLAN. Read More

Indeed, I've got good, no, very good news from Real Life ! :-) About one month ago me and Antje married, so she is now Mrs. Neundorf :-) The weather that day was slightly rainy and misty in the morning, but became better as soon as we were married, and we had a great party in the evening with our relatives and friends :-) Read More

Ok, this blog is not really KDE related (well, it makes the network installation of a KDE developer more convenient, so...), but anyway here we go. Main purpose is to get the compatibility information out there, so others can find it. Read More

I'm just trying to compile Battle of Wesnoth (yes, for me gaming means compiling games... ;-) ). I just built it with CMake, which first complained that it didn't find Lua 5.1. I checked, it really wasn't there. So I downloaded the sources for lua, make, make install, and now lua is in /usr/local/. Then I run cmake again on Wesnoth and it happily finds Lua, so CMake now succeeds and I can build Wesnoth. Read More

I thought I share a few interesting links: Gnome switches to git: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-March/msg00086.html But not everybody does so, e.g. Python is switching right now to Mercurial: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-March/087931.html Read More

Hi, today at work I noticed something strange. My box there has kUbuntu 7.10 (yes, I know, quite old, but does what it is supposed to do). I have an awk script which I want to use to process a text file consisting of 4.2 million lines, something like 600 MB. Read More

Hi, in the good old times(TM) using Linux was simple. If you wanted to access some drive, e.g. CD-ROM, floppy disk (you know these 3.5" square plastic things which could hold a whopping 1.44 MB of data, if you formatted them with special tools you could push even a bit more on it), you just had to know the device file and the file system and if you knew that, it just worked (TM): Read More

Hi, just out of interest, where is Gnome heading these days ? I'm a bit confused. There is Gnome2, which are applications written using libgtk2, mostly in C (also some Python and C#). Read More

Hi, great events are coming closer: the release of KDE 4.2 is due in two weeks :-) To celebrate this, Claudia is organizing a (small) release party Friday, January 30th in Frankfurt/Main, details here: http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDE%204.2%20Release%20Party#_Germany_Frankfurt So if you are from Frankfurt/Main or close to it, come and celebrate KDE 4.2 with us. If you want to come, please send an email to Claudia (rauch AT kde.org) (for now we have a table for 12 people reserved...) Read More

Hi, in KDE 4.2 we have quite a few changes regarding the buildsystem compared to 4.0/4.1. Also we require at least CMake 2.6.2 now, which alone brings a lot of new features. Read More

Since some August or so we are now requiring CMake 2.6 for KDE svn trunk. One thing was has been added and which is very nice support for the new environment variable CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH. It's purpose is to help with getting CMake to find what you want it to find. Read More

I think we are getting one step closer to World Domination (TM) of Linux ! ;-) How come that I think that ? Have a look at that page (it's german): http://www.dm-digifoto.de/gratis-download.html Read More

Back in April I did some very rough performance measurements of my new notebook vs. my desktop machine: Back then I got the following numbers for a complete build of CMake: Read More

Last week I upgraded my development machine, from a AMD Athlon XP 2000+ to an Intel based one, featuring GMA3100-based onboard graphics. Everything's working smoothly that far, I have only one issue: "Virtual" keyword in the "Screen" section seems to be ignored. This was working since my very first Linux installation in 1996, so I'm really used to having a big virtual screen. This is on Slackware 12.1, using xf86-video-intel 2.2.1. Any ideas ? Read More

KDE svn trunk requires [http://www.cmake.org CMake] 2.6.2 since last week. Version 2.6.2 has been released just a few weeks ago, so maybe there are not yet packages for all distros. Read More

There was this blog entry about the state of packaging for the Mac. Containing "Then you think to yourself, if only those nice boys and girls in KDE-land had a native solution for installing their software," Read More

Just a short note: yesterday I booted my laptop with a brandnew kubuntu 8.10 beta CD. How to put it, this rocked so much !!! KDE 4 really is beautiful ! Read More

This year was just my second Akademy. And as my first one, two years ago in Dublin, it was a really great experience again. Actually I don't know where to start. To put it in one sentence, it almost feels like a huge family. Hundreds of people from all over the world come together and meet, they know each other, they work towards the same goal, they appreciate each other. Where else do you have that (for such a big number of people) ? Read More

starting August 4th, i.e. Monday in 2 weeks, CMake >= 2.6.0 will be required to build KDE from svn trunk, which will become KDE 4.2 in a few months. So please update your CMake. In case there are no distribution packages yet, you can get the sources here: http://www.cmake.org/files/v2.6/cmake-2.6.0.tar.gz Read More

Since a few days Kitware is hosting a cdash dashboard for kdelibs. The ctest config file in kdelibs svn has been adapted accordingly. So if you run now "make Experimental" in kdelibs the build and test results will be submitted to http://www.cdash.org/CDash/index.php?project=kdelibs . It would be very useful if we could get nightly builds for OSX, FreeBSD, Solaris and Windows, so we can make sure they stay compiling. Read More

As Friedrich already noticed, blogs are where discussions happen nowadays... Well, also responding to one of Ade's posts, where he states "I've been starting CMake "experimental" builds on various Solaris machines with SS12 to get numbers on how many warnings and errors we're producing. Since Dirk's dashboard works quite well for the vast majority of our developers -- Linux based -- I think a separate dashboard that counts and reports issues for non-Linux builds would be useful. " Yes, it would be really nice to have nightly (or daily) builds of KDE (at least kdelibs) on more exotic platforms. Which means for KDE basically everything != Linux, i.e. Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows, OSX, more ? Read More

This year I was again at LinuxTag, after I missed the one last year. LinuxTag in Karlsruhe was always very nice, the one two years ago in Wiesbaden somehow didn't feel that good, but this time in Berlin it was really great again. Read More

So this blog title is "KMail and bikeways in Germany". You may wonder what they have in common. You may wonder whether there will be an eloquent Aaron-style nice little story behind that. Read More

Ok, we all know, blogs are the new mailing lists, so here just some quick comments from my side on all the release-cycle stuff. About being in sync with releases of other projects: I am caring for our buildsystem which uses CMake, so the releases of CMake and KDE matter to me. I want to provide a stable (as in "not chanigng too often") build environment. If project A (KDE) depends on project B (CMake), it doesn't help project A anything if it's releases are in sync with project B. Why ? Because, well, in order to have a stable environment I don't want to force developers to have to update their cmake from non-distro packages (the binary cmake packages provided by Kitware work flawlessly on all systems I tested so far, btw). This is frustrating ("damn, which package do I have to update today to make KDE build again ?") and takes away a lot of time (not for a single developer, but accumulated for all). So, before we (KDE) require a new version of CMake, I personally want this not to happen before that version of cmake is shipped by the most common distros (i.e. a few months after its release). So I see also a value in not depending on always the latest and greatest releases of other projects. Read More

I don't know why, but often I have the impression that KDE fonts are quite big, and this can be changed by modifying the X11 dpi settings. Let's head over to good old Slackware. How is it done here ? Read More

Different groups of people use different ways to measure performance of computers. Kernel developers test their kernels by, well, compiling the kernel. KDE developers may measure the startup time of KDE. So what does the buildsystem maintainer do ? Read More

A few days ago I asked in the blog "where to buy a 14 inch non-glossy notebook with Linux in Germany". I received quite a few responses and emails, thanks a lot for the support ! :-) Now I (almost completely) succeeded and a notebook is ordered. For those of you looking for something similar, here are the details. Read More

Ok, so because the old notebook is starting to fall apart (it is probably around 5 years old or so) I need a new one. So, I want to buy a new notebook, nothing too fancy: 14 inch, non-glossy, Intel Core Duo, Intel Graphics, Intel WLAN, 1GB RAM, price at most 800 Euro. I guess it's obvious to everybody reading this that I'd like to have fully Intel chipset because of the free drivers. This will actually be my first non-AMD CPU I buy new since 1994 or so. Read More

I just decided for myself I should try to use a text based presentation software, since GUI-based presentation apps require you to think about what goes on which page from the beginning, usually you see only the current page, you have to think about the layout (fontsize, decorations etc.), you have to use the mouse, etc. Read More

SCNR. Rejoice - it has been done - KDE 4.0.0 has been tagged ! :-) Although I didn't touch any significant number of lines of C++ code of KDE for the 4.0.0 release, the last (almost exactly) 2 years since I brought CMake to KDE4 (together with the help of many other developers, especially Laurent Montel !) have been very busy, impressive, awesome, stressful, interesting, rewarding, exhausting, etc. for me. Read More

Around 2000 (back in KDE2 times) I wrote the so called LAN information server lisa (http://lisa-home.sf.net), which can you show the neighbours in your network. This works by regularly sending ping packets on the network. In order not to flood the network too much, if there are several of these daemons running in one network, they collaborate and reuse their results. Read More

Two weeks ago I moved again and it took until yesterday that I got internet access again, now using cable. This actually rocks, it is really fast, 6 Mbit/s. I still can remember, I think it was in 2001 I still had an analog modem with 100something kbit/s. That's really an incredible increase in speed in just 6 years ! Read More

Hi, CMake 2.6 will rock. Latest news: Clinton Stimpson has started to work on a Qt4 based GUI for CMake, so there will be a modern GUI to CMake also on UNIX, here's a screenshot from CMake cvs today: [image:3080]. Read More

Maybe some of you have already noticed, I'm back in good old Germany. Since end of April I was in Clifton Park, New York, working at Kitware. This was a really great time. I learned a lot about the US and visited a lot of beautiful and interesting places, beside the usual also locations which are a bit less known (in Germany at least) but not less beautiful: the Adirondacks, a great place for hiking and relaxing and the peninsula Cape Cod just south of Boston (really beautiful city !). Read More

so since 6 weeks I'm now working at Kitware, Clifton Park, NY, USA. Since it's the first time that I'm in America this means a lot of new impressions for me. Friendly people, suburbs, beautiful nature, huge cars, baseball everywhere and much more. Are there actually any other KDE developers here in the Capital Region ? Read More

Some of you may already know it, but I thought I should announce it here: next Thursday I'll be going to Albany/New York for around 6 months. There I'll have a job for this time at Kitware, you know, the guys who are (among others) writing the best buildsystem in the world ! ;-) Read More

do you still have CMake 2.4.3 installed on your KDE4 development system ? Then it's time to upgrade to CMake 2.4.5 or newer. Because starting Monday in a week, March 19th, at least CMake 2.4.5 or newer will be required for building KDE4. The last required upgrade (which was to 2.4.3) happened on Sept. 12th last year, which is now exactly 6 months ago. Before this we lived with CMake 2.4.1 for 4 1/2 months. I think that's not too bad and CMake 2.4.5 will again last for several months. Read More

So this year I was the first time at FOSDEM in Brussels. Brussels is a very nice city, I didn't expect this. It reminded me on Paris, it has the same french flair and beautiful architecture. But I digress. The exhibition at FOSDEM was smaller than e.g. the german LinuxTag, but there were much more talks. I myself gave two of them: CMake and friends, where I gave a quick overview over CMake (the buildsystem), CTest + Dart (Unit testing and Continuous Integration) and CPack (packaging). It was only a 15 minutes Lightning Talk so I couldn't go to deeply into details. Read More

So finally I decided to do a completely fresh install on my notebook, a Dell C640. If you are looking for a notebook which is good supported by Linux and FreeBSD, I can really recommend it, everything works out-of-the-box. also under FreeBSD, also the external VGA connector, useful when giving talks etc. Read More

So, in the last days there have been several things which made me think "This rocks !". Wanna know what ? So here we go, without any special order. Sun releases Java under the GPL ! You know what ? This rocks ! I have never been especially fond of Java. If you want fast code, write it in a language which is compiled to machine code, like, well, C++ or C. Additionally I always had the impression that Java is almost like C++, just that you cannot do everything with it you can do with C++ (templates, operator overloading, multiple inheritance, ...). But OTOH if you don't care that much about execution speed but things like reduced development time and portability (without recompiling), then why stop halfway instead of going the whole way and use a scripting language (preferably one that rocks ;-), to stay on-topic) like, let me think a minute, like Ruby ? You get even shorter development times, you get dont-compile-run-everywhere and you can do things with the introspection features you can't do with any compiled language I know of. Ok, said that, I think releasing Java under the GPL is really great from Sun. You know, there is something called Mono, which is a free implementation of the attempt from Microsoft to push Java out of the market with C# and its CLI. So, if we want a free bytecode-compiled language, Java had the issue that it wasn't really free, only free-as-in-beer. And Mono has to play catchup with the stuff MS develops, and there's the potential that it might carry patent problems. So, now that Java is free, what has changed ? We have a free bytecode-compiled language, maintained by the main development team, i.e. no clone or fork, and since these guys released it theirselves under the GPL they probably won't sue anybody for violating any patents. So, who still needs Mono since November 13th, 2006 ? Read More

So I am back from aKademy in Dublin, and at first I want to say: I'm feeling very honored that I received one of the three aKademy awards: Best non-application contribution: CMake for KDE4. Read More

Recently it seems to me that Ruby is now really taking off, everywhere you hear news about it. You know, there is Ruby on Rails, which is really the hype nowadays. And there is an effort to get a Ruby implementation for .NET: http://plas.fit.qut.edu.au/Ruby.NET/ . There has already been a project to implement Ruby on the Java Virtual Machine, and now the two main developers have been hired by Sun to work fulltime on JRuby : http://headius.blogspot.com/2006/09/jruby-steps-into-sun.html :-) ...since there are some processors which support Java execution in hardware (e.g. http://www.arm.com/products/esd/jazelle_home.html, http://www.jopdesign.com/) , does this mean these processors will be able to execute JRuby in hardware ? Ruby for embedded ! And as if this wouldn't be enough, there are also people working on running Ruby on Parrot, the Perl6 runtime: http://www.parrotcode.org/news/2006/Parrot-0.4.6.html . Read More

So today I tried to optimize some code using std::string from the Standard Template Library and found something interesting. Let's say you have strings to assign which sometimes get longer and then again shorter. To avoid unnecessary memory allocations you can use std::string::resize(size_t n); so you create the string and then resize it so that it is big enough for the longest string: Read More

Recently it seem a lot of projects are switching to CMake. Just today I read the news about Debian forking cdrecord and almost missed the little note near the end of the article: "For our fork we used the last GPL-licensed version of the program code and killed the incompatibly licensed build system. It is now replaced by a cmake system," Read More

Wanna chat directly with other cmake users ? Ask questions ? Exchange your experiences ? Share your cmake scripts with others ? Let the world know how much you like cmake ? How it made you understand your buildsystem again ? How it brought the fun back to hacking ? And how it finally brought world peace ? ;-) Read More

Hi, now that I found that skype for Linux doesn't support video, is there a good solution ? Ekiga ? Or FFserver on both ends ? Is ffplay able to ffserver streams ? (the docs mention only windows media player) Read More

Hi, well, imagine you find something in cmake which doesn't work or there is something missing. Now, luckily enough, cmake is Free Software, BSD licensed. So, you can just have a look at the sources, write a patch and send it to the cmake developers at cmake@cmake.org . Read More

Just in case you didn't know yet: Dirk Mueller won the german championship ...as if hacking KDE wouldn't be enough ;-)

Ok, so finally I'm back online. When I came back from LinuxTag last sunday, my development box didn't boot anymore :-/ It took until today to get it working correctly again (RAM, mainboard, power supply were suspect). Finally the RAM was broken, now it's replaced by nice 1 GB RAM. Read More

So I fiddled around with hardware last week, accepted that my board really doesn't like DDR400 RAM and got my first SATA disk working, main problem were BIOS issues. Well, finally I have enough disk space for the complete KDE/trunk/ again :-) Read More

svn is slow. Ever tried svn commit or cleanup over trunk KDE ? I started a commit, pressed Ctrl-C to cancel it. It didn't cancel within maybe half a minute. I killed it with -9. Then I tried update, but it told me that it was locked and I should do a cleanup. So I did a cleanup. It took approx. 5 minutes :-/ Now I'm updating again... Read More

Hi, well, since it seems some discussions are nowadays done via blogs, let me say something as reply to [http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2006/04/cmake-sadness.html | CMake Sadness] by Aaron. So, building KDE is a huge task. Building KDE 4 is a much harder task than build KDE 1, 2 or 3. Why ? Because with KDE 4 we support more platforms and more compilers. With KDE < 4 we had only UNIX-like platforms with mainly gcc. With KDE 4 we have UNIX-like, OS X (listed separately because it is a bit different: frameworks, bundles, etc.) and Windows. Under Windows MSVC >6, mingw and msys is supported. This is much more than the autotools were every able to do. Read More

Hiya, the results of the 2005 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award are there. Although the announcement: "Among the winners are Ubuntu, Firefox, MySQL and OpenOffice.org." doesn't sound too good for KDE, here's a (only slightly) closer look at the result :-) Read More

Well, if you want that, you can have it today for trunk/KDE/kdelibs/. The cmake ( http://www.cmake.org ) developers have been so nice to setup a dashboard for KDE: http://public.kitware.com/dashboard.php?name=kde If you build kdelibs/ using cmake, simply enter "make Experimental" and the results will end up there. As you can see, I just succeeded building kdelibs/ on FreeBSD :-) Read More

Hi, just now the first complete compile run of trunk/kdelibs/ finished using cmake as build system. :-)) Only minor things are still missing: khtml (gcc 3.2 is not able to compile it), install rules for headers, some configure checks are still missing. Read More

Some weeks ago I blogged how I managed to compile kpager using cmake. In the meantime the am2cmake script was a bit fine tuned and now even more works. The script and the KDE 3 support files for cmake have finally entered KDE svn, so you can get it from here: http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdesdk/cmake/ So here we go: Read More

Hi all you artists out there, I need an icon for cutecom, a cute Qt replacement for minicom. Anybody outthere who can help me ? Thanks Alex Read More

Hiya, here's a very simple way to get a performance number for KDE: $ time konsole -e sh -c exit This gave me the following numbers: Read More

Hi, in the screenshot you can see a different kpager than the one you know. [image:1667] So, what's different ? This kpager is built from the same sources, but neither using autotools, nor unsermake, nor scons. It's built using cmake ( http://www.cmake.org ). Here's how I did it: Read More

Last week I updated my notebook from Ubuntu Hoary to Breezy. I was very pleasantly suprised when I noticed that they decided to make the "Simple Browser" profile of konqueror the default profile. I added it one and a half year ago to konqueror in cvs and now finally it seems people start using it :-) Read More

Hi, as I mentioned previously, I'm trying to build kdelibs (still 3.5, not 4.0 yet) using cmake. To make it short, yesterday it managed to get to build kwallet, where I discovered that I missed to insert a check for sys/types.h. So I inserted the check, and then could watch how the box started to recompile almost complete kdelibs (since config.h changed which is included in a lot of files). Read More

As time goes by KDE distributors come and go. It seems in the meantime I'm one of the more long-time contributors, I got my cvs account late 1999 I think (with low but quite constant activity...). Thanks go to David Faure, without him I probably wouldn't be around here today ! :-) Read More

Hi all, so now I'm back from Paris, now already almost for two weeks, where I visited the finale of the Tour de France this year. It was a great experience :-) Read More

After todays stage only 2:12 left to the 3rd place ! Go Ulle ! :-)

I'm a bit late, but I also want to share some of my impressions from LinuxTag last week. As always it was fun. It's always nice to meet with other OSS developers, be it gnomes, X devs, the mplayer guys and of course, our KDE fellows :-) A big thanks goes to the people who organized our KDE booth, so especially to Joseph Spillner this year. We had four nice boxes there, two running SUSE, and two running kUbuntu, both very nice although quite different distributions. SUSE is good for exhibitions since a lot of the visitors are using it and so if they have problems it's easier to help them if you have the same system at hand. The kUbunto installations OTOH were more up to date. On all machines there was also amarok and kaffeine installed, kpdf and kdevelop had to be installed afterwards. There were a lot of questions related to KDE PIM: KMail, Kontact, so ideally there should always be at least one KDEPIM person around. As usual the top question was "what's new ?" I think at the booth there should always be one box running KDE HEAD, just to be able to demonstrate new cool stuff. And of course there were questions about KDE 4. I tried to do my best, talked about the split of the Qt lib, the lower memory requirements and the fewer symbols to resolve, multimedia, arts, gstreamer and NMM and usability. The announcement of the cooperation between Wikipedia and KDE was quite impressive to me. Is this now really the beginning of a new era ? Wikipedia contains really a lot of information, available freely on the Internet. All this content is created by small contributions of individuals. Which company would be able to create such a big pool of knowlegde itself ? NMM, the network multimedia middleware seems also to be taking the lead in well, network-enabled multimedia stuff. Stream video and audio seemlessly between different devices, different operating systems, it stays synchronously, the are no gaps, really impressive. And all these things can now be used by free software applications. This opens up completely new opportunities, maybe superior to todays commercial software. Has it ever been possible for individuals to create things made up from such powerful components ? ... standing on the shoulders of giants... Last but not least a list of people/projects who were not at LinuxTag: Read More

Hi, maybe you know it already, but I just learned it last week from Carsten at LinuxTag: if you have an email account at gmx, enter "webdav://mediacenter.gmx.net" in konqueror (or any other KDE application), and you get access to the mediacenter area of gmx. IOW one gigabyte storage available for free at your fingertips, thanks to the marvellous KDE ioslave architecture as comfortable to use as your local harddisk :-) In the authentication dialog just enter your complete gmx email address and password, and that's all. Wasn't that easy ? Read More

There is the myth that using C++ per se makes applications and libraries slow and bloated. Avoiding bloat is of special importance for embedded devices, which usually have limited amounts of CPU power and memory. On www.linuxdevices.com I found a short article on this topic: C vs. C++ on Embedded Devices. Let's get down to the statements being made there: Read More

So finally I'll also try to start blogging since nowadays everybody seems to do so. So, most importantly, the sun is shining today here. Nice wheather make me feel good :-) On the more KDE related side of things, now I also tried the famous kUbuntu distro. Since 1997 I'm Slackware user. I tried Suse, it's nice, polished, but feels quite slow and hides too much from the user (for my taste). Some years ago I tried Debian and was lost in dselect. RedHat sucked in 1998, Mandrake didn't seem to be really stable in 2000. So, I always had Slackware running on all my boxes. With all the hype around kUbuntu, I decided to give it a try and install it on a notebook. Or more exactly, I asked my girlfriend (non-geek) whether she would like to try to install Linux. So she inserted the CD, selected "German", "Deutschland" and "Europe/Berlin", entered the network config I told her and selected the (pre-formatted) partitions for Linux. Then she pressed enter and some minutes later she had successfully completed her very first Linux installation, actually her first operating system installation at all. Even for her it was almost too boring :-) Nothing had to be adjusted manually:soundcard, video, network, touchpad, USB, everything just worked. Once there was the rumor that installing Linux would be hard... Synaptic/kynaptic/apt is a nice thing, makes installing software really easy. That's kind of an advantage compared to Slackware... On the negative side, booting takes with kUbuntu longer than with Slackware. It really does a lot of things when starting. I don't think all this is necessary (LVM, RAID and other things I don't have). Making this parallel could probably speed it up considerably. Read More