Beineri 

I started to publish on Twitter some days ago to not stay completely silent about the good stuff that is happening with KDE/openSUSE. Most of the time my posts even appear on other people's pages and in Twitter Search. According to the "Find People" function I don't exist though. Read More

There have been endless complaints about the KDE4 desktop shell missing certain functionalities like being able to have different wallpapers on each virtual desktop. The openSUSE KDE team has now listened and worked hard to bring back all desktop functionality as you know it from KDE2. A technical preview in form of a Live-CD (for i686 only) is now available. As additional bonus, Time Machine functionality was included too. Read More

New KDE Four Live CDs with KDE 4.2.1, KOffice 2.0 Beta 7 and much more are up. They were built within openSUSE Build Service's KDE:Medias project in which also automatically Live-CDs with KDE trunk snapshot packages (currently 4.2.65) from KDE:KDE4:UNSTABLE repositories are built. The ISOs appear (without prior testing by anyone) here.

Like some other [open]SUSE developers I was casted and am now forced to look for a new day job. It could have happened in better economic times for sure. :-( Read More

KDE 4.2 has been released and gives "The Answer". With the usual openSUSE KDE4 packages available comes also a new release of KDE Four Live, the most comprehensive KDE4 Live-CD, with following changes: Read More

A new version of the KDE Four Live CD with KDE 4.2 RC 1 packages is up. </twitter>

Thanks Nokia! It will be really interesting how this will impact the Qt and KDE communities, desktop, embedded, mobile, cross-desktop collaboration. Looking forward to a friendly competition on technical merits only. :-) Read More

A follow-up to the previous post, the KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop repositories now contain KDE 4.2 development snapshot (4.1.87) packages. This is also the repository that will contain KDE 4.2 RC1, KDE 4.2 and the first bug fix releases of KDE 4.2 in near future. Read More

openSUSE 11.1 Live CDs and USB images featuring KDE 3.5 are now available for download. openSUSE News has the full story.

Tomorrow most people will be back from the holiday season, time to start again with the biweekly IRC meetings of the openSUSE KDE Team. This time we will look back to last year or rather to the openSUSE 11.1 release shortly before Christmas and the biggest reported problems. And also, despite the schedule discussion not being finished yet, we will start to collect and discuss ideas for openSUSE 11.2. Read More

What an exciting day: The openSUSE team has an early christmas gift in the form of the second distribution release this year: openSUSE 11.1 - the best distro with the best KDE desktops. Download it within the first 24 hours to enjoy the Akamai speed afterburner! Also KDE 4.2 Beta 2 gets released today. Packages for openSUSE are available in the KDE:KDE4:UNSTABLE:Desktop Build Service repositories. Together this results in a new KDE Four Live release - an installable KDE 4.2 Beta 2 Live-CD based on openSUSE 11.1. Have a lot of fun... :-) Read More

openSUSE 11.1 will reach Goldmaster status within the next days which also means that things move around in the KDE:KDE4 Build Service repositories: KDE:KDE4:STABLE:Desktop has been already updated to the KDE 4.1.3 packages as in openSUSE 11.1. We will use this repository to collect and test future online updates. Every Fix_is_Ready:11.1 patch should be added there. Please change your repositories from KDE:KDE4:Factory to KDE:KDE4:STABLE if you want to continue using 4.1.3 before we do next step. As soon as SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 has been branched from Factory (maybe in one to two weeks) we will submit the KDE 4.2 Beta packages to openSUSE:Factory and they will appear in the KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop repositories for older distribution releases. When upstream has branched KDE 4.2 prior release (early January) and Trunk is open for 4.3 development then we will start to use KDE:KDE4:UNSTABLE again with regular KDE trunk snapshot updates. We don't plan to have KDE 4.1.4 packages. If you know of important bug fixes/commits in 4.1 branch that should be in STABLE/cumulative KDE online update please notify us about it (bug report preferred). Read More

This is likely interesting for more openSUSE Members blogging on lizards.opensuse.org: Yesterday Klaas asked me if he could make only his posts to the KDE category appear on Planet KDE. A short digging showed that WordPress allows to create custom feeds. So the solution was as as simple as Read More

For openSUSE 11.1 the KDE Updater Applet will switch from the zypp backend to its PackageKit backend by default. Authorization is done via PolicyKit-kde: A KPackageKit package will be available in the online repository for those who don't like the YaST Qt Package Manager. Read More

Another small idea we realized for openSUSE 11.1 is a link in the first-login greeter to a "Introduction to KDE4" page. Originally written for the greeter (hence the current layout and shortness) the text ended in the wiki because we were past openSUSE translation freeze. The wiki solution also allows extension anytime (feedback and translations welcome). Its purpose is to give new KDE users and KDE3 switchers some (openSUSE-specific) explanations and hints for a good KDE4 start. Read More

Another bit for the upcoming openSUSE 11.1 KDE4 desktop is power management: KPowersave has not been ported to KDE4. Powerdevil, which will be part of KDE 4.2, comes to our rescue. Together with a backport of the battery plasmoid popup from KDE 4.2 SVN as in yesterday's released openSUSE 11.1 Beta 5 we get a good power management solution. The backport only uses QWidgets so that we are not forced to backport all the latest Plasma 4.2 widgets etc.: Read More

openSUSE 11.1 will include (besides the to be expected plasmoids from kdebase4-workspace and kde4-plasma-addons) three more plasmoids to be closer to KDE 3.5 functionality: Quick Access, Quick Launcher and Keyboard Status Applet: And many more plasmoids are available from the KDE:KDE4:Community openSUSE Build Service repository thanks to the openSUSE KDE Team. :-) Read More

KDE 4.2 is approaching its first Beta release and it has been a while so here is a new KDE Four Live release with KDE 4.1.72 snapshot SUSE packages from the KDE:KDE4:UNSTABLE:Desktop repository. Read More

Discussions about the usefulness of the Plasma desktop toolbox arise regularly. Usually it focus on the "Zoom Out"/Activities feature which as also Plasma developers admit is not as far implemented and nicely integrated as of KDE 4.1 as everyone wants it to be. If one removes (maybe even irreversible) the "Zoom Out" button, nothing is left in the desktop toolbox which is not also available in the panel/desktop context menus. So why not make it optional completely? For openSUSE 11.0 we offered that as a hidden option. For openSUSE 11.1 we decided to ship with the desktop toolbox disabled by default. This takes effect with Beta 4 (it's not announced/released yet because of the week-end but ISOs are propagating to mirrors). Technically this is done by adding a desktop containment implementation without toolbox (as possible since Plasma/KDE 4.0) and backporting the desktop containment swicher from KDE 4.2. As result users who want to experiment with Plasma activities can easily switch the desktop toolbox on again: Also please take note of the third desktop activity type option. :-) Read More

No blog for over a month as everyone is busy with openSUSE 11.1. The release countdown counter got kicked off too again. What will openSUSE 11.1 bring? In short the best shipped KDE desktop yet (KDE 4.1.3 with many backports and patches, no KDE3 or even Gtk+ apps running by default, Will is heavily busy with NetworkManager-kde4 plasmoid) as well all other latest and greatest versions (like OpenOffice.org 3.0 and Gimp 2.6). Read More

The openSUSE KDE team is holding a Bug Squashing event to work through the KDE bug reports in bugzilla.novell.com this weekend. Among the goals are reporting non-openSUSE specific bugs to bugs.kde.org and closing duplicates to reports within bugs.kde.org or bugzilla.novell.com - hope to see you! :-) Read More

As there seem to be people who continue, despite being told about dependency errors and packages that cannot be upgraded, to install newer KDE packages (and then wonder about a broken desktop) I want to point out this important service information for users of the KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop repository in the openSUSE Build Service. Read More

Zonker has posted on openSUSE News and his own blog our decision that openSUSE 11.1 will be the last release to include the KDE 3.5 desktop. This is a compromise how to handle the KDE4 transition after long discussions with many users. Read More

New versions of KDE Four Live are up to accompany the KDE 4.1.1 release and give an impression of the development in trunk half-way to the first KDE 4.2 Alpha release. These CDs are built with k*-branding-upstream instead of k*-branding-openSUSE packages (see openSUSE branding policy) so their desktop appears less green than usual. :-) Read More

As just mentioned in the openSUSE talk at Akademy, Novell/SUSE is hiring for its KDE team! :-) The team is working on KDE in past and future openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise releases. You can find the job description at http://novell.com/company/careers/ under "Software Engineer Senior" (ID#1158). Please feel invited to inquire us at Akademy if you want know more about benefits, how it's working for SUSE and any other question you might have about it. Read More

Warning: Lazy copycat from openSUSE News ahead! :-) The KDE team today released KDE 4.1. The KDE developers, including the openSUSE KDE Team, have been working on it for the last six months. Lots of feedback from people trying out KDE 4.0 has gone into KDE 4.1, filling most of the gaps people experienced with the 4.0 releases. See the release announcement for more information and screenshots. Read More

KDE 4.1 RC1 has been released yesterday - without big announcement as this is still a development release. The release of KDE 4.1 is planned for July 29th. As usual there are packages for openSUSE 11.0, 10.3 and Factory as well as a Live-CD available. Click below if you're eager to break your openSUSE 11.0: ;-) Read More

Akademy, the big yearly KDE conference, is only three and a half weeks away. Novell sponsors at Gold level this year and will by last count be represented by 8 people (me, Dirk Müller, Will Stephenson, Lubos Lunak, Vincent Untz, Danny Kukawka, Klaas Freitag and Cornelius Schumacher) and involved in three talks during the conference part. I am looking forward to show/distribute openSUSE 11.0 to everyone and spread how lot of fun it is to work on/for [open]SUSE :-)... Read More

KDE 4.1 Beta 2 + openSUSE 11.0 = KDE Four Live 1.0.83 :-)

The launch of openSUSE 11.0 was a big success and positive reviews keep showing up :-), two especially nice ones: ars technica: This is a very strong OpenSUSE release with a lot of compelling improvements. OpenSUSE 11 offers the best KDE 4 experience out there and will continue to be our reference distribution for KDE testing. Read More

Release Announcement Hint: If you get your ISOs within the next 24h you will enjoy full Akamai speed.

[image:3515 align=right hspace=2 vspace=2 width=341 height=256] openSUSE 11.0 will be finally released on Thursday! :-) The Sneak Peeks story about KDE has just been published and I want to follow up with a list how our Plasma desktop differs from the stock KDE 4.0 version. Read More

I am a proud owner of a Geeko. Those seemed to be out of stock and not produced anymore. But now I spotted a first merchant which promises new Geekos for second half of 2008 - and not only a 35cm version but also a 120cm big one! :-) That's of course still not as huge as the mother of all Geekos in the SUSE office in Nuremberg. Read More

It has been several months since I blogged about exciting openSUSE stuff happening (all about at the same time). The next few weeks enough long in the work things are on the home stretch to make June an openSUSE month: :-) Read More

From the listening-to-users department, the openSUSE 11.0 Plasma desktop toolbox contains more useful options as in KDE 4.0 but still many users want to hide it. Try this with our KDE packages on openSUSE 11.0 RC or equivalent from the build service: stop plasma (kquitapp plasma), search in ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-appletsrc the "Containments" config group with the "plugin=desktop" entry, add "ShowDesktopToolbox=false" there and restart plasma. :-) Read More

Just a short late summary: LinuxTag 2008 was fun and interesting, met some new faces both from openSUSE and KDE communities and many familiar ones. I have uploaded some pictures mostly of the openSUSE and KDE booths. The German "KDE 4.0 auf openSUSE 11.0" talk which me and Will gave on Saturday in the openSUSE track had about 150 listeners, the slides are uploaded like the others on the LinuxTag page in the openSUSE wiki. Read More

In two and half weeks the likely biggest Linux Event kicks off: LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin. Four days of exhibition and more talks (the organizers say 240, German/English mixed) than ever before. I plan to be around all the time. :-) Read More

Just want to point out four improvements of the YaST Qt package selector in the upcoming openSUSE 11.0 that were missing too long, much requested (at least by me) and now added :-) : Read More

The usual monthly game: a new KDE bugfix release, openSUSE packages and a new Live-CD which as already said looks more and more less like KDE 4.0 but like our openSUSE 11.0 KDE4 desktop (while still being based on openSUSE 10.3): Read More

From the cross-blogging department, Qt 4.4 has been released and is entering Factory for openSUSE 11.0 with packages for older openSUSE releases being available in KDE:Qt44 (this will move sooner or later to KDE:Qt). Dirk Müller thinks that's boring news as "everyone has packages of it" and I should rather mention that he has created packages from Qt 4.5 development snapshot within the KDE:Qt45 Build Service repository. Read More

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1 has been released including the new beautiful installer, an incredible fast installation and package management, KDE 4.0.3 and 3.5.9. With this Beta the media layout changed: no 1 CD install media anymore, just the KDE4 Live-CD and the DVD which allows to choose between KDE4 and KDE3. This beta marks the generic feature freeze so there was a rush to get everything in which led to the delayed release and some problems like most noticeable the Live-CD installer not working. :-( So if you plan to do an install better download the DVD or use the network installation CD. Read More

Last week HP announced it's Mini-Note PC with preloads of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. Our heros of the Mobile Devices Team have worked the last weeks on that. The Mini-Note is available in different configurations starting at $499 (that would be only 313 Euro if applied for Europe without surcharge). All editions share the form factor, the nearly full-size keyboard and the nice display (1280x768). So I had to lend one from Mobile Devices team and play with it. :-) Read More

KDE 4.0.3 is out and openSUSE packages are available at the usual place as is a new "KDE Four Live" CD. Just want to note that these packages are less pure KDE 4.0.3 with every day we near the openSUSE 11.0 feature freeze. Last week-end I started a "Plasma 4.0 openSUSE" work branch in KDE SVN to combine our local patches, upstream backports and own features. The goal is to ship a KDE4 desktop which has not less functionality than a GNOME desktop ;-) - means eg adding / removing of panels, a simple way of being able to move plasmoids on panels and the theme selector are in there. You can find this stuff already merged into our KDE 4.0.3 packages. Some outstanding tasks are using the Kickoff look of trunk and dealing with the desktop icon issue. Currently there are of course also some glitches to chase down during the bug fixing months until the final release. Read More

Only three days left to apply as a student for the Summer of Code for either KDE or openSUSE ideas. So how about spending this week-end thinking what you could do this summer? Let me list some ideas I would like to see done: Read More

The participating mentoring organizations for the Google Summer of Code 2008 have been just announced and the openSUSE project is among. If you're a qualifying student and want to earn some money by contributing to an Open Source project, please start discussing with us your (eg Build Service, KDE or YaST related) idea. We will also propose some ideas during the week and put them online in the openSUSE wiki. Note the student application deadline on March 31th! Read More

It has been over a month since the last version and it's still a month until KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 so it seems a good time to create a new Live CD with the openSUSE KDE 4.0.66 snapshot packages. It contains some Kickoff/Plasma features I have been worked on in the last weeks like the resizable Kickoff or adding/removing panels. Noticeable absent is my patch to move plasmoids on panels which is not in trunk (yet), you can by all means expect it to appear in our packages before openSUSE 11.0 gets released. :-) Read More

Yesterday I made an excursion to CeBIT. Despite some major names missing and three halls staying closed it's the world's largest IT fair - and my legs remind me today of my marathon. Many halls were rather boring, the ones where the World Cyber Games took place were in opposite rather crowded. Dunno why watching others playing computer games is popular. Or the spectators were all their girl-friends who had free entrance on World Women Day. AMD wins the biggest bag contest. And many exhibitors seem to want to win in the 'Germany's Next Top-Hostess' contest. Read More

The last week-end me and Martin manned the openSUSE booth at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage: [image:3315 size=original hspace=50] Executive summary: the organizers counted 2400 visitors, Martin gave an "openSUSE project" talk to 100-120 people, we distributed 400 Promo-DVDs, several openSUSE caps and some Novell pinguins. More photos from me and from others are available. Read More

It's this time of the year when all the events seem to happen at almost the same time: the upcoming week-end Dirk and Will will be at FOSDEM and give a talk "KDE 4 on openSUSE 11" on Sunday morning in the openSUSE Developer Room. The week-end after I will be at the openSUSE booth of Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. The week after is CebIT, visit the openSUSE counters at the Novell booth and check whether Martin presents KDE or something else. I plan to do a control visit on some secret day too. ;-) Also in March, Novell BrainShare happens where Zonker and Adrian will offer the suits an introduction to KDE4 (session IO140). :-) Read More

First two mentions from an exciting openSUSE week: the new openSUSE evan..uhm community manager has been finally disclosed, it's Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier. And openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 2 has been released with which we put KDE 4.0 to the test as default desktop. To keep up with openSUSE happenings occasionally I recommend openSUSE Weekly News btw... Read More

The openSUSE News story has the same title and I don't want to repeat everything here, just add some bits: The new KDE Four Live CD will hopefully work also on some computers whose broken BIOS had problems finding the boot code in certain sectors before. Read More

Congratulations to Tom Patzig, currently serving in the openSUSE KDE Team, for the first release of Kepas: "Kepas is a KDE4 file transfer tool. It discovers your local LAN for buddies (KDNSSD) and lets you transfer files or Klipper entries from a tray icon or via drag'n'drop with the Kepas plasmoid." Please give him much feedback what to improve until 1.0! :-) Read More

As announced just minutes ago at the KDE 4.0 Release Event, Trolltech’s Qt to be licensed under the GPL v3 - both Qt3 and Qt4. Thanks Trolltech, this saves the distributors and everyone quite some license compatibility mess headaches. :-) Read More

The Lenovo Thinkpads with SLED 10 SP1 preloaded start to ship these days. Not yet available via web today you can already order the first 6 configurations (R61/T61 with 14.1" screens) via phone in the US. The availability in other countries can differ a bit, eg the R61 is said to start shipping in Germany on 22th January. More 14" T and R series models and selected T61 15" models with SLED offers will follow in February. :-) Read More

KDE 4.0 was released yesterday and of course openSUSE complimented with packages for openSUSE 10.2, 10.3 & Factory and the version 1.0 of KDE Four Live CD. For reactions see openSUSE News, Digg or look at screenshots - many readers seem to understand the nature of this "1.0.0 release of KDE4". :-) Read More

This works for a long time but I don't think that it's widely known: you can browse/view/download all the latest patches of openSUSE development in the openSUSE Build Service Factory project (yes, you have to login). That's more comfortable, comprehensive (3000+ source packages) and up-to-date (real-time) than me dumping our KDE patches once every release somewhere. :-) Read More

This new version of KDE Four Live shows the changes done during the holiday season until new year. Compared to the final 4.0 release it misses some days of bugfixing and the final Oxygen artwork (new sounds and wallpapers, icon updates). In preparation for the release this CD contains only applications/modules which will be part of the KDE 4.0 release (so eg no KDEPIM, KOffice, Amarok, Quanta and extra plasmoids). Read More

Before everyone starts to spread his opinion about KDE 4.0 let me spread some reminders: KDE 4.0 is not KDE4 but only the first (4.0.0 even non-bugfix) release in a years-long KDE4 series to come. KDE 4.0 is known to have missing parts or temporary implementations (eg printing, PIM, Plasma). Most changes happened under the surface and cannot be discovered in a "30 minutes usage"-review anyway. User interfaces being unchanged in 4.0 compared to 3.5 may be still changed/improved during KDE4 life time. KDE 4.0 will not be the fastest KDE4 release, like for KDE2 most speed optimizations will happen later during KDE4. Most applications (many are not even fully ported yet) will take advantage of new features which the new Qt/KDE libraries offer only later. Don't measure portability success (eg MS Windows) by current availability of application releases, they will come. KDE 4.0 is only expected to be used by early adopters, not every KDE 3.5 user (and IMHO KDE 4.0 shouldn't be pushed onto other user types like planned for Kubuntu ShipIt [btw said to have only 6 months support for its packages]). KDE 4.1 development will not require the same amount of time as the big technology jump 4.0, expect 4.1 later this year. Last, again: KDE 4.0 is not KDE4. :-)

The week saw this Kubuntu announcement being posted which mixes two news, reasons the one with the other and left some users imo rather confused as shown by this user comment: "IMHO this is a nice present by the Kubuntu Community and Canonical to the KDE Community". So what was announced? Read More

After my previous blog about openSUSE News numbers I became curious and installed StatPress. Of course the site is mostly visited by SUSE Linux users (~53%), followed by just under 30% MS Windows users (XP outnumbers Vista by factor 7). But the positive surprise is that 40.4% use Konqueror to visit the site beating all Firefox versions by 0.3% (Internet Explorer 6+7 sum up to 12%). An outstanding number: 96% of the visitors use Google as their search engine. Among the most popular search terms are "opensuse 11[.0]" and "kde 4". :-) Read More

Defining more than one pattern for a Build Service project finally works after some bugfixes by Michael. :-) [image:3152 size=preview hspace=50] Above you see how we use it in the KDE:KDE4 project, eg "KDE 4.0 Build Dependencies" lists all packages you need to have installed for compiling KDE 4.0 from source. Read More

KDE 4.0 RC 2 has been released so it's time for a new version of the most comprehensive KDE4 Live-CD: [image:3140 size=original hspace=50]

I just noticed the internal statistics of openSUSE News saying "There are currently 200 posts and 1,800 comments, contained within 17 categories" (posts include calendar entries). Thanks to everyone contributing to make its start such a success. :-) And I can still not understand why some other distro portals don't dare to allow user comments. Read More

This amusing question seems to pretty bother some users in forums/story comment sections and fanboys of distros are fast with answering their distro will for sure be it. :-) It's amusing for several reasons: Any question about KDE4 is faulty by concept. Next, how can a distribution be "first" or significant earlier than all other when all get the source code at the same time, which is not earlier than when the release happens (or rather about a week before when the supposed release state got tagged)? And what do they mean with "ship"? One not serious answer I read was "Debian testing". Let us assume distro release including it is meant. I don't think that any distribution will adopt their regular release schedule to the KDE 4.0.0 release (also caused by ever moving release date). And if a distribution would do, would it do its users or the KDE project a favor? Read More

The 2007 Linux Desktop/Client Survey of the Linux Foundation closed recently. One interesting result: [image:3129 size=original hspace=50] Didn't someone claim that companies would prefer Gtk+ because of the license? :-) Read More

I want to summarize some as yet unmentioned changes which we have done during the last weeks: The KDE Wiki page has been spiffed up and should be now a good portal to inform everyone quickly about everything worth knowing about KDE on openSUSE. This includes better packaging documentation like a KDE spec file cookbook and description of used macros. It also mentions a long list of challenges we face - any help to accomplish as much of it as possible until next openSUSE release is welcome. We started to have biweekly scheduled meetings on our IRC channel, the next one will be on 12th December. The Packaging Days this weekend resulted on the KDE part in a fixed kitchensync package and new packages in the build service for Qtpfsgui, Misfit Model 3D and KCometen3. Dirk has posted a proposal how to restructure our build service repositories - looking forward to your feedback! Improved KDE:KDE4 packaging, removed packaging bugs and made it more maintainable. Our KDE4 extragear snapshot packages have been broken down to application packages and include as of today rsibreak, kpager, kaider, ksig, kmldonkey, ktorrent, kftpgrabber, kwlan, amarok, kplayer, kaudiocreator, kmid, kfax, kgrab, kuickshow, digikam, kgraphviewer, kcoloredit, kpovmodeler, kphotoalbum and ligature. KOffice2 packaging has been improved and should show up in Factory soon. That was it already. :-) Read More

I created a page on TechBase to track the porting status of Qt/KDE applications, which are not part of the KDE 4.0 release, with the applications that distributions tend to have in their default installation as a start. Please help to gain and keep an overview by adding applications/updates. Read More

The KDE 4.0 RC 1 version of the KDE Four Live CD generated publicity, was downloaded over 10000 times within the first days and finally scared Dirk. Thanks go to openSUSE project for jumping in and providing powerful torrent seeders during the later hours. :-) Read More

Just read in the GNOME 2.20.2 release announcement: "This is the second update to GNOME 2.20.0. The update fixes all known and unknown bugs and crashers." I have a follow up question, what about my still unresolved bug report, reported over one year ago as example for many continued violations of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines? Read More

I wondered several times in the past why Novell/SUSE people eg in Novell Open Audio interviews presented our internal autobuild system as something special. The relevant feature here is that both the legacy autobuild as well the new openSUSE Build Service have the functionality to rebuild all dependent packages everytime after a change. A new compiler version, a newly enabled security check, or an innocent looking change to a library can break larger parts of the distribution. openSUSE Factory gets completely rebuilt every few days, and the same happens for older maintained products a bit more infrequently. It's an easy way to discover regressions and to prevent an inconsistent distribution so I couldn't imagine a distribution being created without such "feature". Read More

The so called "Release Candidate" of KDE 4.0 has been released, with packages for openSUSE available. The KDE Four Live CD release 0.7 contains them. I looks like whatever will be released or presented at the event which was scheduled by marketing/sponsor to happen in January will be only used by very early adopters. Hopefully openSUSE 11.0 will be able to ship some KDE 4.1.x release or some very high KDE 4.0.x release (which saw some light features freeze lift). Read More

As of today the openSUSE project has the Guiding Principles finally taking effect. Everyone can express support for them on the new openSUSE User Directory site. Also the first openSUSE board has been appointed by Novell. Congratulations to all members, especially the ones from the community. :-) Not so exciting, I have uploaded a new KDE Four Live CD containing 3.95.2 snapshot packages. Read More

The initial comments about openSUSE 10.3 have been ranging from "best openSUSE release ever" to "worse than 10.2". Strange, or? So why not form your own opinion? It's easy with the openSUSE 10.3 Live-CDs released (KDE ISO). The installable Live-CDs address also the common misconceptions mentioned earlier. Read More

Seems I couldn't prevent any longer the completion of a questionnaire: People of openSUSE: Stephan Binner.

What would a KDE4 Hack Week be without a new version of KDE Four Live released at its end? :-) [image:3060 size=preview hspace=100] This version has KDE 4.0 Beta 3+ (mostly 3.94.1 snapshot) packages from the KDE:KDE4 build service project engrafted on openSUSE 10.3 (if you find your way within YaST you can turn it into a full openSUSE 10.3 installation). Extra plasmoids are included with the extragear-plasma and playground-base packages, no Amarok included as it didn't build. The Plasma setup looks only good at 1024x768 resolution - seems Plasma has still to learn about resolution dependence. SATA CD-drives and network setup should hopefully work better than before and auto-login is enabled. Read More

The openSUSE 10.3 box is shipping! Some subscribers seem to have received it already yesterday, today I received my employee copy (German version). I'm pleasantly surprised that it didn't take this time over one month after the release, and that the two DVDs are safe in a plastic cover: Read More

There are some misconceptions floating around about openSUSE 10.3. Unfortunately uninformed people are still allowed to blog ;-) so let me pick up some I read: "No Live-CD! Every hobby distro has one. Why can't a huge company like Novell do one?" Read More

Let me share some hints for openSUSE 10.3 which just came to my mind: If you use GNOME and eg don't like the yast2-gtk package selector or miss the powerful Qt package selector, install the yast2-qt package and set in /etc/sysconfig/yast2 the WANTED_GUI variable to "qt". If you want the Crystal-style YaST icons back, replace the yast2-theme-openSUSE with the yast2-theme-openSUSE-Crystal package. If you miss the photo wallpapers, they have been moved to the desktop-data-SuSE-extra sub-package. For really old wallpapers, think SuSE Linux 9.1, install the gos-wallpapers package. And this seems to be the biggest complaint of some people: you can make the Geeko of the KDE start menu roll its eyes again: kwriteconfig --file kickerrc --group General --key KickoffDrawGeekoEye true">

Today, after ten months of work, openSUSE has 10.3 been released. :-) Francis did an excellent coverage of everything new so let me just relist his Sneak Peeks: Read More

After all the sweat just the important links: Announcement, Screenshots, KDE Live-CD (i386), KDE Install CD (i386), other ISOs/DVD/Torrents.

All efforts these days concentrate on openSUSE 10.3, the one CD installation medias and Live CD installer testing: the release candidate is planned for Thursday. The German box version is already listed and can be pre-ordered (eg SUSE Shop, Amazon.de). It will include a total of 16GB software for 32 and 64bit on two dual-layer DVDs this time! Read More

Did anyone miss a news splash these days about openSUSE 10.3 not shipping KDE 4.0 as default KDE desktop like some other distro? Or maybe not as we have not been telling everyone the last half year that we would. No, we didn't have a crystal ball but experience with our long time existing KDE4 packages. "So much for" knowing what we're doing. ;-) Read More

Other distributions certainly like to pick up stuff that Novell/SUSE are developing (and have been using for long). Recent examples include Ubuntu and Mandriva starting to integrate AppArmor or Oracle porting YaST to their Enterprise Linux and RHEL. On a smaller scale, the sysinfo:/ KIO slave has been improved and packaged for several distributions. Read More

This week was so filled with events and news that it easily qualifies for the most exciting openSUSE week yet: On Monday the rush until feature and version freeze of openSUSE 10.3 started in the evening. The Final Draft of the openSUSE Guiding Principles was posted. At the same day the LinuxWorldExpo San Francisco started with not only openSUSE being present but also the announcements that both Lenovo and Dell will start to pre-load SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and offer support. Finally was announced that AMD has become a sponsor of the openSUSE project by providing hardware for the openSUSE Build Service. The Build Service itself got a new distro download and package search front-end with 1-Click Installation. On Thursday the openSUSE project turned two. The birthday wishes keep arriving and show that openSUSE News gets more known quickly. To celebrate we had also the Release of openSUSE 10.3 Beta 1 which among other stuff has a new greeter (web mockup) to explain and link to the project better. The 'People of openSUSE' series started, with already three interviews being published. The news that SCO got a big kick after all the years also made people happy. And still running the whole week-end, the first openSUSE Bug Slashing. Dunno how we can top this week. Maybe with a great openSUSE 10.3 release which allows us to push PCLinuxOS from rank #1 of the DistroWatch charts. :-) Read More

Porting of Kickoff to KDE 4 has started: the first step is trying to make it work with the Kicker remains. Some code is still disabled but you can already search/browse applications and start them: Read More

Yesterday openSUSE 10.3 Alpha 6 has been released (major changes). As Coolo mentioned this is the first alpha release which feels really alpha due to the package management refactoring. During the last month much other stuff happened so not many visible changes besides version updates for the KDE desktop; the new 10.3 artwork went into Factory too late. Read More

Today one of my hack week projects went online: openSUSE News. Actually I have been working on it together with Robert Lihm already before and finished it only after. :-) Read More

Did you ever feel bothered by a wrong suggestion of the text completion after having entered a typo in an application name, web page url or some web form entry before? So did I regularly and the only GUI-way to "correct" it until now was to clear all entries via the context menu's "Clear History". Not really a satisfying solution. :-) Read More

The missed kdedevelopers.org site is back! Thanks go to Ian Geiser for founding and hosting it until recently. Starting this week it's hosted on a KDE e.V. server and administered by the KDE sysadmins. All old content except the theme has been transferred. The old (new account and password reminder notifications) and most known bugs of the new setup are fixed meanwhile. :-) Read More

A quick roundup what happened during the last three weeks: It started with the Novell OPS Hack Week: I continued one project I started already previously and started three others. One got finished and about two I will blog once they go online/are finished and in our KDE packages. What's better than hack week? Double hack week! Novell Hack Week ended already Thursday evening for me as I departed to Akademy on Friday morning. After the conference during the week-end was the next week filled with the KDE e.V. general assembly (congratulation to Klaas getting elected into the board), BoF sessions and a coding marathon (don't miss the groupphoto plasmoid in playground SVN!). During Akademy running KDE 4.0 Alpha 2 was finally released. Of course we had packages for openSUSE and a Live-CD with them. This article contains some screenshot of it. Also during Akademy the news went public that Novell had become "Patron of KDE" - as first distributor. Thanks to Nat and everyone else who supported it. After playing with Wordpress the last weeks, a welcome change: Drupal, to get kdedevelopers.org going again. Pleased with the openSUSE schedule to bring all new openSUSE frontends, sites and skins online just in time for openSUSE's second birthday which incidentally coincides with LWE San Francisco. SUSE will have much to celebrate there! Look forward to more often and smaller blogs in the future again. :-)

Thanks to a yet to be announced generous sponsor (also the first non-Novell sponsor to the openSUSE project) is the openSUSE Build Service running like on steroids since last week: over 120 CPUs are now available in the build host farm. And the new hosts' disc systems are also very fast. That's enough power to rebuild the openSUSE:Factory project within a few hours. And of course it's nice for packagers: no longer waiting for your builds to start. At least I as heavy user don't remember having to wait for it anymore the whole last week. :-) Read More

openSUSE 10.3 Alpha 5 was announced today (major changes): most exciting novelty are additional one CD installation media giving you a rather complete English desktop. Compared to the default desktop installations from DVD most of the missing applications are games. Before installation (and of course after) from these medias one can register online repositories to get the full default SUSE desktop experience. Read More

I'm back from vacation / LinuxTag 2007: met many openSUSE, Trolltech, KDE and GNOME people - more than expected. Jump over to some pictures. On other news, Novell will be Silver sponsor of both aKademy and GUADEC this year. I will only visit aKademy though. Read More

I hope it surprises nobody that KDE 3.5.7 packages for openSUSE exist: the wiki has a guide how to upgrade. And in case that you belong to the 25% who accidentially installed another desktop ;-), a second guide explains how to install KDE. Thanks to Apokryphos for creating both. Read More

This week openSUSE 10.3 Alpha 4 has been released. As previously announced it doesn't contain ZMD anymore. From my point of view the inclusion of first KDE4 packages and the installation of four KDE4 games in the default KDE selection is more exciting. :-) Another interesting application you may want to install and try is Dolphin/KDE4. With Alpha 5 we should have all KDE4 modules in Factory. Until then has the KDE:KDE4 build service project all modules available (and in atm two weeks newer version than included in Alpha 4). Read More

KDE 4.0 Alpha 1 has been released, code-named "Knut" (btw my reasoning was: "small but growing and being forgotten soon"). And of course it's accompanied by a new KDE Four Live version and packages for openSUSE. Just keep in mind that it's the first Alpha release which is totally unusable and not representive for KDE 4[.0]. :-) Read More

The openSUSE Survey results are in: thanks to the over 27k people who participated. And over 70% of those use the best desktop environment! :-) Read the complete results (PDF) if you have doubts which is it... Read More

New KDE Four Live CDs are online. The last week unmentioned problem with squashfs which led me to uploading a "DVD.iso" is history, now you can get the same content of a typical desktop setup in a 477MB ISO. Additionally I wanted to produce a DVD which contains all the kde* modules and koffice: to my surprise the ISO stayed within CD size with just 655MB. I guess the effort to have a more lean base system and patterns available in openSUSE 10.3 already pays off. So this time there are two CDs flavors available and no DVD. :-) Read More

Lessons for Lizards is a community cookbook-style book project for openSUSE which started a few months ago (FOSDEM presentation). Most of the current articles deal with system adminstration, but there are also already two about KDE: "KDE Configuration for Administrators" and "Customizing KDE". Keep it growing! :-) Read More

On SUSE Linux 10.1 it was required, on openSUSE 10.2 you can deselect it during installation, for openSUSE 10.3 it was planned to be made an optional install but yesterday Andreas Jaeger announced: Read More

I found a nice name for my openSUSE-based KDE 4 Live CDs/DVDs: "KDE Four Live" - which has also spoken a nice second meaning. :-) It has been three weeks since the initial announcement, but still two weeks to go until KDE 4.0 Alpha 1, so I updated the DVD to another random SVN snapshot. The refinement and up-to-date keeping of the KDE4 packages in the openSUSE build service continues. A new KDE4 wiki page describes our goals, the packages and their usage. Read More

Even less known than that there are RepoView pages created in every OBS repository's repodata/ sub-directory seems to be that there is also a latest-feeds.xml file which you can subscribe to with your feed reader. For example, for KDE:Community and openSUSE 10.2, this is the RepoView page and this the latest changes feed it links to. Read More

A short story about using the right tools: Factory is the development distribution of the openSUSE project, currently at version 10.3 Alpha 2+. The SUSE-powered Dashboard tells you what is compiling - or not. If it's a good day the KDE 4 packages in the openSUSE Build Service can be updated. And finally KIWI allows you to create operating system images, eg. Live-DVDs. Read More

Andy Koehler has created some nice animated Kickoff buttons in case you don't like the one that your distribution ships. :-) They look best at their native size but can be used with any: when you change the panel size the animation is not resized initially but a "dcop kicker Panel restart" will fix that. Read More

After the GNOME team made a big splash about their openSUSE involvement some people thought it would be a good idea to found #opensuse-kde to not flood other #opensuse-channels with KDE talk anymore. So join for a more direct way than via the ever existing opensuse-kde mailing list (subscribe) to involve in or stay up-to-date with KDE on openSUSE development. Read More

Two days ago Miguel de Icaza blogged about the revised Main Menu of the GNOME desktop in the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Desktop Service Pack 1 and how it and the KDE Kickoff start menu inspired each other. In the update section he adds some very familiar sounding anecdotes: during the usability study done in Germany with amongst others Microsoft Vista Beta 2 we also found that most users don't recognize a "Search" input box at the bottom. And that users have problems to find its shutdown button which really turns off their machine (iirc a video with this was shown at Akademy). So same findings and wondering if Microsoft has done their homework with the Vista start menu. Read More

The openSUSE project is interested in knowing how you feel about the openSUSE project and the openSUSE 10.2 distribution. Please take a few minutes to fill out this survey until April 30, 2007. You can enter in a drawing for some hardware gadgets as thank you for taking the survey. Read More

Above is the title of a blog I found linked at tuxmachines.org (btw great site with a daily mix of desktop related news and blogs). Its author describes the interface changes in the latest Kerry Beagle release and likes them very much. He also suggests some improvements: I don't think Beagle supports "blank searches" but the other two items he mentions you will likely see soon in a Kerry release. :-) Read More

Joining the list of tools being used internally at Novell/SUSE being available as Open Source (like SWAMP or Testopia) now also the source code for the openSUSE Build Service is available under GPL from today on. So if you have some spare computers in your cellar you can set up your own build service farm (to build your own secret or illegal stuff). Read More

You think that you know every game that KDE ships? How about KNetWalk? It's a nice little game - not just for system administrators. The chance that you have it already installed is high, it's in the kdegames module! It entered SVN in May 2005, received bug fixes, got ported to KDE 4. But only the upcoming KDE 3.5.6 release will fix the biggest bug: the non-appearance of KNetWalk in the K menu. Have a nice play... Read More

It's again time for some Kickoff news: the video of the talk Coolo gave at aKademy 2006 is finally online since start of this year. The work/suse_kickoff/ branch in SVN saw no activity since mid-November as we branched it to work/suse_kickoff_qstyle/ branch at that time to reimplement the tabbing with QTabWidget - still other distros shipping with Kickoff and Kickoff packages for distros seem to continue to ship the old pixmap based version. You will find bugfixes and the new options only in the new branch! Read More

The last feature release of KDE is just over a year old, is well maintained and gains selected features about every two to three months. Still people long for the first release starting with the number 4 often called "KDE 4" - which is wrong. Let me try to disambigue: "KDE 4" refers to the whole life-time of the KDE 4.x based framework, like "KDE 3" does for now five years and six KDE 3.x releases. The "KDE 4.0" release will be just the first one in the "KDE 4" cycle. Read More

Often you don't recognize how good your work actually is unless you take the time to look at what others do. The reason I say this is that I just read the first issue of a new promising dot.kde.org series called "The Road to KDE 4". Together with the other series like "People Behind KDE", "KDE Commit-Digest", "All About the Apps", sub project news letters, KDE://radio and countless other stories (18 total in December) I think that KDE is the Open Source project which keeps its users and own community best informed and entertained. Read More

If you're annoyed by the openSUSE 10.2 YaST Control Center not remembering its last size (but starting always too small/with one column) as me, my home project in the openSUSE Build Service has a yast2-control-center package which does. Read More

Novell Open Audio has a new half an hour episode about the openSUSE 10.2 release featuring openSUSE evangelist Martin Lasarsch (and also a new mention of the missed KDE episode). Read More

The openSUSE 10.2 Release Guide is a nice description of the openSUSE 10.2 goodies whose box edition is meanwhile also listed by shops (North America/World Wide, Germany). I updated my popular VMware image to KDE 3.5.5 with KOffice 1.6 on an openSUSE 10.2 base. If you did not play with the new KDE start menu Kickoff and Kerry yet, now you have no excuse anymore! :-) Read More

On Thursday the download edition of openSUSE 10.2 was announced (screenshots). The interest seems to be high but from what I read users experienced a good download speed thanks to FTP mirrors being prepopulated the week before, some strong initial Torrent seeders and usage of Metalink. This week also the debuginfo repository will be filled and the Live-DVD will be uploaded. Development in Factory has also started again but syncing of the Factory tree has been disabled until above mentioned are also on the mirrors. Read More

In less than two weeks openSUSE 10.2 will be released with really edgy components. And you can download and try its release candidate today and help to find the last bugs! You will experience a complete system management suite and the best-engineered and most improved KDE and Gnome desktops available - with desktop search, 3D effects and interface usability improvements in both desktops. Read More

Last week I released Kerry Beagle 0.2 in preparation for openSUSE 10.2 (whose release candidate is scheduled for Thursday). I think this version is a nice improvement over version 0.1: new interface, more supported hit types and a more complete configuration module than the original beagle-settings. Thanks must go to Debajyoti Bera for adding more Beagle KDE backends (KAddressbook, KNotes, KDE Bookmarks), and my SUSE colleagues Robert Lihm for the nice icons and Sigi Olschner for being beta tester and giving usability advice. Finally thanks to the KDE translators for providing translations for the first time. Read More

During the last days I updated the existing packages, added the until now missing KDE modules to the KDE:KDE4 project of the openSUSE build service and fiddled a bit until all packages built successfully for SUSE Linux 10.0, SUSE Linux 10.1 and Factory. I will make no promises if they work :-) - they are just snapshots of last Sunday's SVN. I think we will update regularly to newer SVN versions to ease development/porting work or just for the curious who are eager to try if they can see progress on the way to KDE 4. Read More

openSUSE 10.2 Beta 1 has been announced marking the begin of the feature freeze. The release schedule btw fits this time nicely with many upstream releases: we have Kernel 2.6.18.1, X.Org 7.2rc1, KDE 3.5.5, KOffice 1.6, Firefox 2.0 Final, OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 Final, Python 2.5 and PHP 5.2rc on board (other changes). cups 1.2.5 is ready for late inclusion in Beta 2. When openSUSE 10.2 will be released in early December a 2 year lifetime will begin, months more than other free distributions offer. Read More

Another great feature release of KOffice and this time it fits fine into the release schedule of next upcoming openSUSE release: You can find fully functional rpms of it in Factory and for SUSE Linux 10.1. The koffice-illustration package for older SUSE Linux versions in KDE:Backports (a build service project which has the goal to not force you to update your system libraries or KDE to get the newest application versions) are missing Krita though as its developers explicitely disable the build of Krita because they think the version of libcms on these distros is too old/too buggy. They rather prefer to have less users than getting reports about some maybe seldom occuring bug caused by that libcms you would never notice. Read More

Seems it's up to me as nobody else blogs about it: SUSE Linux 10.1 "Remastered" CD and DVD ISOs are now available (if you have still the original ISOs around, there exist delta ISOs against them). These have all the online patches which were released since the original 10.1 "goldmaster" release already integrated. This means no more three times restart of YOU during installation. :-) And also a more stable, slightly faster and delta-rpms for online updates supporting package mananagment. Of course all security and other released fixes are also integrated. And because first people already asked: this doesn't include newer application/desktop versions. You have to wait for openSUSE 10.2 (soon entering the Beta phase) for that or adventure the unsupported build service repositories for that. Read More

Today ten years ago the KDE project was founded. It certainly influenced the life of many people including mine. :-) The party at the 10 Years KDE event to celebrate this anniversary started yesterday and ended today. At the end I was continously awake around 23 hours as I didn't want to miss any part of the event and had to arrive to Stuttgart in the morning first. Tackat wrote a nice report about the whole day. Trolltech congratulated giving every attendee a t-shirt with the imprint "KDE - Defining the Linux Desktop for Ten Years!" increasing my geek t-shirt collection (how many do you have?). Also nice to meet some early involved people who are not actively contributing to KDE today anymore like Matthias Hölzer-Klüpfel and Jono Bacon and to recognize how many people from KDE's first weeks are still active and have now their own or are leading employees of companies earning their money with Qt/KDE related development. Read More

Yesterday, on the second conference day of aKademy 2006, the Kickoff talk was given by Coolo. It was well attended and received. Many questions afterwards including if simple calculations in the search line work like in mini cli (yes, they do). I took some few photos of the talk. It was video-taped like all others talks and will be available for download later. The Kickoff page in the openSUSE Wiki continues to fill up with goals of the project, the findings of the usability study and description of the current implementation. Some people asked and it seems others are also not aware that the source code of Kickoff is hosted and developed within KDE's SVN for some weeks: you can find it in branches/work/suse_kickoff/ - so get it and play with it! Read More

Some random thoughts, if you want coverage of the talks happening here: Planet KDE has many impressions. I have never seen so many people being interested in golf. The Ryder Cup is visible everywhere in the town, on many advertizing spaces, on all TVs in the pubs. It looks btw like Europe will win against USA (again). The weather, as cold and moistly as weather forecast predicted. I guess the real challenge in Golf is to play with rain and hurricane left-overs noticeable. How often a week do Irish people have an original Irish breakfast? And how does their cholesterol level look like? In general, the food seems to be expensive here. Never experienced a town were in all nights (ok, only two until now) at around 2am horse carriages are passing on the streets. How to you recognize a good pub? Obviously if there are more people standing on the street (drinking and not smoking) than would ever fit into the pub. The architecture of the living houses and business streets follow all the same imo boring style. Pedestrian lights seem to exist at traffic lights only with a slight chance. They get green (after yellow) in all directions at the same time if at all. The residents seem to ignore them most time anyway. Really risky if you follow this habit and are used to look for traffic to the left... Read More

...and are on the way to Dublin's aKademy 2006 to "shape the future of the free desktop". :-) My last count resulted in 9 Novell/SUSE employees attending, 4 talks of and 2 BoFs with them. Another not so nice "nine": likely rain on all 9 days which I will be in Dublin. :-( Read More

Wondered this morning why there is no GPG/PGP keysigning scheduled for next week's akademy 2006. Obviously it was forgotten, so after a quick query with the organization team about a free time slot I just posted this to akademy-announce: Read More

You may think that I have blogged about every KDE-related openSUSE build service project by now. Not quite yet. :-) Besides the unsupported backports of openSUSE Factory packages in KDE:KDE3 & KDE:Backports and the experimental stuff in KDE:Playground (like KOffice 1.6 Beta and digiKam 0.9 Beta 2) various people started to package additional applications using the build service in the last founded KDE:Community project. With the help of the community it's not absurd to expect this repository to become the biggest of all KDE projects over time. Read More

openSUSE 10.2 Alpha 4 has been released and it includes the new Kickoff start menu for KDE: As you can see we changed some things because of the usability tests performed with the prototype: some users didn't find the search functionality, so we made it appear more prominent. Users didn't use the built-in menu help, so we removed it completely. Users didn't discover "Lock Screen" on the main slab so we moved it into the "Leave" tab and decided to put additionally the lock/lockout applet by default into the right panel corner. The "All Applications" browser gained an all-columns back button for easier browsing. Read More

I created KDE4.x/ application directories in ftp://upload.kde.org's incoming/ directory. The first application it was used for was okular, an universal document viewer for KDE 4 based on KPDF, with a snapshot preview requiring the recent Krash release. Read More

As previously blogged, openSUSE 10.2 will have a redesigned KDE start menu created by the KDE and usability team at SUSE, after doing usability testing with other start menus. We now have a working prototype, code-named 'Kickoff' (started during world soccer championship, obviously), which is currently being tested with real users in the SUSE usability lab. At aKademy 2006 in Dublin, Coolo will give a Start Menu Research talk about what we learned during this project. Also, we are preparing a web-page to document our research. Click on the screenshot for the whole Kickoff sneak preview experience: Read More

The important warning first: this is only for developers and not openSUSE 10.2 stuff! KDE has released a first development snapshot of KDE4 and the KDE:KDE4 project in the openSUSE Build Service has RPMs of qt, kdelibs, kdepimlibs and kdebase for SUSE Linux 10.0 and up. These are raw RPMs of the compiled stuff, not integrated with the distribution at all (won't install to /usr, won't let you choose the session from kdm etc.). Again, these snapshot and the RPMs are only for developers. If you don't know (or are able to figure out from kde.org documentation) how to change a test user account to start it then better don't consider to download. Read More

Linux Magazine informed me that they put parts of their September 2006 issue online including a PDF copy of the "KTools: Beagle Helpers - Kerry and KBeaglebar" story. It's about the 0.1 version of Kerry though. The Kerry development paused a bit after the 0.2 Beta but I plan to continue it again after Kickoff (to be included in openSUSE 10.2 Alpha 4) is now being close to be a good looking, usable and sophisticated start menu - also thanks to previous work done for KBeagleBar and Kerry. Read More

Exactly one year ago Novell announced the openSUSE project to develop its Linux distribution, which is also the base for the Linux enterprise products, in an open way. I was one of the first to download Beta 1 of SUSE Linux 10.0, shortly after I switched the sides (btw there are several open jobs at SUSE in Germany). Read More

I have updated the KDE VMware virtual machine which I have been offering for some months now. It now contains the SUSE KDE 3.5.4 packages installed on a SUSE Linux 10.1 base. Additionally the by default installed applications are updated to their current versions in the openSUSE Build Service and KOffice 1.5.2 is added. As said previously, don't forget to run YaST Online Update once in a while, or install the 'zen-updater' applet to be notified about updates. ;-) Read More

KDE 3.5.4 was released today and the openSUSE Build Service has unsupported rpms of it: SUSE Linux 10.1 YUM repository (32bit and 64bit) SUSE Linux 10.0 YUM/YaST repository (32bit and 64bit) SUSE Linux 9.3 YUM/YaST repository (32bit and 64bit) Btw, we need more mirrors of the Build Service repositories. Please read how to mirror and get in contact with ftpadmin@opensuse.org if you are able to help. Read More

We have founded yet another KDE project over at the openSUSE Build Service. It's called KDE:Playground (SUSE Linux 10.1 repo view). Its purpose? To allow the SUSE developers to test development versions like the current Beta releases of Amarok, Basket, Digikam and Gwenview. You can even find today's KOffice 1.6 Alpha in there (until now only 10.1/i586 rpms built, 10.0 rpms [without Krita] will follow). Read More

After the schedule some days ago now also the abstracts for this year's upcoming KDE Contributors Conference are online. Let me point to the talks of my SUSE colleagues about Network Status Support in KDE and How to Use It and our team project Kickoff - Start Menu Research on which we spend much time during this too hot summer. Latter will be also topic on Novell Open Audio soon. Read More

The community was confused. The press was confused. The SUSE Linux Enterprise customers were confused. So it has been decided that the next release of what has been famous as SUSE Linux distribution will be renamed to openSUSE 10.2 to end this confusion. Hopefully everyone will be happy now? Read More

If I should name the reason which most extended my university visit I might mention XBlast. ;-) What is XBlast? XBlast is a X11 multiplayer game inspired by the classic game Bomberman (known in Europe as Dynablaster). If you don't know it (are you under twenty?), it's a strategic, maze-based computer game with your avatars running around either alone or in teams and pushing soon exploding bombs at each other. It has no 3D or superb graphics - its sole attraction, like so many vintage games, is the fun it makes playing it with your friends. Read More

If you're interested how the KDE desktop of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 looks like, Novell offers now a pre-release for free download. It contains all the functionality of the regular release, but is not the final product. Or have just a look into the SLED 10 KDE Quick Start or SLED 10 KDE User Guide (both PDF). Read More

There is now a public announcement for the hack fest hinted at in my last blog: KDE Four Core aims at paving the way for KDE 4 development for others and is sponsored by Novell/SUSE together with Trolltech. Rather short-term scheduled it was first planned to happen in Nuremberg, nearby of it or then in Prague already during in June but that did clash a bit too much with the soccermania happening in Germany at the moment. So now it happens in Norway with 24 core hackers who could make it in the first July week. Read More

I released this week the current KDE SVN version as Kerry 0.2 Beta because not much progress will happen the next two weeks: coding part of a KDE improvement project together with the usability experts of my SUSE team started and a long-planned week of vacation (for recreation, while others will heavily hack in Norway :-) ). Read More

We knew that some big companies like Adobe or Google developed some of their applications for MS Windows with the Qt toolkit. But they didn't take full advantage of Qt's cross-platform sweetness. Until now. Google released yesterday Google Earth Beta 4 and if you look closely at their download page there is a Linux version available. This is not using some Wine wrapper as Picasa before but is a native Qt 3 application. Time for other companies to wake it? Hello Adobe! Read More

Two good news today: ZDnet reports about a German tax authority migrating 12000 desktops to KDE on SUSE Linux from Solaris. And a first SUSE Linux 10.1 package management update (should be installed with YaST Online Update) was released which fixes several annoying bugs (performance improvements are planned for later). Read More

This week saw the release of KDE 3.5.3 (bugfixes and carefully chosen new features) and also the openSUSE Build Service, although still in Alpha phase, becoming productive as it now creates and offers the KDE and KDE applications backports among other stuff. Read More

After a long time I have updated my Distributor KDE Patches Collection during the last days. It now contains the latest release or release candidate tweaks and fixes of the most actively patching distributions like SUSE Linux, Kubuntu, Mandriva and ArkLinux. It should be of interest for maintainers of applications in KDE modules, packagers and users which are curious how much distributions patch the KDE releases. Read More

Short reading hint: this week's issue of Distrowatch Weekly features an interview with Andreas Jaeger, the project manager of SUSE Linux about the 10.1 release process and more. Read More

KOffice 1.5.1 has been released and as usual there are rpms for SUSE Linux available: either as directly built against the distros' packages for SUSE Linux 10.0 and 10.1 (these packages were btw built within the progressing openSUSE Build Service) or as part of the KDE supplementary repository for SUSE Linux 9.2 to 10.1. Read More

I think this was not yet mentioned on Planet SUSE, at least Ted didn't blog about it as he was on vacation: Novell Open Audio, the company's own podcast show, had a long episode about the SUSE Linux 10.1 release last week. Not Michael Loeffler as advertized but Martin Lasarsch (notlocalhorst) was interviewed for almost half an hour about the cool stuff in SUSE Linux 10.1. Read More

ftp.suse.com and first mirrors now carry the "KDE supplementary" package repository for SUSE Linux 10.1. "supplementary" is one of the unsupported playgrounds of SUSE packagers for providing newer application versions like KDE 3.5.2 with KOffice 1.5.1 for past distribution releases. See this wiki page for a list of other YaST repositories, most of them provided by the openSUSE community, and read this fine tutorial how to add them. Read More

SUSE Linux 10.1 has been finally released including Xgl preview, NetworkManager, AppArmor 2.0 and XEN 3. Learn more about it reading the Product Highlights and studying the first incoming reviews and screenshots galeries. Read More

Joining the announcements about presences at LinuxTag 2006 in Wiesbaden next week, let me spread that Novell will be back this year with a booth (hall 9, number 918). The openSUSE project will be presented, SUSE Linux 10.1 and the SUSE enterprise product line. Additionally thursday is the openSUSE day with 9 talks about the openSUSE project and SUSE Linux - to be found in the free conference program. If you're interested in working, doing an intership or writing your diploma thesis at SUSE research and development department visit the Novell booth on Thursday or Friday when the human resource department is available for questions. Read More

Congratulations to everone involved for the KOffice 1.5 release and especially Krita - finally a usable painting and image editing application with professional color support: Read More

[image:1819 align=right]With the upcoming SUSE Linux 10.1 Release Candidate (really, no kidding!) and no further changes allowed for it I thought it was time to release Kerry 0.1 including translations for 18 languages done by the Novell translation teams. The last days I already created a small homepage in the openSUSE wiki and took some new screenshots. The source is now imported into KDE's SVN, right next to the one of knetworkmanager. Read More

Reading the GNOME 2.14 feature guide you are told that "several important components of the GNOME desktop are now measurably faster" - which is nice. As example the GNOME Terminal is mentioned which a graph says is three times faster than the previous version and now being four times faster than xterm. If I remember an early draft of this document correctly it was measured with "time cat /usr/share/dict/words" so what do you think was measured? How long it took to print all the characters in that file? Likely by no means. Read More

Once upon a time there were some dwarfs who wandered around the earth and told everyone who liked to hear that they would produce a desktop including the distribution of their handcraft every sixth months. And some people believed them and the dwarfs' business grew a bit. But the dwarfs wanted to grow further and so they continued to praise themselves as the high lords of fixed release schedules - and it worked some times somehow. People who had an own project or business to place on the desktop started to trust the dwarfs' telling. The dwarfs were happy and built bigger and bigger furniture... Read More

KOffice 1.5 Beta 2 has been released together with binaries for SUSE Linux 9.3, 10.0 and Factory. Please help to test it to make the release rocking stable and install the provided debuginfo rpms for best crash reports if you can afford to download them. Read More

Novell today announced SLED 10 at CeBIT. Apparently there is some confusion caused by bad coverage: it's the successor of Novell Linux Desktop 9, a rebranded NLD 10 - if you like to say so - which gives you the choice to use either KDE or GNOME. As Nat Friedman stated to some press you will not lose functionality when you choose to use KDE: every desktop's applications will run on the other desktop, OpenOffice.org will integrate into both equally, desktop search is available under both and Xgl/Compiz (if supported on your graphic card) is desktop-agnostic too. Also the KDE desktop inherits from SUSE Linux 10.1 nice stuff developed at SUSE like kpowersave and knetworkmanager which other distributions maybe will only adopt in their next but one release. Read More

[image:1819 align=right] The KDE desktop of SUSE Linux 10.1 (and the future enterprise products built on it) will contain a KDE frontend for Beagle called Kerry. For this Beagle has been splitted into non-GUI and GUI parts, some backends are now in sub-packages (Evolution, Firefox) and the libbeagle API has been improved in parts. Besides generic file indexing Beagle already contains backends written by Debajyoti Bera and others for KMail, Kopete and Konqueror's web history cache. Read More

The KDE project has elected its first Technical Working Group. Three Novell/SUSE employees are among the seven elected members (the others either didn't get elected, are busy with KDE e.V. board work or didn't candidate ;-) ). It seems you can still surprise some people with Novell/SUSE's continued strong KDE support hence this short note. Read More

A bit too silent in my opinion voting within Novell's Bugzilla was enabled: you can now vote for bug reports and enhancement requests which are filed against the "SUSE Linux 10.1" product. During discussion whether to enable it or not KDE's Bugzilla and its success (most hated bugs, most wanted features) was a strong argument for it. Until now not many users have voted, don't miss this opportunity to give feedback! Please keep in mind that as with KDE's Bugzilla votes are looked at for orientation purposes only -- not for specific priorisation / resource allocation. Read More

KDE 3.5.1 packages for SUSE Linux 10.0 are now available which include fixes for the worst KDE 3.5.1 regressions. They will also appear at the usual YaST source. These packages are unsupported and mostly untested: kdelibs3-devel has a known wrong dependency which can be safely ignored and will be removed in the next revision. Packages for older distributions may follow once the new dependency resolution of the build server for older distributions problems are solved out . Read More

Announcing something which has been cooking already last year but got delayed by POTS bandwidth shortage over the holidays: VMware released a player for free with which you can run pre-built virtual machines. Somehow their virtual machine center offers under "Novell" only SLES and NLD images. :-? I created an image which contains a standard KDE desktop installation of SUSE Linux 10.0 OSS, upgraded to KDE 3.5 including KOffice 1.4.2 excluding non-KDE applications. It's a fully working installation so don't forget to install and try some additional KDE applications - and to run the security update when you're asked to. ;-) You can download it from developer.kde.org archived either as 588 MB flavor for Microsoft Windows or 537 MB for Linux. Read More

With SUSE Linux 10.1 Alpha 4 being announced let me list some KDE-related interesting news of it: it includes KDE 3.5 with several packages updated to last weekend's KDE 3.5 branch. The Qt 4 package's version is 4.1 release candidate 1. Digikam 0.8 and Taskjuggler 2.2 releases are of course not missing. 10.1 Alpha 4 includes a recent snapshot of KOffice trunk if you want to test eg Krita. And a work-in-progress version of a KDE frontend for NetworkManager is newly included. Expect some more good stuff in Beta 1. :-) Read More

KDE 3.5 has been released (press quote: "The newest version of KDE will have users happy that vendors have recently decided to keep supporting it"), the really last feature release in the until now three and a half years successful KDE 3 series. KDE 3.5.x will be the versions most users will use for likely more than a year (time until KDE 4 release + time until distributions pick it up + time until users upgrade). And KDE 3.5 will also be the version on the next year upcoming business desktop products which currently still ship KDE 3.2. Read More

KDE 3.5 RC 1 has entered the supplementary/KDE repository on ftp.suse.com and its mirrors. If you previously missed YaST definitions next to the packages hosted on ftp.kde.org, here you go. openSUSE.org has instructions how to add package repositories to YaST. Don't forget to turn on "Refresh" for the installation source if you run SUSE Linux 10.0 so you will not miss any future updates. Read More

The development snapshot SUSE Linux 10.1 Alpha 3 has been released yesterday and of course it contains the latest release candidates of KDE 3.5, Firefox 1.5, Thunderbird 1.5 and X.org 6.9. If you are a developer you may be interested to learn that SUSE is the first distribution which has switched its development to and is based on the upcoming gcc 4.1 compiler and this Alpha offers nice ways (upgrade, http/ftp installation, ISOs) to play with it. Read More

To complete the KDE 3.5 RC 1 release efforts there is now also a Klax Live-CD with KDE 3.5 RC 1 available. Now let me see if someone left something from this weekend over for me. Read More

KDE 3.5 Release Candidate 1 is finally released. Updating the Konstruct build script was easy, but creating the SUSE packages in time did cost me some hours of sleep which I in my current state should have better spent in bed. Read More

Maybe you haven't heard this yet as international pr[ess] is slow: After last week's reports that Novell plans to not ship the KDE desktop anymore on Novell Linux Desktop and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server products, the company got lots of feedback from its customers. And as is reported in the press (German) Novell listens to them and reconsidered its desktop strategy: Novell will continue to ship KDE also in the enterprise products as supported option and it's said that it will be easy to choose KDE as your desktop. :-) Read More

Jeffrey Stedfast is strengthening FUD about KDE developers on some planets. Strange that in the first paragraph he only cites a point for proof, Novell dropping KDE on certain products, which actually was true last week. Read More

James Ogley writes: "NLD is Novell's enterprise desktop product, I'm pretty sure it's always used GNOME". James, you obviously don't know Novell's products well. Neither is GNOME the only desktop on Novell Linux Desktop 9, nor is it the default. And judging from the bug reports and hearsay there are customers using KDE on NLD. It will be interesting what Novell will tell them. Read More

Last Friday I had my first free day. And what did I do? Likely not what normal people would do. I participated on Friday and Saturday the Berlinux 2005 event. Berlinux took place the second time under that name and location and has only regional impact - but it's growing. I took some pictures with still the same old shitty camera. The KDE booth was (wo)manned by me, Ellen and Ossi. As usual for these events, I didn't find time to attend the talks - except my own about KDE 3.5 (no slides available as I used none). Spent most time at the booth answering questions or talking to other exhibitors. But I didn't fail to attend the social event with tasty buffet and the GPG key signing. And just before departing I paid a ransom to free a Geeko from BSD slavery (task: spot Geeko on the pic). Read More

KDE 3.5 Beta 2 has been announced and the full range of testing possibilities is available: My small "Klax" Live-CD has been updated to KDE 3.5 Beta 2 and KOffice 1.4.2. The CD made news on Distrowatch and led to some screenshots on OSdir.com. For building from source the "Unstable KDE" edition of the Konstruct script has been updated. And there are packages for SUSE Linux 10.0 and 9.3 available (packages for 9.2 and 9.1 do also exist and may be uploaded if there is demand and once the KDE mirrors have fetched the current distributions' packages). And of course KDE 3.5 Beta 2 will be also on SUSE Linux 10.1 Alpha 2 which will be published on Thursday. Read More

SUSE Linux 10.0 is available for purchase and download in different flavors and some people are still spreading wrong information (initially started by some journalists). To make it short: "openSUSE" is only the name for the development project. "SUSE Linux" is the name of the distribution, also for the Open Source Software edition. Everything other is wrong, independent from if you read it on IRC, a supposed creditable news site - or even in the openSUSE Wiki. As the nature of a Wiki is that everyone can change it, a user could wrongly rename all references to "SUSE Linux OSS" to "openSUSE". But once discovered the correct information was restored. Read More

KDE 3.5 Beta 1 packages for SUSE distributions versions 9.1 to 10.0 are available. These packages are unsupported and completely untested. We are nevertheless interested in package related bug reports over at openSUSE because KDE 3.5 Beta will be also the desktop of SUSE Linux 10.1 Alpha 1 which will be published next week. A few packages like kdemultimedia, kdenetwork and the translations are still missing but will be added once they are built. Read More

The first release candidate of SUSE Linux 10.0 Open Source edition has been published today. You can download it at openSUSE.org. The KDE task force team at SUSE, consisting of Coolo, Dirk, kAdrian, Seli, Will and me has squashed countless bugs for it. Early next week there will be nevertheless a second release candidate, to which you can then update, with more bugfixes. Read More

Today I had my first work day - at Novell/SUSE, packaging KDE as successor of kAdrian Schröter (please note the part about "poor successor" on that page!) who became a lead for the openSUSE project. So call me biased what is "the world's most usable Linux distribution" from now on. :-) Read More

The "Express" in this blog entry title both refers to me only being able to attend Akademy 5 days this year as also this being the only blog entry summarizing some thoughts and observations after the two initial ones which were supposed to start a daily series. Many general reports and description of the talks have been posted on Planet KDE and Dot already, I won't repeat those. Read More

My KDE related activities, besides visiting the local usability meetings, increased over the last days again (finally implemented the feature to open blocked popup-windows within Konqueror). With the contract for my job starting next month signed, I can now be sure it will stay at a high level. Read More

For most people day one will be the first day of the user conference, for me and the e.V. members it is Friday. As previously written I didn't sleep well last night, not much more than 3 hours. Went to the breakfast area where the interesting game started to order your drink (water, orange juice or coffee) and what you want to have on your bread (tomato or jelly) because the waitress doesn't speak any word English and most of us no word Spanish. If you want to eat more you have to pay (and succeed to order it). Read More

Took the last exam of my studies at long last. :-) Received a KDE-related job offer and accepted it. :-) Booked my flights for Akademy. :-) Unfortunately I will not be able to attend whole Akademy but have to depart on the evening of the last conference day because my work, more on that later, starts on 1st September. So I will miss one or two talk slots (not so important as Fluendo will likely stream/record them), the coding marathon week with all its BoFs (pretty please write summaries for all who cannot attend!), the common city tour and maybe the GPG keysigning party depending on when it will happen. :-( Read More

It's nice to see the amount of people on Planet KDE rapidly growing, indicating a thriving KDE developer community. :-) Let me point out two special tags which some blog newbies don't seem to be aware off: Read More

KDE 3.5 Alpha source tarballs are up on the FTP servers. It's really Alpha quality so you don't will see a big announcement splash for it. One day before tagging KMail got completely messed up. When it was tagged two modules didn't compile at all. Several modules don't compile with --enable-final, Coolo ultimately gave up on fixing it. This week there were problems with the bandwidth of a server feeding the FTP mirrors so enough reasons for the long delay already. openSUSE going live with SUSE 10.0 Beta and people watching reactions for sure didn't speed things up either. Read More

Congratulations to Novell for deciding, according to several reports, to open the development process for SUSE Linux as "OpenSUSE". Also for planning to spread it as widely as possible while keeping the boxed retail version with manuals/support. Looking forward to next week to play with a public SUSE Linux 10.0 Beta. Reading the comments about it the "criticising but uninformed" user type caught my eye again: those guys who once tried something or picked up an argument which is out-dated today but keep posting it because they are experts. In the case of KDE we know the "not based on Free Software licensed library", "KDE is slow" etc. people. In case of SUSE people state it would not be Open Source or Free Software (referring to YaST, it's GPL since last year) or not freely available for download (FTP installations exist for years) or as ISO images (also not true for last releases) or no single community support or package site would exist. Lord, give them some clue! Read More

KDE 3.5 Alpha will be tagged in three days and many applications in /branches/KDE/3.5 still show the version number they had in the 3.4.0 release. :-( I usually go trough all modules before releases and look for many applications whether there have been changes since last release and if the version number has been already increased. This is time-consuming and I don't feel that I should be doing it. Please maintainers of applications (or as fallback contributors to) increase version numbers regularly! Read More

If you're the maintainer of a non-minor KDE application please don't think that posting your release to kde-apps.org is sufficient. Consider also to post a nice announcement including what your application is about and the highlights of the release to the kde-announce mailing list. Many news editors and magazine writers only read kde-announce and don't visit kde-apps.org! As an example see LWN of last week: KDE v GNOME announces. Outside KDE community the Freshmeat application index is the most important site to promote your application. Read More

I know that not everyone is subscribed to and reading the kde-commits mailing list (hint: if you work on or are interested only in a specific area of KDE visit the CommitFilter site). All the more important is having an archive of kde-commits. With a search in the bodies you can quickly track down possible regression introducing commits, see who is working on something, when last, what branches exist for it, on what someone is working and so on. Read More

You are reading the Free Software Desktop Planet which aggregates the most voices. Especially nice to have also several female voices on it. :-) And looking forward to see selected Trolltech blogs also become integrated in future. Read More

I'm happy about the whole bunch of applications which are nowadays available for people's daily tasks: Whether you want to play music, burn CDs, chat, send instant messages, read RSS feeds, manage your photos, keep your money together, draw a mindmap or download a Torrent - there is a KDE-based and nicely integrated solution available. Read More

Thanks to Geiseri for working hard after his return and the Drupal guys helping to bring the Developer Journals back online. Happy blogging! :-)

Fedora is being called a community effort by RedHat. Despite that and demand it doesn't create decent KDE packages. Their KDE still defaults to the ugly and buggy "BlueCurve" style of the past "BlueCurve" age which tried to give GNOME and KDE applications a similiar look. Nowaday's joke is that KDE's default style "Plastik" looks more similar to Fedora GNOME's "Clearlook" style than "BlueCurve". Read More

I guess the news about Sun cooling down Linux desktop plans means that I can eat the promised cookie now myself. And it seems GNOME realized that some of their deployment claims are short on details. Read More

Good evening. Sometimes users file funny, far beyond the capabilities of KDE, or crazy wishes. And I don't talk about the "remove my neighbor country's flag" evergreen. And the nominees for "The Most Fancy User Request" award are: Read More

Let us all together ensure that KDE 4.0 will be released at latest before the 10th anniversary of the KDE project (14th October 2006): this will put us into a good position against that legacy OS' major release "late next year". But do not let it us name "KDE X". :-) Read More

It's nice to hear that (big) companies actually check the number of Linux desktop deployments they are being told. Not good if then "200.000 desktops in Spain" are discovered as addition of some at a conference spread Live-CDs and some magazine accompanying CDs. Or some big proclaimed deployment in South America are actually Windows computers now setup to be able to dual-boot without anyone knowing on how many of them Linux is used after. Read More

Would I tell you this? No, I'm fair and don't try to cheat you. Whoever tried Novell's Linux Desktop 9 will know that it has no default desktop, you have to choose either KDE or GNOME during installation and there is no indication what to prefer. Is the GNOME camp simply uninformed or do they have dishonorable intentions? I keep reading from them and hearing from them like in the "101 Things to Know about GNOME" talk at GUADEC that NLD's default desktop would be GNOME. Read More

Just read an interview with Nat Friedman, carrying a 'Novell Vice President' title, in German c't magazine 12/05 (to be published on Monday). For your information, c't is a reputable computer technology magazine and not something like LUG Radio. In there he says about KDE and GNOME: "The only people who emphasize the differences are the developers, and I do not mean the ISVs (Independent Software Vendors), but the people who do not take showers. laugh" Read More

Trolltech seems to be hard working to smooth out every imaginable point of criticism and to be the best Free Software team player: It ensures with the KDE Free Qt Foundation that Qt will be always available for Free Software developers. Upcoming Qt 4 gets polished with daily snapshots based on everyone's feedback. Qt 4 will be also available under GPL for Windows as already for Linux and MacOS. Trolltech sponsors developers to work on KDE and also hires from the KDE camp. Trolltech invests now into improving the Unix infrastructure like the X server. Likely with Trolltech influence additional to normal Qt documentation also the Qt book is available for free. It continues to support KDE and meetings like the Unix Accessiblity Forum or upcoming KDevelop conference. Trolltech arranges and sponsors Qt development contests with nice prizes. Trolltech developers participiate and help with the initial port of KDE to Qt 4 including making changes to Qt 4. Thanks to a new investment round announced today, Canopy and SCO got kicked out from Trolltech ownership. And no, I won't argue about the LGPL as business plan for a company having a library as main product. Read More

A powerful feature of the "Klax" Live-CD, inherited from its Slax and UnionFS base, are "modules": you can download a module like Gimp or Firefox and either load them into the running Live-CD on the fly or by adding them to the /modules/ directory on the CD (without the need to remaster the whole compressed file system) before burning the ISO image. Today I created KDE translation modules for 17 languages (chosen by amount of native speakers, share in Web content and KDE translation progress). I want to explain you how you can create within 3 minutes a Live-CD supporting your favorite languages. Read More

In general I like the idea of the Open Directory Project (dmoz), a community-edited directory of the web. The part I feel most important about is of course its KDE category. In the past I submitted several times new URLs and reported broken/changed URL and duplicates. But not so often anymore and that's not only because of the lack of time (in main parts due to countless other KDE-related stuff I'm doing): I didn't experience the category editor as very responsive. His decision to also add single pages of listed sites leads to a mess and those are the ones who are likely very soon outdated (anyone still interested in KOffice 1.1.1 release notes?). And for the major kde.org sites and close partners we always had the KDE Family Websites list, for applications and themes related stuff now kde-apps.org and kde-look.org exist and several other stuff like Reviews and Screenshots can be found linked in the KDE Wiki. Read More

Last week new KDE contributor Ivor Hewitt committed the first version of an image blocker for Konqueror which ranked first position in the list of most wanted features at that time. When looking at the next top entries you will perhaps know that many are under development: Bittorrent support in kget is being considered to be added once the kget rewrite to support plugins is finished. Support for removing attachments in KMail is the first TODO of Don Sanders (he is currently busy implementing asynchronous filtering, the most hated bug). The themeable KDM greeter exists already in KDE 3.4 although it doesn't support all GDM elements yet and misses a GUI to set it up (but see KDM Theme Manager). Client side IMAP filtering is also being worked on by Don, a new contributor requested a VCS account to implement ACL support recently, Cervisia is getting Subversion support, smooth scrolling exists in HEAD/trunk and so on. In summary many features which will make many people happy in near-future KDE versions. Read More

On Wednesday evening I visited the podium discussion for the Open Source Jahrbuch 2005. Afterwards some speakers and visitors moved on to a nearby cafe and I chatted with Oliver Zendel of LinuxTag e.V. and also a bit with Eva Brucherseifer and Jan Mühlig about KDE and Appeal until early Thursday. Read More

It's nice to not only see increasing popularity of KDE but to also see applications for KDE prosper and getting the recognition they deserve: last five dot stories are all about KDE applications people have written stories about. :-) Read More

Yesterday I suddenly realized with horror that I missed a trend: everyone seems to rewrite kcontrol or create mockups how it should look like but not me. :-) First I had to find a project name, I chose kcontrol5 because kcontrol3 and kcontrol4 already exist in kdenonbeta. After having this difficult task finished I created these mockups which meanwhile incorporate first feedback from #kde-usability. Read More

KDE sources now blacklist gcc 4.0.0 because it miscompiles KDE but that shouldn't be a reason to do no compilation benchmarks, or? :-) My test machine was an Athlon XP 2600+ with 512MB and SUSE 9.3's gcc 3.3.5. The other gcc versions were pure gcc. My first test was to compile Qt 3.3.4: Read More

kdedevelopers.org hosts different content categories: polls, stories and blogs. As user roles "authenticated user" (working email address, hello spammers) and "KDE developer" (has to be manually verified as such) exist. Every "authenticated user" can submit stories to the story submission queue on which "KDE developer"s have to vote about whether they should be published - in practice nobody does. Stories even don't appear on the kdedevelopers.org homepage anymore, for story publications you better go to dot.kde.org. Read More

With the release of the 5.0 series of the Linux Live scripts and KDE 3.4 packages being available in Slackware-current I thought it was time for a quick update of my "Klax" Live-CD. Maybe it would have been quick if I would have known the differences to the 4.2 series and omitted some pitfalls and own stupidity. :-) The result are two flavors of "Klax" - both based on Slackware-current and using Linux 2.6.11.7: Read More

So Adobe is about to buy Macromedia for 3.4 billion US dollars. Because of the possible antitrust investigation of the market for illustration tools company executives like the Adobe CEO and the Adobe Chief Financial Officer were eager to point out the strong competition with explicit mention of KIllustrator. Read More

KDE is not only developed worldwide and being translated into over 75 languages making it the most and broadest translated Free Software graphical desktop environment. kde.org/international shows that the KDE community also consists of many, mostly non-English speaking, local groups worldwide who promote KDE in their country or region (like KDE Chile at the Latin America Free Software Install Festival recently) and help KDE users in their native language. Read More

First, greetings to everyone who is still (already 2nd April here) reading this entry on http://planet.gnome.org. :-) I wanted to complete my collection of distributor patches with the ones Linspire has applied to the Qt and KDE packages in their Five-0 release. So I contacted them because I didn't find a hint where to get the sources. Their support offered to send me a CD with the source code. I again stated that I'm only interested in Qt and KDE related patches and would prefer a download. Seems I was the first asking for that or for sources at all. :-) They put up two Source CD images on a slow server which they linked in their warehouse (http://my.linspire.com My Products/CD Downloads). So I registered there, downloaded 1.2GB 10+ hours long and then had to diff myself against the original tarballs. I guess the (L)GPL is not talking about getting patches, convenient and fast. :-( The result of all efforts are compressed 845KB big (size is partly due to release->branch diffs) Linspire 5.0 patches. On first sight Linspire didn't patch much, at least much less than SUSE or Mandrake in comparison. Read More

We lost the dot/wiki host for the week-end thanks to the software wonder called Zope, so let me tell you for the case you don't know already that KDE 3.4 Release Candidate 1 was released. I updated my small Klax Live-CD and also Konstruct so there will be hopefully someone testing it and reporting showstoppers. And no, not all known bugs will be fixed before the final release. Update: OSDir.com is the first to have screenshots of KDE 3.4 RC 1. Read More

I have long time not blogged but now that KDE 3.4 Beta 2 code-named "Keinstein" (blame me for the name) was released this week and with it the feature and i18n freezes in place this might change. :-) Also this week Slackware 10.1 became available. A small hobby of me is to test distributions (see history). My first Linux distribution was Slackware 2.0 as book appendix, which I quickly had to replace with Walnut Creek Slackware 3.0 CDROMs because I needed ELF support. Since then I didn't use Slackware anymore, so it was time to revisit. Read More

Your email address is your user id on bugs.kde.org. You create an account by having you mailed a random password. You can of course change your password later. If your email address changes, please also change your bugs.kde.org id so that you will continue to receive comments and questions by developers and other users (if you have not changed the email settings). You have created more than one bugzilla account over the years? Then you can mail the sysadmins and ask to have your accounts manually merged. Read More

On one side: In October 1050 distinct people have filed bug or wish reports on bugs.kde.org. In the six months from May to October 2004 there were 4635 distinct reporters. During the last 180 days (from today) 8340 bug and 3202 wish reports were filed. On the other side: Read More

Do you know KDEMail.net? It provides free email aliases in the form "firstname.lastname@kdemail.net" for KDE contributors and developers of KDE software, not necessarily in the main distribution, who are interested in a stable contact address to put as contact point into their work. Read More

Learned yesterday on IRC that people still think that the KDE Credits page is access restricted. That's wrong, everyone with a CVS account can update it (cvs co www/people/credits/). If you don't have an account read the paragraph at its bottom. Read More

KDE will be present at Berlinux 2004 in two weeks and I'm busy with several preparations for that. There will be several mostly German talks, including some prominent names likes Georg Greve and Jon 'Maddog' Hall, and I should be a bit prepared for my talk about KDE being qualified as enterprise desktop: Kurt provided me with an account for his NX demo server. I made a small deal with SUSE to be able to show the newest version which includes among other things OpenOffice.org 1.1.3 with KDE file dialog integration. Now I have to bug Zack, who finally got his Mozilla CVS account, to create instructions how to build Mozilla/Qt and the Gecko kpart. :-) Read More

Did you always want to know what patches the distributions apply against vanilla KDE source? Did you ever receive weird bug reports with 'impossible' behavior or stacktraces for your application? Or wanted to forward port this feature you saw in screenshots, read about in reviews or used on a machine with that other distribution? But you had not the time to search for the sources or the bandwidth to download the complete source package just to get the patches? Read More

Do you remember my blog entry about the software developer who put days of effort into a new version but then failed to raise the hour to properly announce his software (btw, meanwhile he has stopped its development without clear rationale)? Something similar can be watched in parts with some KDE software. Read More

So aKademy is over for most people, only the aKademy press staff continues to publish stories based on content collected and interviews conducted in Ludwidgsburg and it will take some weeks to close all financial transactions. I only read positive comments until now so don't let me ruin the "perfect" impression by listing what didn't work or other than planned. :-) Read More

I'm attending the whole day the KDE e.V. meeting since 10am and it's still continuing (now 5.30pm). Luckily there was a long midday break with free delicious food (four possible choices including one vegetarian) at "Blauer Engel" restaurant sponsored by IBM. Several attendants have their notebooks in front of them and are connected to Internet via cable or wifi and while listening or sometimes talking and voting in-between doing other stuff: Some watch the reactions to the KDE 3.3 release, read email, code or blog. :-) Others are chatting about what they hear on #aKademy channel at irc.kde.org. So if you want to participate remotely (recording/streaming is still being set up) or have questions about travel, location or organization consider to join and we may be able to help immediately. In short interesting but also exhausting - and the public 9 day program does not start until tomorrow. Let's hope everything works fine tomorrow with most attendees having been arrived and that the fun to work ratio increases. Read More

Today Ossi and I arrived together at aKademy in Ludwigsburg. The organization room seems to be the busiest place at the moment, full with working people, sleepy North Americans, loaned hardware (refrigerators, laptops, network and sound equipment) and delivered merchandizing stuff. I also went around a bit to take photos of the outside, "our" cinema and the yard where the social events will take place. Read More

For those not following the mailing lists, the KDE_3_3_BRANCH (and ARTS_1_3_BRANCH) has been created in CVS from which the release candidate and the final KDE 3.3 release will be created. kdelibs/kdecore/kdeversion.h already states "3.3.0" and won't be touched soon again so you can do a CVS build without fearing a complete rebuild to get 3.3.0 Final. Coolo has created release candidate tarballs which are currently tested for compilation. They should be publicly available tomorrow (without binaries) when I will also commit an updated Konstruct version. The colors of the latest splash screen are said to be changed (to look less childish/cartoonish) and there seems to be a recent regression within Konqueror which immediately deselects text selections. Other than that everything looks fine and there are afaik no other showstoppers known (yet). Read More

I just read that Aaron is excited to go to aKademy and that he will meet KDE developers (and not few!) there. Let me say that I also look forward to get to know some new faces including Aaron, Fabrice and Waldo. And Eric should be interesting to watch (or better listen?). :-) I also discovered the names of some KDE oldies like Matthias Hölzer-Klüpfel and Roberto Alsina who plan a comeback? All the rest of you please assume that we were either already at same place at same time or that I'm simply not aware of your registration. Read More

That's the magic CVS tag which allows you to pull the KDE version from CVS which is supposed to become KDE 3.3 Beta 2. Start your build (perhaps with the help of kdecvs-build) and to write your "KDE 3.3 Preview" today so that your story is finished when KDE 3.3 Beta 2 will be announced. :-) Read More

I want to tell you a true story which happened about half a year ago but is still in my mind. As you perhaps know I maintain Konstruct. Sometimes it happens that an archive disappears from its specified download location, often the cause is a new version release and the old version being deleted. This breaks Konstruct's installation process. Usually I notice this very quick because I read application announcement sites like kde-apps.org. There is an author who unregularly but then within days releases several new versions of an application which is included within Konstruct. He immediately deletes older versions and doesn't announce a new release. So I mailed him and kindly asked to keep older versions a bit or at least announce new versions on eg freshmeat.net so I have a chance to fix it quickly. He replied with a lengthy mail listing what users asked him during the last 3 years (documentation also in other formats, porting to KDE 3, making it compile with gcc 3 etc.) - and he did all this. A release would keep him busy 5 hours now, he says, to test it against KDE2, KDE3, gcc2, gcc3 and different cases of optional dependencies. He concluded that he doesn't see this effort reflected in the users' reactions and declined either of my both requests. Isn't it strange that he sacrifices 5 hours for a release (not counting the days to enhance the application before!) but then refuses to announce it with some minutes efforts so others can benefit from the new features or bugfixes because "there must be a final stroke for my efforts"? And not deleting the old releases would not even have required him to spend more time... My solution for this problem is simple: Download one copy from his website and upload it to another permanent place for Konstruct users. I'm curious if this has a measuarable impact (by Konstruct users installing meta/everything) on his download statistics but I don't dare to ask as my last mail to him only triggered a response "You are at my PERSONA NON GRATA list." He for sure has a problem with criticism. Read More

I bet everyone running a development version has at least once met Dr. Konqi - but do you know his colleague Dr. Klash? How could I, you ask? He is sleeping right on your hard disk within kdelibs! Dr. Klash checks for accelerator conflicts in menus and widgets. To awake him put following into ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals (or the config file for the application you want to test): Read More

Yesterday was the day the feature freeze for the KDE 3.3 release started and as expected some stuff was rushed into HEAD within the last allowed hours. Now the wait begins that everything compiles again and stabilizes so that KDE 3.3 Beta 2 can be tagged. Also yesterday the message freeze started which is unfortunate to say it polite. It's for sure not the best release schedule for people caring for user interface guidelines, the English proof-reading team, translators who right away started to translate and also don't expect every last-hour feature to be mentioned by the documentation writers in the handbooks. Read More

The KDE conference of last year took place in Nové Hrady, Czech Republic and there were attendees from almost everywhere, apart from Africa perhaps. At this year's conference (expect the conferences schedules to be announced real soon now!) in Ludwigsburg, Germany this may be different: The registration shows a great amount of registrants from Nigeria together with requests for invitation letters. It's great to see KDE being such successful there und being used even in ministries. Or is it just because of Germany? Read More

Some days ago I created an account on kdedevelopers.org out of curiosity or to be able to comment, don't remember anymore. Now that Geiseri has unfrozen the mail notification I'm even able to login and can "create content". But why should I blog? For sure not because my neighbour does. This German story reports that only 7500 active blogs in the German-speaking area exist. In comparison there are 3.5 millions blogs in the US and also the French and Dutchmen are more active. Reading the planetkde.org feed list there seem to be six or seven German KDE developers listed. So maybe I'm still in good company. :-) What could I blog? My weekly KDE involvements are mostly boring. I could tell you about people who still create their own non-KDE looking dialog for a line edit despite the existance of qt:QInputDialog and kde:KLineEditDlg (deprecated, see kde:KInputDialog). Applications which survived somehow from KDE2 or even KDE1 times and e.g. create "titles" in qt:QPopupMenu s by setting them disabled and inserting a separator (kde:KPopupMenu::insertTitle() is nice for this). Or API misusage like giving 'i18n("&Do not ask again")' as dontAskAgainName parameter to one of kde:KMessageBox's methods. And last but not least: The "All Files" file mask is not "." on Unix. A continuous annyoing topic are developers who don't know or don't want to read the KDE User Interface Guidelines (yes, they do exist!) and ignore the availability of technical help (kdesdk/scheck) causing me and countless translators double work fixing wrong capitalization, colon and trailing ellipsis usage. API fashion show, exposing developers' faults, my favorite bugs and wishes or just funny or thoughtfully stories around KDE - everything is possible. Only time will tell... Read More