Jriddell 

I've moved my developer blog to my vanity domain jriddell.org, which has hosted my personal blog since 1999 (before the word existed). Tags used are Planet KDE and Planet Ubuntu for the developer feeds. Read More

[thanks to jens for the lovely logo] Many years ago Ubuntu had a plan for Grumpy Groundhog, a version of Ubuntu which was made from daily packages of free software development versions. This never happened but Kubuntu has long provided Project Neon (and later Project Neon 5) which used launchpad to build all of KDE Software Compilation and make weekly installable images. This is great for developers who want to check their software works in a final distribution or want to develop against the latest libraries without having to compile them, but it didn't help us packagers much because the packaging was monolithic and unrelated to the packages we use in Kubuntu real. Read More

Today there are only six days left until I vote in the independence referendum. I usually use my personal blog for non technical bits but I thought some readers of my KDE Blog might be interested in this as it does affect the geopolitics of pretty much the whole world. Read More

Kubuntu Vivid is the development name for what will be released in April next year as Kubuntu 15.04. The exiting news is that following some discussion and some wavering we will be switching to Plasma 5 by default. It has shown itself as a solid and reliable platform and it's time to show it off to the world. Read More

Last month I posted about packaging and why it takes time. I commented that the Stable Release Update process could not be rushed because a regression is worse than a known bug. Then last week I was pointed to a problem where Baloo was causing a user's system to run slow. Baloo is the new indexer from KDE and will store all your files in a way you can easily search for them and was a faster replacement for Nepomuk. Baloo has been written to be as lightweight as these things can be using IONice, a feature of Linux which allows processes to say "this isn't very important let everyone else go first". Read More

Best thing about Akademy Brno

Hacking hard in the hacking room Blue Systems Beer Read More

Welcome to Czech, it has beautiful sunsets Welcome to Akademy at the Brno University of Technology Read More

Some of the Kubuntu Devs Talking and hacking in the corridor Sebas celebrates the release of Plasma 5 David Explains Frameworks 5 Morning exercises led by President Lydia 3D printing Konqi and family

Today my postal vote in the referendum for Scottish independence was sent off. I usually use my personal blog for non technical bits but I thought some readers of my KDE Blog might be interested in this as it does affect the geopolitics of pretty much the whole world. Read More

After sell out dates in Glasgow and Belgium the tour of my dramatic talk "Do you need to be brain damaged to care about desktop Linux?" is making a stop in Brno for the KDE Conference Akademy. In it I'll talk about the struggles of recoving from a head injury mixed with creating a beautiful and friendly Linux distro: Kubuntu. It'll have drame, it'll have emotion, it'll have a discussion of the relative merits of community against in-house development. Make sure you book your tickets now! Read More

Today Qt announced some changes to their licence. The KDE Free Qt team have been working behind the scenes to make these happen and we should be very thankful for the work they put in. Qt code was LGPLv2.1 or GPLv3 (this also allows GPLv2). Existing modules will add LGPLv3 to that. This means I can get rid of the part of the KDE Licensing Policy which says "Note: code may not be copied from Qt into KDE Platform as Qt is LGPLv2.1 only which would prevent it being used under LGPL 3". Read More

Here in the KDE office in Barcelona some people spend their time on purely upstream KDE projects and some of us are primarily interested in making distros work which mean our users can get all the stuff we make. I've been asked why we don't just automate the packaging and go and do more productive things. One view of making on a distro like Kubuntu is that its just a way to package up the hard work done by others to take all the credit. I don't deny that, but there's quite a lot to the packaging of all that hard work, for a start there's a lot of it these days. Read More

Your friendly Kubuntu team is hard at work packaging up Plasma 5 and making sure it's ready to take over your desktop sometime in the future. Scarlett has spent many hours packaging it and now Rohan has spent more hours putting it onto some ISO images which you can download to try as a live session or install. Read More

When life gives you a sunny beach to live on, make a mojito and go for a swim. Since KDE has an office that all KDE developer are welcome to use in Barcelona I decided to move to Barcelona until I get bored. So far there's an interesting language or two, hot weather to help my fragile head and water polo in the sky. Do drop by next time you're in town. Read More

Barcelona Free Software Users & Hackers are having a Barcelona Free Software Users & Hackers mañana, see you there!

We had a fun two hour meeting in #plasma yesterday to decide on the tasks for the next release. It's due out in October and there's plenty of missing features that need to be added before Plasma 5 is ready for the non-geek. Read More

A year and a half ago Qt 5 was released giving KDE the opportunity and excuse to do the sort of tidying up that software always needs every few years. We decided that, like Qt, we weren't going for major rewrites of the world as we did for KDE 4. Rather we'd modularise, update and simplify. Last week I clicked the publish button on the story for KDE Frameworks 5, the refresh of kdelibs. Interesting for developers. Today I clicked the publish button on the story of the first major piece of software to use KDE Frameworks, Plasma 5. Read More

KDE Frameworks 5 is due out today, the most exciting clean-up of libraries KDE has seen in years. Use KDE classes without brining in the rest of kdelibs. Packaging for Kubuntu is almost all green and Rohan should be uploading it to Utopic this week. Read More

Slightly late to the game, Kubuntu now has a Twitter and Facebook account to join the Google+ account. New headlines will go there and we've a fancy account from the nice people at SoDash that makes it easy to interact. Give us a Like or a Tweet. Read More

On our Plasma 5 build status page most of the packages are now a pleasing green colour. For the first time today I installed them all and logged in and... it worked! It took a bit of removing old caches and obsolete installs that'd I'd been making in the months previously and that nice temporary Next wallpaper everyone uses doesn't really get shipped so I had to add that and the icons sometimes work and sometimes don't and there's no plasma-nm release yet so I had to grab a copy and build that before I could use the network. But with some fiddle and wee bit ay faff, it works! Read More

Ubuntu Online Summit starts today with talks and sessions on all matter of stuff related to Ubuntu. It opens with the highlight of the summit, KDE Frameworks - Libraries for all Qt users a talk about the 50-odd framework libraries KDE is releasing and how they will be useful to all Qt programmers. The excitable David Edmundson introduces the current status and what works well. Read More

Today I released the Plasma Next Beta. It's the first major user of KDE Frameworks 5 and tidies up the internal and the externals of the Plasma desktop. Read More

A new cycle and lots of interesting possibilities! Will KF5 and Plasma 5 be supreme? All welcome at the Kubuntu kickoff meeting this european evening and american afternoon at 19:00UTC. Read More

There's only 1 tool to deal with an unsupported Windows XP...

Trust in Me You've been waiting for it, we've been working hard on it.. it's the new Long Term Support release of Kubuntu! This means we've been working hard on removing bugs, polishing features and not adding new ones. This will probably be the last release before KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma Next gets introduced so for those who like to live life on the cautious side you'll be pleased to know the Long Term Support label means we'll have important bug fixes and security fixes for the next 5 years. It'll also get backports of important KDE software for the next couple of years. Read More

Candidate images for Kubuntu 14.04LTS are up and need you to test them. Go to the ISO tracking site to download and mark your testing status. Check out the milestoned bugs for issues we are aware of and do report any we are not. Read More

Lydia brought a load of friends over from Germany to visit the sights of Stirling. Paul threw a party for her friends. I canoed up the Firth of Forth to visit and drank lashings of ginger beer. Read More

This week, as well as being a centrefold model in a tabloid rag, another of my life ambitions came true when I had the glory of being the release dude. Plasma 2014.6 is the first version of Plasma using KDE Frameworks 5 and the developers are hard at work coding on it. The release schedule required an Alpha so I was tasked with working out how to release some tars. Read More

Scarlett has been working hard on packaging KDE Frameworks 5 Alpha 2 and the build status page shows a sea of green (the only yellow is when a framework is asking for a package which doesn't exist yet). Just in time for Plasma Next to get its Alpha release this week coming :) Grab the KF5 packages from the experimental PPA for Kubuntu Trusty. Read More

The Blue Systems office in Edinburgh has moved across The Meadows to the Grassmarket to a larger office which is also surrounded on two sides by curious artist collectives and the occasional hipster café. Hosted in Edinburgh's new technology incubator Codebase we are in another building which is nicer on the inside looking out, this time with a view of our local volcano Arthur's Seat. Read More

Early last year the Linux Mint developer told me he had been contacted by Canonical's community manager to tell him he needed to licence his use of the packages he used from Ubuntu. Now Ubuntu is free software and as an archive admin, I spend a lot of time reviewing everything that goes into Ubuntu to ensure it has freedom in its copyright. So I advised him to ignore the issue as being FUD. Read More

Hacker Public Radio FOSDEM edition is up now for those wanting a podcast packaged full of geek interviews. My interview is 27 minutes in and talks of KDE, Kubuntu and how Baloo will make the KDE world slicker. MP3 file. Read More

KDE Frameworks 5 tech preview shipped last week and we've been packaging furiously. This is all new packaging from scratch, none of our automated scripts we have for KDE SC. Tier 1 is in our experimental PPA for Trusty. Special thanks to Scarlett our newest Kubuntu Ninja who is doing a stormer. Read More

I'm going to FOSDEM for 2014, are you? FOSDEM is a massive free software meeting with more projects than you knew existed. We need help on the KDE stall. We also need visitors in the devroom. Finally we need KDE people to come and eat pizza on Saturday evening. Add yourself to the wiki page if you want to help KDE at FOSDEM. Read More

Frameworks 5 Tech Preview has arrived. KDE Frameworks it a port of kdelibs to Qt 5 and turned into modules so you can install only the bits you need. People are often reluctant to add kdelibs to their applications because it brings in too many dependencies. With KDE Frameworks it has been modularised so much is simply extra Qt libraries. This will bring KDE software to a much wider audience. Many parts of kdelibs have just been moved into Qt itself thanks to the open qt-project. Read More

I'm done triaging old photos, here's some of my favourite Ubuntu themed ones from 2005 to 2009. The first Ubuntu conference I went to in Sydney featuring Andreas, one of the Kubuntu originators Read More

I've also been triaging old photos to make some room on my server, so here's a Christmas present of a retrospective of old KDE photos. It all started here, my first KDE talk about Umbrello, my dissertation project. (And if anyone else is needing a dissertation to work on, I recommend a KDE project, take over Umbrello, academics love that UML stuff, it's a guaranteed A). Read More

#savetheday party 19:50UTC in Munich and #kubuntu-devel from a project which has always taken inspiration from the Timelord.

Two of my favourite things in one evening. Save the Day viewing! Who's your favourite Doctor? Read More

We're having a great meeting here in Munich, last night we collected a range of topics to chat about and today we've been moving post-it notes about as we discuss topics and fix problems. I'm enjoying it a lot. Read More

We're meeting in Munich at the offices of LiMux who have just completed their transition to convert the whole of public administration in Munich to Kubuntu, over 15,000 computers. Tux is supporting the wrong football team Read More

It's little advertised but KDE has an office in Barcelona. With Scotland getting cold, dark and wet I set off in search of sun and colleagues to have a change of scene and improve my health after a surgeon poked needles into my eye. Read More

Linuxcon ended in spectacular style with a party at the National Museum of Scotland, shown here with the interesting addition of a full marching band. Dolly the sheep was supposed to be on display but ran off at the sound of the bagpipes. Read More

Linus is visiting Edinburgh today for a Q&A session at LinuxCon. Asked where he'd like to see Linux in 5 years time he said he started Linux because he wanted to use it on his desktop but he's been disappointed how that hasn't taken off. He wishes desktop communities would stop arguing amongst competing technologies and would work together. How true. (And I continue to feel smug about being part of a community which hasn't started a new project to replace any desktop or desktop technology). Read More

I gave a lightning talk at Linuxcon about KDE and Kubuntu highlighting some of the mega rollouts with Kubuntu such as the <a href"http://dot.kde.org/2013/10/02/ezgo-free-and-open-source-software-taiwans-schools">one which is about to take over Taipai. Read More

Linux has come to my home with Linuxcon in Edinburgh. Me and Kenny C are manning the KDE stall showing off KDE software running Krita on a desktop (bling), Plasma Active on a Nexus (swish, very popular), KDE Software on Windows (ooh I didn't know you did that) and giving away lots of lanyards. If you're here do come over and say hi. Read More

Packaged full of lovely goodness is the upgrade to 13.10, grab it now.. http://www.kubuntu.org/news/kubuntu-13.10 Highlights include... New Software from KDE - KDE Plasma and Applications 4.11 New app installer - Muon Discover New accounts setup - User Manager Easier to get everything during install - Wireless Setup in Installer KDE Telepathy with Better Text Editing and Improved Notifications New Network Manager applet Easier to report what you're using with About System documentation returns at http://docs.kubuntu.org still using good old X.org and planning to follow the rest of the ecosystem with Wayland Read More

Bugs are a pain, especially when a fiddly one comes along involving Python bindings, the number of people who understand SIP is pretty low. So it's nice we were able to fix it quickly. In the reporter's words: Read More

The Krita Lime PPA provides daily builds of the best free software painting application out there. For aspiring artists Krita is a fabulous app to create works of inspiration. Read More

Download and test the beta 2 candidates and report on that iso testing site. Upgrades also need testing. If you're wondering how to help Kubuntu, this is how. Virtual machines and real hardware needed. Join #kubuntu-devel to chat. Read More

Some comments on switching to Kubuntu from a recent Slashdot article... I switched to Kubuntu ... I haven't looked back. I like *buntu distributions simply because they're the easiest to get up and running. Unless you need a highly customized Linux system, you can't argue with *buntu's simplicity when it comes to installation. Read More

As previously blogged Kubuntu Romania launched. Site creator Ovidiu-Florin has a launch ceremony with wine and ribbon to open it. Now that's style.

Kubuntu România launches today, a Romanian language website with Kubuntu news and support.

Winter is coming so why not snuggle up with Kubuntu? Kubuntu keeps everyone warm.

The writer on Netrunner Mag did a review of the Best KDE Distro of 2013 and came to the following conclusion: So beauty plus stability plus accessibility, the precarious triple-point equilibrium lands flat in the court of Kubuntu. This is quite an achievement, and the team behind their project should be really proud. Raring Ringtail is an awesome KDE demonstrator, and it tickles all the right glands. If you have friends and family you might want to expose to Linux, then Kubuntu will probably be the best overall choice.

Application icons had stopped showing sometimes in the KDE SC 4.11.1 update but our lovely upstreams found a fix and when I was notified by a user I was happy to add it to the Kubuntu packages. What a lovely response.. Read More

Medibuntu the archive with libdvdcss and a number of other package which couldn't be put into the official Ubuntu archive is to disappear. Gauvain Pocentek who has been maintaining it for some time is wanting to move himself and his server on. At Blue Systems and in Kubuntu we looked over the packages in the archive and realised they were all obsolete or unnessecary because most are now in the official Ubuntu archive or have better equivalents which are. The main exception is libdvdcss which is illegal in the US so can't go in the archive. But fear not I've been working with the developers of libdvdcss at VideoLan to set up an archive directly at VideoLan. It works with either Ubuntu or Debian of pretty much any release Read More

Thanks to the elite packaging skills of smartboyhw and the review skills of Quintasan we now have kdeconnect in Kubuntu saucy so you can use your phone to control Amarok. Read More

There is a Debian+Kubuntu Bug Squashing Party in Munich and you're invited! If you're wanting to help out with Kubuntu or Debian or KDE do come along and start squishing beasties. It's hosted by our friends at LiMux who do the Munich city rollout of Kubuntu. See the wiki page for more details. I'm going and hope to see you there. Kubuntu Council should be able to sponsor travel for any Kubuntu friendly people who need travel and accomodation. Read More

As reported on Slashdot Commercial Support is available again for Kubuntu. If you or your organisation needs help with your computer systems running Kubuntu but you don't want to worry about the best IRC channel to ask in you can pay some money and phone up the office in England to get some help. They will use phone, e-mail, Google hangout, Skype, VNC and any other method you like to help diagnose the issue and resolve it for you. Read More

There's been some tools added to the Kubuntu developer workflow recently which are handy for current developers and means anyone interested in helping out can find jobs to be done earily. Read More

Just noticed on the BBC News front page Ubuntu sets crowdfund pledge record. Good luck with the pledges Edgers!

Umbrello is the premier UML diagram tool for Linux desktops. UML is a standard for making diagrams of software, useful for documenting and planning your programs. I took over Umbrello in about 2002 and maintained it as part of my University final year project. One of the first changes that I made to Umbrello was to make it a KDE project, it was the natural home. But I never moved the website or mailing list, Sourceforge was good enough. Read More

Gosh I only expected a donation occasionally but we've had 19 people want to thank Kubuntu enough to donate us some money. Thanks Coorey, Orlando, Marcelo, Fabian, Giancarlo, Juan, Javier, Jussi, David, Kevin, Jeremy, Łukasz, Christoph, Nadeem, Philippe, Daniel, Lieven, Christoph, Noam! Read More

Project Neon is a fantastic resource for KDE developers giving daily builds for KDE software. It's maintained by the lovely Kubuntu community on the lovely Launchpad infrastructure. KDE developers can install the various bits they need to develop their part of KDE without having to worry about compiling everything themselves. It installs everything into /opt so it doesn't touch your normal software installation. Thanks to the hard work of Harald and others we have the first KDE Frameworks 5 builds on Neon! I expect this to prove a vital resource in developing Frameworks 5. Read More

Who is KDE? I did some 30 second interviews on the booze cruise last night to give you a flavour.

K people discussing KPeople The organising team busy organising Read More

The day started with a long release schedule BoF. No conclusion but less freezes seemed popular. Shorter release schedule seemed mostly popular with a 4 month schedule getting a fair bit of approval. Not ideal of us though as it would get things out of sync with the Ubuntu schedule. Read More

A quiet day for me at Akademy catching up on e-mail and learning how to make an apt archive so here's some more photos from the rocking party last night. Read More

At the Kubuntu Developer Summit we discussed various topics. The guys on the left are from a 15,000 seat Kubuntu rollout in Munich, we worked out a plan to supply LTS backport packages they need. Read More

Lydia tells us how to talk to each other An audience waits to see which of them will win an Akademy Award Read More

Eva Galperin from the EFF talks on surveillance "Help us Free Software you are our only hope" Kubuntu sponsor's poster on stage with good-to-see new sponsor Blackberry Read More

KDE Meeting in Bilbao! The KDE e.V. AGM, fewer people than normal, only about 50 people (~1/4 of the membership) due to it being held a day early. Read More

New Kubuntu contributor Shrinivasan T's blogs about How did I fix a bug in kubuntu installer?. The post takes you through the process of forking, fixing and merging some code from Bazaar to get it into Kubuntu. Thanks Shrinivasan! Read More

A few months ago Canonical announced their new graphics system for Ubuntu, Mir. It's a shame the Linux desktop market hasn't taken off as we all hoped at the turn of the millennium and they feel the need to follow a more Apple or Android style of approach making an OS which works in isolation rather than as part of a community development method. Read More

SC 4.11 build chart. Lines and lines and lines! < Riddell> "Aurélien renewed their own membership in the Kubuntu Members" yay agateau still loves us! < aurélien> Riddell: of course I do! < aurélie> You know, sometimes people are surprised I am still running Kubuntu now that I left Canonical. I like to answer them "What else?" :) Read More

I still get the best e-mails :) From: Tibor To: jriddell@ubuntu.com Subject: Thank you! Hello Kubuntu/Ubuntu-Team, i only want to say thank you for the great operating system Kubuntu, you are the best. I`m very happy with this. Read More

After many years of working away from my bedroom desk I was invited to a party at the opening of a new hotdesking space. Tech Cube is an attempt to create an entrepreneurial office space in Edinburgh. As I heard it the old Royal Dick (no sniggering at the back) vet school got sold to a nice guy with deep pockets who is turning it into an arts complex but the ugly wee tower block stuck on the side was not very artistic so get turned into this little project. Read More

I get the best e-mails Subject: Kubuntu love Date: Sat, 18 May 2013 12:26:56 +0100 Hello Jonathan I really wasn't sure who to write to about this, but I got your name from the Kubuntu site as a contact. Read More

A repost of Martin Gräßlin's blog Mir in Kubuntu for the benefit of Planet Ubuntu As you might have seen in Jonathan’s blog post we discussed Mir in Kubuntu at the “Mataro Sessions II”. It’s a topic I would have preferred to not have to discuss at all. But the dynamics in the free software world force us to discuss it and obviously our downstream needs to know why we as an upstream do not consider Mir adoption as a valid option. Read More

Distrowatch is a handy site to check out the history of Kubuntu. Today they put up a review of Kubuntu 13.04. "Kubuntu gave me a very responsive graphical environment, an application menu which was free from advertisements and the distribution did not insist I install third-party drivers just to use my desktop." Ubuntu Unity comes in for some critisism though, probably when they post (back) to Qt their graphics requirements will become sane again. Read More

Notes from breakout on Homerun: Needs to move to Extragear no upstream designer in Plasma so hard to change fundementals like app menu KWin would be against it as default, uses full screen blur, no visual consistency between it and dashboard Does not show app generic names netrunner says full screen is distracting for a menu no filters no recent apps Notes from breakout on High DPI sceens: Read More

Me and Rohan and Harald spent the day playing with the cheapo Sony Vaio laptop I got with Windows 8 and UEFI firmware. This laptop has many partitions: sda1 is fat32 and contains a Boot and a Microsoft EFI boot loaders sda2 is ntfs and contains Windows Recovery bits sda3 is efi/fat32 and contains a Boot, a Microsoft, a kubuntu and a ubuntu EFI boot loader sda4 is a Microsoft reserved parition and won't mount, spooky sda5 is an ntfs partition and has Windows 8 on it sda6 is ext4 and I install Ubuntu and Kubuntu to it sda7 is a linux-swap partition Read More

Since there's no UDS we have a room booked at Akademy to spend the day discussing things in Kubuntu if you're coming put yourself on https://notes.kde.org/p/kubuntu-akademy Would be good to have as many Kubuntu people there as possible. The Kubuntu Council has funds if you need sponsorship for travel, don't be afraid to ask. Read More

Here's some notes from the breakout sessions we had yesterday for my own recolation. KWin and Wayland on Kubuntu Read More

Some time ago I got a phone call saying Canonical were stepping back from their support of Kubuntu. But Free Software doesn't like to quietly disappear and I've been spending the last year getting back what went missing. Last week I had a meeting to get the last bit in place, commercial support. A nice guy called Niall from Emerge spent a lot of time and energy getting an agreement from Canonical to be able to provide the commercial support then found a company to actually provide that. So I drove down to a part of England called Huddersfield to visit the offices of With Support, a small company doing Linux support. Their office has a fresh cut wood smell coming from all the fresh cut wood. Tariq is the head man having built up the business from scratch. He started off doing Linux desktop support but has moved away from that due to lack of business, hopefully being an official Kubuntu partner will fix that. We installed Kubuntu to take a look from a user support point of view and found a bunch of issues. The main one was krfb not working to share the desktop, this is important as a way to get access to the user's computer. We didn't look at Kiosk but he considers it important to be able to lock down KDE's settings for companies that want it, I think this should still work but it'll need testing. Muon was a lovely package manager but no good if it doesn't know about packages which if you install without a network connection is the case until the cron job runs, ug. QApt seemed to not be doing what it needs to either installing .deb packages or working with the directory share plugin to install samba. And then he had some features he thought the users would expect like new applications highlighted in the application menu. Then we had a conference call to talk business. The important thing about this deal is all profits go to the Kubuntu Council to spend on things to help Kubuntu. We'll need to set up a Paypal account or other way to pay and a transparent way to split money between us. And it'll need putting that on the website in some suitably clear marketing talk. I'm very excited. Read More

The Ubuntu Developer Summit should have been this week but got cancelled in order to increase transparency. But you wouldn't want to let an expensive hotel booking go to waste so there seems to have been a meeting of Canonical engineers this week anyway just without the community. Twitter says some grumpy things. Well two can play at that game: I've been to every UDS except the Mataro Sessions back in 2004 so this week I'm down the road from Mataro with a dozen KDE and Kubuntu people to discuss what we're all working on. So far mgraesslin has shown his plans for KWin (including no small part of slagging off Mir and the instability of X in Ubuntu) and now Kevin is talking about the status of KDE Frameworks 5. Read More

We need you to test candidates for the 13.04 Kubuntu release. ISO tracker has the tests needed and links to the images. Chat in #kubuntu-devel to coordinate. Happy testing! Read More

Google+ topic to name 100 things that are great about Kubuntu "Community involvement." "I like KDevelop, KDE and Debian packages combined with the fast update service of Kubuntu." Read More

Some slick new artwork has arrived in Kubuntu 13.04. 13.04 is due for release a week today so all hands on deck for testing, join us in #kubuntu-devel to help out. Read More

Bienvenue au Planet KDE Francais, un grand planet pour tout la monde francophone. "C'est cool ça un planet en français pout KDE!" Cédric Bellegarde Read More

Myself and Paul and Nicky and Carry judged the entries. They were all winners. They all showed what could be done when you put people with ideas together with people who can hack. They all showed the power of open, collaborative and friendly development. Read More

Linux geeks The judge and the organiser Read More

NHS Hack Scotland is starting here in Edinburgh brining coders and medics together for the weekend Morning wake up Read More

Sometimes I get the best e-mails... From: "Przemek (cojack)" Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2013 09:42:19 +0100 Subject: Big request To: jr@jriddell.org Hello, I have big request to you, please don't ever stop working on/for Kubuntu. Thanks in advance, Best regards, Przemysław Czekaj. </pr Read More

There’s been chat that my NHS Hack Scotland post implies there’s no point in going to the event, that in light of the NHS Lothian FOI request anything created at the weekend has no chance of being used in the NHS. I wouldn’t be attending (and judging!) if that were true! Read More

NHS Hack Scotland is a weekend event to bring together geeks and developers with medics and manager from Scotland's lovely health service. Like the equivalent NHS Hack Days in the equivalent (but endangered) health service in England is it planned to end up with open source prototype programmes to solve interesting problems. Read More

A re-post of David Edmundson's blog KDE, LightDM and the Mir Kerfuffle for Planet Ubuntu With Canonical's decision to make a new display server, there's been some questions as to how this affects LightDM and the KDE front end I've spent a long time working towards. Read More

Really I do, dunno why some people think I unfairly critisise them. They want to fix bug number 1, "Microsoft has a majority market share". The obvious way to do that was with the existing community made desktop software but after many years that still had minimal traction. Actually lots of nice rollouts around the world in educational institutions, every region/nation in Spain made their own Ubuntu derivative and of course Kubuntu has had the world's biggest Linux desktop rollout in Brazil. But nothing to get it directly into the hands of consumers. Dell did a half hearted attempt to pre-load Ubuntu on laptops but somehow it never went very far. Read More

A repost of elite KWin maintainer Martin Gräßlin from Planet KDE Dear Mark Shuttleworth, so you “have absolutely no doubt that Kwin will work just fine on top of Mir”. This is great and I totally appreciate that you think Mir is a great system. But I’m wondering why you don’t use KWin then, after all it will work fine on top of Mir and is Qt based? Read More

A repost of elite KDE contributor Pau Garcia i Quiles' blog for Planet Ubuntu Mark Shuttleworth recently critized Jonathan Riddell for proposing Xubuntu and others join the Kubuntu community. I thought I could make a few amendments to Mark’s writing: Read More

Some people mis-read (or I mis-wrote) my previous blog as critisising Ubuntu for not caring about its community any more. That's not what I wanted to say and it wouldn't make any sense, Ubuntu is a large community, it can hardly stop caring about itself. Rather I was saying that Canonical has done some moves recently which show a lack of concern for the Ubuntu community. Numerous other blogs on Planet Ubuntu say the same thing today. Mark did too today by saying that Canonical is taking more of a lead in development because GNOME and KDE et al were failing to take over the world, an entirely sensible decision to make. So if you want to be able to take a strong part in contributing then Ubuntu Unity is not the best part of Ubuntu to go. That's fine as there are many parts which are waiting for more people to help out, I recommend Kubuntu but there's dozens of other flavours and sub-projects waiting with open arms. Read More

Of all the nutty things Canonical has done in the last week wanting to drop 13.04 four months into development and two months before release is one of the more anti-social to the community who have been working on it. Fortunately at the "UDS" session today I poked enough and we seem to have consensus that it'll go ahead on the schedule we agreed at UDS last October. Feature freeze on Thursday my friends, two days to go. Read More

If like Martin Owens you're feeling the lack of Ubuntu community and wanting an Ubuntu community that cares about everyone's contribution, doesn't make random announcements every couple of days that have obviously been made behind closed doors and cares about a community made upstream desktop (and err.. whole graphics stack), you'd be very welcome here at Kubuntu. Join us in #kubuntu-devel Read More

Planet Gnome is headed by a curious blog today, Miguel moving to Mac. "To me, the fragmentation of Linux as a platform, the multiple incompatible distros, and the incompatibilities across versions of the same distro were my Three Mile Island/Chernobyl." Read More

I get nice comments on IRC occationally, here's an especially nice one recently: Can I thank all the Kubuntu Ninjas for their superlative efforts with Raring (amazingly stable for Alpha 2), KDE SC 4.10 and KDE Telepathy.. it is amazingly smooth and stable, and uses a lot less memory than previous releases.. very impressed.. Read More

Sony, the company who created Audio CDs which installed a rootkit on Windows computer to try to stop people copying music has pirated KDE artwork. The preferences-system.png icon from Oxygen is on their Choose your Vaio webpages (next to configure) but impressively is also on the UEFI firmware should you boot up into Assist mode. Nowhere on their website terms of use does it list the LGPL 3 licence it may be copied under (It does say "Any unauthorised use or copying of site content, or use of site content which breaches these Terms (or their spirit) may violate trade mark, copyright and other proprietary rights, and have civil and criminal consequences" although it also says "You must seek and obtain the written consent the operator of this site before creating any link to this site" so I don't give that page any legal credit.) Should KDE e.V. and Nuno's Oxygen friends start a new business model by sueing them for everything they're worth? Read More

Microsoft have decreed that every new Windows 8 computer has to come with UEFI, a new firmware to replace the old 80s BIOS. They've also decreed that every new Windows 8 computer has to come with SecureBoot which means it'll only boot an operating system signed by MS. This is only for security of course, nothing to do with making it harder to make competing operating systems, oh no. So I had to hunt out a new laptop to test this on which means going to a real physical shop since no website will list which firmware a computer has it being a most uninteresting feature. My local Sony Centre found me the very last 13" cheapo Vaio laptop in the country to use as a test machine. Read More

Oriental and other input methods have long been fiddly in Kubuntu. I'm very pleased to see that ace Kubuntu ninja Michal Zajac has fixed the language packs to set up the input methods correctly when installing a language that needs it. Read More

Aaron's grumpy discussion of how Unity doesn't currently use Qt on the desktop made it to Slashdot got this nice comment in the /. discussion: 'I have been using Kubuntu -- the semi-official KDE Ubuntu -- for years. I like it, it's stable, and the interface with least surprise. It does what I want, when I want, and it doesn't try to "integrate" things that do not need to be, or should not be, integrated.' Read More

A nice e-mail I received about KDE SC 4.10... Hi there, Wasn't sure where to send this email but wanted to send a huge thank you to the Kubuntu team. I have no idea what happened in 4.10 but my God everything is fast!! Everything loads so quickly and so stable so far. This is by far the best release I have ever used for a linux distribution. I don't see windows 7 being used in the coming weeks. Please forward this to those who would really appreciate it!! Thank you again and please keep up the amazing work!! Cheers, Asa Read More

It's Kubuntu Ninja time! We have the tars for the next KDE Software Compilation beta and now we need to package them up. There's an awful lot of them so do come and help. We're in #kubuntu-devel if you fancy helping, just ask how to get started and hang around until someone is available to help. Then you could end up like this good looking bunch seen here at the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen... Read More

It's UDS time again and we're in sunny Copenhagen. You can join in by looking at the sessions and look up on the schedule when to join, then you can listen in to the audio and type into the IRC channel which is projected into each room. The event this time feel bigger than ever using a whole conference venue on the outskirts of town and full of people from Ubuntu and Linaro. Read More

My head trauma showing itself with a pre-ticked publish box on the Kubuntu release story that just escaped long enough to make it onto Planets KDE and Ubuntu. We're still testing and will be needing more CD testers tonight, come and join us in #kubuntu-devel Read More

Less than a week until Kubuntu 12.10 is due out and the candidate images are needing testing. Join us in #kubuntu-devel and get the images from the ISO tester, run them in a range of configurations and report the results on the tester. Read More

Two weeks until the final thing and we need lots of testing of the beta, now featuring the latest and greatest KDE Platform and Applications 4.9.2. Beta release page lists the new features and the download and upgrade instructions. Read More

There we were starting discussions for the Ubuntu Developer Summit at the end of October in Copenhagen and wondering who we could afford to send when I got a nice e-mail asking what it would cost to send everyone who wanted to go. I replied with a rough budget of what the flights and hotel would be and next thing I know that had appeared in my Paypal account. Now I like to think Kubuntu is a friendly and trusting community but this is generosity beyond my expectations. I'm constantly amazed with how much people like Kubuntu and how they show it. Read More

A fun thread on independent website kubuntuforums.net asking why use Kubuntu rather than the multitude of competition. Some answers: (1) I prefer the KDE look (2) The friendly community I just like KDE and Kubuntu seams to give the best KDE I have tried I use it because I like Ubuntu, but but want customization options. Ive tried a lot of other DEs but none is easier to use and more customizable than KDE. Read More

It's never too late to help out Kubuntu in the cycle Here's our work items for this cycle. Some of the easier ones: track down and update install docs everywhere for having a USB/DVD image but no CD image review kubuntu active for app selection and good experience Kubuntu Quantal Docs - carry on where top contributor LittleGirl had to leave off Update ubiquity to match GTK frontend (the GTK frontend is getting a load of features which will mean the alternate images can go away like LVM partitioning) ensure OwnCloud juju charm works (we like owncloud here at Kubuntu) deal with Kubuntu unique strings now we aren't using Launchpad (should be translated separately either in KDE or in Launchpad). Read More

Posted today to the kubuntu-devel mailing list, this handy image for your website

Calligra has made a second release. Packages are aviailabe for Kubuntu. With this release I'm confident Calligra is ready for bigger exporure and we're evaluating it for Kubuntu 12.10.

Danimo started a Planet Qt as a sign of the project's increased open development model. It uses the same Rawdog setup I made for Planet KDE. Read More

Rekonq, the web browser shipped with Kubuntu, has reached 1.0 congratulations Adjam and friends. It's pleasingly stable and thanks to WebKit it supports almost all the modern fancy stuff in websites. Just a pain websites like BBC iPlayer deliberately fail on it, bad BBC. Rekonq 1.0 is available in Quantal for latest Ubuntu users and precise-backports for those wanting to try it out. Akademy talk videos are up. Even if you're not into domain specific debugging tools for Qt it's well worth looking at the Keynotes of Mathias Klang, Freedom of Expression and Will Schroeder: It has a heart, a brain and it's dangerous. Be selfish and share!

Mega Akademy Group Photo, who can you name?

A week in Estonia, the lovely sunshine, the magical forest and all the BoFs you could want. Qt Quick Training The main event of the Monday was KDAB running a Qt Quick training session. Qt Quick continues to be full of swish bling although the widget sets are all a bit incomplete. The good news is there's not a lot of QML change in Qt 5. Kevin even showed us some new bling from Qt 5 which makes snowflakes, pretty. Read More

A whole week of KDE goodness here at the IT College in Tallinn. Favourite talks: Jeroen van Meeuwen gave a talk about bug management, something we're often not very good at in free software due to lack of manpower. I'd love to have a quick and convenient way of marking bugs for the next kubuntu release for example, and what's quick and convenient for me posting it via IRC, we recently got a bot who could do this but it can't mark it for the next release due to daft security issues, grr. Read More

A life reaffirming gathering of KDE contributors is happening this week in sunny Tallinn in Estonia. Here's some pictures for those stuck at home Pre-Akademy Hacker beer Read More

A shiny new Kubuntu release all for you. You can install it safe in the knowledge that the Kubuntu community will make security updates and major bug fixes for 5 years along with Canonical's lovely resources doing the same on much of the rest of the Ubuntu packages. There's a few Known issues in this release I'm unhappy with, kmix crashes, akonadi upgrades are still not pleasant, Plasma activity manager likes to crash too, and users of 11.10 need to update to the latest packages before starting an upgrade. Sorry about those, we'll get onto them. Read More

I've had some questions about Planet KDE recently. Planet KDE is intended for personal blogs of KDE contributors blogging with a KDE focus. All KDE contributors are welcome to add their feeds to planet by editing the file in svn or filing a bug. Read More

Ubuntu release date is set for Thursday so it's non-stop testing until then. All helpers needed - Kubuntu team will test everything in all permutations but it's never a good thing to be the only tester on software for which you are responsible for, third parties always needed. So join us in #kubuntu-devel and #ubuntu-testing and report results in the ISO tracker. Read More

Calligra has been released, KDE's document suite of applications. It has applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, drawing and much more. Congratulations Calligra team. Install the packages from kubuntu-ppa/backports or direct from 12.04.

A while ago I had to announce that Canonical weren't going to sponsor Kubuntu any more. 'Fair enough' I thought, Canonical needs to make money and after dropping support for Gnome support for KDE couldn't be far behind. Then I got e-mails from companies, governments and individuals saying they depend on it, use it every day for themselves, their clients and their families. It turns out Kubuntu is very popular and important, people really use this KDE stuff I've been working on for the last decade. Blue Systems took the plunge first and said they'd sponsor the project so Kubuntu will continue as a community led, KDE focused Ubuntu flavour and will branch out into new areas like the tablet and ARM. Maybe even server? (KDE has nice apps in OwnCloud and Kolab, these should be better integrated into Ubuntu.) So an exciting future, want to join us? Read More

Lots of KDE SC 4.8.2 packaging and testing today. But some folks can't test it easily because they have small bandwidth or they don't want to install experimental packages on their local computer. I've been using EC2 machines for a while, which you hire by the hour from Amazon Web Services. Whenever someone in Kubuntu needs a machine to compile or test and install on I run my script to get one going and give them access. They're also handy for showing people how to do e.g. packaging, you can log into the same machine and share a screen session to see what the other person is doing. Read More

Since I had to announce that Canonical was dropping support for Kubuntu from 12.11 (and then had to announce two days later they were dropping support for 12.04) I've been getting lots of people asking "is this the end of KDE?" Read More

I've been playing with getting Kubuntu Active on ARM. Getting a working ARM setup is a lot like getting a working Linux desktop setup when I started in 1999. It's unclear what computer you need, it's unclear what install image you need, it's unclear how you install it and then it doesn't work and it's unclear how you debug it. For some unknown reason Ubuntu Desktop images from precise don't work on my Pandaboard but from oneiric they do. Ubuntu Server from precise seems to work so I've installed that and installed the Kubuntu Active packages on top of it. Maybe soon we'll have working Kubuntu Active images on ARM. Read More

The first Ubuntu flavour for tablets is now making daily builds. We even got our first bug reports from our localy Plasma Active upstreams. Images are for i386 only for now, ARMv7 should be added when we know it's a bit more stable and have testers. Read More

"CeBIT is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to CeBIT." Read More

This week I've been on Ubuntu release driver duty for Beta 1. Ubuntu has lots of flavours there days and they all need to be nudged to ensure they get their testing and announcements done in time. We only had a few hiccups, some of the flavours had to be respun late last night for fixes and do lots of testing today. Ubuntu (poor under-resourced flavour that it is) also didn't update their upgrade instructions in good time and some grumping at them was needed (sorry, I get grumpy quickly these days with my traumatised brain). Slashdot linked to the wrong URL for downloading Ubuntu CDs so I had to put in a quick redirect to point them at the announcement where the correct URLs are. Read More

This week is feature freeze in Ubuntu land and the Kubuntu community have been working hard to get in as many as possible before the deadline. Telepathy-KDE is working nicely. We're still deciding if it's better to go with the new-but-not-much-tested Telepathy-KDE or the old-but-unmaintained Kopete by default. Read More

At the end of a long day here are some photos from KDE at FOSDEM 2012. Pradeepto says "3.24 AM here, am in office, those pictures made my day/night/whatever itis now". Read More

From my kubuntu-devel posting. See also Jason's posting. Today I bring the disappointing news that Canonical will no longer be funding my work on Kubuntu after 12.04. Canonical wants to treat Kubuntu in the same way as the other community flavors such as Edubuntu, Lubuntu, and Xubuntu, and support the projects with infrastructure. This is a big challenge to Kubuntu of course and KDE as well. Read More

Kubuntu has packages for 4.8 bringing updates to Plasma workspaces and a load of KDE Applications. To quote a nice user posting on kde-devel "I upgraded to Ubuntu's Precise Alpha 1 a few days ago. After the upgrade completed, I tried out KDE 4.8 RC 2. It worked great until the final release of KDE 4.8 Final. KDE 4.8 Final is even better than the RC!" Read More

Earlier this year Jono mused about getting older. Ah bless, I remember him when he was just a whippersnapper promoting KDE at a warehouse in Birmingham. Today is my turn to reach my 30s and I had it all planned out. I was going to be living on a tropical island with loads of awesome beaches, reliable and warm surf to learn how to use a waveski (sit on top canoe kayak for surfing) while speaking fluent French and drinking ti'punch (rhum agricole, lime, and cane syrup). I spent a lovely month there meeting new people, trying new things, working in the sunshine with a swimming pool a meter away for when something is compiling. Read More

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

Canonical has a company scheme where after working there for a few years you can rotate to work at another part of the company for 6 months. Having worked on the desktop team for over five years I decided to do a rotation to Bazaar. My hopes for this were to build up my own programming skills by learning more Python and by experiencing different programming practices from the ones I'm used to in KDE. Read More

Ubuntu Developer Summit is happening in cloudy Florida. The Kubuntu team have been busy talking about how to make a rock solid LTS release for Precise Pangolin that can be supported for 5 years. KDE Software is in a good place for this LTS since we are coming towards the end of the long KDE/Qt 4 cycle and it is a stable and mature product. Read More

Kubuntu 11.10 is out and ready for download. This is the first Kubuntu release were I haven't had much involvement in putting it together and I'm immensly proud of the team who put in so much work. Read More

Nice little visual change to qbzr, curves on the diff view.. Before: After: Thanks to Iwata Hidetaka. Read More

An LWN article from a few weeks ago talks about Userful Corporation's deployment of Linux in Brazillian schools. "The Brazil deployment has been rolling out in phases since 2008, and currently includes more than 42,000 schools in 4,000 cities. The base distribution is one created by the Brazilian government, called Educational Linux, which is based on Kubuntu." Read More

Bug 83941 Bzr doesn't speak my tongue has been closed. Bzr can now be translated. If you want to help bring bzr to those who prefer to work in non-English languages please help translate at Launchpad (you will need to be in the appropriate Launchpad translations team). Read More

Yesterday's App Developer Week talk on Bazaar Explorer went well. See the logs if you missed it. Tonight I'm giving a real life talk at my old user group Falkirk LUG about Kubuntu and Bazaar. Read More

I'm giving a talk on Bazaar Explorer as part of Ubuntu App Developer Weeks. Starts at 17:00UTC in #ubuntu-classroom on freenode IRC.

These are the people who make your computers free! Still 145 to name, additions welcome.

The Desktop Summit 2011 Group photo needs your help! Please find all the unnamed people (most of them Gnomers) and add their names, irc nicks and affiliations to this etherpad document. Type "xxx" for the unnamed ones. Read More

At the Desktop Summit it was pointed out that Bazaar lacked integration with Dolphin. Of course Bazaar's main GUI is the cross platform Qt based Bzr Explorer. But there is also value in integrating with the tools that are natively part of a desktop. So I've coded up Dolphin integration with the world's finest revision control system.. Read More

I went to the Desktop Summit in Berlin where more than 700 people from Gnome, KDE and elsewhere met for talks and beer. Canonical has a sensible policy of needing a report back from any conference we go to so here's mine.. Read More

Bazaar developers like to play against the odds, whatever the odds This week I'm in Dublin for Canonical's mid-cycle meetup where our Ubuntu developers work on their normal projects but with the advantage of face to face contact with colleagues. It's a bit like working from an office but without the commute and with more Guiness. Read More

I've always been a fan of Bazaar. A revision control system that lets you work however you want and without needing to be Linus Torvalds to understand it. So it's a big privilage to be taking a sabbatical from Kubuntu and rotating to work with the Bazaar community. Read More

This cycle's Ubuntu Developer Summit is in Budapest. The Qt 5 summit was rather exciting and unexpected. The good news is it's not a big Qt 3 -> 4 style transition, it will remain source compatible, it's simply a break in ABI to tidy things up and allow for modularisation. Read More

Several hundered Ubuntu and related people at UDS in Budapest. Qt talk going on now. Just announced is Qt 5 is going to be released expected next year. It'll focus on Qt Quick 2 and use Lighthouse and we saw some fun effects happening in the demo. See the Qt 5 Labs blog post. Read More

A new release is out. The 11.04 release page shows what's new. Samba is a theme with working file and printer sharing, however did we let that stay broken for so long. Improvements to the language selector are nice. We switched to GStreamer for the Phonon backend, which gives us better HTML5 video support. The GTK Oxygen theme makes Firefox et al fit in nicer. And of course all the goodness of KDE's 4.6 releases. We even snuck in a game of Patience onto the CD after 5 years of persistent requests asking for a game by default. Read More

11.04 is nearly here. If you haven't tried the beta yet you only have a week to go to make sure you catch any last beasties in this release. KDE Platform 4 is now in a pleasingly stable state so if you haven't tried Plasma or KDE Software for a while and are finding the alternatives a bit too different in their UI changes do give Kubuntu a try. Read More

Ubuntu App Developers Week has IRC talks on developing /on/ Ubuntu (rather than developing bits of Ubuntu itself. Of interest to Kubuntu and KDE folks is "Widgetcraft: The Art of Creating Plasma Widgets" by Harald Sitter today at 19:00UTC and "Creating a KDE app with KAppTemplate" Jonathan Thomas tomorrow Tuesday at 19:00UTC. Friday at 17:00 sees "Phonon: Multimedia in Qt" with Harald Sitter. Read More

For reasons I haven't worked out, Ubuntu needs a specific tool to write its ISO CD images onto a USB disk. This is fine if you're on an Ubuntu distro or on Windows where we have usb-creator available to install, but is a problem for users of other distros. If an openSUSE user who has no CD drive wants to try out Ubuntu (to steal all our great ideas no doubt) they're a bit stuck. So I learnt how to build RPMs and secrets of the openSUSE build service and put Ubuntu USB Creator into an openSUSE archive. Unfortunately although I patched it to run fine the end result doesn't boot and gets stuck at the syslinux startup credit. So more work to be done there I'm afraid. Read More

Here are the slides to my conf.kde.in talk Kubuntu: Friendly Computing. They're more images though so they don't make much sense without me talking. India is a lovely country with lovely people. Food is excellent of course. Bengaluru is a busy city with crazy traffic (still preferable to Paris of course). Only downside is the mosquitoes and lack of bandwidth. Read More

Having a fabulous time at conf.kde.in in Bengaluru. I've just given a tutorial on writing a programme in PyKDE, then releasing it to the wide world, then packaging it and releasing it for Kubuntu. Here are the slides as requested by my lovely audience. Read More

Not infrequently people ask what's the best cloud "solution" for KDE. This is not a very useful question since "cloud" is woefully overloaded as a term. But now there's a simple answer, I packaged OwnCloud, the file storage web app from KDE. It's in natty or maverick-backports for 10.10 users. The licencing was the most fiddly thing here, if KDE is to get into web apps we need to update our licence policy which doesn't take into account AGPL nor the annoying PHP licence. Read More

Thinkpad T410 Laptop refresh time is here, thanks Canonical. Faced with the prospect of finding a computer to spend a grand on I took the bus trip to Fry's in Dallas. Fry's is a large computer supermarket, I don't recommend it for the cafeteria but they do have a large selection of laptops to browse. The staff are annoyingly keen to help you, until you start asking about the finer details of processor ranges and mention Ubuntu. All their laptops have glossy screens, a phenomenon I do not understand. Read More

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face, Great chieftain o' the desktop-race! Aboon them a' ye tak your place, Coder, tester, or usability expert: 4.6 Release Supper in Edinburgh tonight had haggis, neeps, tatties and finest Burns poetry. Read More

Today is KDE's 4.6 release day. Shiny new versions of KDE Platform, KDE Applications, Plasma Workspaces plus Digikam and KDevelop are available for installing. See kubuntu announcement for details. Read More

Me and Colin and Tomas are having a Burns supper at my place in Edinburgh to celebrate 4.6, let me know if you want to come

Upstream KDE used to give distros a week to package releases, including beta releases. This meant we had plenty of time to package and test and find problems in releases before they go to users. These days the fast pace of our six monthly release and a desire from developers not to send out releases a week out of date with the actual codebase means release candidates of KDE SC releases are only given to us distro packagers a day before they're announced. How to build, package and test 20 source packages in only 24 hours? Read More

If you are coming to FOSDEM, one of the largest gathering of free software developers you probably want some accommodation. Claudia will be booking beds for KDE people next week, if you want to stay with the KDE spods put your name on the KDE at FOSDEM wiki page before Thursday. Read More

Talks wanted for Cross-Desktop room at FOSDEM. Doing something interesting in KDE? Tell the world of developers about it. Submissions by 22nd December 2010 to: crossdesktop@lists.fosdem.org Read More

I was asked to give a talk at TechMeetup Edinburgh about Qt. Techmeetup is an occational event with free beer and pizza and talks. I told them why they want to use Qt, how to write a basic programme in it then introduced the exiting world of Qt Quick. Video online now. Read More

UDS in Florida is over, we flew home and left the sun behind. The main outcome from the conference is a long Kubuntu Todo list. In the packaging section we naturally want the latest bits of KDE and Qt. We'd like to try raster in Qt. We're going to try gtk-oxygen theme. Scott is going to look at automatic bulids on his ARM machines. GStreamer will be investigated. We'll be looking at whether it makes sense to packaging Owncloud and Plasma Media Centre. Then there's Project Neon, a top secret relaunch of the project to make daily builds of Qt and KDE. Read More

The Ubuntu Developer Summit is in full swing here in Florida. There have been a load of important decisions taken. For example today I dropped KDE from our desktop. I know this may be controvertial with some parts of the community but we can have unity in our new desktop.. Plasma. Of course we're Kubuntu so we did it upstream. Read More

Ubuntu Open Week is a week of talks about how to get involved in the many parts of Ubuntu. I'm doing a talk at 16:00UTC today which is titled "Kubuntu is Awesome". Join us in #ubuntu-classroom and #ubuntu-classroom-chat on Freenode IRC Read More

The date and time are set, Kubuntu 10.10 is out. Highlights include all the latest KDE Software, an application focused software installer, combined Desktop/Netbook images, new installer layout (MP3 ready during the install!), a new web browser, a shiny new font, a nifty global menu for Netbook, Kubuntu Mobile featuring Plasma Mobile (technology preview), ooh lots more! Read More

It's the nicht afore release day. Announcements need to be tidied up, upgrades need final testing, release notes need completing, web pages readied. I'm in for a long evening. All going well, tomorrow morning you should find the internet successfully choked as everyone downloads 10.10. It's going to be exciting. Join #ubuntu-release-party to get in the mood. Read More

Today it's all hands on board for the final candidate testing. Upgrades need testing too. Join us in #kubuntu-devel to help.

The Ubuntu Font has finally had its licence sorted out and been released to the masses. It has also been uploaded to the archive and set as default in Kubuntu. Read More

A couple of weeks ago Thomas McGuire realised his name wasn't very German sounding and came to Edinburgh where it would fit in better. He is spending the next six months taking a bit of a break from maintaining KMail and instead programming robots to play football. The robots will be using Akonadi I'm sure. Read More

Candidate CDs for our RC need testing see the ISO tracker for what needs testing, download (or upgrade) and report back. Ask on #kubuntu-devel or #ubuntu-testing if you have questions. Read More

This Friday (20th August) me and Ubuntu translations man David Planella want to spend the day making sure translations in Kubuntu are in tip top shape. Do join us on IRC in #kubuntu-devel if you want to help out. See the wiki page for some things we will be checking. Read More

Planet KDE is your insight into the lives and activities of KDE, a community making lovely free software. Occasionally I get asked to add feeds to Planet KDE which aren't KDE contributor blogs. News feeds, user blogs and non-English blogs are the usual requests. So today, thanks to the helps of others, I've updated our software and added opt-in support for these different types of feeds. Just click the configure button at the top of the page. Read More

After many months kubuntu.org got a new look, complete with new logo. Many thanks to Ofir for his patience in seeing this through. During the Platform sprint in Prague I took Aurelien Gateau, doko and a couple of nice chaps from SuSE Prague canoeing on the awesome whitewater course near the city centre. Read More

Interviews I did some 30 second video interviews at Akademy in Helsinki. You can download them to get a feel for the people and place of Akademy. Unfortunately I've been unable, in the limited time I've devoted to it, to convert them to Oggs, ffmpeg doesn't want to do it. I've also been unable to find a simple HTML5 video gallery script that would make a simple HTML page with the videos embedded. Do let me know if you have the answers to those. I recommend Frank's interview for an insight into what our board spends its week doing. Read More

Finland, Finland, Finland, The country where I want to be, Eating breakfast or dinner, Or snack lunch in the hall. Finland, Finland, Finland. Finland has it all. Akademy has been lovely. Good people, good talks, good sessions. Read More

Coming live from Akademy over IRC later today (Finnish today anyway) is Kubuntu Tutorials Day. Alan Alpert from Nokia will teach you about Qt Quick and QML. You will need to download and install Qt Creator binaries before the tutorial. Qt Creator from the archive is not new enough. Read More

Akademy started with a pre-conference welcome drinks evening today. Lots of KDE developers old and new. There is a Flickr group for Akademy 2010 but it seems I can only post 6 photos to it, which is a strange restriction. Read More

Finland, Finland, Finland, The country where I want to be, Pony trekking or camping, Or just watching TV. Finland, Finland, Finland. It's the country for me. as in previous years we are proud to sponsor Read More

Kubuntu Tutorials Day is back, and this time it's with special guest star speakers. Incase you missed it in previous years (check out the logs, there's some interesting sessions in there), Kubuntu Tutorials Day is a few hours of interactive IRC sessions on topics around Kubuntu and KDE development. If you've always wanted to get started in helping out Kubuntu or programming in Qt this is the perfect opportunity. Read More

If you want to try out Qt 4.7 and the interesting new world of Qt Quick ("from now on /the/ way to make GUIs"), Kubuntu 10.04 users can try it from the experimental PPA. The Qt Creator packages there have Qt Quick designer integration. Read More

Ubuntu Developer Summit is over, we emerged from the deepest darkest Belgian forest full of plans for the next six months of Kubuntu. The specs are written and we have a lengthyTodo list. If you've ever thought about helping out Kubuntu take a look at the Todo list and see if there's anything that inspires you. Read More

Politics politics. Here in Waloonia we have to spreak French, walk half a kilometre north and you are barred from speaking French and have to speak Dutch. Go a further kilometer north and you're in Brussels where you have to speak French but in practice everyone spreaks English. And they manage this all without bothering to have a government. Almost as crazy as home where the old prime minister resigned to make way for a posh English chap who will doubtless steal our milk and make us pay a poll tax. Really I should have been in London tonight to visit Buckingham palace and put myself forward for the job of Prime Minister and had the chance to found the Pacifist Free Software Kingdom of Scotland (plus southern principalities), but I missed my chance all because I'm at the Ubuntu Developer Summit planning the next six months of Kubuntu. Read More

Today we released Kubuntu 10.04 LTS. This is the first Long Term Support release to feature KDE 4 Platform and Applications. It's very exciting that the long journey to KDE 4 has come to the level of stability where we can call it LTS. Read More

Aaron Seigo did a session yesterday with distro packagers on Plasma Desktop Scripting. Here are the logs in HTML and plain text. Something exciting happening tomorrow

Candidate images for the Kubuntu 10.04 LTS release have started to appear. We needs as much testing as possible to make sure these can be given the golden stamp of LTS approval. Download, install, give us your results on IRC in #kubuntu-devel and the ISO tracker. Read More

Aaron Seigo will be hosting a session on Plasma Desktop Scripting in #plasma on Freenode IRC network at 16:00UTC on Tuesday (today). It's intended for distro packagers but all welcome. Read More

On the kubuntu.org front page we list a few interesting Kubuntu users of various shapes and sizes to give a feel for how diverse use is. One rather cool user which is missing is Weta Digital. Whenever I've been out the flat this week I've seen adverts for the Avatar DVDs, those blue 3D faces are all made on Kubuntu desktops and a whopping 35,000 cluster of rendering machines. That must be a large proportion of computers in New Zealand running Kubuntu. Read More

Kubuntu 10.04 Release is nearly upon us. This Thursday sees the Release Candidate with final release due a week on Thursday. So we need ISO testing (and upgrade testing) pretty solidly between now and then. Read More

Last week I went to Washington DC where I was meant to be giving a talk at CALUG. However the whole city was buried in a metre of snow so it got cancelled. In fact the whole government shut down. Good thing the US wasn't doing anything important last week or people would have noticed they had no government and anarchy would have broken loose, it would be like Belgium. The snow was mostly ploughed out the way by the end of the week in time for the KDE 4.4 release party organised by Celeste. The release party started off in true US style in a fast food burger restaurant where I ate Ostrich. Later it moved to a bar with a fine selection of beers of many interesting flavours, gosh it was like Belgium! Read More

The Ubuntu Platform team (the people Canonical employs for Ubuntu) is having a sprint in Portland. Portland is a nice city where you can be wandering down the road and come across 100 tweed wearing cyclists coming the other way. Read More

libxml2 is compiled without thread support in Ubuntu 9.10 due to an oversight from upstream. This causes issues with Strigi which recently added a check for it. You can get packages from my PPA with thread support. It should go into -proposed and -updates soon too. Read More

Winter is here, the snow is falling, the frost is crisp each morning and it get progressively harder to break the ice for the day's canoe. Fortunately Kubuntu has just the thing to keep you snug in these cold months. From the davmor2 knitware shop comes the Kubuntu jumper range. Available in a selection of colours including beige with blue, beige with ligher blue and beige with cyan, it has been carefully crafted by designer extraordinaire Sue Morley over many months of hard work. Order one now, it's the perfect fashion item to impress that special someone in your life for Christmas (possible 6 months waiting time from ordering). Read More

The Ubuntu Developer Summit happened in Dallas last week with 200 developers from every part of Ubuntu as well as upstreams and hardware vendors around. Naturally the best looking of the lot was the Kubuntu contributors who turned up to discuss the next six months in the world's finest KDE distribution. The Lucid Lynx will be a Long Term Support edition and it's exciting that KDE 4 is now at a stage of maturity where this will be possible to do for the first time. LTS means fixing, completing and assuring over and above any new features. The Doctor is in the house. Read More

The Ubuntu Developer Summit is happening this week in Dallas. The theme of the discussions is LTS and what it will take to have a release in six months which can be supported for three years hence. We've been having sessions on packaging, development, bugs policy, translations and more. You can find the schedule and how to take part in sessions on the summit website, there are icecast streams for all the rooms. The Kubuntu specs are on this wiki page still works in progress of course. It's going to be great to have a KDE 4 release suitable for LTS, just six months to do it! Read More

Today I updated the KDE Licensing Policy with a couple of changes following requests from folks. Most notably Creative Commons is now allowed. This is only for standalone media files (such as an image for a splash screen) and not for anything which might want to be mixed with GPL material such as icons. "Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported" is the version allowed. The other change is requiring BSD licencing for CMake modules, which brings the policy into line with existing practice. Read More

I often say that my hypothetical user for Kubuntu is my non-technical girlfriend. Unfortunately I'm between girlfriends at the moment but the intent is still there. Someone who uses the computer for everyday tasks of web browsing, chatting, watching videos, listening to music, writing some documents, storing photos. But also someone who doesn't care about computers any more than I care about my car, it should do the job but I don't want to have to fiddle with it to get it to work. Unfortunately I rarely get the chance to try out Kubuntu on such users, my family have all been using computers far longer than I have and are just as stuck in their ways as I am in mine. Read More

9.10 is out. KDE 4 is really taking shape now with more of the important gaps getting filled. We ported OpenOffice integration to KDE 4, the installer got some beautiful love from Nuno, social apps integation in various places, there's a handy message indicator and notifications work cross desktop. We have the latest KDE apps of course, K3b gets a KDE 4 port, user config got ported too. Rather importantly network connects work and intel graphics drivers aren't rubbish. Read More

Once again we need testers, this time for the candidate images for Kubuntu 9.10. CDs, DVDs, netboot and upgrades all need going through their paces in triplicate. Join us in #kubuntu-devel to coordinate and log your results on the ISO testing site. Read More

Kubuntu 9.10 CDs are now available for pre-order on the Kubuntu Shipit site. Can't wait a month for the CD to be delivered? Download the release candidate now for one last round of testing. Thanks to everyone who helped test the RC releases, see you again next week for the real thing! Read More

All hands on deck for the release candidate CD (and DVD and USB and upgrades) testing day. See the ISO tracker for what needs tested (duplicates tests always welcome) and join us in #kubuntu-devel to coordinate. Read More

Kubuntu 9.10 is on the final lap with freeze coming next week followed by the release candidate and then the final thing. I'm pleased to say it's shaping up to be a decent release. Of course compared to 9.04 that isn't hard, at least it connects to the network fairly reliably. The trouble with being a KDE distro is that when KDE is crappy we end up being crappy too, on the bright side, when KDE rocks, we rock with it. Read More

Nearly Beta time for Kubuntu. We need testers to grab the ISO images and test them. Also upgrade testing is needed. See the ISO tester for what needs tested and join us on #kubuntu-devel to help out. Read More

Ubuntu Developer Week is under way with a whole week of IRC sessions on a range of development topics. Me and Aurelien are running a Write-Your-First-Plasmoid session at 20:00UTC today. See you in #ubuntu-classroom Read More

Recently Aurelien Gateau of the Canonical Desktop Experience team implemented the Message Indicator for KDE and Konversation. Now if you get messages when you're away from your computer or not looking at IRC it'll put them into the message indicator when you can happily not get distracted by them (unlike popup notifications) but can easily find them when you want to. Read More

Incase you missed it, the whole of top project hosting site Launchpad.net is now available and accepting contributions. Complaints about it not having source code available always confused me, I never heard them about the once-open-now-closed Sourceforge.net and KDE seems perfectly happy to make use of proprietary websites like Google or kde-look.org. But now there is no such excuse, Launchpad is the easiest way to host a project or even a quick script you hacked up that might be useful to someone else because you can set it up with a 1 page form then just bzr push. Read More

Ubuntu's new translations coordinator David Planella is holding a Kubuntu Translations Love Day in #kubuntu-devel tomorrow (Wed 29th). Do drop by at any time and let us know all your i18n problems. Read More

Occationally people ask if they can use Oxygen icons on their website or in their (non-KDE) application. The answer is that of course you can, it's all lovely free software, you just need to include the LGPL and credit the Oxygen dudes. I wrote this handy guide for people who want to do so. Read More

Aurelien Gateau and the rest of the Canonical Desktop Experience folks have been working super hard to get the visual notifications on KDE and Gnome united as part of their Project Ayatana. This involves uniting the Galago and KDE VisualNotification DBus interfaces. Along the way freedesktop.org had to get fixed to make such cooperation possible. But now the KDE half of the changes are in (KDE trunk and Kubuntu Karmic) and Gnome apps running in KDE show visual notifications just like KDE apps. There's minor issues to be fixed and the other way round (KDE apps running on Gnome) still has some patches to be finished & crashes to be fixed but it works in a lot of cases. Read More

International Freedom Fighters of KDE. Full photo with names poke me (Riddell) on IRC with additions and corrections.

The main talks are over for Gran Canaria Desktop Summit and Akademy. Glyn Moody wins the prize for best keynote, I always did admire him as the only writer worth reading in Computer Weekly and he proved himself to be an inspirational but thoroughly grounded speaker. I spent much of the time running between rooms manning three of the video camers, and at times acting as session chair too. Nobody from Gnome volunteered to help out so their videos will be badly cut in places, eventually Robert Knight was good enough to help. Running around gave me a good feel for a lot of the talks which were varied and interesting. Turns out there is more to Gnome 3 than cleaning up some APIs (infact GTK 3 may not happen in time for Gnome 3 although nobody seemed to be sure). Marble had the most bling demo and now features other planets too. The Plasma Netbook talk was interesting, the developers have done a lot of research into the user interface possibilities, they critised the Ubuntu Netbook setup for only using the desktop as a simple launcher and not anything else it could be used for (of course this is changing, it'll be integrating Plasma soon). The track on money in free software gave various thoughts: Till had the problem of KDAB hiring all the PIM maintainers so there is the danger that nobody is left to maintain the bits they are not so interested in, the Amarok guys seem unsure how to get started making money although they seem to have plenty of ideas on it, and Frank Karlichek announced the openDesktop.org App Store which will be an interesting experiment in making money by selling binaries. Read More

What Hot Tub Magazine, the magazine for the discerning Kubuntu contributor. The things you find in airport lounges...

KDE's conference opened today after the Canonical sponsored party last night. The location is superb, the auditorium is massive and right next to the beach. The people as always are the highlight with more than twice as many as usual. The hotel is nice too with our rooftop penthouse suite. Read More

Tutorials Day rocked and logs are now available for those who missed it. Talks covered Ruby, Amarok Scripting, Artwork, Packaging and Kubuntu Karmic.

See you in the IRC channel in a few hours for interesting tutorials on a range of topics.

Time for another Kubuntu Tutorials Day. Learn about KDE and Kubuntu development in a helpful atmosphere next Monday from 19:00UTC in the #kubuntu-devel IRC freenode channel. We have a lineup of exciting speakers on a range of topics. The timetable looks like this: Read More

Packaging Training Session at 18:00UTC today in the #ubuntu-classroom IRC channel. "Our next Packaging Training Session is going to show Kubuntu a little love. This Thursday (June 18) at 18:00 UTC, MOTU Jonathan Thomas (JontheEchidna) will be leading a session on packaging KDE4 Apps and Plasmoids. Find out what it takes to pitch in and join the Kubuntu community. Learn the ways of the Kubuntu Ninjas!" Read More

At UDS in Barcelona we again bemoaned that nobody had done the work to integrate OpenOffice with KDE 4. So elite Kubuntu developers Roman Shtylman and Yuriy Kozlov put their heads in their laptops. They have only just resurfaced, successful and triumphant with Roman having done most of the widget and dialogue integration work and Yuiry porting the Oxygen icon theme to OpenOffice's obscure icon format. Read More

Canonical's online services team wants to hire a KDE developer to work on cool Kubuntu online services integration. Amazing what you find on identi.ca.

The Kubuntu spods here at the Ubuntu Developer Summit here in Barcelona went out with a few of the local KDE types. What a good looking bunch. Jonathan Riddell, Aleix Pol, Scott Kitterman, Alex Fiestas, Ken Wimer, Yuriy Kozlov, Roderick Greening, Anthony Mercatante, Albert Astals Cid, Ryan Kavanagh, Mackenzie Morgan, Daniel Chen, [bottom row] Sebastian Krugler, Michael Casadevall, Roman Shtylman Read More

Qt loves Ubuntu. To show their love, they gave away t-shirts to everyone at the Ubuntu summit here in lovely Barcelona. We love you too Qt. Read More

UDS is happening in Barcelona. The hotel is super posh, which means the service is rubbish. I was supposed to arrive on Saturday but they gave my room to some politician instead. On Sunday my room wasn't ready until the evening. This morning the pool tempted me and Sebas to go for a swim until an irate janitor started shouting at us in Spanish indicating that it wasn't open, I wonder why they bother having a pool. Read More

The Canonical AllHands meeting is happening a wee bit outside of Barcelona. It is a requirement of all buildings in Barcelona that they have weird and interesting architecture. This hotel has more floors underground than it has above ground. The translucent showers are a curious feature but my roommate is Aurelien who turns out to be as cool a bloke as you could expect being a KDE developer. Why Canonical, with these Ferrero Rocher you are really spoiling us no? I got to meet Zhengpeng who helped make Kubuntu support CKJ back in the day and now works for the OEM team. Aurélien fixed my Gwenview crasher bug without me having to even report it! I've had a good number of people come up to me to shake my hand and thank me for making the desktop they use happen on Ubuntu, naturally I blush I remind them of the many wonderful people at KDE and Kubuntu who do far more than I ever do. I've also had quite a few say "I've never used KDE. Although I use Kopete all the time. And Amarok is great. And KMail saved me when my other app broke." turns out people use KDE without even thinking about it, which is quite pleasing. Read More

We finally had a meeting of KDE people in Edinburgh, not quite Akademy but it's a start. Nice tie Paul. A couple weeks later Laura Dragan gave a talk to BCS Glasgow on Nepomuk, nice to see KDE interest going outside the free software crowd. Read More

Ubuntu Open Week has just started in the #ubuntu-classroom IRC channel. I seem to be down for doing a Kubuntu Introduction talk in a few hours. Tomorrow Mark Shuttleworth gets quizzed by the community. On Wednesday there's a Kubuntu Q & A with nixternal and elite Kubuntu Ninja Nathan talks about Staying up-to-date with what is going on in the community. Plenty of talks on all other areas of Ubuntu too. Read More

The Kubuntu Team is proud to announce the release of Kubuntu 9.04, the Jaunty Jackalope! With this release, the development team brings you the best KDE distro out there. With its world-renowned Ubuntu core and the KDE 4.2 desktop, Kubuntu 9.04 gives users a well-rounded, feature-filled and elegant desktop. Read More

Testers are needed for the proposed CD and DVD ISOs for the final Kubuntu 9.04 Release. Upgrades from 8.10 and 8.04 need testing too. Report your results on ISO testing and #kubuntu-devel. Read More

Testers are needed for the proposed CD and DVD ISOs for the Kubuntu 9.04 Release Candidate. Upgrades from 8.10 and 8.04 need testing too. Report your results on ISO testing and #kubuntu-devel. Read More

The beta for our forthcoming 9.04 is available for download and testing. It features improved graphics and more slick applications. To see what's new and how to download go to the beta information page. You can upgrade from 8.10 or from 8.04. Let us know what you think on the feedback page and report bugs to Launchpad.

Kubuntu Jaunty Beta is in two days time and we need as many people as possible to help test installs. You can get the candidate CD and DVD images from the cdimage server . We need tests of live and alternate installer and Wubi the Windows installer. Read More

We finished the conference with a final marathon Q & A session. The questions had changed from basic "Does Kubuntu run the same apps as Red Hat" to the sort of thing I can't reliably answer "Can you run a pre-installed OS on a virtual server" (probably). Read More

Nigeria! What a country, what a conference, what a great bunch of lovely people. We rocked the town. I've never had to have a bouncer keeping people from swamping me at a conference before, but then I've never been mobbed my so many people asking for photographs and autographs. Read More

A few months ago I got a phone call from Mustapha asking me to come to a conference he was organising in Nigeria. I get these requests occationally and usually can't make it because I go to far too many conferences as it is but Nigeria sounded fun and exciting. So now I'm in Abuja waiting for the plane to take me back north to Kano. I've no idea what to expect. Nigeria to me means a crowded country with people everywhere, lots of films and books, problems with rubbish and pirates. I've no idea what people wear or eat or how they get around or how they make a living. I'll be an ethnic minority for the first time in my life in a place with Sharia law, that's probably not an issue but I wonder if the wealth difference will make me feel uncomfortable. I don't know what I'll be talking about or who the audience will be, but it'll be along KDE and Kubuntu lines and there are rumours of some 500 people attending, goodness. So far I can confirm that it's stonkingly hot here, the saharah desert is indeed made of sand and, excellent news, they use the right sort of power sockets. The life of an international freedom fighter is an exciting one and spreading it is best of all, I hope I can manage it. Read More

Qt 4.5 came out today and I've just uploaded it to the archives. Lots of shiny new features and speed. Qt Creator also came out and it's available in Jaunty too as an easy to use IDE. Read More

"That's not our usual postman at the door, and why is she carrying a plant?" What a fun thing to have delivered in the morning, and whoever the mystery sender was full marks on potted plant over wasteful disposable non-potted one. Read More

Germany, land of Kinder eggs, regional sausage varieties and underground spaceship themed hacklab-bar community collectives. I'm in Berlin for the Canonical Platform Team (previously called Canonical Distro Team) week long sprint where we have taken over a floor of the very large East Berlin Holiday Inn. East Berlin is a cubist painter's delight, all the buildings are large and cube shaped. 60 geeks on a 3MBit ADSL line is painful, especially downloading CD images to test alpha releases, the pain is mostly over now though and the alpha should be out in the next hour or so. Read More

KDE 4.2 was released yesterday, causing a busy day of last minute package fixes, poking build daemons to go faster, adjusting release announcements and then that the final exciting release moment when I have to update Dot News, Planet (ooh new 4.2 artwork), kubuntu.org and IRC topics all at once. Then sit back and wait for feedback. Pleasingly it's been really good with coverage on a lot of news sites, so give it a shot and let us know what you think. Read More

Not something I thought I'd ever be posting on the Dot but Qt is relicencing to LGPL. They're also going to open up the development archive to non-Nokia developers. Read More

The Ubuntu Development Summit happened at Google the other week. Large numbers of people got together to spend a week discussing the next six months in Ubuntu. Lots of specs got written and you can find the Kubuntu Jaunty specs here. Read More

Stylish new Kubuntu gear available at the Canonical Shop. Just the perfect give for that special someone for Christmas.

The UDS warmup that is FOSSCamp ended on Saturday. Alex managed to charter an entire bus for the KDE spods just so we could hunt round the Google campus to find the giant android and take a fuzzy photo. Read More

Like Robert Louis Stevenson I live in the world's most beautiful city of Edinburgh. Sometimes I wonder if anywhere can match the splendour of my home town so I decided to travel and see what the world had to offer. Read More

KDE trunk now needs CMake 2.6.2. A few people have asked where it can be found for Kubuntu, fear not friends it's in intrepid-backports. You can enable backports through Adept by ticking the "Unsupported Updates" box in the sources editor. Read More

Ubuntu Open Week talks are happening all week on IRC. Today includes Kubuntu man Jonathan Thomas on "reinventing QA the resource-limited way" at 18:00UTC.

Kubuntu 8.10 is out! This release is the first fully supported one with KDE 4. If you're the cautious sort and you're not sure if KDE 4 is for you yet then try out the live CD to give it a test. You are welcome to stay with 8.04 and the fully supported KDE 3 if you want to stay with what you know. Read More

Almost! More testers wanted though, join us in #kubuntu-devel for the final sprint.

Kubuntu 8.10 is due out this week. If you want to help make that happen we need people to test the CDs, DVDs and upgrades. Grab the Alternate CDs. Desktop CD and DVDs should appear shortly. Follow these upgrade instructions. Read More

Are you a KDE developer? Do you want to help improve the KDE desktop experience? Then Canonical's all new desktop experience team is looking to hire you. Let me know if you have any questions. Read More

You asked, and I deliver. I made an alternative stylesheet for Planet KDE with variable width. View -> Use Stylesheet -> Variable Width. My HTML foo is weak so it has mysterious gaps at below the header and above the footer for no reason I can see, plus the top and bottom shadow effects are semi-transparent and overlap in ways I wouldn't want. But it should be good enough for those wanting something that fits on an N810 screen. Read More

For last Kubuntu Tutorals Day and again at Ubuntu Developer Week I gave a quick introduction to PyKDE creating a simple web browser using Qt's WebKit widget. Now I have put the Python KDE tutorial on techbase so you can learn how to make a web browser too. Read More

I added microblogging support to Planet KDE. A surprising number of KDE developers seem to be communicating their lives over Twitter so it seems something that should be opened up for all to read. It's in a sidebar that you have to click to show so it shouldn't get in the way if you're not interested. It's a bit of an experiment, I'm not entirely convinced of the usefulness of it but we shall see. Currently only Twitter is known to work but it's probably not hard to ensure other microblogging sites work (does Facebook let you have a public status update feed?). I expect the content of the microblogs will be generally more personal than normal blogs, currently it's quite Amarok biased since those Amarok people love Twitter. You can add yourself through the normal means, editing the config file, submitting a bug or poking me on IRC. Read More

8.10 beta is out. This is our big switch to KDE 4 so do test out the upgrade and let us know how it works. Read the announcement or go straight to the upgrade instructions. Read More

The all new Planet KDE is going well. One hickup was that blog entries would duplicate themselves in RSS readers when anyone edited their post. I've fixed that now by changing to using the URL to the entry as the ID in the RSS feed (before it was using a hash). So you may well get duplicates of everything today with the change to the new scheme, but not after that. Read More

This morning KDE is waking up to a shiny new Planet blog aggregator. I'm not sure what caused this, but there are reports the old host didn't want the CPU load on their server any more, many thanks to them for having put up with it for many years. Fortunately I'd been working on a new Planet started by Chris Lee using rawdog and my own Rawdog RSS plugin. The design comes from the exceedingly cool Oxygen dudes, Nuno and Ruphy. Read More

I added system-config-printer-kde into kdeadmin. This is a Kubuntu application that saw a very early version in Hardy and is now usable to do various printer settings. It's always nice to add new applications and fill in gaps in our offering. Plenty more to do should there exist somewhere out there a free software developer interested in printing :) Read More

Ubuntu Developer Week happens on IRC next week. I'll be giving my introduction to PyKDE with a WebKit web browser tutorial. There's plenty more interesting talks, see you there. Read More

Akademy finished, it was great. Next week is feature freeze in Ubuntu land, so we are working hard on filling the distros with the necessary features, if not always beastie-free. Read More

One of the release process improvements that happened with KDE 4 is the move to have module maintainers. This has ment some of the lesser loved modules now have a greater sense of community which helps a lot for those apps which are otherwise developed all alone. Here is the kdeutils members who were at Akademy. Read More

We have had a great couple of days talks here at Akademy in Belgium. The energy in the KDE community is brilliantly high as we move from the long KDE 4 development period into having the world beating desktop. Read More

Haven't blogged for a while, so here's some of the changes that have happened in Kubuntu recently. I finally found some time for the KDE port of system-config-printer, still far from feature parity with the Gnome version and needs plenty of tidying up but should be usable. Read More

Two micro blogs while I wait for ibuprofen to stop my wisdom tooth from hurting so much... Kubuntu 8.04.1 has been released, featuring a large bunch of updates. Read More

5-A-Day is a simple way for everyone to get involved in helping Kubuntu or other parts of the Ubuntu family, just triage 5 bug reports a day. Today the statistics show Team Kubuntu-de.org are the first team to triage 2000 beasties. Well done folks (especially top triager txwikinger who I had the pleasure of meeting earlier this week). Read More

Kubuntu Tutorials Day is back. Join us on IRC for some fascinating chats with Free Software's finest developers. We have five months of development ahead of us for Intrepid, so this is the perfect way to learn how to get involved. Read More

Fresh from Planet KDE is the news that Polish supermarket Bledronka has an offer on Kubuntu Laptops. Comes complete with Kadu, "killer app in Poland".

The Ubuntu Develpers Summit finnished a week ago in Prague. Unlike conferences, summits have written output in the form of specifications which form the basis for work on Kubuntu for the next six months. You can find the Kubuntu ones on this wiki page. Read More

Ubuntu Developer Summit is winding down here in the tallest building in Prague. You can preview the Kubuntu specs and I'll write more about them when I get back. Now we're off to dance at an Ubuntu music jam. Read More

I took the train to Prague, much more relaxed and environmentally friendly than flying. Went through Berlin where I found a curious memorial to the Glorious Soviet Union and stopped off for an executive power breakfast at Trolltech's new office, which seems to still be in the process of being built around them. Read More

Qt 4.4 brings lots of goodness. Packages are now entering hardy-backports. If you want the latest unstable trunk Qt, kdelibs, kdebase and amarok on a regular basis without the hassle of compiling it yourself, project Neon has a Launchpad Personal Package Archive with regular builds. Read More

The IRC talks series Ubuntu Open Week is under way now in #ubuntu-classroom. Coming up at 20:00UTC is Kubuntu Development - Richard Johnson. See the timetable for a whole week's worth of talks. Read More

Kubuntu 8.04 is out, upgrade now for rock solid 3.5.9 goodness, or download the CD with a choice of 3.5.9 or cutting edge KDE 4. New stuff includes printer autoconfiguration (coming to the rest of the world in KDE 4.1), super easy compiz setup, auto-codec install for Kaffeine, Wubi the Windows installer making it easy to install for those first timers, bulletproof X, NTFS Support and User Mountable Hard Disks and the latest versions of everything you can think of. Read More

OpenStreetMap can get addictive once you discover how easy and powerful the flash editor is. But what, my girlfriend asked, is the point when you can get maps at no cost from Google et al. The justification is that unrestricted by copyright you can do interesting things that you would be otherwise unable to do. OpenStreetMap Cycle Map shows all the best routes for a bike. Open Piste Map makes maps for skiing. So this evening I made Open Whitewater Map to create maps for canoeing and other river users showing places to get in and out, rapids and their grades and hazards on the river too. The WikiProject Whitewater Maps page has the info. Only a few river routes done so far, any canoeists out there want to add some more? Read More

Kubuntu and variants Release Candidate is due out this week and next week is the final thing, so its solid install testing until then. We need people to download the daily and daily-live CDs and install them. Upgrades and netboots also need testing. See the ISO Tracker for what needs doing, the test case for the all new KDE 4 and the old KDE 3 procedure and join us in #kubuntu-devel and #ubuntu-iso for coordination. Read More

Qt 4.4 RC 1 now available in my PPA https://edge.launchpad.net/~jr/+archive for Hardy. Don't run a dist-upgrade when you add the PPA, you'll get other random packages which are in there. Read More

FOSSCamp is happening in Prague next month. This is a general free software get together with sessions on whatever participants want (it happens just before the Ubuntu Summit but is otherwise unrelated). A good number of KDE people are expected but more welcome. Jorge explains all. Read More

Today's Kubuntu Hug Day looks at bugs in Launchpad with comments regarding the KDE bug tracker. Join #kubuntu-devel and #ubuntu-bugs to help out.

With our own beta out the way I got a moment to compile Qt 4.4 beta. It adds QtWebKit packages for those who missed it in my last 4.4 packages. Read More

The beta of Kubuntu 8.04 is available for all testers. The supported version comes with the rock solid KDE 3 while a remix features the cutting edge KDE 4. Download or upgrade. Read More

Come help triage Network Manager related bugs in today's Hug Day. Join in on #ubuntu-bugs and #kubuntu-devel.

I posted the list of Kubuntu settings to kde-core-devel in the hope of getting as many as possible changed for KDE 4.1. If you have an opinion or any more to add, do reply on the list. Read More

Went to Wolverhampton LUG the other week (don't ask). Their LUG meetings are divided into two sorts, the loud sort where LUGRadio presenters turn up, and the quiet polite sort where they don't. This meeting had the special task of mapping the entirety of Wolverhampton "city" centre (Wolverhampton is a suburb of Birmingham, but don't say that to anyone who lives there, you won't survive long). Impressively enough we managed it, by dividing into four pairs and taking lots of GPS trails. In years to come people will be riding through Wolverhampton using Satellite Navigation Systems and I'll be able to say, "that part of the world, I discovered it first". Read More

8.04 Beta is due this week in Ubuntu land. We have two versions of Kubuntu needing testing this time, the plain old KDE 3 one and the cutting edge KDE 4 Remix, so plenty to help out with. CDs will appear soon at the ISO testing site, then you can download (from cdimage) and check if it runs & installs. Report your results on the ISO testing site. Join us in #kubuntu-devel and #ubuntu-testing to coordinate. Read More

Akademy 2007 organiser Kenny went to Belgium a few days before FOSDEM to scout out the Akademy 2008 location. I started a poll to see what current thinking is on best application programming language. Surprisingly high Java support.

Kubuntu-KDE4 got its first alpha today. Lots of bits to tidy up but for the most part it works. Qt 4.4 beta is in my PPA for hardy, thanks to fdoving (still liable to break existing compiles of Plasma). Read More

It's FOSDEM this weekend, a huge gathering of free software enthusiasts all in one place with dozens of talk tracks. I'm giving a packaging tutorial on the Sunday at 16:00 in the cross desktop devroom (note different time than advertised). Read More

Tsk to marketing types who bring negatives tones to otherwise peaceful Planets. I like to walk cheerfully over the world so here's some top reasons why Kubuntu is good for KDE. Read More

I got a new laptop recently, a Thinkpad R61, works decently well (no suspend, sound settings are strange but otherwise all good). However now I have three computers (new laptop, desktop and laptop-held-together-with-duct-tape) it leads to the issue of how to move over settings and keep them the same on all three. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to tell KDE to keep its settings on a remote server and download them when you move to a new desktop. Today I wrote a quick mockup application to investigate the idea. It keeps Konqueror's bookmarks in bzr and uploads them to Launchpad, then from another computer you can grab them again. Of course there's a hundred issues to solve this properly, it shouldn't be a separate app but integrated with the KDE config framework, it needs to know when to sync and what to sync (no passwords unless its to somewhere very secure), apps need to know when to refresh their settings and some settings, like Amarok podcasts, are stored in hard-to-sync binary databases. So just an idea for now, code is in Launchpad, let me know if you want to pick it up. Read More

The release event went swimmingly with a whole bunch of useful discussions and talks. Since then I've been in Canonical Tower looking down upon London. With feature freeze coming closer for Hardy, exciting things are in development. I've been working on porting system-config-printer to Qt, so we get magic printer setup when you plug in your printer. Yesterday came the first alphas of Adept 3, a rewrite for KDE 4. Today nosrednaekim popped up with some sources for a compiz setup tool for those who want maximum bling. And iRon is looking at bullet proof X for KDM. Read More

Much exciting happenings here at the KDE 4.0 Release Event. Best of which is Trolltech adopting GPL 3 for Qt (and future GPL versions as approved by them and KDE Free Qt Foundation). That'll make the life of distros much easier. Read More

As one of the archive admins for Ubuntu I often get to see programmes which are in some way improperly licensed. Often the licence text itself is missing, and sometimes it doesn't match the header file. So I end up having to care about licensing. Read More

Busy day today, in a few hours something amazing starts..

Back when I was attending my first KDE conference there was an interesting talk announcing that Qt 4 was in development. Now 4.5 years later that development has been released to the world in it's full form, KDE 4.0! Read More

Many a year ago I decided it was worth sacrifising something in the name of freedom and switched from the frustratingly not quite free Pine e-mail app to Mutt. Mutt is free but has the most insane keybindings and is generally not as slick a user interface as Pine. Plus it doesn't have the nice feature of keeping your main inbox open while you look at other e-mail boxes, and if your inbox is as large as mine that means a bunch of time lost just for reading a mailing list. So it was a lovely surprise to see Alpine, a free Pine from the original authors at Washington University. So back to integrated editor, sensible keybindings and being able to read mailing lists without spending 10 minutes opening my inbox again. Yay freedom. Read More

The Bazaar team released version 1.0 of the world's finest revision control system. Congratulations to them all. I think the best explanation of the power of Bazaar is the workflows page, you can use it in the old central repository mode if you wish but there's a number of others ways of doing revision control and bzr's strength is that it works well with all of them. Read More

Good Morning Friends, do join us in a few hours for these fine IRC tutorials. And congratulations to Trolltech for including parts of Qt in KDE's svn for the first time. Even closer cooperation with our favourite framework authors is worth getting up early in the morning to publish the story for. Read More

That went well. We even had some of SuSE's finest drop by, were they picking up tips? :) Logs available now.

Kubuntu Tutorials Day With KDE4 only a month away, now is the time to get involved in becoming a Kubuntu developer. We've set up these IRC sessions below to get you started. Read More

Ah, New England in the Autumn. Lets of reds and yellows and greens. It's a desktop art theme waiting to happen. Went canoeing on the river and enjoyed it much. No photos of that but here's some exciting other ones. Read More

UDS happened with much planning for the next six months in Ubuntu land, resulting in our second LTS release, Hardy. The two explicitly Kubuntu specs are catchup where we look at what's missing in Kubuntu and KDE 4 plan with our packaging expectations. Exciting parts include better printer setup, kaffeine codec installation, decent compiz and bullet proof X. Read More

This cycle's Ubuntu Development Summit has been preceeded by FOSSCamp, an un-conference. No schedule, no talks, just intelligent people and rooms to chat in. Robert Knight does a good summary of some of the interesting sessions. I also talked GPL 3 with people from the FSF, the good news is that core libraries like libc are unlikely to go GPL 3 only any time soon but we are likely to need an extra copy of libsmbclient and possibly other libraries until KDE can go GPL 3 happy. We had a couple of sessions on usability in Ubiquity which hopefully will go somewhere, although partitions are never likely to be an easy thing to understand. We looked at PackageKit and saw that it was good but apt support is lacking at the moment and it missed important apt features like debconf support. I pondered the possibility of porting system-config-printer to KDE which I think is quite promising. We also looked at our troublesome patch to add forkpty() support to Konsole which Robert promises to fix in return for lots of beer. Finally we chatted about Java and the problems of getting it into Ubuntu server. Read More

This week is Ubuntu Open Week, a series of talks and Q&A session on IRC. Yesterday Richard did a top session on Kubuntu and logs are available for those wanting to catch up. He had another session tomorrow (Thurday) at 2100 UTC. There are also sessions on using Launchpad, packaging for beginners and pretty much every other part of the Ubuntu world. At 1600 UTC today is the ever popular Ask Mark session, join #ubuntu-classroom for the chance to put in your questions. Read More

Some KDE people met to discuss next weekend's FOSSCamp on IRC. Reading the logs might be useful if you're going and don't yet know what to expect.

Kubuntu 7.10 was released today. Much jubilation and celebrations all around. Read More

Preparations for Gutsy's release continue apace. #ubuntu-release-party is going a bit nuts. Many thanks to those who have helped test CD candidates, davmor2 gets the prize for most testing this round I think. Read More

So says this advert me and the other organisers put in this month's Linux Magazine. Thanks to them all for making Akademy possible and to media partner LNM for the advert space. Read More

Kubuntu Gutsy Beta is out. The upgrade from Feisty is under-tested so if you are running Feisty please follow the upgrade instructions and let me know how you get on. Read More

I've spent a lovely week in the English enclave of Costa Adeje in the south of Tenerife with my girlfriend and without internet access. Today I moved north to La Laguna, a city where they actually speak Spanish. Here they were celebrating Software Freedom Day with a demonstration lab setup in the city centre running Bardinux, one of the local derivatives of Kubuntu. Read More

One of the goals of Kubuntu Gutsy is to have Strigi installed by default. Unfortunately the existing panel app was a line edit embedded in kicker, which took up loads of space. So I made it into a systray applet. Read More

LinuxMCE launched their new version 0704 today. It's an addon CD to Kubuntu 7.04 which can set your your computer to serve media around the house or play it with their beautiful bling interface. It can even run your home. Watch the video walkthrough for what this baby can do (or just read the features list). Read More

Being in the area I wandered down to GUADEC, the Gnome conference. I sidled past the registration desk where people were grudgingly paying their entrance fee (in return for free t-shirts) said hi to assorted Ubuntu people (and Hub in his KDE t-shirt) and went to find the talks. "xcomposite, xdamage, xrender, gtk+" bravely tried to explain what all these fangled X extentions do. Turns out xcomposite doesn't compose, xdamage has a cool name and then I got a bit lost but it seems these days everyone just uses openGL anyway. Read More

Akademy happened in Glasgow and rocked lots. Unfortunately a combination of no internet for the first day and a half and kdedevelopers.org being down meant much of the atmosphere didn't get onto the internet at the time. Of course you can catch up with the videos, including talks from Mark Shuttleworth and myself. Read More

Debconf finished in Edinburgh. Thursday night saw a ceilidh which went surprisingly well despite the poor ratio of lasses to laddies. msp's talk on the Debian KDE Extras team was interesting and I hope I didn't ramble too much in my comments on why the Kubuntu relationship is the way it is. There was also a KDE packagers BoF early on Saturday which gave some interesting history into the current team. No volunteers to package Jambi yet though. Read More

Debconf rolled into town and took over Edinburgh university's lovely Teviot building. Makes quite a change being able to cycle for 10 minutes to get to a conference rather than travelling for a day. Me and Kenny have been keeping an eye out for things to copy and things to improve for Akademy (now only 11 days until arrivals). Read More

The year's greatest free software conference, Akademy 2007 is only two weeks away. We have some top stuff lined up for you. Keynotes will be from Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical, Lars Knoll of Trolltech and Dan Kohn from Linux Foundation. The rest of the conference programme is packed with goodies including an opening from local member of parliament Patrick Harvie and a closing with the Akademy Awards (the winning names are written inside a sealed envelope on my desk, anyone trying to steal it will have to get through my laser intrusion system). After the conference on Saturday we'll be having pizza and music at the chateau, remember to fill in your food preferences or you won't get any pizza. Read More

When I was 12 we had a question in the school's annual general knowledge quiz "What is Georgia?". The three correct answers were: a country in eastern Europe, a state in the US and the dog of my English teacher. The dog died and I don't know much about the US state but we had a nice talk about the country this morning. Read More

UDS is back underway, this time in the sunny city of Sevilla in southern Spain. As usual we are working on specifications for the next six months of Kubuntu. Areas being looked at include desktop search, dolphin in KDE 3, bluetooth support (it's all going to break apparantly), making sure the user is properly informed of removable media, improving Guidance and moving it to Qt 4, adding an on screen keyboard for accessibility and of course packaging KDE 4. Read More

An e-mail out of the blue and within an hour of a reply saying I liked the idea, Akademy is hosting the Text Layout Summit 2007. This will be a really exciting event for the specialist but important area of text layout. The one last year in Boston has an impressive list of attendees from Qt, Pango, KWord, DejaVu, fontconfig, Scribus and others. It'll be really great to have KDE developers mixing with those from other projects just as we will have on the Tuesday at the Edu and School Day. Register by Monday is you want us to book your accommodation. Read More

Ubuntu Open Week is happening again with lots of interesting talks and Q & A sessions with la creme de Ubuntu developers. Tomorrow at 21:00 UTC (and again on Thursday) imbrandon tells us all about Kubuntu and how you can help out with the groovyest distro around. Read More

A surprisingly large number of people seem to think that being in the EU means you can wander around everywhere without a passport. This alas is not so with the British Isles. You can not get in on the strength of one of those pink bits of cardboard with a photo pritt-sticked on top that the Germans call a drivers licence. Your laminated piece of paper that is an identity card will not suffice. If you are going to Debconf, Akademy, Guadec, Python UK or any of the other conferences happening on our archipelago this year and you are not coming from the UK or Ireland make sure you sign up for a passport toot sweet. Read More

Feisty is available for download. Canonical's servers are going slow so use a mirror or bittorrent. Or, you can use the super new distribution upgrade tool, if you're up to date with edgy-updates you should find Adept pops up a prompt to upgrade to Feisty when you fetch updates. Must of the work in this release is behind the scenes with various apps ported to Qt 4. The new partitioner in the installer is a big improvement in reliability over QtParted. Network Manager by default is an equally big improvement over the old network app. Our OEM installer looks shiny and bling for all those machines due to be sold with Kubuntu on them, thanks to Abattoir. The Kubuntu help documentation has a big improvement in organisation, thanks to nixternal (who also did a smashing job on the release announcements). One of the smaller changes is setting Konqueror to use Firefox as the user agent for Google which makes GMail and Google Calendar suddenly fully functional. Stefan S turned up on IRC one day and wrote a funky new logout dialogue. There have been a number of small improvements to Adept, mostly to support the upgrader and to make us compliant with the universe-by-default spec, thanks to manchicken, Vladimir and others for that (there is a slight worry of branching too far from Adept trunk, so I want to merge back as soon as it's sane). Packages for KDE 4 are available as well as the latest CMake and Qt 4.3 beta (the -kdecopy packages). Guidance gets a funky Wine config module and improvements to the power manager, thanks to Sime, Sebas, Lure and Yuriy. Lots of work done by Tonio as usual including the new default kicker layout. Thanks also to Trueg who put up with me poking him about K3b 1.0, which we got included in time. We had some troubles with Qt and Chinese characters, which is why Qt 3.3.8 isn't in, (well spotted freeflying). Read More

Registration for Akademy 2007 is now open. This year it's being run by KDE GB. You need to register by the end of the month if you want accommodation with the KDE booking. Please pay promptly for the accommodation, it'll save us all a lot of hassle, payment is through paypal. Akademy 2007 is going to be great! Do come along. Read More

Launchpad today got a shiny new makeover for the 1.0 beta. If you haven't looked at Launchpad yet I highly recommend it for hosting free software projects. Nifty features include linking bugs to different distributions, team management and web based translations. But the killer feature is integration with Bazaar (bzr) which makes it super easy to make branches. If you are working on something which is at all experimental just branch then merge back in to mainline once its done. The other killer feature is that unlike other free software hosting sites you don't have to ask to set up a project, just fill in the name and it's done, project registered, it gives the freedom to be able to set up a project for any random script you think would be useful to others. Read More

Kubuntu Feisty now has a Beta. We need testers for the Edgy to Feisty update tool, please give it a shot and comment on the bug mentioned. Take a look at the beta release page for what's new. Read More

As happens the registration for Akademy has been delayed because the one we were looking at didn't work. If you need a visa to enter the UK (UKVisas tells you here) and you are a known KDE dude coming to Akademy then contact me to get your invitation letters sorted. Read More

Some people have asked me which of the various Ubuntu distributions the French Assemblee Nationale has chosen to run for all its members. While there seems to be no official press release from the company involved yet, I can point you towards the one site which got it correct as Le Monde who put a K before the name. Read More

I just uploaded support in Adept for Apport, the Ubuntu crash handler. Ubuntu uses a modified kernel which calls a user space application when an application crashes and that writes a report with information including the core. Adept Notifier now watches for these reports appearing and runs the Apport frontend when they do, which uploads all the data to the bug tracker if the user so wishes. Read More

The Akademy 2007 Call for Sponsors is out there. We've contacted our previous sponsors, but there must be companies and organisations out there who depend on KDE and would be willing to help the most important conference out there in return for their logo on a big banner infront of hundreds of computer professionals. Send us an e-mail if you know of any companies who fit that description. Read More

Linspire have announced that future versions will be based on Ubuntu.In their Canonical partnership FAQ they say that they're sticking with their preferred desktop, KDE, which adds one more to the list of Kubuntu Derived Distros. Read More

Canonical sent its distro team to Oslo last week, to spend the time locked in a hotel room making sure all the Feisty feature goals got done. I worked on the dist-upgrade tool and the software-properties apt sources.list editor, as well as finishing and uploading KDE 3.5.6 and KDevelop 3.4. The tricky part with the dist-upgrade tool is patching konsole to be able to attach to an existing pty (from apt), fortunately mvo was a here there and dived into the meaty code of kpty. The result is that upgrading from edgy to feisty should be much smoother than from dapper to edgy. Read More

The Akademy 2007 call for papers is out. If you are doing something cool that's KDE or cross desktop related, this is for you. Don't think your project isn't important enough to contribute, it is. Doing a talk is not hard, and it's very satisfying, let us know what you're up to. Read More

Today's my birthday, this makes me happy because I get presents and cards and I get to tick off another successful year on the chart of life. More exciting though was going to Croatia last month. I gave a talk at the fantastically impressive Monteparadiso Hacklab where some borrowed bandwidth and Ubuntu machines give free internet access to the locals of Pula. In the Mediteranian part of Croatia at least life seems to be very relaxed, and most people seem to only work a couple hours a day. I didn't ask much about the Yugoslavian war, but the general attitude seems to be that it's not a major issue, they'll just stay out of the way of people in Serbia until the memory has passed some more. Read More

Ubuntu Open Week happens next week and has a plethora of intersting looking IRC sessions on how to develop for Ubuntu. Among talks specific to one of the Ubuntu teams is the Kubuntu talks being done by Brandon, which should be really interesting. Read More

On the final night of our Ubuntu Developer Summits we usually go into town for a posh dinner followed by revelling and merryness. So who was the greatest dancer on the dance floor? You decide... Read More

A few weeks ago the spam filter at Canonical which was doing a good job of keeping the flood of viagra opportunities at bay was turned off, and I've had trouble keeping up with my e-mail since then. Most of the servers I have access to are virtual servers and not powerful enough to run spamassassin without killing the other virtual servers on the machine. So I've turned to another option which is to send all my e-mail to GMail and set GMail to forward it back to me, which has the handy side effect of filtering out the spam. There's surprisingly little delay in the extra roundtrip and it has the handy side effect of keeping a copy of all my e-mail should I accidently run rm -rf / on the server that I read it from. In the 24 hours since settings this up I've got 800 real e-mails (not that many considering I subscribe to kde-cvs, kde-bugs-dist, ubuntu-wiki and other high traffic lists) and 300 spams, with only 1 false positive. Read More

The Ubuntu Summit at Google in the US is now underway. The Googleplex is huge and we are only in one of the smaller buildings on the campus. Of course this is America and everything is huge, we shared a salad between three people yesterday and still didn't finish it. Read More

Packages of KDE 3.80.2 are available for Kubuntu Edgy. In this second developers snapshot of KDE 4 full sessions seem to be running nicely. Lots of things crash but it's a good start. As a distro developer one of my current worries is how KDE 3 apps will run under KDE 4, with these packages it works except for kioslaves which complain about klauncher breaking. So if I can work that one out, it should be OK. Read More

I've now added Okular packages to the KDE 4 archive. Okular is the rocking replacement for KPDF in KDE 4 featuring support for numberous file formats I've never heard of. Read More

Kubuntu Edgy has been released, download it now! Thanks to nixternal for the pretty release announcement. With this release our community continues to grow, with great power management work from Sebas and Lure. Sime shuffled around System Settings for the usability review done by el. Read More

The Kubuntu Edgy Release Candidate is out. After Ubuntu added f-spot we couldn't be outdone and added Digikam to the default CD for camera goodness. We also upped KDE to 3.5.5. Read More

The secret is lifted and Akademy 2007 will be in Glasgow, organised by me and Kenny. We'll be holding it earlier than previous Akademies, hopefully that means we'll be able to get some students from the US who haven't been able to attend before. We had our first local team meeting last week and it's very exciting to have a bunch of enthusiastic helpers. With debconf in Edinburgh and Guadec in England this means we'll have the three largest free software projects having their conferences in Britain next year, an exciting trend (and even cooler, two of them are run by Quakers). Now the fun starts of opening bank accounts and organising a conference, anyone who wants to help with sponsors especially welcome. Read More

This weekend sees the anniversary of 10 years of the Free desktop. Well done to Tackat for organising what looks like a great stream of talks and party. Read More

The KDE conference has had a great first day here in Dublin. The buzz here has an impressive atmosphere because unlike last year where we were just hearing the start of what might become KDE 4 one day, now we have all these projects saying what they've done and where they're going. KDE 4 really is going to rock! Read More

As usual at Akademy we have an icecream cluster here, icecream is the distributed builder for the discerning compiler. Update: David Faure recommended upgrading to Subversion 1.4 for 10 times extra speed, so I've added that. You can get subversion 1.4 and icecream from: Read More

I put up some packages of the KDE 4 first tech preview for Edgy. i386 only at the moment but they're sitting in Edgy's NEW queue and will be compiled for everything when they pass through that. They install to /usr/lib/kde4 so it's quite safe to install them alongside your existing KDE 3. I compiled Umbrello and was very happy to see that it compiled and worked without major problems. Thanks to Oliver and Kleag for getting that to happen. Having text under buttons is going to be an interesting challenge for a lot of programmes. Read More

This week I'm at the Ubuntu distro sprint in Wiesbaden near Frankfurt. If you're in the area do drop by and say hi.

In the tradition of KDE Developers Sebas and Chris me and Krissy have converted this antique wardrobe into a Chinchilla cage. The chinchilla's like it very much. Read More

I've made a Qt 4 client to Ubuntu's Hardware Database which lets you anonymously submit details of your machine. You can then attach your given ID to any bug reports and the data is also collected into interesting statistics for the Ubuntu distributions to find out about our user's hardware. Read More

For the Kubuntu Power Management spec I've made a new power management applet. This is a fairly simple frontend to HAL's power management features and replaces the ageing klaptopdaemon (the alternative kpowersave already duplicated much of what was in HAL). Thanks to Sebas for starting this off. Read More

LUGRadio live happened at the weekend and we had a good number of KDE and Kubuntu people there. Full report coming later but the highlight of the show was when Billy Piper from Dr Who stopped by the stand to say how much she liked her free Kubuntu CD. Read More

Last week I went to UK Unix Users Group's Linux 2006 conference to talk about KDE and Kubuntu and watch a bunch of other talks. First talk was from Tethys who tried to convince us that sed was good for more than s/foo/bar, seems not worth the hassle to me. Torsten Spindler showed off his video masking privacy feature which detects when someone has walked into a CCTV shot and pixilates that are so you can't see who it is. A loud person from Novell talked about their desktop work by starting his talk saying he didn't mind what desktop people used and then went on to talk about Gnome, he didn't even have KDE highlighted in the list of projects Novell hires key people in, the other Novell attendee didn't pretend and just said that they had picked Gnome as their desktop to promote. That there are people in Novell who deliberately ignore the excellent work their company puts into KDE (like sponsoring KDE Four Core) is a shame and they'll loose out because of it. Read More

The Paris summit is now over and by the looks of the blogs the KDE developers are pleased with what happened. The specs we have approved are: kubuntu-launchpad-integration - Add a menu item to applicaition Help menus to take you to Launchpad langpacks-desktopfiles-kde - Let .desktop files get their translations from .po files kubuntu-laptop-buttons - get laptop buttons working with Ubuntu's acpi-support package kubuntu-power-management - an all new power management frontend, Sebas already has some code for this in Guidance kubuntu-edgy-docs - Help!, And those that are in review: Read More

The Ubuntu Developers Summit is now happening by Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris. We have a bunch of KDE developers here to help with the specs for Kubuntu Edgy in four months time. We've made our own Kubuntu schedule because the automatic BoFicator didn't schedule anything for us. If you're near Paris do drop in and say hi. The sessions are supposed to be broadcast on teamspeak so anyone can join in but in practice this doesn't seem to be working too well. Read More

A note to the KDE translation teams: Ubuntu's web based translation tool Rosetta is now complete for Ubuntu and Kubuntu Dapper. https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2006-May/000082.html This is the first release which has KDE imported into Rosetta so KDE translation teams now have the option of using Rosetta for their KDE translations. Read More

The release candidate for Kubuntu 6.06 LTS, also known as Dapper, is out now for your downloading pleasure (please use bittorrent). The LTS stands for Long Term Support which means the Ubuntu team and Canonical will support it for 3 years on the desktop and 5 on the server. The focus for the release has been fixing all the bugs, and while we havn't got all of them it is feeling really polished. Read More

What could DHL be doing delivering me a parcel I wondered early this morning. Well it seems my Google Summer of Code 205 t-shirt turned up, just in time for me to start looking through the 200 KDE applications and just as many Ubuntu applications for Summer of Code 2006. Read More

In the interests of making sure KDE works with CUPS 1.2 the lovely people at MEPIS (now based on Kubuntu) bought me an HP printer. Alas it didn't work (foomatic's fault, not KDE) so I guess there's still some issues to be worked out there. Read More

kubuntu.de published a note today that Canonical had not answered their requests. Their article makes everything sound much worse than it is. The problem was that when kubuntu.org moved to a new host the sysadmin request to recreate Amu's account never got answered. Amu makes the cool Live CDs that get published along with KDE releases so it's obviously very useful for him to have an account. I should have poked Canonical's sysadmin to remind him but the account has now been added so problem solved. This doesn't mean, as some people seem to have suggested, that Canonical is in any way dropping support for Kubuntu, they continue to be wonderfully supportive, both to the community of developers and commercially if you want to buy a support contract off them. Read More

Last week was the Kubuntu and Ubuntu UI sprint in London where kwwii got strict instructions to turn up the bling on Kubuntu's artwork. The Gnome Clearlooks developers were also there to turn Ubuntu orange. Read More

September 23nd to 30th 2006

FOSDEM at the weekend was great, there's something really exciting about having all the different Free Software communities together. As well as the KDE talks I went to see mjg59 talking about ACPI (but sadly failed to catch up with him regarding Kubuntu laptop support), the debian-installer talk, Automated Display Configuration for X and making SuSE packages. We sold out of KDE merchandise and gave out 800 Kubuntu CDs. I even managed to get a bed on the sleeper back home defeating the best efforts of the staff at Waterloo. Read More

Linux.conf.au got onto New Zealand news. The clip features Mark Shuttleworth signing one of the >500 Kubuntu CDs that were given away. lca2006_tvclip.xvid.avi (13MB).

A while ago I did an article on Cosmopod on KDE Dot News. Cosmopod do remote KDE desktops via NX supported by an advert down the side. Before publishing I asked the Cosmopod man if he was sure he would be ready for the influx of users this would bring. He said he was but 10,000 registrations later and the poor server came to a grinding halt. Well they're now back up and running, the About Us page has some interesting comments on the future of computing. Read More

This last week was the Ubuntu distro sprint, where a bunch of core Ubuntu developers get locked in a bland hotel in a bland part of London (which was overcast for the whole week with no variation in weather) and told to work on things in return for Amarulla. Read More

Both KDE and KOffice decided to release new versions today. Kubuntu has packages for both. Konversation released a new version which was going to be in time for Kubuntu dapper but they delayed to get some last minute bugs out, the good news is that we got an upstream version freeze exception and the new Konversation is now it. It's nice to have apps start shaping their release schedules around Kubuntu, there really is something in this regular release idea. Read More

Today I published an article pointing to a KlamAV tutorial. I'm not sure how useful klamav is since e-mail viruses don't affect gun/linux but I think the claims that we do not get viruses are wrong. The other day I found my machine going sluggish and noticed that today my router had decided to forward incoming connections on port 22 to my laptop (I'd asked it to ages ago and it never worked at the time). I had an account on my laptop with username test and password also test that I had used at some point to check out what a first time user sees of Kubuntu. Some computer had ssh'ed into my laptop, checking for various common usernames and presumably accounts where the password is the same as the username and having succeeded to get into my computer it copied a program rootkit over to try and get root access meanwhile using my computer to portscan various IP ranges for other vulnerable computers running ssh. Self copying code doing malitious things, sounds like a virus to me. Read More

Coming soon to a Kubuntu near you, zeroconf support! Thanks to Jakub for making KDE zeroconf support, now with all Free Avahi. For those who left comments on my last blog asking for Kubuntu CDs, I can't do much without a postal address (and remember you need a good excuse like doing a talk or a KDE stand at an exhibition, this isn't shipit). Read More

My, what a lot of Kubuntu CDs. Let me know if you're doing a KDE talk at a LUG, having an install day, running a KDE stall at an expo or otherwise have a good excuse and I'll send you a box. Read More

To get my Python skills up to scratch I ported hal-device-manager to KDE making KDE HAL Device Manager. Python is so much nicer to code in than C++ in almost all respects. The only part I'm not convinced about is variables that aren't static typed, static typing adds a lot to the readability of the code. Unfortunately the pyuic compiler for Qt Designer doesn't like working with KDE widgets so no KListView stripes or searchbar for now. Read More

Edinburgh was busy last night for the worlds largest Hogmanay party and we saw in the new year with enough fireworks to cover the whole of the castle and Castle Rock in thick smoke. Read More

Having released a few too many Kubuntu flight CDs without testing the powerpc builds I bought a minimac. I did intially think I would keep MacOS X on it since it's always useful and interesting to be able to play with another operating system. But by the time the Kubuntu powerpc CD had downloaded I'd had enough of it and wiped the whole hard disk. The graphics in macOS X are of course lovely, and the search engine spotlight is just right, but this is also an operating system that is unable to minimise or maximise windows properly and that doesn't even have an applications menu so you can find what programs are installed. Further problems: Read More

Ubuntu Docs Corey was trying to find KDE 3.5 and 4 screenshots on planet KDE. Of course KDE screenshots aren't news to most KDE developers so they don't get blogged about but the KDE 3.5 visual guide lists some of the new features. KDE 4 can be found at KDE4 - understanding the buzz, not much to see here I'm afraid most of the work has been happening on the libraries, that should be accelerated now that KDE 3.5 is out the way but don't expect fancy screenshots for a wee while yet. Read More

I like fanmail, I get them occationally, it makes me feel loved. This guy might need some guidance in the correct direction though. hey jon.whtz up. i m frm india. i m a IT engineering student.i wanna b a hacker.will u plz help me.plz reply me.i would like 2 join u.plz reply me. thnx Read More

Cycling around Montreal on the back of a Brompton me and Sladen discovered you can get very very large pumpkins very cheaply after Halloween. Montreal is on an island and has long bridges that take a good while to cycle over. For that authentic North American experience we went to college (called a school) and hung out with the anime club who have nice sofas. We discovered the original buckyball and found that their artworks make for very challenging climbs. Read More

This week Kubuntu is in Montereal for the Ubuntu Below Zero summit. This is not a conference with lots of people giving talks, although we do have talks each morning and lightning talks in the evening, I took some notes in my usual style and there are videos on that page too. This conference is about specs. Lots of specs. We sit in small groups for an hour at a time and discuss the specification then go and write it up. This is not the usual way to do free software development and may seem somewhat harsh to outsiders but it works really well at defining what we are going to do for the next 6 months. My specs page has most of the Kubuntu ones. Read More

The Ubuntu developer summit got under way today in Montreal with a community love day. Talks covered the wonders of Breezy, Edubuntu, LTSP, advocacy and Launchpad. I took some rough notes. My own talk on Kubuntu went well (slides) and I was pleased to see a good number of Kubuntu users in the audience. Also really exciting is that South African distribution Impilinux will be the first Kubuntu derivative. Read More

Stephan Hermann asks why Mark likes dragons so much yet doesn't use KDE. Seems Stephan wasn't on the IRC channel to spot this [Sabdfl] Riddell: so, I'm thinking of converting my desktop to kubuntu for dapper Read More

Kubuntu Breezy is out. Grab it while it's fresh (and make sure you use a mirror that has synced). http://kubuntu.org/announcements/breezy-release.php There's some fun stuff in this releases, best of all is Adept the package manager. At long last .deb distributions have a decent package manager. It needs some extra features, usability review and a cut down version along the lines gnome-app-install but we have the ability to do all that now quite easily. Read More

This nice machine got dropped off yesterday for some AMD64 goodness and uberfast compiles. But if that wasn't fast enough, turn down the ambient light and it sports triple shades of go faster LEDs through its groovy transparent box. Read More

The Kubuntu Release Candidate won't be available tonight (unless you know the right IP address) due to problems with syncing with the mirrors. Well done to ArkLinux for getting theirs out though. Mañana as we say in Malaga. Read More

Last week I had the privilage of meeting Ariya at ScotLUG. I introduced him to Irn-Bru and we discussed Speedcrunch, KSpread, Kubuntu and his top secret project (he didn't let on what it was). Read More

I've been trying out a few distros to see what they offer. MEPIS is in some ways like Kubuntu, a single CD debian derivative that uses KDE. It's not too clear from their website what their policy is with free or payed for downloads nor what the difference between SimplyMEPIS, ProMEPIS and other MEPISs is, but I tried the one with the newest timestamp. Graphics at boot is nice, although it's just text on top of a background image. Hopefully Kubuntu will have pretty boot splash breezy. Install is from a live CD environment, and works well although it doesn't ask for keyboard, language or timezone. Neither sound nor networking work as default. It was released in February but still uses XFree 4.3 and there's no HAL. The KDE desktop is cluttered by default and even runs KWeather by default. It uses Nuvola icons which are pretty but unlikely to be favoured in a business setting. Lots of applications are installed by default. MEPIS OS Centre has various configuration tools. Nice but the design is too much like KControl (hard to navigate tree structure) and integration with kcontrol would have been nice. There's a bunch of strange files in home directory by default. It uses Synaptic for the package manager which is understandable. For music playing there's no Juk or Amarok only XMMS. Finally they don't seem to care for legalities, it comes with java, mplayer, flash and a bunch of video codec .dll files in /usr/lib/win32/*. There's no sources available that I could find for their MEPIS OS Centre. Read More

Jorge says "there is no Free equivalent to MS Exchange". I recommend Kolab which recently released it's second major version and is in heavy use by various branches of the German government. Quite why certain other groupware servers get much more attention before they've even made a release I'm not sure (not providing RPMs as their Debian packages could have something to do with it of course :) Read More

Appologies to readers of planet.ubuntu.com, the return of kdedevelopers.org has done funny things to the RSS feeds (and planet.kde.org is even more broken). Edinburgh got taken over by anarchists the other weekend. We had to board up Subhi's new internet café to protect the rather fancy SIP phone setup he has inside. Read More

LUGRadio Live happened yesterday. At last Britain gets a community run expo/conference for Free Software geeks. Me and some Glasgow LUG geeks took a roadtrip down. Ben Lamb came along to help run the KDE stall and we handed out lots of Kubuntu CDs and showed people the goodness of KDE. Credativ UK dude and Kubuntu devel Chris Halls turned up Mark Shuttleworth talked about Ubuntu and going into space, Colin Watson talked about the Ubuntu installer, Christian Schaller talked about GStreamer and Jon Masters talked about embedded Linux. I've put in notes I took on the LugRadio Wiki, scroll to the bottom. I gave a talk on Kubuntu and KDE, slides are up. I'm not a good public speaker, it'll be interesting to watch myself once the videos are available. It also doesn't help that KPresenter 1.4 can't open it's own files without crashing (OpenDocument files are fine). Read More

Kubuntu at LinuxTag in Germany today. Eagle eyed attenders may have seen Amu on the KDE stall handing out limited edition Kubuntu CDs. These have dragons on the cover so are assured to be cool. Read More

This week I've moved all the KDE application icons from crystal to hicolour. Hicolour is no longer the KDE 2 icon theme, that was renamed to kdeclassic. These days hicolour is the fallback icon theme used by all desktops that follow the freedesktop.org standard. KDE knows to always look in crystal because it's the default theme for KDE but over at Gnome they have a different default theme and couldn't find the KDE icons needed for the application menu. So remember always put your application's icon in hicolour if you want non-KDE users to be able to see it. (Actually applications outside KDE's CVS should probably put all their icons in hicolour incase KDE moves to a different default icon theme.) Read More

The Ubuntu Down Under conference is now closed. Mark gave some closing thanks which I noted down, again completely un-proofread and spellchecked. Finally on the last day I found a fellow KDE coder. sebr the elite Amarok hacker. Jeff Waugh explained how #gnome-hackers had been laughing at the scary Amarok setup wizard, I'd like to get rid of that for Kubuntu, infact if Amarok could be simplified by default and keep the fancy features for those who want them that would be great. Read More

This conference isn't about talks and it isn't about hacking sessions. Instead it's about small birds of a feather meetings on a lot of topics. Everything from KubuntuRoadmap to GraphicalInstaller to GettingInvolvedInUniverse are discussed with groups of 2 to a dozen people. That's the BrainDump stage. Then the BoF leader writes down the notes into a Spec which is the DraftedSpec stage. That then gets edited by the professional proofreaders in a room called Sublime 3 making it an EditedSpec. After that is has to be checked over by the most elite Ubuntu people, making it an ApprovedSpec. Finally, after the conference, we go and implement the spec sometime before the next release, making it an ImplementedSpec. Previous releases have had release goals, the idea behind making specifications like this is so everyone can see exactly what the plans are. Of course just because there are specifications of what we would like to get done doesn't mean it will get done, which is where the community comes in, Specs should be generally available after the conference I assume, last one to implement is the looser. Read More

Most of this morning was spent writing the plan for the next Kubuntu release. It's a very long plan as we have a large number of ideas for making Kubuntu into the finest operating system there is. With any luck that will get approved tomorrow. Somewhere amongst the writing I went to a session learning about HCT, Canonical's groovy tool built on top of their version control system Baz which treats patches as if they were branches. It can also pull in sources from CVS or SVN so I think I'm right in saying that it can branch CVS, which is fun. Read More

Today at Ubuntu Down Under I failed to attend GrumpGroundhog (making packges from latest CVS/SVN for developers to be able to get the latest KDE or whatever), and UniverseSecurity (find some trustworthy people who can join the closed security lists and keep universe secure). I did make it to Edubuntu which is a request for easy remote user administration which sounds like it could benefit greatly from Kiosk. Then me and amu further discussed gcc 4 fun with Doko, it should be just a case of changing Qt (and arts) as a dependency then everything will have to be upgraded. Whether or not KDE actually works when compiled with gcc 4 remains to be seen. ServerInstallation turned into a discussion of server administration and why Cobolt went bad and webmin smells, a promising looking replacement was demonstrated. After lunch we spent as long as we could discussing Kubuntu before my laptop battery ran out. Then it was time to look at language packs which are quite broken in Kubuntu (it ships with all the translations for Gnome). Ubuntu does nifty things with stripping out .po and .pot files, putting them in Rosetta then experting from Rosetta to make language packs. Or something like that. A scheme was worked out to create kubuntu language packs and I think I convinced the Rosetta dudes that the way KDE stores its .po and .pot files is actually quite sane. Finally the artwork session looked at a possible new icon set which looks a lot more glossy (a la MacOSX or clear-e). Could KDE and Gnome share an icon theme? Seems unlikely but certain people may try. Of course it's not like certain KDE developers don't have devious plans for their own new KDE icon theme. Night all. Read More

Today was the first day of the Ubuntu conference in Sydney. It opened with Mark Shuttleworth reviewing the last release and looking forward to the next. I took some notes which are not proof read or spell checked in any way. Next Matt Zimmerman ran an Ubuntu brainstorm asking what would we like to make Ubuntu better. Somehow the hour filled up quickly. After that the day was 8 solid BoF sessions, brainstorming ideas which will shortly be made into a specification. In expanding universe ogra and dholbach talked about how MOTU have pulled in packages from apt-get.org and how they can get more universe (MOTU) developers. There is now a KDE team page on the wiki, my plan is for KDE to quietly take over MOTU. The next session was the Kubuntu Roadmap where me and amu plotted plans for the next Kubuntu. KDE 3.4 was perfectly timed to come out with the Ubuntu schedule, chances are we won't have such luck with KDE 3.5 so we'll have to see what happens. I went to the Rosetta BoF next where Daf and Carlos decided on their 1.0 release in a couple of months. The Ubuntu build daemons are modified to search for any .pot and .po files and import them into Rosetta for easy translation by whoever wishes to help (and unlike some distros the result is then open for anyone to take back). KDE packages don't work with Rosetta yet because Rosetta assumes one directory with the .pot and .po files not the structure of kde-i18n which has a templates/ directory with all the .pot files and a directory for the .po files of each language. Hopefully Rosetta can be modified to take in kde-i18n. In toolchain roadmap we discussed the scary prospect of converting to GCC 4. This is a big change for KDE because of the new C++ ABI. Also KDE seems to be generally untested with GCC 4 and is rumoured to break in unknown ways, so that'll be fun. USplash seems to have been stopped in favour of a simpler system just doing cat foo.jpg > /dev/fb0. The Graphical Installer BoF was talking about possibly making an installer based just on the live CD (which would significantly reduce the cost of shipit, and at over 1 million shipit CDs sent I can see why they don't have the budget to make Kubuntu shipit CDs). Finding Packages discussed a program which would be a cross between gnome-app-install and click-and-run, a program installer focused on applications not packages and with fun features like screenshots and user ratings, would be cool to have something like that in Kubuntu maybe based on Kapture, but the actual package manager needs to be taken care of first. Finally language selector discussed how users could install language packages easily since at the moment you only get the one installed that you chose when installing (k)ubuntu. Adding something to gnome-app-install or its replacement seems to be the way here. Read More

Today KDE Everywhere visited Sydney As did some (k)ubuntu hackers. But there's still time to visit the tranquility of the local Quaker meeting Read More

If I read the Swedish mirror's statistics correctly that's almost 100,000 downloads of Kubuntu. 2TB of Kubuntu is a lot of Kubuntu. It even beats the Ubuntu downloads. that's because it's listed top on the kubuntu.org download page. Read More

The wee 80x15 website banners have become a popular to show your allegiance and make a much more sophisticated alternative than the old style of banner which started long long ago with "Netscape Now". Read More

Whenever something in KDE has frustrated me in the last month I've added it to a list: Tidy Konqueror. Konqueror has hardly changed since KDE 2 although the settings menu has gained a few extra unnecessary entries (which should be merged into the main Configure Konqueror dialogue). The sidebar should maybe be part of each tab not global to the window and a context sensitive sidebar for file manager would be nice. Kicker's Add to Panel and Remove from Panel menus should be dialogues. HAL support in KDE 3.4 is nice but Konqueror should pop up into the forground when a device is entered not have to wait for the user. The Help Centre suffers from much the same usability issues as Konqueror, it's got too much stuff in it's user interface. I'm not convinced that long manuals are the best format for documentation, shorter articles on specific actions which can be easily searched might work better. So in KWord if I search for mail merge it can give me a two or three paragraph article about how to do a mail merge. Systempreferences (in kdenonbeta) makes a good KControl replacement, of course there are larger plans afoot for KControl. Share folders sensibly. kpf is nifty but the user interface is all wrong (in kicker when it should be in Konqueror). And I've never got the right click on folder->share folders to work. A single download dialogue to replace all those file copying dialogues. Being able to pause and resume downloads would be nice to. KGet can do that but there's no reason for it to be separate from KDE core. Improved KNotify. This is where dbus needs to replace dcop since then everything down to syslogd can pop up friendly messages on screen as required. Juk pops up messages when playing a new song and amarok pops up slightly more pretty looking messages but there's no reason why that can't be done through KNotify. See Growl for this being done well on MacOS. Search in minicli. I should be able to type something into minicli and it will pop up with all the relevent applications, recent e-mails, files on my hard disk, contacts in address book, etc. See Quicksilver for MacOS goodness. Sounds like a perfect use of Tenor (klink). An option to say that actually I really would like to quit when I close the window and please stop telling me you're going to be hiding in the system tray. abakus, because I've wanted something like it for ages. Maybe a new icon theme, one that actually is based on SVG so that it can be maintined. Maybe call it Appeal. Standardised icon names too. Nicer website, with photos and pretty things. More usable wiki.

The Kubuntu announcement and preparations kept me up until about 5 o'clock last night just in time for a couple of hours kip before the announcement this morning. The feedback has been good and there's been a few sightings of Kubuntu in the wild. Many thanks go to the helpful people at Ubuntu who put up with us being somewhat newer to this game than them. Read More

With Linspire 5 out and the sources tracked down we can now get to see the new Crystal icon set commitioned by Linspire. Very shiny. They're under a proprietry Linspire licence at the moment so the question of whether KDE will use them hasn't come up yet and just maybe the artists are working on their own super sekret plans in the icons area. Also there's no SVGs yet, sigh, anyone caught adding icons to KDE without SVGs will be thrown to the gimp. Also alert viewers might spot the folder_{voliet,yellow,orange}.png icons in the lower pane of the screenshot below, they were made by me and licenced under the LGPL so quite how they end up in a .deb which does not include any mention of the LGPL is a mystery. Read More

The Kubuntu Release Candidate is out. This is your last change to test and complain before our first release next week. Feedback so far has been good and #kubuntu has been increasing in numbers enough that it's hard to keep up. Both OSNews and golum.de carried screenshots. Read More

Today we announced this little project I've been working on. Ubuntu has been stealing the lead with the non-business distribution recently so it's time to take it back for KDE. We are the first distribution with KDE 3.4 and the live CD is a great way to test it out. Still plenty of work to be done to catch up. Not all the KDE 3.4 modules are in yet, the artwork still has to be tweaked and all the little applications that make a distribution easy to use (package manager and update watcher, network config etc) need a lot of work. Please do come and join us, the mailing lists are at lists.ubuntu.com and we're on #kubuntu on freenode. Many thanks go to KDE of course and also the KDE Debian packagers. Please try out this preview and leave us feedback on the wiki page. Read More

Here's a fun pipedream overheard on #kde-devel. Very exciting I think you'll agree. Yes you freedesktop.org skeptics, you'll agree too. KOffice developers will agree too even though they don't know about it yet. Read More

Launching today for those of you lucky enough to have KDE 3.4 installed is... Get Hot New Wallpapers! Using the excellent Get Hot New Stuff platform and its KDE library KNewStuff I added Get New Wallpapers button to the desktop configuration module. It looks like KDE Look man Frank has now added the feed from kde-look.org so you can get the current 10 latest, greatest and most downloaded wallpapers at the touch of a button. Read More

Tonight on KDE eye candy watch... Basse produces a rocking new Konqi image for the logout dialogue: Then follows it up with this cute little number for the About KDE dialogue: Read More

Do you own a TV is the poll I've just set up on kdedevelopers. Many geeks, including myself, find little need for mindless entertainment when we're quite busy enough doing useful things. Now time for sleep while I let bittorrent download tonight's episode of 24. Read More

With IBM selling their Thinkpad division I have to wonder what the best type of laptop to get once my current Thinkpad goes the way of its predecessors (stolen, destroyed by aeroplane cargo men etc). Fortunately Betty bought me this laptop as a birthday present at the weekend for 50p down the market, I'm fairly confident it will last for years. It even beeps which means its a real laptop. Read More

Recently I became part of the exclusive invite only club of KDE Dot News editors. It's surprisingly time consuming to proofread and filter all the articles into a constant stream of high quality news for the world to learn about KDE from. The submitions queue gets some oddities from spam to rants to an article about how to start kppp, and various completely off-topic stories. Then there's questions like do we link to theKompany when they release a new proprietary product (if it's KDE related) or a new commercial GPLed product (yes) or to Linare with their cheap laptop which happens to come with KDE (I let that one through but has anyone heard of these Linare people? what is their distro based on?). The Dot doesn't tend to cover program releases, that's what kde-apps is for, the trick is to accompany it with an article or review. Anyone who wants to write an article is very welcome, we're always looking for more. Read More

The news of a GPled Qt for Windows today let in a round about way to a discussion on IRC about funding Free Software development. Would people pay for easily installable software? Maybe apt could include a payment system, after all that's what Lindows is trying to do. Mobiles seem to manage something similar with ringtones somebody pointed out. And then we realised KDE could do the same thing. KNotify+KNewStuff+Paypal. Genius. 1 euro for a new login sound. 2 euro for Schnappi (the semi-official song of KDE 3.4 beta 1) to be your KMail new mail notify. The plan can't fail. Read More

Today was string freeze day for KDE, over 500 commits were made and lots of people were desperatly trying to make the deadline for i18n(). I was struck down with a cold and couldn't manage much but did add some bits to Kontact's new about screen. Read More

Shiney new about:konqueror in CVS today. KControl also updated. Expect the docs to be updated soon too. Is there a right-to-left script user out there who can tell me if this works properly on right-to-left? Read More

KDE should work with the rest of the software world as much as possible and not just look within itself. This means having KDE programmes on Windows because that is useful for me and you and all the other people who have to use Windows occasionally. Its useful having Gimp and Firefox on Windows, it would be useful having Umbrello and Konqueror too. Of course for that to happen we need a Free version of Qt on Windows. Read More

Recently I took my first dive into kdelibs. I wanted to make the tabs in Umbrello resize automatically like those in Konqueror and the correct way to do it when several applications want a feature is to put it in kdelibs. I grabbed the code from Konqueror and made it fit into KTabWidget and posted to kde-core-devel. Unfortunatly nobody replied and when I pressed I just got a "yeah, looks fine" which it wasn't. There arn't many KDE developers with the knowledge to work on kdelibs and they're all very busy (and probably too trusting :). So I committed it and it worked fine in Umbrello which kept me happy but caused crashes and other strangeness in Konqueror. Part of the problem may have been that even though I was very careful I still managed to break binary compatibility. The rules for binary compatibility are complex and make no sense whatsoever unless (presumably) you know how linkers work. I realised I was in too deep for my programming ability (best in university year isn't quite so good in the real world) and would have taken the code out had Binner not done a great job of fixing it all up as far as possible. Phew. Read More

The SVG wallpaper contest is over. My favourite didn't win, I really liked KDE Celtic. Some people have queried whether KDE's SVG icon engine is ready for such use, and actually it probably isn't. It's too slow especially on intricate but beautiful designs such as Gear Flower. Read More

KPDF being merged into HEAD has been the talk of the IRC channels for a while, everyone is impressed. Here's the snazzy presenter mode: Read More

Umbrello UML Modeller 1.4 has gained tabbed diagram layout and entity relationship diagrams for databases as well as a tonne of fixes and XMI compatibility from Oliver. The ER diagrams stuff is quite basic at the moment and we could really do with some help, you don't have to be the world's best programmer just willing to spot the missing features (SQL generation please) and add it. Read More

Linspire 5 will come with a new version of the Crystal icon set. So far nobody knows what this looks like but the icons are part of the Linspire 5 beta which is available to Linspire Insiders (CNR Warehouse subscribers). Naturally we'd like to see what it looks like so if you are a Linspire insider please take a screenshot (preferably of Konqueror pointing to /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/apps or similar), put the screenshot on a webserver and add the URL in a comment to this blog. Or you can send it to me http://jriddell.org/contact.html Read More

Today I made desktop wallpapers use .desktop files for their metadata. Hopefully this means the image names will be translated. I also made it possible to use SVG images as wallpapers. Read More

Last night I made Umbrello use tabs for it's diagrams. KTabWidget does the job but it misses the nice feauture that Konqueror and Akregator have which is shrinking tabs to fit available width. It would be nice if this feature was in KTabWidget directly. Read More

10 people have now joined last.fm's KDE station so we now have our own group music stream. Now playing is the very cheerful Slayer's God Hates Us All courtesy of chouimat. Read More

last.fm offers personal streaming music stations based on your preferences and those of your neighbours. It doesn't cost anything to join, although they request a donation. You can add Friends etc making it similar to orkut, but good. I've set up a KDE group so join up and if we get 10 people we'll have our own KDE radio station. Read More

My laptop was Ryanaired. A new screen would be 500 quid so result was a new laptop (same trusty IBM Thinkpad r40e). Lessons: always carry your laptop as hand luggage on an aeroplane and always check your luggage before you leave the airport. Read More

That's KDE® now.

Today I chanced upon another feature where KDE leads, HTML access keys. a tags can (and should) have accesskey="x" elements. I used them in this website I made last year. Unfortunatly they are almost completely useless because you don't know they're there, that website has to mark them out with span tags and a stylesheet to underline them. Then you get the problem in Mozilla that if you make say 'f' as an access key you find your File menu becomes quite inaccessible. In Konqueror just press Control and the access keys available pop up as wee tooltips. Then press the key you want. Clever. Read More

Last night I watched a video of a talk from the Swiss Unix Users Conference on the Linux Standards Base. Their aim is to create a standard which binary programmes will just run on. Instead of creating a dozen packages for each distribution and each version of those distributions you can create one package (a subset of RPM so it can be converted with alien to .deb) which will run on any LSB 1.3 certified distribution. The way they are doing this is by specifying the filesystem hierarchy and the libraries. This is a middle ground between the API only standard that is POSIX and the One True Operating System standard which Bruce Perens first tried to make LSB into (SuSE and Red Hat didn't want to be told to just use Debian, he's still trying with UserLinux) and which there was a faltering attempt made by the proprietary Unix vendors called OSF1. Read More

I went to University and found the experience really useful even if most of what I learned was outside the lectures. The first semester was HTML, and out of date HTML at that. But after that we started with Java programming which gave me the theoretical knowledge to be able to pick up a hefty C++ book and learn that quickly enough. University might not teach you the direct skills you want but instead should give you the theory to be able to learn whichever branch of computing you find interesting, as well as the resources (mmm, big libraries and fast internet) to be able to do your own learning. It does mean however that you have to be prepared to work self motivated, most people on my course weren't which is why out of a year of 50 there's only 1 I can think of who is a better programmer than me. (And I'm not a great programmer, out in the real world there are suddenly many much better programmers, I'm always in awe at most of the KDE contributers.) Read More

I'm not sure what the definition of enterprise is, it sounds a lot like a meaningless buzzword to me, but I suspect that what I saw last Friday comes into the category of enterprise. I was invited to visit the finishing touches being put to the nice new building below and more importantly their new computer system which uses KDE on the desktop. There will be about 250 users moving in this week and so far they love it. There has been only one person complaining, he can't move the icons on the desktop. That would be Kiosk. Read More

Everything is set up for the expo tomorrow. Matthias Ettrich will be there, which will be groovy. There are piles of leaflets to give away. We will have news of a 250 (going up to 1000) machine deployment of KDE. We have lots of shiny computers on which to demo KDE. I even helped to contrust the dreaded Debian shelves of doom. Read More

With the release of Xorg 6.8 I decided I ought to work out how to get the fancy trasparent windows stuff working so I could demo it at the expo in London next month. I wrote a short guide. Read More

Canonical Software is the name of a company making a new Debian based distribution. I suspect there isn't much knowledge of this among KDE developers so here is what is known. Mark Shuttleworth is the man who used to do the company that become Verisign (and was the first African in space) has hired the best Debian, Gnome and Python developers to make a freely downloadable distribution which I suspect is supposed to be Debian made good (shorter release cycles being one of the main features). Read More

Why is everyone so surprised when I tell them I walk to the youth hostel from aKademy rather than take the bus or shuttle car? Really it's not that amazing. Of course I'd rather cycle (or take a rickshaw) but I don't have one with me. It only takes 40 minutes and it might work off that pizza you had earlier today. Read More

It's taken me two days solid but I'm down to 1 unread e-mail. It feels so satisfying. Today I went to the impressive KOrganiser on Windows demonstration. KDE programs on Windows would be a great way of introducing more people to Free Software and KDE. Read More

It's been a great day here in Ludwigsburg. Lots of interesting talks and people. I've written up the talks I went to at Talks @ aKademy. Scott's metadata ideas are ambitious but necessary. Making all files have metadata and be searchable is great, it shouldn't be easier to find things on the web than on your own computer as he said. And if search sorts out KControl that will be just great. Read More

Further to my last entry, I was wandering to the hostel yesterday evening when I passed a woman who said something in German to me. "Sorry I don't speak German" I said as I passed and she replied "Sir sir! we have a newspaper in Stuttgart that you can sell, they give it to you free to make money". Genuinely, she said this. Read More

I was at a train station in a town called Heidelburg at about 4:00 this morning on my way to akademy, having not slept for 20 hours at this point and I'm trying to work out the German train system where one machine charged me €14 and another wanted to charge me €49 when a man wanders up to me and says that "I look poor" and would I like some money. I assured him that I wasn't in any real need for money just now and he wanders off. Not long later when I'm on (the wrong) train when he taps on the window and gives me 20 euro, mutters something about god and wanders off. Read More

A quick rant: I don't like the system tray getting full for no good reason. My system tray is getting almost as bad as the ones on a Windaes desktop where device drivers put their company's logos just because they can. Why do an increasing number of KDE apps insist on not quitting when I those their windows and instead stay around in the system tray. When I close the main window of an application I expect it to quit, this isn't MacOS. But Noatun, KGet, Akregator, KSCD, Kaffeine and no doubt others just hang around for no good reason. I'll let KMix off because it can actually be useful. JuK shouldn't be needed either since everyone should use the mediacontrol applet which is wonderful. Read More

KDE has had the same splash screen for the last two releases so I think it is in need of a new one. It doesn't matter if the new one is better or worse than the KDE 3.1/3.2 splash (it's all artistic taste), this is new for the sake of new otherwise it looks to users like nothing has changed. Read More

No Debian CVS packages, my usual way of staying up to date, have turned up for KDE 3.3 so I turned to Konstruct for compiling beta 1 and it's very nice. It's even nicer after adding an extra 512Megs of memory. Read More

I did a talk to Edinburgh GNU/Linux Users Group and again to Tayside KGX Users Group this week past. Discussed how to become a KDE Developer, some nice KDE features and software patents (EU elections tomorrow and this weekend, please vote Europeans). I have just put up the quickly put together slides. Read More

We got on well with the GNOMEs at the Linux User Expo in London today. Except for when I filled in their missing poster space with a spare KDE logo, they didn't take that too well. Read More

The good news, Rich, is that the KDE stand at the UK Linux Expo is now ready, cos I just set it up :) Thanks to SuSE for supplying a machine. Various other SuSE bits were also supplied, does anyone have ideas for what to do with 4 copies of SuSE 8.2, a box full of SuSE Office-Pro CDs for SuSE 8.0 and 20 SuSE mouse mats? Hopefully I can get a SuSE 9.1 CD so I can install software as needed, like the required en-gb translations. Incidently the SuSE 9.1 widget theme is an interesting and quite pleasing mix between Plastik and Kermarik. Read More

KDE artists is an interesting project limited by the number of people who are actually talented enough to create high quality artworks (not me). There isn't much coherency to the group, people who know what they're doing are often too busy to reply to those who don't and posts to the list can go unanswered. The website is quite limited too. Changes to improve this include a wiki page and hopefully the bugs.kde.org entries will soon point towards the mailing list. There's also an IRC channel #kde-artists on freenode which may or may not catch on. Read More

Annoyed at the lack of directory image browser for Konqueror and the primitive image viewer I turned Gwenview into a Konqueror KPart. You can get it from kdeextragear-1 CVS, all comments are welcome. Read More

Dearest Umbrello and KDE Developers, KDE has been branched for 3.2 and Umbrello UML Modeller 1.2 will soon be released with it. My impression of Umbrello 1.2 is that it is a good release with features that were defiantly lacking in the previous version. Developing as part of KDE has been a good thing, our release cycle has matched well and we get quite a bit of development, translation and packaging support as well as publicity with it although I hope it doesn't put off non-KDE users from using Umbrello. Two commercial UML tool have bought Google Adwords for 'Umbrello' which affirms in my mind that we compete with the commercial competition (and in many ways surpass it). We have gained a couple of top class developers in the last year and a few equally important beastie reporters. My most proud achievement is getting Americans to use the word 'beastie' :) Read More

kde.me.uk has some things of mine on it. kde.com's e-mail feed of KDE dot news died along with kde.com so I set up another one for dot news and added debianplanet.org and kdedevelopers.org. email news feeds. KDE dot news are planning on adding their own e-mail feed so that one may dissapear. Read More

I'm giving a talk next week at the Linux 2003 conference in Edinburgh about UML Modelling with Umbrello. Since I'm not too sure what to say I'm writing notes here in the hope that I'll be struck by inspiration and maybe some useful comments. Read More