Mkruisselbrink 

Since several KDE folks were in town for the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit they decided to come visit us as kind of an impromptu KDE 20th birthday party, and to meet KDE's newest/youngest disciple. She might still be a bit young to write code, but we'll see how long it'll take to change that. One of the reasons neither me nor blauzahl have been very active in KDE lately... Read More

As I posted the last time I blogged (which I really should do more often), I had some problems with Calligra Active on Android and the number of shared libraries it requires (various versions of android have different, but low, fixed maximums for the number of .so files that can be loaded in a single process). Since then I did several things to resolve that. One option would have been to go the "libkok" route, like we did when we developed/ported calligra/koffice to Maemo and the Nokia N900 and N9. There we basically rewrote the kdelibs cmake files to just build those files that we really need, and build it all into one big library. The big problem was that approach was that it was completely unmaintainable, which meant that we were basically stuck with whatever snapshot kdelibs version we chose to base that on. So instead of doing that I got out the CMake manual, and came up with some relatively simple cmake code that basically combines several existing targets into one new target. The downside to this is that it still has to build all the individual targets as well, so build times basically doubled, but other than that it gives me a nice "libkall.so" that contains all of kdelibs that Calligra Active depends on, combining 11 .so files into one. See here if you're interested in the CMake code I came up with. I did something similar for the libraries Calligra itself provides reducing the number of .so files even more. (I had some problems to combine the various kdelibs libraries together because of the way automoc works. Basically when you have several source files with the same filename but different directores they will overwrite eachothers .moc file if they are built in the same target. To get around that I renamed some files). Read More

As I wrote in my previous blog post, I've been doing work on getting Calligra working on Android. My first attempts of this used Calligra Mobile, our QWidget based mobile UI originally written for the Nokia N900. One big problem with this is that the scrolling speed when running on android was horribly slow. I think I got maybe 1 or 2 frames per second, and that on fairly powerful hardware. Early on in the development process of the calligra based document viewer for the Nokia N9 we were having similar performance problems, caused by wrapping our QWidget based canvasses in a QGraphicsProxyWidget. Now Calligra Mobile itself is completely QWidget based, so it shouldn't have those problems (it works decently on the N900 afterall), but because of the way Qt on Android is implemented there is a similar kind of indirection going on as with QGraphicsProxyWidget, so instead of trying to fix the performance of Calligra Mobile, I decided to instead give one of the other mobile UI's of Calligra a try. Read More

As most of you are probably well aware, since quite a while it is not very hard to write Qt applications to run on Android devices. A couple of weeks ago we at KO GmbH decided to look into how hard it would be to get KDE applications to run, and more specifically, if it would be possible to run Calligra with one of its mobile UI's on an android device. Read More

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

Yesterday nokia gave away 300 pre-production n900 devices to all attendants of this years Maemo summit in Amsterdam (in the form of a six months loan, after that they'll have to go back to Nokia). I'm also attending, so I also got one. Deciding what the first thing to port to a new device is is always hard, but in the end I figured that something with plasma might be nice. As maemo5 makes it possible for home-screen widgets to be part of separate processes, I figured it might be possible to adapt plasmoidviewer to act as a simple program to put any type of plasma applet on the normal maemo desktop (actually, I think it was somebody else that suggested this, I just don't remember who it was). So after several hours of hacking (and a lot more hours of compiling Qt and various parts of kde (btw, the just released Qt 4.6 maemo5 technology preview is missing some essential bits like for example qdbuscpp2xml), I managed to figure out just exactly how to get the window to appear on the normal desktop as a widget. At first this didn't look to pretty as you can see in this screenshot: Read More

After spending an extra week after GCDS hiking around on La Gomera (another one of the Canarian islands), I finally got home and had time to process some of the photos I took during the desktop summit, so you can go ahead and take a look at them in my gcds gallery on my smugmug page (so if anyone needs a smugmug referral code you can also ping me). Read More

After quite a while of not doing much maemo related, I finally found the time to build a bit more up-to-date kde packages for maemo. I've now uploaded kdelibs, kdepimlibs and kdebase from KDE 4.2.0 (more modules will follow), and also the just released koffice 2.0beta6 (unfortunately no kspread yet, as I couldn't get it to compile with the old gcc version in scratchbox). If you want to play with kde and/or koffice on your maemo powered device, add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:deb http://93.157.1.37/~marijn/maemo binary/, and install kde and/or koffice related packages (you probably don't want to install them to the small rootfs, as the packages are still a bit big). The state of maemo/hildon integration for kde applications hasn't changed much since my previous packages (for example applications still don't have a correct icon in the taskbar), but I hope to be able to spend some time in that area as well. Read More

It is of course a bit late to announce, but this sunday (february first), there will be a KDE 4.2 release party in The Netherlands. Everyone is welcome to join us at De Commanderie van Sint Jan in Nijmegen, starting from around 14:00. Read More

Until now I've always been using my own built Qt packages when building KDE packages for maemo. Initially because the Qt packages in extras-devel where missing some vital parts for KDE (mainly SSL support I think) but after that because I just had them installed, and it worked. But now I wanted to change this, and use the extras-devel provided Qt, as in theory that shouldn't matter, after all they are build from the same sources, with nearly identical configuration. As it turned out, this was actually quite a bit harder than I thought it would be. Read More

As KOffice is supposed to be a lightweight office suite, I figured it would be nice to see how well it would run on maemo based devices. Thanks to Thomas Zander who replaced a lot of the double usage in koffice with qreals it was quite straightforward to get koffice to compile and packaged. Well, for the most part that is, I didn't manage to get kspread to link as apparently the old gcc version I'm using has some problems with inner classes in templated classes and duplicate symbols. After fixing some trivial issues, I could install koffice on maemo and run it: Read More

During the last couple of days I've been working on trying to get parts of kde packaged for maemo, to make development for others easier, and after some struggles, I finally succeeded in doing part of this. Most of this isn't available yet in the official extras-devel repository, because getting it to build in the buildsystem there would probably be quite some extra work, but I've uploaded the binary packages to my own repository. All the stuff in this repository is of course very experimental, and it might do all kinds of ugly things, but I at least managed to run kbuildsycoca4 after installing kdelibs5 from my repository. Read More

Since Nokia will be giving 100 n810 devices tomorrow at the Embedded and Mobile day at Akademy, I thought it would be a good idea to describe a bit how you can get KDE working on your brand-new device. Since it is already quite some weeks ago I first did this, I might be missing some crucial steps, so if you have any questions after reading this/playing with your n810, feel free to ask me, I'll be at Akademy for the entire week. Writing this I've discovered how bad I am at writing any kind of howto/documentation, but hopefully it will still be a bit helpfull, and else you should just ignore it :) Read More

Continuing my efforts to get a decent KDE based system on a maemo based device, this week I've worked on getting sound to work. As maemo uses gstreamer for its media, my first attempt was to use the phonon-gstreamer backend. To get the phonon kcm to build without having xine installed (as I couldn't find any xine packages for maemo) I had to hack around a bit in some cmake files (why are the only options "no multimedia at all" and "multimedia with xine", and is there no "multimedia, but with a different phonon backend" option?), but I got it to compile. However when I tried to play sound I didn't got any errors, but I didn't hear any sound either (when playing music with amarok tracks finished as soon as I started them). Read More

As a next step in my SoC project this week I've worked on getting Plasma to run on a maemo based device. Getting KDE compiled for this platform provided some new challenges, mainly caused by the old compiler used by its SDK (gcc 3.4.4), but apart from some compiler issues I didn't have many problems to get it to compile. Overall compiling stuff for maemo seems a lot easier that cross-compiling it for openmoko, as the scratchbox environment maemo uses nicely hides all the complicated cross-compiling issues, so it appears as if you're compiling normally (scratchbox even transparently uses qemu to run any ARM binaries that are build and used in the same build process). Read More

An issue I encountered while running plasma on my Neo1973 is the lack of a right mouse button (the screen can't really distinguish between ends of the stylus/which finger I use). A situation where this lack of an RMB is most clear is when you want to use some functionality that is only available in a context-menu. I've implemented one way this is sometimes handled on other devices: if you hold your 'left' button for more than a certain delay (without moving more than a certain distance), the widget will receive a context menu event instead of the original left mouse button down and up events. I've implemented this by installing an event filter on the application object that intercepts all mouse events and when it detects a left mouse press, this event is saved and not immediately passed to the program. Instead a timer is started. If the left mouse button is released or the mouse is moved far enough before the timer fires, the original event will be send, so the application will just think a normal click or drag happened, however if the timer fires before the button is released or the mouse is moved, both the press and release events will be eaten by the event filter and instead a QContextMenuEvent is sent. Read More

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, I'm working on making KDE and plasma behave better on systems that are quite different from 'normal' computers, specificaly small devices. As currently the only physical device I have access to for this project is a Neo1973 Openmoko phone, most of my initial work will be for that device. Read More

As this will be my first post published on planet KDE, I want to use this opportunity to introduce myself a bit. I am Marijn Kruisselbrink, a 22 year old computer science student from The Netherlands. My first significant contribution to KDE happened last year when I participated in the Google Summer of Code to implement music notation support in KOffice. Aside from that I have also done some work on improving KDE on Mac OS X, by writing OSX implementations of some of the abstractions KDE provides. Also I've helped with this years Akademy by writing a large part of this years (and hopefully many years to come) registration system. Read More

[image:3150 align=left size=thumbnail hspace=20] As you can see in this image, I managed to get plasma to run on a Neo1973 phone (using an openmoko image for the rest of the software). The only changes I needed to make to kde code where changes related to qreal not being a double on an ARM processor (except of course some hacks to actually make it cross compilable). Read More