KDE Blogs 

The GCDS, and particularly the Akademy ended. Mostly everyone is still already back home, so all I can say is: Thanks to Agustín, Rodrigo, Miki and the rest of the local organization team for the great conference. Everyone I've talked with agreed that they were having a very good time, and I can only reassure that. The only "problem" I can find is (and I thought I would never say this) there were too many parties :) . So, congratulations for a very successful event!

At conferences like the GCDS there is so much going on, and you get bombarded with information from all the talks one after that other, and that means that sometimes it takes a while for the meaning of it all to sink in. For me the two biggest themes of the conference were firstly the emerging Semantic Desktop, and secondly the increasing importance of visual design. We actually are in the process of inventing new ways of visual communication, and it was very exciting to be right there in the middle of it happening. Read More

This year at GCDS I had the pleasure of meeting Gökmen and Gökçen (pronounced “Gerkman” and “Gerkchan” with hard Gees not Jays). They are part of a relatively small team of around 15 developers who are sponsored by the Turkish government work on a Turkish Linux distribution called Pardus. It is a KDE focused distribution which has been around since the end of 2005. What makes this distribution so interesting is the system tools and configuration tools which they've developed based heavily on Python, PyQt and PyKDE. Read More

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

Yesterday I wore my GSOC tee-shirt at GCDS and got together with Arno Rehn to review his smoke bindings library generator tool. It turns out the project is going great and is pretty much finished. Read More

I learned a number of useful productivity tips during this akademy, so as the self-appointed guy-who-shares-productivity-tips-with-the-rest-of-kde, I thought I would share them here :-) Read more below for yokadi, ack-grep, autojump, and cgdb. Read More

I'm back from the awesome Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. It feels good to be back in Berlin and with my family, but I'm very scared of the backlog that now awaits me. Before I tackle it (and potentially blog more about the event) I need to get something off my chest, lest it is forgotten. I'd like to publicly thank Klaas Freitag, who's term as a member of the KDE e.V. board of directors just ended with our general assembly a few days ago, for his contribution to our project. He stepped up to help out with the more mundane and every-day tasks that are required of the board, thus freeing up people like our beloved bouncing ball and poster boy Aaron (who's term also ended, but who'll get plenty credit anyway ;) to do what they do best. I really admire the effective, quiet and ego-less way in which Klaas has carried himself and represented us. He's done a lot of work behind the scenes that benefits KDE greatly and helped get e.V. and its operational side up to a sustainable level. So thank you very much, Klaas, and enjoy the extra time you can hopefully now spend with your family again. :) Read More

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

I noticed yesterday that at the kde-apps.org page for WMIface, a tool that allowed scripting the window manager used by KDE3 from command line, a comment appeared asking about a version for KDE4. It felt like a good idea to do something as simple as this in the evening as a relaxation, so, after quite some time playing with C++ templates and so on (since I'm a lazy developer and therefore I went with doing some extra work that would save me from doing work), I have to disappoint you. There is no version specifically for KDE4. In order to reduce the dependencies I made it depend on just QtCore and X11 libs, with those few important classes from kdeui copied into the project. No KDE dependency whatsoever. This provides the CLI tool with startup time decent enough for direct usage, and makes it usable on every system, KDE, GNOME, Xfce, whatever. Read More

Hello everybody, I should introduce myself first: I am Ramón Zarazúa, I am a GSOC student working on C++ refacoring support for KDevelop. I am very pleased to be contributing to KDE and the community, and want to make us the best we can be! Read More