KDE Blogs 

A promising student was talking with me about working on Network Management in GSoC 2009, but decided to concentrate on his studies this summer. Out of the discussion I've created this idea proposal. In case anyone is interested in making mobile broadband connections really easy to do in Network Management, see the KDE Google Summer of Code 2009 ideas page.

We've recently extended our Marble Wiki to include more documentation about how you can participate in Marble development. Here are a few possible jobs for a start: If you are an artist or interested in historical world maps you can help us to improve our "Historic Maps" library: Magnus Valle ("wiscados" on #kde-edu) has done some great work in this area (resulting in the Historic Map that comes with Marble 0.7). Find out here how you are able to take part in this. For source code aficionados we have lots and lots of JuniorJobs for Marble. You can have a look at our How to become a Marble Developer page to find out how to tackle those. If you're a student and you are still looking for a Google Summer of Code 2009 topic, then you can either look at the KDE ideas page or you look at Wikipedia's fine article about Virtual Globes. They got a nice comparison matrix there which even includes Marble. There are still a few red "No" marks there which might help you to get an idea for your Marble topic for the Google Summer of Code application (like e.g. Movie Maker, Guides, Planetarium, etc.). Just make sure that you don't work on "Imagery of other planets" as Marble already has got this feature since Marble 0.7 (the author of the article just hasn't updated the page yet and I myself don't want to edit such wikipedia pages due to my obvious bias ;-) If you'd like to help us or have questions regarding Marble, just join us on IRC ( channel #kde-edu on irc.kde.org ) or write an e-mail to marble-devel@kde.org.

In a recent blog, David Nolden talks about transferring user-generated, file associated meta-data. His post was well written and the ensuing discussion interesting. I'd like to continue his line of thought here. Read More

I thought I share a few interesting links: Gnome switches to git: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-March/msg00086.html But not everybody does so, e.g. Python is switching right now to Mercurial: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-March/087931.html Eric Sinc has an interesting blog about DVCSs: http://www.ericsink.com/ 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.

Drkonqi is nice and friendly, but some apps (e.g. kded or krunner) have a crash handler so that they restart instead of annoying the user with crash dialogs. As developers, we want to see backtraces of crashes in all cases; and to be in gdb in order to be able to print variables etc. Solution: asking for core dumps. That part is easy: Read More

Want to see how to crash almost every KDE application? In your favorite KDE application, open any modal dialog, e.g. the configuration dialog. Quit the application using D-BUS, like this: qdbus org.kde.kontact /MainApplication quit Chances are high that your application just bit the dust and you're greeted by Dr. Konqui. Read More

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

I was happy to see both KDE and OpenChange (and some lesser projects :-)) were accepted for this year's Summer of Code project. OpenChange is progressing quite well - Julien now has a server running that supports Outlook logging in, and returning the folder list. If that is the sort of thing you'd like to be involved in, check out the list of ideas. 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