KDE Blogs 

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

Yes, sounds strange. Why should i did it ? Well, first is known among the distros that qt-creator in first release is not the most friendly to packaging. Not only beacuse qmake, but because some distros rely on things like splitted packages or 32/64 bits coexistent libs and plugins. Second, was quite a challenge for me do this, because i need to learn some new tricks ( thanks dfaure for automoc4 help ). Third, dressing my packager hat, i would love to see qt-creator been in the main Mandriva distro, compliant with our policies, and been adopted as well i expect for kdevelop4 when be released. Qt Creator is one of the amazing IDE's around and i thought that worth the effort to give some love in buildsystem to have it in a full Mandriva way, including our flags and standard cmake build. During the process, i could manage to fix all bugs open in our bugzilla about packaging, and at same time enable the "most wanted" feature here, the designer plugin, which for some reason was not enabled in our qmake previous compilation. Read More

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

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

Since I was in the US anyway, I thought I'd fly to North Carolina and verify something that has had the KDEPIM community wondering for years. Does Allen Winter, in fact, exist, and look like the picture, since no one has ever met him in person. Well, after a 2 hour plane ride from Chicago and another 2 hours in a car, I can attest that he does, in fact, exist, and is as nice in person as he is online. Photographic proof below. Your reporter will write more as events develop, now it's lunch time. :) Read More

Arrived the time of year of doing another test upgrade for Mandriva users. This time is a little bit special, since you will be using Qt 4.5.0 final, with all our efforts to make it stable with backports, annoying some KDE devels ( thanks dfaure and Thiago ), etc.. If you want to know who are the guilt ones for this release, go and see nice about tab in "KDE about" after installed :-) Standard urpmi repositories are available. README for some detailed information.

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

So I was notified that commits to KDE are HOT, and I am in serious need of some hotness. What could be more hot than working on Kiosk Tool? Well maybe KHTML, but I don't need love that badly. So back to kiosk tool. Back in KDE 3 Waldo Bastian made up this nice little tool that could give administrators a GUI interface around the kiosk functionality in KDE 3. Well 5 years have passed and the tool was in need of some love. First step was to get the last of the KDE/Qt 3 compatibility code removed. That took most of the day yesterday. Today was spent trying to add a few features to make it easier for 3rd party application developers to add their application's settings to the Kiosktool UI. I broke up the old monolithic XML file into modular ini files that can be installed into the kiosktool application data directory. This allows any application developer to create a custom set of options for administrators to lock down their application. Read More

While working through my backlog of articles on Planet GNOME on my way to Nuremberg (yes, again), I came across a blog entry of Philip Van Hoof. In it he asserts that soon the era of email clients will be over, which I think some people misinterpreted as application for reading and managing email messages becoming obsolete. Read More

My talk from linux.conf.au 2009 is now available for everyone to see on video: http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2009/Friday/72.ogg The slides are also available in PDF and ODF. There are a lot of other interesting videos also available - see Read More