KDE Blogs 

I would post a screenshot of what this is going to be about, but the screenshot would look remarkably similar to other KDE3 screenshots I could post. Unless I switched the decoration to Oxygen/Ozone, but then yours truly is still quite happy with the KDE2 decoration (and then, also not quite happy with all those people who think that anything that's older than a year, especially if it's not shiny, must be oh-so-bad), so let's just skip that. You can try yourself after all. Read More

The hero of the current Marble KDE 4.1 Beta1 release is Jens-Michael Hoffmann: He has successfully worked on getting OpenStreetMap integrated into Marble and KDE 4.1! This means that once you start our free software virtual globe and select "OpenStreetMap" as a theme then Marble will directly start to download OpenStreetMap tiles from the OpenStreetMap server: If you want to try it you can either wait for KDE 4.1 Beta1 packages to appear on the KDE Website next week. Or you start to compile current Marble SVN yourself. It's pretty easy: You only need just Qt 4.3 (or 4.4), or alternatively KDE >= 4.0 and Qt >= 4.3 including headers. Then you can start to build Marble according to our HOWTO. Once you have compiled Marble from current SVN you can start it either from the menu or from the commandline. You'll be greeted by our globe. If everything went well, you'll see that Marble now features a starry sky plugin (notice the constellation "Orion" right next to the earth in the following screenshot): If you have compiled the KDE version then you can adjust the quality settings for "Still image" and "During animations". We'd suggest that you use "High" for "Still image" and "Low" for "During animations" however you can adjust the values according to the performance of your hardware. Read More

There are a few scattered updates in the world-o-wheels of late. The biggest of which, as a number KDE folks are already aware is that I'll be leaving Native Instruments, where I've been for the last couple of years and starting my own company with a friend or two rather soon. I'll post a link once we're to the point of launching a public beta. It's not desktop software, and it's not a consulting service, but this will mean that my primary (professional) development platform will be Linux once again. Read More

Well, a few days ago, I attended the release party for Fedora 9. There was a lot of people who showed up a few Red Hat folks who work on Fedora and packages. There were also a few users who showed up to try Fedora out for the first time. It was a big success! Thanks to all who came out Read More

[image:3467 align=left hspace=16 vspace=5 size="original"] Akonadi is hot. I completely realized that when I saw the fantastic submission by Nuno and Thomas for the Akonadi logo contest. This logo captures the essence of the Akonadi architecture in a very beautiful way. I remember well when I drew the first version of the Akonadi architecture on the whiteboard at the Osnabrück 4 meeting more than two years ago. The round shapes made it hard to put it in digital form, though. So after taking a tour through the drawing applications of the free software world without lasting success, I decided to write a program to create the diagram. When I saw the Akonadi logo contest and some of the submissions there, I thought it would be great to have a three dimensional version of the architecture diagram, and now Nuno and Thomas just did that. Wonderful! 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

KDE has always been a community that I saw myself very happy with. Open, friendly and cheerful to newcomers. To improve that, and not to diminish the quality of coding while doing so, #kde-devel is better used for coding only, and suggests #kde-cafe for a socialisation channel. I promoted the use of that channel in the past. Read More

Today is day one of FOSSCamp. FOSSCamp is an unconference, which means there is no set program. The program consists of writing entries into the empty program grid. This is refreshing approach which seems to work rather well for one particular use case: recognizing and fixing problems. Read More

So this blog title is "KMail and bikeways in Germany". You may wonder what they have in common. You may wonder whether there will be an eloquent Aaron-style nice little story behind that. Read More

Today I took the plunge and merged the Solid network management infrastructure into KDE SVN trunk, where it will soon be released as part of KDE 4.1. Here's a summary of what it includes. Since what follows is Long, Save Planet[KDE|OpenSUSE] and read more for details. Read More