KDE Blogs 

OpenStreetMap can get addictive once you discover how easy and powerful the flash editor is. But what, my girlfriend asked, is the point when you can get maps at no cost from Google et al. The justification is that unrestricted by copyright you can do interesting things that you would be otherwise unable to do. OpenStreetMap Cycle Map shows all the best routes for a bike. Open Piste Map makes maps for skiing. So this evening I made Open Whitewater Map to create maps for canoeing and other river users showing places to get in and out, rapids and their grades and hazards on the river too. The WikiProject Whitewater Maps page has the info. Only a few river routes done so far, any canoeists out there want to add some more? Read More

There are plenty sources for KDE relates feeds and news, but reading them through the usual neutral feed readers or even on separate sites takes the fun out of the less serious ones. Also the common separations between different parts of KDE (internal devs, external dev, artists, usability experts, bug hunters and pr people) is reflected in the different community cultures (mailing lists, bko, dot, wikis, kde look/apps/files, other forums) which usually never mix (dot comments are probably the closest to that happening). I always thought putting them all together onto one (naturally huge messy) page should give an interesting overview, similar to the yellow press' collection of often useless(ly funny) article collections. As I recently found out about simplepie I decided to test myself how far I would be able to go with an automated yellow press parody of KDE news, all while both making good use of my limited webspace (with "unlimited" bandwidth) as well as satisfying my rather constant need for KDE tinbits from everywhere. The result after a couple of hours today is here (warning: brutal use of bright colours).

Jakub Stachowski, who just committed a significant performance improvement to KConfig parsing, which, with previous improvements of his, made it about 4.5 times faster than the initial KDE4 version, and slightly faster than the KDE 3.5.9 one.

NLnet provided new KOffice logos (and it sponsors ODF development). Kudos for that! To help readers of the announcement, let's note that application logo is not always equal to its icon. Read More

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1 has been released including the new beautiful installer, an incredible fast installation and package management, KDE 4.0.3 and 3.5.9. With this Beta the media layout changed: no 1 CD install media anymore, just the KDE4 Live-CD and the DVD which allows to choose between KDE4 and KDE3. This beta marks the generic feature freeze so there was a rush to get everything in which led to the delayed release and some problems like most noticeable the Live-CD installer not working. :-( So if you plan to do an install better download the DVD or use the network installation CD. Read More

I've just published the Building KDE on openSUSE guide over at the openSUSE wiki. It makes it insanely easy to build latest KDE 4.1 in a minimal number of steps, but the goal is not just to make it easy, but to give people the tools and the skills to go from just building KDE to developing it. If you're the type of person who always stays up to date with the latest alphas/betas, or are a Power Bug Reporter who wants to report bugs with full debug output and maybe try applying a patch from a developer or twiddle a few bits yourself, this is a way to get the freshest KDE 4 Plasma or Amarok around. Read More

This morning Patrick complained that he had no picture of himself while he was at the cebit. So here comes remedy. I stumbled across some other random KDE related pictures also... Read More

I've been playing with using KIO::get() to make queries on the DBPedia SPARQL endpoint, parse the XML result set and convert it to be used by a Plasma Data Engine. I'll explain how it works as I think it is pretty useful and makes it very easy to link up applets with Semantic Web/Desktop data. Read More

A few days ago I asked in the blog "where to buy a 14 inch non-glossy notebook with Linux in Germany". I received quite a few responses and emails, thanks a lot for the support ! :-) Now I (almost completely) succeeded and a notebook is ordered. For those of you looking for something similar, here are the details. Read More

Last week HP announced it's Mini-Note PC with preloads of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. Our heros of the Mobile Devices Team have worked the last weeks on that. The Mini-Note is available in different configurations starting at $499 (that would be only 313 Euro if applied for Europe without surcharge). All editions share the form factor, the nearly full-size keyboard and the nice display (1280x768). So I had to lend one from Mobile Devices team and play with it. :-) Read More