KDE Blogs 

I hope that everybody who celebrated Easter has enjoyed some pleasant days (well and of course everybody else, too ... ;-). Recently I've received a few e-mails from Thomas Hartmann who works in Trolltech's Qt/WinCE team. Thomas has started to port Marble to Windows CE after I had told him about Marble during the KDE 4 satellite launch event in Berlin. After having seen a few screenshots of Marble running on Qtopia this is the fifth plattform apart from Marble on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux/Solaris/Unix. The high portability of Marble is due to the fact that Marble doesn't have any dependencies apart from Qt 4 itself (and it doesn't use OpenGL). So you don't even need to have KDE 4 installed to run Marble. However for users the KDE frontend is very much recommended as it has a few extra features that the Qt4-only frontend doesn't offer: like e.g. GetHotNewStuff support. The fact that Qt offers the same API across plattforms (unlike other toolkits) has certainly helped a lot to make the Windows CE port possible. Of course Thomas had to strip down Marble due to the 32 MB memory limit, so the initial vector data isn't as detailed as for the desktop version (we hope that we'll find a GSoC 2008 student who will volunteer to implement vector tiles for Marble): Thomas also created two youtube videos which show Marble on a Dell Axim X51v. The result is pretty impressive given that this PDA is using an XScale/ARM processor (which doesn't provide hardware support for floating point instructions):

With our own beta out the way I got a moment to compile Qt 4.4 beta. It adds QtWebKit packages for those who missed it in my last 4.4 packages. Read More

As some of you may have seen, Kent has released the QtScript binding generator on Troll Tech labs. I've been playing with the code for a bit, and as with KJSEmbed one of the first tests was to make sure you could use it to write a simple web browser. Kent recently added support for QUiLoader to the bindings and as a result, I can use the QWebView designer plugin to make things simple. The result is a basic web browser in less than 10 lines of javascript: Read More

The time to paint easter eggs has not come yet. It will though, in about half an hour. Also I don't really know why I'll do it. Maybe to reflect on my art skills once more and be happy that other people user their ability to create great artwork for KDE and Parley. Instead I yesterday started something that had been rotating in the back of my head for about a year now. Since I started working on KVocTrain/Parley one problem has been how to deal with synonyms (to a lesser degree antonyms and false friends, which will be done with in the same instant). Trying to check in at four in the morning probably doesn't help me fighting git. But I wanted a branch locally. I won, with only little side effects for the Kalzium plasmoids Carsten made me hack on earlier. Also the first version of the gui was somewhat scary, including three buttons, a lineedit and a listview plus two labels. After getting some sleep, it's down to a label, button and a list that shows the synonyms of the currently selected word. Also having to fix a bug in "The Raven" by Poe, no wait, in the importer for KDE3 vocabulary documents I decided that ember and radiant had to be synonyms for today, as I wasn't in the mood to look for better ones. [image:3345] If you feel your vocation is to suggest me a more clever way of setting up synonyms, make yourself heard. Read More

Haven't blogged for a while, mainly because I didn't have much worth saying. I still don't have a lot worth saying, but I'll blog anyway. I recently became part of the OpenChange team. For those not familiar with it, the OpenChange project is developing a client and server implementation of the "MAPI" protocol (which is really Exchange RPC - MAPI is the API you use to access the transport) used by Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange. OpenChange is the key to implementing an Akonadi resource that can work with Microsoft Exchange. Read More

Some words on performance Nepomuk performance has always been a bit of a problem. Last but not least this was due to the D-Bus communication with the Nepomuk server that took place all the time. Don't get me wrong, D-Bus is pretty fast, but you always get the overhead of the marshalling of messages and routing them through the D-Bus daemon. So with the new QLocalServer and QLocalSocket in QT 4.4 which introduce Windows compatibility, I re-enabled the Soprano local socket communication which is a lot faster. Now the Nepomuk server provides two interfaces: the good old and very easy to use D-Bus interface and the fast binary local socket interface. (The latter is barely documented since it is only intended for Soprano itself through Soprano::Client::LocalSocketClient). To use the new interface one could of course create and instance of LocalSocketClient but that is not recommended for two reasons: Read More

The beta of Kubuntu 8.04 is available for all testers. The supported version comes with the rock solid KDE 3 while a remix features the cutting edge KDE 4. Download or upgrade. Read More

Come help triage Network Manager related bugs in today's Hug Day. Join in on #ubuntu-bugs and #kubuntu-devel.

Over in Salt Lake City, Utah, Novell's BrainShare 2008 event is taking place. This is where the faithful come to see what's new and good in the big red N world every year, and what would be better to liven up a wintry landscape than a colourful talk about KDE 4? The KDE Team here at Novell have worked our KPats off all over KDE 4 to make it great and the Novell customer base deserve to know about it. So I put together a presentation to communicate the advantages of the brand new version of the other desktop on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and since 1839kg of CO2 is not to be sniffed at, got my colleagues Adrian Schroeter and Zonker who are big KDE fans and were already attending to present it. So the interested but not-a-techy introduction to KDE 4 can be found here (Novell login eg Build Service, forums or bugzilla required) along with a lot of other interesting stuff about what Novell does with Linux. Read More

I posted the list of Kubuntu settings to kde-core-devel in the hope of getting as many as possible changed for KDE 4.1. If you have an opinion or any more to add, do reply on the list.