KDE Blogs 

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.

Went to Wolverhampton LUG the other week (don't ask). Their LUG meetings are divided into two sorts, the loud sort where LUGRadio presenters turn up, and the quiet polite sort where they don't. This meeting had the special task of mapping the entirety of Wolverhampton "city" centre (Wolverhampton is a suburb of Birmingham, but don't say that to anyone who lives there, you won't survive long). Impressively enough we managed it, by dividing into four pairs and taking lots of GPS trails. In years to come people will be riding through Wolverhampton using Satellite Navigation Systems and I'll be able to say, "that part of the world, I discovered it first". Read More

I guess many people see KWin only as 'the window manager from KDE', but there are actually things that can make KWin beat many other WMs - features (some of them first introduced in KWin, such as the focus stealing prevention), compositing, tested codebase, handling of various broken apps, configurability, window-specific settings. I introduced window-specific settings to help with many special cases (broken Java apps, focus stealing prevention problems in corner cases [BTW, Metacity until recently didn't have any option to turn its focus stealing prevention off at all, and even now it's only all-or-nothing - I wonder if people learn to live with such problems, or how come], or simply I-have-this-very-special-case-when-I-want-this-window-do-this). But as you know, it's never enough, and there are some requests to make the somewhat large window-specific settings dialog even larger. I really have no idea how I should create a decent GUI for cases like 'when a window is maximized do ...'. Nor I am going to try anyway, for such really special cases. Contributions to KWin core are quite rare (except for people working on compositing, for which I'm really grateful) and I'm only a human. Read More

8.04 Beta is due this week in Ubuntu land. We have two versions of Kubuntu needing testing this time, the plain old KDE 3 one and the cutting edge KDE 4 Remix, so plenty to help out with. CDs will appear soon at the ISO testing site, then you can download (from cdimage) and check if it runs & installs. Report your results on the ISO testing site. Join us in #kubuntu-devel and #ubuntu-testing to coordinate. Read More

Now that the Nepomuk project review is done I can get back to promoting Nepomuk features and possibilities. Today I will show how existing Nepomuk and Soprano technologies can be combined to provide very simple "Social" capabilities. In a previous blog entry I presented the Nepomuk search client which allows to search the Nepomuk data store based on installed types and properties. Now how about taking that, wrapping it in the simple Soprano tcp server/client system and announcing it via Avahi? That would allow us to query our buddies' Nepomuk data. I did exactly that and the result are two little tools with very fancy names: The Nepomuk Social Query Daemon and Client. Read More