KDE Blogs 

In Part I we have seen how easy it is to create your own maps for Marble. We've also seen how this works down to the zoom level of aerial photos or OpenStreetMap. Part II will show how Marble manages to provide the biggest bang for the byte when it comes to providing map data. It outlines how we managed to get the default map squeezed into the 10MB package that the Marble-Qt version gets shipped with. We basically show ... Read More

First two mentions from an exciting openSUSE week: the new openSUSE evan..uhm community manager has been finally disclosed, it's Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier. And openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 2 has been released with which we put KDE 4.0 to the test as default desktop. To keep up with openSUSE happenings occasionally I recommend openSUSE Weekly News btw... Read More

I just moved the two Akonadi KResource "bridges", i.e. implementations of the KResource plugins for contacts and calendars based on Akonadi (KABC::Resource and KCal::ResourceCalendar respectively), to kdepim/kresources. If you are intersted in testing them, you need an Akonadi setup with at least one resource for the respective data type, e.g. an Akonadi vCard resource for testing the kabc plugin. Run akonadiconsole to check and/or add such resources and it would probably be wise not use valuable data :) Read More

This is the first part of a new series about Marble. I'll try to address a few frequently asked questions as well as the current status of the development. So stay tuned. If you've ever followed KDE 4 development then you've probably heard about Marble. Marble is a virtual globe which displays the earth. So Marble can be used as a nice digital replacement for your desktop globe at home where you can look up places. But wait! There's more to it: Actually these days Marble can also display flat maps (thanks to Carlos Licea), can show different "map themes" and can serve as a Qt4-widget as well as an application! This means that as a programmer you can use Marble in your very own project as a map widget (License: LGPL). Marble was designed to run on any device and on any operating system supported by Qt4 without any further requirements. You can download the latest version of Marble together with KDE 4.0.1 here (It's part of the KDE-EDU module). How Marble stores texture data Read More

Last weekend I was invited to the KDE-PIM meeting in Osnabrück to represent Nepomuk. First of all I have to say: thanks a lot for inviting me, guys. The meeting was a lot of fun (although staying awake got harder during the course of the three days you crazy work-maniacs!) and it was great to see known faces again and meet new nice people. As they have during the last years Intevation hosted the event and I want to give a quick thanks to them, too. Read More

Lily Aimée Adam, 2955g, 51cm, healthy, impossibly lovely. Publicity shot here. Righteous.

Plasmoids have been creeping into different parts of KDE... The E-Team lately spotted two of them. So maybe check out KDE-Edu to get a real hot calculator made by apol. The gui is in need of some love, but it's already very powerful since it uses KAlgebra behind the scenes (yay, scientific calculations on your desktop). [image:3267] The other one I quickly hacked together, using artwork that leeo did for the icon originally. Being reminded by aseigo to seperate engine and applet, I had a glimpse at how engines are created, decided it's easy enough, so the engine is there too now. It can easily be extended to give tons of data, so I'm open to crazy ideas, if you want it to spit out more data, just tell me. Font config works, but some layouting might do good. And feel free to come up with an improved design and especially layout. As I have little time lately and rather want to get Parley in trunk into a working state again, I won't update the plasmoid much. Junior jobbing anyone? Great place to start, I already have a couple of ideas... drop by in #kde-edu on freenode. Read More

When logging out of your desktop session, you want all programs to shut down quickly. Strigi is one of the programs that can linger while it is analyzing a file. I've done some work to improve this latency and have measured the current latency after some improvements to analyzers that can potentially take long on some files. Read More

The openSUSE News story has the same title and I don't want to repeat everything here, just add some bits: The new KDE Four Live CD will hopefully work also on some computers whose broken BIOS had problems finding the boot code in certain sectors before. Read More

Here's the first blog in my life. KDE PIM meetings are for hackers like a bottle of water in a desert. Finally time to hack, hack, hack and only sporadic meetings. And those meetings about development topics. This meeting took place from friday 2008-02-01 till 2008-02-03. This time I remembered to take vacation for the friday. At 10:00 am, I departed from Alzey and arrived shortly after 14:00 in Osnabrück at Intevation who hosted this meeting (thanks!). Some guys were already there. I finally got to know Thomas who had shown me <a href=http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Getting_Started/Set_up_KDE_4_for_development#KDevelop >how to use kdevelop for KDE 4. I used this day to get KDE compile on my notebook. We left the office at 1 am. krep On Saturday, I gave a presentation about my pet project, simplified debugging. I showed how you can increase your productivity by using a combination of add_trace and krep. My pain points are: Read More