KDE Blogs 

I wondered several times in the past why Novell/SUSE people eg in Novell Open Audio interviews presented our internal autobuild system as something special. The relevant feature here is that both the legacy autobuild as well the new openSUSE Build Service have the functionality to rebuild all dependent packages everytime after a change. A new compiler version, a newly enabled security check, or an innocent looking change to a library can break larger parts of the distribution. openSUSE Factory gets completely rebuilt every few days, and the same happens for older maintained products a bit more infrequently. It's an easy way to discover regressions and to prevent an inconsistent distribution so I couldn't imagine a distribution being created without such "feature". Read More

I saw a nice form of recruiting software developers on web.de today. On the page which appears when an error on the server occurs they have a box saying "This wouldn't happened to us with you? Show it to us, apply for a job as software developer". That sounds like the commercial version of "Send a patch". Read More

Now that it's getting closer, I'm getting really excited about being able to go to Bangalore again this year, for one of the most fun conferences in the world, foss.in. It's extra special for me to get to return there, for several reasons: I get to go with friends and colleagues from KDE and KDAB this time, Volker Krause and Kevin Ottens (yes, he's been assimilated too), get to meet friends from Trolltech (who are sponsoring the event this year), I get to meet the wonderful KDE.in community and we get to present to them and all of Free Software-dom in India the wonders that are KDE 4 in general and Akonadi in particular. It's just great to see how far KDE in India has come, largely because of the amazing job done by a little guy who was following me and Taj around at foss.in 05, bothering us to do BOFs and meet various people, my friend and colleague Pradeepto Bhattacharya. Dude is famous now, as this poster clearly proves, and he has become a great leader of the KDE community in India and an inspiration to future contributors from his country. The KDE project day at this year's foss.in will be amazing, and a long, long way from the 7 person BOF we had two years ago. I'm also looking forward to picking up many conversations with various folks from other projects, Indian and otherwise, again. Can't wait. :)

The so called "Release Candidate" of KDE 4.0 has been released, with packages for openSUSE available. The KDE Four Live CD release 0.7 contains them. I looks like whatever will be released or presented at the event which was scheduled by marketing/sponsor to happen in January will be only used by very early adopters. Hopefully openSUSE 11.0 will be able to ship some KDE 4.1.x release or some very high KDE 4.0.x release (which saw some light features freeze lift).

(I suppose using such number for this part makes the previous blog entry, part IV, written already quiiiiteee log ago, to have a wrong number, but who cares about that nowadays, it's just numbers, right? Anyway, it was so long ago that even I don't remember what it was about, which means I now have to think what to write about now. Hmm.) Read More

So I'm doing a bit of hacking on Kopete and System Settings tonight and thought I would compile kdemultimedia for the first time in ages and see what KDE4 sounds like. And I'm pleasantly surprised. Sitting here listening to Crystal Castles and some random chiptunes from 8bitpeoples is a suitably retro techy soundtrack for the future of the desktop. Read More

From time to time I get overwhelmed by my passion for computer games and I buy a game which promises to be fun. So it happened a few weeks ago when I saw a special offer of Valve's "The Orange Box" in the local electronics store. This box contains all kind of Half-Life 2 stuff including the new Episode Two and the very promising looking game "Portal". But boy was I wrong. This was one of the worst buys I ever made. Read More

I need help on some things which ought to be trivial. I'm working on the KStars Observing List tool, depicted here: Ain't it pretty? The first trouble arises if the TableView listing the objects loses input focus. Then it looks like this: So it's just about impossible to see what objects are selected, and the only way to restore the active colors without altering the selection or column ordering, is to click on the vertical scrollbar (if there is one!). If these "disabled" colors appeared when the dialog lost focus, that would maybe be acceptable. However, as it is now, if any other widget in the dialog gets focus, I get these "disabled" colors in the TableView. This is obviously a usability nightmare; how do I make the "active" colors persist as long as the dialog has focus (or heck, keep the active colors no matter what...that would be better than the current situation)? Any advice would be most appreciated. The second thing I need help with is resizing the dialog. The button in the upper right is supposed to present a more compact version of the tool, in case the user would like to keep it open without it taking up too much of the screen. This button hides all columns except the first, and shrinks the Action buttons so they only contain one letter each. This all works, but it simply refuses to resize the dialog itself to match the contents: What I want to happen is the following (which I achieved by manually resizing the Dialog): Does anyone know how to make it do this resizing automatically? I've tried resize(), adjustSize(), everything I could think of. Thanks!

Last night I was discussing how to load KParts in Korundum with CapitalT on the #kde-ruby IRC channel. It took me a bit of googling to work out what to do, and I eventually realised I'd left the KDE::PluginLoader class out of the Smoke library that the KDE4 version of Korundum uses. Read More

After much back and forth, Parley has an icon! And not only one, Lee also gave in to my wish to create maybe one or two other icons for the menus and such... so now I have 13 new icons, some even in svn already and some more on the way :) (note: the screenshots are not the final versions... some of the icons have already been updated yet again) It's great to see how many people care about this little edu app which really is not that important... but it made four people (that I have contact with) get KDE4 from svn ;) Getting regular user feed back is the best that can happen I guess. Which reminds me: Thanks to you all for making this possible! Keep up the great work! Thanks Lee Olson! Read More