KDE Blogs 

Danimo and frinring already blogged about Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2007 and I can't resist doing it as well. I have been quite lucky at picking which talks to go to, especially the choice to attend Meike Reichle's talk about how to promote Free Software. She is an awesome speaker, totally in control of her audience's attention. Read More

I just commited a change to the main CMakeLists.txt of kdelibs to require Strigi. There is no code actually using it, this will come next monday (promise!). Adding this dependency now will allow us to iron out potential problems with compiling Strigi that might pop up when many KDE developers try to compile it. To compile Strigi you need at least the following development packages: zlib1g-dev, libbz2-dev, libssl-dev, libmagic-dev, and libexpat1-dev. These are the names of the packages in Ubuntu Edgy. On some distros libmagic-dev is called file-dev or file-devel. Read More

You have been using KDE since a few months and you love it so much that you'd like to tell other people about it? You're located in or near Germany and you have some sparetime to offer next week, between March 15-21 ? Then staffing the booth at CeBIT might be a great experience for you! We are still searching for volunteers who would like to help out a day or two to show people the wonderful world of KDE. Technical skills aren't really needed as long as you know how to use KDE! Travel costs as well as accomodation shouldn't be a problem either as you can file a request for reimbursement to the KDE e.V. if you staff the KDE booth. If you'd like to join us, please enter your name and contact information into the Wiki. The CeBIT KDE booth wiki page is also the place where you'll find more information concerning the organization of this year's CeBIT KDE booth. Above you can see a screenshot of Marble showing the city of Hanover where CeBIT takes place. Update: We aren't really in urgent need for people for the weekend anymore. This doesn't mean that we don't welcome you to help out. It just means that we are short on accomodation facilities. The only day where we are currently short on volunteers is the last day of the fair: wednesday March 21st. Read More

I started a few weeks ago to port the mimetype support in KDE to the "share mime info" standard from freedesktop.org (http://standards.freedesktop.org/shared-mime-info-spec/latest). There are a number of reasons for doing that: Read More

At Fosem when asked about motivation developing OSS, it's learning in my case. I started the XML engine in KMPlayer when in my previous job, between projects, I was reading some docu's about JavaEE, and getting bored reading I started thinking about an implementation. Now there where some bug reports about not supporting certain links, that turned out to be crappy ASX/broken XML files, I started writing a failure proof XML parser, replacing pre parsing hack to make QDom happy. It grew a bit beyond former expectations to also support more XML playlist like XSPF, podcast and SMIL. Now SMIL is big, so that will keep me busy some time, but I just fix/implement real live links. Now SMIL is a bit old fashion and I believe to be super seeded with HTML+CSS+JavaScript or flash. Nevertheless, moving KMPlayer in other directions than the other KDE mm-players, I kept on working on it. Latest edition got the cairo painting implementation. Painting was always crappy till then and I was delaying the real fixing to later, eg Qt4 has this nice graphicsview.. Anyhow, my current colleague Frerich Raabe introduced me with the visitor pattern that, at first looked a bit inefficient, has this nice benefit to separate a particular functionality in a single class. Together with the porting of KMPlayer to the Internet tablet and a thread on the mailing list about cairo compared to other painting engines, this was a nice way to learn about the behaviour of visitors. Two visitor classes are now used, one for painting and one for mouse events. And yes, it really is a cleanup. Read More

So this year I was the first time at FOSDEM in Brussels. Brussels is a very nice city, I didn't expect this. It reminded me on Paris, it has the same french flair and beautiful architecture. But I digress. The exhibition at FOSDEM was smaller than e.g. the german LinuxTag, but there were much more talks. I myself gave two of them: CMake and friends, where I gave a quick overview over CMake (the buildsystem), CTest + Dart (Unit testing and Continuous Integration) and CPack (packaging). It was only a 15 minutes Lightning Talk so I couldn't go to deeply into details. Read More

Today, the code for Strigi moved to a more prominent position in the KDE subversion repository. The code now resides under /trunk/kdesupport/strigi. This is a directory for code on which (parts of) KDE depend(s). The next step will be to make kdelibs use Strigi code for getting at file metadata. A branch in which this work is being done has existed for some weeks at branches/work/kdelibs-strigi/ Read More

This weekend I was at FOSDEM and it was great. Jim Gettys was presenting the One Laptop Per Child progress (video). Strigi saw a lot of limelight. It was prominent in no less then three talks: Read More

Unfortunately FOSDEM is over already, it was a lot of fun. Today started with me getting there at the much too early hour of 08:55, meaning I'm very tired today ;) This morning I mostly was in the Crossdesktop session of the GNOME room. It started off with a pretty impressive demo of Metisse, which apparently is some kind of X hack that looks and works really well. Some impressive features were the customized UI and the 'flipping' away of the screens on top of a lower screen when you select text from it. Next was Jos van den Oever's talk about Strigi internals, which I think will be very neat in KDE4. I tried my best to get a picture of him in action, but unfortunately it was too dark for the small camera I borrowed from Jos Poortvliet; hopefully the GNOME people took a pic, that would be nice. After that was a talk about Wasabi: a proposal for a standard on stuff like desktop search engines and things a user can query. Read More

I went to Fosdem this year, mostly to see people I have not seen for quite some time. And that part certainly was successful! Seen so many familiar faces. People I know from Java (Sun) that I met for the first time, people that I know from free-java that I saw again, and naturally quite a lot of KDE people. One of them was Annma, whom cancelled a meeting years ago and she moved a couple of times since then. So it was good to finally see her in real life :) Read More