KDE Blogs 

The NetworkManager backend for Solid in KDE 4 is ready to announce. Since writing the frontend in September I hadn't gotten round to making it useful, but after a lot of encouragement from ervin I picked up my tools again. Read More

You may have heard that KFilePlugin will be replaced in KDE4. In KDE4, we will use analyzers to get text and metadata out of files. Since last monday, you can start porting you analyzers and now I have written a tutorial on how to actually go about this. The tutorial uses BMP as a simple example and it should be pretty simple to port the existing KFilePlugin implementations. Read More

I added three projects related to KDEPrint in the page of ideas for Google SoC 2007: http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Summer_of_Code/2007/Ideas#KDEPrint_--_UI_redesign http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Summer_of_Code/2007/Ideas#KDEPrint_--_porting_to_CUPS_.3E_1.2 http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Summer_of_Code/2007/Ideas#KDEPrint_--_porting_to_Qt-4.3.2FKDE-4 I hope we have an even better summer this year!

Provo I'm at the Novell office in Provo this week. We are having some pretty productive meetings here. The conference room we use is impressive. It's on the fifth floor and has an amazing view on the mountains. I like working this way. Read More

Qt 4 includes a useful class called QTimeLine that can form the basis of animations, it's used in QGraphicsView but is also more generally applicable. I did a bit of hacking this weekend and wrote a class that illustrates how it can be used to create a fairly general mechanism for animating QWidgets. The code as it stands needs some work, but it can animate the properties of any QWidgets. You basically say widget X has propery P which should vary from A to B. For example: Read More

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