KDE Blogs 

Yesterday at 10:00 AM the president of the KDE e.V. Eva Brucherseifer welcomed the audience of the presentation track at the KDE anniversary event at the Technische Akademie Esslingen (TAE) in Ostfildern near Stuttgart, Germany. Keynote speakers were Matthias Ettrich, founder of the KDE project, as well as Klaus Knopper of Knoppix distribution^wfame. During their presentations they looked back at KDE's successful past 10 years and they offered their thoughts about the future of KDE and Free Software. Jono Bacon, Canonical's community manager of Ubuntu / Kubuntu, congratulated KDE with his own presentation about Kubuntu and KDE. Jan Mühlig from Relevantive and Daniel Molkentin, KDE e.V. talked about Usability and KDE 4. In the afternoon the audience of the presentation track met for a group photo and celebrated the event with sparkling wine and a big birthday cake. Even the dragon mascot of the project was present - this time made of marzipan, right on the top of the birthday cake. Right after the afternoon break the presentation track continued with a speech from Heinz-M. Gräsing from the city of Treuchtlingen who gave some insights about the successful migration of Treuchtlingen to KDE. The presentation part of the anniversary was concluded by Knut Yrvin, community manager at Trolltech, who surveyed the KDE 10 Years raffle together with Eva Brucherseifer. As prizes Trolltech offered a Qtopia Greenphone and Open Source Press offered Daniel Molkentin's new book about Qt4 programming. Further KDE people arrived at the TAE in the evening when people met in the cottage for a delicious big "italian" dinner. People clinked glasses later at midnight when the party started to last into the actual anniversary. The KDE project would like to thank the speakers of the presentation track, the Technische Akademie Esslingen, Trolltech and Open Source Press for their support of the whole event. A special "thank you" goes to the confectioner who created that awesome marzipan dragon for the cake ;-) And of course we would like to thank all the people who were not able to attend the event and who sent their nice wishes to the KDE Project.

Last weekend I was at Gnome Live, Boston to attend the Text Layout Summit. The Text Layout Summit is a meeting intended to further all of Free software text rendering, both to screen and for print. Read More

This summer was a good summer for syncing. A couple of days ago the OpenSync project released their version 0.19 which now finally is able to sync the KDE desktop data also when using the KDE frontend KitchenSync. Previously this wasn't possible because the event loops of the KDE plugin and the frontend got in conflict, when running in the same process. With a new architecture which allows to run plugins in separate processes communicating with the sync engine via an IPC protocol, OpenSync solves this problem. This work was started at the OpenSync meeting in Amsterdam earlier this year and now finally completed and released. Congratulations! Read More

Near the end of Akademy, when it was finally short enough on talks, BoFs and whatnots to leave some time for serious hacking, after staring at the source of glcompmgr, I finally decided that this OpenGL compositing thingie cannot be that hard. And, 24 hours (with some sleep in the middle :) ) later, after staring at the glcompmgr code more, using code from it and searching in the OpenGL Redbook, I had this: Read More

.. but this scripting thread that keeps going and going on kde-core-devel is pathetic. Bah! Currently I am no longer reading the thread and simply deleting every email with scripting in the subject. He who codes decides and as soon as an application is working properly in any scripting language (therefore the bindings are working fine) it should be shipped inside a module. Period. If it creates an extra dependency then so be it. I assume cmake will be made smart enough to make sure that when the bindings are not there the application will not be built and cmake will not bail out with a "requires these and these bindings" error. If you feel that you have to have the same app in C++ then code it yourself. Again he who codes decides. You need it in C++ and you make it better than the scripting version, fine we ship both versions as long as they are properly maintained. That goes for any software we put inside the modules like it has always been done. Read More

This week I've been converting the QtDBus examples from Qt 4.2 to Ruby, and getting the various Qt::DBus* classes working. Now QDBus support is pretty much complete and it will be fun hacking up some interesting apps like bridges to web services like I tried with DCOP. I'll have to get kde4 kdelibs and whatever else builds so I've got some sample apps with DBus support to experiment with. Read More

Like many I came home from aKademy with a little flu thingy and I fell asleep the moment I got home last sunday night. I slept a lot this week trying to get rid of this bug but also just because I really was low on sleep anyway so I had to replenish :) So next to sleeping and talking on IRC (hi Kat!) I didn't do a whole lot this week. Nobody again say you don't need a holiday if you don't have a steady dayjob! Read More

So I was finally forced to switch to KDE4 (again, but this time for real, apparently ;) ) to start porting my Krita 1.6 stuff to Krita 2. Meaning I now have some new and not completely unrelated things to talk about. Read More

My last last blog entry about Marble covered how Marble is meant to be a generic geographical map widget. It shows the earth as a sphere but doesn't make use of any hardware acceleration (NO OpenGL). So although it might look similar to professional applications like Google Earth or Nasa World Wind it's rather meant to be a small light weight multi purpose widget for KDE. Still Marble comes already with basic Google Earth KML file support and therefore Rainer Endres sat down and did some script magic to convert the data on KDE WorldWide to KML file format.To improve the very basic placemark rendering I added some code to make sure that the labels don't cover each other. So here's the North American KDE Community in all its beauty (Say "hi" to Aaron, Jason, Chani, Annma, Jeff and all the others): Of course the algorithm in place can't compete with more sophisticated automatic label placement methods (like Simulated Annealing), but judging from the result it's a good start - especially given that it's not optimized yet at all. If you want to try it yourself these are the steps that lead to instant success: Make sure you've got SVN and at least Qt 4.1 installed svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/base/marble cd marble ./buildqmake qmake (make sure that the parameter refers to Qt4's qmake - on Kubuntu you have to type in buildqmake qmake-qt4 "). make Now download Rainer's fresh KDE Community KML file and save it in the "marble" directory that you have just created. As a last step execute: bin/marble ./kde-devel-locations.kml and Marble is ready to roll ... Have a look at the fine work of my coworker Slartibartfast and see the Trolls while you're near. And as you're there already don't forget to register for the 10-Years-KDE anniversary party: You might win a Qtopia Greenphone if you do so ;-) . Last but not least I'd like to thank Joseph Wenninger who did an initial port of Marble to cmake right after I had commited Marble to SVN.

I want to run a survey about Gwenview. I have been googling for some web based surveys for a while, but it would be even better if I could get some real experiences. Read More