KDE Blogs 

I get the best e-mails Subject: Kubuntu love Date: Sat, 18 May 2013 12:26:56 +0100 Hello Jonathan I really wasn't sure who to write to about this, but I got your name from the Kubuntu site as a contact. Read More

A repost of Martin Gräßlin's blog Mir in Kubuntu for the benefit of Planet Ubuntu As you might have seen in Jonathan’s blog post we discussed Mir in Kubuntu at the “Mataro Sessions II”. It’s a topic I would have preferred to not have to discuss at all. But the dynamics in the free software world force us to discuss it and obviously our downstream needs to know why we as an upstream do not consider Mir adoption as a valid option. Read More

Distrowatch is a handy site to check out the history of Kubuntu. Today they put up a review of Kubuntu 13.04. "Kubuntu gave me a very responsive graphical environment, an application menu which was free from advertisements and the distribution did not insist I install third-party drivers just to use my desktop." Ubuntu Unity comes in for some critisism though, probably when they post (back) to Qt their graphics requirements will become sane again. Read More

Notes from breakout on Homerun: Needs to move to Extragear no upstream designer in Plasma so hard to change fundementals like app menu KWin would be against it as default, uses full screen blur, no visual consistency between it and dashboard Does not show app generic names netrunner says full screen is distracting for a menu no filters no recent apps Notes from breakout on High DPI sceens: Read More

Me and Rohan and Harald spent the day playing with the cheapo Sony Vaio laptop I got with Windows 8 and UEFI firmware. This laptop has many partitions: sda1 is fat32 and contains a Boot and a Microsoft EFI boot loaders sda2 is ntfs and contains Windows Recovery bits sda3 is efi/fat32 and contains a Boot, a Microsoft, a kubuntu and a ubuntu EFI boot loader sda4 is a Microsoft reserved parition and won't mount, spooky sda5 is an ntfs partition and has Windows 8 on it sda6 is ext4 and I install Ubuntu and Kubuntu to it sda7 is a linux-swap partition Read More

Since there's no UDS we have a room booked at Akademy to spend the day discussing things in Kubuntu if you're coming put yourself on https://notes.kde.org/p/kubuntu-akademy Would be good to have as many Kubuntu people there as possible. The Kubuntu Council has funds if you need sponsorship for travel, don't be afraid to ask. Read More

Here's some notes from the breakout sessions we had yesterday for my own recolation. KWin and Wayland on Kubuntu Differences between Wayland and Mir are minimal, only client vs server side buffer allocation, so no benefit from it for a desktop distro dri3000 is a project to make X do client side buffer allocating KWin won't support Mir, (unless canonical wants to do it) it has no ABI stability KWin was working on Wayland suppport, now shifted effort to Qt 5 support before going back to Wayland work. KWin in 4.11 might work with Qt 5 but not for distros to use X wayland is a rootless X server used in both Wayland and Mir, no use for KWin which needs a rooted X server. wayland has libwaylandserver and libwaylandclient libraries, libwaylandclient for use in toolkits like Qt. current KWin architecture not fully planned but probably Weston as system compositor and KWin as client compositor worry that Canonical might havily patch mesa for Unity/Mir making Kwin/Weston break (more then it already is) Only Weston needed for LightDM then Kwin started same as currently by startkde (maybe a bit earlier in the script) Change to Wayland for Kubuntu about 14.10 or 15.04 Wayland & Weston release every 3 months, KWin every 6 months Unity will have 1 binary equivalent to X, compiz and unity Weston can be run on X for testing current thinking is to ensure Debian's Weston packages are in Ubuntu archive and use those for Kubuntu, might make ubuntu-desktop and kubuntu-desktop not easily co-installable Installer ubiquity-dm a tricky point Read More

Some time ago I got a phone call saying Canonical were stepping back from their support of Kubuntu. But Free Software doesn't like to quietly disappear and I've been spending the last year getting back what went missing. Last week I had a meeting to get the last bit in place, commercial support. A nice guy called Niall from Emerge spent a lot of time and energy getting an agreement from Canonical to be able to provide the commercial support then found a company to actually provide that. So I drove down to a part of England called Huddersfield to visit the offices of With Support, a small company doing Linux support. Their office has a fresh cut wood smell coming from all the fresh cut wood. Tariq is the head man having built up the business from scratch. He started off doing Linux desktop support but has moved away from that due to lack of business, hopefully being an official Kubuntu partner will fix that. We installed Kubuntu to take a look from a user support point of view and found a bunch of issues. The main one was krfb not working to share the desktop, this is important as a way to get access to the user's computer. We didn't look at Kiosk but he considers it important to be able to lock down KDE's settings for companies that want it, I think this should still work but it'll need testing. Muon was a lovely package manager but no good if it doesn't know about packages which if you install without a network connection is the case until the cron job runs, ug. QApt seemed to not be doing what it needs to either installing .deb packages or working with the directory share plugin to install samba. And then he had some features he thought the users would expect like new applications highlighted in the application menu. Then we had a conference call to talk business. The important thing about this deal is all profits go to the Kubuntu Council to spend on things to help Kubuntu. We'll need to set up a Paypal account or other way to pay and a transparent way to split money between us. And it'll need putting that on the website in some suitably clear marketing talk. I'm very excited. Read More

The Ubuntu Developer Summit should have been this week but got cancelled in order to increase transparency. But you wouldn't want to let an expensive hotel booking go to waste so there seems to have been a meeting of Canonical engineers this week anyway just without the community. Twitter says some grumpy things. Well two can play at that game: I've been to every UDS except the Mataro Sessions back in 2004 so this week I'm down the road from Mataro with a dozen KDE and Kubuntu people to discuss what we're all working on. So far mgraesslin has shown his plans for KWin (including no small part of slagging off Mir and the instability of X in Ubuntu) and now Kevin is talking about the status of KDE Frameworks 5. Read More

We need you to test candidates for the 13.04 Kubuntu release. ISO tracker has the tests needed and links to the images. Chat in #kubuntu-devel to coordinate. Happy testing!