KDE Blogs 

This conference isn't about talks and it isn't about hacking sessions. Instead it's about small birds of a feather meetings on a lot of topics. Everything from KubuntuRoadmap to GraphicalInstaller to GettingInvolvedInUniverse are discussed with groups of 2 to a dozen people. That's the BrainDump stage. Then the BoF leader writes down the notes into a Spec which is the DraftedSpec stage. That then gets edited by the professional proofreaders in a room called Sublime 3 making it an EditedSpec. After that is has to be checked over by the most elite Ubuntu people, making it an ApprovedSpec. Finally, after the conference, we go and implement the spec sometime before the next release, making it an ImplementedSpec. Previous releases have had release goals, the idea behind making specifications like this is so everyone can see exactly what the plans are. Of course just because there are specifications of what we would like to get done doesn't mean it will get done, which is where the community comes in, Specs should be generally available after the conference I assume, last one to implement is the looser. Read More

With the release of the 5.0 series of the Linux Live scripts and KDE 3.4 packages being available in Slackware-current I thought it was time for a quick update of my "Klax" Live-CD. Maybe it would have been quick if I would have known the differences to the 4.2 series and omitted some pitfalls and own stupidity. :-) The result are two flavors of "Klax" - both based on Slackware-current and using Linux 2.6.11.7: Read More

So because of events outside of my own wilful control I have been mandated to render every computer in the house booting or recycle it. Now past the fact that there are about 20 some computers in the basement, and that some of them have operating systems I wrote long ago in school I have some keepers that are in dire need of help. So if anyone has some help/hints/boot disks please send them my way. Basicy the systems on the rocks are: Read More

Most of this morning was spent writing the plan for the next Kubuntu release. It's a very long plan as we have a large number of ideas for making Kubuntu into the finest operating system there is. With any luck that will get approved tomorrow. Somewhere amongst the writing I went to a session learning about HCT, Canonical's groovy tool built on top of their version control system Baz which treats patches as if they were branches. It can also pull in sources from CVS or SVN so I think I'm right in saying that it can branch CVS, which is fun. Read More

Today at Ubuntu Down Under I failed to attend GrumpGroundhog (making packges from latest CVS/SVN for developers to be able to get the latest KDE or whatever), and UniverseSecurity (find some trustworthy people who can join the closed security lists and keep universe secure). I did make it to Edubuntu which is a request for easy remote user administration which sounds like it could benefit greatly from Kiosk. Then me and amu further discussed gcc 4 fun with Doko, it should be just a case of changing Qt (and arts) as a dependency then everything will have to be upgraded. Whether or not KDE actually works when compiled with gcc 4 remains to be seen. ServerInstallation turned into a discussion of server administration and why Cobolt went bad and webmin smells, a promising looking replacement was demonstrated. After lunch we spent as long as we could discussing Kubuntu before my laptop battery ran out. Then it was time to look at language packs which are quite broken in Kubuntu (it ships with all the translations for Gnome). Ubuntu does nifty things with stripping out .po and .pot files, putting them in Rosetta then experting from Rosetta to make language packs. Or something like that. A scheme was worked out to create kubuntu language packs and I think I convinced the Rosetta dudes that the way KDE stores its .po and .pot files is actually quite sane. Finally the artwork session looked at a possible new icon set which looks a lot more glossy (a la MacOSX or clear-e). Could KDE and Gnome share an icon theme? Seems unlikely but certain people may try. Of course it's not like certain KDE developers don't have devious plans for their own new KDE icon theme. Night all. Read More

I'm in Berlin for week, enjoying a city that many friends said is definitely worth visiting. Well, they were right :) The first thing I noticed was the traffic. I took my car to Berlin and the first day (without a good map) I got lost all the time. Totally frustrating since I normally navigate in new cities without any problems. Normally, when I miss a turn, I just take the next one and make sure to go left and right one more to get back to the right road. This strategy completely breaks down in Berlin since almost no road is straight (nor circular, for that matter). Read More

Aaron was interested in what I thought needed doing with KDE/ruby and I mailed him this to do list the other day. Here it is in case anyone else is interested. Read More

Since Licq got integrated with the rest of the KDE desktop using KIMIface (nice work Kevin), it's inspired me to make a couple more changes to improve our integration. Now it's easier to link IM contacts with people in your address book, and you can use your calendar to switch your IM presence. Read More

Today was the first day of the Ubuntu conference in Sydney. It opened with Mark Shuttleworth reviewing the last release and looking forward to the next. I took some notes which are not proof read or spell checked in any way. Next Matt Zimmerman ran an Ubuntu brainstorm asking what would we like to make Ubuntu better. Somehow the hour filled up quickly. After that the day was 8 solid BoF sessions, brainstorming ideas which will shortly be made into a specification. In expanding universe ogra and dholbach talked about how MOTU have pulled in packages from apt-get.org and how they can get more universe (MOTU) developers. There is now a KDE team page on the wiki, my plan is for KDE to quietly take over MOTU. The next session was the Kubuntu Roadmap where me and amu plotted plans for the next Kubuntu. KDE 3.4 was perfectly timed to come out with the Ubuntu schedule, chances are we won't have such luck with KDE 3.5 so we'll have to see what happens. I went to the Rosetta BoF next where Daf and Carlos decided on their 1.0 release in a couple of months. The Ubuntu build daemons are modified to search for any .pot and .po files and import them into Rosetta for easy translation by whoever wishes to help (and unlike some distros the result is then open for anyone to take back). KDE packages don't work with Rosetta yet because Rosetta assumes one directory with the .pot and .po files not the structure of kde-i18n which has a templates/ directory with all the .pot files and a directory for the .po files of each language. Hopefully Rosetta can be modified to take in kde-i18n. In toolchain roadmap we discussed the scary prospect of converting to GCC 4. This is a big change for KDE because of the new C++ ABI. Also KDE seems to be generally untested with GCC 4 and is rumoured to break in unknown ways, so that'll be fun. USplash seems to have been stopped in favour of a simpler system just doing cat foo.jpg > /dev/fb0. The Graphical Installer BoF was talking about possibly making an installer based just on the live CD (which would significantly reduce the cost of shipit, and at over 1 million shipit CDs sent I can see why they don't have the budget to make Kubuntu shipit CDs). Finding Packages discussed a program which would be a cross between gnome-app-install and click-and-run, a program installer focused on applications not packages and with fun features like screenshots and user ratings, would be cool to have something like that in Kubuntu maybe based on Kapture, but the actual package manager needs to be taken care of first. Finally language selector discussed how users could install language packages easily since at the moment you only get the one installed that you chose when installing (k)ubuntu. Adding something to gnome-app-install or its replacement seems to be the way here. Read More

Okay I finally started a blog @ kdedevelopers.org. So I now feel warm and fuzzy as I can write down my ramblings and share this with the rest of you. Isn't that "gezelli" ?