KDE Blogs 

I just read that Aaron is excited to go to aKademy and that he will meet KDE developers (and not few!) there. Let me say that I also look forward to get to know some new faces including Aaron, Fabrice and Waldo. And Eric should be interesting to watch (or better listen?). :-) I also discovered the names of some KDE oldies like Matthias Hölzer-Klüpfel and Roberto Alsina who plan a comeback? All the rest of you please assume that we were either already at same place at same time or that I'm simply not aware of your registration. Read More

After Till kept bugging me, I finally asked David Vignoni to submit his final versions of the icons, which I then committed to CVS. As a result, Kontact has now finally decent icons. Interested people should take a look. Have a look: Read More

KDE has had the same splash screen for the last two releases so I think it is in need of a new one. It doesn't matter if the new one is better or worse than the KDE 3.1/3.2 splash (it's all artistic taste), this is new for the sake of new otherwise it looks to users like nothing has changed. Read More

That's the magic CVS tag which allows you to pull the KDE version from CVS which is supposed to become KDE 3.3 Beta 2. Start your build (perhaps with the help of kdecvs-build) and to write your "KDE 3.3 Preview" today so that your story is finished when KDE 3.3 Beta 2 will be announced. :-) Read More

I've been slack, busy and confused. Hence the lack of blog. The one thing that I have done, based on a likely need to refer to it to write up my talk for aKademy is to mostly complete the KFile meta-data tutorial. The bit that got added yesterday and today is on using meta-data plugins in your application. So it is basically a description of the other side of the kde:KFileMetaInfo interface. In some respects, its a bit lame, because I didn't really have a good insight into what you might need beyond kde:KPropertiesDialog in a real application. Maybe I can learn more at Wheels' presentation at aKademy. If anyone has something to add to either of my tutorials, just commit in the SGML docbook source for the tutorial (and CCMAIL: me, if applicable). Read More

While watching a very boring Tour de France remain boring yet another day, I managed to punch a small dent into the gargantuan pile of duplicate, useless, out of date and in parts plain revolting cruft that is KMail's bugzilla area. Now, I remain convinced that bugzilla is a very valuable tool and that there are in fact very important pieces of information buried in there, amidst all the smelly bits, and I also feel that we should be thankfull for each person spending the time and effort to give us feedback, but it's just so much work to keep on top of the buggers and even more work to climb back on on top everytime we've slacked off a bit and let another 100 or so reports accumulate on top of the 400 or so we managed to reduce the pile to last time. Not counting wishes. Be that as it may, we are nearing the 3.3 release, and it'd be great to at least find those bug reports that are genuine KMail issues which are fixable before 3.3 and fix them. It would also be great to give those nice people reporting issues with the betas timely feedback, especially since the same issues tend to get reported multiple times, and often only a friendly "Thanks, we know." is required. If you think you might have an hour or two to spare and would be willing to help with that, stand up and be counted. Like, now. Drop into #kontact or mail me or the kmail-devel list. This is your chance to finally help with the project that was Touched by Zack (TM), $GOD's own Wrapper around GPGME (TM), We put the sin back in sync, Forgotten Attachment Warner with a 50 MB Memory Footprint, the one MUA to rule them all. Yes, that's right, our very own KMail. Don't miss out on this excellent opportunity. Even cartman has recently been spotted contemplating closing a KMail bug. Lypanov has already gone through and solved all ruby related issues. Follow their lead, boys and girls, it will be much appreciated. Read More

I want to tell you a true story which happened about half a year ago but is still in my mind. As you perhaps know I maintain Konstruct. Sometimes it happens that an archive disappears from its specified download location, often the cause is a new version release and the old version being deleted. This breaks Konstruct's installation process. Usually I notice this very quick because I read application announcement sites like kde-apps.org. There is an author who unregularly but then within days releases several new versions of an application which is included within Konstruct. He immediately deletes older versions and doesn't announce a new release. So I mailed him and kindly asked to keep older versions a bit or at least announce new versions on eg freshmeat.net so I have a chance to fix it quickly. He replied with a lengthy mail listing what users asked him during the last 3 years (documentation also in other formats, porting to KDE 3, making it compile with gcc 3 etc.) - and he did all this. A release would keep him busy 5 hours now, he says, to test it against KDE2, KDE3, gcc2, gcc3 and different cases of optional dependencies. He concluded that he doesn't see this effort reflected in the users' reactions and declined either of my both requests. Isn't it strange that he sacrifices 5 hours for a release (not counting the days to enhance the application before!) but then refuses to announce it with some minutes efforts so others can benefit from the new features or bugfixes because "there must be a final stroke for my efforts"? And not deleting the old releases would not even have required him to spend more time... My solution for this problem is simple: Download one copy from his website and upload it to another permanent place for Konstruct users. I'm curious if this has a measuarable impact (by Konstruct users installing meta/everything) on his download statistics but I don't dare to ask as my last mail to him only triggered a response "You are at my PERSONA NON GRATA list." He for sure has a problem with criticism. Read More

I bet everyone running a development version has at least once met Dr. Konqi - but do you know his colleague Dr. Klash? How could I, you ask? He is sleeping right on your hard disk within kdelibs! Dr. Klash checks for accelerator conflicts in menus and widgets. To awake him put following into ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals (or the config file for the application you want to test): Read More

Yesterday was the day the feature freeze for the KDE 3.3 release started and as expected some stuff was rushed into HEAD within the last allowed hours. Now the wait begins that everything compiles again and stabilizes so that KDE 3.3 Beta 2 can be tagged. Also yesterday the message freeze started which is unfortunate to say it polite. It's for sure not the best release schedule for people caring for user interface guidelines, the English proof-reading team, translators who right away started to translate and also don't expect every last-hour feature to be mentioned by the documentation writers in the handbooks. Read More

While Kolab 2 promises an easy installation, I always thought Kolab 1 was a bitch to set up. When I tried to set it up and build it from scratch, it took me more than a day and it was really bad. The fortunate thing is: It's not any longer a pain to get your Kolab running. You can now set up a Kolab Server while watching the evening news. "How does this work out?", you might ask. Well, the fine guys at ZfOS have made Kolab installation much more convinient. They have packages available for all mainstream distributions. Even if your Distribution is not covered, their "obmtool" (OpenPKG poor man's Boot, Build & Management Tool) makes it easy to setup an entire Kolab in three easy steps: Read More