KDE Blogs 

Google Summer of Code application deadline is near and we are still looking for highly motivated students to work on a Marble Virtual Globe project this summer. One of our favorite topics is "OpenStreetMap vector rendering with tiling support". And in this blog I'd like to describe our current ideas about this interesting subject a bit more in detail: Basically all the maps displayed by Marble are based on bitmap texture data. Some of these maps even consist of multiple texture layers. On top of these texture layers we display further content like placemarks and possibly even simple geometries (like GPX or KML data). For displaying this bitmap texture data efficiently we are making use of the popular concept of QuadTiles: the data is arranged in different zoom levels. Read More

And Now for Something Completely Different. Kexi's Easter Egg just appeared and quite magically it's only available on April Fools' Day ;) To try, run any beta of Kexi 2.4 or 2.5 alpha. Then close the app, run again and look closer. Enjoy! Read More

As I wrote in my previous blog post, I've been doing work on getting Calligra working on Android. My first attempts of this used Calligra Mobile, our QWidget based mobile UI originally written for the Nokia N900. One big problem with this is that the scrolling speed when running on android was horribly slow. I think I got maybe 1 or 2 frames per second, and that on fairly powerful hardware. Early on in the development process of the calligra based document viewer for the Nokia N9 we were having similar performance problems, caused by wrapping our QWidget based canvasses in a QGraphicsProxyWidget. Now Calligra Mobile itself is completely QWidget based, so it shouldn't have those problems (it works decently on the N900 afterall), but because of the way Qt on Android is implemented there is a similar kind of indirection going on as with QGraphicsProxyWidget, so instead of trying to fix the performance of Calligra Mobile, I decided to instead give one of the other mobile UI's of Calligra a try. Read More

Since so many students have already shown interest in working for KDE during this years Google Summer of Code, with some already having started to send in first drafts of their proposals, I thought I'd a bit of advertising for a specific idea. Well "my" idea :) Read More

Since I had to announce that Canonical was dropping support for Kubuntu from 12.11 (and then had to announce two days later they were dropping support for 12.04) I've been getting lots of people asking "is this the end of KDE?" Read More

I've been playing with getting Kubuntu Active on ARM. Getting a working ARM setup is a lot like getting a working Linux desktop setup when I started in 1999. It's unclear what computer you need, it's unclear what install image you need, it's unclear how you install it and then it doesn't work and it's unclear how you debug it. For some unknown reason Ubuntu Desktop images from precise don't work on my Pandaboard but from oneiric they do. Ubuntu Server from precise seems to work so I've installed that and installed the Kubuntu Active packages on top of it. Maybe soon we'll have working Kubuntu Active images on ARM. Read More

The first Ubuntu flavour for tablets is now making daily builds. We even got our first bug reports from our localy Plasma Active upstreams. Images are for i386 only for now, ARMv7 should be added when we know it's a bit more stable and have testers. Read More

"CeBIT is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to CeBIT." Read More

This week I've been on Ubuntu release driver duty for Beta 1. Ubuntu has lots of flavours there days and they all need to be nudged to ensure they get their testing and announcements done in time. We only had a few hiccups, some of the flavours had to be respun late last night for fixes and do lots of testing today. Ubuntu (poor under-resourced flavour that it is) also didn't update their upgrade instructions in good time and some grumping at them was needed (sorry, I get grumpy quickly these days with my traumatised brain). Slashdot linked to the wrong URL for downloading Ubuntu CDs so I had to put in a quick redirect to point them at the announcement where the correct URLs are. Read More

As C.Boemann already said, we met at my place for two days in order to fix some serious issues we had with the undo/redo framework in Calligra Words (and Stage for that matter). Read More