KDE Blogs 

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.

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!

Google+ topic to name 100 things that are great about Kubuntu "Community involvement." "I like KDevelop, KDE and Debian packages combined with the fast update service of Kubuntu." "I have to hand it to the Kubuntu package team, they really get the updates out fast" Read More

Some slick new artwork has arrived in Kubuntu 13.04. 13.04 is due for release a week today so all hands on deck for testing, join us in #kubuntu-devel to help out. Read More

It's Hack Week 9 at SUSE, and I'm working on a cracking project this time around. I've codenamed it 'KLyDE', for K Lightweight Desktop Environment, and it's an effort to point KDE at the lightweight desktop market. Surely some mistake, you say? KDE and lightweight kan't fit in the same sentence. I think they can. Read More

It's been 10 years since I joined Kexi and thus the KDE community. I think writing down some history and summary makes sense. 2003-03-28: first touch on Kexi sources for porting It all started at a technology fair in Warsaw, 2003. I wasn't too keen to go but got free tickets and free time. I met a founder of OpenOffice Polska LLC (later renamed to OpenOffice Software) from Warsaw presenting its adaptation of deeply localized, nicely prebuilt office suite based on OpenOffice.org. The office suite has been open sourced StartOffice over two years before by SUN and then localizations or user handbooks basically did not exist. During the meeting among other topics we also discussed apparent missing bit in the OpenOffice.org suite: a rival of MS Access. I proposed to perform some research on how the app can be added. I got hired and engaged full-time from March 2003. Read More

I've been really busy on the job front these days most recently being interviewed at palantir.com HQ. It was a great experience. I made it to the final steps but unfortunately, was not an exact fit for what they needed (I applied for a Quality Engineering role). Even so, I'm proud to have gotten to the decision stage, they aren't an easy company to get into. Now that my passport is being renewed, hopefully more opportunities will arrive. The economy hasn't made any of this easy looking for work but hopefully something comes around soon. Please take a look at my Linkedin profile. If something catches your interest, contact me :) http://ca.linkedin.com/in/shawnstarr/

Bienvenue au Planet KDE Francais, un grand planet pour tout la monde francophone. "C'est cool ça un planet en français pout KDE!" Cédric Bellegarde "Une planète en français s’il vous plait!" Jean-Nicolas Artaud Read More

Myself and Paul and Nicky and Carry judged the entries. They were all winners. They all showed what could be done when you put people with ideas together with people who can hack. They all showed the power of open, collaborative and friendly development. Read More