KDE Blogs 

I've been following the development of the Raspberry Pi computer, which is a small ARM based device costing only 25-30 euros. It is designed to plug into TVs, and is targeted at teaching kids to learn programming. I was excited to read today that the KidsRuby programming environment is running on a Raspberry Pi. You can read some of Liz's other blogs for more details about the Raspberry Pi's progress. Read More

KMail is one of the most important applications inside KDE, I think hardly can argue anybody about it. Everybody is using email, and even if some think that a webmail solution can be just as good, most of us still do what we did 10-15 years ago: download mail to our computer/phone/tablet and carry that around. And for that we need a mail application. It is not news that KMail got just too big and not flexible enough in the KDE 3.x days. Somehow it was ported to KDE 4, but this was a crude port, without much improvements in its design. A new generic PIM backend was growing up meantime, and with some corporate support from KDAB, a new generation of KMail, KOrganizer and other PIM application started to take shape. From those I can tell about KMail, as I was more involved into it. As we wanted to have a mobile, touchscreen version as well, the work of porting KMail to Akonadi was done together with breaking KMail into smaller pieces, more or less standalone libraries to reuse as much code as possible. Time, manpower and other reasons limited what we could do, so this was a part success. We created and improves some generic usage libraries (KIMAP, KMime), some internal libraries that are nice, some that are not that nice, and in the end we had something that could have been a good foundation for KMail 2 series. I started to use KMail2 at that time, and in the beginning it was a fustrating experience. I can't count how many times I deleted and created again the accounts, the Akonadi database. But after a while I realized that I don't have to do anymore. KMail2 was still not released to the public, but got better and better. Unfortunately only slowly, as even less people worked on it, and only in their free time. It had bugs, some more annoying, some less annoying, but was usable enough to not force me to go back to KMail1. Then the PIM community took a deep breath - just like the KDE community did with KDE 4.0 - and finally released KMail2 officially. Funny or not, around this time I started to have problems with it. A migration of my second computer failed horribly. A cleanup of the Akonadi database and changing from the mixed maildir to maildir format was also painful. I blamed the developers a lot (including myself :) ). Then things started to move on and KMail got a new maintainer, who is very active (hi Laurent!). And we organized a developer sprint to stabilize KMail. The sprint took place last weekend in KDAB's Berlin office and was sponsored by the company. Everybody who knows the KDAB office, knows about the famous foosball table. Do I have to said that in the weekend we played only once? Yes, people were coding intensively, Volker had to raise the priority of the "FOOD" topic often. Issues were listed on the whiteboard. And everybody picked up what he was interested to do. Work was done on the migrator, the mixed maildir agent, the maildir resource, on the akonadi server, performance bottlenecks were identified and a new filtering resource was created, fixing the most hated KDE bug (should be closed as soon as Tobias Koenig is happy with his work). My choice in the sprint was mostly maildir related work, I tried to make it more reliable, more standard compliant and somewhat faster than before. And the biggest win is that I fixed most issues that bothered me with KMail's maildir handling. Yes, I was selfish. The sprint did not end in Berlin, for me it continued on the flight back home (that thanks to the weather and Lufthansa was almost a day longer than expected). And somewhat still continues as of now, although daily work reduces the time I can allocate to KDE. I can say that I'm happy again with KMail and Akonadi starts to gets less and less in the way of me and the users. The biggest success will be when users will not know that there is a nice server helping them, called Akonadi. For those eager to try out the changes, unfortunately most of them are in the master branch only (the upcoming KDE 4.8). We will try to port as much as possible into the KDE 4.7 bugfix releases, but as some changes required library additions, this won't be always possible.

An LWN article from a few weeks ago talks about Userful Corporation's deployment of Linux in Brazillian schools. "The Brazil deployment has been rolling out in phases since 2008, and currently includes more than 42,000 schools in 4,000 cities. The base distribution is one created by the Brazilian government, called Educational Linux, which is based on Kubuntu." Read More

Bug 83941 Bzr doesn't speak my tongue has been closed. Bzr can now be translated. If you want to help bring bzr to those who prefer to work in non-English languages please help translate at Launchpad (you will need to be in the appropriate Launchpad translations team). Read More

Short personal notice: I am currently in Cologne for a business trip lasting two weeks so I am staying over the weekend. If any KDE people around Cologne want to go for a beer until next Thursday, let me know :) Read More

Today is the second and last day of the Calligra Words mini-sprint. After spending yesterdays first day on planing and implementation of decisions made we spent today on solving all kind of problems that showed up since then. Read More

Yesterday's App Developer Week talk on Bazaar Explorer went well. See the logs if you missed it. Tonight I'm giving a real life talk at my old user group Falkirk LUG about Kubuntu and Bazaar. Read More

I'm giving a talk on Bazaar Explorer as part of Ubuntu App Developer Weeks. Starts at 17:00UTC in #ubuntu-classroom on freenode IRC.

Actually it's day #2 already since Boemann and myself already started hacking away yesterday evening when I arrived at his place in Denmark. The main goal of our small mini-sprint is to address the various problems we have within Calligra Words with anchors and anchoring objects and text running around such anchored objects. Read More

"World must be crazy" say fellow hackers when realized that one day I left Samsung's Linux Mobile Lab to work on Smart Refrigerators. But well, it's still in the same company, the same city. Yet this does not mean I am stopping to dig in Linux stuff for living: we're talking about Linux fridges. Read More