KDE Blogs 

Thinkpad T410 Laptop refresh time is here, thanks Canonical. Faced with the prospect of finding a computer to spend a grand on I took the bus trip to Fry's in Dallas. Fry's is a large computer supermarket, I don't recommend it for the cafeteria but they do have a large selection of laptops to browse. The staff are annoyingly keen to help you, until you start asking about the finer details of processor ranges and mention Ubuntu. All their laptops have glossy screens, a phenomenon I do not understand. Read More

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face, Great chieftain o' the desktop-race! Aboon them a' ye tak your place, Coder, tester, or usability expert: 4.6 Release Supper in Edinburgh tonight had haggis, neeps, tatties and finest Burns poetry. Read More

Today is KDE's 4.6 release day. Shiny new versions of KDE Platform, KDE Applications, Plasma Workspaces plus Digikam and KDevelop are available for installing. See kubuntu announcement for details. ColinG says he's bringing "amber coloured drinks" for this evening's release supper. Read More

In a previous blog post, I showed a simple example of using threads to perform complex calculations (SHA hashes) in a worker thread. I used them there because generating the hash of a DVD ISO can take a while, and GUIs that block make everyone cry. In this post, I'll use the same technique to load and scale an image whilst still letting my GUI startup instantly. Read More

Me and Colin and Tomas are having a Burns supper at my place in Edinburgh to celebrate 4.6, let me know if you want to come

Upstream KDE used to give distros a week to package releases, including beta releases. This meant we had plenty of time to package and test and find problems in releases before they go to users. These days the fast pace of our six monthly release and a desire from developers not to send out releases a week out of date with the actual codebase means release candidates of KDE SC releases are only given to us distro packagers a day before they're announced. How to build, package and test 20 source packages in only 24 hours? Read More

Hi, just to let you know, our friendly buildsystem developers from Kitware are progressing on their plan towards world domination ! ;-) While their main offices are in the US, in beautiful upstate New York, they recently opened their first office outside the US, in Lyon, France, where e.g. their main CDash developer is located. Read More

The new year 2011 has just started and it looks very, very promising for Marble: According to the Release Schedule "KDE Software Compilation (SC) 4.6" will get released with Marble 1.0 in about two weeks. This will be an exciting release which will introduce largely extended worldwide Routing support (Online and Offline), Bookmarks, QML bindings for libMarble, official support for the Nokia N900 / Maemo platform and too many other things to mention! With our usual release cycle the next big milestone would be Marble 1.2 which will be released together with KDE SC 4.7 (Summer 2011). We have hopes that this might introduce the first steps towards an OpenGL mode for Marble and lots of other bigger framework changes. For all Marble addicts we have even better news: Google Code-In has just been successfully completed and the students who focussed on Marble tasks did some marbleous, amazing work! Utku Aydın for example created some great new functionality for Marble: An Earthquake plugin which visualizes earthquakes in realtime via geonames.org A Social Contacts plugin which uses OpenDesktop.org to display your friends on the Marble globe. And a Map Creation Wizard that allows you to create your own maps (e.g. using ready made images, a WMS Server or a Server Url) and prepares them for upload and contribution to the Marble map servers. Really cool stuff! Read all about it in Utku's blog! Read More

SSL is a pretty complex topic, and whilst Qt makes the APIs pretty easy to use, there's a lot going on underneath and it can be hard to debug. In order to make life a bit easier, I've written a simple tool that will connect to an SSL service then dump every piece of information Qt makes available concerning it. Of course the aim here is both that the tool be useful in itself, and also that it provide a good illustration of how to use the APIs concerned. Read More

A couple of newsworthy items regarding The English Breakfast Network Thanks to our awesome admins, we now have 2 aliai (ebn.kde.org and quality.kde.org) that redirect to our classic web address... certainly much easier to type. The Krazy checks are operational again. Our API Documentation site is now providing tarballs containing kdelibs and kdepimlibs man pages generated using doxygen. This is a nice companion to the Qt Assistant version of the same content. Look for the "[man]" links on the top-level page. As an extra bonus, we also have man pages being generated for kde-qt (our KDE tweaks for Qt). Searching on api.kde.org should be improved a bit now. We added search capabilities for namespaces and projects recently. And now search is case-insensitive. Thanks all I can remember at the moment. Read More