KDE Blogs 

I've just added an idea for a Google Summer of Code project to the wiki; a Language Bindings Documentation Extractor/Generator tool. For last years GSOC Arno Rehn wrote a tool called 'smokegen' which parses Qt and KDE C++ header files and generates language independent 'Smoke' libraries that are used by several bindings projects for Ruby, C#, Perl, PHP and JavaScript. It is plugin based, and the main part of the documentation extractor project would be to write a new plugin that would parse both headers and sources and extract doc comments and code snippets. For each different language the plugin would translate the C++ docs to a format suitable for the target language. Any embedded code snippets should also be translated as far as possible. Possibly it might be better to have seperate plugins for each language. Part of the project might be to write some sort of documentation viewer tool if one didn't already exist. Read More

The student application deadline for Google Summer of Code 2010 is near: So if you plan to submit an application for a Marble project then it needs to arrive no later than April 9, 19:00 UTC. I have just added a few more ideas to the idea page: OpenDesktop.org support and Panorama support. So now in total there are five Marble ideas listed on our idea page: Time Support for Marble More online plugins for Marble Enhanced KML support for Marble Marble To Go (Navigation Mode) Panoramic Picture Support in Marble ("StreetView") Of course this isn't the limit, so if you come up with another great idea don't hesitate to apply for it. In other news we've just created a Marble Facebook Group for all users of Marble and Facebook. Join us! Join the Marble Community!

If print preview doesn't work (no viewer found for PDF files), then most likely okularpart (from kdegraphics) isn't installed. If this is because your kdegraphics can't find poppler (the test for HAVE_POPPLER_0_12_1 fails) even though you have it installed, look into CMakeFiles/CMakeError.log. If you see "undefined reference to qBadAlloc" while linking, then the problem is that /usr/lib/libpoppler-qt4.so was compiled against a Qt with exceptions enabled, and your own Qt (e.g. from kde-qt git) was compiled with -no-exceptions. The solution: recompile Qt with exceptions, or download and recompile libpoppler against your own Qt. Putting this up here so that people googling for the error can find it :)

As you may have followed, I compiled my KDE in a virtual machine, described an example how it goes and even compared compile times in a mini-benchmark. I stopped using a virtual machine later because VirtualBox only gives you one virtual CPU, QEmu as well, and VMware Server only two. The good thing is I found KVM virtualization and learned how to set it up. It is a bit tedious and you will have to create a network bridge after every reboot, but the result is astonishing - I could compile Qt 4.6 in 20 minutes instead of 80.

Today was my last day at AviBit Gmbh where I have been working for almost nine years now. Starting with development of internal tools, becoming maintainer of some of the companies main components and finally designing and supervising implementation of a versatile client framework for our surveillance products. What a ride :) Read More

A couple of large commits changed the organization of the Strigi project. As you probably know, Strigi provides the code to extract data from files and also allows for fast searching for files. We have reorganized the project to be a meta project. It is now split into five projects that can be compiled independently: libstreams, libstreamanalyzer, strigidaemon, strigiclient and strigiutils. This move has been done to make it easier for other projects to use the library parts of Strigi. KDE, especially Nepomuk, depends on libstreamanalyzer, which in turn depends on libstreams. Read More

I read an interesting blog this morning Freedom vs. The Cloud Log where Glyn Moody interviewed Eben Moglen. Eben Moglen was General Council of the FSF for 13 years and helped draft various versions of the GPL. He talks about the implications for software freedom caused by the rise of services in the 'cloud' where your data is owned by the service provider, and the fact that they don't usually release the code of their applications that run on the servers. Read More

Apparently, with my original posting here, I stepped on several people's toes. I'm sorry for that, and for this reason, I've simply removed this content (and also because - as some of you pointed out - some of the things I mentioned were not Plasma's fault, but workarounds or bugs in other areas, although to me as a user they appeared on Plasma). Read More

It is raining massively, outside, again. It does that every day here, in Manaus, what with it being the rainy season and this being the Amazon jungle. The negativity ends there, though, since it takes about 15 minutes, is very refreshing, and everything else here is Awesome (TM). I have really enjoyed the past few days, Bossa Conference has been a great experience. The presentations were generally of high quality, I had many very good conversations over many excellent meals, and by a luxurious pool, met several impressively talented individuals and the equally impressive INdT teams. There is a lot of very nice work being done here in Brazil in Free Software in general and around Qt and KDE in particular. I'm proud to have been invited to come. Read More

Aaron, Sandro, moofang, Shantanu and Diego have been hacking up a Plasma storm lately on the Javascript bindings for Plasma and the Plasmate builder tool. Since good code is running code, and running code is a lot easier when somebody else builds it and packages it, I've updated the Plasmate packages in KDE:KDE4:Playground to 0.1alpha2 and have updated the javascript bindings in our KDE SC 4.4.1 packages to include Aaron's latest errata - no need to update yourselves. Read More