KDE Blogs 

Kubuntu 10.04 Release is nearly upon us. This Thursday sees the Release Candidate with final release due a week on Thursday. So we need ISO testing (and upgrade testing) pretty solidly between now and then. Read More

Did you know every app built with KDE 4 can save files as easily to a FTP server or a remote computer using SSH as easily as it accesses your local hard disk? You should! This is a feature that I take for granted since it was introduced in the days of KDE 2.0, but it's easy to forget that the majority of KDE users only started using it since then. Read More

Hi, KDE 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4 all required at least CMake 2.6.2. I'd like to know how much "pain" it would be to increase this requirement for KDE 4.5 to CMake 2.6.3. Read More

Lukáš, who's taken over TagLib maintainership these days, has just released the latest bug fix release for TagLib, also posted in his blog: Changes from 1.6.1 are: Read Vorbis Comments from the first FLAC metadata block, if there are multipe ones. Fixed a memory leak in FileRef's OGA format detection. Fixed compilation with the Sun Studio compiler. Handle WM/TrackNumber attributes with DWORD content in WMA files. More strict check if something is a valid MP4 file. Correctly save MP4 int-pair atoms with flags set to 0. Fixed compilation of the test runner on Windows. Store ASF attributes larger than 64k in the metadata library object. Ignore trailing non-data atoms when parsing MP4 covr atoms. Don't upgrade ID3v2.2 frame TDA to TDRC. As a side-note, some of my buddies from RethinkDB have been looking hard for good C++ folks out in Silicon Valley doing a MySQL backend for solid state devices. If you're a systems-y C++ wonk in search of a job at a hacker-friendly company, they're good folks. If you're interested and we know each other drop me a line and I'll do a little intro show-and-dance. Read More

KDE Developers may have noticed that the developer documentation server at api.kde.org is down. This is due to a hardware failure which will be recovered next week. That need not put the brakes on your work though, since if you have the source code on your system you can build the API docu locally yourself, as HTML, as man pages, or as Qt Assistant help files to view in Qt Assistant or Qt Creator. Read More

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