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The past month had quite some cool things in store. It started with the Akonadi developer sprint in Berlin, Germany, where we got quite some work done, especially regarding mails. This was followed by the general ranking period for this year's Google Summer of Code proposals and we were delighted to see that the Akonadi related ones did exceptionally well. Read More

The first episode of 'programming in SVG' led to some nice bling improvements in KDE. Aaron showed how to put an SVG program in a plasmoid and Ariya taught us the incantation to make the desktop shine through such a plasmoid. And last but not least Remco Bloemen mailed me with a working demo that hows how to include arbitrary data in an SVG application with data URIs. Read More

Recently I received positive feedback on my program CubeTest. The program is being used in primary schools to help children to achieve better spatial insight. There is a teachers manual on-line. CubeTest was originally written in Qt3 and ported to Qt4 later. Because some cube decorations are SVG images, the Qt4 version needed to use Q3Picture, a class for backwards compatibility with Qt3. The renewed interest prompted me to suggest to add CubeTest to KDE-Edu and clean up the code. Now I was faced with a chose: keep Q3Picture or move the cubes to a QGraphicsView. Read More

One of the new features proposed for GCC 4.5 is the ability to use plugins. I'm a big fan of plugin architectures, especially in open source software. I think that plugins provide a really nice starting point for potential developers. So you can start with something simple and well defined, and grow into the rest of the system. Personally, the idea of understanding all of GCC is just overwhelming. But perhaps I could do a really basic plugin that can do an additional static check. Read More

I'd like to say hello to everybody reading this blog. This is my first blog entry. I'm starting my blog because I got accepted to this year's Google Summer of Code to work on Marble. Read More

Ubuntu Open Week has just started in the #ubuntu-classroom IRC channel. I seem to be down for doing a Kubuntu Introduction talk in a few hours. Tomorrow Mark Shuttleworth gets quizzed by the community. On Wednesday there's a Kubuntu Q & A with nixternal and elite Kubuntu Ninja Nathan talks about Staying up-to-date with what is going on in the community. Plenty of talks on all other areas of Ubuntu too.

The Akademy program is almost done. Speaker notification deadline was yesterday, but we are still busy sorting out some last details and haven't sent notifications yet. Please bear with us and have a bit more patience. We have a lot of great proposals, more than we can fit into the schedule. So it's not easy to decide what we can take, and the co-hosting with GUADEC adds another dimension of complexity to this task. But we are on a good track, and we will have a fantastic program. Stay tuned...

Hearing that kubuntu jaunty was out, I upgraded two machines today. My wife's machine, so she can finally use KDE 4.2, and my own desktop machine. On her machine, NVidia card, no problem at all. On my machine, ATI Radeon X1300, after the upgrade, X would always just show some red dots on the top of the screen, and then the machine would hang (no keyboard, no ssh, nothing except reboot). I tried every possible driver in xorg.conf, no difference. So this isn't a driver problem, but an Xorg problem. Other people on #kubuntu (e.g. "chx") reported the same issue. Read More

Martin Schlander already said the most important things but repetition never hurt a good message: KDE 4.3 is coming to KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop<. If you do nothing and use this repo you will get KDE 4.3beta1 installed soon! The stable KDE 4.2 packages will continue to be available in the new KDE:42 repo. The Extra-Apps repo is gone, its packages merged into Desktop, Community or Playground according to their level of support and release readiness. App packages which have both KDE 3 and KDE 4 versions are being renamed to show that KDE 4 is the default. Eg for digikam, we have kde3-digikam and digikam-kde4. This will cause a package upgrade to the new stable version. If you want to keep the KDE 3 version, install the kde3- package instead of the new KDE 4 based package. The Geeko is a quiet and stealthy animal. It doesn't make a lot of noise. But it produces solid, well engineered Linux distros year after year. Stephan 'Unstoppable Force Beineri' Binner has produced a respin installation CD of openSUSE 11.1 containing the latest and greatest KDE 4.2.2, and all the online updates since 11.1 came out in December. Is the longer openSUSE release cycle making you twitchy for a hit of something new? Do you want a rock solid openSUSE with the best KDE has to offer and none of this repo-fiddling nonsense? Get the respin from: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Medias/images/iso/.

The Kubuntu Team is proud to announce the release of Kubuntu 9.04, the Jaunty Jackalope! With this release, the development team brings you the best KDE distro out there. With its world-renowned Ubuntu core and the KDE 4.2 desktop, Kubuntu 9.04 gives users a well-rounded, feature-filled and elegant desktop. Read More