Posts 

From the cross-blogging department, Qt 4.4 has been released and is entering Factory for openSUSE 11.0 with packages for older openSUSE releases being available in KDE:Qt44 (this will move sooner or later to KDE:Qt). Dirk Müller thinks that's boring news as "everyone has packages of it" and I should rather mention that he has created packages from Qt 4.5 development snapshot within the KDE:Qt45 Build Service repository.

Time is passing by. Sometimes I'm also amazed that it was more than 5 years ago when I wrote my first KDE application and soon after I joined the Quanta Plus project. And a few months later Quanta Plus become part of the KDE releases, I think with version 3.1. Probably many of you know that I worked full time on Quanta in the past years, thanks to Eric Laffoon and many other supporters, who made this possible. But things have changed, and I cannot spend all my time anymore on this beloved project. I don't abandon it, just realized that alone it would take just too much time to get a release for KDE 4.x series out in time. Therefore I call for help, I'd like to ask the community, existing developers or users with some C++ knowledge, developers who would like to find a challenging project in the open source world to come, join us. Help to make Quanta4 a reality and make many users happy throughout the world. You don't have to be afraid of the size of the project, one of the goals of Quanta4 is to have a modular code, build up as KDevPlatform (KDevelop) plugins. Read More

Yesterday was a busy day on the akademy-talks mailing list. Proposals were rolling in constantly. This is because today is the deadline for submissions of presentations for Akademy 2008. So you still have a chance. Have a look at the Call for Presentations and submit your talk now. Read More

I don't know why, but often I have the impression that KDE fonts are quite big, and this can be changed by modifying the X11 dpi settings. Let's head over to good old Slackware. How is it done here ? Read More

Different groups of people use different ways to measure performance of computers. Kernel developers test their kernels by, well, compiling the kernel. KDE developers may measure the startup time of KDE. So what does the buildsystem maintainer do ? Read More

Collaboration I am pleasantly surprised to hear from Aaron Seigo and others that there has been more collaboration going on that most people might not know about. Learning that Qt 4.x now can use the Glib event loop gives us a lot of abilities to create glue between KDE and GNOME interfaces which is really encouraging. Read More

Well, maybe "The Next Level" is overstating it but I improved the query API a lot. Not only can we now properly handle all sorts of literal comparisons but we can also use plain SPARQL queries. The latter allow some nice stuff like "Recent Files". Read More

The IRC talks series Ubuntu Open Week is under way now in #ubuntu-classroom. Coming up at 20:00UTC is Kubuntu Development - Richard Johnson. See the timetable for a whole week's worth of talks.

XFig is not young. It's not beautiful either. It is still in use though. Even on Windows, there are people setting up cygwin only to get xfig. And that is because it has one killer feature. Export to Postscript/LaTeX in a way that lets latex replace the text in the drawing. That way the font and text size etc are consistent with the rest of the latex document. And you can add LaTeX text relatively easy and comfortable to your drawing too. Usability wise XFig is a killer... Even though it is possible to work fast with it thanks to keyboard shortcuts and quite advanced functions below the gui. I wish there was something like this available in a modern graphics application like Krita. Looks like I will have to learn getting along with XFig... Read More

I'm at II Guademy 2008, the Spanish conference combining aspects of GUADEC and Akademy this weekend. I arrived yesterday, had lunch with my Novell colleagues Rodrigo Moya and Vincent Untz, then got straight into our presentations, which are a combined call for more cooperation and communication between the two Free desktop environments communities, leading to more effective sharing of data and infrastructure. Read More