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Only a few hours left until FOSDEM starts. I'm about to leave for the airport to fly to Brussels together with the rest of the SUSE crew. There will be an openSUSE developer room and I will be speaking on Saturday afternoon about "Packging made easy". The intention is to present some of the tools we have created with the openSUSE Build Service which make packaging of software much more fun than it was before. Read More

FOSDEM 2007 is approaching very rapidly: this weekend a lot of KDE and other FOSS people will gather in Brussels to meet and talk. There are two small changes to the KDE Devroom schedule that might be interesting. The first one is that we had to change the speaker of one talk: unfortunately Sebastian Trueg is ill, so now the Nepomuk-Semantic KDE talk will be done by Jos van den Oever (of Strigi fame) and Stéphane Laurière (from Nepomuk, EDOS). Should be a very interesting talk! The second change is the addition of a new talk: 'KDE e.V. - The organization behind the project' by Sebastian Kügler (of KDE e.V. Board and MWG fame). Hope to see you Saturday or Sunday! (Here you can find a very incomplete list of KDE related people who will be attending, you can add yourself if you're coming. Dot article for some more info.)

Two days ago the first incarnation of sidux was released, code-named "Chaos". sidux is a desktop-oriented distribution. It comes as a Live CD based on the "unstable" branch of Debian, but is easily able to install onto harddisk from the running Live CD using a completely new graphical installer frontend. Read More

Since my last blog I've been working on various different projects in KOffice. Most are not really screen-shot interresting so I declined to blog about them. After all, who wants to se that if I type text in a text-frame the frame will grow automatically when the text would not fit anymore. That's soo boring :) Read More

Just the other week I was talking to someone that is a big supporter of the Open Document Format. He was arguing that we need to find a way to get KOffice and OpenOffice to open all the documents made in MSOffice without any loss and any change in layout. He argued, if that's impossible, then what is the advantage of ODF? Read More

I read this recent article about Mono on the Mac and thought why don't I try building Qyoto on Mac OS X and see if it works. The article talks about GTK# using X11, although a native port of it, along with System.Windows.Forms being done. Cocoa# seems a bit incomplete. I personally like Objective-C, having been an Objective-C programmer for 10 years, and I don't think the Cocoa libs translate too well into C#. The api looked a bit ugly to me, with weirdness like every C# method being annotated with the objc type signature so you get to write everything twice. Using Attributes to annotate methods and classes is fine in the bindings classes themselves, and the Qyoto code does exactly the same thing with the C++ type signatures, and classnames of the methods being wrapped. But I'm not sure if you want to do that in application code. For example, here is a snippet of code from the ViewSample.cs example: [Register ("SimpleView")] public class SimpleView : View { public SimpleView (IntPtr raw) : base(raw) { } [Export ("initWithFrame:")] public SimpleView (Rect aRect) : base (aRect) {} [Export ("drawRect:")] public void Draw (Rect aRect) { BezierPath.FillRect (this.Bounds); Graphics g = Graphics.FromHwnd (this.NativeObject); Font f = new Font ("Times New Roman", (int)(this.Bounds.Size.Height/15)); Brush b = new SolidBrush (System.Drawing.Color.White); g.DrawString ("This is System.Drawing Text\non a NSBezierPath background!\nTry Resizing the Window!", f, b, 10, 10); } } Read More

I just uploaded support in Adept for Apport, the Ubuntu crash handler. Ubuntu uses a modified kernel which calls a user space application when an application crashes and that writes a report with information including the core. Adept Notifier now watches for these reports appearing and runs the Apport frontend when they do, which uploads all the data to the bug tracker if the user so wishes. Read More

So some money come my way and I finally caved in and bought myself a laptop, after having talked on and off about the idea to Deb for the last couple of years. I bought an Acer Aspire 5612, which is to say 15.4" widescreen, 1Gb ram, 120Gb HDD, Intel Duo Core with the matching set of Intel chips and Intel 945 graphics. All for about 850 euro. The price was right, the specs were right, and best of all is that the drivers for everything are good and FOSS. Being able to buy it off the shelf, literally, in a real shop, is also handy, especially if you are impatient. I've got Kubuntu Edgy running on it plus that other OS that came with it, (for Deb who wants it for her work). Read More

I wanted to use the title "merged kconfiggroup_port branch", but I think I should learn from Aaron, so there we go :) It all started by a bug David fixed in kmail: KConfig *config = giveMeRandomKConfigObject(); config->setGroup("Hallo"); config->readEntry... Read More

Two days ago Miguel de Icaza blogged about the revised Main Menu of the GNOME desktop in the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Desktop Service Pack 1 and how it and the KDE Kickoff start menu inspired each other. In the update section he adds some very familiar sounding anecdotes: during the usability study done in Germany with amongst others Microsoft Vista Beta 2 we also found that most users don't recognize a "Search" input box at the bottom. And that users have problems to find its shutdown button which really turns off their machine (iirc a video with this was shown at Akademy). So same findings and wondering if Microsoft has done their homework with the Vista start menu. Read More