I'm happy to announce the availability of a second stabilization update for the 1.5 series of kdev-python, the Python language support plugin for the KDevelop development environment. See the 1.5 announcement for more information.

kdev-python running in KDevelop master

• Fix a bug which led to the PEP8 checker running on non-python files in some cases
• Properly support unicode docstrings (thanks to Alexandr Zamaraev)
• Fix a crash in code completion which happened in some rare cases
• Fix a crash which could happen ...read more...

OpenMandriva Lx beta has been released. This is the first beta edition of what will become the first stable release of OpenMandriva Lx, a distribution built around the latest K Desktop Environment and desktop technologies from ROSA Desktop and what??'s left of the old Mandriva.

The other day I wrote about Bodega, an open market for digital content. It was impossible to get everything into one blog entry, however, as Bodega engages with people in three different ways: as consumers, as creators and as distributors. In that previous entry, I focused on what Bodega is to you when you are interacting with it as a consumer. Today we'll be exploring Bodega from the perspective of a content creator.

Warehouses and Stores

The FLOSS ecosystem consists of a large amount of independent projects which develop their software. In the end this software should be used by a user and we have the “distributions” to provide the software to them. As the name implies it’s about distributing the software. A distribution takes software from a large amount of independent projects and integrates them to provide a working set applications. A huge and impressive task and that’s the main task of a distribution: they are software integrators.

Various software products depend on each other and there is the chance of conflicts. The distributions need to ensure that this all works. The best matching metaphor for how this works is a river. It flows from the spring to the sea and takes on the water of many other rivers. The code flows from one project to the other to reach at the end the user.

Although that looks rather linear, it is not. In truth each independent project has many upstream and many ...read more...

QMake users: public service announcement. If you use CONFIG+=ordered, please stop right now. If you don't, I'll hunt you down. I promise to god I will.

There is simply no reason to use this, ever. There's two reasons this might be in your project file:

1. you have no idea what you are doing, and you copied it from somewhere else
2. you have a target that needs to be built after another target, and you don't know any better

HDD cleanup continues apace. I did like the wisecrack about semantic storage — although it’s not quite correct, since these are drives removed from otherwise decommissioned machines, or tarballs rolled of my university student account before the departmental Solaris server was decommissioned. It’s more like moving boxes never before opened (I know there’s several that I moved house with 8 years ago that are still awaiting an opening moment). In the mean time I’ve discovered a bunch of academic papers I had forgotten I had ever written and a bunch of OCaml I wrote that I no longer understand, as well as several versions of my bachelor’s thesis written in the winter of 1998.

The Calligra team has released version 2.7.4, the third of the bugfix releases of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active in the 2.7 series. This release contains a few important bug fixes to 2.7.3 and we recommend everybody to update.

Here is an overview of the most important fixes. There are several others that are not mentioned here.

Krita

• Fix bug 293708: Cannot paint on duplicated layer
• Fix bug 288714: Fix layer lock after exposure change
• Fix bug 325193: Fix crash if there are multiple local selection masks

Kexi

• Fix bug 325070: Saving new table design for the first time does not clear history of edits

Try It Out

• The source code is available for download: calligra-2.7.4.tar.xz.

As far as we are aware, the following distributions package Calligra 2.7. This information will be updated when we get more details. In addition, many distributions will package and ship Calligra 2.7 as part of their standard set of applications.

• In ...read more...

Kubuntu 13.10

Last week I sat down with a pile ‘o hard drives of varying vintage (although all of them SATA-era), ranging from 80GB to 500GB, which had been used in machines over the past ten years. The idea being to sort out what’s where and why and to consolidate the interesting bits. First order of business on each drive was figuring out what partitioning scheme and filesystems were on there. I suppose if you stick to one OS over time that’s a simple thing, but I have fdisk+ext2 filesystems, gpt+zfs, gpt+gmirror+gstripe+ufs and other things in the mix. Reconstructing the path from two physical drives labeled “Comice” and “Anjou” to a readable filesystem can take a while.

I just booked my train tickets to Brno for the KDE PIM Sprint 2013 this November!

There I plan to discuss the future of KMail Active with Michael Bohlender, my ideas for task-centric communication using KPeople with the KPeople people (muahahaha!), as well as general KDE PIM usability stuff with everybody who does UIs in KDE PIM. And, given that people like Àlex Fiestas, David Edmundson, Jan Grulich, Vishesh Handa or Martin Klapetek are there as well, there will probably also be quite some non-PIM-related stuff to talk about.

Since sprints are mostly “hacking time” for the devs, I will have to find some non-discussion stuff to do during the times when all you can hear in the room is the clacking of keyboards, so maybe I’ll use the time to improve my QML skills (a KDE sprint is surely a good occasion for that because there are always people around who know QML quite well already).

I’m looking forward to seeing so many nice ...read more...

Cobra WinLDTP is based on Linux Desktop Testing Project - http://ldtp.freedesktop.org LDTP works on Windows/Linux/Mac/Solairs/FreeBSD/NetBSD/Palm Source, yes its Cross Platform GUI testing tool.

The GSoC coding period has ended last Monday. In this blog post, I will summarize what I have done during the summer, to give a general idea of what you can expect from a future version of Nepomuk, if my work is accepted by the Nepomuk maintainers.

The source code of the first two projects is available in the steckdenis-gsoc2013 branches of the nepomuk-core and nepomuk-widgets Git repositories. The browser plugin can be found in the scratch/dsteckelmacher/nepomukintegration.git scratch repository.

The Nepomuk Query Parser

The first part of my GSoC project was to implement a new user query parser for Nepomuk. This parser is responsible for translating queries entered by the user into a formal representation suitable for querying the Nepomuk database.

Project Goals

The current version of the parser (that is used for years now) is based on regular expressions. It recognizes a language close to what you can use on Google (“foo -bar title:something”). At the beginning of the project, Vishesh Handa explained me that this parser has limitations (it is not able to parse file sizes, and its parsing of date-time ...read more...

The KDE Frameworks, designed as drop-in Qt Addons , will enrich Qt as a development environment with functions that simplify, accelerate and reduce the cost of Qt development.

Quote from Dan Vratil:

===============================================================

A friendly reminder that deadline for requesting travel and/or accommodation
sponsorship from e.V. is in 6 days, on October 1st, so please register on
sprints.kde.org if you haven’t done so yet.

Also if you want to have your accommodation arranged by organizers, please fill
it in sprints.kde.org until the same date, so that I can book the hotel as
soon as possible.

Looking forward to see you all

Cheers,
Dan

===============================================================

The goal of this post is that the security experts out there find flaws in our design so we could improve the security of KDE Connect, which is an important point. Probably this will get too technical if you don’t know what RSA keys are, so proceed under your own responsibility .

The first thing we need in KDE Connect is the discovery of other devices. At the moment we provide a single backend that uses network UDP broadcast to achieve this. When a devices connects to a new network, it sends a broadcast message with its unique ID and name and how reach it (that is: ip and port). Other devices will react to that broadcast sending back their own information, so both devices will know each other.  (Note: We tried Avahi instead of a manual UDP broadcast, but finally we didn’t use it because we found two main problems: the Android implementation is of extreme poor quality, plus multicast is sometimes blocked by routers ).

At this point the ...read more...

Is it possible to convey an idea comprehensively  in 5 minutes? The Frismakers movement seems to think so. I had a chance to try it at the recent Frismakers Festival in Berlin, where I presented on how we apply the Open Source way to build Endocode and its corporate culture. This was a challenge for the five minute format because it is just not a trivial idea.

The question I raised in the talk was how experienced Open Source contributors would design a company. When asked about what motivates them, contributors often say it is the sense of creative accomplishment and working with others that share their interests. When we started Endocode, we wanted to retain and channel that kind of intrinsic motivation. While others are searching for the Open Source business model, we wanted to create a business that allowed us to work in the Open Source Way, a place where contributors like us would want to work. Among other things, ...read more...

Hello everybody!

It’s been a while since my last post, and it’s about time i tell you some of the progress on the kmix2 project. At last, kmix has now multimedia players support. For now, all major mpris-enabled audio players are ready and stable. Supported players for now are: Amarok, VLC and Clementine! I’ve having some thoughts about the libraries needed to support them. First thought was to create a generic mpris library and call every player using its respected dbus path. That seemed a little inconvenient, as long as differnt players support different/or unique features that other players don’t. That said, at some point we would need a different class for amarok, an other class for vlc etc supporting those features. The best idea (so far) was to create a different class for every player, in which I code its mpris implementations plus all the other features via dbus. All these classes are exposed to a central class by the name «Players», so everybody who wants multimedia players support can just create a Players class instance in his/her code ...read more...

Find out 10 reasons why you should try Krusader, a twin-pane file manager that might be faster than Dolphin on older computers or just a better match for your computing habits.

Today I run into a strange error where I was not able anymore to create new VMs with virt-manager: I always got an input/output error when I tried to start the machine after installation.

A look into /var/log/syslog showed quite some errors on the dm-device – note that my VMs disks usually are on logical volumes.

The fix is pretty easy: when you create the disk and thus the LV for the virtual machine, make sure you tell virt-manager that it should allocate the entire disk right from the start. ...read more...

Finally, Amarok 2 has been released. The 1.x series were the champions on music management (on BSD and Linux) and playing during KDE 3.x time. Actually, it was preferred on all desktop environments, shells or plain windows managers.

Amarok 2

As always, let's begin by how it looks the first time you run it, in this regard Amarok has definitively improved, the old wizard ...read more...

For those interested in the progress of KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 2, I’ve recorded a demo video which shows a few aspects of the current state of development of the upcoming version of your favourite Desktop.

The demo video shows the new Plasma shell running, including a panel with the task manager. It shows a demo applet doing some OpenGL tricks. The Kwin window manager and compositor is running in its Qt5 / Frameworks 5 incarnation, and there’s konsole, which has also already been ported to Frameworks 5.

Of course, all the usual warnings apply: This is a very early state of development, many things are missing, unstable or do not perform well yet. There’s also a fair bit of user interface cleanup and streamlining to be expected.

We are just about to enter a state where the desktop becomes dogfoodable, so we can use it ourselves regularly and find and iron out all kinds of bugs. The good news is of course that this ...read more...

We released the first stable version of plasma-nm today, but that was not the only thing I was working on during the last (3) months. I was working on my GSoC project and because GSoC almost ends I would like to show you my results. My GSoC project has two parts, the first part is network applet optimized for Plasma active and the second is active settings for configuring network connections.

Applet

The first idea was to have two versions of plasma-nm applet, one version for desktop and one for plasma active, but we had a session/discussion at the Akademy with Thomas and Bjorn and we came up with the perfect design which is suitable for both parties. No additional changes are needed to make the applet easily usable on Plasma active.

Some screenshots from Plasma active running on Nexus 7

Active settings

My focus in this GSoC was especially the network active settings, ...read more...