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Ubuntu Developer Summit is happening in cloudy Florida. The Kubuntu team have been busy talking about how to make a rock solid LTS release for Precise Pangolin that can be supported for 5 years.

Starting with version 2.8.6 CMake supports what is known as automoc, i.e. automatic handling of moc when using Qt4.

This article is not directly KDE-related, so you might want to skip it. But if you’re interested in a cool project simplifying the way software is distributed on Linux, read on!

At time, if you develop a new application “Foo”, you as an upstream developer let other experienced people distribute your application in Linux-Distribution X through a package. Packaging an application is not as easy as some people think, a package of high quality requires some work. And the package wants to be maintained. The upstream -> downstream way we have at time works very nice, although there are some problems:

• It takes time for downstream people (packagers) to package a new bugfix release / a new major upstream release
• If a distribution is frozen (=stable), new upstream major releases aren’t sent to the archives anymore, so users will use an outdated version of an application
• Some stuff is just not packaged, think of proprietary software as an example. But also free software needs someone to step in an package the stuff.
• There ...read more...

We are proud to announce the immediate release of Kdenlive 0.8.2. We encourage all users to upgrade.

For this release, we did put a lot of energy into bug fixing and stability (more than 140 issues solved) to bring you a better editing experience. We have solved a lot of project corruption issues, and the introduction of the automatic backup feature means you should hopefully enjoy Kdenlive better than ever!

Among the features improvements, the proxy clips (clips replacing the original ones when editing a format that is too slow to edit, for example AVCHD) should work fine now, HDMI capture should also be improved (feedback welcome) and some GUI multi threading should make operations a bit smoother.

As usual, we also benefit from the latest improvements in MLT, a new version (0.7.6) was released today that improves stability and fixes important issues for users of non english locale.

We are also getting closer to the KDE community, and the first step was to start a documentation effort, which means Kdenlive is now distributed with ...read more...

At KDAB we spend all of our time working with Qt. As with any software development, much of that time ends up being focused on understanding, debugging, profiling and bug fixing rather than implementing new functionality.

With the blessing of the Gentoo KDE team, I have recently filed the request for stabilization of KDE 4.7.2, which means Gentoo stable users will see the upgrade sometime in the coming weeks, after the testing and the resulting bugfixing has completed.
In general the upgrade from 4.6.5 to 4.7.2 should be easy and bring quite some advantages; we're really happy with most of KDE 4.7.2 here. In particular also many quirks of the graphics acceleration have been ironed out.
However, there is one Big Thing happening with the upgrade: While the stable version of the KDE PIM applications (kontact, kmail, korganizer, ...) so far was still 4.4.11.1, we will try to stabilize KDE PIM 4.7.2 now. (Not my idea.) This is a major upgrade with potential for major breakage, especially since many people think that KDE PIM 4.7.2 has not even reached beta quality yet.
Why are we doing this, you may ask? Well, the big problem is, the upstream KDE PIM developers consider version 4.4.11.1 obsolete and unsupported. The first regression has appeared (see Gentoo bug 382411 ...read more...

Following the release of phonon 4.5.1, I’ve got another bit of news. libqzeitgeist 0.8.0 was tagged and released earlier today.

As usual, you can get it from the KDE Infrastructure.

Big Ben by Hari_Menon @Flickr

For those not in the know, Zeitgeist can be thought of as the concept of your web browser history, extended to everything on your desktop. Conversations you had, videos you watched, documents you edited, etc. I wrote a pretty lengthy explanation of it some time ago.

libqzeigeist provides a Qt interface to the Zeitgeist DBus API. Since Zeitgeist’s “native” client API is written in python, this isn’t just some simple wrapper around a bunch of C code as one might expect from other glib-based projects.

Going beyond being a simple wrapper, libqzeitgeist 0.8 introduces some exciting new features that you won’t find in 0.7. For starters, there is the LogModel class. It is a QAbstractItemModel that ...read more...

I have just converted master branch to contain the Plasma NM code for NM-0.9 ported to libnm-qt and libmm-qt. The branch compiles but I have not tested it yet, I will do it tomorrow (it's very late at night here in Brasil).

Anybody willing to help to stabilize this version do the following:

1. Compile libmm-qt and libnm-qt in this order (libmm-qt is a dependency of libnm-qt). Update 27/10/2011: read new instructions:

. git clone git://anongit.kde.org/clones/kde-workspace/iliakats/libnm-qt.git
. mkdir libnm-qt/{libnm-qt_build,libmm-qt_build}
. cd libnm-qt/libmm-qt_build
. cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ../libmm-qt
. make && make install

. cd ../libnm-qt_build
. cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ../libnm-qt
. make && make install

2. Compile Plasma NM's master branch:

. git clone git://anongit.kde.org/networkmanagement
. mkdir networkmanagement_build
. cd networkmanagement_build
. cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ../networkmanagement
. make && make install

Have fun... or not :-)

Software Description: - kde4libs: KDE 4 core applications and libraries Details: Tim Brown discovered that KSSL in KDE-Libs did not properly perform input validation when displaying the common name for an SSL certificate.

This Monday I started a dream job at KDE e.V.'s office in Berlin. Yes, I'm now a full time KDE developer o/

Our college offered us sponsored internship abroad in a country and company of our choosing. Long story short - I chose KDE. I've been working on KDE-Telepathy since this January, working mainly on the contact list part. Not too long ago I also wrote an integration module for KDE, which sits inside kded4 and just watches the system for various events and acts on them. So for example your presence is now set to 'Away' if you're idle for some (configurable) time. Or you can now use 'Now playing..' presence plugin, this currently sets 'Now listening to %SONG by %ARTIST from %ALBUM' as your presence message, reading data from the current playing mpris-enabled media player (tested are Amarok and Clementine). The string is not yet configurable, but will be, don't worry. And the integration module also handles all your connection errors, so it's now a mandatory component for KDE-Telepathy suite (without it you won't see any errors...and they ...read more...

What is padding?

Padding refers to the space between a border and an item, and between items. For simplicity we'll call padding, margins and spacing the same thing.

There are a few basic rules to follow:

Leaving room to breathe

If text or an icon ever touches the border it immediately looks wrong, visually you can't tell if something has been cropped, and it just looks generally messy. Anything less than 3 pixels looks cramped.

Being even

The amount of padding on the top and bottom should generally match so things look centred, and with even spacing each side. There are exceptions to this rule, but generally only when it is a conscious decision.

Consistency

This is one of the hardest ones to sort out. Consider the following two buttons. Both of these are perfectly valid, and obey the two rules above, and viewed on their own either of these are great. The problem is, if you put these side by side it looks wrong, one has a smaller icon and ...read more...

I am glad to announce the first bugfix release for Muon Suite 1.2. The Muon Suite is a set of package management utilities for Debian-based Linux distributions built on KDE technologies.

This is the second monthly bugfix release for the 1.2 series, and brings several fixes for Multi-Arch packages on 64-bit systems with Kubuntu 11.10, as well as fixes for a few other bugs with package searching, the history view, and the QApt .deb Installer.

Packages for Kubuntu 11.04 will be available soon from the QApt repository. I will try to get 1.2.2 pushed as an official update for Kubuntu 11.10 over the next week or so using the Ubuntu Stable Release Update process. Since this has a more rigorous testing process than my unofficial PPA, regression testing from users will be required. Stay tuned for more info about that if you’d like to help!

Further technical information about the release, including source tarball downloads and a detailed changelog, can be found at the project pages here and here.

I will be releasing the first pre-release of the Muon Suite ...read more...

"Don't browse, search" is already well known demand and it changes the way people expect to use your app.

As I wrote during the last Solid Sprint we are working to bring libnm-qt and libmm-qt to Plasma NM. Libnm-qt is a Qt-only  wrapper around NetworkManager's API and DBus interface. Libmm-qt is the same for ModemManager's DBus interface. Both libraries were created by Will Stephenson for NetworkManager 0.8 and ModemManager 0.4. Ilia Kats ported libnm-qt to NetworkManager 0.9 API during the Sprint. Thanks to both for working on that.

This week I have started to port Plasma NM to libnm-qt, I had to do some changes in libnm-qt and libmm-qt to allow Plasma NM to compile against it, nothing that special. There is still a long road to go, according to cmake I can compile about 31% of Plasma NM's +57K lines source code, not counting the auto-generated .cpp and .h, nor the .xml files used to generate them. Some parts of Plasma NM are going to be refactored since libnm-qt implements them itself. Fortunately, that also means Plasma NM's source code is going to shrink a bit.

libnm-qt is basically the Solid's NM backend (networkmanagement/solidcontrolfuture/solid/networkmanager-0.9) refactored ...read more...

A title that is effectively social-suicide to post on PlanetKDE, but I'll risk it anyway. I spent some time last week trying out Gnome 3.2, and it has a lot of really good ideas that we can steal take influence from.

I think as desktop developers it's always worth spending some time to see what our "competitors" are doing in both the open source and commercial world.

I've shared just a few of the things that stood out in Gnome 3 as things I liked.

Smart use of font colours

In this screenshot, we can see for a list of "label: value" the labels are slightly greyed out. I really like this, as your eyes are instantly drawn to the information you want to see, the values that change not the label. My brain doesn't need to see the label to know that "100 Mb/s" refers to the speed, or see something formatted like an IP address and it makes it quicker to find this information.

The equivalent KDE ...read more...

The ZevenOS Team is pleased to announce ZevenOS-Neptune 2.0. This is the first version we ship in two editions: Minimal Edition and Full Edition Both ship with an updated and optimized Kernel 3.0.4. Minimal Edition includes PCManFM 0.9.8, DeaDBeef 0.5.1, GnomeMplayer 1.0.4 , Abiword 2.8.6, Iceweasel 7 & Iceweasel 5 . Full Edition includes KDE ... (more)

OK, now KDE is 15 years old, it is time for my work to grow up and start looking at git. One of the questions I get asked from time to time is how much code rewriting I will need to do in order to for with git. Thankfully… none.

All of my scripts parse SVN logs and it is easy enough to get git to give back logs in SVN format. Just like this:

git log –reverse –format=”<logentry revision=”%H”>%n  <author>%ae</author>%n  <date>%ci</date>%n</logentry>”

So as a first brief experiment with git, here is the result of generating the green blobs for KDEPIM (click to enlarge):

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Kubuntu 11.10 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops.

So, I thought I would take a quick look at what KDE community “looks” like after 15 years under development. So here I will briefly show off three visualisations with no particular comment. I will just leave them here for your amusement.

So let’s start with the now-infamous green blobs (click to enlarge):

For the uninitiated, a quick lesson: Each column in this visualisation represents the commit history of everyone who has committed to KDE SVN. Each row represents a week, with the most recent weeks being at the top. If the contributor committed during that week, they get a green blob, otherwise it is left empty. For each column the committer, the date of their first commit and the % of weeks in which they committed (of those they /could/) is given.

You might remember from my last blog post that I charted the growth in the number of accounts in KDE SVN. With ...read more...

As part of my job at Collabora I am part of a project to port Telepathy to Android smartphones and tables. I'll be giving a talk about that at the GStreamer Conference, in Prague next week. Feel free to contact me if you are around.

read more

"ownCloud is a free software project developed by the KDE community as an alternative to some proprietary web services.

Version 1.0 Author: Falko Timme , Christian Schmalfeld This tutorial shows how you can set up a Kubuntu 11.10 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops.

It is time again to prepare for Google Code-in. We have 2 weeks to collect tasks that we’d like high-school students aged 13 to 17 to work on. Last year GCI was an amazing success and I hope we can take part again this year.  For this I need your help.

We need to fill this page with as many tasks as we can in the next 2 weeks: http://community.kde.org/GoogleCodeIn/2011/Ideas  Unlike last year we will not be able to add more tasks for the students until the middle of the program so we really need to have as many as we can by the time the program starts.

We are again looking for tasks in the following areas (we need at least 5 in each of them):

• Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
• Documentation: Tasks related to creating/editing documents
• Outreach: Tasks related to community management and outreach/marketing
• Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality
• Research: Tasks related to studying a problem and recommending solutions
• Training: Tasks related to helping ...read more...

It's easy to dismiss digiKam's slideshow functionality as a feature of no particular use. After all, most photographers prefer to publish their photos using the photo sharing service of their choice. But the slideshow feature can come in handy when showcasing photos on your machine is the only option.

Continue to read

So today I had noticed I had build failures in quite a few modules that were based on errors linking to libkipi, involving undefined references to KIPI::ImageInfoShared::~ImageInfoShared().

Normally fixing this is as easy as ensuring that the library which provides the symbol has been updated, built, and installed and then running kdesrc-build --refresh-build on the modules that had failed. In this case it didn’t work though. Hmm…

Looking at my log/latest/gwenview/error.log showed that it was the same build failure, so I went to the affected build directory and ran make VERBOSE=1, which shows the command line involved.

The output was a whole lot of something like:

Had I been paying close attention I may have noticed the actual problem right here, but in the event I merely noticed that libkipi had no version number referenced, only the libkipi.so.

The next step for me was to try and figure out why the symbol wasn’t defined, but first I wanted to make sure that the symbol wasn’t defined, ...read more...

In the world of Linux desktops , Ubuntu's Unity and GNOME have tended to dominate the headlines in recent months, but there's another contender that many consider an even better choice.

At the desktop summit, many contributors got a ExoPC from Inten, but the software on it was quite a disappointment. Meanwhile, there is an official release of Plasma Active that fills the gap. So I sat down and installed it on the ExoPC. It really works quite nice and smooth. Applications like Amarok and a browser make it usable to hear music and do some quick internet surfing. I documented the steps in order to get everything up and running.

Running Plasma Active One from the USB Stick (LIVE version)

To get a quick impression, you can download the file plasma-active-one.iso from open-slx.com. Then, plug in a USB stick to your computer and run the comand

where <DEVICE> corresponds to the USB stick (in my case, this is sdc). When finished, plug the USB stick into the upper USB port of your ExoPC and press ...read more...

The KDE Wifi Manager is a graphical tool to configure and monitor wireless LAN PC-Cards. This program suite is for the K Desktop Environment, version 3. It is the direct successor of the application suite "KOrinoco", which was designed for KDE 2. Category: Software > Monitoring/Scanning Link Logger is the premier Windows logging tool for the ... (more)