What? Cagibi is the prototype (in progress) of a cache/proxy daemon for SSDP (the discovery part of UPnP). Starting with upcoming KDE SC 4.5 the network:/ kio-slave (from kdebase/runtime) will optionally use this daemon to also show UPnP devices/services in its listing of the local network: If the UPnP (root)device (e.g. a router or a media server like on the PS3) offers a web interface, the network:/ kio-slave will forward to that url on a click of the item in the listing. (There is no build-time check for it in the network:/ kio-slave code yet, as well as no pkg-config support in Cagibi. It’s an optional run-time D-Bus dependency, if not existing just silently ignored by the network:/ kio-slave system)
Where? Cagibi 0.1.0 tarballs can be downloaded from stable/cagibi at the KDE ftp server (please consider using one of the mirrors).
Why? As the network:/ kio-slave so far only supported services as reported from DNS-SD/Zeroconf via the Avahi daemon on GNU/Linux (as wrapped by KDNSSD ...read more...
While most of my fellows at Openismus are currently in The Hague for the GUADEC (after all those who are there are Gnome users and developers ) I got aware that this year’s edition of the conference for users and developers of KDE software, Akademy, is already a few weeks ago again, time to complete and dump my blog entry about it. (And time to welcome next year’s joint event, so all Openismus people will be at the same place at the same time ).
After more than two month with almost no work on KDE stuff (due to broken backlight on old laptop, starting as employee at Openismus and for this moving to and settling temporarily in Helsinki, getting a new shiny laptop but with completely broken kernel drivers for the GPU) I was happy to be able to dedicate my full time to KDE stuff again, by rushing some development setup onto the laptop I temporarily have for work and start hacking ...read more...
Sometimes we have to clone ourselves 5 or 6 times to manage to do everything. It's a kind of magic we rarely succeed, but sometimes we do :)
Between Akademy and bugfixes for the SC 4.5 release, I managed to get some work done on the Plasma Mobile front, and a quick video of it can be seen there:
Now there is a new kind of activity for managing widgets there, a new addition to the Desktop (that you normally use on normal computers) and the newspaper (designed for netbooks and big tablets)
This one, that is called mobile desktop, is explicitly tought for very small screens (in phisical size, pixel resolution has nothing to do with size!). It's based on a big flicking scroll widget, just as the newspaper, because the main method of interaction if a touchscreen, but shows only 2 widgets per screen, (at their minimal size to still make sense)
If you scroll everything around no interaction with the widgets will happen, but if you tap one, it will get maximized, ...read more...
As I stated in a previous post, the swap file feature for Kate is almost done. Back then, the view differences feature wasn’t ready, but now we have a basic implementation of it.
So now, by pressing the “View changes” button, a new KProcess is created, which receives as command line arguments the ‘diff’ program and the two files to be compared. One file is the original file on the disk, and the other one is represented by the recovered data read from the standard input. Then, Kompare launches, and there you can see the differences.
But sadly, at the moment you can’t merge the changes or some of them through Kompare, but I’m working on it. All you can do is see the differences and decide whether you want to recover the lost data or not. Close Kompare, and then press the “Recover” button or the “Discard” one, depending on what you want to do.
I’m back from conference touring (which was awesome btw – more about that later) and Tom reminded me that the release parties for 4.5 are not planned yet. And the release is planned for August 4th, so in a bit more than a week. OMG!
Clearly it is time to fix this situation and give the world a chance to meet some cool KDE people. So go to the 4.5 release party planning page and check if there is one near you already. If there is one then sign up for it and have fun. If there is none yet it’s time to start one. Pick a date and time (preferably within 3 weeks of release) and reserve a place in a local restaurant, bar, meeting room, university, whateverelsefits. Add it to the wiki page, spread the word and then have lots of fun.
Of course it’s my pleasure to announce the first of hopefully many release parties: Stuttgart, Germany on 7th of August. Exact place and time is still to be determined. Check the wiki page ...read more...
Yeah, I know, I'm riffing on Last Week in Krita and Last Week in KOffice... Marijn and me have been in Bangalore for a week now. I think that, code-wise, we've made really good progress. I've completed most of the work to make KOffice's flake library flexible enough that a canvas widget can be implemented either as a QWidget or a QGraphicsWidget. Marijn has implemented a QGraphicsWidge-based canvas for KSpread, and I've done the same for KWord -- and now we're testing that, and that will probably mean we'll have to fix some stuff in our canvas implementations, of course. And Marijn has also been working on fixing memcheck errors and performance issues, notably a recent regression in loading speed in KSpread. Probably caused by the new text-on-shape feature.
Friday afternoon, we met with the students again. They've been doing some really good work. I've already written about a lot of it in my Last Week in KOffice blog, but this time they demoed it to us. Two new students are working on a ...read more...
This week I continued to work on fixing Krita. I started with outlines. When you fix something, you break something other sometimes. It happened this time. Duplicate brush known as clone tool in Gimp is somehow special regarding the outlines. It is showing outline even if you are not in outline mode. It is also the only brush engine, that needs to know the position of the input device (mouse/tablet) and my new API with QPainterPath did not included this information. I fixed it, changed the API and also use the position of the device for other brush engines. That resulted in more simple code in the freehand tool. Also I simplified the way you code outlines. Before you had to specify the area of the outline in separate function so that it is erased correctly when redrawing the canvas. Now I use bounding box of the QPainterPath. One bonus of my work is this one: When you wanted to duplicate some area, first you have to setup origin point with CTRL+click. This was outlined by cross. Now it is ...read more...
Well it's taken me a little time to commit this work, but here it is. This is the fruits of my labour from the KDE Multimedia Sprint earlier this year.
As well as taking part in various discussions, I was able to spend some time cooking up a UI to control the configuration of PulseAudio and the various cards attached.When adding PulseAudio support to the various parts of KDE that need it (Phonon, KMix), there was an important part of the puzzle missing: a card profile selector, and a sink/source port selector. I had always intended to include this functionality somewhere, but the KMix framework didn't really allow for it neatly (I could have created a separate dialog of course but it didn't quite feel right).
The eagle eyed readers may have seen a sneak preview of this feature when looking at the KDE-specific help page I wrote up on the PulseAudio website. So I give you this: the Speaker Setup tab in System Settings.
Last week I said to you that HUPnP did not recognize UPnP internet gateway devices in the network. Now I think I can say it used to not recognize. :-)
Seems like Tuomo's patch fixed the problem and now the Solid UPnP backend is able to "see" my wireless router and finally invoke the UPnP actions available on it (like to do some port redirect and toggle the internet access, for instance). I have made some tests and seems like the action invocations are working well from the HControlPoint instance in the UPnPDeviceManager. Now it's time to refine the API and add more operations, probably.
However, "the world is cruel". This week Nikhil and Bart pointed to me and Kevin some problems with the media server stuff. Besides some mistakes on the HUPnP use from my part, seems like there is ...read more...
TechBase: The primary place for high quality technical information about KDE targeted at 3rd party developers, ISVs and system administrators.
Community: The working area for the KDE community. It provides a place for sharing information within the community and coordinating community teams.
UserBase: The home for KDE users and enthusiasts. It provides high quality information for end users on how to use KDE applications.
So TechBase is a source of mostly technical information. This includes step-by-step howtos for all sorts of KDE development as well as the feature plans and schedules for KDE releases and so forth. It’s mainly static content. Think of a howto for a Plasma Widget or a howto for building KDE. The content usually is valid for a long time, mostly even for years. For those of you longer in the KDE project, TechBase ...read more...
With my last entry, I announced the start of the work for an OCS library for the KDE Community Forums. Today I’d like to blog again about the recent developments.
First of all, now there isn’t one, but two Python modules:
ocslib, a pure Python module that can be used to interface with OCS-based forum systems;
ocslibkde, a PyKDE4 based module that can be used to interface with OCS-based forum system in KDE applications.
Currently ocslib supports reading and posting, while ocslibkde only reading (as of now). Both can be retrieved from the kde-forum-mods repository under the ocs-client subdirectory. The Python lib needs unit-testing, then I’ll be able to push a tarball soon for people to test (but you can always check out the Git repository). With regards to the PyKDE4 library, I plan on making a proof-of-concept plasmoid soon that shows how to use the API.
Speaking of API, here are some examples using ocslib:
>>> from ocslib import service# Connect to OCS >>> ocs_service = ocslib.service.OCService("http://www.example.com") ...read more...
This might surprise you: Adding a reimplementation of a base class virtual function to a derived class might be binary incompatible. Here’s why.
Assume you have the following classes in a library that maintains binary compatibility across releases:
// release 1.0 struct base { virtual f() {} }; struct derived : base {}; // doesn't reimplement base::f()
And in an application using the above library:
derived d; d.f(); // ok, calls base::f()
Q: Is d.f() a virtual function call? A: No. Not if your compiler is any good.
When the compiler can prove the dynamic type of an object, it will resolve the polymorphic calls at compile time. In other words: It will de-virtualise the call.
In our case, the compiler can prove that d‘s dynamic type is derived, so it just inserts the function call to base::f(). Don’t believe me? Ask your compiler:
struct base { virtual ~base(); virtual void f() const; };
For everyone that only knows my Twitter account @ademmer: I use to blog with the same account name on the free microblogging service Identi.ca, but here solely in English and only about Linux/KDE related topics. Follow me and end the mess of this account having only three followers until now!
Don’t be afraid having to install new software: Most Twitter-Clients can already deal with Identi.ca. KDE Users may use the excellent Choqok for example!
For quite a while there have been a lot of different softwares which let you connect an IRC client to them, so that you can always be online (like in irssi) but also enjoy all the benefits of a GUI client (like Konversation, Xchat, etc)… They’re a nice happy medium between the two extremes, and are generally regarded as a Good Thing. And indeed, they are. I run irssi and connect to it using konversation via a module called irssiproxy. (/load proxy, on any distro package should work fine as its an official module)
But what I lack is a bouncer for non-IRC modes of communication: AIM, MSN, XMPP and Yahoo! primarily. I have yet to find one… yes, there is bitlbee, which can be used just fine through any number of BNCs, but I want to be able to use Kopete for that. IRC queries for everyone and their dog simply don’t "work" for me… it becomes hard to manage in Konversation, and Kopete’s UI seems better suited, imo.
Ever get tired of copying and pasting the same few lines of code over and over to perform a list of simple comparisons?
I'm talking about the situation where you need to convert, usually a string to another data type based on the value of the string. Something like converting a string representation of a number ("three") into the corresponding integer value (3). You may try something like the following code:
void stringToInt( QString value ) { if( value == "one" ) return 1; else if( value == "two" ) return 2; else if( value == "three" ) return 3; else if( value == "four" ) return 4; else if( value == "five" ) return 5; else if( value == "six" ) return 6; else if( value == "seven" ) return 7; else if( value == "eight" ) return 8; else if( value == "nine" ) return ...read more...
We thought it might be a good idea to give everyone a new status update about the progress we are making regarding the conversion to Git. This report has been put together by a couple of members of the sysadmin team. Let’s start with the tasks done in the past weeks:
SSH Key Management itself can be done in Gosa – but the backend to get it live with gitolite is still to be done (see current todo list below)
Integration of Reviewboard with LDAP has been accomplished in a testing instance successfully. A script has also been written to sync data such as names and email addresses from LDAP into both Redmine and Reviewboard.
Gosa has begun to be themed using the kde.org style, chihuahua. Ingo Malchow is brave enough to work on this part.
Ben Cooksley has been working on making some additional forms for the initial account registration. Basically the new workflow will be like this:
User can register, and can use their account immediately after verifying their email address.
KDE SC 4.5 will be out soon and as mentioned in an earlier blog entry, for Dolphin this release has been used to do bugfixing, polishing and internal cleanups of the code. I'm quite happy with the result, however last week I decided to have some fun again and have started to improve the search interface of Dolphin (will be part of KDE SC 4.6).
History
In KDE SC 4.3 a searchbox has been added to Dolphin's toolbar. It used Nepomuk to do the searching:
Although it was already possible to search also for tags, ratings and other kind of data, it was nearly unfeasible for users to discover this functionality. In KDE SC 4.4 I tried to improve this by showing some search options as soon as the user clicks into the searchbox:
Yesterday i tried poppler with lcms2 instead of the regular lcms1 and some pdf give a speed improvement of 10%, the problem is that it seems that almost no distro packages it so we can't really depend on it. So please if you want a "free" speed improvement in poppler bug the packagers of your distro to package lcms2
It’s been a very long time since I made a post, mostly because my college started this week which meant I lost around a week in traveling, registration and the whole process of ’setting in’. Either ways, since my last post, a lot of changes in KWin. Actually, a very important change has been made in the entire structure of how clients are generated and currently things are looking very neat and much more systematic.
Clients and toplevels
In KWin, the Client object inherits from Toplevel. Toplevel is the class for all clients, whereas Client handles managed clients. Now, I could just directly wrap Client and not really care about Toplevel, but doing these things separately enables me to reuse the code for Toplevel for unmanaged clients as well if I plan to. I have always been doing these two things separately, but my previous method was pretty tacky.
Previously: Earlier, the SWrapper::Client object and SWrapper::Toplevel classes were just standalone classes that both used to generate QScriptValues. So, inside the SWrapper::Client::generate function:
Firstly, it used to call the SWrapper::Toplevel::generate ...read more...
Just a quick note, I released a new version of the fastuserswitch plasmoid. This new release implements all the improvements suggested by the users plus some minor fixes.
Code can be downloaded from here. openSUSE packages are already available on the build service.
These are some screenshots illustrating fastuserswitch’s new features.
KDE SC 4.5 is about to be released soon -- just two weeks to go. We will have some great new features in Marble, your favorite virtual desktop globe. Hopefully we'll have a visual changelog ready for the release summarizing the new and noteworthy.
While releases need their time to stabilize, development continues distributed in git repositories and in subversion trunk. Siddharth Srivastava is making great progress on his GSOC project Marble to Go with a major part of his work already in reviewboard. I'm sure he'll give an overview in his blog when it hits trunk. I'll focus on a different topic today. Marble's routing capabilities rely on OpenRouteService in KDE SC 4.5. Although it works great in most situations relevant to me, there are two major disadvantages: The OpenRouteService integration in Marble requires Internet access to retrieve routes and OpenRouteService itself is limited to Europe.
The Wheel of Time turns… meaning that the Kate Project has quite along history by now. The Kate Project was started back in December 2000, so it’s almost 10 years old. Development sometimes continues with a fast pace; and at other times there is almost no progress for weeks. But all in all, looking back at those 10 years, we can proudly tell you that the project is very much alive. Let’s take a look at the traffic of our mailing list:
The traffic itself does not say much about the development. It probably tells us that there are quite a lot of people using Kate and reporting wishes and bugs. This is a good thing The commit statistics for Kate, KWrite and the KTextEditor interfaces look like this:
Before 2000, Kate did not exist yet. Instead, so these commits come from ...read more...
As with any new code, during adoption bottlenecks show up.
For example the rendering of text lines with many ranges inside was quiet slow. This is now partly addressed by Milian Wolff, thanks a lot.
An other bottleneck was the assumption, that it is fast enough to hash the ranges just by their block and iterate over all of them to search the ranges matching a specific line. This does scale well enough for KatePart itself, but KDevelop creates multi-thousand ranges for small documents. To improve this, an internal special mapping was implemented by David Nolden for ranges which don’t span more than one line. For them an efficient line => range mapping is easy and not to costly.
If both changes are tested a bit more, they can be backported in time for KDE 4.5, which will allow a good usability of KatePart for KDevelop once again after the rewrite, given other bugs are fixed.
Following hot on the heels of a week of intensive KOffice performance analysis in Helsinki and a great Akademy, I'm in Bangalore again for two weeks. Not specifically to meet again with the Bangalore interns working on FreOffice, but rather to work with Nokia on mobile KOffice. Marijn Kruisselbrink is here together with me, and when we leave, Jos van den Oever will relieve us.
I'm happily hacking away on a project that was started at the last KOffice sprint in Essen: making KOffice more flexible by allowing other canvas types than QWidget-based ones, for instance, based on QGraphicsView. Lots of interesting challenges, and also some quite nice progress already.
It's the rainy season, as you can see from this picture taken from the rooftop of the Nokia building:
Instead of a boring hotel room with four attendants to serve me with a beer, we've hired an apartment in the Orchard Suites, about ten minutes by car from the Office.
Day by day KPresenter becomes more and more an end-user presentation application. However, to be a real end-user application, KPresenter needs some new options and some new cool stuff. That’s why, I think it’s a good idea to ask for KDE community to know the essential need for them. So if you think KPresenter needs something, please send a comment .
There is already a brief idea list from zagge, morice-net, me and some discussion with KDE community members during Akademy.
Presentation tools :
Blur effect on highlight mode (presentation tools) and add anti-alisasing (in order to have a smoothy circle)
When an animation tool like highlight or black screen was selected play animation like fade effect
New tool to navigate easely between slide (For example if presenter view mode is disabled)
Allow user to navigate with keyboard when a presentation tool is activated
Allow user to resize light (highlight tool)
Page effect :
Allow user to set a default page effect for the slideshow (for a 30 slides presentation ...read more...
OpenChange is an important project, but it does require quite a lot of work to get it all to build. We're working on the process, but in the mean time, we've (ok, Julien Kerihuel with nothing from me except encouragement) has built a Virtual Box image that provides OpenChange all built, configured, set up and ready to try.
) I got aware that this year’s edition of the conference for users and developers of KDE software, 
).
...read more...
The commit statistics for Kate, KWrite and the KTextEditor interfaces look like this:
Before 2000, Kate did not exist yet. Instead, so these commits come from 
...read more... 
.