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As presented on this blog a bit ago the central and more important view for Plasma Netbook Shell is this so called "Newspaper" activity: applets are positioned in an arbitrary number of columns (default two), one on top of the other, scrolling when there isn't enough space, giving you actually an "almost infinite" vertical real estate

At the beginning this was decide just for a screen size issue, but with time this has been revealed to be a damn good metaphor that could have been expanded, so let's see what the direction is.

As said pretty much over the place, the "netbook" is not a little laptop is a totally new class of device, that is kinda inept to do what the computer has been used for ages, create content.

The shift we are seeing now, is a shift on using the computer to create content only in certain moments (i.e. work ;p) and most of the time just "consuming" content or creating only really lightweight type of content (hello microblogging).

A different beast, a different use

This is what ...read more...

For quite some time now (seems like forever) I’ve used a bit modified scripts from Techbase: Increased Productivity in KDE4 with Scripts to build KDE.

I don’t know why, but I’ve never even tried kdesvn-build script, so the things I’ll write here are maybe (probably) already present in it.

So, if you don’t use kdesvn-build, and have your system set up like it is explained in the above link, keep reading.

Important: I’m using ZSH, so the scripts here maybe need changing in order to be usable in BASH.

Environment

First of all, we need to add some global, environment variables. You should put this in the script for setting KDE4 variables (for example in .my-setup)

The first variable will be used by the build logging system. You should define it near the definitions of KDE_SRC and KDE_BUILD variables.


# build and src folders
# you might want to change these!
export KDE_BUILD=$KDE4ROOT/build
export KDE_SRC=$KDE4ROOT/src
export KDE_LOG=$KDE4ROOT/log


After this, we are making ...read more...

So let's talk about what's going on in the Ark land. Some time ago, Lydia blogged about raising the number of bug reports marked as junior jobs on Bugzilla.

It is hard to believe the noughties are over - happy new year! It has been a decade of extremes for me on a personal level. It started with me going back to university, which was very challenging and rewarding. I attained a first class degree in Physics, and enjoyed it so much that I decided to stay and study for a research doctorate in nanomaterials. I was very look to work with Tim Richardson and Neil Cowlam who really allowed me to explore the field and go off on some really interesting tangents.

During my Ph.D. research I found the time to get involved in open source development, first with GentooKDE. I was lucky enough to be selected for a Google Summer of Code project in 2007 right at the end of my Ph.D. research. I spent most of my time working on Avogadro, Kalzium and Open Babel.

After that I ...read more...

CModuler is a CMake module generator. I was fed up with copy & paste, search & replace over and over again 90% of the time.

Version 1.0 (AKA “CModuler Meta”) provides only very limited functionality: it will create finders (modules of the form FindXXX.cmake) for libraries consisting of only 1 library. CModuler-generated modules support debug/release configurations.

Here is an example of a CModuler-generated module for finding Sqlite3: FindSqlite3.cmake

You can download CModuler from Gitorious

Like CMake, CModuler is licensed under the BSD license

NB: The comments in this blog do not work due to a hosting issue

The next twelve months will be good to Linux and Free software, but we won't capture the market just yet.

So 2009 is expiring where I live.

The year was shaping up extravagantly 12 months ago. We were expecting our second baby soon. My ship had just come off a spectacular (for SSBNs) patrol, and had won the squadron Battle “E” and even the Omaha Trophy. I was due to rotate to a nice shore duty soon.

In my volunteer efforts, KDE 4.2 was shaping up to be a fantastic release of the KDE Plasma Desktop and associated platform software. I was even going to get to visit my family in the upcoming 2009 summer and reconnect with a lot of people I hadn’t had a chance to see in awhile.

As it stands though, 2009 has been a massive heartbreak. Good riddance to a horrible year. Here’s hoping 2010 can’t get any worse.

You often think “this KDE idea of mine would kick ass” but then you don’t have time to implement it and finally you forget about it? Welcome to the club!

Collecting Ideas

I want to blog about some cool things to do for the KDE project on week-1 2010. I’ve got just a couple of good ideas, so I’m asking you to add your ideas so we can make a good collection of nice things to do. You can either reply to this post (don’t be shy, just post it!) or send it to me at <enrico.ros@gmail.com>.

Sharing your idea with the community raises the chance of seeing it implemented!

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For mirroring my backup drive, central data store for devices, music playing and a webserver for experiments, I'd like to run a small server at home. I want this server to be energy efficient, easy to modify, robust, silent and run customizable free software. It should have at least 500 GB of storage, but 1 or 1.5 TB is better. You can buy very low-energy computers such as the Fit-PC 2 (6 watt) or the Linutop 2 (8 watt). Energy costs for machines that run constantly can be roughly estimated by doubling the power draw in watt, so running a device that uses 8 watt constantly costs about 16 euro a year.

Until recently the computer I used most was a Dell X1 Latitude laptop. That machine is now 4.5 years old. At the time, I chose it because it is a laptop with no fan and hence very silent. It is still better than any atom based netbook. So I would like to use this laptop as a server. UPS and ...read more...

Earlier this year, the KDE team released the highly-anticipated 4th major revision of the KDE desktop.

For a good while, I’ve been wanting to write a KDE app sorta like Photobooth for the Mac. If you’ve never used it, the name says exactly what it is. It uses your webcam to turn your computer into a cool little photobooth, snapping pictures with different effects, backdrops, and even recording video. Cheese from GNOME does the same thing, but it lacks that ‘KDE’ feel.

With the holidays done with, I had some time today to toy around with the Video4Linux API. After a few hours, I had a small console program with Qt that opened up my webcam and…didn’t do much else. I read about the many different formats supported by the API, all of which looked like a pain to write support for. Then I remembered that Kopete has had webcam support in for a very long time. A little more digging later and I found rudimentary support for webcams in phonon/experimental.

Turns out the code in phonon was lifted almost verbatim from kopete, but it hadn’t been touched since 2008. That meant ...read more...

The announcement is up on the dot. The first beta of KMyMoney for the KDE 4 Platform has been released! We started in May, due to an innocent email sent by Laurent Montel, which triggered a series of events that led us to this point.

It took a little while, but I wrapped up the licenses-as-icons with a summary in tabular form. It’s not on this blog, because I don’t know how to pull in fancy CSS and tables into wordpress. Instead, it lives on one of my personal sites for now. It will move to the FSFE pages in due course, once I’ve had some of the other people in the Freedom Task Force look over it. The page is largely auto-generated now by a little python program that understands the labels given to the different licenses. There is plenty of room for improvement: links to the license texts, better explanations of what the badges mean, etc.

One thing I’m quite happy with is the family overview: it shows which licenses are the same when compared using only the qualities reflected in the badges. So it shows MIT and BSD 2-clause as the same — which I’m willing to accept. Unfortunately, due to the granularity of the badges, it also shows some things together (or at least indistinguishable based on ...read more...

Tomorrow Monday is the release of KMyMoney 3.95. This will signal the end of a great and challenging year to me, and of course, as every end, it is the beginning of something else.

Ladies and gentlemen, Sembrowser 0.1 is out for testing!

Have you noticed the version number? It is not that low for nothing: the application (which is a prototype for a faceted side panel) is far from finished and not guaranteed to be stable/scalable/with good performance; anyway, the main feature, that is the faceted panel itself (with basic functionality) is ready for some comments. I want to add that this app is not and will not be a replacement for Dolphin: the idea was and is to create a testing file manager for faceted browsing; Sembrowser has way less features than Dolphin (and I don’t want to copy all of them or port all of them), even if some things are similar (like the places side panel). The new panel itself may be, at some point, taken and ported to Dolphin, but it is too early to talk about this…

So, get the sources and give it a try: you ...read more...

The -440 repository — that is KDE4-OpenSolaris-speak for “the Mercurial repository which holds the specfiles that are being developed for building KDE SC 4.4.0 once it is released” — has been bumped to beta2 now (version 4.3.85). We’re still in the process of rebuilding everything, as there are some new dependencies and the usual fixes and patches to be updated. I count 66 patches still applied; we have started pushing more of them upstream — especially the trivial ones like adding newlines to the last line of a file. Thanks to SadEagle for picking up some of the patches to KHTML again as well — they’re a little odd in that they apply to code that isn’t ever called but that needs to compile anyway.

xz: this is a new dependency, a general purpose compression library. Very straightforward build, no other dependencies — something that we should be trying to foist off on SourceJuicer as quickly as possible so as to make it available to more people.

libattica: Frederik Gladhorn (and whoever else worked on that), I salute you. No ...read more...

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Sometimes answering apparently harmless questions on instant messaging can have unexpected results. In particular, I was telling about Danbooru Client to someone and a question popped up "Why don’t you support pages?". It seemed a nice idea, so I branched off the code (yay for git!) and started working on it.

Well, it took me more than a month to get this thing done… I didn’t spend every day coding, but it was a challenge. Glad it’s over now, which means that Danbooru Client 0.5 is finally available. Grab it at the usual place on kde-apps.org.

Changes in this version:

• Massive code refactoring and documentation
• Support for multiple pages: the same query can be repeated multiple pages (shown in a tabbed interface), kind of like browsing the actual Danbooru board;
• Rating information added to the API;
• Support for translations (thanks to Pino "pinotree" Toscano for the help): the tarball now contains a .pot file which can be used for translating Danbooru Client. If you make a ...read more...