Category: KDE

There was a complaint that it wasn’t possible to run a KDE 4 session, so I thought that it isn’t that bad and tried.
I’m now typing this from a KDE 4 session, here’s my findings: composite works well, I do have transparent windows.
Konsole also works well. Kate also works, I don’t see any immediate problems (above all, it certainly doesn’t crash
on my machine). Marble looks nice (not a major component, but still). Plasma has some applets on the desktop (I don’t
need much, but no problems there). A basic taskbar provides access to open applications. The only Xinerama glitch
I’m seeing is that menues opened appear on the other screen. Not a big deal,
certainly nothing that makes working impossible. KRunner doesn’t start at the moment, but as that one always worked
well for me, I doubt that it’s a long-standing problem, and I assume it’ll be fixed quickly. I’m running kontact
from my KDE3 session, though. (I love my mailbox and I’m not sure how well PIM works already. :-)) Okular, dolphin
and the likes show no problems. And according to powertop, it doesn not even screw up your battery life, it seems.

So Dirk will be tagging beta2 today, and that’s really the time where a lot of the developers should at least
parttime use KDE4. Otherwise we’ll never have it stable. And don’t we all love seeing progress? Do we even remember
having the “Ah that one is fixed now, too” feeling every single day? :-)

Arrived in Bonn / St. Augustin yesterday, where on Saturday morning FrOSCon
kicked off. This is the second time the local user group organises this conference and I must
say that this is certainly one of the most relaxed conferences I’ve ever been to. Highlights include good
drinks to keep you running (Go Mate!), couches,
wifi available already before the conference started,
good beer and a lot of nice gimmicks such as the bouncy castle. The atmosphere is very friendly, quite
some KDE-related peeps here, especially Amarok and KDE friendly projects such as Kubuntu, Sidux, Skolelinux
FreeBSD and inevitable the FSFE. The conference is quite a bit more busy than it was last year, and last
one of the gods that make the weather decided to put up sunny, not to hot and above all dry skies on top
of this conference. During my idle time, I talked a bit with Olaf about using Javascript in website and how
this can be done in a way so it’s accessible for everyone. I’ll probably work a bit on websites during this
weekend to make it so. Talk is cheap.

Friday, after arrival, we took on the task of making sure the BBQ works and the beer is of high quality,
I’m glad to announce that both failed none of our tests, so we were rather safe for saturday night — same exercise.
photos. My talk on Saturday about KDE4 went really
well, a double lecture hall packed with people
(probably the biggest one here), the organising team’s estimate is 400-450 people attending this talk, I was able to
go through most of the new frameworks (“pillars”), such as Solid, Phonon, Plasma, Oxygen et al, talk a bit about
our community, demo what’s currently there and finally answer quite some interested questions. People were really
positive of how far we’ve come with KDE so far, and there’s lots of people waiting eagerly for KDE4 while most
seem to understand that stable and cool software doesn’t develop itself. I’ve talked to quite some people and it’s
amazing how our stuff gets people to think. I’ve heard the questions “do you think it would be possible to implement
[insert amazing idea here] with that?”, the answer has more than once been “Yes, in fact, I think it’s quite easy
because that’s what the frameworks are made for” — workflow improvement ideas are quite popular. This is to me a
good indication that we’re underway very well, and that we’re poking into people’s imagination.

This morning, I had another talk scheduled, “CodeYard – bringing Free Software development into Highschools”. While
the audience was much smaller, the audience was interested in what we’re doing and received the talk really well.
After that, I took advantage of Torsten showing up here in St Augustin presenting Marble, then sat down at a couch
in the Chiilout area, mainly to finish this blogentry and upload photo’s. That didn’t happen until two hours later.
Turned out there’s a Canadian sitting next to me, named Zak Greant. I knew his name from the FLOSS foundations
list, he’s a staff member of the Mozilla Foundation. We talked about topics such as Free Software adoption (no
really!) sneakers, college drop-outs (see my crack dealer
blogentry) and generally had a relaxed time.
Zak shared some interesting insight in how the Mozilla Foundation works, and how it’s related to the Mozilla
Corporation and how he sees the software ecosphere developing after becoming mainstream. We also chatted a bit about
business ethics. I seem to have this strange talent to always pick the one Canadian out of the masses, good thing
they’re generally enjoyable folks. :-)

I’m on a train right now to Darmstadt, where BasysKom
kindly hosts a meeting of the KDE e.V. Board of Directors. Adriaan is on the same train,
Cornelius and Klaas will be arriving tonight, Aaron as well, albeit a bit later. He’s coming
in from Oslo which saves him one jetlag.

The main purpose of this meeting is — apart from the really administrative stuff such as
registering the board at the court — how we can speed up the process of getting an
employee to handle administrative work for the KDE e.V.. That should give us, the board
some more room for developing projects and looking into the future. Besides, it’s a waste
if really good developers (not me, mind you) are bogged down with administrative legwork for
a couple of hours every week.

Last weekend, I’ve been to Haldern Open Air, a smallish
(i.e. 6k people) festival in the west of Germany. I was with Kim and met a couple of my friends there
(friends from the time before I moved to the Netherlands). We spent the days barbequeing,
drinking beer, listening to music and relaxing. The weather just turned into summer when we
arrived there, perfect for camping. The festival is in a very rural area, we
literally camped between cows (and their leftovers), one of which got a new calf on Saturday morning.
I’ve also taken some time to make photos, most notably sunflowers.

After returning from the Board meeting in Darmstadt, I’ll be at home for two nights and then
going on vacation for roughly a week. We’ll first get on a night train to Vienna, stay there
for a couple of days and then travel on to Bratislava. Vacation time is much needed, although
my travel schemes currently won’t make you believe that. After the vacation, I’ll be speaking
at FrOSCon about KDE 4 and
CodeYard. After that, I’m at LinuxConf Europe in Cambridge, and short thereafter on
another week of vacation in Portugal, mainly for the wine. End of September I’ll either travel
to Brussels for a EU FP6 Concertation Meeting or to Berlin for a week of hacking on SQO-OSS.

Not sure who started this, but this is my place to hack (well, one of them, anyway).

Last week, in Nijmegen there were the
Vierdaagse,
according to Wikipedia the largest marching event in the world. Roughly 40.000 people walked
for four days, every day between 30 – 50 km, depending on age and some other things. Only
~3000 did not make it. Those days go together with the “Zomerfeesten”, a week-long festival
in the whole city centre, attracting 1 Million people throughout the week, with a peak on
Friday, the finishing day of the Vierdaagse.

Friday was also the day when Kenny (our great aKademy overlord from Glasgow) came to Nijmegen,
as a part of his vacation. I’m not sure he was prepared for a city full of people partying,
30 – 40 stages in the whole city and the celebrations starting around noon. He’s chosen the
busiest day of the year to visit this city. =)

After aKademy, I was quite exhausted for roughly a week, and I had to catch up on other work
which has been left undone for the week before. I’m quite up to speed with all activities
again now. Today was mostly dealing with administrative stuff for the e.V., such as preparing
travels for the next months and hotel booking for the Board meeting we’re holding at the
beginning of August in Darmstadt.

My TODO list for the next days includes some aKademy aftermath (merchandising, logistics mainly)
and sorting out businesscards status. I’ll also do some more hacking on the
Battery plasmoid, but
that is really freetime / evening activities.

On the way back from Glasgow to the Netherlands, a 13 hour trip (after a technical problem
on the high-speed track between the Lille and Brussels even longer), I read
quite a bit. Adriaan got a copy of “Freakonomics”, a book by Steven D. Levitt and Stepen J.
Dubner, which I am now reading (he finished it while I was snoring 40m under the sea in the
Chunnel).

One of the chapters deals with the question “Why do drug dealers still live with their
moms?”
The answer to this question is that most drug-dealers can hardly make a living from their
“earnings” and that their incentive to choose dealing crack as their profession is the
perspective of becoming a top-notch drug dealer (small chance) and then earning a lot of
money. Of course, the chance to die in the process is much higher than actually succeeding.
(The chance to die while dealing crack is even considerably higher than the chance to die
when you’re on death row in a texan prison.)
The reason for choosing crack-dealer instead of “some other well-paid profession” is that
succeeding in crack-dealing is quite visible in their environment, whereas famous writers
(for example) have close to no visibility — hence more choose to get into the drugs
business.

Now you wonder what this has to do with Free Software? I think there’s an analogy that also
applies to
what we’re doing. Having students see that you can become successful (in whatever way)
by writing Free Software, so increasing the visibility of “Free Software developer” being
a profession, rather than a hobby and a good way to make a living should — following this
analogy — motivate folks to actually become Free Software developers.

Combine this with the situation that there’s actually a lack of Free Software
developers (at least in the KDE ecosphere, I know quite some companies who are looking for
competent Free Software developers they could hire).
Working on KDE gives you a track record and shows that you’re actually able to write good
code, work in a team, have technical understanding and a sense for accomplishing something.
I even dare saying “If you’re working
on KDE and are able to contribute in a meaningful way, you’ll almost certainly get a good
job in this industry.”
For some of us it might be obvious, lots of people have interesting and well-paid jobs in
the Free Software industry. The key is communication. Communicating that actively solves
various problems
at once: new apprentices, a healthier job market and of course more people participating
in Free Software projects. This is by the way also what I’m actively communicating to our
CodeYard students.

Things at aKademy are starting to wrap up. The last few days have been very intensive,
lots of talking, meeting new and old people, solving problems such as “Where’s a free bed
because the hostel has screwed up *again*?”, “Where the hell did DHL deliver the
merchandise?” (Certainly not to the address that was written on the packages, but to a
random motorcycle shop where the box sat for a week. DHL wasn’t reliable for us at all.)

Great progress has been made on current state the KDE4 desktop, to a state where most
applications work quite well, Plasma is taking shape, lots of people are writing
DataEngines and Plasmoids … it’s shaping up really nicely now and we’re starting to
reap from the effort that has gone into it over the past years. We’re still in the phase
where pieces fall into place.

One of the most important things to me at aKademy is the community. It’s simply great to
meet such a lot of nice people. While I’m really tired after a whole week of conferencing,
hacking, BoF’ing and ‘socialising’, I’m extremely excited by the current state of the
community. There’s both, old and new people who are working on all kinds of things, the
community is really healthy as it is, and everything looks very promising. I’m right now
compiling kdegames for tomorrow’s 13-hour-train trip, and I’ve downloaded some of the
videos of talks from last weekend that I’ve missed. Back home, I’ll catch up on sleep and
start working on the aftermath of aKademy.

Yesterday, Danny Kukawka of kpowersave fame, Kevin Ottens, the Master of Solid and I sat
together to discuss how powermanagement in KDE 4 should look like. We came up with a nice
architecture, having a policy agent (which is a new version of kpowersave), a plasmoid to
show current state of things and of course Solid providing us with most of the API that’s
needed for this. Powermanagement in KDE has not exactly been unified in KDE3, but as it’s
now, things look very promising for KDE4.

I’ll stop rambling now and prepare for the night activities, which is “taking the
organising crew out in order to thank them for their outstanding contribution to KDE. The
conference went very smooth. This doesn’t happen by itself but requires a huge amount of
work, discipline and dedication.

A huuuuuuge thank you to Kenny Duffus and his team!

Father…ooh…oh…oh…
I see the world, feel the chill
Which way to go, windowsill
I see the worlds on a rocking horse of time
I see the verse in the rain
Ohh…ohh…ohh…ohh…

Pearl Jam – “Release”

Mark Shuttleworth talked about what he thinks is a sensible
release rhythm. While you probably all know his proposal, here’s what I’m thinking about
releasing every six months (or in regular intervals anyway) and synchronising our releases with
the release of other Free Software communities.

Right now, we can say very little about KDE4. We will have to see how KDE4 pans out. My expectation is that it’ll
prove to be a reliable and stable platform that will suffer from little regressions after 4.0 is out. That means that
we should be able to put out a snapshot every so often and use some weeks (6, 8 maybe?) to stabilise it. Time-based
releases are possible in this scenario, but we should ask ourselves if we want to release on a regular basis (and in some cases
postpone shipping some new feature because it would’ve needed three more weeks to finish and polish).

On the other hand, KDE3 releases were very reliable. If I recall correctly, we only slipped once or twice slightly due to a
security problem (which would affect time-bases releases in the same way). So practically, we have time-based
releases for some time already.

What we can do to make it easier for vendors to ship the next version of our software is making it clear what needs to be done
before a release. That would mean: “Here’s a list with what the next release will look like, if you want to make it happen
earlier, help us hacking” This could be as easy as recording this in bugzilla, marking it as “showstopper” or “required
for x.y.z” and then make the query showing those entries easily accessible through, for example, a direct link.

As to a pulse and having Free Software communities release at the same point in time would
— from a marketing point of view —
be a very bad idea. It would mean two things: Press coverage for Free Software only once in a while,
and smaller projects being snowed
under by those that are doing better PR work. I’m actually wondering why this is brought up by Mark since Canonical’s
umbrella branding fails miserably in this respect — measured by the press coverage that a Kubuntu release has got during the
last cycles.

Got up early today after yesterday night’s Pearl Jam concert which totally rocked. Those guys definitely are not burnt out. Although they’re clearly still suffering from a feeling of guilt for the person who died during their act at Roskile festival in 2001 (I understand they stopped touring for about 3 years), they delivered a staggering concert in our backyard (no really, 300m from my house). Being able to make contact with the 50k people at this Open Air, having a good mixture between older and newer material and rocking with songs like Neil Young’s “Keep on Rocking in a Free World” made my day (night) yesterday. The megalomaniac in me would love those guys for the KDE4.0 Release Party, but this might be a bit hard to realise. :-)

4 hours after hitting the hay, the alarm clock went off, kicking me back into the real world. 45 minutes later, I’m at Nijmegen Central Station to commence a 13 hour trip to Glasgow where aKademy kicks off tomorrow. To my surprise, there’s wireless network available on this train. It’s not cheap, but being able to sync email once during the day and svn up on some stuff is, I think worth it. (Ok, admitted, getting online on a train is new to me, and excites the gearhead in me.) So got up early, had lunch in London, will have dinner tonight with the other board members in Glasgow (supposedly in the Livingston tower pub where other gearheads are meeting tonight.)

Tomorrow during lunch in Glasgow, I’m trying to get people together for a first press team meeting, we do have a press room for this kind of purposes, it’s L13.02 in Livingston tower. Does the 13 mean 13th floor (or just be damned?), having a nice panorama of Glasgow? Find out by coming by! 12.15 L13.02!

So yeah, I’m obviously on a blogging spree. Meanwhile, aKademy is getting closer, 1.5 days and the
most important conference of the year (to me, that is) gets kicked off by Lars Knoll in Glasgow.
Tomorrow, I’ll spend most of the day on various trains between Nijmegen (NL) and Glasgow. There’s
flooding in Northern England reported, so it’s a bit unsure whether Adriaan and I will arrive in
time for a quick meeting of the board in Glasgow.

Today’s packing, charging batteries and printing stuff (I usually take a cheatsheet with me,
containing address of the hotel and other things I might need on the journey) is pretty much
the climax of the preparations last week. And some things aren’t solved yet. Such as the Indian
contributor who was late deciding that he’d actually want to go to aKademy, and who’s visa was
refused the first time he applied. This means a couple of phonecalls to India, faxing the same
document various times and crossing fingers. Tonight, he’ll hear if his visa finally is accepted
so het can get on his plane tomorrow. Close call, let’s all hope we’ll see him in Glasgow.

Then there’s lots of merchandising stuff that has been designed and ordered during the last weeks.
A couple of t-shirts which will change owner in Glasgow to travel on to Canada and the United States
and quite some other really cool swag. I’m sure you’ll see some of this on the blogs from
Glasgow in the course of next week. We’re seeking at making this stuff available online, but not
all the details have been sorted out yet. If you’re looking for something really special for a
gearhead,
have a look at this page.
I’ve got one of those silken pillow those, they’re really nice (and you know what you’ll be
dreaming of).

See you on Saturday!