Category: KDE

I’m currently on a train that left an hour ago in Brussels, and about to descend into a
large black
hole which will I’ll travel through for roughly 20 minutes, at 160km/h and at 40m below sea
level.
Exciting, if you’re aware of that. Other than that, having a cold and being in environment with
changing
airpressure sucks since the cold makes it harder to decompress your ears.
It seems travel season is in full swing again, mostly for the sake of Free Software (and
admittedly a bit
of sightseeing and beer in between). I’ve been blogging very little lately since I just didn’t
feel like
(which I should because communication is important, oh well).

Late February, I’ve been to FOSDEM in Brussels (beer!), it’s been a great event, met lots of
nice people
among them Trolltech’s community manager Knut Yrvin, some people from the SQO-OSS project, more
KDE
people. Knut, friendly as he is invited me to Oslo to sit down with Trolltech’s marketing people
in order
to have a look at how KDE and Trolltech can work together more closely on this topic. We synced
the
meeting with Aaron touching down for 36 hours in Oslo. Turns out that within Trolltech, most
developers do
know KDE very well, whereas the marketing it’s actually not that ubiquitous. :-) The meeting
was
very productive in terms of short-term items that we can work on (there’s new accessibility
features in
Qt4 that might be very important points when organisations think about deploying KDE, for
example). We
could also think about creating marketing material together — for Trolltech, it’s showcasing
Qt, for KDE
it’s showing our balls.

So the train got into this big dark hole and the journey to London continues. Later today, we’ll
join a
meeting of the British Computer Society’s Open Source Specialist Group, featuring a talk about
an Open
Source approach to Healthcare automation, not exactly my domain of expertise, most probably
interesting,
definitely followed op by a beer or two.

Tomorrow morning, the third SQO-OSS project meeting will kick off. Those meeting are essential
for the
success of a European research project such as SQO-OSS, it gives us the opportunity to talk
about the
stuff we’re doing, mind you, not everyone is evenly communicative when it comes to email and
commitlogs,
so I’m looking forward to some of the stuff others have been up to. Socialising with your
colleagues that
are usually located across half of the continent is a good thing, too. Not at least, sitting on
trains for
six hours mandates to talk with your direct colleague (ade, taking a nap right next to me
typing). I’ve
taken a week off from work-work last week, the yield of that is some detailed ideas of what I’ll
be
working on within KDE the next time. It involves merchandising (made some mockups for t-shirts
for
aKademy, for example) and bringing KDE’s business
directory back
to life by coupling it with KDE e.V.’s Supporting
Membership programme. The latter needs more
thinking, both issues did not yet enter implementation stage.

In early May, I’ll be at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Sevilla, later in May, I’ll probably
travel to
Berlin for Linuxtag2007. Oh, and Kim asked for a bit of vacation, too. ;-)

KDE is visiting a lot of events on a yearly basis. In most cases, the booth is staffed by
volunteers. A successful event attendance depends on a number of factors, if those aren’t
considered, it might end in frustrated, or even burnt out contributors. But getting it right
is not just about “went good / bad”, there are various shades of grey. Having a look at past
events, the most important factors seem to be in two groups, general considerations and
planning
and per-event planning. Let’s see what those two are about:

General

• What events are there, when and where?
• Are there people who would like to represent KDE at this event?
• Is there material for events, such as demo hardware, demo data, flyers?
• Is there merchandising material and goodies available? Where can that be
  gotten from? What material is there? Can we have special stuff made?

Per Event

• How do I get the boothmaterial?
• What do I need to know to run a booth?
• How can I get merchandising material? What do I need to know to handle it?
• What event-specific planning is required?

Parts of those problems have solutions already. For example, we know who can get us
merchandising
material, we have some booth material in the form of the boothbox. The
SpreadKDE team is
working on a module for the SpeadKDE platform to make planning easier. What we’re really
lacking is
cool stuff, such as well-designed merchandising materials. Doing an event should be more or
less
a routine task, so we can concentrate on the fun stuff and on what exactly we want to show.
So
let’s try to get the organisation in place so that event planning and attending is an easy
and
fun task.

So to tackle this, we’re putting together the KDE Event Coordination Task Force (KECTF).
This group of people will
think about how to solve all those issues (Most of them are fun to deal with for the right
people!).
If you want to be part of it, if you’ve input on those issues, or just would like to design
a flyer,
a t-shirt, …, subscribe to the
kde-events mailinglist now
and
start your carreer as part of the Event Coordination Task Force today!

I’ve just submitted a last-minute talk for the
KDE Devroom at FOSDEM in
Brussels.
FOSDEM, the biggest European Free Software Community Event is, I think a great
opportunity to give the KDE e.V. some more exposure and at the same time KDE – The
Organisation
some more transparence. So my talk will give deals about the what and the why of
KDE e.V., the foundation that deals with legal and
administrative details behind KDE.

I’ve picked the slot on Sunday afternoon from 16:30 – 17:00, so I am still able to
attend the talks I’m
personally very interested in, Andrew Morton’s and Dave Neary’s talks do definitely
attract my interest. Apart from that, I’m really looking forward to seeing a lot of people
again this weekend, and then Brussels is quite a lovely city…

If you’re in Brussels this weekend, definitely do FOSDEM, and drop by the
KDE devroom for some chit-chat or hacking on KDE4!

Now playing: Heather Nova, Oyster

Only one day after I found out that Pearl Jam would be giving a concert in the park 200m
from here,
I read that 4 days earlier, the Red Hot Chili
Peppers
will be giving a concert in the same venue. Tickets will be available from Saturday, I’ll
try to get
myself one. And I just received an email from a friend that
The Levellers will be giving a concert in Nijmegen
as well,
in March. Yay!

The powermanager we wrote for the Edgy Eft release cycle of Kubuntu has made quite some
progress in
the Feisty Fawn release cycle. Simon kindly added some code to query the XScreensaver
extension
for the amount of seconds the system is idle, and I quickly added code to make use of that.
Powermanager now supports suspending the machine after it has not been touched for a
while.
Luka has added support for changing CPU frequencies based on if the machine is connected to
AC or not,
which is another nice feature that should help to gain some more minutes of battery life.
(This stuff
is not enabled in the screenshot, since I’m running Edgy and Edgy’s HAL does not support
cpufreq.)
During the last Ubuntu developer summit, Ken and Nuno have been working on some nicer icons
which also
give more fine-grained information about the battery state.
Finally, and most boring, we fixed numerous bugs so powermanager is as stable as never
before. We did not,
however try to work around all glitches of various machines HAL reports. This kind of stuff
needs to
be fixed in HAL. Instead, we encouraged people to report those bugs upstream.
Whether or not the screen should be locked after resuming is now configurable, too.
With all those changes in, we managed to keep everything compatible with the existing
configuration
files to make the upgrade process to Feisty as smooth as possible. Also, it should be
relatively easy
to get powermanager running on any other distro, there is nothing distro-specific in it,
having HAL
installed should be sufficient.

There is some stuff in powermanager that makes it more flexible. Partly, it’s debugging
functionality,
but it can also be very useful for various other purposes. At the top of the file
powermanage.py, you
can find the variables SUSPEND_USE_HAL, S4_COMMAND and S3_COMMAND. Set SUSPEND_USE_HAL to
False, then
whenever powermanager initiates a suspend/S3 (or hibernate/S4) cycle, those commands will be
run.
Useful for suspend2 users, who use the hibernate script by Bernard Blackham and who did not
integrate
it into HAL. (The latter can be done by hacking the scripts in /usr/share/hal/scripts/.)

Next, if you are not happy with some default values, powermanager uses, here’s what to do.
(We did
not make everything configurable, but used those const values at the top of powermanage.py
whereever
we had to find some ‘sane default’ for a setting. Most notably, you can set the default
value for
the ‘Suspend when battery life is less than N minutes’, use BATTERY_CRITICAL_MINUTES in that
case
(and set it to the amount of minutes you wish).

Today, I bought tickets for a Pearl Jam concert which will be held 200m (yes,
that’s meters!) from
my house this summer. Adriaan
managed to shock me with a “Well, good luck, you’ll
be in Scotland then!”, but a quick check revealed that
aKademy2007
will only start two days later.
That said, I’m really excited that I’ll get to see Pearl Jam again, and that within a five
minutes walk. I wonder how many people can say that one of their favourite rock bands
are visiting their backyard. :-) Browsing pearljam.com, I
noticed that
they are selling live recordings from various concerts. +1: No DRM stuff; FLAC and MP3
offered and platform independant download application. They even mention Free Software in
their FAQ. Good to see that things can be done different than the Sonys of this world
want us to believe.
More music-related, tomorrow, our new hifi set will be delivered. We (that’s me and Kim)
had chosen it
3 weeks ago, listening to different combinations of amplifiers, cd players and speakers.
The winner is an amplifier and a CD player by Arcam, a british brand and speakers by
Dynaudio (danish apparently). I’m counting the number of nights I’ve got to sleep until
the new toys arrive for some time already. Childhood rocks. :-)

At the same time all this exciting stuff lightens up my private life, it seems that the
call for dot journalists really has had
some great effect. On The Dot There’s a couple of weekly
series running about new stuff in KDE4, among which DannyA’s ever so famous
commit-digest. Be sure to
check it out. Join kde-promo
if you want to help out (there’s also jobs
for PHP coders, drupal gurus and web-people in general).

I gathered that my blog is now also aggregated on
planet.ubuntu, so hi there!

Now playing: Madrugada, Industrial Silence

I’m under way right now returning from Eindhoven where I gave a talk with the
title “Business
Models with KDE”. The audience was business
club of Free Software-related IT firms. System integrators, web application
shops, embedded system developers among them.
In the talk I tried to present KDE in a business-compatible way, showing what
KDE is, telling about the organisation of our community, ways to support it and of
course licensing. I’ve also taken a couple of different business models that are
viable in the Free Software world and showed how those can be combined with
KDE.

The feedback was pretty positive, some people were a bit surprised to see
someone coming directly from the Free Software community, visiting them and
telling them how to make money, and that there are Free Software projects around
that think about organisational issues and how to make it easier for companies
to contribute.
One of the more interesting questions I’ve got was “How do you as a desktop
person see webservices becoming more and more important?” Well, obviously we
have the technology to exploit webservices — Konqueror / KHTML. But we can of
course offer more. Integration of webservices in the desktop seems to be a big
point, and things such as Get Hot New Stuff, information of Wikipedia in
applications, KHTML as a desktop component for easy reuse can be quite a big
point. But also, of course locking down the desktop by means of Kiosk — if you
have webservices, you can switch off a lot of other stuff.

Yesterday was quite a bit different. I was invited by a group of Computer
Science teachers with the CodeYard hat on, introducing them to concepts of Free
Software development, collaboration tools and peer-to-peer communication
models.

Saturday, we’ll have the CodeYard Community Day
Adriaan already blogged about.

But tomorrow, I’ll get to know my nephew. I’m uncle for a week and a half now!

The KDE Marketing Team is looking for journalists for the dot. You don’t need to be a
professional journalists, but some writing skills will definitely help.
Half an hour (or more, to your liking) of spare time a
week (or maybe even less often) is enough already, so please consider joining
the KDE Marketing Team as a
writer for the dot — KDE’s premium news site.

Although you won’t get paid, your contribution will have considerable effect on the
KDE community and often, your stories will also be picked up by the world-wide press.

Right now, there is a shortage in people that are willing to write and publish a story
on dot.kde.org, which is a shame since al lot the goodness
that is being produced within the KDE project will go unnoticed.

So if you have some time and want to contribute to KDE,
subscribe yourself
to the
kde-promo mailinglist and send a note
that you want to contribute as a dot journalists.
It’s a very rewarding task and you can make a difference!

I’ve got a shiny new telephone, a Nokia n73. It has a big display, colorful icons,
it can play music, take photos, show images, view pdf files and much more.
Playing around with it tricked me also into the experience that I see my first
complete freeze of the telephone. In the course of getting the new phone, I also
had to buy a memory chip (miniSD, wich I found out is not microSD, or even
‘normal’ SD, of course I need the faster version!). I’m serious asking myself
how much harder the industry that creates such a mess will make it.

On the bright side, I managed, after a long struggle to have some internet shop
ship me an AMD X2 4600+ for socket 939. They’re quite hard to get. The reason is
probably that if I wanted to upgrade to a new socket AM2 motherboard, I’d also have to
replace my graphics card and memory, all less than two years old and more than fast
enough for what I’m likely to do with it.

Eva already blogged about the two two-day
meetings she hosted (thanks!). The Marketing Meeting went really well, especially
since it’s one of the first meetings of this team. We took a lot of notes, which
have to be polished and put up on SpreadKDE, we hope to get that done within the week.
Check on kde-promo if you don’t want to miss the progress. :-)
In the course of the first day,
we discussed in different session the current state of the art of branding-related
topics in KDE. Target Groups and Community Identity being the most important.
We began the second day with a longer, split-out session. The first group worked
out a rough planning of branding-related areas, such as artwork, public relations,
copywriting, …). The second group took an attempt to work out different possible
target groups for KDE ‘brands’.
The general way to go will be that KDE as it is should become an umbrella brand
that shares (parts of) its Community Identity with different brands such as KOffice,
Oxygen, Plasma, or the KDE desktop as you use it now, KDE technology as a development
platform and not at least the great and bright community around it.
We structured the Team using the Community Identity as a template. Wade Olson,
Jürgen
Gerner and Claire Lotion stepped up and agreed to giving a go to coordinate the effort.

We also had presentations about various topics. Jürgen Gerner
educated us about Emotional Marketing, Christian Bobzin of
Konsylo gave information Viral Marketing.
It’s really exciting to see the team flourish, to see a group of professionals in
that area get together and work out an improved way of presenting a diverse and
strong community such as KDE is.s

Day 3 and 4 of the DarmstadtMeetings was the Board Meeting we started with a packed
agenda. Eva has already written something about it, so I’ll try to cover different
topics here.
On Monday night, we met Carsten from a company named iverse. Carsten works on a way
of file and data browsing that involves visual representation of the data, sorted by
different characteristics in a 2d space. Check
liquidbrowsing.com. Carsten told us he’d
like to see those concepts (and maybe code) reappearing in KDE. It’s an exciting
technology.
On Tuesday, we paid a visit to Wikimedia Deutschland, who have a couple of months ago
hired an Executive Director who’s handling the daily business Wikimedia, keeping the
administrative part of running a Free Culture project going. Since we have similar
plans,
Arne and Matthias from Wikimedia had a lot of good advice, and good experience
with taking this step.

I’m very happy with both meetings in general, we made great progress in most areas, and
maybe still most important: It was great to see everybody again, and some for the first
time.

Tonight, the Ubuntu Developers Summit in Mountainview, California at the Googleplex will
conclude. Some people,
such as the Oxygen guys are already flying out in the course of the day, so attendance
is thinning out.

Today, I’ve attended a couple of BoFs on X in general, since that’s pretty interesting
for the future of
Guidance’s displayconfig. The
good news is that X will
be able to do much more runtime configuration, to the point where the developers think
that the infamous xorg.conf
can be abandoned completely. That’d mean that we’re basically doing all kind of
displayconfiguration at runtime,
no necessity to restart X anymore and less risk of ending up with an X server that’s not
starting after
configuration changes such as switching to dualhead setups. Really nice.

On the driver front, there has been some discussion during the last days. The intention
is to enable
Composite (bling!) by default in the next Ubuntu release. Unfortunately, that includes
shipping and enaling binary
drivers by default in some cases.

More good things Keith Packard told about is that there’s some light at the end of the
tunnel: It seems that ATi
is currently trying to find a way to publish specifications for at least some more of
their chips
(not *if*, but *how*!), that might have been the effect of AMD buying ATi. There’s also
promising work being done
on a new free NVidia driver. Apparently, some time ago there have been patches
obfuscating some code, that is being
taken as a starting point for reverse engineering the “Nouveau”
driver. So at some point in the future, hopefully not too far away, there will be 3d
accelerated X for most of the
graphics hardware around.
Also coming up in Xorg is a new memory management system, that will make Composite at
acceptable framerates possible
for most of the free drivers, and thus more free software users happy.

In the “bulletproof X”, we discussed to make the odds that X doesn’t start as small as
possible. That requires some
changes in GDM, mostly to check if X started, and to take measures if not. As Kubuntu
guy around here, that kind of
fixes also needs to be done in KDM, since Kubuntu is not using GDM. Keeping track of
this is probably a good idea,
although I wonder how much more things like that are being forgotten to also ‘port’ to
Kubuntu.

Yesterday night, we went out in Mountainview again, visited a bookstore where I got a
copy of
Lawrence Lessig’s Free
Culture. David Vignoni
from the Oxygen team joined us to have a burger (restaurant version, not the fast food
thing, I managed to avoid that
special experience yet) and a couple of beers. Tonight, we’ll conclude this summit going
out to have food with most
of the people attending it, tomorrow I’ll go to San Francisco for four more night,
nothing specific planned yet
(drop me a note if you’re in the Bay area and want to go out for a drink).

The Googleplex is a really nice location, though, and the Googlers are taking care of us
Free Software people just
excellently. Special thanks to Leslie Hawthorn for being around, answering all our
questions and being the nice girl
we can approach with whatever we have. Thanks Leslie!

Yesterday night, we met George Staikos and David Vignoni for dinner in Mountainview. I
took the
opportunity to order a ‘real burger’, and that was also when George and Celeste taught
me how
to eat a burger properly (I first started with cuttery, but they kept complaining).
When in
Rome, do as the Romans do. The food itself, though, was really good, although not
necessary.
Here at google, there is a buffet all day long, so if you feel like it, you can keep
eating all day
(which is what I try to avoid), and the food is pretty good, too. Yesterday it was
Indian food, lots of
different cakes, fresh fruit, sandwhiches, wraps … goodness!

Today, we started off discussing KDE4 in Feisty Fawn. Kubuntu will be providing KDE4
packages during
the development phase. Feisty will still be based on KDE3, though. We discussed some
technical issues
when having KDE4 stuff installed at the same time as KDE3, effects of running KDE3 apps
inside a KDE4
session, migrating settings, porting KDE3 specific stuff from Kubuntu. …
Usecases we thought of are the developer that wants to port his app to KDE4, and use the
KDE4 packages to
do that and users who want to help maturing KDE4 by testing the packages. You can find
more details
here.

Having the whole Oxygen team down here in California of course also means some eye-candy
improvements:
Ken and Nuno have been working on new icons for powermanager, which should improve
contrast on darker
panels, expect them to hit svn soon! Nuno also helped out with my Portwine addiction by
bringing a
bottle of Single-Quinta Tawny here. Thanks Nuno! I still have some hope that the bottle
makes it back to the
Netherlands next week, the authorities seem to be accepting the occasional bottle of
wine as long as
it’s in checked-in luggage.