Category: KDE

So this release cycle’s Ubuntu Dev Summit has ended. 60 people from the wider Ubuntu community
gathered in Paris to draft the next release, Edgy Eft — and it will be rocking (although probably
edgy, as its name says). Some highlights are an event-based replacement for the init system, SysV
init does not fit today’s use cases very well anymore, a system nowadays is almost never booted with
all kinds of pluggable hardware, suspend and resume functionality. Speaking of
suspend, I’ve talked to Ben Collins, Ubuntu’s kernel maintainer about integrating
suspend2 in Edgy’s kernel. He had a quick look at the patches
and was quite surprised by the improved quality. Nigel Cunningham, suspend2’s main developer has put
quite some work in making the patches less intrusive and more mergeable. Last week, I benchmarked
both, suspend2 and vanilla’s software suspend. The results were simply amazing: swsusp needs 45
seconds to bring the machine back up, whereas suspend2 does that in 25s (mainly caused by image
compression). suspend2 also adds a nice userinterface (framebuffer splash, textmode progress bar —
pick your poisoln) and is much more reliable under high memory load. The least
thing you want is a system not suspending when you run away in a hurry and drop your laptop in a
train. That’s definitely a big plus. Hope Ubuntu will be the first distro shipping this cutting edge
technology by default.

We also talked about the benefits and disadvantages of decoupling Ubuntu’s and Kubuntu’s
release schedules. It would make sense from a branding point of view. Putting out a press
release of Ubuntu and Kubuntu at the same time doesn’t make sense, it’d only harm the clarity of the
message to the outside. That is mainly why Kubuntu didn’t have a separate press release. To create a
stronger brand, however, it’d make sense to have a real opportunity to notify the public. From a
technical point of view, releasing for example 3 weeks after a Ubuntu release makes it possible to
get the first wave of bugfixes onto the CD, so one might expect to be of higher quality. I talked
about that with Jonathan of Kubuntu fame, and also with a couple of guys that’d probably be affected
by it, notably Daniel Silverstone from the Soyuz team (package archives infrastructure), and Colin
Watson and Matt Zimmerman from the release team. They were not directly opposed and certainly see
that it’d add benefit. The details however need to be sorted out first.

One thing I’m really excited about is the level of cross-desktop collaboration
I was confronted with last week. On Thursday, we had a BoF that was called gst-umbrella. We talked
about how GNOME system tools could be improved, and how we can share more code between the three
desktops living in the Ubuntu world — KDE, GNOME and XFCE. The atmosphere was really relaxed and we
were very much on the same line. There is quite an opportunity to use the same configuration
manipulation backends for all those desktops. Currently, according to the GNOME guys, the GNOME
system tools source package is a tarball of 12MB of perl backends, C frontends and XML-based GUI
files. Feel the pain. There is a common understanding that it makes sense to move that stuff to
Python in the future. Those issues have to be checked back with GNOME-upstream. We might even have
the first results of that ready for edgy, which has a pretty tight release schedule — feature
freeze in 11 weeks.

The people that might worry about me after Ken’s
report from wednesday night in Paris : I’m fine. Only have to wear my (prescribed)
sunglasses now all day (and night!) which makes me look a bit stupid. Can’t say I’m
unhappy with that acutally, people should basically never expect me to be too serious. :P Still a
good thing that it’s really summer here in Western Europe.

Myriam from the FSFE was kind enough to take me to Germany, we had a nice chat in the car
about Freedom, messaging, the Free Software world in general, buy in from other organisations,
political stuff …

That’s about it for now, I’ll probably blog some about FrOSCon more later on. Ow, thanks to \sh (who’s also here at FrOSCon) and it seems I’m now also
aggregated on Planet Kubuntu, so hi there!

So the KDE 4 Multimedia meeting is finished with only minor casualties. Leinir missed his train
and will be back here soon to spend another night in the beautiful village of Zundert – not
completely voluntarily though. We will give it another try to send him back home to Denmark
tomorrow. Today finally the sun showed up, resulting in a nice set of photos of the wild
peacocks that are living in the neigbourhood of the Annahoeve.
One of the first things that grabbed our attention this morning was Gábor announcing that
the Qt4 port of amaroK actually started.
Matthias told me that he redesigned the core of Phonon to make some neat introspection features
available. We also discussed some vague use cases for Phonon which really showed why Phonon is an
incredibly good idea, and that a simple audio / video backend such as GStreamer just doesn’t cut it:
Imagine you’re listening to music while surfing the web. Then you’re clicking on a link playing a
video file embedded in a website, your music volume will be lowered so your the sound of the movie
file, the movie file finishes playing and the music volume increases again – all done automatically.
I’m obviously really looking forward to all that goodness.
Allan who already left earlier this
afternoon showed us that seeking in KIO does actually work already for KIO file. That will make a
wealth of new stuff possible, I’m imagining running amaroK with your music collection on a remote
machine (and then of course playing your files using Phonon’s NMM backend outputting the music to a
remote machine), using digikam with the photo collection on a remote machine …

All in all, the meeting has exceeded all our expectations by far. Not only have we seen a wealth
of new stuff going into svn (check Danny
Allen’s latest svn digest, for example). We were able to offer the developers the possibility to
meet each other in person, to exchange ideas that are not easily communicated via the Internet. The
network effects of the meeting are not measurable, but probably even more important than the code
that has actually been written, improved (or killed, such as the sexb^W eeh moodbar that’s gone
because it was unmaintained). We were also able to get the amaroK developers integrated more into
the KDE community, probably another thing that’s not measurable but a long-term important thing.

The concept of making an event possible where everything is taken care of – from
quality food to travel expenses, computers for those that don’t own a laptop, a great location,
information material and above all a friendly host who is
contributing in a very unique way to our project: Thanks Cees and José!

Tonight, after having dinner in a Wok restaurant where you could compile your own wok meal and
have it prepared right in front of your eyes we couldn’t resist and hooked up our notebooks onto the
random neighbour’s access point again and read blogs, comments on dot stories, e-mail and of course
write a blogentry after a terrific and very special and productive KDE event.
Paraphrasing our good friend:
I love this community.

The KDE 4 Multimedia Meeting is running smoothly now after some problems getting the network
stable enough for compiling using icecream.

Intermediate results of the meeting are:

• Vastly improved startup time of amaroK (about 50%!)
• A Phonon media queue class which makes it easy to, well, queue media for
  playing
• Importing of playlists from last.fm into amarok (of course you can only play the
  things you have
• Allan began working on seeking in KIO slaves (applause!)
• Kmix integration with Phonon
• Usability work on amarok, use cases for Phonon’s volume handling
• Porting amaroK to Qt4 / KDE4
• Improvements in the scripting support of amaroK
• Of course: APIDOX, mostly making it work again using cmake

AmaroK 2 design boF is coming up, so stay tuned!

Meanwhile, the marketing people are working on streamlining events
documentation.

The multimedia meeting is now in full swing, twenty people have gathered in the south of the
rainy Netherlands to discuss, design, meet, program and have fun. After a keynote and a short
introduction round, Matthias has given a detailed overview over Phonon, discussing the design,
explaining how to write frontends, what to consider when building a backend, how effect work and
much more. Matthias will upload his slides later tonight so everyone can have a look at the great
stuff to come.
After Matthias outlined the future of KDE multimedia called Phonon, Max Howell gave us
information about what the amarok guys have discussed yesterday while going out in Amsterdam,
Exciting stuff to come! There probably won’t be an amarok 1.5. The developers plan to do a major
redesign of the code for amarok 2.0 which will be Qt4 / KDE 4 based. More interesting to the user
might be the planned improvement of last.fm support. Why would you
want to tag everything yourself when fellow music lovers already did all the work. Max also
announced “We do want to make a Windows version.”.

Maarten en Jurieen of Source21 fame visited us to
record a couple of interviews with, they’ll be downloadable from their website soon – we’ll announce
that separately.

And I also took photos.

In other news:

• Allan just blogged that he’s
  planning to add seeking to KIO, which I think is very exciting since it will make KIO useful for so
  much more stuff – think of remotely using your music collection using KIO, running digikam on the
  local machine
• Linux 2.6.17-rc5 is called “Lordi Rules”
• Icecream is a nice
  toy

So I finally collected all the necessary bits to help fellow T60 users such as [ade] to get
Linux running on their machines. Therefore, I wrote up most of the stuff I learned about this piece
of hardware, collected stuff how to deal with problems and created a set of customized packages for
the notebook. Custom packages means packages for Kubuntu Dapper, which I use. Those contain a kernel
image, patched with libata fixes and the ipw3945 wireless driver, ATi driver packages (unfortunately
there is no OSS driver other than VESA for the builtin ATi x1300). I also published my config files
for various things, so it should be relatively easy to get the stuff running on other distros as
well. Here’s the page. Suggestions for improvements are
welcome of course.

In other, and for the KDE crowd probably more important news, the KDE MultiMedia Meeting in the south of the – unfortunately
rainy – Netherlands is going to kick of tomorrow morning with developers from 4 different
continents. I’m about to stuff things such as cables and other network gear and a couple of geek
t-shirts in my bag and will be picked up by [ade] later this afternoon. What we’ve learnt until now
organising such a meeting is that purely mailbox-based workflows suck because they create a lot of
confusion and unnecessary work, but that we’re glad to have sponsors such as NLnet, Trolltech, Semprix, Wallsteijn, BasysKom, Novell, OGD and I2RS. They made it possible
to organise this high-quality meeting for the developers. A big thanks!
So until next sunday, we’ll be designing, hacking, discussing multimedia-related stuff, but
we’ll also use the opportunity to work on some marketing related things as well. A part of the KDE
marketing department is based in the Netherlands and involved in the organisation of the meeting as
well (that’s why the business cards had to be put on hold, for those interested – we were lacking
time).

Hang on for more coverage of the meeting though, and expect the Marketing Team to be fully
functional again sometime next week. :-)

KDE-NL was at the Free Software Bazaar 2006 during SANE2006, but also quite some other
interesting projects.

As [ade] already mentioned, EduKitty is a development framework for educational software,
written in Qt. Since this guy is looking for new developers, he’ll probably be happy with a win32
port of kdelibs, which could save him quite some code. He’s sent me the pdf file of his folder material so I can share it
with the interested reader. Impressive one-man-show.

Another nice project is Simuze, an Open Content music
community. They have a complete CD for free download. Check out the Penis Song. Speaking of
penises and Open Content, Free pr0n is not just a
pipe-dream anymore.

In dutch railway stations, they are currently advertising Martijn. I wonder why it took so
long to find out that Martijn needs some serious promotion effort. :-)

So back from Linuxtag, a four-day linux show in the heart of Germany, and probably one of the
best opportunities to meet KDE people other than aKademy.
I met Georg Greve there, whom I knew from the suspend2 mailinglist a couple of years ago where
he frequently hang out helping with debugging. He’s still running it to his content as he told me.
On saturday, we did the t-shirt and hug thing to celebrate KDE being associate of the FSFE now. I think it’s just
right, KDE being an independant, real community where the idea of freedom is one of the core values
and the FSFE as probably the biggest political organisation in Europe. We make a great couple
indeed. :-)

On saturday, we also met with some people of the Kubuntu crowd (well, I discussed some
powermanagement issues with amu and \sh earlier already). The meeting was meant to draft the future
of Kubuntu, and we did our best to develop ideas how KDE can play a role in making Kubuntu even
better. Mark Shuttleworth invited a couple of KDE people to Paris in June, probably not only because
I bribed him with a t-shirt. :-)
He also told that some of the next people to hire for Ubuntu will come from the KDE crowd, so issues
between the Ubuntu platform and the KDE desktop will surface earlier and can be fixed more quickly.
During his keynote, he addressed some of the more technical issues, such as integrating KDE’s
bugzilla with launchpad to make it easier to trace bugs in
the software stack.

Linuxtag was covered with a whole lot more of interesting discussions, meeting people, educating
people about KDE and demoing KDE.
One of the more interesting bits was the meeting with the OpenUsability we started off in a cafe
and then moved behind a screen to sit down and work out ideas we gathered previously. The idea in
question was to apply the results of our ongoing strategical analysis of target markets, filter them
through what makes sense from a usability point of view and develop ideas for KDE’s future. Funny
enough, right after the meeting, Tina dragged my attention to an
article that exactly described the technique we were using. We’re right now in the process of
getting the rough results of our meeting in shape.

Kim and me have finally finished the new cage of the chinchillas, so yesterday was the day –
well the night – they could move into their new home. It vastly imcreases the space they have,
roughly by a factor of three. We also equipped the cage with a small wooden ‘house’, so the two
chins can retract during the day and find some rest. They immediately liked the new cage and it was
really nice to see them exploring everything in an excited way.

The last weeks have KDE-wise been pretty hard work, we’re getting the Multimedia meeting
into shape. This process is now developing from finding sponsors to more practical things, cash
flow, creating a webpage, all that stuff. Other hot items are the business cards, their workflow is
– thanks to Martijn’s great effort – getting more and more into shape. Hopefully we’re able to
deliver the long-needed cards to their owners within the next couple of weeks, so please bear with
us a little more. Preparations for Linuxtag are also in full swing, writing a press release, getting
some documentation for the booth team into shape, solving a couple of smaller logistical problems
such as buying a train ticket despite the Dutch Railways best efforts
in preventing me from doing it. We’re also quite close to setting up a press channel, so we can
inform interested journalists more effectively of what’s happening in KDE. On the other hand, it’s
good to see how much is happening, and that the Marketing Team is going forward at full steam.

My paper I submitted to FrOSCon has been accepted, so
I’ll talk there about Marketing KDE. I’m kinda looking forward to this opportunity since my
presentation at FOSDEM back in february has been received very well. I’ve submitted another proposal
to DesktopCon which will take place in Ottawa in July. I’d
like to use desktopcon as an opportunity to get in closer contact with a couple of guys from the
other side of the pond to streamline marketing efforts on the freedesktop.org platform.

On monday, I went to Muenchen for the E*OS3 project, I’m working for. We paid a visit to the LiMux project team which is migrating 80% of the 14.000
municipal desktop to a KDE-based Linux solution. Way to go, Munich. The discussion was quite
interesting, and the people told us that the project was mostly fun. By 2008 they should be done,
and be able to take over the support slowly themselves (they clearly didn’t want to outsource). When
I handed over the KDE card, they smiled and immediately recognized it interestedly. We obviously
have friends there :-)

After the visit to LiMux, we were kindly invited by Till Jaeger, the lawyer of Harald Welte
of gpl-violations.org fame. Speaking with him was quite
interesting, he could bring a couple of new angles into our research for a quality standard for Open
Source services. He also was a nice guy and offered us very good cookies. Who said that lawyers
suck?

The next day, we went to the university to visit the department of business informatics and
talked about modularity of IT services. Interestingly, we came to the conclusion that market share
is one means to measure quality, that immediately brought up my question about how you could measure
it, because that’s where we’re stuck within the freedesktop.org forum at the moment. Not really new
insight, but still, a new wire in my personal agenda… :>

Insane trip though, travelling 1500km by car in two days. :/

Today, it was CodeYard time again. The students of Koning Willem II College in Tilburg (NL) presented their final
projects. They automated different kinds of shops, one of the teams even built a robot which could
be used to compile orders from the magazine, well proof-of-concept, but very nice to see actually.

In other news, we were able to collect sponsors to finally be able to give green light for
the multimedia developers meeting in the Netherlands, second half of may, and I’m proposing a paper
to the DesktopCon committee. Hope I’ll be able to make
it to Canada in July, but that’s still quite far away. It would be a good opportunity to strengthen
our collaboration with other desktop-related projects, though.

Next week, I’ll go to Wiesbaden to visit Linuxtag,
we’re putting together the first version of the KBoothbox there, and it’s a great opportunity to
talk to a couple of people in person, after all, e-mail often just doesn’t cut it. A friend was kind
enough to invite me to his place where I can spend the nights, hopefully getting a little sleep. See
you in Wiesbaden!

Luite visited me last weekend at our (fairly) new place.
We were planning to do some hacking, and that was quite some fun. Luite has been working on a photo
editing tool which makes use of the GPU to do most operations on the image. He was already able to
show editing levels, emboss and brightness / contrast in real-time. His program is using the OpenGL
shader language to do those operations in the graphics card. With his Radeon FireGL T2-128 (Radeon
9600 Pro), 30 FPS was easily possible. Nice, maybe we’ll see this in krita at some point in the
future, it is currently in a proof-of-concept stage.

I myself had been testing a couple of network setup programs during the last weeks, none of
them worked to my satisfaction and I ended up various times with having a bunch of different
configuration files in /etc/network/interfaces.* and symlinking the ones that I’d use to
/etc/network/interfaces. That part has been automated now and put into a systray application that
makes use of the “Debian infrastructure”. It works well until now. I’ve also added the option to
scan for open wireless access points and connect to those. My neighbours were friendly enough to
provide me with a testing environment (although they’re probably not aware of that). :-)
I might polish KNetSwitch a bit more and release it to the public, but I don’t know
if it’s really worth it and if I find the time to make it releasable. If someone is interested,
email me to get the code. It’s written in Python, using PyKDE for the GUI stuff. The program that
does the actual switching is implemented as a console program that’s called via sudo or kdesu
(configurable). Anyway, it seems to work well and does the job at least for me. A possible extension
for this program would be a guidance module that allows you
to edit the config files by hand. Judging by the manpage of
/etc/network/interfaces, you’ll get a lot of useful functionality ‘for free’.

Last friday, I submitted a paper for FrOSCon. It’s
about the work in the Marketing Working Group. Danimo was kind enough to invite me and Adriaan to
his place. Guess it’ll be fun over there. Ow, if the paper gets accepted, that is…

Update: I’ve received quite some requests to put knetswitch online, so
here it is.