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Jonathan Riddell (riddell): Kubuntu-KDE4, Qt 4.4 beta, Earthquakes, FOSDEMKubuntu-KDE4 got its first alpha today. Lots of bits to tidy up but for the most part it works. Qt 4.4 beta is in my PPA for hardy, thanks to fdoving (still liable to break existing compiles of Plasma). Was rudely awoken last night to the shaking of the bedside cabinet. Turns out to have been an earthquake, which would have been exciting if I hadn't gone back to sleep. FOSDEM happened and was crammed packed with good talks, great people and finest free beer. (I never did find out who was paying for the free beer, but thanks.) My talk went surprisingly well, I only expected half a dozen people to want to learn about .deb packaging but the room was pleasingly filled, I'm still waiting for someone to follow through and supply me with an updated package for GNU Hello. The KDE room in general was packed full most of the time, which was great, although I tried to get out and visit Gnome, SuSE, Debian and others.
Categories: KDE blogs
John Layt: Qt 4.4 Print Dialog - Follow UpJust a quick follow-up to some of the comments in my last blog: * No, this is not my work, it's all the trolls, so i can't take credit or change anything in it * Remember, this is still pre-beta code I'm running, so not everything may have been finished or polished yet, such as pretty icons showing what the options do. * There's a new Print Preview framework, including widgets and dialogs that haven't had time to play with yet. * The reason there's is so much 'wasted' space in the Copies tab I showed is due to the dialog resizing to fit the KWrite added tabs, as proof here's the 'pure' Qt dialog without any KDE added tabs: There were a couple of good points that I'll try pass on: * Yes, more pretty icons would be good * Showing the printer status with an icon next to the name in the combo box, or text directly below the combo box would be useful Speaking of the combo box, I forgot to show another KDE3 inspired improvement with choosing Print to File: I hope we eventually get an API to add our own options in there (Print to Fax, etc). Next time, I hope to have a proof-of-concept of adding Cups n-up printing. Categories: KDE blogs
Richard Johnson: Kubuntu 8.04 KDE 4 Alpha Released!The Kubuntu developers are very excited to bring you the first alpha of the new Kubuntu 8.04, the Hardy Heron, release featuring the KDE 4 desktop. Available in both the desktop, or live, CD as well as the alternate text-based installation CD, the community supported version of Kubuntu is now available. Kubuntu 8.04 will come as two separate and distinctive releases. The commercially supported release of Kubuntu 8.04 will feature the KDE 3.5 desktop while the community supported release will feature the KDE 4 desktop. As it stands, KDE 3.5.9 is the version of KDE to be commercially supported by Canonical, and the community supported version should feature KDE 4.0.3 if all goes as planned. The new Kubuntu 8.04 featuring KDE 4 can be downloaded at either of the following two locations:
Bugs can be reported as usual at http://launchpad.net/bugs/+filebug. There are quite a few known bugs, so double check and make sure the bug you are witnessing hasn’t been acknowledge previously. Categories: KDE blogs
Espen Riskedal: Qt for Windows CE on Embedded World 2008So the Qt 4.4.0 beta is finally out, and on that occation we’re also launching the port of Qt for Windows CE. The chosen launch location is Embedded World 2008 down in beautiful Nürnberg (Germany). Download Qt for Windows CE from here: We´ve had lots of people over to our booth on Embedded World and there’s never been a quiet moment. People are generally impressed with the cross-platform nature of Qt, and especially that it also extends to embedded devices. As you probably know Qt is supported on Windows, Linux/Unix and Max OSX as well as embedded Linux, and now also Windows CE (including Windows Mobile). I’d like to congratulate the creators of Qt for Windows CE with a job (almost finished now) well done:
…and say that it’s a pleasure to present the fruits of our labors after over a year of focused development (I’m sure Maurice agrees). Cheers guys, and I’ll see you at the cabin trip this weekend. So here is a small video of “live” footage from Embedded World today: If you’re stopping by Embedded World tomorrow, I’m having a talk at 14:40 in hall 11. I’ll go through an introduction on using Qt for Windows CE. So, thanks for now and I hope you enjoy the video AND the release. Don’t be shy. If you’ve got any feedback or problems, just subscribe to the preview list by sending a mail with subject: subscribe to [email protected] and start asking questions. I have a video of Qt runnin on an HTC Touch compared to Qt running on an OpenMoko NEO1973. I’ll put it up next week I promise! Categories: KDE blogs
Albert Astals Cid (TSDgeos): Poppler 0.7.1 (0.8 Beta 2) releasedAvailable from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.7.1.tar.gz This is the second release of what will be the 0.8 stable series. We will be having a roughly weekly release schedule until we hit 0.8 stable version. Target is March 19 for 0.8.0 Major Changes: * Really distribute CMake files as optional build tool * Initial Optional Content support in core and in the Qt4 frontend Minor Changes: * Allow grouped checkboxes to be selected individually * Qt4 demo program improvements * Keep cairo and cairo_shape consistent * Safety checks on Splash renderer so that it does not draw outside the allocated bitmap * Do not try to display bitmaps of invalid size * Fix building with exceptions * Improvements for building with MSVC and CMake Testing, patches and bug reports welcome. Categories: KDE blogs
Danny Kukawka: HAL: some deprecated keys ...... will be removed from HAL with end of this month, because they are deprecated since 12 months now and already replaced by other keys/properties. The affected keys (old --> new/replacement) are: 2008-02-28:
2008-03-01:
Please note, that there are some other (IMO rarely used) keys which are planed to be removed end of March: 2008-03-21:
Please check your packages for these keys (code and shipped fdi-files) and prepare them for the next HAL package. If you use openSUSE or you package RPMs for openSUSE: the next HAL version for openSUSE 11.0 (Beta) will be shipped without support for these keys. Categories: KDE blogs
Aaron Seigo (aseigo): animating lots of things simultaneouslythere's a new game in kdereview right now called kdiamond, writted by Stefan Majewsky. it's a fun little game that is much like the classic bejeweled. with any luck it'll move from kdereview into kdegames for 4.1.
while playing it, i noticed that sometimes the animations weren't overly fluid. this was something that others had noticed as well. i did a quick valgrind and saw that the actual drawing and game mechanics code wasn't really significant, though there was a lot of time being spent in driving the event loop. without even looking at the code i could guess at the problem: each diamond on the canvas was animating itself. indeed, that's what was going on. i wrote an email to Stefan suggesting a fix (which he implemented very quickly; sweet! =) and Zack suggested that i should write a blog entry about this general issue since it may be of use to others as well. this is that blog entry. there's nothing new or even overly interesting to graphics developers, but for the rest of us ... it might be helpful. so... why is it so nasty to have individual items animate themselves? the obvious approach to animate a bunch of items is to give each item a timer (e.g. QTimeLine) and move the animation along in time to the progress of the timeline. in the case of moving an item, this is a simple matter of taking the start and end points, the current progress of the timeline (e.g. from 0.0->1.0), figuring out how far along the item should be on a given path between the two points based on the progress value and setting the location. the math is trivial and everything gets nicely encapsulated in the animated item's class. here's the problem, though: let's say that the item is being animated at a nice smooth 25 frames per second. that gives us a 40ms delay between frames. (that's an oversimplification: the delay will vary depending on actual system activity and other processing in the app itself, but let's go with this generalization for now.) if we have two items animated then we have that same 40ms window, but now it is divided into two pieces averaging 20ms in length. (the real intervals may be 10ms and 30, or 6 ms and 34ms, or whatever; again, this will vary from interval to interval ... but the average in the oversimplified scenario is useful information here.) obviously, as we add more and more items, if the distribution is somewhat random (and in practice it will be) then our time slice between animations gets smaller and smaller and as we approach 40 items we end up with an animation happening every millisecond (again, going with the oversimplified generalizations). over 40 items and obviously we're into the sub-millisecond range. the problem, however, is not in animating the movement of those 40 items (that's probably very fast) ... it's the "in between" part that causes us grief. with every item having it's own timer, each animation step of each of those items implies going back to the event loop, checking the next timer and if it's scheduled to trigger emitting its signal (or put another way, calling the connected methods) and then returning to the event loop. suddenly there's a lot more time variance and the animations will start to appear sluggish and completely uncoordinated as the individual frame timings drift about. but that's not the worst of it. what's really bad is that while in the event loop other things will happen. really expensive things, like repaints. using a canvas such as QGraphicsView, it will eventually decide to update its contents on one of those trips to the event loop and trigger a bunch of repaints. if this happens when N out of M total animations have stepped through their frames, then not only will you get a paint with some of the animations in step and some not, but a (relatively) huge delay will also be introduced as all the data structure traversal, math and then resulting painting necessary to update the canvas happens. while fast in the general case, this can end up being detrimental to the fluidity of the animations if triggered too often and without coordination with the animations. besides canvas paint, user interaction events and other input data processing will end up getting in between the individual animations. it just all gets very messy and animation frame latency starts to suck. (firing all those timers randomly without aligning them is also rather bad for power consumption as it wakes up the cpu more often, but for most apps doing animations that's often not really a priority issue.) the solution, thankfully, is really quite simple: share an animation tick. this is nothing new, really, and has been done in graphics programming since the days of yore, when the grass was green and amigas were still impressing people with that stick figure guy juggling three ray traced balls. ;) but it's still something that i noticed gets missed, especially as more people are adding them to their apps, often for the first time. how it works is really simple: most animations are simply updating an internal state and then using that state to affect some sort of visual change, such as the start/end point interpolation of the above movement example. so you start a single timer that triggers a step forward in the animation ("the next frame" or "a tick") and on each of those ticks every active animation is iterated over and their state is incremented (whatever that means for the given animation). in this way the event loop is exited and entered only once for all the animations. upon re-entering the event loop the scene or canvas is free to update itself with all the animations having been updated and ready to go in a coordinated fashion. so for each 40ms slice there is one animation tick, the time required to update the animations elapses (that should be very fast, even for good numbers of items) and then the repaints needed can happen. the end result should be a lot smoother and just "feel" better since things will be moving together at the same semi-random interval rather than each at their own semi-random interval. Categories: KDE blogs
Adriaan de Groot (adridg): Research on KDEThere's sometimes vaguely humorous threads on how you can improve a given comic strip by appending "... in the dark!" or something similar to the final panel. You can get that kind of stuff at the Comics Curmudgeon. But I was reminded of it by today's sequence of my blog titles which are all of the form "<FSPOOS> on <FSOPOOS>" where FSPOOS stands for "Free Software project or operating system."
Let's carry on in that vein. Did you know there was a research room at this year's FOSDEM, where (European) researchers who work on studying Free Software got together to talk over their research findings? It's too bad not many of them escaped from the research room, though. Paul Adams did, and he spent most of the weekend at the KDE stand getting started on KDE hacking. he says lots of the researchers got out and integrated with the community, but I can't say I spotted that many. Zbigniew (IRC nick "gandalf" because he claims that's easier to pronounce) stopped by with some sociological questions. Although there have been many studies of motivation on OSS developers in the past, this one looks beyond just the coders and includes contributors in a general sense. There are some rendering issues in his survey with konqueror, but it's worth filling out. I always time surveys to check the accuracy of the "this will take only ten minutes" claims, and this survey too me from 14:41:36 to 14:53:37 including a distraction about labcoats on the #kde-research IRC channel. So ten minutes seems fairly accurate. There are a lot of questions though. As for #kde-research, that's the IRC channel on Freenode where the people who do research on KDE or use KDE in their research or who are KDE folk who are also researchers hang out. There's labcoats for everybody. Categories: KDE blogs
Ariya Hidayat: Why are DOC/XLS/PPT so complicated?Still related to the b2xtranslator and the direct availability of Microsoft Office binary (doc, xls, ppt) file formats, the question that is often raised is why are they so complicated? Of course, office suite developers know the likely reasons behind this. But in case you miss the interesting part, read Joel on Software's insight on this matter. Categories: KDE blogs
Adriaan de Groot (adridg): KDE4 on FreeBSDKDE4 on FreeBSD is moving forward apace. There are ports in progress, and Qt4 can be built normally as a port from the main ports collection. No word on 4.4-copy, though.
What is kind of missing is an overview of what is where. The main KDE on FreeBSD site is not well maintained, and is missing links to all the essential bits. So here they are:
Since the latest Qt in ports is a 4.3 version, we're stuck trying to build qt-copy for work on trunk, and that has its own little issues. Like phonon falling over spectacularly in the gstreamer backend. Much like the include order issue for CLucene on Solaris (where we don't enable gstreamer yet, so this issue hasn't cropped up) it's about bad header directories sneaking in. In this case, /usr/local/include gets in ahead of the Qt4 build directories, and the wrong Qt headers are used. Anyway, it keeps the CPUs warm. Categories: KDE blogs
Adriaan de Groot (adridg): Qt 4.4 - crunchy on the outsideI've been crunching through Qt 4.4 (well, qt-copy from KDE4, which is copied again into the KDE Solaris SVN) in order to get it to compile. I previously blogged about errors that needed solving along the way. Thiago very helpfully responded, and over the past few days I've cracked most of the nut that is webkit. That doesn't mean that Qt 4.4 is done, though, on OpenSolaris with the environment that the KDE-Solaris team has picked out.
The main issue remaining is the way in which third-party software is included. We have CLucene installed (0.9.19), but the Qt assistant uses the internal copy bundled in 3rdparty (I can't tell quickly what version that is). The versions are different enough that they don't mix, leading to cruft like this:"/opt/foss/include/CLucene/config/CompilerGcc.h", line 65: Error: A declaration does not specify a tag or an identifier. "/opt/foss/include/CLucene/config/CompilerGcc.h", line 65: Error: Use ";" to terminate declarations. "/opt/foss/include/CLucene/config/CompilerGcc.h", line 65: Error: A declaration does not specify a tag or an identifier. "/opt/foss/include/CLucene/StdHeader.h", line 62: Error: #error "Neither unistd.h or (io.h & direct.h) were available". Here the fix is to take out the explicit -I/opt/foss/include that points to where all our other dependencies are installed. On systems where system clucene is installed in /usr (or somewhere else in the compiler's standard search path) the paths used during the Qt compile take precedence, but here our "system" include directory sneaks in ahead of the Qt ones. For the purposes of our packaging, this means editing one more Makefile after configure. Not a big deal, really, but something that makes me wish for a CLucene configure check. Speaking of checks, I suppose it's time for a brain check, because having spent a day fixing up webkit, I finally discovered that I was fixing webkit for Cstd, the old and broken STL on Solaris and not for stdcxx, the new and doesn't-need-fixing STL that KDE-Solaris uses. Categories: KDE blogs
Ariya Hidayat: every night has its dawnYou learn that you can be friends with those who do not always share your thoughts, because differences are not obstacles to a mutual respect. But you get to know others who, for whatever reason it might be, always try to convince every soul in this planet that their opinions are the best. You learn the magical meaning behind loyalty, for you go along with those with whom you can trust your life. Yet you uncover the secret of betrayal and meet those who do not hesitate to stab you in the back when an opportunity present itself. You know those who do many different things for the sake of the humanity. You also meet those who tend to keep everything, often not only their belongings, for themselves. You learn that sharing your knowledge is the best way to advance the human civilization. However, some prefer to keep the charms and spells in their own vault as if they are not aware that great minds think alike. You learn that your good intentions are sometimes misunderstood - and that sometimes you wonder 'where did I go wrong'. But somehow, there are still some others who are always full of mercy, as giving a benefit of doubt is more challenging than simply blaming someone. You know few which genuinely pay attention to you and patiently listen to your tales. And there are some who have the knack to say something about anything and just keep bombarding you with their rants and ramblings, as if these do really matter. You know people which have great passions and love for what they do (and that really inspires you). However, infrequently you are stuck with some others who do things as if their spirit is not completely in their body. You work with those who are exciting with all the challenges and on the other hand you also meet those who just drain your brain endlessly. Everything is just like Hollywood stories. Someone finds salvation in everyone, another only pain. And life won't let you understand. Five years. Time to move on.
P.S: This is my last official day at the university, though I still need to go back one more time for the final exam. Categories: KDE blogs
Roland Wolters (liquidat): Short Tip: replace characters in txt files with sed
The -i option makes sure that the changes are saved in the new file - in case you are not sure that sed will work as you expect it you should use it without the option but provide an output filename. The s is for search, the foo is the pattern you are searching the file for, bar is the replacement string and the g flag makes sure that all hits on each line are replaced, not just the first one. Sed should be available on every standard installation of any distribution. At lesat on Fedora it is even required by core system parts like udev. Categories: KDE blogs
Rex Dieter: and all that jazz...I see some folks are defecting to KDE4 due to some recent rawhide gnome borkage. Welcome aboard!
Speaking of borkage... my bug of the week is... startkde becomes Zombie Child of gdm-binary on logout. Usual bribery rules are in effect... Anyone with clues, insight, debugging mojo or even patches wins a few ounces of my eternal gratitude and a beverage or two on my coin at the next FUDCon. I guess I don't use gdm, so I'm not all that inclined to debug that. I suppose the gdm devs will feel that same, likewise. :( Well, I'll give gdm a whirl and see what I can find before admitting defeat and begging for even more help. On a personal note, my best childhood friend, Jeff, is going to be in town for a couple of days this week. Haven't seen him in over 15 years, woo! Hope to catch up on a lot. I don't know how much time we'll have, so I certainly intend to make the best of what we'll have, and to make a new commitment to stay in touch. Reminds me of all that "life is short", "seize the day",and all that jazz. Categories: KDE blogs
Dominik Seichter: KRename VideoPeter Upfold from fosswire.com has posted a great video on how to use KRename.
I think this video is great to show how KRename (or any other application) is working. I love the way he made the video: easy to understand and very well commented! Great work Peter! You can find his article including the links to the video here. The video is available as flash for viewing online or as OGG for download. Categories: KDE blogs
Aaron Seigo (aseigo): loading random widgetsone of the main things i worked on today was support for loading widgets plasma doesn't know about at build time. this is to allow us to load various sorts of widgets that aren't appropriate or possible to stick into libplasma itself.
all widgets are, at their most basic level, housed within a Plasma::Applet. libplasma itself provides support for native Plasma widgets, aka "Plasmoids". a Plasmoid is a collection of scripts, images, configuration, UI and widget specific data files that are bundled up together into a package. the package itself is defined by a PackageStructure which informs a Plasma::Package what should be and what could be within a given Package. Package provides the ability to install the package locally, query the packages, fetch a given resource from them, etc. Package is how we are able to list non-c++ widgest in the Add Widgets dialog, among other things. now, Package is nothing like the packages that software applications come in for your operating system (e.g. rpm, deb, pkg, tar.gz, etc....). they are both simpler and more about accessing resources rather than managing installation (though Package does that) and calculating dependencies. this system is all well and good for Plasmoids, but what about other packages ... like MacOS Dashboard widgets? or any other widget of this style, for that matter. the widgets have their own structures; while Package can handle this it does need a way to get at the package structure. so Package can read the structure of a package from a config file. unfortunately, this isn't enough: some widget package formats are just stupid and have no predefined structure whatsoever which makes dealing with them far more annoying and code-laborious than necessary. yes, MacOS widgets are in that category, and as such can't easily be codified in a config file without adding some flexibility that would amount to a description language of sorts. so rather than subject myself (and those who would use this) to that sort of pain, Plasma::PackageStructure can now also be provided as a C++ plugin, giving us all the flexibility we could every hope for, need and want. the end result is that when a widget (regardless of type) is accessed (installed, listed, opened, etc) it looks like any other widget to libplasma based applications. behind the scenes when the Package is loaded, Applet looks to see what PackageStructure it uses. if none is defined, we assume it's a native Plasmoid. if there is one then we look for a plugin and if that doesn't work out then we try for an installed config file description. assuming that goes well, we now have the PackageStructure, which directs Package, which provides a standard interface to Applet, which makes all widgets look the same to libplasma. neat. the last bit of work i have to do here is to add Package install pre-processing for widget archives (most of them are just zip files) so that when the user installs a new widget we can create the proper metadata that Package needs and deal with whatever compression system the widget uses. this is the easy bit, though, compared to getting the above working. once it is done we'll have the full round-trip from the Add Widgets dialog (via Get New Widgets) to disk to applet listing to desktop/panel/etc placement. over the weekend Zack got WebKit based widgets working, both "native" plasma ones as well as MacOS widgets. the native plasma widgets have access to things like DataEngines from javascript embedded within the webpage. this is a little different from the qscript plasmoids where the javascript is stand-alone and is the widget for all intents and purposes; with the webkit based widget the webpage is the widget and javascript to manipulate it lives inside the webpage itself. the Dashboard stuff basically came along for free. it was neat to watch the hello world, clocks and Chuck Norris MacOS widgets load up and work without any prodding. we will need to provide some additional javascript API that some dashboard widgets assume to exist, and we'll likely never be able to satisfy the macos bundles bridge that is available on MacOS due to how tied into the platform that is but thankfully few widgets seem to use those. there are patches upstreamed for WebKit that are required for this to work, so until they hit qt-copy the code will remain in playground. we also ran into more of the same WoC (widgets on canvas) bugs with the web applet support that we had already run into with the general WoC porting of libplasma. gotta love living on the edge of development ... constantly. ;) and the screencast will have to wait to tomorrow, as p. is back and fast asleep in bed. i don't want to wake him; in fact, i should probably head to bed soonish myself as i have to get up at 07:00 to get him off to school. Categories: KDE blogs
Bart Coppens (BCoppens): Looking back on FOSDEM 2008 (with pictures)So, after Saturday's FOSDEM KDE Group Picture, perhaps it's now time to give a slightly fuller account of FOSDEM 2008 (with pictures). Since most of my pictures from the main tracks were too blurry anyway, I'll just focus on some of my pictures related to the KDE FOSDEM 2008 presence (leaving out some pics of individual persons and overview shots). Photos have only been resized and cropped where somewhat appropriate. Perhaps to do for next year: buy a lens which captures more light, or a bigger flashlight (Shooting at ISO 1600 is rather noisy ) Let's start with a picture of the KDE stand, featuring Adriaan and his fancy box (btw Adriaan, another piece of consumer electronics that people willingly pose with would be the OLPC). The first KDE talk was by Nikolaj Hald Nielsen about Amarok 2, and introduced a live mascote for Amarok. I noted that Amarok 2 really should try to get the ability to download and manage live performances and other music available from the Internet Archive. Let's hope they try that again (given that he actually looked into it already). The following talk was by me about KOffice 2, but since I did that talk myself, I don't have pictures of that I was followed by Sebastian Trüg talking about Nepomuk. I could really have used his proposed feature of using FOSDEM speaker information to find mails from them Knut Yrvin then talked about Free Software in telecom. Not only did he pass around a Greenphone (unfortunately no decent pics of that), but he also gave away a free book to the first person in the audience that could answer a tough question about what code TT GPLed at some point last year. It was so hard that he had to ask an easier question to be able to give away the book Unfortunately I had to miss most of Holger Schröder's KDE on Windows in order to meet someone, but I was still able to snap some pictures of him in action (actually I made more decent pictures of him than of most other speakers, intriguingly enough). The last talk on Saturday was done by Josef Spillner. He talked about multiplayer gaming for KDE4 games, which apparently exists already even though the functionality is hidden somewhat. I can't really check that because I don't actually compile KDE4 games, but it's still interesting to know about. The first talk on Sunday morning (way too early for my taste ) in the Crossdesktop room was done by the dynamic duo Simon Peter and Kurt Pfeifle (Simon doing the talking, and Kurt demonstrating Klik on his laptop/the projector while Simon discussed it, very nice interaction). They talked about Klik (2). I guess their target audience was me, because they showed a Klik error dialog about Krita not working Unfortunately I had to leave early during their Q&A session, because I wanted to see part of the Xen main track talk. I arrived late, and the room was completely packed and rather hot. So instead of staying in that room for the next talk about VirtualBox, I left in the break to go to the other main track about build tools, just in time for the SCons talk. (I was planning to meet a friend of mine during the CMake talk anyway, so now I just met him slightly earlier.) It was a lot less crowded there, and even a bit too cold (but that might've been because there was a draught). While I moved rooms, I was still able to quickly make a picture of the questions section of Jos Poortvliet and Sebastian Kuegler's talk on KDE4. After the CMake talk I had to leave early again (and miss the next devroom talk), because we had a small meeting on the grass field next to the devroom about the upcoming aKademy 2008 in Belgium. That meeting finished just in time to catch another talk by Knut Yrvin, this time on Free Software in Education (he gave a total of 3 devroom talks, but his other talk about Free Software and phones was scheduled at the same time as the Klik one). No free books this time, but he did tell us about how teaching young kids how to use an office suite is a bad idea. I guess Inge won't like the sound of that After the main track CMake talk by Bill Hoffman, we also had our own version of a CMake talk, this time by Alexander Neundorf. I guess I should really try if that excluding of unit tests also works with the Krita unit tests, since that does sound like a nice feature to use. Bill attended the talk as well, and gave a free CMake book to a happily surprised Peter Rockai (mornfall) during the questions section, after Peter asked a question about integrating Java in CMake projects. After that, we first had Øyvind Kolås (pippin) talking a bit about GEGL (we had to switch his talk and the Deb Packaging Jam, unfortunately). It seems that the current development version of Gimp has a checkbox in the main GUI to 'Enable GEGL', which is rather interesting (amongst other things, it provides them with live previewing of filters, a feature the current Krita development version has as well, and which I also demonstrated the day before). As seems to be typical with talks by pippin, he used a custom presentation interface to do his presentation (this time it appeared to be a graphically 'enhanced' file system browser ) Following that I had another scheduling conflict: there was both the Deb talk, and another Klik talk (this time as a main track). I resolved it by quickly visiting Simon and Kurt to take a picture, and then go back to the Crossdesktop room where Jonathan Riddell explained us all about making Debian Packages. He did this by using the rather amusing example of packaging the GNU Hello World program. Unfortunately, due to circumstances, we had to cancel the last devroom talk, so no pictures from that. After that, I hung around a bit with mornfall and Pino Toscano (who doesn't like me taking pictures of him, yet is on the group picture ). After Holger talked a bit with us, FOSDEM 2008 was unfortunately over already. Let's hope next year's FOSDEM will be at least as good as this one PS: I bought a Debian T-Shirt at FOSDEM, I guess that makes up for my rant about them I actually wanted to buy one last year already, but they were sold out then. I made sure to buy one on Saturday this year, and indeed they still had some (FYI: like said in the comments there, that issue has been temporarily fixed in their kernels now. I tested it, and it indeed works, yay ) (And generally speaking, I really like Debian, and that's mainly why I get angry at it sometimes: I care about it) Edit/PS 2: Seems like Jonathan Riddell put up all of my KDE related FOSDEM pictures on his Flickr account, so now you can have a more extensive view of them Categories: KDE blogs
John Layt: A quick look at the new Qt 4.4 Print DialogI've finally set up a VirtualBox session for KDE 4.1 development with Qt 4.4 installed, so I've been able to have a quick play with the new QPrintDialog, and it's a huge improvement. Hopefully I'm not stealing anyones thunder here, but I thought we should have a quick peek. First up, a reminder how the old KDE 3 print dialog and current Qt 4.3 dialogs look like : Now lets see what the default Qt 4.4 dialog looks like: A lot cleaner and simpler, and obviously picking up the collapsable options button from KDE3. So lets look at the two options tabs the come with Qt 4.4 (so far at any rate). Qt 4.4 Print Dialog - Copies Tab Qt 4.4 Print Dialog - Options Tab Well, not much there, just the stuff you'll most frequently change (note the new duplex options). The other tabs you see are the KWrite added options, just as in KDE3. You can click on the Properties button to get the more advanced options that are less frequently changed, i.e. the stuff the app developer should normally take care of setting for you: Qt 4.4 Print Dialog - Page Tab Qt 4.4 Print Dialog - Advanced Tab So a vast improvement there over the old Qt 4.3 version and catching up to KDE3. I'm not sure if we'll be getting any more options added for 4.4 (Cups n-up, non-continuous page ranges, etc), but it looks like a better base for the trolls to build on in the future, and for us to add features to in the meantime. I do have a few problems. I still don't like the Advanced options implementation which appears unchanged from Qt 4.3, which I think suffers from a lack of visible clues about how to actually change the settings, but I don't know if that's the final version or not. I also think it is a shame that there doesn't appear to be a way of us adding tabs into the Properties section instead of the Options section. There's also a couple of thngs I'd like to see exposed in the API to make it easier to extend the dialog, but that's probably something for feedback direct to the trolls. Categories: KDE blogs
Sune Vuorela (pusling): Fosdem2008First time ever I have been at a conference and attending so few talks. Needed to talk to sooo many people. But anyways, it was quite interesting to put some faces of the people I kind of work with. Especially my favourite kde upstream people. So many keys to sign, but I guess I am finally thru it. If you are expecting a signature from me and haven’t got one yet, please check your spam filters and/or try poke me. I guess I will keep my paper notes a couple of days before ditching them. Beer event was bigger this year, but still too crowded. Fosdem is also quite crowded - so crowded that I missed some talks because of it. But anyway, see you next year - probably. Categories: KDE blogs
Jason Kasper (vanRijn): In-Ear Headphones and Puking Yer Guts Out?I bought $180 of in-ear headphones to try out (the Shure SE210’s and the Sennheiser CX300’s) and both of them, I think, made me feel dizzy to the point of falling over and feeling like I was going to hurl my guts out the next morning. I’ve blogged previously about motion sickness, but this is just frightening and frustrating and badness. Does this make any sense to anyone? Is it possible to be predisposed to dizziness and room-spinning-ness? Are in-ear, noise-isolating headphones known for making you feel dizzy, causing the room to spin on you, and not take effect until the next morning? I felt fine while I was listening to them. But after I took them off, went to bed, and got up the next morning, the room just spun ferociously. Blef. Categories: KDE blogs
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