Next Thursday afternoon I’ll be attending the Drumbeat Festival discussing about Education software.
If you are interested on the subject don’t hesitate to come!
Category: Software Libre (Page 8 of 9)
Hi fellow KDE enthusiasts!
I know this may sound like a rant but I think that if I don’t say that I’m going to explode.
First of all, it’s great that since we’re based on Qt as a development environment we have the opportunity to get in the mobile sector. It’s not great, it’s awesome. I’ve been willing to develop there for many years and with the new Nokia platforms I will be able to use my projects there. After getting the N900, I have developed 3 applications in Maemo, just one of them has been released in the open. For Qt projects, it just works.
Let’s focus on KDE now.
– Everybody tells me that we should develop for Meego: for Meego we don’t have any KDE packages whatsoever (or at least I couldn’t find them) and AFAIK there’s no device that ships it and there won’t be any until 2011, I can put it but not even Nokia supports it. Yes, it’s a great target.
– I have Maemo, it’s an awesome Debian and there’s even some packaging already done in files.kolab.org/local/maemo/. These packages are good for testing, I could compile KAlgebra in my scratchbox. My problem with these packages is that they depend of some Qt4.7 experimental, so kdelibs in Maemo depend on something huge that I don’t need . Additionally we don’t have kdelibs packages in Maemo repositories (there are -devel repositories, it’s not like we have to stuff anything on Maemo systems), that means that if I wanted to release KAlgebra in Maemo I should add them? Doesn’t sound very community friendly.
– Why does KDE people keep telling me to trim KDELibs usage? KDELibs is useful, it makes no sense to not use it just because we don’t have packages for it. We want to share code! It’s what has made KDE great since I’ve been around at least, why do we forget that as soon as we don’t find KDE packages on some system?
– Why isn’t there people interested on packaging KDE on these systems? Probably because these distributions aren’t community-friendly enough, or because these don’t have enough users. Personally, I like to focus on development, do we really expect to push these platforms if not even developers can’t have their applications on their devices to be able to test them.
– Is it that creating packages for these platforms is just technically hard? Maybe we should address that first.
Going back to my experience, it was such straight forward with Qt apps that I convinced myself to port KAlgebra, now i have a version that just uses kdecore and kdeui (according to KDAB packages kdecore+kdeui+kalgebra, this should be less than 2MB, instead of the >10MB if I use their packages with their dependencies).
I guess that KDE development on mobile devices is kind of stale because the only applications that have been ported are huge (like Plasma or Kontact) or they just don’t use KDE (like Marble or Qthello which forked KReversi somehow, AFAIK). What would happen if we consider KDE a project and work together a little? I’m pretty sure we could bring KDE Edu or KDE Games all together into Maemo with little amount of work, why do we have people who would contribute these stopped because the lack of packaging in Maemo?
Maybe I should just consider that KDE is not supported on these devices and spend my time somewhere else.
PS: I didn’t mean to despise anybody’s work. It’s not hatred, just frustration.
The story about this meeting was quite casual, during our typical beer session after our also typical KDE 4.5 release dinner party we decided we could meet sometime with our laptops to do some hacking, considering that all KDE contributors in Barcelona we have very different targets (catalan translations, pianos development, distribution development and some colorful devils) it was something that came along quite fresh so, after some discussions on where could we do it, we decided to gather on some linux classroom our city hall offers for free (rather than a bar, which would be what some spaniards would typically do on a saturday afternoon) and announced in some local mailing lists, blogs and asked to spread the word.
I must say I was impressed because I didn’t expect much people to come and that made me realize that probably we should do that more.
I think it was quite nice to be able to meet KDE users in Barcelona, there was even people from any kind: who had sent some code to KDE but, since they don’t come to Akademy(-es)’s we never got to know each other, there was also some users who just wanted to meet for a while, also people of those who know they want to collaborate but never find their spot, people who used to collaborate with KDE but life grow us apart, people who are from my surroundings and kind of forced them to come and, of course, those people inside KDE Spain who knew about this event from the first time.
I think it’s really good to be able to interact in person with the community, I guess we all know that (e.g. sprints, akademy’s) but also it’s always helpful to grow KDE interest in your local area. Just one hint: make it sure to announce it to the local free software mailing lists. It’s going to be the best place to get to the people that’s not directly into the KDE circles that are quite easy to reach, apparently not everybody reads the KDE Planet!
Some pictures:
Hello fellow KDE enthusiast!
Next Saturday 9th October afternoon, we will celebrate the a KDE Meeting at Bocanord, in Barcelona.
The plan is to go there at 4pm, make a small introduction about KDE for newcomers at 5pm and then to work in different groups depending on your specific interest, like translation with Josep Maria, development with me and Alex and also Pedro offered to solve any problems you might have with Linux sound stack.
If you’re just using KDE and you have any doubt, question or just want to chat for a while, you’ll be welcome as well!
See you!
This saturday we will be celebrating the Software Freedom Day in Barcelona. I’ll be attending and I’ll talk about KDE and Education.
If you’re close and interested on the subject feel free to come and we will discuss anything you like! 🙂
See you there!
KDE is moving to Git, Qt did a while ago, like many other free software project did before. I’m sure you would expect your favorite IDE to properly integrate with your Free Software projects seemlessly, well from the upcoming KDevelop 4.1 version you’re going to find them supported by default.
So, what kind of integration do we provide?
– Same integration we get from Centralized VCS’s, such as commiting, checking for differences, moving, copying, etc. Which is already a huge step forward when it comes to the KDevelop experience.
– Also we support some distributed or git specific features. We can Push/Pull, Branch management and Stash management.
– And of course, cloning projects, as I showed on a recent blog post:
I hope that you will be able to take advantage of the new features we are providing now and in the future from it. 🙂 And of course, if you have any question remember we have a mailing list and an IRC channel to get to us!
As some of you will know, given some kate recent changes, now it’s not possible to work with KDevelop/KDevPlatform master together with up-to-date kdelibs trunk, so if you want to keep up to date with KDevelop development you will want to freeze your svn trunk to some revision before r1162564.
Another option you have, if you’re a brave KDevelop user is to use the movingranges branch which david’s fixes to work with the new kate ranges system, that will be merged once 4.1 is released.
We understand that it’s a little disturbing for everyone but we hope it’s going to be better really soon :), kdevelop gears don’t stop turning. ^^
Regards!
Hi,
It’s becoming a tradition already, new release, new KDE dinner in Barcelona :).
If you want to come just add yourself!
For more information see: http://community.kde.org/Promo/ReleaseParties/4.5#Barcelona
See you there!
Hi,
I’ve been willing to talk about my progress on the GSoC project for a while, never found the time though, so I decided to do it today given my sleepy state.
The first part that’s working (besides some little issues) is the new Import Wizard page for importing projects from the VCS locations in case it’s needed. The idea is that we won’t force the user to rely on other tools than KDevelop for starting to work on a project.
There are some little issues still, mostly regarding usability but that will be addressed in the future.
There’s been some improvement on the Laucher Configuration dialog which nobody liked either, here’s the first iteration I worked on today. If you have any idea for improvements just tell me 🙂
If anyone is interested on improvements or further development please contact us on our mailing list, stop me at Akademy or any other non violent and friendly way :D.
Good night!
When preparing these KDE presentation we usually need some artwork from the KDE icons and sometimes I’m too lazy to find them. That won’t happen anymore since I created this really small tool that solves part of this problem :).
Works like that:
This generates a 128px kalgebra.png file with the KAlgebra icon:
kde-devel@tatilx:~$ kicons kalgebra 128
This generates a 128px kalgebra128.png file with the KAlgebra icon:
kde-devel@tatilx:~$ kicons kalgebra 128 kalgebra128.png
And of course, the real reason to post 🙂
