Category: Software Libre (Page 9 of 9)

Buzzing

28 May 2010 / apol

I haven’t found the laptop of my dreams yet (yes, I’m a romantic, probably I should write some series about How I Met My Laptop when I’m done) but life has not stopped, au contraire, it just kept moving on.

For starters, I spent last week with the KDE Edu and KDE Multimedia teams in Randa where we gathered to get our projects some steps forward. Personally it was a great experience, I was actually looking forward to discuss some issues with the KDE Edu people mostly and I think we did great, we’ll see how it turns out in the future but I’m quite optimistic about it :). Also I could meet Percy, our new KAlgebra contributor in person, so we could discuss about some technical issues we found and about how are we going to rule the world in the future. 😀
On the other hand, with my Kamoso developer hat on, it was a nice experience also to get to talk to some VLC developer to sort our problems out which is going to mean a new version soon. \o/ Great, and kudos to Alex who is doing some really tough work (VLC has bugs too! we had a hard time to realize that). And last but not least it was great to be able to show KDevelop to some KDE developers who had not realized its awesomeness yet, I even think I convinced some of them so, yay us!

Other than that, I keep working on my GSoC, I’ll have some flash visit home tomorrow and much more to come :D.

Being a hacker

12 May 2010 / apol

Hi!
So after last Akademy-es (which was great BTW \o/) I realised that I have to find a new laptop since the current is basically broken in many ways.

I’m writing this blog post for 2 reasons, as a reivindication and as a call for help.

The Reivindication: I’m sure I’m not the first one who finds himself in that ugly position where you’re a Free Software hacker and have to pay you want or not for a Win7 license. That sincerely sucks in many levels, it’s hard to get to be a proud and solid community when you feel like all the industry is denying you exist. In fact I think that hackers should be a good market (they fix their computer themselves, everyone asks them to know what’s the best computer,…) but the truth feels far from that, apparently the segmenation is netbooks, businessmen and hardcore gamers. Well then, the reivindication is this: why isn’t there any company that would let our community be part of their market?
Why isn’t there any of such free hardware initiatives in Europe? (which sells laptops, of course)

The Call for Help: I’ve looked through all the important brands, even if I consider to pay for the windows license (even if I hate to do so) I still can’t find anything I’d be comfortable with. I want something at least GNU/Linux-friendly and not too heavy to carry around everyday but still scales up to my usual KDE hacking. Most laptops claim to be “good for business” which is some concept I just fail to understand, does anybody know what’s appropriate for my use case? (of course budget is limited as a student’s :P)

Thanks!

EDIT: Needs, well I need to be able to compile KDE there for sure. I was wondering if some of these ULV processors would be fine. I don’t do any gaming so for graphics intel is just fine, I just need something where KWin works properly.

KAlgebra Everywhere

7 November 2009 / apol

Today when I got home I felt like doing something big, something new and something fast. As many other times, this turned into some KAlgebra coding rush but today it was a bit different, because it involved a new project in KDE: Cantor.

So what happened? Cantor is an interface for mathematical engines (supports Maxima, Sage and R) that works on worksheets instead of just a console as we do in KAlgebra currently, like many other programs that you might know like Maple for instance. What I did was to implement a KAlgebra backend for Cantor.
I have to say it was quite straightforward. Alexander Rieder, the developer, has been helpful and everything worked fine, which is great and surprising for such a young project, so kudos for Cantor! 🙂

This backend already supports code completion, syntax highlighting and some embedded help, it doesn’t support plotting or latex exporting Â¿yet? though, but I hope this will be added at some point. I’d like to remark that it’s good to have such backend because it makes Cantor a project that properly integrates the tools that KDE-Edu provides and doesn’t just rely on (probably better) choices from 3rd parties.

So now we have 4 KAlgebra interfaces: GUI, Console, Plasmoid and Cantor. What’s next?

Here you can see what it looks like:

Enjoy!

KDE talk in Barcelona

6 March 2009 / apol

Hi, I will be giving a talk about KDE next sunday at 11:00 am in the UPC university, on the Campus nord and I am posting this blog entry because if you are in Barcelona and interested in KDE you might want to come.

Here you can find all the information about how to go, schedules and (yes, there are other talks you might want to go too 😉 ): http://www.fiberparty.org/

See you!

KDevelop4’s Documentation Integration

28 February 2009 / apol

I’m back to you today to show something that we have been baking lately for KDevelop. It is its new documentation integration.

With KDevelop 4 we have been focusing on putting together the information that the user will be willing to read every moment. Until now, while browsing the code, we were only showing the information gathered by the C++ support. Since the last week this is no longer true, we can now show the documentation provided by the different documentation plugins. We only have a QtHelp plugin for now, but I hope the architecture will be flexible enough for the new plugins we will have on the future, such as, maybe, a Doxygen’s, cmake’s or anything the reader can imagine.

Here you can see a couple of screenshots that might give you an idea of how does it work so that you can see KDevelop 4, love it and try it.

– The information shown when hovering the DUChain:

– The tool view on the right showing the requested information:

🙂

KDE for students

23 December 2008 / apol

Last week Albert and I made a couple of talks related to KDE on the TÃ©rmens Lan Party event. One of these talks was about KDE-Edu. We reviewed every application one by one, showing some of their strengths.

There was a teacher in the audience (who is concerned about free software, afaik), he said that he was trying to get to use gnu/linux on his school but that he was facing some problems when it comes to use KDE.

One of the issues he mentioned (and that I don’t really know about) is the lack of accessibility tools, the other one is that KDE-Edu applications don’t really fit teachers needs.

It is this second point the one that I would like to focus now. We have quite good applications, but we developers (despite the ones that are both developers and teachers, of course) do what we ponder that’s useful, but not what it is in the actual classroom, so I just wanted to point out that we are open to requests, or at least I am.

In this direction, I wanted to mention that someone contacted me since he wanted to see some features happening on KAlgebra because of some study he is doing. I’m just mentioning that because it was a feature that I was not intending to add in a near future but that can indeed be useful in a real scenario, and it is implemented and hopefully will be in for KDE 4. Here you can see a screenshot of it and you can download and try it here if you wish, even if it is not ready still.

In conclusion, I just wanted to say that if you miss anything, just ask for it. If you don’t know what we have, just check all the (maybe too little) information we’re offering and if you want to contribute but you don’t feel like coding, you can help to improve this communication channel, that is actually failing, so that this education software reaches its goal, students.

Guademy and GSoC

28 April 2008 / apol

Yes, this year you will have to put up with me with another Google Summer of Code project (well, mainly Matt Rogers, who is mentoring me again 😉 ). This year I’ll try to get KDevelop (KDevPlatform) to be able to use plugins written on different languages through Kross. Great! 🙂

On the other side, this weekend I’ve been at ValÃ¨ncia, attending to the Guademy conferences, where we have been discussing about interoperability between free software environments (or should I say KDE and Gnome?) among other things related to free (libre) software. It was quite interesting so far, despite I had to a bit earlier due to some personal issues it’s been great to be there. 🙂

Back to reality, now I’ll have to concentrate a bit more on the university before starting the summer of code hard work… But still I want to put some code that I have been baking lately related to KDevelop’s cmake support… 🙂

C’ ya!