TheBlindCow

FreeSoftware to the fullest!

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Social KDE

In barely 5 hours I’ll be taking my plane to Bruxelles, on my way to FOSDEM, where I’m going to meet a bunch of people interested on a lot of things like I do, mainly Free Software (and chocolate :D, but that’s off topic I guess). Also there I’ll be talking about KDE in Education at the Cross Desktop devroom. I’d like to tell anyone interested on education to come and share with us their opinion and thoughts regarding Free and Open Education.

I’d also like to remind you all that we’ll be celebrating the KDE 4.6 dinner in Barcelona (well, this time Badalona, but it’s still close 🙂 the next 19th february, if you want to come, please just follow these instructions: http://community.kde.org/Promo/ReleaseParties/4.6#Barcelona

Last but not least, it would be good that anyone interested in coming to this year’s KDE Edu sprint says so on KDE Edu mailing list so that we have a correct appreciation about how much people is interested in coming. There will be hacking, talks to the local community and lots of fun with the local folks in Bilbao :).

See you soon!

KDE Memory game and MeeGo conference

Hi!
As some of you know already, last week I was in Dublin trying to understand what MeeGo means (I got some conclusions, maybe some day I’ll share them). More importantly though, I also met a bunch of KDE hackers and we decided to start to work on some project together. I wanted to work on a KDE Memory game for a while and there I found some time to work on it, here there’s a demonstration about what we can do.

video source: http://proli.net/meu/los_otros/kmemory-presentation.ogv

If you’re interested on it and want to help get it in shape for the next KDE (now 4.7) release, here’s a list of what you can do:
– Think of a good name (yes, kmemory sounds fishy)
– Create a theme
– Create an icon
– Give ideas on how can we improve the theme specification (see kde.theme example in the git repository)
– Give ideas on what UI do we want (not how can it be improved, but what we want, it’s a little different).
– Just try it and enjoy yourself 😀 (no, that doesn’t mean an X theme ¬¬)

You can find the project here: http://gitweb.kde.org/scratch/apol/kmemory.git

Cheers!

Hidden WiFI switches

So yesterday I got a Lenovo IdeaPad S10, it was really nice, the only bad thing was that it didn’t have WiFI.

I (and Albert, thank you 🙂 tried everything I found. echo’ing > /sys files, rfkill tool, looking for hidden buttons, nothing seemed to fix it. -.-

Just in case anybody comes across this one again, just install Windows, install Lenovo Power Management drivers, press Fn+F5 and press On on the WiFI and Bluetooth, then you can come back to the freedom :P.

It’s too bad that this stuff keeps happening…

Twitter is scary

Since we wanted to add support to some Twitter satellite services in Kamoso I decided I would sign up in this popular service (never been in Twitter until today).

I got surprised when I found out that both my @kde.org and @gmail.com accounts were already taken. I told the service that I forgot my password and they let me reset it on both. That helped me see that I was subscribed to an African religious healing half-god on both accounts.

It’s scary to see how a security bug in such a huge web service stole my identity on such a little part of the world. I wonder what could have happened if the hijacker wanted to do something actually serious…

-1 for Twitter.

Kamoso in git.kde.org

Hi,
Today (yesterday already) has been an intense day for Kamoso, I met with Alex and we rearranged our ideas regarding the project, more information will come.

Another big step on the project and the reason for this post is that we’re moving away from gitorious in favor of git.kde.org.
From now on, if you want to give it a try, just run:
git clone git@git.kde.org:kamoso as described in here.

Thanks to the KDE Sysadmin team and long life to Kamoso! 🙂

KDE on the Mobile

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.

KDE Community in Barcelona

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:
people happy people

KDE Meeting in Barcelona

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!
kde 4.5 dinner in Barcelona

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