• graphical artists
• usability experts
• user support specialists
• documentation writers/translators
• software translators
• bug triagers
• marketing ninjas
• community managers
• release managers
• website and wiki maintainers
• unlimited funds…

Amarok is very lucky to have most of those. No, not the unlimited funds, sadly, thats one of the reasons why we ask our dear users and Amarok lovers to support us with donations, it allows us for example to maintain our server,  which in turn can host other Free Software projects of the KDE family like Konversation.

Linda and Valorie have started to write the handbook for Amarok 2.2.2, and Valorie is currently looking for skilled wiki writers and maintainers,  too.

I am more active in doing user support and act as a bug triager for Amarok, and occasionally also other KDE projects like Phonon. This all started on a rainy Sunday afternoon when I tried to get rid of some of the numerous duplicate bug reports and wishes and I got hooked on it. Some 12 months later I have closed 1885+ bugs and triaged thousands of others:  Amarok went from 2.0 to 2.2.2 and got 2864 new bug reports and wishes in this time, of which 3071 could be closed. An average 5-10% only were unique bugs, all the rest were either duplicates, invalid, already solved or reported against the now unmaintained Amarok 1.4.x. Some were also reported against Amarok by error and had to be reassigned to another project.

Bug reports and wishes are something that definitely needs triaging, since many reports have flaws. This can be

• an incomplete or a too complicated description, sometimes not even in English
• missing elements: version number, distribution, what were they doing when the bug occured
• in case of crashes: incomplete backtraces
• more than one item per report, which makes it too difficult to follow
• duplicates
• already implemented features or corrected code
• Invalid reports

All of these flaws are quite common, it is rather rare to get bug reports that can be used “as is” by the developers. And that is my point: bug triaging is not a developer task. Developers develop code, they should not have to loose their time running after users for more information about a bug or a wish. Unfortunately most of the projects don’t have their own triagers and rely on the KDE bugsquad to do this task, which is not that easy and something that needs to be addressed:

While much of the triaging can be done by people not involved in a particular project, it gets difficult when the triager doesn’t know the application. IMHO s/he should at least be a regular user of the application and ideally also run the developer version from GIT or SVN. This is not as complicated as it sounds, most of the projects have step-by-step instructions on how to build from trunk. If it is one single application the triager is interested in, s/he can build it locally in the home directory, which can be easily removed if needed. But it is of course important that the triager is in direct contact with the developers, be this only to be able to get feedback from them if necessary.

I encourage all larger projects to recruit dedicated triagers. This has more than one advantage:

• it takes away an important workload and the developers can concentrate on their primary task
• dedicated triagers know the application and can judge much better what is needed to make a report useful than somebody who occasionally triages here and there
• it adds strength to the team, and dont’ forget, sometimes triagers become developers (not me, there are already too many bad coders in this world … )
• id adds efficiency to your development cycle, and you find your way around in the bugs list since all incomplete bugs are gone

Now how do we recruit triagers? This can be done by encouraging advanced users to give a hand from time to time, I can assure you, bug triaging can get addictive
But there is a much easier way: through the BugWeeks dedicated to bug triaging in the KDE Forum. The first BugWeek has just ended, set up and lead by Darío Andrés, our “Bugs Hero” who had the initial idea and set up all the course. We plan to hold two BugWeeks per month and encourage everybody to participate and make the number of untriaged bugs much, much smaller! Also, a BugWeek on the forum has the advantage of being easier to run than a BugDay, where people need to be online at the same time and share a wiki.

On another hand I would like to write about a particular form of invalid bug reports: those from poisonous people. Every project has sometimes to face people submitting bug reports and wishes in non-objective ways . The bug may exist, but the way these particular reporters report it and comment on it is poisonous, subjective to the extreme and sometimes quite insulting. A non-objective report is not something one can act upon in another way but by marking it as Invalid  if the reporter doesn’t change their tone. To avoid loosing the important information, IMHO the triager should make a new report with the important information, but close the original one.

I have done this twice already and it worked out quite well, so I think this is really worth a try.

My reason for doing this is clear: useless reports by these people, insulting and personal attacks are discouraging and demotivating for the developers. It can in the worst case lead to developers leaving a project because of this. The triagers have a unique possibility to avoid these insults to reach the developers in filtering those. Of course this can be dangerous for the triagers, too, as themselves can get wary of such posts.

We here should all think and take action to not let this happen and make use of the wonderfully motivating and supportive network we have which is KDE: talk about around you and let the magic work. Don’t keep it in your mind alone or in your developer channel or mailing list or bug report, talk to your team, to your friends, to the bugsquad and of course the Community Working Group. And don’t forget the two last paragraphs of the KDE Code of Conduct: Support Others in the Community and Get Support from Others in the Community.

Regardless this interesting suggestion, I will stay at home and give a hand in bug triaging, this will probably be more efficient Don’t hesitate to join the fun in #kde-bugs on irc.freenode.net on November 8th!

PS. I seem to travel again on November 21st, this time to Giv’at’Ada, Israel. Since I planned to be in Bern for the Swiss Karmic Koala Release Party, I guess that’s what is meant

Eckhart, Andi and Adriaan held a booth for KDE, Mark and Sven were manning the Amarok one and I tried to be at both the KDE and Kubuntu booth during these two days. This was made quite easy by the organizers as they arranged the three booths around the same pilar we shared with the guys from the Swiss OLPC Team.

While Andi could only attend the first day (thanks again, Andi, for helping us, it was really nice meeting you!), Adriaan was also wearing his FSFE/FTF hat and was busy with attending talks, FSFE and Swiss FOSS meeting and getting in touch with a lot of Swiss activist, especially during the second day. He sometimes found a little time to show KDE running on OpenSolaris and talk about the pilars of KDE and brought some very yummy Dutch cookies. Eckhart held the KDE flag steadily, selling swag, showing 4.3.1 and handing out CDs (we had Kubuntu 9.04 and Fedora KDE Live Media kindly provided by the Fedora guys from the booth right in front of us). He even found some time on brainstorming about how to improve the booth to make it better despite the little space and prevented the table from getting too much cluttered with empty water glasses, paper and such. Great work, Echkart, as usual! I sat somehow between the KDE and Kubuntu booth (actually the booth of the official Swiss Ubuntu LoCo Team), showing KDE 4.3.1 on my laptop to give people some taste of what they could expect for the next release. The Swiss Team was present with Manuel and Roman on Wednesday, Dirk and Dani on Thursday (since Dani helped out a the OOo booth on the first day) and Nick was the nice guy who attended all two days! He really deserves a special Thank You for his patience and expertise It was also a nice occasion to meet Dirk, who is usually helping out the German team and took his Thursday afternoon off to give a hand.

Don't try this!

Despite the ongoning economic crisis, the event was nice although very noisy, with good catering and the organizers did a lot to make us comfortable (thanks again to Hannes and the two Matthias from ch/open !). The adjacent business event called Topsoft was focusing on the same themes as usual, ERP and CRM, with big booths, suits and ties everywhere, expensive flyers and buzzwords. They even had Brazilian dancers on the first evening “apéro” But even without the big money, we had a lot of fun on our side and were greeted with a yummy supper at the social event, listening to some lightning talks (where Sven presented the Darker Radio Charts available as a script in Amarok) and making new acquaintances. Add to that the Free Beer which made us all quite happy

The evening of the second day was topped by a gathering of about 20 Free Software activists in a Spanish bodega with very good tapas and some beer and sangria in Zürich. So sad Eckhart had a train to catch and couldn’t join in, but we will repeat that on the next occasion, promised. How about Openexpo in Spring again?

Warning: please do not try this if you are not comfortable with compiling from sources, and be aware that compiling from a development branch can break a few things!

Note: as I use Kubuntu, this is heavily biased, but there are a few indications for other distributions, as far as those have been provided by the previous bloggers.

Thanks go to Mark Kretschmann who started that adventure and wrote the first instructions, to Stephan Jau who wrote an excellent How-to for the SVN version for Kubuntu users and to David Faure who corrected some of our settings. And, of course, all the Amarok Team who do a tremendous job every single day

This document explains how to install Amarok 2 from GIT in your home directory - in an easy way

Update:October 12th 2009 I updated a few things since the first edition, in particular the README content in section 5 and adapted it to the upcoming Karmic Koala aka Kubuntu 9.10 (remember, I am biased)

If you already have an Amarok 2.x version installed from your distro, un-install it to prevent setting conflicts and similar. You will need the kdelibs and kdebase-runtime from KDE 4.2 or higher. Please see also the minimal requirements and mandatory dependencies in section 5.

1.Install git, the compiler and KDE 4 development packages:

• In Kubuntu, Debian, and all their derivatives:
  • sudo aptitude install git-core build-essential kde-devel
• In Archlinux:
  • sudo pacman -Sy git base-devel kdelibs kdebase-runtime
• In Gentoo:
  • sudo emerge -av dev-util/git kdelibs plasma-workspace

2. Install ccache to speed up compilation

ccache is a very nice tool that can speed up your compilation. It speeds up re-compilation of C/C++ code by caching previous compiles and detecting when the same compile is being done again. Install the package from your distribution and set the size of the cache to 2 GB with the command

ccache -M 2G

This will take 2Gb of space in your local directory, but the gain of time is really impressive. Enable the use of ccache by adding it to your local .bashrc, described in step 3 below:

3. Define the PATH and local environment

• export PATH=$HOME/kde/bin:$PATH
• export PATH=/usr/lib/ccache:$PATH

• source $HOME/.bashrc

NOTE: if you are not using the bash shell, edit your proper shell config file (~/.zshrc or ~/.tcshrc or whatever it may be).

4. Make KDE aware of Amarok’s plugin location:

5. Make sure you have all the necessary dependencies

The README file in the source states the required and optional dependencies, but I might as well write it down here, so there is no other document to be read for the lazy ones. Of course, before diving into compiling from source, check if those dependencies are available in the package repository of your distro

Note: you must also install the devel versions of these packages!

• KDE-Libs 4.2 + KDE-Base-runtime 4.2 (or newer)
  • http://www.kde.org

• TagLib 1.6 (or newer), Metadata tagging library
  • http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/taglib.html
  • svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/kdesupport/taglib

  Note: You need to compile taglib 1.6 with -DWITH_ASF=On -DWITH_MP4=On when running cmake, or use ./configure --enable-asf --enable-mp4

• TagLib Extras 1.0.1 (or newer), Support for metadata reading of additional file types
  • http://kollide.net/~jefferai/taglib-extras-1.0.1.tar.gz
  • svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/kdesupport/taglib-extras

• MySQL 5.0 (or newer) Embedded: libmysqld compiled with fPIC (In-process database support)

  Note: If you have installed MySQL Embedded in non-default location (i.e. $HOME/usr), Amarok may fail to start with error regarding libmysqlclient library. In this case, add the following string to your ~/.bashrc:

  • export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/usr/lib/mysql:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

    where $HOME/usr is the path you will use in the --prefix option when compiling (see step 7. below)

• QtScript Generator, Qt Bindings 0.1.0 (Qt Bindings for QtScript for Amarok’s scripting system)
  • http://code.google.com/p/qtscriptgenerator/
  • git://labs.trolltech.com/qtscriptgenerator

  Note: make sure to follow all steps described when compiling Qtscriptgenerator

• libgpod 0.7.0 (or newer), iPod support
  • http://www.gtkpod.org/libgpod.html

• libmtp 0.3.x, MTP device support
  • http://libmtp.sourceforge.net/

• Mp3tunes.com integration (including synchronization) requires:
  • OpenSSL http://www.openssl.org
  • libxml2 http://xmlsoft.org
  • libcurl http://curl.haxx.se
  • Glib2 http://www.gtk.org
  • Loudmouth, the Jabber library, http://www.loudmouth-project.org/
  • Qt must be compiled with Glib enabled

• Liblastfm 0.3 (For scrobbling, Internet radio, and artist info)
  • http://cdn.last.fm/src/liblastfm-0.3.0.tar.bz2
  • http://github.com/mxcl/liblastfm/tree/master

• MySQL 5.0 (or newer) Server (external database support)

5.1.Various dependencies that might cause compile errors and have to be installed:

(these are rather specific to Kubuntu, might have other names in other distributions and/or are already installed)

• libstrigiqtdbusclient-dev
• libsearchclient-dev
• libmysqlclient15off
• libmysqlclient16-dev
• libmysqld-dev
• libmysqld-pic

6. Create folders:

• mkdir $HOME/kde
• mkdir $HOME/kde/src
• mkdir $HOME/kde/build
• mkdir $HOME/kde/build/amarok

7. Checking out and Building:

Now you need a source checkout from Gitorious. In the folder ~/kde/src/, type the following command:

git clone git://gitorious.org/amarok/amarok.git

this will drag approx. 55-60Mb of data, depending on the moment you actually make this checkout.

Everything is now ready to build:

• cd $HOME/kde/build/amarok
• cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/kde -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull $HOME/kde/src/amarok
• make install

8. Updating KDE Config:

• kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental

Note: this might not be necessary for most of the cases

Now you are ready to run Amarok 2, by typing “amarok” in the shell. We strongly recommend you run amarok with the -d and –nofork option, so you will have debugging enabled and can get a valid backtrace if Amarok crashes.

9. Updating your Amarok build:

Since the development is quite fast with git, you should update your Amarok build regularly, and a daily checkout is not too much. This is made easy with the following command:

• cd $HOME/kde/src/amarok
• git pull

This will update your local git branch. If you have done modifications to your local branch you would like to keep, make sure you update with the --rebase option. See also the git tutorial for KDE in section 10.

You can now simply build again with

• cd $HOME/kde/build/amarok
• make install

Since you have installed ccache, a full build will speed up over time. To have an idea about the build time, just type time make install when building. If you have several CPU cores, you can speed up even more with the -j[n] option, where [n] is the number of CPU cores +1. Of course, the more CPU you use for building, the less you will have available for other tasks

10. More information and useful links

Don’t forget: running a development version also means that it is not stable and can break anytime ! This is especially true after a feature freeze, when the developers merge their personal git branches to the master branch.

Note: To be notified about major changes you definitely should subscribe to our mailing list amarok@kde.org at https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok. Of course you will also find help in our #amarok channel on irc.freenode.net, but reading the mailing list is mandatory and spares us a lot of time.

Since you don’t want to repeat all this completely when you upgrade to a newer version of your preferred distribution, you should consider installing your /home directory on a separate partition from the start, it will spare you quite some time and hassle in the future.

• The git tutorial for KDE
• A shortcut for reporting Amarok bugs

Edit: Casper van Donderen just pointed me to the possibility to have the latest Amarok from git on Windows, too: if you build KDE using the emerge system, just type emerge amarok at the kdeenv command prompt. Thanks for the hint, Casper!

]]> http://blogs.fsfe.org/myriam/2009/09/compiling-amarok-from-git-locally-full-summary/feed/ http://blogs.fsfe.org/myriam/2009/09/preparing-for-another-conference-openexpo-in-winterthur-next-week/ http://blogs.fsfe.org/myriam/2009/09/preparing-for-another-conference-openexpo-in-winterthur-next-week/#comments Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:38:29 +0000 myriam http://blogs.fsfe.org/myriam/?p=74
It’s this time of the year again where I prepare for attending OpenExpo in Winterthur. This important Free Software even is held on September 23 & 24 in Winterthur, Switzerland.
This year I helped organizing more than one booth: Amarok, KDE and the Ubuntu/Kubuntu booth of the Swiss Team. While Mark and Sven will handle the Amarok booth, showing the upcoming version 2.2 of your preferred music player, I will share my time at both the KDE and the Ubuntu/Kubuntu one, presenting the latest KDE 4.3.1, using Kubuntu 9.04 (unless I find some time to install a preview of the upcoming Karmic Koala before). Not alone, of course, as I will have a lot of helping hands from Andi, Adriaan, Eckhart and Pascal for KDE, and Daniel, Dirk, Erwin and Roman at the Swiss Team booth

Then complete with ‘make install’ and voilà, you have the most recent 2.2-git

For updates, you just run ‘git pull’ in your ~/kde/src/amarok/ folder and proceed as before with ‘make install’.

As usual, don’t hesitate to come to #amarok on irc.freenode.net for more questions.

Image by Benjamin Kirschner, Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License

When the FSFE launched their fellowship back in 2005, I joined to be a fellow almost immediately. I have always been a strong supporter of Free Software and the FSFE is doing a great job in Europe with far less money than the FSF, who is working mainly in the US. This is not an easy task, with so many different countries and legal systems and languages, but they have managed to build up a great network.

I sometimes meet people who ask about what the FSFE is doing precisely and I wonder if they have been living under a rock: preventing software patents, advising the EU in various society issues, building up the Freedom Task Force, offering the Fiduciary License Agreement to developers and much, much more are the daily work of these brave people from the FSFE, which I count among my good friends. So when the fellowship was created, I was glad to join and give some of my money to support their work, knowing I would get a lot back.

Still, I was surprised and honored to be contacted for an interview as a fellow, which you can now read here: The smallest unit of freedom: a fellow.

Now, my friends at the Free Software Foundation Europe have been busy working on a website to propose alternative readers for all OS platforms: pdfreaders.org. And it seems that there is only one alternative package running on all operating systems: Okular Another proof that KDE is “The Universal Desktop”.

Don’t forget to use the buttons provided for your websites: There are other models in the “Graphics” part of the website.

Update: if you want to get in touch with the authors of pdfreaders.org, you can drop them a mail with this link.

A few weeks ago, our neighbor, a fifty-something housewife, asked us to have a look at her rather new computer making strange noises and refusing to boot. Of course, this was the ideal moment to try what we first thought to end up with a dual boot:

It was not only impossible to boot with the installed Windows XP, but all attempts to repair the existing installation were vain. Wild guess, total infection as she used the Internet without almost any protection, a very likely scenario. So, what to do? Either reinstall first Windows, then Linux and make the traditional dual boot for newbies, adding tons of firewalls and anti-virus tools. Else, convince the lady that she could continue to use her computer as before with mostly Free Software and get rid of the Windows part, a far easier choice for us who don’t use Windows at all since quite some years, but what about her? She put all her trust in our affirmation that Linux was a far better choice for her. I should add that she is by no means an expert user but also a beginner in the Windows field, so there would be quite some knowledge building.

image copyright by Ian Spare, CC ny-nc-sa

Here are the needs: mailing, some text processing, some basic image manipulation and, most important, Skype with video to keep contact with her family abroad. Languages would be German as system language, quite unfamiliar to us as we both use an English installation and Polish to keep the computer usable for the husband who is not as fluent in German as she is.

Long story short, we installed everything and configured a basic installation with Kubuntu Intrepid Ibex beta and KDE 4.1.2. We did no particular hardware configuration except for the wide screen which turned out to be actually a flat TV and this went in a dash after we set up the 1440×900 specification. The HP color printer was recognized auto-magically, same for almost all the hardware, except for the Canon 4400 F scanner that turned out to be totally unsupported by SANE. The most tricky was actually to install Skype with video support and gave us an evening of headaches, the Logitech camera with built in microphone accepting either only the sound input or the video one. Some two hours of tuning the sound settings (K Mix REALLY needs more usability!) later we managed to make it work with an external headset and suggested to buy a headset, anyway nice to have for late night phone sessions. Oh surprise when after a reboot both camera and built-in microphone worked, and have ever since.

Now, two weeks later I did an update of the language packages, we still have an awful mix of German, Polish and mostly English as the Canonical folks are sadly behind schedule with language packs, the lady managed to nuke the panel and unfortunately it’s not possible to add it at the bottom as it stubbornly decides to turn up at the top of the screen. Moving .kde/ to .kde-old/ and restarting did the trick. I still have to figure out how to activate desktop effects with the Radeon-HD driver, some residual fglrx (installed by default, such a shame) probably preventing the run (it did for the older radeon driver on my laptop).

But, on the bright side, she was able to use Skype almost all the time with both sound and video, used text processing and the next step will be to install Krita for image handling which she is very keen of and bringing her my old HP Scanner I don’t use anymore.

Overall a nice demonstration of how Mom-compatible both Kubuntu and KDE4 already are, enabling a computer newbie to use her computer without those “horrible beeps” and restarts she experienced before. She doesn’t miss Windows at all and say that it’s far more beautiful and not more difficult now than before