Bobulate

Linux gadgets. What’s not to like? vanRijn likes the Palm Pre, or would like it if it was available already. Like him, I spent a long time on Palm Pilot syncing and the enthusiasm for the whole platform just petered out. Handheld device syncing never really took off like one might hope it would, even with OpenSync and other bits and pieces. Perhaps the Pre will turn things around for Palm, and I hope at the same time that they put a little more support into Linux (or Free Software Desktop) syncing this time around.

Me, I think my main desktop sync desire right now is my Nokia 6300 phone. Or it would be, if I cared about syncing my phone book with the desktop at all anymore.

I spotted another searching-for-Linux-gadgets kind of post; is it really so hard to find neat gadgets running a Free Software operating system now? I’ve got three on my desk right now I could enthuse about (a Conceptronic NAS, a Freecom MusicPal and a modded Linksys 54GL) but, truth be told, none of those three are the kind of shiny gadget you’d use in a business setting. They’re boxy and utilitarian even when they’re shiny (this picture has a nice collection of devices, not all of which are Linuxy).

What does make my heart beat faster (and then my brain kicks in, saying that I don’t have time to look in another direction at all) is something like this ARM board. As far as the BeagleBoard goes, I have the baseball cap but no hardware. There are a dozen cool things you could do with these, but after that putting it into a shiny box for consumer use is a big step. Marvell’s SheevaPlug has made the step to stodgy white plastic (but then again, it’s supposed to be a wall wart).

Finally, Aaron writes about gadget integration with the desktop. The relevant part is a bit hidden, so I’ll quote it here:

The project is building a proof of concept device using an Arduino processor with a Bluetooth board attached. When you approach with a Plasma device (well, pending Rob’s GSoC project on Remote Plasmoids) we’ll see that there’s something available via Bluetooth. Plasma will poke the device such that it spits out a Javascript Plasmoid that will then appear ready for action. Walk away and the Bluetooth connection goes away and so does the widget.

It’s not that far from carrying your applications in your pocket and BT’ing them onto the desktop. You can almost see a set of Lego blocks like that carrying around your personal computing environment. It reminds me of a device I saw a few years back which had a full Linux system on a USB stick which would export a display via VNC, so you could plug it in, VNC to the stick and continue working there. I wonder what became of that? In any case, I think there’s enough niftiness out there, just waiting for use.

Some days, there’s just too much new software out there at once. Not only has a pony escaped (I met Kushal last in Bangalore), but a tiger is on the prowl (Gökmen, Negril), and KOffice (I know the last time I met Cyrille it was in a large bar, multi-storied, all wood paneling and such and Boudewijn was there as well but I have no clue what year or even what country it might have been in).

I mentioned recently a KDE Amharic (or Ge’ez) translation. Unfortunately, such a thing does not yet exist. My brother is moving to Addis Ababa later this year, though, so I’ll stop by at some point. That is the total extent of my own intentions for Amharic KDE (I do think it is a beautiful script and attended an interesting talk last year about text messaging in Amharic). However, starting a translation effort is relatively simple; the Hausa team (re)started this year. Bear in mind, though, that starting is easy, finishing all 148809 strings is not so.

First off, the statistics for languages currently being translated are on the KDE l10n pages. There’s a “participate” link on that page as well as a translation HOWTO to get you started. Very roughly:

• Make sure you can enter the characters you need in a text editor. There’s not much point in starting if you can’t enter a እ from the keyboard.
• Get the very first file to translatie, which is kdelibs4.pot and take a look at the kind of strings in there. I remember with Hausa there were long discussions about some of the terms — especially because there’s often not all that much context available and it can be useful to have a KDE4 installation running and to know where the strings are coming from or being used.
• Start filling in the msgstr parts. You can use any text editor that supports UTF-8 entry. I used kate for a while. However, there are specialized applications that support translation workflows much better. KBabel in KDE3, Lokalize in KDE4. There’s also po-edit and others outside the KDE world.
• Translate a few dozen strings in that file. Read the translation howto. Create a suitable directory structure for your language, copy the translated file in there, then .. gosh, I’d have to look up what to do next. I remember that the first real feeling of accomplishment in Kano with the Hausa team was when we’d (I say ‘we’ here very loosely: Mustapha, Ibrahim, Nasiru and the other guys did the translating and I did the typing) translated the KDE About box and some other bits and could start up LANG=ha konsole and read ‘Cire’ in the File menu. There was some compilation and futzing about involved there, which I can reconstruct from my laptop if it still boots.
• Apply for a KDE svn account, inform the translation team coordinators, and start committing strings. And then send me screenshots 🙂

A while back Aaron wrote a bit about his reasons for attending Akademy. They aren’t *personal* reasons, but reasons of community building, community growth as well as the “special reason”, the overall question answered at the conference; unfortunately personal reasons will keep him from attending this year. Akademy (the yearly KDE world summit) and GUADEC (the yearly GNOME world summit) are hosted together on Gran Canaria, as part of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit (GCDS). The reasons for this are twofold: the boards of both projects wanted to try a joint(-ish) conference and that Canaries have a strong track record in Free Software. I suppose you could also claim proximate cause and say that it’s being held there because the boards of both the GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. decided (following membership consultation) to hold it there.

The generic reasons for attending a large KDE event — community building, putting faces to svn account names, doing design work on a whitboard with a cup of tea and a crowd discussing things and then finally taking a picture and putting it in SVN somewhere as documentation, discovering hidden shared interests and talents (team humongous will be on a foodie rampage, I can assure you) and the simple joy in being together and creating something beautiful and Free — will apply as always. I’ve never been to a GUADEC, but I imagine that the atmosphere there is similar, and look forward to looking around there.

The most generic reason of all to go to a conference is the content thereof; the programme committees of the joint conferences have put together a wonderful set of talks with cross-desktop and project-specific content lasting three days. The keynotes have a few surprises in store for us all.

Still, what’s the special reasons attached to the conference, its overall purpose? I think Aaron does well in aiming squarely for KDE 4.5 — to be released around Akademy 2010, that is. Taking the long view and ensuring the long term stability of the software platform and improving the user experience so that it will keep for a long time is a good thing to do. I have my own list of things that need doing and for which a large-scale event is necessary; they are ancillary to the long term goal and not, strictly speaking, at all essential:

• Plan how we can expand the i18n efforts in novel locations (I’m thinking Hausa and Amharic for largely personal reasons here).
• How to get Raffi to do a KDE theme song (because the bananaphone is ringing).
• Ensure that the legal tidbits around KDE code are explained clearly to all contributors and that newcomers learn quickly how we not only do the technical stuff but the project management and legal mumbo-jumbo around it as well. As part of this we will be encouraging — gently, since it is an individual’s own choice — people to fill in a FLA to simplify our copyright situation.
• I want to re-connect to the people working on Krazy and the English Breakfast Network. I’m sometimes (often?) better at starting things than seeing them through to to their technical perfection and conclusion, so I’ve been rather disconnected from the goings-on in KDE’s software quality checking system. I know Bertjan is doing cool stuff together with Allen and that Brad Hards is looking into gcc plugins (not necessarily for the EBN, but you never know). A long term plan — where do we want to go with this software quality toolset? what should be its direct impact on KDE code? can we promote the use of the tools and presentation software elsewhere?

A large Free Software project like KDE has many facets. I’m going to Akademy to try to buff up a few of them and to get a picture of what the consensus is on the direction of the project as a whole.

Some folks have noticed that my “Bobulate” blog on fruitsalad.org has gone away. This is true. For many years, the KDE-FreeBSD team used fruitsalad, kindly hosted by Hasta AB (a manufacturer of cool curtain rods and blinds). It seems the machine has rolled over and died one last time; the home directories are no longer mounted. While I might have liked a little notice (for instance to get backups off of the machine) there’s not much to be done about it right now except try to reconstruct things using search engine caches. Nonetheless, thanks to Hasta AB for hosting things for so long.

On the KDE-FreeBSD front, development things are now hosted at iXsystems, such as the ports repository, patches, and whatnot. I’ve been slowly updating all my FreeBSD machines to the current ports (KDE 4.2.3) to see what it’s like and what I should expect when updating the packages that I do for OpenSolaris.

As for my blog, I’m happy to move it in with the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). I’ve been involved with the FSFE for some years now, latterly as an FSFE fellow (still owing Rainer much beer, I think) and as a member of the Freedom Task Force. These relationships with the FSFE follow from the kind of things I do as a board member of KDE e.V., where I wear the “legal dude” hat, and from my long-term commitment to Free Software. I’ll be using the FSFE blog platform (it’s WordPress) for my own writings from now on. I will try to continue to cover the usual topics: kids wearing funny hats, Free Software conferences, legal issues, KDE development and KDE packaging on non-Linux Free Software operating systems.