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Vorstand (list) no more
September 21st, 2010
For years — perhaps since KDE e.V. was formed — there has been a mailing list kde-ev-vorstand. A perfectly sensible name if you happen to speak German and know something about eingetragene Vereine. For the rest of the world, perhaps not so much. The list has now been renamed to kde-ev-board. Unfortunately, during the changeover, mail sent to one list or the other has gotten lost. So if you tried to communicate with the board of KDE e.V. on the weekend or monday or tuesday morning, september 18-21 2010, your mail may have silently vanished. Please be extra alert for replies and don’t be shy to re-send.
So, what’s KDE e.V. you might ask? It is the non-profit association which was set up to support KDE development. An association is a convenient legal form in Germany (and elsewhere). It has members — the membership of KDE e.V. are those people who want to help the association achieve its goals. It’s a little like a tennis club: the members want to be able to play tennis and so set up a club that ensures that there’s infrastructure so that everyone can play. The association doesn’t play tennis itself, even when the members do; its purpose is there to make things possible. KDE e.V. makes it possible to channel money into developer sprints and helps organize the yearly Akademy conference — this year that will be a Desktop Summit once again in cooperation with the GNOME Foundation. You can find out what the association has been doing in the Quarterly Reports. The latest one is for 2010Q2; Q3 is just about to close so we’ll be looking for volunteers to help write it up and we’ll be soliciting items from the various working groups and teams in the KDE community.
The board list is the right place to ask about travel reimbursements (ask before you book!) or to suggest sprint topics, offer hardware support and instigate new projects which have funding requirements. Just remember that kde-ev-board@ is now the best address to use (although -ev-vorstand continues to function).
Software Freedom Day
September 16th, 2010
This weekend is Software Freedom Day — a chance to celebrate the idea that you, the owner of a computing machine, should be in control of the computations done on that machine. As the owner, you should be able to run what ever you want on the machine — or be able to prevent running someone else’s software on your device. This is a notion best served by Free Software.
The SFD events are global and organized in a decentralized fashion. I see there are six events in Nigeria, for instance, including one in Bauchi state and one in Sokoto. There are two events in the Netherlands, one on the 18th in Den Haag (the Hague). Karsten Gerloff, president of the FSFE, will be speaking there, among others. The other event is on the 17th in Amsterdam at the CWI.
Also don’t forget that the 19th is Talk Like a Pirate day.
KDE4 on OSOL bumps
September 16th, 2010
A bit of a belated thanks to Albert and Frederik for providing information about updates in dependencies needed for KDE4 — even trunk things as it works towards the 4.6.0 release of Plasma Desktop and the KDE applications.That kind of "heads up!" makes it much easier to keep the whole software stack up-to-date. Shortly after reading their blog entries, I updated (attica) or added (ebook-tools) specfiles to the specfile repository for 4.6.0. ebook-tools needed libzip, which as far as I could tell wasn’t available yet either (caveat: Oracle basically stopped updating all the package repositories and the SourceJuicer efforts, so the past four months have seen total stagnation on the official front for software packages, so it’s possible that someone else has already packaged the stuff elsewhere). Anyway, it’s appreciated, and those packages will affect the next package release on OpenSolaris.
We’ve just bumped the build to KDE 4.5.68 snapshot (in the -460 repository; the -450 one remains at 4.5.1). The builds haven’t finished shaking out yet, though. We’ve rolled a Phonon 4.4.3 tarball (apropos tarballs, I really enjoy reading Valorie Zimmerman’s blog for a reminder of what it’s like to start out in developerland) from git for internal use. QScintilla and the Python bindings for it have been added. Those aren’t directly useful in KDE, but they’re nice to have. I have tried a bunch more PyQt applications and they all seem to work ok, so I’m declaring those bindings "good enough."
Bug reports and patches can go into KDE’s bugzilla bugs.kde.org, with the OS set to Solaris.
Sun Studio updates
September 15th, 2010
Sun Studio has been renamed Solaris Studio, to reflect its target OS — or maybe just to say that Sun has been consumed by the boa constrictor that is Oracle. Of course, Studio works on Linux as well, so the name is now a misnomer in other ways.
Solaris Studio 12.2 is out, a minor upgrade over 12.1. The KDE4 on OpenSolaris project is one of the biggest public consumers of the C++ compiler — I suppose VirtualBox is as well, although that project never led to much C++ technology being updated in Solaris. Pavel was active during the beta phase of this product, and was the first person to report a regression in the C++ compiler: the -Y flag (in particular, -YP, which is documented to prepend directories to the linker’s search path) changed behavior. Now, historically the -YP flag has been different between the C and C++ compilers (duh?), and code consolidation pushed the C behavior into C++.
Unfortunately, the documentation hasn’t been updated to reflect this change. Neither has the regression been fixed. In other words, a bug reported pretty much on day 1 of the beta, shipped unchanged three months later.
We (as in the KDE4 on OpenSolaris crew) are creative enough to adapt to this situation: instead of using -YP to prepend paths, we can set the whole search path (like we would in C) like so: -YP,/opt/kde4/lib:/usr/lib . There’s one big gotcha, though: the C++ runtime and standard libraries live in the compiler installation directory, which must be searched for them. So we end up with a situation like this: if it’s Studio 12.1, use -YP,/opt/kde4/lib (nothing else, since the compiler libraries and /usr/lib are searched already) and if it’s Studio 12.2, first find out where the compiler libraries are installed (typically, but not necessarily, /opt/solstudio12.2) and then use -YP,/opt/kde4/lib:/usr/lib:/opt/solstudio12.2/lib . And don’t forget to adjust for different architectures (x86 vs amd64 vs SPARC).
In short: Solaris Studio 12.2, don’t bother.
Of course, a compiler isn’t the most important thing for Oracle. That’s just enabling technology and I imagine that it just needs to be good enough to push their in-house code to production. ISVs apparently don’t contribute enough to the bottom line to give them the tools to use the OS as well.
PDF Readers near you
September 15th, 2010
Do you get this as well? A PDF delivered along with a message that you can use Adobe Acrobat Reader (r) to open that file?
PDF is a (relatively) open standard. It is an ISO standard (19005-1), for one thing. This also means that there are alternate implementations of the standard. And you might have good reasons to avoid the Adobe implementation. For instance the number of exploits against their implementation, or because it doesn’t run on your hardware / software platform. Most of the time I’m at a computer which is perfectly capable of dealing with PDF files through a Free (both as in speech and in beer) PDF reader, and the "download Reader" just strikes me as weird. I get these PDF files from travel agencies, hosting providers, financial advisors and local governments. I often reply asking them to update the text accompanying the file to say something like "You need a PDF reader to view this file. Get a free one or use something else." The PDF Readers (.org) site is a good place to point people and organizations. The site points out the available options and how to get a Free PDF reader.
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has started a campaign to promote the use of Free PDF readers by local governments. The idea is to point out where your local government is pointing only to the proprietary software solution and to get them to adapt the text to offer more choice. There’s a contest involved, as well.
As far as the PDF readers site goes, it points to muPDF; that’s one I would personally avoid for semi-technical reasons: the code is terrible and utterly undocumented. Maybe the application works — but it’s not something that satisfies my code-readability test. Not one of the files has a license header, although the thing as a whole is licensed under the GPL version 3 or a commercial license.
Turning to the more popular — or rather, the recommended readers on Free Software operating systems — selections, there’s Okular and Evince. I use both of them fairly regularly — Evince is my fallback on OpenSolaris during those times that I’m compiling KDE. Following the links from PDF Readers to the two web pages for Okular and Evince shows a pretty big difference: the latter is focused on packages and contains a link to a how-to-compile page, while the former is all about building the software from scratch with a comment that there’s probably packages available. Neither of these strike me as a particularly good user experience. I wonder if there’s any feasible (technically and privacy-preserving) way to detect the OS so as to improve the download suggestions.
Progress in KDE4 on OpenSolaris
September 14th, 2010
The past few months I’ve been a little quiet about KDE4 on OpenSolaris, but that’s not to say that nothing happens. Pavel Heimlich and Jan Hnatek have pushed the packages and dependencies forward. For instance, the 4.5.1 release of Plasma Desktop for OpenSolaris along with KDE Applications happened entirely because of their efforts. Pavel is now part of the kde-packagers group, so we should see a slight improvement in release timing — that is, KDE4 on OpenSolaris should release packages on release day alongside SuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu and PC-BSD.
The Korona distribution of OpenSolaris — that is OSOL plus a Plasma Desktop and KDE applications by default — is also a result of their work. There hasn’t been a recent update of it (not with 4.5.1 that I know of) but there will be, once the dust settles a little around OSOL.
Ah yes, the dust. Einsturtzende Betriebssystemen or something like that. Oracle has managed to collect epic amounts of ill-will from Sun fans, ex-Sun employees, Free Software enthusiasts, Open Source folks, software packagers and whoever else I’ve left out. Examples of annoyance and exasperation can be found on most of the OSOL forums. Here and here are two examples (mirrored from the OSOL forum site, though).
So, what’s up for us? Well, various dependencies are being updated — like testing Sun Studio 12.2, upcoming Qt 4.7 — for KDE 4.6 releases. The breadth of available software in our tree is increasing — see the inclusion of PyQt and QScintilla as of this week — and our coverage of KDE Applications including the office suite is getting better. I don’t think we have a full KOffice available yet, but it’ll get there eventually.
As always, our software development happens in the open and patches get pushed upstream as much as is feasible. Communications happens on #kde4-solaris on Freenode and on the kde-discuss@opensolaris.org mailing list. Join us. OSOL is still more popular than Plan 9, after all.
PyQt comes to OpenSolaris
September 10th, 2010
For the past month I’ve been honing my PyQt skills and greatly enjoyed it. I’ve been saying to people at conferences — for years already — that Python (or some other scripting language) is the Right Approach ™ to a great many end-user applications for its speed on development and ease of prototyping. Now I finally spent a month testing the truth of that statement.
However, all the work I did was on Linux systems, both Ubuntu and Fedora. Today I sat down to package PyQt for OpenSolaris. Riverbank Computing supports Solaris, to the extent that sip lets you do –platform solaris-cc, but there were a few gotcha’s along the way.
- The mkspecs parser in sip expands Windows-style percent-sign variables. This bumps into the Sun Studio flags which includes things like -library=no%CStd. It took me a long time to track that down, and then patch it out.
- Python lives in /usr while our Qt packages live in /opt/kde4 — this just causes packaging headaches and RPATH juggling, nothing spectacular.
But those little gotchas aside, packaging went smoothly. You can get the specfiles from the KDE 4.6.0 preparation repository. Packages are not yet available from our usual KDE4-on-OpenSolaris repositories, though. We might backport into the -450 specfile and package repository if there’s any enthusiasm for it.
One thing I’ve had some trouble with is finding code to test the bindings with. Somehow the examples that are bundled with the PyQt source distribution aren’t mentioned a lot on the web, so it took a while for me to find the obvious testing ground. But from there the whole QtDemo application runs except for the OpenGL parts: it seems I’m missing the bindings for that. So there’s still some polishing left to do with the dependencies, too.
So what’s the future hold now we have Python bindings for Qt in OpenSolaris? Well, the obvious thing to do would be to produce some small applications that help with OpenSolaris-specific features such as ZFS, dtrace or containers. That would give the KDE4-OpenSolaris desktop a boost as well.
NLUUG fall conference schedule finalized
September 9th, 2010
The NLUUG‘s Fall Conference — this time on the topic of Security — has been finalized. You can find the schedule, with speakers on both practical and theoretical topics, one the conference website. One of the speakers will be Frank Karlitchek, on Cloud security (in the context of OwnCloud). There tends to be a good amount of KDE presence at the NLUUG conference — I guess that means I’m good at spreading the Call for Abstracts in KDE circles, I guess.
Attendance for students is dirt cheap, so here’s a chance to pick up some useful or inspirational information on security.
Next NLUUG conference will be in May, topic still to be disclosed.
KPresenter template contest
September 8th, 2010
Eugene reminds us about the KPresenter template contest. This made me go “hunh? did I miss something?” and yes indeed, there was an announcement on the dot some time ago.
Of course, my artistic skills are limited to Kolourpaint and LaTeX beamer hackery, so I’m not going to enter, but I’d encourage all those with actual talent to submit something. Spice up everyone’s presentations! Do bear in mind that the license on the resulting artwork needs to be liberal enough that it can be redistributed — consult the contest rules for details.
Bread in the Bone
September 8th, 2010
After the summer months — during which I’ve been in hiding, of sorts — I thought I’d pick up with recipe blogging first. In the style of Ariya Hidayat. When he’s not doing ridiculously cool things, he has nice photos of various dishes.
During the summer months I’ve picked up making bread as a nice relaxing activity. The feel of the flour as it sticks to your fingers, the elasticity after kneading the dough, the stink of yeast and the smell of fresh-baked bread in the kitchen contribute to that relaxation. Yesterday’s exercise was a bread braid — just plain whole wheat rolled out and then braided, so that you get a loaf with some character. My intention had been to take a picture of it, but the kids (and myself) liked it so much that the whole thing was devoured in under a half hour. Well, that was dinner taken care of, at least.
No bread today, but I’ll point to a scone recipe on the BBC site that is quick and tasty. 20 minutes from “braaaaaains … I mean, scones” to the finished product is just right. I poke a single raisin on the top of each scone — a raisin which is duly removed and dropped on the floor by the kids.
Bread is different from software. You mix in the right ingredients, follow the build instructions, and what comes out varies based on the phase of the moon or the draught in the kitchen or a hundred other variables not under your control. Oh, wait, maybe it is like software packaging. But more on that some other time.