Mario Fux

These are wild days in the Qt land. The big finnish home of the cute trolls decided to work closer with some other people from nanosoft land and the new Nessecitas brings our wisdom to the land of the droids. What will happen? We’ll probably see but Qt stays cute and thus to the main topic of this post. What was and what will be or what I’ve done in the last week (or two) and what I plan for the next days and week.

The weekend before the last we (the people of the LUGO – Linux User Group Oberwallis) had a hack-weekend in Randa. We worked on a new homepage for our LUG, enjoyed the fellowship and talked about some registration form for the Randa 2011 meeting. And last but not least Randa at this weekend held one of the two official Swiss KDE 4.6 release parties. Etienne Rebetez from Kalzium fame was there as well and we concluded the weekend with the visit of the great Swiss computer museum (If you’re ever in Switzerland or more precise in Solothurn go and visit it. They even have a working Apple I and the new building for the museum will show even more of the history of computers.)

Even before this hack-weekend I started together with some people from the LUGO to translate the new great KDE promo booklet to German. Felix Michel, the layouter of this booklet, agreed to newly layout the text when we’re ready which I hope to be the case in the two coming weeks. Other things that I worked on are more email communication about the Randa 2011 meeting and possible sponsors, I joined the game and got some business cards from KDE e.V. for the further searching of sponsors (another good opportunity for the translated KDE booklet ;-).

And today I had a short meeting with Prof. Bernstein from the university of Zurich. He gave me the (Java) source code for some of their NLP projects. I hope to find some inspiration or ideas for a possible NLP (natural language processing/programming) interface for Dolphin and/or Co.

And these are the things I plan to do in the next days or week:

• Finish the setup of my KDE development enviroment. I had some problems with a missing dependency on my Debian system. The dbusmenu-qt is not available in an current version.
• Sonnet and other NLP stuff: I plan to take some hours to read through the Sonnet code in KDE. Probably some new API docu commits will follow but this time without embarassing typos in the commit message ;-).
• Randa 2011: More emails and letters to potential sponsors, more communication with the owners of the building in Randa, some contact with the municipality of Randa, finishing the registration form and presentation to the four groups about what’s missing.
• And on Friday I do my second of five evening in a Linux course. Last week we started with some history, philosophy and free software and Linux basic stuff and this Friday we’ll look into package management, installation and virtual machines.

So all a good week and I’m sure I forgot to write about something important…

Oh yes. I loke (ok, I can’t decide if I love or just like it 😉 RSIbreak. Since some month now I’ve problems with my wrist and some weeks ago I decided to install RSIbreak which forces me now for a 20 seconds break every 15 minutes or so. Great. Thx Tom!

As I wrote yesterday today I’d like to share my blog with Joel and post his short article about how to setup a KDE development environment. This is partly based on several techbase pages but as KDE is currently in the process of migrating its version control infrastructure from Subversion to Git there are some new commands and URLs. Next week I’d like to write about my university projects and thus about more Sonnet and linguistics stuff.

But here goes Joel:

A few days ago, Mario and me set up our own KDE-Development-Environment. This guide shows, how you can setup your own KDE-Development-Enviroment, using the new git repositories.

Mario used the following commands under Debian, I used them under Kubuntu 10.10.

Step 1 – create user:

First of all, we need to setup a new development user called kde-devel. We do that, because this is easier with an extra user, and with this way, we can’t destroy our existing user.

• $ sudo useradd -m kde-devel -s /bin/bash
• $ sudo passwd kde-devel

Once we created the kde-devel user, we have to add the user in the sudoers file.

• $ sudo visudo

Under the “User privilege specification” comment, we add the kde-devel user under the root entry:

# User privilege specification

root ALL=(ALL) ALL

kde-devel ALL=(ALL) ALL

This gives the kde-devel user all root privileges.

Now we have to copy the .bashrc from our existing user to the kde-devel user:

• $ sudo cp ~/.bashrc /home/kde-devel/

We have to enhance the .bashrc from the kde-devel user with the bashrc from this link: http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Increased_Productivity_in_KDE4_with_Scripts/.bashrc

• $ sudo kate /home/kde-devel/.bashrc // please choose your favorite editor (e.g. gedit, vi, nano…)

Step 2 – login:

We created a user and gave him root privileges. Now we can try to login with the kde-devel user to our local machine.

There are two different ways to do this. The first variante didn’t work for me.

• $ su – kde-devel // didn’t work for me
• $ ssh -X kde-devel@localhost // worked for me

Step 3 – Install packages:

When you are logged in successfully with the kde-devel user, we need to install a few developer packages. Visit the following page and install the packages under KDE 4.x and KDE 4.6 with aptitude or apt-get [or the package management tool on your system]:

http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/KDE4 [Paragraph “Required packages from your distribution”]

I just linked this page, because the packages in the wiki may change.

Step 4 – Clone and build repositories

When you installed the packages, we can install qt-kde, soprano and kdelibs. For that, we clone the packages via git and compile them. This part may take some time. I did this on an i5 with 4GB of RAM and this step tooked me over one hour.

Install qt-kde:

• $ cs // change to the src directory
• $ git clone git://anongit.kde.org/qt-kde
• $ cd qt-kde
• $ ./configure – -prefix=$HOME/qt-copy // (remove the space between the two dashes
• $ sudo make -j 2; if [ “$QTDIR” = “`pwd`” ]; then find . -name ‘*.o’ -delete; else make install; fi; // this takes a little while

Install soprano:

• $ cs // change to the src directory
• $ git clone git://anongit.kde.org/soprano
• $ cd soprano
• $ cmakekde

[You’ll probably need further software from the kdesupport module like Phonon, Strigi, etc.]

Install kdelibs:

• $ cs
• $ git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kdelibs
• $ cd kdelibs
• $ cmakekde

Install kde-baseapps:

• $ cs // change to the src directory
• $ git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kde-baseapps
• $ cd kde-baseapps
• $ cmakekde

Install kde-workspace:

• $ cs // change to the src directory
• $ git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kde-workspace
• $ cd kde-workspace
• $ cmakekde

Install kdelibs-runtime:

• $ cs // change to the src directory
• $ git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kde-runtime
• $ cd kde-runtime
• $ cmakekde

[If you need Kate or Konsole, these are now in separate repositories.]

Step 5 – Enjoy:

Now your done. You setted up your basic development environment. Now you can start cloning existing projects and hack’em.

I hope that this guide was a bit helpfull for you.

Greetings Joel Bodenmann & Mario Fux

Morning dear reader. It’s some time since I last blogged but my christmas and new years blog holiday is now over. From now on you’ll find here again regular post about my KDE work days. And there is good news: I’ll do another KDE university project in the linguistic area. And although I did not blog for more than a month I did not stop working for KDE (and working for KDE is fun and not really work ;-).

In the last weeks I did some organizational work for the Randa meeting this year. I’m even in some good contacts with sponsors. But here the most important information about the Randa meeting:

• Where: HausRanda, Randa, Valais, Switzerland, Europe, Earth, Milkyway
• When: Wednesday, 1st (arrival) to Tuesday, 7th (departure) of June 2011
• Why: Why not? 😉 But seriously: because it’s fun and we get done a loooot (very productive!)

And here are the participating groups:

• Nepomuk
• Platform_11
• Multimedia/Phonen/Amarok
• KDevelop/Kate

If and when you’re part of one of these groups or want to work in this area and want to meet or people face-to-face just wait for the official registration possibility in one of the next weeks.

And thus Randa for the second. This weekend our local Linux user group – the LUGO – is going to have a hack weekend in Randa at the same place as Tokamak 3 of Plasma happened. Beneath a new homepage for the LUGO we’ll work on the registration infrastructure for Randa2011.

And three last things:

1. Dinesh was the winner of the kookie blog contest ;-). He is going to get a box of cookie from B. and me in Berlin at the Desktop Summit.
2. B. "volunteered" to be the receptionist in the registration office of this year’s Randa meeting ;-). So expect a nice and friendly face when you’ll enter the building.
3. In the next days, Joel B. (a talented, young guy of our local LUG) will guest post a short introduction about setting up a KDE Development Environment (KDE, pun intended 😉 with the new git repositories here.

Read U (RU 😉 and don’t forget to flattr me if you like this blog and my work…