Mario Fux

The dates for the sixth edition of the Randa Meetings are set: Sunday, 6th to Sunday 13th of September 2015. The first Sunday will be the day of arrival and the last Sunday accordingly the day of departure.

So what about you? If you know about Qt and touch gesture support, want to bring your KDE application to Android and Co, plan to work on KDE infrastructure for mobile systems, are a UI or UX designer for mobile and touch interfaces, want to make your software more accessible or just want to work on your already ported KDE application please register as soon as possible on our Sprints page.

The registration is open until the 13th of May 2015. Please add your estimated travel cost and what you plan to work on in Randa this September. You don’t need to include any accommodation costs as we organize this for you (see the Randa Meetings wiki page for further information about the building). After this date we will present a budget and work on a fundraiser (together with you) to make it possible for as many people as possible to come to Randa.

If there are any questions or further ideas don’t hesitate to contact me via email or on freenode.net IRC in #randa.

Our first meeting was quite successful. Something like 10 people participated. We discussed and introduced the current state of the CI system and got an introduction to the current Season of KDE project which Scarlett Clarks is working on and about the Mac OS X CI system. Afterwards we talked about what everybody could do and then decided what do to next and who works on what. Some work items are:

• Evaluation of different CI solutions
• Different platforms like Windows and Android
• Continue with the current work

So there is progress (just today I saw huge progress on the Mac front) and I’d like to thank all the people who help for their time and dedication.

Interested people should read the summary (including a full IRC log) for more information.

And if you don’t have (yet) a KDE Account and thus can’t check the logs, mail me and I’ll send them to you.

Next IRC meeting is going to happen on Tuesday, 16th of December 2014, 8 pm CET (UTC+1). So if you want to help, see you there, speak up on kde-devel or ping me (unormal) on freenode IRC.

This blog post is about another possibility to contribute to KDE. It’s about taking work off Ben’s shoulders and about fixing the bus factor for our great CI (Continuous Integration) system.

I’d like to start a series of weekly or bi-weekly (to be decided) IRC meetings to coordinate the work to understand, change and enhance our CI system and therefore we need a first date. So if you’re interested please add yourself to this Doodle (think about different timezones!).

Prospective agenda for the IRC meeting:

• Ben: Short introduction to KDE CI
• Everybody: Short introduction incl. their skills and wishes for KDE CI
• Ben: What needs to be changed
• Everybody: Work on a roadmap and distribute work till next meeting
• Everybody: Determine date for the next IRC meeting

This is your chance to help KDE to enhance the code quality and spread to even more platforms and thus bring our great software to even more computers and people. But if you prefer to support us in another way their is our ongoing fundraiser. Thanks for considering to help us!

And one last thing about the KDE CI system: we’ve a page about CI on the Frameworks wiki too.

Short Personal note: My diploma thesis was finally accepted (and thus again thanks to everybody who wished me all the best for my thesis!) and thus I’ve a bit more time (to coordinate some stuff in KDE ;-). But I still need to learn and pass the exams (and there is some other big private change in my life soon to come ;-).

The Randa Meetings 2014 fundraiser is quite successful and I want to thank everybody who already donated or supported us. But there is still some time till the 9th of July and thus we have still some time to convince more people for this good cause.

So please, remove the dust from your blog or social media account and spread the word and convince your friends and environment to give something. Just ask them politely and the worst you get is a “no”.

You can tell everybody that they will get even better KDE software, software that runs on almost all platforms and in the future on even more and software that everybody can use and share. Concretely this means that at the end of September 2014 you will get an updated KDE Book that helps you to work with KDE Frameworks 5, a more stable Kdenlive, a first port of KMyMoney to KF5, a glimpse at Amarok 3, another beta of GCompris based on Qt, a reinvigorated Gluon Games Framework, at least a first idea of the KDE SDK and much more. Isn’t that worth it?

And we will try something new this year at Randa to keep you, dear supporter, better informed about what happens at the meetings. Everyday you can check this work page and see in a short and concise form what everybody has done and achieved.

So thanks for donating, spreading the word and supporting us!

As I probably already mentioned somewhere there is currently quite some energy going into the work of bringing more and better KDE applications to the Mac platform.

• See e.g. the recent raise of emails on the kde-mac mailing list.
• Then there is the work of Harald Fernengel and Co on KDE Frameworks 5.
• Or the collection of problems with KDE software on Mac.

So it’s a perfect time to get involved, help to solve the problems or test our software on another platform and thus make another step in {our,a} plan to konquer the world. And don’t hesitate to do this for other platforms as well and/or come to Randa to help with this.

PS: There is still the little poll open about KDE, families and Randa. Please participate and share your anonymous opinion. Currently seven people filled it in.