apacheLog

Opportunistic opportunity

2010-02-25T18:57:00.007Z

Opportunistic (very recommended to follow this link) programmers, as we are, here at Ubuntu, the Kubuntu developer branch recently came to wonder about the miracle of opportunity.

Now first of I want to make clear that programming based on opportunity is not the same as programming based on freedom.

For that you should first read the free dictionary entry on opportunity and try to understand it.

So let me give two examples, one for programming based on freedom and one for programming based on opportunity.

You do not like that GNOME is using a closed source toolkit, so you create another desktop environment based on a free toolkit.

This is programming based on freedom. You have the freedom to find it bad that a closed source toolkit is used, and you have the freedom to create a new desktop environment. Just like you have the freedom to use Windows and not give a mushroom about whether the software you are using is free software or not.

Users are getting more and more unsatisfied with the software in Debian stable, so you fork it and advertise a new distribution with more recent software versions.

Here we have the opportunity to get a vast user base with minimum effort. Of course you also have the freedom to do this, no doubt, everything includes freedom at some level, but you do not have the freedom to get a ready to go system with minimum effort, you get the opportunity to.

This was rather theoretical, so let me give you some real life examples, from a recent IRC conversation:

<apachelogger> game of the day

<apachelogger> go to planet.ubuntu.com

<apachelogger> and search for "opportuni"

<apachelogger> I get 28 hits

<apachelogger> must be new record

<apachelogger> KOpportunistic, doesn't look that bad, maybe we should rename

<Quintasan> OpportunistiK

<Quintasan> I fixed it for you :)

<nixternal> apachelogger: hahahaha, someone else did the same thing you did the other day...I think you won with 28 though

You see, I had the opportunity to propose this (btw, rather awesome game) because there is a lot of coverage on the word opportuni[stic,ty], and Quintasan had the opportunity to fix my distro name, because it was broken. nixternal had the opportunity to respond to me because I had made that statement, if I hadn't said anything he would have had the freedom to start a conversation with me that might have lead to that statement. From this we can learn that any type of conversation is filled with opportunities, so if you are entering a command on a shell you are indeed doing opportunistic programming! The shell, or the executed command, gives you a reply, and you again have the opportunity to enter some more, or exit.

<ScottK> I do opportunistic programming all the time, but it's not going to get entered into any contests because it's for $WORK.

This is an interesting rule. Contested opportunistic programming must not be $WORK!

-*- Quintasan might not understand

<Quintasan> what it exacly means?

Quintasan: The idea is that opportunistic programmers ares doing normal application development like most people think of it. It's small, one off, scripts or small apps to solve local needs.

Having such things be FOSS is almost irrelevant because it really is a local need.

And in this part I want to be serious. This is indeed a very true statement. See. If you are creating a shell script that sets your MAC address to different one, whenever you exceed your traffic limit on some by-MAC-restricted-internet-service, then that is opportunistic programming. However, that local need might indeed be growing beyond that scope and you create a generic MAC changer script that works on all Linux based systems, in which case, I for one, would not call it opportunistic anymore.

Now for some random wisdom:

<apachelogger> ScottK: it is all about opportunity of not understanding it! [trying to explain why it easy to not know what opportunistic programming means]

<apachelogger> you see, you have the opportunity to understand it

<apachelogger> but that implies you also have the opportunity to not understand it

<apachelogger> that is worht a blog post!

<apachelogger> And apparently it was worth a typo too. Oh my!

<ScottK> apachelogger: If it's worth doing, it's worth doing wrong.

And finally I had the opportunity to write a serious blog post, but then again I do not particularly care about python and neither do I care about the fact that apparently opportunistic programming == python programming.

But please, pretty please, join me and break my "opportuni"-search-on-planet.ubuntu.com-highscore, you could for example post your score on identi.ca and tag it with #opportunistic ;)

(all links are sponsored by Microsoft Bing search ... allegedly)

When X decides to crash

2010-02-24T15:30:00.006Z

Yesterday evening at 20:45 (UTC+1) I decide to do a good deed and help Mamarok help a Kubuntu user getting his system fixed.
The symptoms sound quite familiar (apparently there also have been quite some cases of this): login doesn't work, get thrown back to KDM.
At approximately 21:00 I realized that simply helping to help will not suffice in this particular case.
At 22:36 I gained SSH access to the affected machine.
At 00:43 I found the source of the issue.
At 01:17 I got all data for a somewhat feasible bug report.

OH MY!

I certainly do hope that you now wonder what the problem was I spent around 4 hours of time on. Well, an X crash, though you probably guessed that much already from the title of this post ;)
More interesting is how we got there, I collected the most important data in the bug report on launchpad.

Apparently some recent update triggered the issue. Naturally I inspected the dpkg.log, but since there was one rather large update recently, that did not give me much of a clue, xsession-errors is also rather unspectacular, well, other than the X connection problems (I suspect those were caused by X going down?).
So while I was digging around finding a sensible way to debug this properly, the help-seeker made some very weird discovery, apparently changing the locale from he_IL to en_US and creating a new user made login work for the new user (?). That seemed rather unrelated, but the fact that it worked for a new user lead me to suspect a problem with some config in $HOME, so we spent quite some time on looking for possible causes, didn't find anything though. By that time I got ssh and vnc accesss, poked a bit more with the $HOME stuff, switched back to he_IL and guess what, login for that new user did not work (I did not try with en_US, so I cant even tell if it really worked before, but the user claimed it worked twice (?)). So while the issue gets weirder and weirder I at least discovered that login to an xterm session worked without any problem. hah!

Natural assumption at this point: if xterm session works, but KDE does not -> something KDE related must be at fault. So from the xterm session I invoke the usual suspects (kwin, plasma-desktop...), but nothing, indeed the system seemed to be working just fine, quite fast too. After some poking and prodding I finally came to think of the ultimate answer, and it is not 42! If KDE appears to be causing the problem, but all KDE apps start just fine on their own, the problem must be in startkde. That of course leads to another question: how to debug startkde?

Since the issue was appearing immediately (i.e. once you hit enter in KDM, X would crash, no splash, no nothing), the only option I could imagine was adding sleeps to startkde. Obviously something within startkde triggered the crash, so I just worked my way down the code. Added sleep 60 -> try login -> sleeps -> move sleep 60 a few lines down -> try login... Until I went beyond one line...

xsetroot -cursor_name left_ptr

...a.k.a. daemon command of startkde ;)

So I go back to the xterm session and run that command. But nothing happens. Nothing at all. After some more prodding I gave up and accepted the fact that the binary is not alone responsible. So I comment out that line and remove the sleep, and surprise surprise KDE login works!

Conclusion: xsetroot alone is not dangerous, but combined with something else in startkde triggers the X crash.

Finally it is time to get a backtrace, which is actually pretty easy, just follow the Ubuntu X Backtracing guide. Well, almost. First try did not result in a proper backtrace from gdb, apparently one needs to run X with -dumbSched, which is pretty easy to archive with kdm:
in /etc/kde4/kdm/kdmrc
just add the option to ServerArgsLocal= and restart KDM.

Voila, a beautiful backtrace. Now if only someone can find the source of the crash :/

You might be wondering why I think this is worthy to be written down. Well, I did spent 4 hours of my live on it, and it shows how weird issues can be. And hopefully the next user who runs across such a login issue finds this post via Yahoo (;)) and gets something to hold on.

On that topic: REINSTALLING IS NO FIX - GO FIND APACHELOGGER

Also, I think Kubuntu needs a new slogan "Kubuntu - The only OS with Developers coming home to you to fix your system" ;)

Opportunistic Plasma Scripting for Feature-Rich Kubuntu Deployments ... and the like

2010-02-24T14:43:00.004Z

In case you don't know yet, but Plasma in KDE 4.4 supports scripting using ecmascript (aka javascript). The idea is to provide a flexible enough solution for administrators and distributors to script default setups etc.

So, now instead of patching KDE to get a modified default desktop for Kubuntu, we script it, which is of course much preferred over patching. And let me state right here, that I find javascript a rather nice language (for the Ubuntu planet readers: ECMAScript is a very opportunistic programming language :P).

For intial setup we use 01-kubuntu-default-setup.js, I think this really shows how simple everything is. The script adds an activity and a panel, and then fills both with widgets.
Some of those get default settings right away, such as folderview, which shows the desktop by default:

folderview = activity.addWidget("folderview");

folderview.writeConfig("url", "desktop:/");

And others do not get added depending on conditions, like the twitter plasmoid, that only gets added if the screen is >= 1024x768 (otherwise the widgets would overlap).

if (!(screenrect.right < 1024 && screen.bottom < 768)) {

activity.addWidget("twitter");

}

This script however already exhibits one particular problem: the systemtray supports embedding of widgets, but the API does not, so what we do is manually hack the applets in. A rather dirty approach as I'd like to think. But I find it very awesome that the scripting API already has useful properties like hasBattery, it always annoyed me that my desktop PC got a battery applet ;)

For updates from 9.10 we use 01-kubuntu-10.04.js, this is a bit more magical so I'll break the basic functionality down a bit:

only use first panel - we concluded that people wouldn't want us to mess with all their panels
iterate over all widgets of the panel and check if we can find a systray and also if those widgets that we want to move to the systray are present, if so add them to an array of widgets
if there is a systray, then move each of the found widgets there
moving involes: checking if it is already present in the tray, adding the widget, manually migrating all settings, moving the widget

After running the script some of the default widgets from Kubuntu 9.10 should be migrated to the sytemtray, along with all their config settings.

Here's another thing one should watch out for: variable scope is a bit of a monster!
Say you have a loop outside a function and use the counting variable "i", then inside a function you use "i" again for another loop. What you might not know is that the i inside the function is indeed this.i (i.e. the same as i outside the function).

And finally something I was wondering about. The API documentation mentions that "For security reasons, scripts located in the user's home directory will not be run during this phase.", which IMHO does not exactly add security:

mkdir -p /tmp/malware/share/apps/plasma-desktop/updates/

touch /tmp/malware/share/apps/plasma-desktop/updates/foo.js

export KDEDIR=/tmp/malware

export KDEDIRS=$KDEDIR

and what do we get at plasma-desktop startup?:

plasma-desktop(4878)/plasma DesktopCorona::evaluateScripts: evaluating startup script: "/tmp/malware/share/apps/plasma-desktop/updates/foo.js"

But all in all is Plasma scripting great fun and actually made me learn javascript quite a bit :)

Ubuntu One KDE Tech Preview

2009-11-25T15:34:00.000Z

As all my dear groupies probably have noticed, I started working on getting Ubuntu One a KDE frontend.

First results are now available as a tech preview.

The Ubuntu One KDE client is a small application that lives in your system tray (the thing next to your clock). It notifies you when a new transfers from or to the Ubuntu One server have been started and when they are finished.
Additionally it will show up whenever there is a problem with the connection.

You can get an impression of what it does from the two prototype sceencasts

What can you expect from this preview?

Crashes, startup failures and missing functionallity, as to be expected from a tech preview.

Please note that this preview is directly based of a prototype, so the internals are most likely to change a lot.

Still here?

Ok.

You can get the client from a special PPA. Just add the source lines and install ubuntuone-client-kde. Before you do anything you need to run the GNOME client (ubuntuone-client-applet) at least once to obtain authentication from the Ubuntu One server, then you can just quit the GNOME client and start the KDE one (you need to start it with --nofork or it will not work).

I have also create a screencast showing all that.

Once authentication is implemented an the client works properly I'll take a look into implementing Dolphin integration (most likely via a kio slave, due to lack of other options). Meanwhile the Desktop CouchDB Akonadi resources get finsihed. So we will hopefully have meaningful integration into the KDE Platform by the time Kubuntu 10.04 LTS gets released.

Interesting times lie ahead!

Interpretation and learning from it

2009-11-21T11:24:00.004Z

I just got up and Quassel presented the following to me:

<daskreech> apachelogger: as regards to your musing on what Kubuntu should be in terms of providing what is needed for the user. I just had a look at the Perfect Kubuntu Desktop 9.10 setup and the first steps are to replace nearly all the KDE apps

Honestly, I did not read the howto just until now, so thanks to daskreech for reminding me. There is indeed some things that need highlighting. Certainly not the application selection though.
The most important thing about this how to is the last line from the introduction:

I want to say first that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

This is a very reasonable statement. See, if the author were to present applications that are superior or missing, then he would need to justify such claims in one way or another, but what he does is present how his perfect Kubuntu system looks like, and he even says so.

Even if he did not mention this fact, it would be pretty obvious why we can not take this howto for any indication on whether the current application selection is wrong. And here is why:

F-Spot vs. Picasa, Opera vs. Firefox, Thunderbird vs. Evolution, KTorrent vs. Azureus/Vuze, Amarok vs. Banshee vs. Rhythmbox vs. XMMS. That last part is particularly interesting though. The "Sound & Video" section is filled with duplication, the better part of it really consists of players, so that might indeed be an indication that a power user is not happy with the quality and/or provided features of all multimedia applications at hand.

In addition to those duplications, that will most likely not affect an average user, you have a set of applicatons that are not likely to be used by the user at all. VirtualBox, Gimp and Scribus come to mind. All three of them would not be useful to the majority of users.

Which leads me to my final conclusion.
It is important that we interpret such articles properly. What makes a power user most different from an average user is, IMHO, the ability to actually install software that she finds most suited for her needs. The CD installation is targetted to provide a ready to go system, not to provide the all knowing, all doing, all fancy desktop. For the power user the CD installation should be something to build upon, and for the average user something to use.

What we can learn from this article is that we apparently fail at the former (partially at least). The author first really goes for synaptic, because mass installing packages is a PITA with kpackagekit it seems. So that is something we should really take a look at.

And while I was writing this. I started wondering. Kubuntu actually does have a DVD available for download, with a lot more languages and a lot more software. Yet I am not sure if the software gets installed by default (which would probably make sense, or at least provide an option for that at install time) and whether it is really properly advertised.
You mostly get redirected to the Kubuntu CD, granted it is our install media of choice, but I do not see why a power user should not be able to stumble upon a DVD which might be a more useful base for her.

To end this post I'd like to raise the question why such an howto is necessary. Is it that our documentation is not visible enough? Or maybe we do not guide people enough after first install?

Kubuntu's Project Timelord

2009-11-03T00:00:00.003Z

After some initial discussion, Kubuntu now officially announced Project Timelord \o/

Four years ago I started contributing to Kubuntu. So, it only took me like half a decade to get started on fixing it to become super awesome :P

A couple of weeks ago, I paired up with some other Kubuntu developers in order to review where we stand and where we should be. This lead to the creation of Project Timelord.

Project Timelord's primary objective is to make Kubuntu leave the old baggage behind and do a progressive restart. A reincarnation if you will. For one month the Timelords have been drafting up a paper describing major flaws within Kubuntu, the product and the project, and trying to find solutions.

Each of those flaws will be addressed over the course of Project Timelord. Some issues will require serious discuission, some will require a lot of work. I am not going palliate it, it's going to be dirty, exhausting and difficult at times. Yet, properly executed, Project Timelord will make Kubuntu even better than it is right now.

The journey ahead will sure be an exciting one, for the users as well as the developers.
Join the Kubuntu awesomeness crew today and get a free cookie!

I am the Doctor, and I love KDE and Kubuntu alike :)

KDE + Distro + Package splitting = 100% fail for user?

2009-10-21T09:41:00.000Z

...not necessarily.

For quite some time I envisoned a solution to the problem of package splitting and runtime dependencies (or recommendations at large).

Let me outline one very visible problem. Every KDE app got a Help menu in its menu bar (that is if it got a menu of course), in this standard Help menu there is an entry for documentation. This entry will open KHelpCenter, hoping for it to find the appropriate documentation.
In case of Debian/Kubuntu documentation is sometimes detached from the main package to decrease the package size. This is especially important for Kubuntu since the installation media of choice is a CD and thus Kubuntu needs to be very careful what the space is used for.
Here comes the problem. The user tries to access the documentation via the Help menu, KHC pops up and starts crying because it can't find the necessary file(s) => KHC not happy = user not happy.

Granted, this is a distro-created problem, so KDE could not care (the excuse of being source-only distributor is always a good one, I used it quite some times myself ;)), but KDE wants to care. Any distro issue reflects badly on KDE (and to some degree also on other distros shipping KDE).

Let me give another example, where the user is not exposed to distro politics (such as installation media constraints), but rather law. MP3 support is technically available, yet most larger distros do not ship it by default, due to possible patent issues and what not. In Amarok 1 there was an interface that allowed distros to specify a way to obtain MP3 support at runtime. Amarok would start crying to the user and offer installation of the necessary components for MP3 support, user would either allow it to install all the magic or not.

My envisioned solution to all issues of this kind (i.e. missing runtime stuff) builds upon what Amarok 1 implemented.
In the best case scenario we have 2 information sources:

The application knows that something is missing. This is most obvious, without knowing that something is missing it would be jolly hard to give an error message to begin with ;). Ultimately the application even knows what exactly is missing. For example, KHC would know that the documentation for knode is missing, because it was trying to access it.
The distribution developer knows where the missing something is to be found (if at all). If the distro developer stripped the knode documentation, I would suppose they also know where they stripped it to :)

One source knows that something is missing and the other knows where to find it. Sounds like we just need to hook them up, right?

Let's assume there was a library that could do exactly that. KHC cries a river to the lib, the lib looks up where to find the stuff, KHC is crying about, and offers the user to install it.

So, how would this work?...

The distro dev provides a desktop file describin how one would do package installation on $distro
The distro dev also provides desktop files for stuff that would be required at runtime or that was stripped intentionally. For example, there would be a desktop file knode-doc.desktop stating that the knode documentation is in package "kdepim-doc"
The application detects that something is missing and uses the lib to complain to the user
The lib looks up if it can find the missing component in the data provided by the available desktop files (e.g. looks for a desktop file about knode's documentation)
The lib finds information and polls user whether to install the additional stuff or not
If user wants to install, then lib invokes whatever command is outlined in the desktop file, described above
If all goes well the lib notifies the application that the missing component is now available, thus the application tries to access it again
Hooray, all good (e.g. knode documentation is displayed :))

The trick is that you design the process in such a generic way that you can apply it almost everytime, some important stuff is missing (assuming the application knows what is missing precisly). That way you can apply the same solution for missing documentation, missing codecs, missing applicaton to open filetype (say I want to open a .exe, wouldn't it be nice if KDE recommended the installation of package "wine"?), improvements (nepomuk might recommend to use sesame rather than redland)...

Does this make any sense to anyone?

Insane Cisco VPN Client

2009-10-16T18:34:00.000Z

First off, yes there is VPNC, and yes VPNC works very well, I just want to drop a rant about the product deployment of Cisco.

So, since I am student of software development now \o/ (at all famous Graz University of Technology) I eventually had to poke a bit in the Cisco VPN client stuff. Apparently a lot of universities use Cisco VPN solutions to, well, create a VPN. Considering that and the market share of Cisco in networking solutions in general, one would expect that the Cisco VPN client is a somewhat decent application (from a Linux POV).

Think again!

That beast has a long history of being unbuildable on latest kernel releases (in fact it appears the definition of 'latest' spans at least 1 year in for this particular application). There are some people trying to patch it buildable as good as they can, but really, it is not worth the effort. You can google the patches quite easily, Google is also nice enough to offer information about them, even when you are only looking for the Cisco VPN client for Linux ;-)

So here is why it is not worth the effort of patching: the client does not even have a GUI on Linux (I remember even ATI's driver installer happened to have a GUI at some point).
All the more interesting that at least the Windows Binary ships with a Qt 3.3 dll file (I, personally, consider this a strong sign that it is actually implemented using Qt), also if it really is, then this would explain why there is a Mac GUI, but why on earth is it not available for Linux? That is like cooking dinner for 2 when 3 people are to attend.

Anyhow. IMHO Cisco should put some more effort into keeping the client up-to-date (also a bit of dkms scripting could not hurt) and give Linux a GUI and while they are at it port to Qt 4 awesomeness.

For the time being I can only recommend vpnc unless you need particular functionality that is not available in vpnc.

As I tend to say in packaging context "Patches are evil", which also applies to a upstream-is-broken context, which could also be enhanced to "Patches are evil and no long-term solution".

How to swarm some code

2009-09-15T09:52:00.000Z

As if a "how does one make such a code swarm?" comment was not to be anticipated....

First of all you'll need codeswarm in order to use it you'll also need sun-java6-jdk (or whatever your distro might call it) and ant. (on Kubuntu I recommend you install without recommends though)

Now it gets tricky. You'll need to get a log from your version control system and convert that using the script in convert_logs. If you are using bzr you are boned since the script does not parse the default log output of bzr, neither is a plugin available for bzr that would output something the script can handle (or directly to the XML format as produced by the converter script)... if anyone wants to create one... :)
So, if you are using bzr it's probably best to convert to something supported (beware bzr fast-export|git fast-import is broken if you have tags that include :, such as used to mark an epoch in debian packaging). I used hg (aka Mercurial) since it got a halfway decent converter plugin that converts from about everything to hg (also you get additional goody magic, see below).

Now just take a look at the data directory and tweak stuff to your needs. Execute run.sh and you should get a live swarm in a window.
If you set

TakeSnapshots=true

in the config you will get loads of png files, those you can abuse to render a video (with mencoder for example).

---

If you want it a bit more automized...http://rakjar.de/shared_codeswarm/readme.html
With that fancy script you bascially just need one config fie with loads of hg convert lines, then run script and you'll end up with a ready to go rendered avi file.
The config might look like this:

`--> cat simple.config

banshee: hg convert /home/me/src/git/banshee banshee

amarok: hg convert /home/me/src/git/amarok amarok

It executes the given command and hopes to end up with a directory named like the entry, then gets an hg log from that, parses it, combines it with the other entries in the config to end up with a shared codeswarm. Then it just executes the codeswarm app with an autogenerated config, mencodes the resulting pngs and plays that back in mplayer.

I hope you understand that I don't give a step to step tutorial, the documentation is all there and....one remark: Since codeswarm is javaware and community_codeswarm is pyware you are going to have to do fiddling to get it work properly :P

Have fun swarming :)

Code swarms: Kubuntu; QuasselVsKonversation; AmarokVsBanshee;

2009-09-14T10:53:00.001Z

Boredom is your friend.

Over the course of this weekend I created 3 code swarm videos. Code swarms are not particularly useful (though interesting, thus I will highlight some of those interesting things below), but in any case good looking, a bit like Star Wars ;)

Note: to see the videos, please direct your browser to the blog post directly.

Kubuntu
Of all three videos this one is probably the least useful one :P Since the recently introduced bzr branches for Ubuntu packages are incredibly fat (the Amarok one is >500MiB) and since I got commits only to show up as done by James (are those imports really done through his account?), I had to use the raw packaging branches of Kubuntu. This has 2 downsides. For one up until end of 2008 there were only 2 branches (most importantly kubuntu-default-settings) and for another Jonathan Riddell did not setup his bzr properly so he shows up with at least 3 different nicks ;)

Despite the disadvantages one thing becomes very apparent. The amount of contributors is raising ever since we introduced the bzr branches. I am referring to short term raise here. Since the multi-branch information is making up a very small amount of the video you might want to watch the ending more than once. Starting 0:30. More people contribute changes to the branches (represented by the entering nicks) they kind of form a steady flow. I suppose that is a good thing :)

Quassel vs. Konversation

Unfortunately the history of Konversation's current trunk does not include the time it stuck to KDE 3 with KDE 4 working branch available, though this might be a good thing after all. It becomes very apparent that when Konversation faded a bit due to the KDE 4 migration, Quassel had quite the boost in both commits and contributors (though I doubt it would ever be able to compete with the density of a project hosted in KDE SVN - see Amarok below). It shall be very interesting how this comparison looks in one year, when Konversation has some history in it's KDE 4 live cycle. I imagine an epic swarm battle :D

Amarok vs. Banshee
Talking about epic swarm battles. I would say the following counts as such. Rendering that took roughly half an hour or so.

That is what I meant when I said that Quassel's swarm will probably never be as dense as the one of a KDE project. While abock almost always forms some kind of epicenter of the Banshee swarm, the Amarok one is just one big fat ball with stuff streaming in and out. That is, IMHO, what being a KDE project can do to your code. Looks like Star Wars, doesn't it ;)

Kubuntu apps repraise

2009-09-10T12:00:00.008Z

Some of you might have noticed that recently two new Kubuntu apps hit the CD for the upcoming 9.10 release.

Also some bugfix improvements were done to the available ones.

AptUrl

Apturl is a tiny application that allows installation of packages via apt:// URLs. So for example apt://firefox will install Firefox. This fancyness is available in Ubuntu and Firefox since 7.10 and starting with 9.10 also in Kubuntu (aight, 4 releases lag is not that bad ;)).

The good thing about KDE is that, since AptUrl provides a protocol handler for KDE it is technically available to any KDE application right away.

So if you some friend a message containing apt://tellico Kopete will allow them to open the link and the Apturl app starts doing its magic.

Also, you can just as well enter such an URL in KRunner (the thing that pops up when pressing Alt+F2). I suppose you get the point :)

Kubuntu-Firefox-Installer

At some recent Kubuntu meeting we came to discuss the situation of web browsers. Basically coming down to whether we do not ship Firefox by default. The answer appears to be that it wouldn't fit on the CD (or only at the cost of translations).

So dearest seele suggested that we create a simplified installer that allows users to find something 'firefoxish' that leads them directly to installation. The apachelogger code-monkey seemed to like that idea and started hacking on kubuntu-firefox-installer.

The application is really fairly simple. It provides a menu entry in the Internet category of the menu and upon launch will offer the user to install Firefox. It currently does not remove itself when Firefox finished installing and doesn't use the official Firefox icon (due to trademark restrictions) though both should be resolved one way or another by release time of 9.10.

In addition to the Firefox installer I trying to get a least my Oxygen theme for Firefox ported to 3.5 in time, so the user experience can be even better.

Others

I hope to have install-package (the thing that is used when installing codecs for example) replaced by KPackageKit rather sooner than later (dantti to the rescue!). Mostly because the install-package UI looks pretty bad alright (next to be nuked is gdebi-kde).

qt-language-selector (the thing that allows installation and selection of the system-wide language) is in immediate need of UI love as well, so I might digg a bit into that. Also the way it is integrated into KDE's locale KCM is quite confusing.

software-properties (management of sources.list) is in a pretty good shape, it got some annoying bugs and doesn't support import of sources.list files yet.

Really, even though those apps are written in python their code is not half bad ;)

All in all I am quite confident that 10.04 (i.e. the release after 9.10), which is likely going to be a long term support release for Kubuntu, will ship with a set of actually working applications. Be it Kubuntu specific ones or those that we (had to) include prematurely.

Ooops, we did it again

2009-09-08T08:20:00.002Z

This is a response to http://soliverez.com.ar/drupal/node/103

To spare you the time for reading: it's basically about how translations are broken in Kubuntu jaunty even though KDE 4.3* is installed which should have fixed the brokeness and that is no good sign for karmic.

While I like it a lot that actually, for once, someone actually complains in a meaningful way so that stuff gets fixed (though, since I am sure it will be commented, I must also agree that it shouldn't have been broken to begin with), the spread FUD is a bit worrying.

So, in order to get rid of the FUD, let me explain a bit.
a) in Kubuntu (and Ubuntu for that matter) translations of software with ultimate Canonical support (i.e. what the techies would refer to as packages residing in main, which is this by Canonical supported part) is detached from the source
b) right, in KDE it is as well (meaning translations are in kde-l10n-fb and not kdebase itself)
c) a) actually consists of b)+additonal stuff (e.g. Amarok... it is not part of core KDE so its translations are not in kde-l10n-fb). So what actually happens that leads to Kubuntu's detachment is that at build time the translations get stripped from all packages in main and imported into launchpad, from where they get exported every once in a while and hopefully work as expected
d) 4.3 for jaunty is deployed via a PPA (i.e. c) does not apply, since there is no stripping+import+export-via-launchpad, but a) is still valid
I hope you can follow...
e) since Kubuntu does not (yet) install kde-l10n-fb by default, deploying that package via the PPA doesn't make too much of a difference since one would need to manually install it
f) so we have: a) providing a Kubuntu language pack for stock jaunty c) is not applying and e) prevents easy solution.

Since I am pretty sure I lost you, dearest reader, I'll just explain it a bit more. The translations in your jaunty installation don't come directly from kde-l10n packages but a package specific to Kubuntu, those packages only get updated via launchpad. Since KDE 4.3 for jaunty is not deployed via Ubuntu directly, those Kubuntu specific packages can not be updated with KDE 4.3 translations. So, when you install KDE 4.3 from the PPA you actually get KDE 4.3 but still stick to the KDE 4.2 translations. The only way to work around this, would be by deploying kde-l10n along the KDE 4.3 packages, but currently those kde-l10n packages are not getting pulled in by default, so that would only help those that know about this particular fix. However, that last point ought to change in 9.10 (according to Riddell) but AFAIK that is not yet the case (Arne to the rescue!). So, it should be possibly to deploy KDE 4.4 for karmic with actually working translations.

At this point you hopefully understand why backport deployments (no matter whether they are done via the Ubuntu backports repository or a Kubuntu PPA) will never ever give any indication as to what the status of translations in the current development series is.
While on jaunty with KDE 4.3 you either get KDE 4.2 translations (via regular language packs as exported from launchpad) or KDE 4.3 without launchpad influence (in case you manually install a kde-l10n package), karmic by default comes with KDE 4.3 translations (via regular language packs as exported from launchpad). So no matter what jaunty l10n != karmic l10n.

Somehow I have a feeling that I didn't quite explain what I wanted to explain... ah well, at least I explained something :-)

oh, right, one last note: translations from kde-l10n-* will _always_ override the Kubuntu specific packages (which is also why having kde-l10n installed would help with backport deployments)

A vision and a mission for Kubuntu

2009-09-08T08:16:00.002Z

In my last blog post I asked what the vision of Kubuntu might be, some of you confused roadmap, mission and vision, but still mostly very very very useful comments. I shall thank you a lot :)

Meanwhile I was thinking about my own vision of Kubuntu. It is actually a very simple one:
«I want to go to a public library and hear the Kubuntu startup sound. Also when I am sitting at the train station in Graz, I want people to stop by and ask for an autograph»
Obviously the latter is pretty selfish and not useful at all but I just happened to be in that sitution recently (well, without the autophraphing). Anyway. I think the first sentence pretty much sums up what I want Kubuntu to be... THE Linux... no... THE OS... like when you go to a public library the chances are pretty good that you get to hear an insanely loud Windows startup sound. I would like Kubuntu to be responsible for that annoyance in a usually quite calm environment. So that is a vision, or rather, my vision, though I hope we get to share that vision sooner or later.
To help general understading along a bit: a vision is a, for the better part, quite specfic image (an imaginative one) of what a specific future should be looking like. Even though a vision might be shared, usually the precise perception of that written description might look different from contributor to contributor. Oh well, enough of that theory.

Since I started this, I probably need to finish explaining stuff though. A mission, is a more precise and probably more objective view of the vision. Simply put is the mission a list of things that ought to happen one way or another in order to make the vision become reality. Here comes a general rule of all this fancy management junk: the more precise stuff is written down, the more likely it is to follow, the more likely it is to implement (like with any good plan really). The mission of Kubuntu must obviously somehow state that Kubuntu must become better than all competitors. But that is only a small and considerable unuseful statement. If we want to be successfull we first need to study our surrounding. Where can we be better than the competition and how? How can KDE help us with that? How can we help KDE? (most obviously, upstream<->Distro is a powerful connection that needs to be established an maintained at all costs) What could prevent us from archiving our target?... I suppose you understand what I mean. So I'd like everyone reading this to think a bit about it and post a comment stating the results of that thinking. Within the next couple of weeks Kubuntu should be establishing a mission paper that can be used as gernal guidance on decisions of large impact.

Once we have created a mission, we can continue with the really ugly stuff. The roadmap. If the devil created anything at all, it was the concept of roadmapping. The thing with roadmaps is, they usually require a considerable amount of work to keep them updated, you will almost never be able to meet a predefined milestone in exactly the anticipated condition and it is impossible to understand what larger impact the map will have. Right, the latter is why the mission gets created first :). I suppose one could say that the roadmap is a short-term TODO list (short compared to the vision anyway). One of the comments in my previous post suggested that Kubuntu is trying to fight all the dragons at once, and at the same time brings new ones to life. I must agree, a lot, with this statement. Actually I think this is mostly because there is not much planning going on. Of course some of the Kubuntu devs meet once every development cycle at the Ubuntu Developer Summit to discuss what fancy stuff ought to be done that cycle, but really, if you'd ask a Kubuntu dev what is going to happen in dev-cycle+1 you probably won't get a good answer (especially not one that has larger impact than that particular dev). A roadmap is exactly what one can do about this situation. So getting one of those, is also on my TODO, still far away though, so no need to blog about it :P.

Kubuntu vision?

2009-08-31T14:50:00.001Z

Does anyone know the vision behind Kubuntu? I just noticed that I dont....

Mirco should use CMake! (like seriously)

2009-07-20T19:44:00.004Z

http://macslow.net/?p=309

http://macslow.net/?p=311

http://macslow.net/?p=313

http://macslow.net/?p=316

http://macslow.net/?p=368

If things could always be as easy as...

Improving Kubuntu's l10n + Icon making

2009-06-30T14:19:00.003Z

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kubuntu-devel/2009-June/002964.html

The best mail in all of June :D

Which made me create:

https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~kubuntu-members/kubuntu-dev-tools/kde-l10n-orphans-parser

... a fancy ruby script to parse KDE's process_orphans.txt file in order to track po movements (which need to be applied manually to the Launchpad templates), the design is as wicked as it can get, but it seems to work (at least for core KDE).

Talking about ruby... the ruby tutorial at the Kubuntu Tutorials Day was kind of weird (I still find the concept of IRC talks rather confusing TBH), it certainly could have been worse though. I think that it is pretty diffcult to squeeze the awesomeness of ruby into a one hour tutorial. Pretty lame excuse, huh? :P

Later on kwwii did an awesome talk about artworking which made me create:

Though it might be better to use the Kubuntu icon rather than the text, because you really wouldn't notice that this icon is about Kubuntu at 48x48.

All in all, the tutorials were really awesome and totally worth almost falling asleep at the dentist's today :)

Kubuntu Tutorials Day!!!

2009-06-29T18:27:00.003Z

With me as incredibly hot but clueless ruby tutor!!!eleven

Checkinstall DEBs done the CMake way...

2009-05-02T17:04:00.004Z

CMake can by default build binary packages in DEB, RPM, EXE... Using the all famous CPack (yeah right, you probably never heared of it ;-))

Making use of CPack is in most cases actually quite easy and just involves a bit of copy and paste.

Lets use rekonq as example:

First you'll need to get the source from kde-apps and extract it, then edit the CMakeLists.txt file in the main directory and add the following at the very end:

SET(CPACK_GENERATOR "DEB")
SET(CPACK_PACKAGE_NAME ${CMAKE_PROJECT_NAME})
SET(CPACK_SET_DESTDIR TRUE)
SET(CPACK_DEBIAN_PACKAGE_MAINTAINER "me")
SET(CPACK_PACKAGE_VERSION_MAJOR "0")
SET(CPACK_PACKAGE_VERSION_MINOR "0")
SET(CPACK_PACKAGE_VERSION_PATCH "1~alpha1")
include(CPack)

You can use this portion for about every application, though you might want to change the VERSION parts accordingly ;-)

Once you are done editing, just continue with the normal build process (i.e. mkdir build; cd build; cmake ..; make). When/If make finishes just run cpack or make package. If everything went well this should place rekonq-0.0.1~alpha1-Linux.deb in the build directory, waiting for you to install it.

Disclaimer: This package does, just like a checkinstall created one, not list dependencies, nor does it meet all requirements of a sensible debian package and thus should not be distributed. So, if you create a package using CPack, don't distribute them, it might very well cause problems for the people who want to use it. Instead I'd recommend to learn packaging, neither debian packaging nor RPM packaging are difficult to learn (mastering them takes a live time though, or so I have been told ;-)).

Also note that it is indeed possible to create sensible packages using CPack (after all that is it's primary usecase), it requires a bit more work than just adding the lines listed above though.

Facts about Rosetta and Kubuntu l10n

2009-04-22T21:05:00.010Z

Facts

Kubuntu (needs to) import KDE's translations (+po templates, +desktop file translations, +desktop file po templates) into Launchpad's translations system Rosetta
Those translations then can be changed and/or enhanced
Changed translations don't automagically get overriden by a new upstream import but have to be reviewed by the translation team
Changed translations have to be manually upstreamed by the translator or the translation team (thus implying that one should either have direct access to upstream's po files or file loads of bug reports)
Rosetta makes new contributors contribute to out-of-date translations
Rosetta failed to properly support KDE 3's po format for years
Rosetta's interface is difficult to use
Rosetta has no clue when a package gets removed from the archives or superseded with a new major version that does not ship the once available translation template
Kubuntu's localization breaks at least once every release cycle, always as close to release as possible
Kubuntu string changes/additions don't get translated at times
Kubuntu needs to maintain patches to keep that whole construct of import-breakage-export working

Rants

Import

Having to import all main applications' l10n related data to a distribution specific tool for enhancement and bug fixing is a completely sane thing to do. Of course, if the whole process would not be bound to the build process (i.e. if it could be supervised outside the build process) it would be a lot easier to notice/track/find issues, and god knows there are loads of those (at least for KDE imports). It probably would also help if rosetta wouldn't need ages to process the data for import. But hey, what can you do, it's a bottlenecked design.

Rosetta

So, assuming that the data ended up properly in Rosetta (which is not always the case, though it arrived there ... I guess you can imagine what I'm talking about), now a nice community member can start fixing bugs or enhance the translation (to pick up on the bottleneck: if the template is imported but the po is not, there will be loads of untranslated strings ... again I'm quite confident that you see the implication here).

---
Let's use the following example:

Leon is Kubuntu user. He is speaking German and wants to help translate KDE. Being a user who actually knows about the need of translation he knows that the translations are being handled over at Launchpad. So he commands to konquer launchpad.net. Right at the top there is a link to Translations. Leon clicks.

On the translations main page he finds a link to the translations for Ubuntu 9.04. Again he follows that link.

Oh dear, what a load of red!!!!

Anyway, he scrolls down and eventually finds german.

So far so good, now Leon just needs to find some KDE application.

Hum... Leon reads kdesktop and kicker, having used KDE for quite some time he knows that this stuff was replaced in KDE 4 and is not even available in the archives anymore, so he avoids them, luckily they are fully translated anyway.

On the very same page he finds konqueror with one untranslated string. He thinks that one untranslated string would be a perfect starting point so he wants to give it a shot.

Our character filters for untranslated items having no clue what the guide filter means as there is only none or german.

The suggested translation "Textmarken" from openoffice's translations sounds about right so he applies that. For those who don't know, the KDE default translation for bookmark in german is "Lesezeichen", Leon doesn't know that, and neither does Rosetta. JohnTooray suggested "Lesezeichen" but that was almost 2 months ago, so one must assume it was not very much liked, so for the scenario's sake we will just ignore that there is already a suggestion.

Leon submits his suggestion "Textmarke" and goes on walking through >20 pages of templates trying to find more KDE stuff to translate.

[timelaps]

3 months later still no one approved his suggestions (in Rosetta someone from the managing team, i.e. the ubuntu translation team for $language, needs to approve the translation ... those poor people have to know all common translations for GNOME, KDE, GNU, $someothersoftwarestackinmain). Leon is right now pretty pissed off and decides to never try helping again.

---

I hope you see the flaws I tired to highlight, in that very simple example use. Those are mostly non-technical problems, I have talked about the technical ones so often on IRC and in various meetings that I am simply tired of repeating myself all the time.

Export

If we are super lucky someone didn't decrease the translations quality and the language teams were not too busy fighting with Rosetta's interface to not be able to approve new suggestions. At some point (post string freeze, so someone like Apachelogger, who would actually care if import and export are working correctly before that, doesn't have a chance to fix quirks before translators start working there arse off) a ubuntu langpack gets generated and spit upon the archives.

Communication

Ubuntu must be high on something since it seems pretty much impossible that Ubuntu and Kubuntu communicate just for once. It goes like that: Ubuntu does something -> Kubuntu notices it -> hell breaks loose -> Kubuntu tries to catch up -> Kubuntu barely (read: only partially) manages to catch up before release. That seems to be some kind of law of nature.

Latest example: "lets go rape our packages of their desktop file translations" which was done less than one month before release of 9.04 without any warning.

Result: Systemsettings was speaking english most of the time, so did the menu, so did loads of other stuff

Cause: The Kubuntu patch for grabing desktop file translations from .mo files was not working + the translations were not imorted + the templates were not imported + no-one ever warned us

This isn't news at all. A flickr image set is watching the progress of Kubuntu since 8.04 (though it is, with exception of 8.10, mostly tracking in-development progress, then again how much localization QA can you expect when it is horribly broken half the time).

Also if you speak german you might want to check out the latest KDE-de thread about Kubuntu's state of translation, they also had a similar one for 8.10, where they considered various crude but understandable actions in how to handle this issue. After all the KDE l10n teams probably get most of the complaints, because the user is lead to believe that it's a problem there.

Conclusion

So, finally just let me get my position straight.

Rosetta is the best example why rolling release does not work in every case
I raised my concerns about the constant issues and lack of quality coming out of Rosetta... for I think the last year or so
Most people do not speak English, and if they do as second language I find it doubtable that they do well enough to use an operating system in English
Ubuntu touts itself as believing it's important for everyone to have a computer that works in their own language, yet the project as whole (Kubuntu being part of that larger Ubuntu) fails to meet that very claim most of the time
I pity all those that have to use Rosetta in order to make their desktop not speak 2 languages at the same time, as well as those that have to live with constant complaints coming from Kubuntu users
I am deeply sorry that I can't help either of them, due to the very nature of Rosetta still not being open source
Should this crap continue I am going to leave the Project and join Debian or Fedora, I am not going to waste my time on a system that is constantly breaking due to external (meaning not caused by the Kubuntu crew) screwups
Comments on how to improve the situtation (i.e. what Kubuntu should do in order to get out of all this) are greatly, because I'd rather not leave a project I have spent most of my spare time on for the last couple of years

I am disappearing

2009-02-06T23:41:00.004Z

Due to new employment (Zivildienst) I'll be unable to continue my work on the various projects I am a proud contributor of. Well, until mid-October at least.

I'll most likely not be able to follow mailing lists, nor will I be online on IRC when I am not really available. If you want to reach me, you better drop me a mail personally... the inbox is pretty much everything I kind of read. Should you be lucky enough to actually get a hold of me: don't expect me to do or say anything useful :P

By 2010 I should be able to attend conventions and fairs again, so you can worship me live and in action ;-)

So long...

Monthly changing wallpapers? ... aye!

2009-01-15T13:57:00.000Z

While KDE 4 is shipping with awesome default wallpapers, I still find myself at times facing the problem that they become boring after some weeks. At the same time being developer and all it is difficult to keep up with latest wallpaper trends, also partly due to the fact that I simply can't watch kde-look for hot new stuff. So I said to myself (due to continuing lack of people to drop my ideas at :P) maybe having the wallpaper switch monthly via a remote resource would make sense. Well, that is how I came up with Kubuntu Wallpaper of the Month (kubuntu-wotm). Now, while this would be a nice feature for Plasma itself, due to me being a self-centered distro developer (and not being qualified for Plasma hacking anyway) I decided that doing it via a package makes more sense for the time being (+ it has the advantage that our update-notifier queries the repos anyway).

Don't let me bore you though. Bottom line is: we need a team of people with taste for good wallpapers and the time to select a good one every month, to get monthly new wallpapers for Kubuntu. If you are constantly looking for hot new wallpapers anyway, joining the team and helping people like me, who are totally incapable of finding good wallpapers at all, would probably improve your karma quite a bit :)

Please poke me on IRC, leave a comment, or drop a mail to apachelogger@kubuntu.org

...

Since we just talked about this a bit on IRC: I could also imagine that we make a collection of wotm wallpapers available in the official Kubuntu archives (e.g. wallpapers of the last 12 months). That way you can also have a nice collection of wallies for slideshowing, updating everytime you upgrade to a new Kubuntu release :)

choqoK - twittering fun

2009-01-07T19:07:00.003Z

I am glad to announce that choqok my most favorite Twitter client (well only for a week or so ;-) is now available for Kubuntu Jaunty as well as Intrepid-backports (a.k.a. unsupported updates).

I must admit choqoK looks very promising and can probably also become a very awesome non-twitter micro-blogging client. I guess the lead developer could use some help, so if you get a minute or two: check it out and maybe come up with some feedback or even a patch or a piece of translation or a handbook... ;-)

Have fun with 0.2 meanwhile.

Project Neon: KDE Nightly Edu++ GGadgets++

2008-12-31T09:30:00.004Z

If I had more time for blogging I would do more blogging... but I don't have :P

Quick update:
Newly available in Project Neon's kde-nightly is kdeedu (i.e. kde-nightly-kdeedu). Newly available in the kdebase build is support for Google Gadgets (using GGL SVN from yesterday).
Upcoming is Quassel (which got KDE integration) as well as the return of MSN in Kopete.

It is Qt...

2008-10-20T22:22:00.000Z

...unless you are talking about Quick Time. :-P

Can't you hear the drums?

2008-10-04T20:49:00.000Z

You know the tension before something huge happens? Like when Luke faces Darth Vader, or just the minute before Batman chooses to make Harvey Dent a hero in exchange for his own reputation, or when Frodo is supposed to throw the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom.

That is what I am experience more and more with every day that passes by.

^ that is a clicky link, by the way

To the Batcave!

2008-09-26T13:55:00.001Z

<jontheechidna> You should do a seminar "Rapid debian package deployment with ruby"

(Click for bigger awesome)

QA, PowerDevil, KDESVN-kde4, Quassel, Java

2008-09-19T17:53:00.001Z

Kubuntu got its very own bug team! :-D
The bug tracker changes list also got updated to aggregate all KDE 4 packages (well, at least I hope we catched all). But! Be aware that Jonathan is pretty much flooding the list (I didn't read mails for 2 days and got 360 unread bug mails...).

Anyway.
I am currently thinking about getting powerdevil (that power manager thingy) in the Intrepid pockets. Problem is: currently it only ships with one profile, which actually screws more stuff up than it could possibly improve :S
You can find Intrepid and Hardy packages in the experimental archive (I'd like to remind, that this repository is dangerous, so you should either remove it from your sources.list once you got the desired package(s), or download/install the packages manually). If anyone tries it - I would like some feedback :)

kdesvn-kde4 is also available in this repository. It's a SVN snapshot from yesterday, seems to be working quite well though. If you choose to test it, please also install the -dbg package and give feedback at it's kde-apps page.

Intrepid's quassel(-core) package got a make over and is now creating a fancy log file + it doesn't die on upgrades + configurable loglevel/port in /etc/default/quasselcore.

kubuntu-restricted-extras doesn't depend on sun-java6-plugin anymore (we switched to -jre)... a workaround in kubuntu-default-settings is making it actually work without doing anything.

Snapshot of the day:

Introducing the Apachelogger Software Store

2008-09-12T16:22:00.002Z

Project Neon (i.e. me, me and me :P) recently introduced the all fancy kdeplasma-addons package to kde-nightly on Kubuntu...

followed by kdeutils...

followed by sleep...

followed by kdepim (including -dbg package, for the upcoming KMail BugDay)...

followed by a screenshot:

Sometimes I am feeling loved

2008-09-07T22:32:00.001Z

... definitely not today.

I can't do anything in the Ubuntu wiki (bug report) ... yeah Konqueror is only default browser on Kubuntu, why would we do QA for it

I just learned that when you install the java plugin it will pull in firefox, which will pull in ubufox, which will pull in synaptic, which will pull in half the main archive.
And why do you think is that?

Depends: libasound2, libx11-6, libxext6, libxi6, libxp6, libxtst6, sun-java6-bin (= 6-07-4ubuntu2), firefox | firefox-2 | iceweasel | mozilla-firefox | iceape-browser | mozilla-browser | epiphany-gecko | epiphany-webkit | epiphany-browser | galeon | midbrowser | xulrunner

Notice anything?

Now I am feeling rather stupid because I actually started work on ubuntu-kde-default-settings making KDE 4 apps look like native Ubuntu/GNOME ones, too bad I don't feel like continuing it :-(

:-)

Comparing KDE 3 with $SOMETHING

2008-08-31T23:04:00.000Z

I just (again) noticed how different KDE 3 and KDE 4 really are.

In the latest issue of Full Circle (Ubuntu/GNOME focused online magazine, still very recommendable!) theming of KDE 3 and GNOME were compared at page 26.
Now this doesn't make any sense because theming is a useless thing in KDE 4, Oxygen is just too awesome to theme it away ;-)

But seriously. All 4 mentioned points aren't like that in Kubuntu's KDE 4 anymore... I hope I am allowed to quote Lance. If not: he may poke me in the eye, thus slow down release preparation of KDE 4.1.1 ;-)

1. In order to theme the login manager you have to install KControl. Why is this not already available in the Look and Feel?

There is still a little quirk (or actually a rather big one) since you can't get root access easily. I hope to get that resolved before Intrepid.

2. The GRUB boot loader can be themed, but again, it's not an option by default in KControl. Why does it require an application to be installed?

In Intrepid we will most probably ship Kgrubeditor by default allowing you to restore a broken GRUB from the Live CD and of course theming when installed.

3. After downloading a theme, there is nowhere to apply it unless you know that it can be dragged and dropped on top of the settings window, or that you can go to the command line and use KControl.

I guess you are talking about theme packages. Support for these vanished from KDE 4.1 and IIRC they never worked properly anyway, eventually they broke more settings than they actually themed.

4. I also had to install Ksplash to change and theme the splash screen just after login, but before you hit the desktop.

I guess that is an improvement over KDE 3? :)

...now back to the batcave (don't ask, it's top secret)

About Help, Wikis and Firefox Qt

2008-08-17T19:05:00.001Z

Busy days, like really busy....

First things first.
KHelpCenter looks less awkward:

It now uses the help-browser icon instead of the old crystal one. The style templates are fixed, glossary now also comes with KDE 4 style and the old introduction stuff got removed completely.
Kicker applets stuff was removed in favor of Plasma (which also got an icon ;-). In general all icons are now fixed (well, some quirks with the main items are still remaining).
KCModules (i.e. the thingies for System Settings and KInfoCenter) are added to their categories.

I also came to think about improving the general experience. In my opinion the interface should be redesigned making the search a central part (considering nepomuk/strigi usage gets implemented), there is really no way I would want to browse docs manually in the year 2008 ;-). Also using Phonon and KHTML/QWebKit a much greater use of online content should be considered (e.g. screencasts).

About the written online content we also had a discussion today. Essentially a lot of the documentation is outdated, no wonder thinking of the amount of applications and features, so really no one's fault here, still we should improve the situtation. Current proposal: using a wiki for ongoing documentation, then take snapshots for proof reading by the responsible developers and then let translators do their magic. Eventually even do the translation in the wiki? I certainly think with this approach we should only ship a very basic amount of documentation with KDE and access the remaining parts online.
I think Windows' help does it quite the same way in that it includes the MS support database, well at least I think it does.

If anyone wants to get loads of karma, he/she may step up and start work on KHelpCenter, I really think there is great potential for this application.

-------

Another really cool thing: work on a new wiki.kde.org started (whichmakes me quite happy since the current one was always kind of not-working when I needed something). The best thing about it is that it got OpenId (alsa known as 'I-only-need-one-login') support, which goes very well with the OpenID support in Amarok's web infrastructure.
The thing is: we need you! you, dear reader :)
Content from wiki.kde.org needs to be reviewed and selected for migration or dumping (later on moving and updating seems to be on the todo).

So, if you have some time and want to help KDE get a new shiny wiki -> join #kde on irc.freenode.net and poke Jucato

-------

Meanwhile I got firefox-qt to work (at least until you press any buttons...), head over to Jonathan's blog for more information.

One note about the used archive though: this archive is meant for very expermiental packages (Intrepid users will find mozilla-plugin-plasma for example). By experimental I don't only mean the software itself but also the packages, e.g. there is no guarantee that firefox-qt will be named firefox-qt once it is in the offical archives.
Therefore I suggest to be very careful which packages get installed from this archive, I would even go so far that you should remove it once you installed the desired software and check for updates yourself.

The Awful KHelpCenter

2008-08-15T16:24:00.001Z

Today I did a little bug hunt (that's where you actually search for the bugs and then kill them int he most hackish manner ;-)

And KHelpCenter made me cry, seriously...

It's still using the crystal icon all over the place:

It's main content is for some reason missing icons:

Remember this pic:

Notice anything?

Note the upper right in the following

Glossary has an as awesome icon issue open content uses help-contents, closed ones should use contents2 (crystalsvg name of course, and an oxygen replacement never got requested apparently :S)

Content of the Glossary then did it and made me cry

At least I got search index....

...strange that it doesn't work even though the index builder said so

First off: I didn't report these issues yet, because bugs.kde.org only offers versions up to 3.5 and unspecified, now I can't really use unspecified, right?

Things I was wondering: Why does khelpcenter still use htdig? Wouldn't Strigi/Nepomuk would be better for that kind of job? Does the index builder need to make me think it succeeded? Does everything have to look so broken? Is khelpcenter actually maintained?

Meanwhile I understood that none of the answers is important anyway .... we, KDE, as a community should just go fix these issues.

I already did a start

Project Neon: neonmake

2008-08-14T20:36:00.001Z

I totally forgot to blog yesterday :-S

Anyway, since the first day of Project Neon, there was neonmake. You might be wondering what neonmake is, though if you read all the other blog posts about Project Neon you probably know that I will explain it as following:

neonmake is a wrapper around make, ensuring all environment variables are set as necessary

That however doesn't really describe it very well, in theory neonmake should be called amarok-nightly-kde-nightly-cmake-make-sudo-make-install, which of course is far too long ;-)

Well, let's get through it step by step.

neonmake consists of 3 parts - neonmake, make.sh and varsrc

neonmake is a wrapper around cmake, make.sh and sudo make install
the nifty thing about it is that it will bring you to $src/build, or stay there, or create it (i.e. it forces you to do out-of-source builds and keep your source tree clean :)
it will also detect whether you are trying to compile anything amarokish (i.e. if amaork is part of the source directory's name) and tell make.sh about it

make.sh is a wrapper around make and varsrc
it will force compiling against kde-nightly or amarok-nightly depending on certain magic cases and invoke vasrc
once varsrc is finished it will run make

varsrc is responsible for the environment variables and is usually invoked by all amarok-nightly-* or neon* scripts

The actual capabilities are quite confusing (I think I don't even understand it completely, and I created that thing after all).

you can run neonmake with kde or amarok as argument forcing it to compile against kde-nightly or amarok-nightly
if the source folder contains the word "amarok" neonmake will asume you compile against amarok-nightly
neonmake will create and/or take you to a subdirecotry called "build" ensuring you do an out-of-source build
if 1. and 2. don't apply varsrc will check whether kde-nightly's kde4-config is available
if kde4-config doesn't return the proper direcotries it asumes we have kde-nightly installed but aren't using it -> variables for amarok-nightly
if 4. does not apply (i.e. no kde-nightly is installed) it will check for amarok-nightly's kde4-config, if it is available -> varaiables for amarok-nightly
if none applies it will throw out totally insane errors

to sum that up:

you can only compile against kde-nightly with kde as argument or when you are running it
you can only compile against amarok-nightly with amarok as argument or when kde-nightly is not installed or when the directory name contains amarok

Suggestions for improvements, as always, very welcome.

Now you go play with neonmake and I have to rest from this post.

Qt Firefox

2008-08-12T23:20:00.001Z

Due to the KDE Dot interview about Qt Firefox I (as a Kubuntu guy) felt pretty challenged....

me@apoc { ~/moz }$ ls -lah | grep deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 22M 2008-08-13 00:35 firefox-qt_0.1~hg20080812-0ubuntu1~ppa1_i386.deb

That's all for now ;-)

DBug

2008-08-12T13:59:00.001Z

What is better than Akademy?
...
inGardenWithCoffeeHaXX0ring(tm) :-P

Nowadays everyone is obsessed with debugging, including me, this obsession leads to the urge of having debug packages for each any everything. So, while half the KDE crew was listening to talks due to leak of power supply I was working on debug packages for Project Neon (i.e. kde-nightly and amarok-nightly) and I think the Neon PPA doubled its size.

Now you can install amarok-nightly-dbg which is pulling in a complete debug stack for amarok-nightly. In addition to that you also get a new script called amarok-nightly-debug which wraps around amarok-nightly-vars and gdb. Basically the same applies for kde-nightly, but kde-nightly-dbg will only pull in the necessary dbg packages rather than the complete stack (just like kde-nightly). There is no wrapper script yet, but kcrash takes care of almost everything anyway :-)

If you have time, please take the dbg packages for a testcrash and complain if it fails to crash ... err... to trace the crash :P

And tomorrow I'll tell you about a script I created months ago and used it yesterday for the first time.

Dragons, DVDs and New Device Notifiers

2008-08-09T11:08:00.001Z

Some days Dragon Master Ian aka eean asked me to have a look at integrating Dragon Player into the New Device Notifier thingy. While I was pretty sure it's not meant for actual use yet (didn't seem like it afterwards either :P) I jumped into it and came up with dragonplayer-opendvd.desktop.

The magic behind that stuff is that one actually can define very clearly when the desktop file should apply (using information provided by Solid).

X-KDE-Solid-Predicate=[[ StorageVolume.ignored == false AND OpticalDisc.availableContent == 'Data|VideoDvd' ] OR [ StorageVolume.ignored == false AND OpticalDisc.availableContent == 'Data|VideoDvd' ]]

Meaning unless the volume is set to be ignored somewhere from something and if it is an optical disc providing video dvd data this cool application can launch it.
The line above might seem a bit strange ... actually it is ... apparently whatever is parsing that desktop file (some solid dataengine I guess) doesn't like 2 ANDs or no AND or no OR => simply put: x = ? AND y = ? OR x = ? AND z = ?
No more and no less than that ;-)

Also I think the new device notifier needs some changes to increase understandibility:
The usual action is 'Open with ApplicationName' (e.g. Open with Dolphin), in my opinion an approach like in KickOff would be much better => use the generic name and only provide the application name as minor information. As a new user I might not know what Dolphin or Dragon Player is and what it does (ok, for Dragon it's pretty obvious ;-) so using 'Open with File Manager' and 'Open with Video Player' seems much more reasonable to me.

Anyway, get the new dragonplayer and check out the new device notifier integration :)

BTW: kde-nightly is pretty broken apparently ;-)

A breath of fresh air for Konsole

2008-07-31T22:20:00.001Z

Oxygen thingy of the day: Konsole Color Scheme

I'd still like to get some feedback on the color composition so give it a try. Currently only Nightrose (aka Lydia) tested it, and usually her display's colors are way off ;-).
Lydia also states that it rocks with irssi, but who uses that thing anyway? :P

Grab it today and get your Konsole a breath of fresh air.

BTW: apparently it takes some time to get used to it, but once you did, it is quite awesome to work with this color scheme :)

Le KDE sprechen ズールー語

2008-07-31T12:08:00.001Z

Kubuntu users now also can get a localized KDE ;-)

Just install you language's package, e.g. kde-l10n-de for german, then do the following:
Kickoff -> System Settings -> Regional & Language
there you can select Country/Region which should auto-adjust a couple of stuff to your local preferences (for example the date formatting) in addition to that it should also select the installed language. If this fails for whatever reason, use the "Add Language" drop-down menu instead.

Beside l10n, we also uploaded a couple of extragear packages like KTorrent, Skanlite and KFax.

Pimp my Konqueror
Installing konqueror-plugin-searchbar-kde4 will add the world famous google searchbar to your konqueror again ;-)
Also checkout the other konqueror-plugin-* packages, maybe you want to install some of them.

KDE 4.1.0 + Kubuntu Ninjas

2008-07-29T14:55:00.004Z

Finally KDE 4.1.0 got released *hoooray*.

... since I am sure there are going to be plenty blog posts about the beauty of and awesomeness of 4.1 I want to move the spotlight a bit (as if I ever had it put right ;-)

The Kubuntu Ninjas
While I was doing the rc1 packages on my own I noticed that this is just too much work for one mind to deal with and it is impossible to prepare the Hardy backports (which are more important on a short-term base) as well, within the given amount of time. As a result of this some guy stated on ubuntuforums.org that apparently Kubuntu's QA is pretty bad. Reasonable assumption considering we didn't get KDEPim built in time and thus caused some problems for early upgraders.
As a result of this we know have certified Package Ninjas(tm) for KDE releases. Using super nifty infrastructure we managed to provide a pretty flawless transition to KDE 4.1.0 on Hardy and almost the very same for Intrepid. Note the word 'pretty' in that sentence ;-). There were some minor quirks which have to be worked out in future release preparation, but I am confident we are on the right way.

So who are these guys providing Kubuntu users with the awesomest KDE 4 packages ever?

JontheEchidna (aka Jonathan Thomas) likes to play XBoing and is best in forgetting to exchange files necessary to build on Hardy ;-)
vorian (aka Steve Stalcup) is the one leading us to World Domination or at least helps us take over #amarok to throw one awesome party, meanwhile he tries to archive karma by packaging all of extragear and preventing kdebase-runtime from building
smarter (aka Guillaume Martres) is the Blue Knight who is pretty much ready to become a MOTU (Master of the Universe = the guys who keep the majority of Ubuntu packages in shape) but does not know how to become one (maybe someone can help? I really don't know how I became MOTU either... ;-)
Arby (aka Richard Birnie) seems to be our personal merge (debian+ubuntu packaging = new ubuntu packaging) monkey and does backports in the shortest amount of time I ever measured
Riddell (aka jr or Jonathan Riddell), the almighty Kubuntu robot, who's sponsoring the Intrepid uploads ... he also can transform into an oracle if someone might have unanswerable questions
and me, myself and I, sitting in my deckchair, sipping Captain Morgan with Coke and partying until 5:30 in the morning ;-)

So join some strange IRC channels on Freenode, apparently they hang out in #kubuntu-devel and #kubuntu-kde4, and give them some cookies or similar.

And now... for the spotlight... KDE 4.1.0 is so awesome, I just love folderview, Plasma is the most beautiful piece of software I have ever seen. :-)

KWin and the capseo thingy

2008-07-27T15:20:00.001Z

Since some people already asked what to do with the mysterious .cps files:

KWin in KDE 4 offers the possibility to record one's desktop. The resulting files have a .cps suffix (cps = capseo = video codec created by the same developer as the underlying library [called captury] of the recording feature). I actually know no player which supports native playback of capseo, which is why you most likely want to convert it.
Here comes the trick part, the website moved from captury, to captury, to captury (yes this is just for giving google some context ;-)

On the most current location of the website you can find:

cpsrecode -i screen-capture.cps -o - \
| mencoder - -o screen-capture.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=xvid:autoaspect=1

This binary is on Kubuntu part of the capseo package, and probably something similar on other distributions.

Have fun.

Fire has three needs: ignition, fuel, and OXYGEN

2008-07-21T22:38:00.002Z

Light years ago work on an Oxygen theme for Firefox started. Meanwhile the maintainer changed, a new major version of Firefox got released and people noticed how ugly Firefox can be without gtk-qt-engine ;-)

To fight this ugliness, I stopped sleeping for 2 days and uploaded the Oxygen theme for Firefox, version 1.0, a couple of weeks ago.

Even though it didn't quite make it through the public nomination process yet, I am quite certain that it works like a charm so grab the first release and don't forget to give a review to get it out of that awful sandbox/experimental area.

Grab it ---> HERE <--- F.A.Q.:

Why do I have to login to download?

Version 1.0 isn't yet approved for public use and experimental downloads are only available after login.
Logging in also gives you the possibility to leave a review (which is highly appreciated as every review probably reduces the time until this version can leave the experimental status).

Why is it only available for Linux?

The Windows and Mac versions of Firefox expect the drop down arrow for recent pages to be themed and have an icon assigned manually, since I don't have a Windows or Mac around I can't get it to work and I have no idea how/whether this change effects the Linux version. Windows and Mac support is target for 1.1 though.

Why does this only change the icons?

Desktop integration, which is what the Oxygen crew is trying to provide here, means for one that an application uses the current icon set. This is however prevented by the fact that Firefox doesn't rely to 100% on the GTK-defined icon set (thus even with gtk-qt you wouldn't get a complete Oxygen experience). But desktop integration also includes widget style and colors, even though we could make the theme look somewhat like the real Oxygen, it would remove the style and color integration. This is really where software like the gtk-qt-engine should fill in.

Project Neon - Ask Harald (FAQ)

2008-06-23T15:27:00.001Z

Note to me, myself and I: FAQs should be listed somewhere to save me the daily headache....

Is amarok-nightly for openSUSE published yet?
No, I'll try to get a repository outside of my personal home one and build for openSUSE 11.0, after a couple of tests amarok-nightly for openSUSE can go live.

Why is there no amarok-nightly for openSUSE 11.0 to be tested?
Because I am preparing for exams, so I have no time for build-dependency magic, and because I will only build for openSUSE 11.0 once the above stated reason is sorted out. However, apparently the 10.3 packages work just fine on 11.0 as well (hooray for good packagin ;-)

Why is amarok-nightly for openSUSE not built nightly?
No neon package gets built nightly as long as it is being tested. Nightly builds will start once openSUSE packages are published in an own repository.

Does kde-nightly for Kubuntu include debug symbols?
No, neither does amarok-nightly. The packages are built with debugging enabled, a packaging script however strips them for some reason I forgot. In fact I tried adding -dbg packages earlier on, but that didn't work for some strange reason. The good news however is: I will digg into this soonish. After all a good description on how to reproduce is almost as good as a good backtrace ;-)

Can we get a foobar package for kde-nightly?
Feel free to drop ideas at the mailing list, but keep in mind that the build resources on Launchpad are pretty limited, so kdepim or koffice are probably not going to get in... at least for now. In general the current amount of packages is not going to grow a lot - I might only add kdeplasmoids some time soon, but that's about it.

Do you plan to integrate more applications into kde-nightly?
See above.

How do I compile stuff against kde-nightly?
This is a bit tricky - you can take a look at the neonmake script in amarok-nightly-tools to get an idea. I will include some proper buildscripts later on for use with kde-nightly and amarok-nightly.

Why is there no kde-nightly for openSUSE?
The openSUSE KDE guys do a great job on maintaining their own KDE snapshot packages. So launching a kde-nightly stack would be rather pointless, right? Duplicated effort and all..

Project Neon - KDE Nightly Builds

2008-06-18T16:39:00.000Z

..it's that time again, when I announce something new, which isn't new at all due to testing ;-)

Since amarok-nightly is a huge success ....

Project Neon now also includes kde-nightly builds for Kubuntu!

Currently available are kdebase, kdemultimedia, kdegraphics, kdenetwork and kdesdk

Now my dear Kubuntu users, you can: develop, debug, fix, test, promote and break your system :-P
Have fun, and in case something goes wrong: blame KRF in #amarok.neon.

Misc:

Thanks to everyone who helped testing kde-nightly!
As seen above, Neon now has a shiny IRC channel - YAY \o/
amarok-nightly for openSUSE is undergoing testing, if you want to join the fun -> #amarok.neon
I am now member in the elite Oxygen Club -> Video
Because I got loads of stuff to do this post is quite short ;-)

Something I always wanted to blog about...

2008-06-03T16:28:00.001Z

THANK YOU!

It didn't get any better

2008-06-01T19:39:00.000Z

Back at home (finally). I had to spend 7 hours at the Airport in Salzburg (that city with Mozart and classical music entertainment stuff) because I was far too drunk to drive home. Of course I didn't just drink coffee and hack on neon+kde... because one doesn't get much sleep @ LinuxTag, I decided to catch up on that: after sleeping on the table and in a bathtub, I ended LinuxTag 2008 with a quite long nap at the Airport, in the parking garage, in my car :-D

Anyway. It was an awesome event, again!

In more interesting news ;-):

Neon KDE nightly packages for Kubuntu are building right now (i.e. heading fast towards publishing)
I hacked a bit on the openSUSE Build Service integration which is next on the todo
Apparently I became MOTU Mentor (I really have no clue how this happened)
Amarok 2 is pretty much like Nokia - connecting people
Karaoke is fun

What I did today

2008-05-31T14:52:00.000Z

....sitting in front of my laptop, looking at launchpad because I was waiting for builds to finish.

Compile clusters are so much nicer -.-

Late night hacking and finding a bed

2008-05-29T12:19:00.000Z

I love LinuxTag!

Stephan already blogged about how I was sleeping on the table.
So, here comes the background story:
After hours of hard work on Project Neon, an Amarok project to create nightly binaries of the latest Amarok version (I was sorting out some underlying issues in the base components in preperation for the openSUSE build service integration) , and as I was somewhat tired and it also was quite late in the night (or rather early in the morning) I choose to go to bed, though one shouldn't call that 'go', anyway, I didn't find one within the critical 10 seconds and chose the next best option: table + chair + me in between (I better don't tell you about the bathtub ;-)

My head is telling me that I got too much beer, so please excuse any spelling/grammar errors.
*looking for something to drink*

About the karaoke and the linuxtag

2008-05-27T18:58:00.000Z

So...
First part of exams done! *yay*

But meanwhile Stephan invited kwwii for a bit of karaoke @ LinuxTag in Berlin. Kwwii of course agreed, which made Stephan wondering what will happen with records that go straight into my hands.

Well, first of all, I was practising karaoke yesterday (instead of learning for today's maths exam), so i am almost not the best karaoke singer ever :-P

Anyway, the problem is, I have absolutely no sense of embarrassment so I will not only play eventual records on Radio Amarok, I will make them play 24/7 post them onthe 15 blogs I own and make them part of Project Neon.

That reminds me...
Neon is undergoing major refacturing, mainly in order to provide KDE nightly packages for Kubuntu (thanks to Kevin for pushing me so hard ;-)) . Currently the source fetching component is work again (at least to the low profile testing I did) and the ubuntu component is close to be finished, so maybe apt-get soon tells us about kde-nightly :-)

Just for the record, amarok-nightly will use a different package tree in order to preserve the current tree size.

Also new is the Phonon KCM bundling

Project Neon - Explained

2008-05-06T17:37:00.001Z

For comments on comments :-D from yesterday's post please read at the very bottom.

Let's get started with the technical details.

I am not at home right now, so I can't use my awesome paper+pencil-drawing(tm) for this explaination so bear with me in case some parts are a bit too complex (I actually created most code while operating on ballmer's peek, so it's as difficult for me to understand it as it might be for you ;-)

Anyway, the Neon framework, which is responsbile for the important parts of the nightly build process (I am considering building as not important here :-P) is written in Ruby (omg!).

http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/extragear/multimedia/amarok/supplementary_scripts/neon

Those of you who had a look at the upcoming Amarok release script will notice quite some similarities, most of them are caused by the fact that I absolutely hate scrolling in files so both source trees consist of some dirs and a couple of files named according to their use (surprise!).

Neon basically consist of 4 components which more or less rely on each other:

neon.rb/libneon.rb as core component
fetcher.rb is handling the collection of sources - more on that later
publisher.rb is basically a wrapper for various ways of source distribution (e.g. tarball upload via FTP)
distro.rb is a wrapper for distributions

neon.rb is responsible for very very very basic tasks, like setting necessary variables/constants, deciding which parts fetcher.rb actually has to fetch and how to publish the tarballs as well as which distribution processes to invoke (well, and cleanup work, but that might eventually get it's own file).

The first real work that is done, is checking which source trees need to be fetched (Qt gets built once a month - Strigi, TagLib, KDELibs and KDEBase are built once a week - and only Amarok is built once a day). Qt and KDELibs are actually just downloaded from the KDE snapshots on ftp.kde.org, the others get fetched directly from SVN (kdebase, or rather kdebaseruntime is a very cut down version which only ships with stuff that is necessary to run Amarok - the Xine Phonon backend for example).

In case all the SVN magic finished without problems the publishers would kick in and pull the newly created tarballs to some source distribution server (ftp/web server).

Then the distributions get their source packages. All distribution realted tasks are within special files located in neon/distros/ - the only working one is Kubuntu right now, but the processes are the same for most package types anyway.

First it pulls a copy of the source trees, and prepares everything as necessary for the package type/distribution, once that is done, it uploads to a remote build server (in case of Kubuntu this is done package by package to prevent complete meltdowns of the repository in case of an issue.

The most important part is that fetcher.rb created an array listing all fetched source trees (including their SVN revision number), so that all distributions can create an appropriate version string (Kubuntu is using DATE+svnREVISON-0amarok1).

There are a couple of guidelines all distribution packages should follow, for example they should require few to none maintenance. Ultimately the only reason one would have to edit the packaging, once everything works properly, is to make it work for new distribution releases.

Again Kubuntu as example: source packages are created according to the soure tarballs provided by fetcher.rb, they get thrown in a build deamon and run threw some automated cmake/kde build scripts and one gets _one_ resulting binary per source package.

Also, all packages should come with development headers and debugging symbols (I guess it's pretty obvious why that is ;-)

To sum that up: the most tricky part is probably to get the packaging right - general information for distributions are on the wiki page.

Everyone who is interessted in contribution, either contact me personally or use the Neon mailing list

------------------
Regarding Comments:

OpenSuse build service
Good thing, but it's really up to the maintainers where they want to build. For Kubuntu it makes most sense to use the Launchpad Personal Package Archive, for openSUSE however we will of course use the OSBS ;-)

Ubuntu -> Debian
Not much of a problem, with a bit of tuning they could actually rely on the same debian directories. The only tricky part is the remote build server, I guess using the openSUSE build service is a good idea?

-dev packages
The first public release of Neon had quite some dependencies on -dev packages, they are there because Neon is also meant to help developers join Amaork development. I removed them from the deps stack (strigi, taglib, kdelibs, kdebaseruntime, amarok) they should disappear from qt at some rebuild as well.
For the developers there will be a seperate package for all necessary -dev packages. Should be available soonish.

Missing Icons?
Should be fixed now.

Wrong Colouring!
I can't reproduce the issue, and actually thought it was fixed months ago. If anyone gets hold of information why this appears please leave a mail at the Neon mailing list

How seperate is it really?
Let's say it that way: the possability that Neon will cause issues with _any_ existing KDE/Amarok/Qt configuration is close to not existing at all.
This also includes your collection.db :-)

Project Neon - Amarok (2) Nightly Builds

2008-05-05T20:23:00.001Z

Yesterday we (the masters of Amarok) publish ed a super secret project, named Neon.

A least 5 people ask us every day when Amarok 2 will be ready and when it will be easy to install without compiling it - since yesterday we can tell them: there you go!

Project Neon makes it possible for YOU and me and everyone (kind of, at least ;-)

Neon is meant to provide nightly Amarok builds ....
which means that it generates new Amarok packages for various distributions (currently only Kubuntu, openSUSE is in the queue though) ever day so that everyone can install them for whatever reason (testing, checking out the latest development, ...).
... So the main aim of Neon is clearly to provide a way to install the latest Amarok development version.

After installing amarok-nightly you will find an entry in your application menu, I'd like to call that well integrated with the operating system ;-), but the nifty thing about it is, that amarok-nightly will run without problems along a production system, it is stored in a completely unrelated path and all configurations are (or rather should) be stored in it's own directory.

This makes it possible to check out Amarok 2 once a day while running Amarok 1 to get the usual music entertainment.

More information on Neon and how to use it are available on it's wiki page.

Later I will write a more technical post, explaining how it works and how to get other distributions supported.

Amarok Resolved

2008-04-26T18:20:00.001Z

Dear Tristan, I like further developed ideas, mostly, and I also like to develop ideas further.

...I just read such a further developed idea and since I like it a lot, I am goint to develop it further (normal process for me).

Tomorrow Amarok, Linux market leader in the Music Application segment, will announce something revolutionary.
We came to the decision that others know better and therefore we will sync our release schedule to Ubuntu, Linux market leader in the Home User Operating System segment. Our current model of partly time-based and partly feature-based release planing is apparently creating enormous inefficiency in the development of our high-quality software. Mainly because of this we will do 2 releases per year, each 2 days before Ubuntu releases a new version, so that the build servers have enough time to build the packages.
In order to join this with our very fast and feature rich development we will provide at least 25% new or changed code in a time-frame of one year (2 releases), we hope that by setting this minimal growth rate we are able to increase our userbase by 213% per year.
To support these alternations quality assurance will be reduced to a minimum as it can cause scaling issues in combination with this new concept.

This is however only the first step. In a long-term view we aim to breakup the underlying project of Amarok and become a 100% part of the Ubuntu project to share resources and create a strong leader in thew newly created market of Music Home User Appliaction Operating Systems. We also want to prevent our users from wasting half their life with compilation, so we will stop releaseing source tarballs but instead only offer Ubuntu DEB-files.

We will also suggest KDE and all the distributions, we have intensive collaboration with, to start a strong binding to the Ubuntu project as well, and possibly become part of it.

Watch out for the announcement and the moving of our structures from KDE/Amarok ones to Ubuntu/Launchpad.

A nice day wishes your soon-not-to-be-anymore-project-manager.

READ ME - P A R T Y!!!!

2008-04-24T14:11:00.001Z

It's that time of April again, Ubuntu/Kubuntu released the all new shiny versions of their distributions. This time the releaes is called Hardy Heron *woohooo*

So, what do we do when a new version is out?
Right, party!
Join the Halligalli Hummel Party(tm) in #kubuntu-devel and celebrate the latest Kubuntu release with us on 24-04-2008 @ 16UTC. Of course as party guest you should use the official party wallpaper -> this svg or png

Make sure not to miss the grand party kickoff!
We also have our own bar and a radio show, sponsored by Amarok, (maybe ;-))

In case you just want to have some information about the release, head over to kubuntu.org

Finally: spread the word by bloging, twittering, talking, giving calls etc
GO GO GO!

ubuntu 5-a-day-stats?

2008-04-11T22:38:00.000Z

http://daniel.holba.ch/5-a-day-stats/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Apparently kubuntu-de.org hit 1000 triaged bugs... as first team ever!!! *jump* *party* ... ah well, no time for partying, more bugs are waiting ;-)

Still it makes me proud to be part of such a wonderful community, not only Kubuntu-de.org but also Ubuntu as a whole, including all of *buntu.
Thanks to everyone who's showing that Kubuntu is a healthy part of the Ubuntu community!

...so much for the 'Kubuntu is a second class citizen' issue :-P

Amarok + French + IRC = Love

2008-03-11T21:17:00.000Z

Ladies, Gentleman, Bots and others, may I introduce to you #amarok.fr on FreeNode.

Yeah, it took me over a year to get this project done, but better late than never, right? ;-)
French is now as well as English, German and Spanish one of the Amarok IRC-based support languages *cheer*

Everyone who speaks French, wants to speak French, or just once in his life wants to hang out with the cool guys -> join the channel.

In other news:

Cebit was quite exhausting, but very worth it
Project Neon is still having 2 or 3 quite annoying (means difficult to fix) showstoppers
Amarok 2 nears Alpha
Amarok 1.4.9 should get rolling somewhat soon as well
GMail's interface is awful when trying to organize a lot of mailing lists - kde-www has 120 unread mails right now

Intervu with the guy inside my head

2008-02-12T20:20:00.000Z

Yesterday, without any warning, Emanuel Goscinski asked me whether I'd like to do an interview with kubuntu-de.org. Of course I said yes (after all I am very selfish and like to search myself on Google ;-)).

Anyway, all this resulted in an (IMHO) quite good interview, a tiny little bit too much tech stuff, but otherwise worth reading...

Emanuel however removed one super important question (according to Nightrose it describes me pretty well):

Welche drei Menschen und welche drei Dinge würdest du auf eine einsame Insel mitnehmen (ohne Internetanschluss)?

Ohne Internetanschluss? Vergiss es, ich fahr nicht auf die!

Translation:

Which 3 people and which 3 things would you take with you on an lonesome island (with no internet connection)

No internet connection? Forget it, I'm so not going!

In case you really (?) want to have a look at the complete interview, head over to kubuntu-de.org:

click ---> here <--- for the english translation
click ---> here <--- for the german interview

SNAFU .[k\w\W].[24]

2008-01-17T13:25:00.000Z

-(~:$)-> wtf snafu
SNAFU: situation normal, all fucked up

Tomorrow it's one week of KDE 4. Well, just yet another week, with no more than 5 hours sleep per day, heavy thinking and a couple of new stress balls.

Probably none notice that I didn't blog about KDE 4, I can't even blame you, everyone else did, so I don't matter (even less then usual :-P)

But I have the best excuse ever: "It's all Kubuntu's fault!"
After I installed the Kubuntu packages of KDE 4.0.0, I was considerable surprised, that the icons were totally screwed, new applications like dolphin and systemsettings didn't have one at all and some others (like) Konqueror, were using the old version. Everyone who knows me, pretty much gets were that led to -> me trying to fix it, but breaking even more instead. I dugg in and didn't precisely get out since Friday, icon fixes are still not finished, but instead I have introduced new build rules and backported fixes and styling improvements, created some concepts on how to improve the status of KDE 3 + KDE 4 coexisting ...

May I say: I hate when this happens! :-@

Anyway, I think 4.0.1 is going to be one useable desktop (at least when you got a KDE3Pim ;-).
The direction is right, KDE 4 just needs more love.

As for Amarok: something really cool is coming up, although my new wrapper script for releases is br0ken ;-)

Xmas packages report

2007-12-30T20:27:00.000Z

I finally uploaded the first part of my Xmas packaging - PokerTH, a poker game (actually it turned out that it already was in the archives, so I just updated it).

Also I packaged KGtk, but I broke the GTK on my PC, so I can't test it right now.

Packages that didn't make it but at least made it on my TODO for investigation:
* Jahshaka
* kiwix
* Kmuddy (can someone enlighten my what muddy actually is?)
* MegaMek
* Wesnoth-ng (though I really think the -ng should go into debian)

That aren't all packages that have been requested, but a selection of the most interesting ones to me (I might actually have a look into the others as well, but for now these are my candidates - my packaging todo is really long anyway :-P)

Thanks to everyone who requested something, and in the future, if you have a request, just create a [needs-packaging] bug in ubuntu and subscribe me to it, or mail the URL.

By the way... I'll also try to get some important package updates into gutsy soon (just watch out for it :P)

Oxygen Cursors in Action!

2007-12-27T17:50:00.000Z

So, while I was suffering from an awesome flu-like illness thing recently, I'm now slowly recovering and had a look at the nu Oxygen cursors yesterday evening.

Well, THEY ARE FUCKING AWESOME!!!!! *cheer*
Inspried by it's awesomeness I created a short preview video, so you get an idea of the most prominent cursors (click the image ;-)

Hooray for Oxygen and thanks to the whole team for the wonderful work in all of Oxygen's areas!

.

Xmas (Package) Wish List

2007-12-19T14:01:00.000Z

You are missing a really cool application in Kubuntu?

Well, Santa Apachelogger is coming to town and is willing to package something for you, of course only if you've been good ;-)

The requirements

Has to be Free/Libre Open Source Software
Not yet available in Ubuntu nor Debian
KDE/Qt software (not necessarily though)
Needs to be actively maintained

The wishlist
Send your wishes including a short description and the homepage URL to apachelogger /at/ ubuntu.com.

The buzz
You might also try to create some buzz about the application, so it becomes more visible to me. This can be done by asking your friends to mail me as well, blogging about it, gettin it into press (one way or another) or by constantly bugging me on IRC ;-)

The End
With some luck and a considerable good buzz you might find your application soon in Ubuntu's package archive.
Therefore: good luck :-)

Amarok.de channel party

2007-12-08T01:08:00.000Z

Live blogging from the very first Amarok.de channel party :-D

Location is proudly sponsored by our very own sven423 (i.e. near Karlsruhe, Germany). Visitors are markey, Mamarok, Nightrose, Sput, basti, craegga (part time) and me.
We just had cheese fondue (very late dinner ;-) and are right now chilling like never seen before.

I can totally suggest every IRC channel to do a channel party at least once a year, totally awesome, really.

(BTW: markey is totaly in love with craegga)

MOTU cheer

2007-12-02T11:17:00.000Z

Finally I have time to blog.

I'm glad to announce that I'm now an Ubuntu MOTU (Master of the Universe, Ubuntu Universe Maintainer - guess that would be Hu-Man or something ;-). Wohooo *cheer* *cry* *wave*

Now how is that good for me/Kubuntu/Ubuntu/everyone?
Primarily it speeds up the process of uploading new packages to the ubuntu universe, hence the flood of KDE packages can heavily increase :-P . It also gives me the possibility to review new packages by other contributors, which means I can help keeping the latency of KDE related packages down (at least for me it usually was unbelievable high). Last but not least it's easier (as in faster) for me to fix bugs and such.

All in all: yay, I love being a MOTU :-D

I want to thank everyone who supported (mentally - Mamarok, Nightrose ;-) and helped me and of course Daniel, Michael and Søren for voting in favor of my application :)
Also I thank everyone who congratulated me (shouldn't I have already done that, be ensured that I simply didn't because I was busy revuing, discussing or packaging - busy weekend).

Now, let the contributors come!

LinuxDay in Dornbirn, Austria

2007-11-26T21:42:00.000Z

What an event (awwwwuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuooooooo!!!!). Friday I filled my bag with some clothes my laptop and a bunch of drugs (aka business cards). I didn't know much about LinuxDay, though what I knew was very promising.... and it totally messured up to my expectations.

LinuxDay is really not one of the biggest FLOSS events in central Europe, still it is one of the best. A bunch of nice nerds (not too many though - should definitely be improved) from time to time a visitor ;-) and one of the finest organisation team.

Saturday 9am my granpa and me fetched an emonkey (Carlos Diener, Kubuntu-de.org), at the train station and some minutes later we were already preparing our booth. As usual I was kinda unprepared for the upcoming talk @1pm (though unlike the other times I wasn't either drunk, nor did I have a hung-over, nor did I not get enough sleep, which turned out to have negative effect on my creativity). Anyway, the talk didn't scare people away (which is quite surprising to me), we had good entertainment and got plenty of food, especially "Kääääspätzle" (no idea how to translate that... something with cheese) for dinner. So much about the loosing weight plan.

LinuxDay now resides along with FrOSCon as the finest FLOSS events I attended so far. Next Year I'll take the horde with me to decrease productivity.

Amarok @ LinuxDay in Dornbirn

2007-11-23T06:38:00.000Z

Tomorrow I'll be at LinuxDay in Dornbirn, Vorarlberg, Austria. Beside having a joint "booth" with Kubuntu-de.org (saves me the time of traveling between the party locations ;-) I'm also giving a talk about Amarok, the Amarok project and Amarok2 (read TWO).

So, if you are living in western Austria, eastern Switzerland or southern Germany and don't know what to do on Saturday, then come visit us at the Amarok/Kubuntu Party Booth.

Oh, and someone should bring the beer :-P

.

The Amarok's New Screenshots

2007-11-09T15:50:00.000Z

So finally I came round to create a proper screenshot set of Amarok 1.4. Well, the truth is I never intended to create it my own (read: I actually wanted to save my precious splendour for 2.0), but since none managed to create them in (guess) half a year... I kind of did it myself.

You can find the new screenshots on our beloved amarok.kde.org. There are only 7 of them, because (personal opinion) it doesn't make any sense to create a screenshot of every feature (beside that this is almost impossible) no one will browse through tons of screenshots if he/she can as well go straight ahead and try it.

Therfore the main purpose of a screenshot should be to give a very raw idea of the application and how it looks like. For feature presentation we can as well use text, can't we? :P

Anyway, I wander off the point... so new screenshots are online, feedback is very welcome.
Also I recently started to port our release script to cmake and also made it pretty generic (so it technically can be used by any extragear/playground application). The totally out-of-date release spec also got some love, not yet finished, but it's going to give l10n a lot more time and refine the description of alpha, beta and rc releases.

Hardy Kay

2007-10-25T17:17:00.000Z

Today I started my packaging work for Kubuntu Hardy Heron (god, I <3 the names :-P).

Anyway, since I have about 300 packages which didn't make it into Gutsy I'll first have to update them and get them into Hardy ASAP. So maybe I can get some new packages on my TODO. But really, revuing is taking far too long, if I'd start packaging new software from kde-apps straight ahead, I probably have about 600 packages for Hardy+1. Also I somehow doubt the maintainability of that many packages ;-)

Maybe I can even revu for Hardy+1, after all the target is still to become a MOTU (though, how can I revu while maintaining 600 packages... now that's insane - welcome back to the apachelogger world ;-)

So on the road are:

kthinkbat
tastymenu

Also, does someone know whether projectM 1.0 is working with libvisual+Amarok? Either I broke my package or "ehmm... Houston, we got a problem!"

Power saving++

2007-09-21T13:26:00.000Z

Intel launched lesswatts.org, a collection of tips and tools for extreme powersaving. And I, as someone who loves _very_ long standby times, of course started right away enhancing my gomobile script (I run this script on demand, since it doesn't make much sense to activate all power saving settings just for going downstairs where AC plug is waiting anyway).

I have to admit that I was using powertop since I'm running Kubuntu Gutsy, so I can't exactly recall my battery standby time with stock Kubuntu, but I think it was slightly more than 4 hours. With powertop I managed to increase it by 2 hours (i.e. slightly more than 6 hours), but what I achived with the tips on lesswatts is just _awesome_ -> 7 hours 44 minutes... with quite decent (meaning for me bearable) settings.

Thats why I want to say "Thank you for the hardware, the drivers and the tuning tool/tips." to Intel.

...next to do: check out all the fine tools, yummy :D

Amarok needs you...

2007-09-15T17:28:00.000Z

...or rather, I do?!

Anyway, Amarok got plans to launch its own web radio. As you might have suspected, this causes a lot of work, which is the reason I need someone to take maintainership for Radio Anorak (doing show schedules, finding interesting content, caring about the infrastructure and maybe create a team).

As much as I'd like to do that, I just can't effort yet another very time expansive job. So, I'm looking for help, the requirements are actually quite low:

kinda knowledge of amarok
good music taste
ability to do organizing
some hours per week
proper hardware (means soundcard with hardware mixing etc)
interest in longtime work with/on web radios

In general it's like almost every job I come up with: it can be done by mostly everyone. If you're interested, got a question or something, mail harald -a..t- getamarok.com or just leave a comment here.

FrOSCon - I didn't eat a lot (part2)

2007-08-28T21:15:00.000Z

Past FrOSCon = before FrOSCon

May I present to you: Mamarok (aka Myriam Schweingruber - on the photo talking with Amarok's upcoming community manager, Lydia).
On travel Monday a waiter in cologne supposed she might be the Mother of Sven, Dennis, Florian, Mark, Lydia and me -> i.e. Mamarok ;-)

Welcome to the family!

Photos are up, everyone is home and got enough sleep and I'm not running around with my laptop doing strange things -> FrOSCon 2007 seems to be over :-(
But hey! It was a freaking awesome, Kubuntu and Amarok were able to once again get in contact with users. Amarok showed off his wicked minded community structure. I came to think about a new design for rbot's bar plugin written in ruby, Amarok's very own markey wasted some bandaging material, Sven got yet another thing to talk about (drinking beer @ FrOSCon, not FrOSCon itself ;-), Kubuntu booth manager Thomas and I personally met... finally... and I was once again able to show that I can be the most busy person at an event with busy people all over the place :-P

Seriously though, we had a lot of fun, a lot of beer, a lot of (considerable) good music, a lot of dancing and a lot of good catering. As I said before FrOSCon: "this is going to be the best event this year" ... and it was.

Talking about events. We also came to discuss about the Amarok2 release party, and since I'm still megalomaniac, let me tell you: considering the financial part is working out, this is going to be the best release party this planet has ever seen. Actually, I have to say release parties, because we are doing 2 events, and both are going to rok in their very own ways.

It's pretty obvious, that those are not going to become such official, tie thingy events, since Valerie pointed out, that we know how to party (I always tell everyone, just none believes me ;-). Anyway, I don't want to tell you too much, but my ideas include live music, live releasing and the best locations we can offer for those 2 events.

FrOSCon megalomania (part1)

2007-08-28T13:46:00.000Z

As after every FLOSS event I attend, I ran into a gigantic megalomania. This time: Kubuntu Packaging Task Force.

I want to package kde-apps.org ... completely, at least for the parts which compile with a current distribution at all. In fact, I also want backports for new versions in less than 3 days after release, to latest stable Kubuntu.
To reach such an enormous aim it takes a lot of people, like _a gigantic a load_ of them.

Which leads to the next idea: Free Development Promo Tour. Which of course is mainly about recruiting more developers, packagers, bug triagers, translators, promoters, bug testers...

You might think all this sounds totally insane and megalomaniacal. I probably would agree, though I just came back from a FLOSS event so let me live in my free world bubble ;-)
But, just in case anything like that should be announced one day... don't blame me for not giving you latest information about the world domination plan (tm).

...travel report is to be written (waiting for pics)...

Froscon socialized

2007-08-25T23:24:00.000Z

We are socialing :-D

yepeeeeee, Amarok's project founder Mark just started a discussion about permissions in ubuntu, where www-data seems to have access to a shell. Although he just noted that he wants to cuddle and be a lovely nice person, so letz drop this totally pointless note.

Anyway, the thing is we are going to do a live stream on radio anorak today (2007-08-26 stream link). From about 8 o'clock UTC to about 12 o'clock UTC we are going to present you the finest electronica music the free music world has to offer. Also short notes about current on going discussion will be aired, so check it out if got a chance.

It will be totally awesome

Froscon... Kubuntu + KDE + Amarok = krusade

2007-08-23T22:23:00.000Z

On Saturday Froscon, the Free and Open Source Software Conference in St. Augustin, Germany, finally starts. (head over to the website for more information)

Very important nerds (V.I.N's) of even more important K divisions (KDE, Kubuntu and Amarok) are attending, I've been told that 8 Amaroks (including the project founder and the project manager ;-) are attending, also Kubuntu-de.org delegated 7 people (including their very own packaging team) and the mother of all K projects, KDE, is going to push everyone in one Korner ;-)... to create the highest accumulation of force in the whole universe (at least for 2 days).

In fact we even have our own little talk schedule for the very own KDE developers and contributors room.

Amarok is showing off latest Amarok2 snapshots, and also got a surprise for visitors with an USB stick. On Sunday, project founder Mark Kretschmann, (so-called :-P) community manager Lydia Pintscher and me are going to talk about successful project management, 14:00.

Kubuntu-de.org is providing instant support for Kubuntu at the booth as well as showing off some of Kubuntu's fine features. On Sunday, Kubuntu-de.org member Marcus Czeslinski, Ubuntu women member Lydia Pintscher and me are going to talk about the german Kubuntu community in past, present and future, 16:00.

KDE is going to perfect everything with KDE4 snapshots (oh it's gorgeous!!!! :D. On Saturday, KDE's very own Sebastian Kügler is going to do exactly the same in his talk about KDE4 (it's totally worth visiting, better than the Simpsons movie ;-) 16:30. On Sunday, Torsten Rahn is talking about the 'more than a virtual Desktop Globe' virtual Desktop Globe, Marble, 13:00 ... who's going to join me founding the marble fan club? ;-)

Well, I ran out of buzz words, so let me just say: FrOSCon is totally worth a visit for users as well as developers, the talks related to KDE are of course very interesting and a visit in the Korner is probably going to unveil new bleeding edge technologies :)

See you @ FrOSCon 2007

collaboration to the core ++ OpenID

2007-08-02T18:21:00.000Z

Hi Planet Ubuntu :D

My name is Harald Sitter (aka apachelogger), yesterday I finally became Kubuntu/Ubuntu member, so here I am, intorducing myself.

[Riddell] congratulations apachelogger, welcome to kubuntu and ubuntu membership

More of this boring stuff about me is to be read on my wiki page and the meeting minutes.

.....Since I'm Amarok's wiki dude (among other things ... election for project manager scheduled :-P) I recently started to move our wiki's to OpenID, and I actually can say: we have a working version going.

While we did the configuration we had to face one really important question -> What to do with the exsisting users? -> this is especially important considering we want to move the public Amarok wiki as soon as possible to OpenID. Ian and I finally came to the decision to run a dual login (at least for the first half year or something).
This way users can still use the password logins, but can't create new ones. In other words: "old" users should convert to OpenID at some point, new ones will have to get an OpenID.

I came up with AmarokLogin, a MediaWiki extension combining the default login with the OpenID one (see screenshot). The code is still far away from perfect and at the current point I wouldn't even think about releasing it to the public (would be hell embarrassing ;-), basically one can consider it as a basic hack, however it is completely functional.

To sum it up....
Status: work in progress... Public Release: no idea... Aim: bring OpenID love to our beloved contributors :D

Amarok.KDE.org goes OpenID

2007-07-28T15:02:00.000Z

So finally I got ultimately annoyed by the fact, that I have to keep 4 logins to access the Amarok web infrastructure. ITS THE SUCK!

I finally started to OpenIDify the website(s), and since Mark pointed out that I'm the wiki guy, I started with mediawiki ;-). As Professor Farnsworth will use to say "Good news everyone!" --> it's working.

Yesterday I setup a mediawiki for testing, and with the somewhat new extension I got to a proper result within no time. See the screencast. As soon as I can reach our admin I'll move the Rokymotion wiki to OpenID. After testing and polishing, I hopefully also was able to move either Drupal or SMF to OpenID, so that I finally can move most of the websites to OpenID.... especially meaningful for the wikis since we got 2 of them (a dirty one and a polished end-user one)

Anyway, next on the TODO is Drupal, it looks like getting OpenID to work with it might not be a big problem, since current trunk actually already includes OpenID by default, so I hope it's a save bet for 5.x as well.

...now if KDE would switch to OpenID... ;-)

Amarok Release Party Trial #1 (Update)

2007-06-18T20:47:00.000Z

So, Amarok 1.4.6 is considerable near to it's final release. Reason enough to plan a release party (need some XP for 2.0 anyway).

Problem is: I'm living in Austria and I know exactly 3 (?!) other FLOSS supporters round here, which is why I don't expect a lot of people to come ^_^

Anyway, partE day is Thursday, sometime in the evening (not yet defined), somewhere nere Lambach, Upper Austria (not yet defined either). So should the unlikely case apply that anyone wanna come (and actually is able to ;-) send me a mail to sitter DOOOT harald AAATTT gmail DOOOT com (not that the address wouldn't be available via google search ;-)

Be prepared for my revu... so long fellows

[[Update]]
Cafè Stadlmayr, Marktplatz, Lambach, Upper Austria, Austria.
20:00 CEST

BTW, the release party became a release party weekend sort of thing, so if anyone wanna get drunken this weekend, get back to me ;-)

VoIP - Screw it!

2007-06-15T15:29:00.000Z

Now, the Amarok Wolf Brigade(tm) actually just wanted to do some VoIPing. It ended up in a big fucking mess, which lead to the awful cognition that Skype is the only usable VoIP software on Linux.

Wengo: crashing a lot, not logging in properly, not working properly -> I did 52 tries to package it!!!
Ekiga: pretty sound, shitty GUI, robot voices in conference rooms
Gizmo: crappy sound, crappy GUI, crappy dmix support, funky conference mode
Jabbin: broken website
KCall: crappy GUI, didn't work with wengo SIP

Skype on the other hand got conference call, good quality and a nice GUI. this is probably the reason for stories like this:

[markey] this morning I woke up
[markey] slightly disoriented
[markey] then I realized I'm lying flat on the floor
[eean] o.O
[markey] computer keyboard and mouse are on the ground too
[markey] some keys fallen off
[eean] wtf
[markey] must have fallen asleep
[markey] and then slipped from the chair
[eean] dude
[markey] didn't hurt though
[eean] you need to sleep more ;)

So let me tell you: VoIP on Linux sux, except for Skype, which is closed source though.... but hey, we just wanna talk, not save the world from evil Ebay :S

[EDIT]
We also tried twinkle, but unfortunately one does need a SIP account and we were quite disappointed, so we didn't got any further ..... though from screenshots we noticed -> the gui is shit ... and the FAQ is telling strange things about 3-call-conference with horrible how to do that.

Jamendo Lyrics Script for Amarok

2007-06-11T16:07:00.001Z

Today I finished my work for Amarok's brand new Jamendo Lyrics Script.

Now, why is it good?

it's using super efficient code (at leat I hope so ;-)
unlike about 90% (?!) of scripts out there it doesn't do HTML parsing and therefore is a lot faster
it's accesing a CC music website to get lyrics for CC music - and we all love CC music, don't we :-P

Now, all this wouldn't be possible without Jamendo.com - the most lovely CC music site on the internets - big thanks to the Jamendo crew.

Last but not least also thanks to Amarok's very own adoptive wolf, C7, because without him, telling me 300 times how awesome Jamendo is, I wouldn't have checked it out until Amarok2 ....

[C7] apachelogger: hab übrigens gestern noch mit whisky (meinem hund) heulen geübt ;) aufnahmen kommen noch..

which means something like: he and his dog were practising howling yesterday ;-)

So... Check it out, ye will luv it
http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=60223

.

Microsoft's Patents -> THE Solution

2007-06-11T05:47:00.000Z

In today's total tiredness I noticed:
Linux violates 42 Microsoft patents
now the notice:
42 = the answer to life, the universe and everything

Meaning: the violation of Microsoft patents by Linux is the answer to life, the universe und everything... I say hooray! :D

LinuxTag aggregation

2007-06-09T20:45:00.000Z

Our very own Amarok father (hey markey! :D told me to blog about photos (since everyone loves photos), therefore I'm introducing to you: LinuxTag content aggregation part un

Report by Kubuntu-de.org crew (english version):
http://www.kubuntu-de.org/english/reflections-linuxtag-2007

Photo collection by Kubuntu-de.org crew:
http://www.kubuntu-de.org/bilder/events/linuxtag-2007

Photo collection by Sven from Amarok (including comments - you really should take a look at it ;-):
http://amarok.kde.org/d/en/index.php?q=gallery&g2_itemId=1122

Amarok introduction by Sven and /me (have to say sorry, I was quite tired):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3769412612065314512&hl=en

Sven's interview with german radio Deutschlandfunk:
http://developer.kde.org/~danimo/dlf-kde-lt2007.mp3

Slides:
http://www.kde.org/kdeslides/index.php#linuxtag2007

Amarok related content is also listed here

Still missing:

videos from Sven's talk and my workshop (have been told it is unbelivable funny)
radio interviews with RadioTux

I'll inform you as soon as they are available... I'm really looking forward to the videos :D

[music] Systylé

2007-06-08T16:39:00.000Z

Amarok 2.0 will get support for Jamendo.com, reason enough for me to do some discovery. First thing: proper lyrics fetching -> result -> isn't possible, API does some horrible issues in that manner (gotta talk to someone).

Well, afterwards I started download some music (no server download sux IMO :(.... anyway, as usually music isn't that bad (actually sites like Jamendo or Magnatune satisfy me lot more than mainstream offers). My first trial of course was tag:ska :D .... well, I found wonderful stuff in there.

For example Systylé. I can just recommend everyone to listen to at least one track, it's really good Ska, which might not only be loved by Ska fans ;-)

In Kubuntu news: busy busy day again. Packaged: domino and krawlsite and something else? can't remember :P

Free Injections

2007-06-07T21:21:00.000Z

The Amarok project is very proud to offer you free (as in free beer) injections ... into your Kubuntu DPKG.

Everything started with:

<eean> apachelogger: if your still here, is it possible to uninstall amarok without uninstall kubuntu-desktop?
<apachelogger> no
<apachelogger> eean: why would you uninstall amarok?
<eean> really? :/
<eean> switching to svn
<apachelogger> I can produce a fake package if you want to

And ended with inject.rb .. now as a packager I'd say WTF... this is total bullshit and dangerous as hell ... on the other hand, DPKG doesn't offer any possability to tell it that a certain package is installed from source. Anyway, it's a nice Ruby hack.

One starts the script with ruby inject.rb APP VERSION (e.g. ruby inject.rb amarok feisty)
now the script creats some dirs and generic debian build files
finally it runs some debhelper scripts to create the actual package, which includes nothing more than nothing
in the end it cleans up and installs the package

Really, I have to repeat: don't use this script if you don't have a really good reason for doing so, and you most probably should also know what you're doing

Cover the Top

2007-06-06T14:48:00.000Z

One might have noticed, that I'm currently quite active in kubuntu-devel, at least compared to 2 weeks before. This is because I'm right now as motivated as never seen before, to get Kubuntu in best shape possible, and this by all means.

Fact is, by ensuring Kubuntu is the most proper Distro it's easier to promote it, and therfore to promote KDE and the default Kubuntu apps (i.e. Amarok). So I'm currently busy packaging every more or less usable application on kde-apps.org. When Gutsy enters freeze, I'll try to get some bugs sorted, assure quality and have a look at the translations....

So Gutsy will hopefully kick everyone's ass ;-)

In Amarok news Lydia and I thought about promoting Amarok @ FrosCon (kind of smaller LinuxTag thing in Germany), so we will have to get in contact with KDE and Kubuntu-de about coordination (I also need a money supply for the flight ;-). The good thing is: markey has to come as well, as it's not really far away from $HOME.

Hm, while writing "flight", I had to think of "filelight" ... which finally entered Gutsy in version 1.0!!!! Still we need to sort the debian <-> ubuntu breakage issue.

Anyway, this morning I did the fastest fix quickie in my whole life. 30 seconds including error evaluation, file opening, reuploading and testing .... all that just before I went off for school, but now searching the Amarok wiki works again ^_°

LinuxTag Mash

2007-06-04T17:00:00.000Z

mash - A mass of mixed ingredients reduced to a soft pulpy state by beating or pressure; a mass of anything in a soft pulpy state.....

...Perfect description for my LinuxTag sum-up.
It was the first time Amarok got directly visible to it's users at a fair (FOSDEM is not a user event IMO ;-). And I think for the first time we did quite well.

Merchandise selling did go well, though we didn't have shirts on first day due to delivery problems, but after all we sold about half of our sortiment. Also I noticed that the stats @ amarok.kde.org about 50% new and 50% recurrent visitors might be true, as I met about the same amount of users as not-yet-users (on the other hand I also was a lot of time helping at the Kubuntu booth to promote KDE and Kubuntu).

For next time we really have to ensure to get something visible and attractive for booth decoration, just the icon isn't enough IMHO, also business cards should be available (KDE ones would be most meaningful?) and most important .... a hot and sexy configured KDE+Amarok.

We also got to create a new branding on Amarok - "Awwwwuuuuuuoooooooooo" - simply put: howling. I guess we should continue this branding as it's great fun and also really unique to Amarok.

Finally I'd like to thank Sven, Lydia and Dennis for booth work, really great job you did. Greate thanks also goes to Kubuntu-de.org for caring for cute (4.3) little apachelogger :D and for just being such an awesome team - folks I simply love ye!
Last but not least I'd also like to thank KDE for providing the base of all my promotional work as well as my desktop, Trolltech for sponsoring Qt 4.3 and a dinner, LinuxTag e.V. for the fair and LinuxNacht and Ubuntu-Berlin for the BBQ, and in general everyone who was involved including the whole FLOSS world ... for just kicking the .com's ass :)

See ya next year in Berlin (then I want to visit the Trolltech office there :D

me packaging, testing myself and I patch a lot

2007-05-27T19:51:00.000Z

Not that bacem totally insane and made myself a hardcore packager... but hey, 8 packages WIRFR (waiting in revu for revu) isn't that bad ;-)

So beside preparing some school projects I also threw kcmnnview and kopete-otr (finally) into revu.

Yesterday I also started work on maxemum tv guide (need upstream fixes before upload) .... kirocker is still waiting for upstream (didn't respond at all yet) .... also pokerclock went to revu yesterday (though I have to talk to upstream author about storing the binary in /usr/share/pockerclock and link it to bin !!! did patch it as of now) .

On the other hand kblogger and finally also khalkhi got uploaded, so soon work on khalkhi apps can continue.

Finally to give you an idea about my current deb portfolio (did a total cleanup before I went to vacation):
filelight
filelight-i18n
gst-plugins-moodbar
kblogger
kcmnvview
kde-build-essential
kftpgrabber
khalkhi
kio-sysinfo
kirocker
kopete-desklist
kopete-otr
kubuntu
kwin-style-crystalgl
kwin-style-flatknifty
kwin-style-hypnotista-sade
kwin-style-hypnotista-siyah
kwin-style-knifty
kwin-style-mytango
kwin-style-serenity
mtvg
oooqs2-kde
pokerclock
qtpfsgui
tmp
tweak
wengo

And I still think I'm not packaging a lot :P

In Amarok news: Maximillian (McFossey) did ask for some web artists to pimp AKO for 2.0 release .... letz hope the best :D

Home Victory for Amarok! :D

2007-05-20T14:48:00.000Z

We just got KDE SVN revision 666666 :-) :-D :-) :-D

sitter * r666666 amarok/trunk/extragear/multimedia/amarok/src/images/amarok_logo.svg: proper rendering for the sexiest logo in FLOSS world

Web, Promo - I need you :)

2007-05-16T17:58:00.000Z

Since I'm suffering from never ending productivity I didn't do a lot today ;-)

Meaning... beside bumping the versions in extragear.kde.org, updating the amarok page there, updating the icons there, and changing the developer.kde.org URLs in kde.org main pages ;-)

Well, actually that's not real work, more like something you do because it has to be done, kde-www is needing manpower!!!! so get over and join the URL and version changing forces :D
It's no difficult work, but sometimes a lot of it, like now where most developer.kde.org URLs have to be changed to techbase.kde.org, but that's not really high priority. Version bumps for extragear apps are hi-prio IMHO, but mostly the authors don't change it or at least forget to notify the kde-www team about the changes. Also from time to time content needs to be updated, or crap needs to be sorted out, especially in the kde.org subdomains. So if you have an hour or two from time to time, have a look at kde.org and check what could be updated/changed/fixed, then mail kde-www and either send a patch or ask for commit karma to www.

Anyway, also amarok got some love today. Since we (or is it I?!) are working on a marketing campaign for 2.0 it's necessary to do some analysis and today I noticed that it's kind of awkward to guess user's needs, because the possability that the user really has this 'need' is quite high, though it isn't very likely that it is a high priority to the user.
The fact that the market now splits up to 3 platforms with 3 totally different types of users doesn't make it any easier. That's why I'm planing to do a 'user's needs' research by having personal interviews with friends etc.
So I will need YOUR help to do that. If you're interessted just mail amarok-promo@kde.org or me sitter.harald@gmail.com. It's not taking a lot of time, basically I think it's like 5 minutes for the interview and 5 for digitalization of the data.

We will start with operation brainsucker on Monday (I hope).

I'd really appreciate your help :)

Package Tuesday

2007-05-15T15:14:00.000Z

Somehow Tuesday became package day (probably because I'm doing packaging on almost every Tuesday?! :P).

Anyway, today was quite awesome since I noticed that 29th is a holiday (thx to a1ex for actually telling me ;-) and therefore I should be able to get a earlier train to vienna which means I don't have to take a taxi to the airport (which would have been insane expansive anyway).

With this informatin in mind I started packaging.

kblogger got an update to 0.6.2 and is waiting in revu for revu (?!)
kftpgrabber 0.8.1 is waiting for approval for the kubuntu-de.org repo
yesterday evening khalkhi already got an update fixing the lib's packaging (waiting in revu for revu)
kirocker got a patch to ensure proper library paths, though I still wasn't able to contact the upstream author, which means, since the package is awfully broken (but fixable), that I can't get it into the official repos until there is a fixed upstream tarball
I also started work on kopete-otr (off the record encryption that is)
tweaK (aka kde-tweak got updated to 0.2.1 (which fixed a small issue in case 0.1 was installed before), it's also WIRFR

Linuxtag progress

2007-05-14T17:24:00.000Z

I made like 100% progress for linuxtag today ;-) ...

arrival

train will (hopefully) arrive in vienna at 19:34
then I'll probably take a taxi to VIE (bus would needs about 35 minutes - normal traffic that is)
plane takes off at 21:20 and lands at 22:30 in berlin tegel where marcus (Czessi) is going to grab me up

linuxtag

most probably(hopefully?) I'll sleep with stephan (\sh) and carlos (emonkey) from kubuntu(-de) in a vacation apartment near the fairground
I'm going to have a workshop about Amarok and DCOP, beside that I'll be present at the booth of Amarok, Kubuntu and KDE (most time @ Amarok, but also quite some @ Kubuntu and maybe also as much @ KDE?! don't really know yet :P

depature

plane takes off at 06:15 (hell early)
bus takes me to the railway station
around 13:00 I'll be back @ home and have to learn for the german and accounting tests on monday (which is why I leave that early)

Back!

2007-04-21T18:12:00.000Z

Ahoy!! :D
/me is back from holiday.

Actually I'm already idling in #amarok since February to get back in touch with everything. Now I'm also back with KDE stuff and Kubuntu packaging. So basically holiday is over :(

Anyway, I'll attend LinuxTag in Berlin. Majorly as part of the Amarok crew (as my beloved project actually pays the flight) but you'll most probably find me as well on the KDE and Kubuntu-de booth. I might also do a workshop about Amarok DCOP magic...
Though total financing isn't settled yet (accomodation and diet missing totally) I'm really looking forward to do some KPromotion in Germany's capital city.

Writing about KPromotion.... In March I did a Linux workshop at my school (featuring Kubuntu), was a quite good success, and as part of my Final Exam's Project I aim to migrate a local NGO from Windows to Linux, I hope they actually want to :D (more on that after Tuesday).

Timeoutlogger

2006-09-25T19:07:00.001Z

Some people might know that since about a month I'm suffering from no, or actually very low, motivation to do anything. As result of this I decided to take a timeout from Amarok, KDE and FOSS development/management, for a not yet known period of time.

This will most likely start after release of Amarok 1.4.4

I will unsubscribe from every mailing list, not aggregate planets or blogs or IT related news, not join any IRC channel, not log into my jabber account @ kdetalk, not answer any mail about Amarok, KDE or FOSS (as long as it's not really important to do so) and probably some more I didn't think of as I also stopped drinking coffee (doctor's advice).

Now, why do I do this?
Mainly because I have far too much responsibilities right now (not only in FOSS), and this is putting a lot of pressure on me, but also because I want to get an all new view at the whole open source movement, and last but not least, because I want to spend more time on learning French ;-)

So, watch out for Amarok 1.4.4

aKademy - Hoooray!

2006-09-20T21:34:00.000Z

Arrr.....

aKademy is starting in some days, and I'm kinda busy with doing last organization for the trip (even forgot to learn for the french test tomorrow :| - it's not that easy to go to Vienna (Duesseldorf was easier at least ;-)

I will arrive on Firday 13:55 @ Dublin Airport (check the wiki) and will le ave on 7:30 the following M onday - and currently have no clue how to go to hostel or college or anywhere :P
Anyway, to make it easy for everyone to recognize and lead me to the right direction, here's a short description: tux cap on my head, big Kay on my black t-shirt, black trouser, black shoes, laptop bag on the righten side, (sliver colored) backpack on the back, a Kay pin on my jacket and no clue of anything but location of next coffee shop...

If you still have no idea how I look like: <-- the Kayed one. So, I hope someone will guide me to aKademy location and ensures that I don't tumble in a big hole (->O<-) gotta pray a bit now (getting the plane is already quite difficult). Anyway, finally I just want to thank my school for making it possible to travel on Firday and Monday, so that I can at least enjoy the weekend of this year's KDE Conference.

(BTW: there will be no Amarok release, live from aKademy - 1.4.3 was just too ASAP and .4 is not finished - maybe a special aKademy snapshot, though I wonder about the sense...)

Re: the kay, the dee, the ee on the tee vee

2006-08-26T17:52:00.000Z

So, Aaron asked in first of his latest tripple-blog-post-mode-action (?) for visitor bump on march 15, 2005.

As we didn't use Urchin analytics back then (as we usually only use Google services if KDE doesn't offer them :P - and only Google services in that case) I can't show lovely graphics and big load of background information, but I guess Webalizer also does a good job ;-)

In particular:

Dublin - something to look fwd...

2006-08-21T11:57:00.000Z

A friend recently went to Dublin for some days, and he brought interessting information with him.

As we can see here, MS Windows wants to welcome everybody with a well known look, which just reminds on home. In fact, this is a research done by the government, to find out whether it is possible to control the amount of visitors with such welcome messages. I can tell you, since they started to welcome visitors like this, the amount of visitors got unhalved.

Now, I, as an free desktop enthusiast, think we should prepare for the worst when entering the plain/train to Dublin. So, don't forget your Kubuntu CD's, your Kay-Shirts and last but not least the Kay's. Also make sure you know every single detail about KDE, people usually take you more serious, if they notice you know what you're talking about ;-)

In 80 Days Around the Kay

2006-08-07T16:44:00.000Z

It somehow looks like next 2 months are going to be great fun...

In early september I'll join the KDE booth at the Linuxtage in Essen (Germany). Actually I still have to find cheapest way to get there, as the way from $HOME to /essen isn't quite short, but no way would be too long for my Special Kay ;-).

In mid-end setember I'll be at aKademy 06, for the weekend. Also not shortest distance that is, will be about 170 from Vienna to Dublin and back. But aKademy is really a must this year, as I couldn't participate last year as I had to work - so it could be even 500 bucks to go there!

Last but not least it's also highly possible that we (roKymotion team, the currently 2 members :|) do a talk at Practical Linux in Gießen (Germany). Although I will first have to check how to finance that funky trip.

So, maybe see ya at one of those events :-)

Freedom?

2006-08-07T12:39:00.000Z

Belive it or not, but I'm really free.

Google is taking care of that - and therefore: thank you Google! :-)

I can read latest news selection everywhere, check mails everywhere, can stay in contact with friends everywhere, I can do wordprocessing every time, I can do spreadsheeting every time, I even can manage my calendar everywhere, and all this I can do from one site in the web.

Yeah, I know, I probably post too much about the never ending go(o)dness of Google, but I just noticed again that I don't depend on any OS for the stuff that really matters in all day life.

KDE Everywhere - Malta

2006-07-06T18:38:00.000Z

So finally I came round to blog about my Malta travel, more specific, the krusade.

After having some troubles preparing the monsterious big Kay for the journey, I was quite surprised how well it worked. Although - I of course forgot the adhesion to make the 5 pieces one big Kay, I first had to find something sticky, which wasn't as easy as I thought, anyway I got the adhesion and was able to start clogging.

So as I get very hyperactive when I have to do such a precise and important work (I had exactly one try), it took me about 3 hours to get the Kay finished (most time was probably used for shouting, crying and freaking).
Hopefully understandable that I didn't want to leave it, but it was evening and the class crew was preparing for going out - what does a nerd do? - right! - he takes the Kay with him (awful idea though). Of course the Kay was suffering from all the Heineken and smoke, so that it wasn't very good looking when we came home, that's when I got the intuition that I might should have protected it with a transparent plastic shild thing.

But it survived the night and was able to go with use to Valetta (capital city of Malta). Wasn't easy to find a good backround for the Kay as whole Malta doesn't look so good in summer (as it is so hot- everything is quite dusty). So I took some pictures which look quite good imo (athough the Kay doesn't do so on high res ;-)

KDE-Look

PicasaWeb

Thank you ATI

2006-07-06T18:31:00.000Z

I just wanted to say thank you ATI. Without you and your awesome driver for Linux, my life would be just totally boring. No one would like a rock stable Kubuntu, much better it is to repair demage done by silly drivers - wooohoo I love it when I have to stop boring packaging and boring promoting to play with my wonderful looking fglrx.

Really ATI - I LOVE YOU

without you my system would be just too stable.

Genesis - 1.4.1 beta1

2006-05-30T10:41:00.000Z

As I was busy reading the da vinci code, which I had to write an disquisition about, I recently got notified that there will be a beta release of amaroK 1.4.1, reason -> K4M3 (K3M). A view into my mailbox showed me about 100 unread mails in the commits folder...usually the amount doesn't get > 45 ;-)

So, on Sunday+2weeks (06-06-18) we will probably pull out amaroK 1.4.1 beta1 - advanced amaroK users might know that we don't do betas for x.x.y releases, reason for this beta are enormous changes in the GUI as well as the core.
Those are mostly results of K4M3 (kde 4 mutlimedia meeting) which had lead to really great improvements and ideas.
We plan 1.4.1 for 2 weeks after the beta (if there are no big problems) and probably apply a string freeze 1 week before release.

As of now trunk includes:

changed GUI - context tab got removed and fights with the playlist for user's attention
startup improvements - currently about 50%
bugs bugs bugs
bugfixes for other bugs

I'm still trying to sort out the bugs in the amaroK nightly script, which moved together with my server from SUSE to Kubuntu (woooohoooo!). Not only that this is the first somewhat, trying to be professional, work in Ruby (using 4 times an external app - on 200 lines!) also getting the debian dir to work properly with SVN snapshots is really nifty stuff ... I really hope to get it done within the next few weeks. Maybe before 1.4.1 final ;-)

All About Eye-Candy

2006-05-23T22:10:00.000Z

today kapilzad publish his KDE Spectra proposal series for KDE...

Most important thing for me is KDE Spectra Player - meant as "KDE should have a powerful multimedia player, with cool graphics and should be like a file-browser"

powerful media player: just wondered why his mockup uses stuff named suroor.mp3 - dunno tags? dunno vorbis?
cool graphics: which actually means as big that your eyes start bleeding because you have to move them 3 cm to see another button :P (big + shiny != cool)
should be like a file-browser: aye, since one doesn't have tags... :|

So, there is a reason why this proposal got quite some negative votes, and it's not only amaroK.

Anyway, the whole KDE Spectra propal series is missing a good point, the whole idea lacks usability (thought of a non-usability expert), functionality and is actually only about eye-candy (allthough I wonder whether hundreds awful BIG buttons are still eye-candy)

This is not how I'd like to see KDE!!!

Notice the nerdification

2006-05-22T16:21:00.001Z

So, how does one notice that he becomes more than a usual geek? Well, if he starts replacing mathematical variables with initialism....

Like for example K (for german Kapital = capital) with KDE. This way K0 (which is base value) becomes KDE0

So happened to me :S
apachelogger <--- nerd!!! Here is an excerpt of latest mathematics test:

Actually this appearance was quite funny, since my maths teacher used to use GNOME ;-) So maybe it was just my unbelivable cynicism? Dunno! Maybe this post is even part of that cynicism? ;-D

wahoo bug in amaroK

2006-05-21T21:29:00.000Z

So the kubuntu.de users discovered a real strange bug in amaroK described at http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125210.

It basically says, that amaroK doesn't honor the Show Splashscreen setting from a kiosk config.
Kubuntu uses such kiosk configs to provde the simplified system with lot of preconfigured stuff, so a Kubuntu user (probably only dapper ones) is not able to deactivate the splash screen. Doesn't sound important, it isn't - but some dislike our 1.4.0 splash screeny ..... so give the user what he demands ;-)

Plus: bugs suck anyway, imporant or not.