Thomas' blog

2 days to go and KDE turns 15!

2011-10-12T20:48:00.000+02:00

Whoooo. Just 2 more days until KDE can celebrate the 15th birthday. Have you prepered your presents ;-)
And even more important: Are you ready to party?

Find more information on the dot.
http://dot.kde.org/2011/10/05/freedom-15-years-party

October 14th—a global celebration of freedom and achievement!

Back from the Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin

2011-09-03T12:54:00.000+02:00

Perhaps I am the last one writing about the wonderful Desktop Summit in Berlin some days ago. Nevertheless I want to summarize my personal highlights.

The Desktop Summit was awesome. I had the pleasure to meet people (old and new friends from all over the world), discuss complicated stuff face-to-face and of cause: have a lot of fun together.

In a combined cross desktop marketing BoF we discussed some ideas how we (GNOME and KDE) could join forces to get bigger media coverage (e.g. TV, radio or big newspapers). One intresting first step is by paying attention on our messages. It occured that the message was: "... is THE Linux Desktop Environment" or "A is better than B".

From a commercial marketing perspective this is very common. Just a little bit ignoring the reality and making a strong statement (with the hope the unknowing reader is going to believe it) is usual. On the other hand this takes us (down) to the same level of trust many of the big companies have today. Exacletly this is one of the big differences we want to make. We are NOT like these big companies, playing with "the truth" to manipulate people. So we agreed to use phrases like "... is ONE of the leading / bigest / ... Desktop Environments for Linux" etc. There is GNOME, there is the KDE Plasma Workspace etc. and if we look at the whole market we see, that the big competition is not the other community.

Further I had some good discussions with different people about the improvement of the business side of KDE. Recent (economic) developments showed us the danger of having only a few, but big companies in our environment. The big ones are very nice, however, we gain stability by having many small businesses as well in our ecosystem. You might like business or not. But who would deny some money for hacking on his/her favorite open source project?

I recognized with big pleasure how powerful, creative and successful small/medium companies could be when they cooperate. Plasma Active is here one excellent example. In my view we need more such cooperation. There were some ideas how we, the community could build a better context for those developments.

Besides the talks and BoFs there were many techical and social activities together.

Hacking on computers ...

... and hacking on the piano ...

... or having lunch together.

Jos did again his collaborative open source cooking.

There were really many great events. One of my personal favorite was the football match (thanks to openSUSE/SUSE for sponsoring).

Like last year I came back with a huge motivation and many plans how I could help to bring KDE further. As I know big plans and great ideas do not matter in our world, it is the result, the things you have actually done. My daylife hit me (not really soft) when I came back and I did a poor job for KDE so far. Other times will come in a few months.

Preparing my talk about conflict management for the Desktop Summit

2011-08-01T15:05:00.000+02:00

This is my favorite place to prepare my talk for the Desktop Summit in Berlin. It is about conflict management in communities and teams. Watch it on Aug. 6th from 12:00 until 12:30, room: Audimax.

Last chance: Vote on openSUSE strategy

2011-06-29T16:40:00.005+02:00

The vote on the openSUSE strategy is closing on 30th of june. So official openSUSE members have the opportunity for ONE more day to express their opinion.

Take your chance. It is here: go, read the document one more time and cast your vote!

And if you are not sure if it is important, here you find some hints.

And BTW:

Visiting Randa: The multi sprint

2011-06-07T09:02:00.002+02:00

Last Saturday I visited Randa to see my friends working hard on the future of KDE. There were about 60 developers in the house, hacking and discussing everywhere.

Hacking everywhere - The nepomuk and multimedia crowd

Especially for my they did some lightning talks to give my an overview. (I haven't expected less.)

The audience is listening

Sebas was explaining the whys and the hows about plasma active.
Miliam talked about new features of KDevelop like the plasma based dashboard and python language support.
Frederik Gladhorn presented some work about accessibility.
Harald Sitter gave an overview about KDE multimedia covering Phonon, Amarok, Tomahawk kde'n'live and more.
Finally the Fluffy gang reveled there plans to go Flinky.

Also some "work" was done outside.

Platform_11 team at work

Finally Sebas gave us a demo of the plasma active tablet. The usability was not so bad. Even my 3yo daughter could change activities.

My impression during the short time was that a lot of work was done yet and a lot was waiting to be done. I am sad I could not stay longer. But it was a pleasure meeting you all again. See you in Berlin.

Strategy is alive

2011-05-23T23:10:00.000+02:00

CC by nc sa mikep @flickr

There was a long pause during the strategy process. Now the strategy team is working on it again. News are coming the next days. Stay tuned.

Contributions that matter

2011-04-14T10:11:00.015+02:00

CC-BY-NC-SA by __Dori__ @ flickr

In the last days I read two post on planetkde and planetsuse, written by (to me) new contributors with the best intention to help their projects. However the response of the community was not as positive as they would have expected. What happened?

3 types of potential new contributors

Some lines from my last years Akademy paper.

"Krogh, Spaeth and Lakhani analyzed the characters of potential new contributors in mailing lists.[12] Based on that work three types could be found.
Proactive problem-solver: They use the program, find a bug, and work out the solution. In the first mail to the list they send the patch. These people are very successful in communities and often become continuous contributors.
Waiting volunteer: This group offers their abilities to the community and waits until they get a job allocated. In general this character is not very active. Most communities can not integrate them successfully.
Visionary: They use the program and have ideas on how the program should be improved. Although visions and aims are important in communities, the character-type visionary is not successful. In the past his/her visions were not identical with the ideas of the code developers. The resulting costs of conflicts exceed the benefits of the discussion."

Even the headline of one of the post gives you a hint which type might be behind the post in question. Visionaries often use words like "it should", "you have to" etc. instead of "I have done" or "I am going to do".

Results matter - words do not

In open source communities the developers decide what they do. They want to get work done. In most cases they have a vision for their project and not enough time to do as much as they would like to. That's one of the reasons why achievement is the currency. Talking and writing visions is not. If you want a change - do it.

This does not mean, that your contribution is not appreciated. The contrary is the truth.

Contributions that make a difference

KDE as well as openSUSE have special pages to guide new contributors. They propose your first steps into the project. (You will find other useful information about how to start contributing at openhatch a plattform to bring new contributors and projects together.)

Contributions that make a difference are contributions which are important and valuable from the perspective of the community; things the developers want to get done. Help them and you will succeed. Junior Jobs (JJ) are a good starting point as well.

Start now doing things!

There is really a lot to do. Your contribution is very welcome. Visions are important in communities, but they are not the best point to start with.
Instead, grab a task the community needs to be done. Inform yourself first, invest some time and love. Then contact the mailing list and post your questions or ask for a mentor. Present a solution and be amazed by the positive feedback you might receive.

Good luck!

P.S.: If you have an idea how the program could be improved use the provided tools (the brainstorm section in the KDE forum is the place for your are locking for; more experienced users could open a feature request at bugs.kde.org; openSUSE has openFATE.) or contact the developers on the mailing list.

GSoC idea 3: Store annotations within PDF

2011-02-23T07:22:00.003+01:00

As I mentioned in my previous post I can't mentor GSoC students myself and therefore are looking for a developer to jump in for me.

GSoC idea 3: Store annotations in PDF file

Application/component: Okular/Poppler

Brief explanation:

It is possible to store annotations with Okular. They are saved in separat files. One of the most wanted bugs is 151614 (123 comments, 739 votes). It would be awsome to have that feature in our wonderful Okular.

Expected results:

Store annotations in the PDF file.
If that is not enough apped support to modify the PDF (insert, delete pages etc.)

In my next life I will become a developer and the I could mentor that project myself. Until this happens I am really hoping someone else steps up.

GSoC idea 2: Improved (more elegant) keygeneration in KMail/Kleopatra

2011-02-22T07:49:00.000+01:00

As I mentioned in my previous post I can't mentor GSoC students myself and therefore are looking for a developer to jump in for me.

GSoC idea 2: Improved (more elegant) keygeneration in KMail/Kleopatra

Application/component: KDEPIM/KMail and Kleopatra

Brief explanation:
Signing and encrypting emails is very old, however only a minority is using it. One reason might be, that it is not easy enough for regular users to use it. The importance for private and business users is still high. Private companies started to sell proprietary, secure e-mail services (e.g. in Germany DE-Mail and e-brief). There are good key creation, signing and other key management functions present in KDE software. The goal of this proposal is to make it easy and fast to work with signed and encrypted emails.

Expected results:

Analyze and optimize the key creation, signing etc processes, make it dumb easy to create and use a key/signature. One way could be to add a button “Generate Key” (next to “Change”) in the KMail – Identity settings – Cryptographie; start the key creation wizard from Kleopatra and take the name and email address from that identity (at the moment you have to enter them manually). The user just has to enter the passphrase and is done. Offer a button “Save private key and revoke key on usb” or something like this and “send public key to server” / “Make key public”. Add the key creation (or import possibilities) into the identity / account creation wizard of KMail. Add the possibility to create revoke keys within the gui (when sending the key to the server, there is an information message yet.)
Guide the user through the whole process of signing and encrypting/decrypting emails. Offer possibilities to learn about the topic in an easy and fast way (offline help, online help / wiki, videos, tutorials etc). Show how they use the keys, how they get their keys signed, how they sign other keys etc.
Integrate other free/open services like CAcert.

These are just some ideas. If there is someone interested I could go more into details if necessary.

GSoC: Mentors wanted! - Elegant display settings for presentations

2011-02-20T11:57:00.002+01:00

I recently mentored some students during the Google Code In project. Now the preparations for Google Summer of Code have begun. Unfortunately I am not a hacker, I am a promo guy and I can't mentor here. Nevertheless I have some ideas for GSoC and I hope to scratch somebodies itch so she or he will mentor that idea.

Idea 1: (More elegant) Display settings for presentations

Application/component: Plasma

Brief explanation: The handling of multiple screens has continuously improved during the last releases. The handling of a stationary setting of two screens seems to be rather good. When it comes to presentation-mode with a projector I would be delighted to see even more elegance (simplicity).

Expected results: When doing presentations there is in general only one question to decide. The presentation mode:

The same picture of both screens or
The notes on the notebook, the presentation on the projector.

To 1: Autodetect the smallest max. resolution of the two displays. Instead of scaling the picture to full screen it would be nicer to keep the ration and leave some space blank on the left and right notebook screen.

To 2: Autodetect the max. resolution of each of the two displays and set those different resolutions. The panel, all the widgets and all the open windows should stay on the notebook screen. The projector screen shows only the wallpaper. It does not matter if the projector “screen” is located above or on the right or wherever of the notebook screen.

It would be very useful to link that dialog to the keyboard shortcut (e.g. Fn+F7) or to start it automatically when a projector is attached. (At the moment I have to start krandrtray from krunner first or have the symbol in the taskbar all the time. I am not sure if a new users could work that out in a couple of seconds.)

Save the display/plasma settings (esp. widget positions etc.) to restore them when the projector is detached. (Perhaps that could be solved with activities.)

Extra points: It is possible to save the standard settings. In a second step different screen setting profiles could be saved and loaded (like in powerdevil). Presentation-mode 1 and 2 could be such profiles and a user could modify them (e.g. projector on top or right) if it is necessary.

So what do you think. Is that scratching your itch? Can you imagine how cool this would be to have? At least for me as a presenter that would really rock.

Free/Open Content for promo

2011-02-10T19:10:00.001+01:00

I am presenting and promoting open source software at various locations. It is much more impressive to show the power of KDE/Linux when you have some content with you; Amarok rocking the booth is much more attracting than a plain KDE Plasma Desktop (the plain Plasma Desktop is attracting anyway but it could be enriched :-) ). Interested people could play around by themselves if they find some data on the demo machine. You can't do much expect moving Dolphin windows with a blank system (unfortunately most live CDs don't provide content). We wanted to change that. So I submitted a couple of tasks during the Google Code in project.

Now
* we have cc music (which works with Amarok's Wikipedia, lyrics and CD cover downloads features,
* we have HQ blender videos (like sintel) to show multimedia power (moving pictures are always attracting),
* we have documents in ODF- and MS-formats to show the import/export capabilities,
* we have pictures for your favorite photo-management software (like digiKam or Gwenview).

The next step would be to create compressed archives to make it possible to download the whole packages but I haven't found a good place to put them.

You can download the content onto your promo machine (e.g. I put it into my demo-user home directory) or integrate the content onto live CDs (or more likely DVDs when talking about videos).
With Suse Studio you can create a live CD/DVD/USB-Stick within a couple of minutes. You can choose the applications you want to have included and you can upload all the demo content.

Perhaps the creators of live CDs find some space on their media to include at least parts of that demo content. IMHO it would significantly increase the experience for a our users / testers.

Google Code In – My Summary

2011-02-06T15:10:00.003+01:00

(C) by Wade Olsen

It was my first time I mentored a couple of students during a Google sponsored project. It was possible to submit non-coding tasks as well. So I focused on promo stuff.

Results
Over all I submitted ten tasks (nine could be closed).

The first block of tasks (solved by Todor Stoyanov and Paul) was about the creation of a free/open content collection that could be shown during demos and presentations or could be integrated into live CD/DVDs.

The second block of task was covering KDE and FLOSS in the area of education (solved by TheOne and Giannis Konstantinidis). It started with a survey of needs of students, doing the survey, analyzing student tasks and ended with a concept for students how to promote KDE and FLOSS at their school (incl. promo material e.g. a poster, presentation, talking points for students etc.). One of the students is going to test it within his school. Isn't that rocking?

I truly believe that KDE and FLOSS (esp. KDE EDU and the openSUSE based Desktop4Education and Server4Education projects) have so much to offer for schools and students. We should do even more in this area.

Challenges
For me it was very difficult to set the level and the time needed to fulfill the task when I was submitting it. It depends so much on the skills and the age of the student. The task to find free music and test it with Amarok (support for CD cover, lyrics and Wikipedia information) would be easy for a student with installed KDE and with some experiences with free and open stuff. A student new to the open source world will need days to work out that (for him) difficult task.

Summary
All in all it was much more work than I expected, on the other side it was a wonderful experience to see how the students developed themselves over time (and how fast the tasks were taken). It was a great success and I am looking forward to the next time.

@my students: Thanks for your contribution. It was a great pleasure to work with you. Let's keep in touch. Let's keep on rocking the world!

Our early Christmas present: Jonas

2010-12-26T20:48:00.000+01:00

On Dec. 13 our son Jonas was born. He and his mother are doing well. We are all happy that he is with us now.

Convert mp4 into ogv

2010-12-02T21:39:00.001+01:00

With ffmpeg2theora you can convert mp4 files to theora ogv files.

ffmpeg2theora filename.mp4

In the following case all mp4 in that directory will be converted into ogv without video output.

for i in *.mp4; do ffmpeg2theora --novideo -a5 "$i"; done

I joined the game ...and you can, too!

2010-12-01T07:56:00.004+01:00

Some months ago I joined the Game. "Join the Game" is the campaign from the KDE community to make it possible to everyone to support the KDE project. Although I contribute to KDE already (e.g. promotion) I had the impression that I still take more than I could give back. To show my love and to support the vision and the values behind KDE I decided to become a financial sponsor, too.

This is the little present I received in return.

Christmas time is approaching. This is a time of reflection. A time to rethink your values and to check if your actions are supporting those aims. Joining the game really helps to improve an amazing free and open source project. Therefore I joined the game!

... AND YOU CAN, TOO!

LinuxDay in Dornbirn, AT ... or an extraordinary day of success stories

2010-11-28T20:55:00.003+01:00

It is 11pm and I am on my way home from LinuxDay in Dornbirn, Austria. It was a long but amazing day. Myriam, Mark and myself were at the KDE and Amarok booth. Surprisingly Christoph (a local KDE on Gentoo user/hacker) supported us rather the whole day.
We were demonstrating our software to potentially new users talked about upcoming awesome
features with more experienced users; we were selling some KDE merchandise articles and were giving a way a lot of openSUSE 11.3 CDs. Furthermore it was an excellent possibility to intensify the cooperation with other projects.

Thomas, Christoph, Myriam, Mark

KDE EDU Applications
We showed and explanied KDE software to many visitors. The best feedback we got after presenting KDE EDU applications to a student was: "Hey, this way education really makes fun!"
We did at least one thing right. YES!!!

Christoph explaning KDE software

Linux4education
I meet Helmut and Matthias (from Austrian desktop4education and server4education project) at openSUSE conference in Nuremberg before. We got in contact there and discussed the brilliant stuff they are doing. Install a school server (based on openSUSE) with just two clicks (enter the IP address and the root password). The school server provides a LAMP server including authentication for all teachers and students (openLDAP), Fileserver (Samba), Webserver (incl. Joomla), Teaching tools (Moodle), etc. For the desktop I think you need about 4 questions to answer. The server could be accessed by Windows clients, too. The project is supported for (at least) the next 3 years by the department for education of Austria to distribute and teach their software at schools in Austria. This is really rocking cool!

At openSUSE conference we talked with Nuno about the KDE-Edu project in Portugal (special widgets and such stuff) and other possibilities the KDE Plasma Desktop provides. At the moment I saw them in Dornbirn today, they greeted my with the words "You don't have to convince us anymore. Our next release (coming out in December) will ship KDE."

Matthias and Helmut at their booth

LibreOffice and X2Go
It was also a great pleasure to talk to the LibreOffice crew to exchange some news and think about an intensified collaboration. X2Go is a open-source project providing remote access to other PCs and terminal services. Next to web-access a qt client provides access from the desktop. They are very interested in a cooperation, esp. together with OwnClowed to provided remote access to applications and data. X2Go is used by d4e mentioned above. This seems a great chance for the KDE and X2Go project to join forces and provide much better services than every project alone. Collaboration across borders rocks!

LibreOffice and KDE folk

Work, live and learn with KDE software
At high noon I had the pleasure to giva a presentation about KDE software, esp. for in educational environment. Audience level: Beginners (so I was told at least). So my talk was aiming for beginners. To make sure I asked at the beginning. About 95% were using Linux and knew KDE software. I decided to change my talk. I only showed a view slides and did a mixture of live demo of cool features and questions & answers. I think it went quit well.

The day ended with the traditional "Kässpätzle" in a beautiful restaurant in the town. The event was professionally organized and I will be going next year, too.

Social event with "Kässpätzle"

Thanks to the organizers, the other projects, and especially Myriam, Mark and Christoph for the fun we had. I hope to see you soon again.

Special thanks to the whole KDE community for creating, maintaining, distributing, improving, ... all the amazing software. Without you I had nothing to present.

openSUSE conference 2010 is over

2010-10-24T22:20:00.000+02:00

Hackspace

openSUSE conference is over. It was an amazing and exhausting time. And the most important thing I learned was: The openSUSE project is a commuity. Of cause I meet many community members employed by Novell. But also many contributors NOT payed by that sponsor. The project is moving more and more into the direction of independence (e.g. with it's community based new strategy).
I was suspisious myself when I choose my distro some time ago. Shall I really try openSUSE, with all the deals the main sponsor is doing? From now on I am sure that these prejudices were wrong.

Chani doing artwork for KDE promo.

I had many inspiring conversations with many intresting people. One I want to mention here. There were three impressive guys from Austria. They created Linux for schools (desktop4education) based on openSUSE. The desktop is installed with 4 question, the server only needs 2 questions to be answered. More information at: http://d4e.at/ (DE-only)
I meet these heros end of November again and I hope we are going to improve the cooperation between their project, the KDE edu team and openSUSE-li-f-e (edu-project from openSUSE).
Greetings to Austria. You rock!

Freedom step by step

2010-09-24T21:46:00.001+02:00

cc-by-nc-nd by Images by John 'K' @flickr

Just a short note: Today I announced that the company I am working for is switching from MS Office to OpenOffice.org. :-)
Most of the people never heard from OpenOffice.org before and have no idea about Free / Open Source Software. The majority of the minds is open and they are curious about that new software. Others kindly asked for guidance. All in all I have a good feeling about that change. Wish me luck!

openSUSE strategy is moving on

2010-09-24T09:24:00.000+02:00

openSUSE strategy is evolving. The strategy team is working very hard to integrate all the input they get. We got some great ideas from our contributors as well as from users and even non-users.
I would be interested in further input from the upstream projects.

What do you expect from the openSUSE community? In which direction should out strategy point to improve our collaboration?

Please let us know your hopes and expectations in the comments or via mail (firstname.lastname at gmail com).

P.S.: I would be great if you could spread that page to other upstream projects.

Strategy is mighty!

2010-09-15T00:57:00.002+02:00

Following the openSUSE strategy discussion I read some reasonable questions and comments like: Why do we invest time into that useless strategy discussion? What is the benefit of a strategy? Strategy is only for companies!
This is a follow up to my friend Jos' post about strategy.

I love strategy! (Strategy was one of my major subjects at university and a research focus of the chair I worked and taught over four years.) So I might be biased. Nevertheless I want to ~~convince you~~ share some of my thoughts.

Why do we invest time into that valuable strategy discussion?

There are several studies about the success of organizations. The strategy is in most cases playing an important part. I explain why:

What is the benefit of a strategy?

A good strategy should
1. show your major future challenges and provide an answer to those challenges,
2. point into a direction where the team wants to move and
3. unite the team.

Challenges
"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. " (Niels Bohr) But you have to try to anticipate the challenges. Otherwise you have no chance to act. You could only re-act and that is not an advantage. It is always easier to change things when you are in the driving seat. These challenges include the development of customer needs as well as of the competitors. Business tools (like them or not) can help to see some things clearer.

Direction
A good strategy gives a direction where the herd is aiming at. In an environment with no strong top down control (like in communities), having the same targets and values are essential. This direction - called the vision or mission - summarizes the common goals in one sentence. This goal is far enough away that you have to move yourself and close enough that it is possible to reach.

Uniting
A strategy can help a community to glue together, to find the things they have in common and to define (together) the way they want to go (together). In business many strategies are defined by the top management and fail because they are not wholeheartedly supported by the employees. The best strategy is worth nothing if it is not filled with life. Therefore, the perhaps most important part of a good strategy is the process how this strategy was created. Who was involved? How were the opinions collected and summarized? Is the process open enough? Is the communication and the flow of information transparent? How many people outside of the organization were involved? Etc. [This would fill a whole blogpost of it's own.]

Strategy is for communities!

Most strategy projects at university I did with NPO (non profit organization). We worked with kindergartens, with schools, with the youth welfare office etc. I can assure you: those projects were a blast. I am convinced that it works for communities as well!

Strategy is mighty!

A brilliant strategy, developed in an open environment by the community and external persons can take your open source project to the next level of success. Focus on the processes not (only) the content. Don't write down a strategy just to have one. Make it move your world!

Open Source Principles at Schools?!

2010-09-14T23:12:00.000+02:00

CC-BY-SA @San Jose Library

Today I read an article in one of the big Swiss newspapers about the use of the internet, esp. Wikipedia at school [1]. According to the article teachers still mistrust this rather unknown media internet. Wikipedia is not a trustworthy source for information. In some schools even the site is blocked. What a pity.

There are so many fantastic possibilities to use and learn with it. You mistrust Wikipedia? No problem. Make a project with your students. Pick a topic (from you history book for example) and analyze the wiki page. Let your students compare it with a couple of textbooks. Discuss why the article could be not up to your standards. And finally fix it! Edit the page with your students, improve it until it matches your standards. Create something valuable with them. What a fantastic learning experience!

In one paragraph the article mentions that e.g. the Russian version of World War II is not completely objective (in their view) because it has a national perspective. Oh! I am sure that textbooks are always objective in all countries. Talking about "untrustworthy" sources like the Internet (or perhaps official books in countries we call dictatorships) the young people learn to think on their own and to check other sources. Imho this is a very valuable experience.

So if you mistrust the source in your language, let your colleague, the English, French, Spanish, or what ever modern language teacher, join your project and compare the content of the different languages sites.

If you know some children (those little persons making a lot of noise), then talk to their parents and teachers. Inspire them to experience wikipedia and other open source projects, let them feel the power of working together and sharing, let them learn together while exploring the world and creating something valuable. Offer your help and make things possible.

[1] http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/startseite/per_mausklick_zur_schlacht_am_morgarten_1.7536473.html (German)

Hello Planet SUSE

2010-09-07T08:12:00.000+02:00

Since many years I am an (open)SUSE user and spread openSUSE wherever I could in my private environment.
The openSUSE strategy discussion has scratched my itch and I started to contribute more to openSUSE.

What could you expect?
Don't expect much code from me. My experiences are more in the area of strategy, marketing and promotion. Perhaps I could also share some results from my researches during the last years about open source communities.

So be curios and stay tuned.
I am happy to join the openSUSE community and I am looking forward to know more of you.

Let's have a lot of fun!

Cheers,
Thomas

KDE's 4.5 Release Party in St. Gallen (Switzerland)

2010-09-02T23:32:00.000+02:00

One of the many KDE Release Parties [1] took place in St. Gallen (Switzerland). On Tuesday, 17. August we celebrated together with the Linux User Group [2]. The LUG is not very big but at that evening an amazing number of interested people turned up to see the new release of KDE's workspace and applications. My notebook was defect at that time so we used the KDE 4 live cd [3] on a system of one of the participants (thank you, Petra).

The atmosphere was very friendly and we had really good conversations with gnome fanbodys. So I could have a look at gnome shell.

All in all it was a great evening and I learned a lot.

1. There are many open minded and interested people out there. Just invite them and show them a solution to their problem.
2. Doing the main presentation with a live cd is not the best idea
a) it's slow,
b) there is no content and
c) it was not rocking stable.
3. At least "a view" were impressed and I could give away some live CDs.
4. The accessibility has room for improvement.
5. The important thing for (new) users is: Easy to use (incl. out-of-the-box abilities), stability and their favorite apps (or equivalent). (So nothing new here, but we still a few miles to go.)
6. Improve use-cases information.

[1] http://sg.linuxtreff.ch
[2] http://community.kde.org/Promo/ReleaseParties/4.5
[3] http://home.kde.org/~kdelive/

Getting more people involved

2010-08-12T21:42:00.002+02:00

cc-by Frank Karlitschek

Akademy is over since a week or so. (Damn, time is running so fast...). After a little trouble with some personal belongings (car broke down, fridge malfunctioning, water boiler defect and at last the death of my laptop screen) I finally could go after some ideas born during Akademy.

On Akademy tuesday we had some community related BoFs. The following summary was made by Diederik (of KMess fame) and me.

One of the main question was, how we could get more people involved in KDE. The "get involved"-pages already give a good overview about the possibilities to contribute. Although we thought that this site could be improved.

Camila did a short survey why the attendees were contributing and how that begun.

Reasons for participating:
The main three reasons were:

"Friends invited me to do something for free software."
"I feel accepted. / The members of the KDE community were open."
"It was not hard to start. (There were no imposed barriers.)"

In the following discussion barriers to enter were summarized.

Why are people not contributing?

They were afraid. (See talk from KDE women).
They don't know that they could contribute.
They didn't know how / where to start.
The steps to take for a new contributor were too big (e.g. the advice: "Fix umbrello") and scare them.

In our community we have potentially great contributors, who could use just a little assistance in the right direction. Getting these people aboard could really help us reach new levels.

We decided to enrich that page and to add some emotions and some "selling" points for new members. Working in our community is not only work but gives you something back.

Selling points.

For example, we show people behind the movement, enthusiastic people, learning and working together and having fun! Together with Neja and Ivan we drafted some text and collected pictures.

If you have any ideas or nice photos, expressing the fascination, passion and fun we all experience in KDE, please let us know in the comments section.

Stay tuned to see the final result.

KDE Software on Windows

2010-08-09T07:12:00.003+02:00

Why do I need KDE Software on Windows? Use Linux instead! That's much better anyway.
Yeah, that's right. But there are situations where that strategy does not work.

I am sitting in the office and are still fascinated by RKWard (as I blogged before). So I kindly asked our IT guys to give me an old notebook to install Linux onto it. And because they are great colleagues they gave me one. (Yes, I come to the point soon.)
So I started to download openSUSE 11.3. But the network connection was so poor that after an hour or more the download was aborted and I had to start from the begin. If I only had a nice torrent client. (Now I come to the point.) ktorrent!
(Yes, there are other programs as well but perhaps I was searching for a reason.)

That was my chance to give KDE on Windows a try.
After downloading the installer (http://windows.kde.org/download.php) I clicked through the wizard until I came to the packages. What packages do I need? And where is ktorrent? I installed the network pack. The installation went well but it took a while.
No. tkorrent :-(
Hey, but there is KGet. This one can handle torrent files, too. After adding the kdebase-apps (konq.dll was needed) I could download the openSUSE iso.

Resumée: The installer is easy to use and works very well. The packages are not really small and it was not totally clear for me, which packages I had to install to get my favorite apps on windows. All in all it works and is easy to use. Kudos to all KDE on Windows dudes. You did an amazing job!

It is so good to have gwenview, konversation and at least some of my other favorite KDE apps around.

RKWard is amazing!

2010-08-06T15:25:00.000+02:00

I had the pleasure to meet Aleix Pol and Stu Jarvis at Akademy. They guided me the way to KDE EDU and scientific apps for KDE.

Weeks later I am sitting in my office doing some statistics. The funny thing is, that your brain sometimes is useful and I remembered an app called rkwrd or something.

My friend google told me that it is called RKWard and that it is not a KDE Application. It is an application based on kdelibs (it I see that right).

At home I fired up my kBook and installed the packages for r and RKWard. After a quick look into some of the nice tutorials I could do my first analysis and the linear regression I wanted to do. Brilliant. What a fantastic application. And I had such a hard time during my studies calculating statics by hand.

The other advantage is that I am reminded that I wanted to invest more time for the promotion of KDE EDU (inculding scientific applications). Why has a day only 24h?

KDE release counter

2010-07-29T11:53:00.006+02:00

Dion just made new release counter for 4.5.

Just add a HTML/JavaScript gadget to your blog:

For the square banner:

For the long banner:

Post Akademy

2010-07-14T21:29:00.007+02:00

My first, but not my last, Akademy is over and I arrived back in Switzerland. Akademy was really amazing and I want to thank everyone who made that possible. It was a great pleasure to meet you all. Keep on rocking!

One of my good post Akademy intentions is to support the KDE-EDU team. The first step is to get my kids joyfully involved into software development with rubber ducks. They love it! ;-)

And this picture is for you, Tomaz.

Akademy: KDE rocks!

2010-07-04T23:43:00.014+02:00

This is my first Akademy and I have to admit: I'm blown away! It's better than I even expected. It's such a pleasure to meet so many friendly and openminded KDE members from India, Hungary, France, Italy, Brasil, the Netherlands, USA, Canada, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Slovenia and many many more countries.

I really enjoy to know the people behind the names and nicknames. Two days ago I meat Aurélien Gâteau, the developer of Gwenview and yesterday he won the KDE award for the best application. Congratulations!

On the first night we showed the world that KDE doesn't only rock your desktop but also rock your party!

One final point. The local organizing team and specially the local volunteers are doing an excellent job! You rock, too!

Akademy 2010: Day -1

2010-07-01T23:59:00.004+02:00

I arrived in Helsinki on the evening of June 30th. The sightseen today was very nice and the weather is absolutely great. You can expect finish summer for the next days. :-)
Although the water might still be a little cold for residends from milder geographical regions like me.

My talk about the principles behind successful open source communities is finished and I'm looking forward to all other presentations. It's Our World, Clearly!

Akademy is approaching

2010-06-24T23:41:00.008+02:00

Akademy is approaching faster than it is good for me. Just too many things to do until then. One of those things is to prepare my talk. As long as I haven't found a template yet, I modified an existing one. You can grab the first draft here (OpenOffice ODF). Please improve it and share it again.

I'm looking forward to see you all there!

TO DOs:
Flight: Booked.
Hotel: Booked.
Paper: Sent.
Talk: Concept and template done.
Planned the first two days in Helsinki: Failed.
Organized travel from Helsinki to Tampere: Not started yet.
....

Calling for help

2010-06-16T06:21:00.010+02:00

In the last years I was hunting the secrets of successful open source communities (for my PhD thesis). The analysis of the principles of those fantastic communities is done. The next (and last step) is:

How could the positive effects of open source communities be transfered to classical organizations. Of cause I have some ideas but I think it would enrich my work if I could discuss those ideas with people from "real life".

Most people are happy to live in an self-determined, passion encouraging, fearless "open source community environment" but are not convinced to privde such an environment to their subordinates, because they fear to loose control etc.

It wouldn't be so difficult to get interviews with empleyees or lower management. The problem is, that these groups generaly like the idea to have such a workenvironment, too, but have very limited possibilities to let their dreams come true. (And it is easier to impress the professors with the opinion of somebody from top management.)

This would be the perfect interview / discussion partner for me:

A member of top management of
a medium-sized or major enterprises
who is interested in new ideas to shape the company way beyond cost reduction (e.g. the increase the use of collective intelligence in the enterprise, the creation of a passionate environment or the introduction of the "sharing spirit" etc.).
It would help if the company / manager has heard from the open source movement and the power of communities before.
(Non software related branches would be more intersting, because the differences between them and open software communities are bigger.)

I tried the last weeks to get to those peolpe but without success.

So if you have some connections to top management (e.g. NOKIA!) please let me know.
( thomas dot thym at gmail dot com)

And by the way:

Cut mp3 and ogg files without decoding

2010-06-13T10:21:00.004+02:00

Audio editing software (in many cases at least) is decoding the audio files before edit. At the end they are encoded again. If you only want to split the file with the mentioned method the quality of the file decreases.
The command line tool mp3splt [1] does that job (without de-/encoding) for mp3 and ogg files. (And there is even a gtk-gui.)

The basic command is just:

mp3splt [options] filename starttime endtime

e.g. mp3splt -f filename.mp3 02.55 06.22
Option -f for variable bitrates
The output will be in filename_02m_55s__06m_22s.mp3

There are several options. Take a look at the manual [2].

[1] http://mp3splt.sourceforge.net
[2] http://mp3splt.sourceforge.net/mp3splt_page/documentation/man.html

A first glance at the Plasma Netbook Reference

2010-04-02T22:53:00.004+02:00

As promised my first impression about the Plasma Netbook Reference.

First boot took "very long" but at least I had an amazing netbook interface with great effects running really smooth on the N270 1,6 GHz processor with 1GB ram. All in all really promising!

Downside: WLAN was not working and it was not possible to start an application that required root priviliges (like software management).

So I changed the root password (I don't know if that was the best idea). Now I was asked for the password but the app didn't start anyway. After the reboot WLAN worked. So I updated via konsole with yast2. The Netbook Reference is KDE SC 4.3.5. After the update everything worked great (WLAN, amazing desktop effects, start of every app, ...) Only one minor: Maybe it would be helpful for new users to have the logout/shutdown button in the panel. But this isn't software for new endusers anyway so it doesn't matter.

In the next step I tried to update to 4.4.70 but then KDE didn't start anymore (nothing happend after the login screen). As this should be the device for my wife (and she prefers a rock stable system) I decided to install OpenSUSE 11.2 with KDE 4.3.5. As the netbook reference is a on-stick-version I will try it some day again without any effects on the hard disk to give useful feedback to the developers.

All in all it was a good experience and very promissing.

BTW: Where can I get the beautiful grub menu and splash screen?

Finding the KNetbook (part II)

2010-04-02T15:08:00.012+02:00

As I wrote a view weeks ago I am searching a notebook for my wife to run KDE SC 4.4 on Linux on it. Now we decided that it would be a netbook.

Why am I telling you that. I am still unhappy with the small market share Linux has and want to point to some points I recognized during my way to find my product.

Steps if I wanted a netbook without preference for an operating system:

Check some netbooks at a netbook test or discussion site of your choice.
Check the hardware in a store of your choice.
Buy the netbook and ~~have fun~~ try to use it.

Steps if I want a KDE netbook:

Check some netbooks at a netbook test or discussion site of your choice.
Spend hours to search the web if there are known issues with hardware compatibility.
Oh yes, there are known problems. But the sites were last updated one year ago. Perhaps the problem is solved by now? Keep on searching!
Check one or many of the hardware compatibility sites of major distros.
Find out, that your favoured netbook is not listed (the compatibility databases are often by far not completed) and the sites are a little bit outdated anyway. [1]
Go to bed and spend your next free evening, too.
After several hours of searching for other nice and affordable peaces of hardware finally write about your martyrdom on identi.ca. (Thanks to anyone who answered!)
Get really useful information from your fantastic KDE community within a couple of minutes / over night and decide.
Search the web for a reseller shipping your favoured netbook to your country WITHOUT operating system.
Renege your promise never to pay again for an operating system you don't use and order a Acer Aspire One D250 with XP/Android. (It is not possible to buy state of the art hardware without OS. Something goes definitely wrong here.)
Before wiping the hard disk have a look at android. Find out that you have to end the windows install (incl. licence agreement) before you can use android. Forget about android and pass to the next step.
Download your linux distro of choice and copy it onto an usb-stick. (Excellent descriptions for OpenSUSE and the KDE netbook reference are here and there.)
See your netbook come to life and HAVE FUN!

You might assume that it is much easier to find a windows netbook than one with linux. And you are totally right.

My resume:

Simplicity rules: If we want to increase the market share of Linux/KDE it should be really easy and fast to find proper hardware and software.
Our strength is the community: I spent hours searching the web without usefully results. The community helped me within minutes.

What can we do to improve these two major points? Is it only a personal issue or is this important for anybody else? Where can I steel the time to contribute? ...

P.S.: About my experiences with the KDE netbook reference I will blog another time.

[1]
http://en.opensuse.org/Hardware
http://en.opensuse.org/HCL/Laptops/Asus
http://en.opensuse.org/HCL/Laptops/Acer#Aspire_One
http://hcl.mandriva.com/
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/Laptop/Reports
http://hardware4linux.info/systems/
http://www.ubuntuhcl.org/
http://www.linlap.com/
http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/
http://www.linux-drivers.org/

Finding the kBook

2010-03-04T21:19:00.001+01:00

My wife as well as my sister are looking for a small notebook or a netbook. I did a quick research to find a proper gadget to run KDE on it. I made good experiences with Lenovo, so I started there. One thing was clear to us all: We don't ever gonna pay for a Windows whatever version.

It seems that Lenovo has a "close relationship" with MS. No refund for MS operating systems possible. :-(

Same situation with some bigger vendors and reseller. Lenovo UK wrote in their mail about an agreement with MS only to ship windows with their machines.I have to admit: I'm shocked. Windows only systems where ever you look.

I didn't knew if I should laugh or cry as I read the Lenovo slogan "New World. New Thinking."

Hey European Commission! Wake up! After your success against Microsoft in the browser war here is your next goal: Every computer (esp. notebooks) should be available WITHOUT operating system. The price should be reduced by the cost of the OS.

Still alive

2010-01-31T21:14:00.003+01:00

4yo and 2yo "working" with their favorite app Krita.

It has been a long time since my last post.

Since my move to Switzerland and my new job I haven't found any time to support the KDE-promo or www-team. (Ok. I never was one of the top-contributors, but it was always a great pleasure to contribute a little bit to such a great community).

From time to time I can read the promo mailinglist and are happy to see how many remarkable people are doing fantastic things. I can't wait to see the new web-design and new t-shirts and of cause KDE SC 4.4.0.

The only two things I could achieve the last 1/2 year.

Spread KDE in the private environment: Infect my sister and her husband with KDE passion. I could convert them from windows and now they are two proud only-KDE-on-Linux-users.
Convince future users: Show my two kids the free world of KDE. Their favorite app krita saved a small forrest (in form of paper) so far (see the picture above).

Thanks to all (real) contributors who keep the KDE-community running!

Life is Great!

2009-10-16T01:13:00.005+02:00

Photo by mikep (CC-BY-NC-SA)

A view days ago Lydia dented me to an interesting video on TED. (If you don't know TED it's worth having a look. The clips there are much better than the regular TV program.)

It's a talk from David Logan on tribal leadership.

According to Logan the difference between tribes (or communities) are their cultures. Build on the culture communities can reach different states. He suggest 5 tribal states:

State 1: Life Sucks

That's the culture of gangs and in prisons. Life is horrible and you just try to survive.

State 2: My Life Sucks

Life isn't so bad. But mine! If I had other possibilities I would have fun.

State 3: I'm Great (and you're not!)

That's the culture in most companies and other "tribes". These people keep telling you their own success stories.

State 4: We're Great

Tribes in this state focus on the WE, not the I. The spirit glues those communities together. They produce excellence and are having fun. A view brilliant companies and many FLOSS communities have reached that level.

State 5: Life Is Great

Tribes in state 5 are those who change the world. They focus on values.

According to David Logan's research 2% are in state 1, 25% in state 2 and the majority (48%) is in state 3. Only 22% are in state 4 and 2% in state 5.

David Logan introduces two assumptions:

1. You can only understand someone who is at the same state (plus minus one).

2. The way as people see the world so they behave.

You might have been wondering what that has to do with KDE? Here it comes: KDE (as a brilliant community) has definitly reached state 4. How can we move from 4 to 5?

Eric Raymond discribes the attitude of FLOSS hackers: "The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved." This discribes exactely the attitude: Life Is Great!

What is your attitude?

When you are looking for fascinating problems: Grab one! ...at http://bugs.kde.org

The four questions I am asking myself are:

How do I see the world? At what state are the people around me? How do I communicate with others? How do we change that amazing world?

OpenExpo in Winterthur, Switzerland

2009-09-23T23:59:00.002+02:00

I just came home from OpenExpo in Winterthur, Switzerland. Unfortunately I could only send the afternoon and of cause the social event afterwards. It was a great pleasure to meet Myriam, Adriaan, Eckhart, Andi, Luca and Markey and Sven from Amarok.

Sesame backend for soprano on openSUSE

2009-08-21T21:31:00.004+02:00

Just a short note. I tried to install the sesame backend for soprano on opensuse 11.1 factory (KDE 4.3.0). Since I installed the java openjdk-devel packed (thanks for the hint) and of cause soprano-backend-sesame Nepomuk runs perfectly well.

Second note: I'm really happy that openSUSE is a community based distro and is (again) selecting KDE as the default while installation. Gnome is still at the top of the list but it's a great sign. If you are not an openSUSE user you might give it a try.

The World is moving

2009-07-25T10:47:00.002+02:00

Not only the famous and great members of the KDE community are moving. Also a small member of the KDE promo team has moved to a new country. (To be exactly I moved from Munich, Germany to St. Gallen, Switzerland.) Switzerland is really a great country. I love it! And it seems that I might win the power-plug-adapter-battle and as you can see I managed to be online again.
The only purpose of this post is to say: Hello KDE Switzerland!
Anybody who lives near St. Gallen?

Updating OpenSUSE 11.0 to 11.1

2009-06-04T14:11:00.003+02:00

I'm just updating my OpenSUSE 11.0 to 11.1 with zypper dup (http://en.opensuse.org/Dup). Because I have many repositories installed (KDE4, community, factory, ... repos) I had to change a lot. And then the fun started. After 'zypper dup' I had to solve about 1000 missing dependences. What a nightmare. In general I'm very satisfied with OpenSUSE but updating from one version to the other is horrible. There is room for improvement. Kubuntu does this in a much smarter way.

But after I solved the dependences OpenSUSE 11.1 work really great.

Forget tabs?

2009-05-22T15:05:00.004+02:00

I am hoping to get tabs for KWin in a view month and the Mozilla Project is discussing what innovative concept will come after tabs.

"Reinventing Tabs in the Browser - How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?" is the questing of the Design Challenge 2009.

What fascinates me:

Another concept of bringing the Internet to the desktop (compared to KDE's approach of integrating the web into the desktop).
How they are thinking into the future and drive real innovation.
How they designed and started the campaign (nice website, many involved specialists (look at "cooperations with" and "partners" at the bottom of the page), ...).

Keep your eyes open. Always think a step ahead. Perhaps there are some good approaches for KDE, too.
E. g.

To visualize search results from nepomuk not in a list but 2D in the dimensions relevance (top-down) and chronology (time, left-right) (see the last link) or
the idea that content that is opened / used in the same time frame might belong together.
...

Links:

Design Challenge 09: http://design-challenge.mozilla.com/summer09/
What's next after tabs? http://informationarchitects.jp/designing-firefox-32/
an extension for Firefox to structure the tabs in a tree view: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890
or: http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/firefoxnext-tabs-on-the-side/
Some points about the browser as the new operating system: http://softwareas.com/taking-browser-tabs-seriously
Visualize search results in the dimensions relevance and chronology: http://www.lizblankenship.com/tabviz/?tag=mockup

Mozilla Firefox doesn't start after update

2009-05-22T12:09:00.002+02:00

Starting Firefox after the update failed with the following message: "Could not find compatible GRE between version ...".
In the Mozilla Buidservice repo I use (http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/mozilla/openSUSE_11.0/i586/) the
xulrunner package is updated to 1.9.0.11 (mozilla-xulrunner190-1.9.0.11-2.2.i586.rpm) while Firefox is still 3.0.10 (MozillaFirefox-3.0.10-3.1.i586.rpm). Just downgrade xulrunner* to 1.9.0.10 and everything should work again.

Destroying Communities

2009-05-12T08:54:00.005+02:00

I'm not only promoting KDE and asking stupid questions I also research about community building. The opposite of the questing you want to answer sometimes gives you a totally new perspective of your subject. Therefor my question is not how to build communities but how to destroy them.

How can I destroy a community (as a leader or developer or user or troll)? Under which circumstances would you stop contributing to KDE or any other Open Source Project (I've read some tweets about developer leaving a certain distro)?

I would be very happy if you could leaves some comments.

Noise reduction with audacity

2009-05-11T10:55:00.003+02:00

I recorded some interviews for my PhD thesis during OpenExpo (in Bern). The background noise unfortunately was very loud so I had to concentrate very hard while listening. Audacity has the nice effect "noise reduction". I tried it and normalized the track afterwards. The difference is magnificent. Now it's easy to understand the answers to my questions, althou the voices sound a little bit unnatural now (but that doesn't matter).

Kudos to wine developers

2009-05-11T10:17:00.005+02:00

Yesterday my father was visiting and wanted to show me a CD about Australia. I first thought there were some images or videos on it but it was a MS-Windows .exe file. :-(

I knew I installed wine some month ago. So I just clicked on the file and entered "wine" when KDE was asking for the application with which I wanted to open this file. Really deeply impressed we could navigate through the whole program including animations, music, text, etc.

Kudos to the wine developers. Great work!

Finally I added wine as standard application for .exe files to the file association dialog in KDE4 systemsettings and now I can run .exe files with a simple mouseclick. I'm delighted to see how flexible Linux has become these days.

How to convert wma to ogg

2009-04-30T10:36:00.009+02:00

How can I convert all *.wma to *.ogg in one directory?
I first tried the approved ffmeg. That one helped me many times with good results.

Version 1:

find -name '*wma' -exec ffmpeg -i {} -acodec vorbis -ab 128k {}.ogg \;
rename 's/\.wma//' *\.wma\.ogg
(Test the renameing: rename --no-act --verbose 's/\.wma//' *\.wma\.ogg)

or

Version 2:

for i in *.wma; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -vn -acodec vorbis -ab 128k "${i/.wma}".ogg; done

# ffmpeg: -vn => novideo, -acodec vorbis => ogg-encoder, -ab set audio bitrate to 128k (64 is standard. That option doesn't seem to work with ogg :-(
# ${i/.wma} is cutting the filename $i from ".wma"

The quality gets really worse.

Best quality with version 3:

1. Step: Convert wma to flac with ffmeg

ffmpeg -i input.wma -vn -acodec flac output.flac

2. Step: Convert flac to ogg with oggenc

oggenc input.flac -q2 -o output.ogg

# -q quality 2 (1 bad .. 10 excellent)
# -o output-file

Or all in one line to convert the whole directory:

for i in *.wma; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -vn -acodec flac -y tmp.flac; oggenc tmp.flac -q2 -o "${i/.wma}".ogg; done; rm -f tmp.flac

# -y Overwrite output files.
# rm -f delete without further questions

EU Parliament elections and F/OSS

2009-04-30T09:57:00.004+02:00

European Parliament election in 1 month and 4 days. The last months before elections politicians are listening very carefully to their voters. http://www.freesoftwarepact.eu has some ideas how to bring FS and OSS into politicians minds. Even if there is no campaign in my EU-country (at the moment there is only one in Begum, France and Italy) it reminds me (and hopefully you) that this is a good time to act. NOW!

I will tease every politician I see and ask him or her about their attitude towards

software patents,
DRM,
support for F/OSS in schools and gov. administration,
...

And perhaps I'm going to write some emails. So they know there is something like F/OSS and there are many, many voters interested in that topic.

Presenting KDE at LinuxInfoTag in Augsburg (Hello Planet)

2009-04-15T13:47:00.000+02:00

Sat. March 28th LinuxInfoTag took place in Augsburg (in the south of Germany). Round 250 interested people were visiting the booths of KDE, Debian, and many many more Open Source Projects and could discuss with members of the communities or listen to 20 talks. This was not only my first official event promoting KDE I also had the chance to do my first talk introducing KDE 4.2. (Talking about first times: this is my first post on planet.kde.org (thanks to Jonathan Riddell): Hello Planet!)

It was a great pleasure and honor to present KDE 4.2 together with Lydia, Eckhart and Frederik! Thanks for the fun and thanks to everyone who contributed to KDE (otherwise I had nothing to present).
Apart from a small number of comments the majority of visitors was really excited about KDE 4.2. :-)
Kudos to all of you!

P.S.: You can find the slides (German) here:
PDF (3,7MB): http://www.luga.de/Angebote/Vortraege/KDE42_LIT_2009/KDE42_LIT_2009.pdf
ODF (OOo3.0.1) (4,6MB): http://kde.org/kdeslides/LITAugsburg2009/KDE42-LIT-Augsburg2009.odp
ODF template (102KB): http://www.mevin.net/download/KDE42-template.otp

Activation and deactivation of the touchpad

2009-02-08T20:25:00.003+01:00

Most of the hotkeys of my Thinkpad wok fine with KDE 4.2 (Fn+F4 Suspend to RAM, Fn+F12 Suspend to disk, Fn+F5 act/deact bluetooth, volumes, start/stop/previous/next). Fn+F7 (select Display) and Fn+F8 (act/deact Touchpad) don't work yet.
To act/deact the touchpad I found the following comand [1]:

/usr/bin/synclient "TouchpadOff=`/usr/bin/synclient -l | sed -ne 's/$TouchpadOff *= *$$[01]$/\2/p' | sed -e 'y/01/10/'`"

Now I'm searching a way to map the key in KDE4 without installing hotkeys or other programms.

[1] http://forums.opensuse.org/hardware/laptop/388880-thinkpad-fn-f8-toggle-touchpad-example.html

KDE 4.2 RC1 tested

2009-01-21T20:59:00.003+01:00

Today I updated my system to KDE 4.2 RC1 (factory repository). After the restart plasma crashed. I contacted the #plasma team on IRC and got a good tip within seconds: delete (or better move) ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-appletsrc.
After that I had a fresh new shiny open source state of the art (or above) desktop environment. If you want to have a look search http://blip.tv for "kde42" or http://youtube.com for "kde 4.2".

The whole KDE community has done an amazing work. Thank you very much! You ROCK!

IBM copyed our slogan

2009-01-14T20:28:00.004+01:00

Just read the article "The 10 Coolest Open Source Products Of 2008" and found that IBM uses the slogan "Be Free" for Lotus Symphony.

http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home

Convert ogg to mp3

2008-12-24T15:10:00.003+01:00

My sister is here for the holidays. Unfortunately her mp3 player only supports mp3 and no ogg. :-(
I helped her to convert their ripped ogg files from her kubuntu system into mp3 files. The following command transforms the whole directory from ogg in mp3.

for i in *.ogg; do sox "$i" "${i/.ogg}".mp3; done

(sox old.ogg neu.mp3 is the basic command to transform ogg to mp3.)

Microwaves playing "Jingle Bells"

2008-12-21T10:21:00.003+01:00

If you thought the purpose of microwaves is to heat meals, you might be wrong. Watch this little video from a PR-company.

Marry Christmas!

Unison: Permission error with FAT32 USB-drive

2008-12-20T12:09:00.004+01:00

Syncing my Linux (etx3) directory with a Windows USB-stick (FAT32) unison produced the following error:

Error in setting permissions:
Operation not permitted [chmod(/media/storage...

The permissions were set correctly. Here I found the solution.

Unison stores sync profiles in ~/.unison/*.prf. Edit the relevant prf file, and add a line 'perms = 0' and it will always ignore permissions for that profile.

See also the unison documentation: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/u....html#profiles

Installing Linux with KDE 4 on a Thinkpad R61

2008-12-03T22:31:00.006+01:00

After removing Vista from my new Thinkpad R61 I decided this time to install OpenSUSE 11.0 with KDE 4.1 (I run Kubuntu at the office, and I wanted to try another distribution.)
It took about 15 minutes until it was finished. Then I downloaded the online updates, added some programs and adjusted the desktop (plamoids and KDE4 composit desktop effects).
Network, WLAN, 3D-effects, sound (in and out), suspend to disk when the battery is low, ... worked fine out of the box. Congratulations to the whole open source community! Excellent work!

Only a few things don't work properly.

The fingerprint reader is not recogniced (but I don't need it).
I could aktivate bluetooth (after installing some bluetooth packages and the activation of bluetooth in YAST) but it is not possible to connect with my mobil phone (Nokia) longer than 3 seconds. I will work on that later.
Sun Presenter screen couldn't be installed. I will post on that later.
WLAN is connecting only in one out of 10 times. (Works pretty good now.)
Highspeed USB-stick is not recognized. (I have to deactivate ehci with "sudo /sbin/modprobe -r ehci_hcd")

More Variations of System Settings

2008-12-03T09:57:00.005+01:00

Original, Background for headline

Original, Background for the category

Original

Line above, background for the headline

Line above, background for the category

Line above, no background

Mockup KDE4.x System Settings Dialog

2008-12-02T15:52:00.004+01:00

Another alternative for the System Settings dialog of KDE4. Keep it elegant and make it clearer!

Follow the discussion about design and UI in KDE4 at:
http://weblog.obso1337.org/2008/system-settings-as-a-design-lesson/#comment-157247

Marketing lecture and meet the news

2008-11-20T15:05:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I had the pleasure to teach marketing for about 40 people studying a BA in Engineering. It's always a challenge to speak in front of students who like engineering and have to listen to crazy management folks. But it was amazing. They were very interested and the results were really well. I hope it wasn't only fun for me, but also for them. Perhaps a little bit.

What I didn't know. Most of them used to work for a big German company. Yes: They used to. I remember that I heard it in the news that the company would close one of its branches because it is not (enough?) profitable anymore. A few thousand employees would lose their jobs. And now those people, excellent people by the way, were sitting in my classroom. Those anonymous thousands loosing their jobs suddenly had names, faces, families, fears, ... complete lifes.

There's a great difference if you only hear the news or if you meet those people in real life. This time it was me who learned something in my lesson. But I hope the students did, too.

Extract mp3 from flv

2008-11-16T22:34:00.003+01:00

Tonight I tried to rip the audio track from a flv file. First I wanted to convert it into ogg but as the audio track is a mp3 stream itself I decided just to rip the mp3 data into a file (same quality as in the video file. A higher samplerate would only increase filesize).

UPDATE: Today the audiostream is often aac (not mp3 anymore). That means, you have to use mp4 instead of mp3 with ffmpeg ... -f mp4 ... .mp4).

One of those commands will do the job:
mplayer -dumpaudio in-video.flv -dumpfile out-audio.mp3
ffmpeg -i input.flv -f mp3 -vn -acodec copy output.mp3

To convert all files (*.flv to *.mp3) in the directory use one of the following commands:
for i in *.flv; do mplayer -dumpaudio -dumpfile "${i/.flv}".mp3 "$i"; done
for i in *.flv; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -f mp3 -vn -acodec copy "${i/.flv}".mp3; done

#ffmpeg: -f mp3 => force mp3 format, -vn => novideo, -acodec copy => stream-copy
# ${i/.flv} is cutting the filename $i from ".flv"

UPDATE: As the files are not always in the same format and my portable music player couldn't play mp4 I decided to convert them to ogg.
ffmpeg -i input.flv/mp4 -vn -acodec vorbis output.ogg

This script will transform all flv files in your directory into mp3 files.

1. Create a new file e.g. with kate and name it flv2mp3.sh

#!/bin/bash
for i in *.flv
do
echo "$i"
# Alternative 1
# mplayer -dumpaudio -dumpfile "${i/.flv}".mp3 "$i"
#Alternative 2
ffmpeg -i "$i" -f mp3 -vn -acodec copy "${i/.flv}".mp3
done

2. Change the right of this file:
chmod +x flv2mp3.sh

3. Goto the directory and run the script

Wikipedia.de is down!

2008-11-15T14:14:00.001+01:00

I'm shocked.

The German site of wikipedia is down due to a court decision forced by a member of parliament.

I doubt that this was the right way from Mr. Lutz Heilmann (Die Linke) to prevent the world from knowing something written in the wikipedia-article.

I'm looking forward to the reactions of the community.

More information:
http://www.golem.de/0811/63574.html (german)
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutz_Heilmann (german)

Trackback: http://www.golem.de/trackback/63574

BTW: You can support Wikipedia! http://wikimedia.de/spenden

Hello World!

2008-11-12T12:10:00.000+01:00

I bought a Thinkpad R61 and installed Linux (KDE4) on it. My intention starting this blog is to publish my experience. Perhaps this helps another user with his problems.