KDE at LinuxDay in Dornbirn, AT

More than one week ago, there was the LinuxDay in Dornbirn, Austria. This is a small-medium, very well organized event near the Swiss and German border with up to 500 visitors.

Since many years we have a KDE booth there. Together with Myriam we represented the KDE project at a booth and also gave a talk about KDE EDU apps. We had a KDE Plasma 4.13 netbook with „search and launch“ activity, one laptop with the „standard“ 4.13 desktop (proudly presenting our wonderful EDU apps, and two laptops running Plasma 5 (one with a touch screen).

Several KDE users came by for a little chat or to see the new Plasma 5. But there were also many none-linux-users. They were interested and I think also a little bit impressed by our powerful software and community.

We got a lot of positive feedback about Plasma 5, especially the design (even from a long year GNOME / Unity-user). The new nearly monochrome design looks much more professional. The users were very happy, hat we stayed with the work-flow and concept of the workspace.

 #1 FAQ was: Is the classic menu (the cascading menu) also available in Plasma 5? Answer: Yes.
Many other questions we could solve immediately.

One user made the proposal to create a kind of „introduction to KDE“ / „first steps“ where the basic (and advanced) features were well documented.

One unsolved questions was: How do I associate a file-type without extension to a certain program (e.g. a text-type files with no extension to kate oder kwrite)? Extensions could easily be linked to a program, but is this also possible for file-types?

Sadly the demand for merchandise stuff went down to 0. The KDE users have already t-shirts etc. and the non-users didn't buy.

 All in all it was an interesting day.

German labelings of birthdays in KOrganizer

In Kontact/KOrganizer it is possible to view automatically generated birthdays (generated from the addressbook) in your calendar. The generated title of the event is "Geburtstag von %name". In the month view there is not enough space to display the whole title. The result is that in every birthday I can only read "Geburtstag" and not the person who has her/his birthday.

 I can see that it is a birthday due to the candle-symbol (yes, that is not a battery symbol) and the colour of the item (calendar colour). (I think the english version is "%name's birthday" where "birthday" is cut away when the text is too long.)

So I filed a bugreport but it seems to be more difficult to get a real good solution for that. However the text is changed (thank you Frederik) in the next version.

I didn't want to wait that long and Burkhard was so kind to give me a howto so I could change it on my local machine. I want to share that with anyone who wants to change that, too (it seems to be a problem in other languages as well). This howto is for openSUSE but you should change that easily to your distro of choise.

0) install package gettext-tools

1) msgunfmt /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/akonadi_birthdays_resource.mo >/tmp/akonadi_birthdays_resource.po

2) edit /tmp/akonadi_birthdays_resource.po

Change "Geburtstag von %1" to "%1 (Geburtstag)"

[shortcuts: i = edit   esc = exit edit   :wq = save and exit] or use "kwrite" instead of "edit"

3) sudo msgfmt /tmp/akonadi_birthdays_resource.po -o /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES /akonadi_birthdays_resource.mo

It takes a view minutes until the titles will be changed.

2 days to go and KDE turns 15!

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

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

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

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

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.