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.

Google Code In – My Summary

(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!

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

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

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

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!

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?

OpenExpo in Winterthur, Switzerland

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

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.

Presenting KDE at LinuxInfoTag in Augsburg (Hello Planet)

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

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

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

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

Installing Linux with KDE 4 on a Thinkpad R61

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

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

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