In the last KDE and Qt meetings, there have been many and important changes, so I decided to blog about them to keep users up-to-date. The summaries and logs are available in each project’s site (http://kde.gentoo.org and http://qt.gentoo.org). Both projects have regular meetings, every third Thursday of the month (unless announced otherwise), and very often they have a common one. The channel that hosts us is #gentoo-meetings in Freenode, and everyone is welcome to join us. I will mention only the most remarkable issues that were discussed/decided, which seem to be a lot:
Qt meeting, 19 February 2010
This was delayed one day, so I missed it. I really hate it when I miss Gentoo meetings, as every time they are very fun and challenging, and I like very much interacting with so many Gentoo developers and contributors at the same time. Before proceeding, I’d like to point out that the Qt Project was very recently founded as a separate project, because the Qt Team (sub-herd of the KDE Project) has grown too much and had too many non-KDE issues. The Qt members are doing an awesome work. And here are some of the important issues:
- We now have an “unofficial” channel in IRC, and a new shiny Qt Subdomain! So from now on you can find us in #gentoo-qt on Freenode, and our documentation resides in http://qt.gentoo.org (thanks to Robin (robbat2) for setting that up). Of course we will still be available in #gentoo-kde or #gentoo-desktop.
- Raster USE flag is going to be on by default. Μάρκος (hwoarang) already blogged about this asking for testing.
- Qt 3 has been masked for removal from the tree, along with all Qt 3 packages and the qt3 USE flag. The only blocker for this task was MythTV, which now has a stable Qt 4 replacement in Gentoo. Also, Ben (yngwin) informed the kde-sunset maintainers about this, but so far I didn’t see anyone committing those apps there, so if you want to do it (or do general qt3 and kde3 work), consult this document. (Reminder: kde-sunset is user-maintained overlay, anyone interested can ask for access there, so if you are still interested in Qt 3 and/or KDE 3 packages, please ask for commit access instead of complaining to the Gentoo developers).
KDE meeting, 25 February 2010
This was delayed one week, which was a request by me, so it won’t be during my exams. There hasn’t been a KDE meeting in January, so there were plenty of topics to discuss. I was also the moderator of this one, which made it double fun. In most of the issues there has been some progress, so let’s begin:
- We now have a new leader, Tomáš Chvátal aka scarabeus. After a year of Jorge Manuel B.S. Vicetto’s (jmbsvicetto) absolutely perfect leadership, we had the annual elections, were scarabeus was voted by pretty much everyone. He is admittedly very skilled and very active in Gentoo community in general, as a member of QA, X11 and KDE Teams and also a recent council member. I’d also like to give props to my former “boss” Jorge, especially for taking over that old nasty mysql/amarok issue and creating the libmysqld.so patch.
- KDE SC 4.3.5 is stable in tree now, and the newly released KDE SC 4.4.1 is available in tree as testing. There have been many problems with 4.4.0 (mostly crashes), so it won’t be a stable candidate for sure. We’ll see how 4.4.1 goes and accordingly decide if this is going to be a stable candidate, or wait for 4.4.2.
- Amarok and MySQL 5.1 suffer from the same old libmysqld.so issue. Thus, we strongly recommend to remove the embedded USE flag from both Amarok and MySQL. In fact, it is not anymore enabled by default in the ebuilds. As a side note about MySQL, Akonadi seems to break in some machines with >MySQL-5.1.42. The problem is known to upstream developers, and there have been some workarounds in KDE forum, but I didn’t have time to test any of them yet.
- KDEPIM in trunk KDE is currently broken (really just kmail). This is because kmail’s mail storage is being ported to akonadi, so IMAP (I don’t know about the other protocols for sure) doesn’t work at all at the moment. Sput (Quassel developer) proposed to use the enterprise KDEPIM branch, which is supposed to work, as it is being paid by companies. I sent an email asking for help in gentoo-desktop mailing list, with no answers so far. Please see the thread archive (available here) for more info. I would also like to inform you that the KDE Team decided not to provide the usual trunk snapshots until version 4.4.70 (which is going to be the first alphas), because of this KDEPIM issue.
- KOffice 2.1.1 is released a month ago, but it is not available to users yet. Actually, it is in tree hardmasked, as it needs a close depedency checking in ebuilds. I was held responsible for this, and I hope till the weekend it will be done, if I get enough help from scarabeus which was the former KOffice ebuilds maintainer, or by anyone else from the KDE Team (there are plenty of people in the Team, I’m sure I’ll find someone to help me). By the way, this is my only KDE todo thing left.
- KNetworkManager is now in tree, but also hardmasked. This was in upstream’s kdereview branch, which contains packages that stay there for review by the developers for wider testing, before they move to their final KDE module or extragear branch (take a look at KDE’s SVN repo to get the picture). It was supposed to be released along with KDE 4.4, but it didn’t make it. So, I created a snapshot of the current SVN repository, which seems to have many problems, like crashes, missing features etc. So I guess it will remain hardmasked for a while, and I will continue to update the snapshot once every two weeks.
- The KDE Documentation is also one of my playgrounds. I recently updated the guide, and with a quick look I did the following: closed all three bugs regarding the KDE Installation Guide, added more items in Hints and Troubleshooting section, completely removed the kdeprefix reference, replaced the snapshots installation guide with a note that we won’t provide them for now, and done a bunch of small fixes (mostly version corrections and typos).
- I raised the issue of kde-meta (and accordingly @kde-* sets) not including all KDE modules. It currently excludes the developer-specific modules like KDESDK and KDEbindings (although it does contain KDEWebDev), and proposed either to include them all in kde-meta or to introduce a developer or sdk USE flag in kde-meta. Some developers were opposed on this, proposing to have a new meta package, like kdefull-meta, an idea which I actually hated. Our final word on this was to open a new discussion thread in gentoo-desktop mailing list, which I did, and review the issue in the next meeting.
- Finally, I’d like the attention of everybody here, as the following issue is very very important. In a previous meeting we discussed the split of the desktop profile in gnome/ and kde/ subprofiles. We raised the idea in gentoo-dev mailing list for review, and we had a positive feedback in general. Other DE’s refused to have a special subprofile, so they will stick to the basic desktop profile. What this means is that the desktop profile from now on will not contain GNOME or KDE-specific USE flags, which are transfered to the according subprofile. For users that want both DE’s (or just both DE-specific USE flags) can enable them manually in their make.conf (they are not many after all). The major advantage from the user-side of view is that many unwanted dependencies get stripped off automatically, and from the developer-side of view is that from now on we’ll have a more separate approach when packaging. The patches are ready and sent for review in gentoo-dev mailing list. Currently the result can be seen in the kde-crazy overlay, and here you can see the relevant thread. A news item will also be made before committing, and I hope that the final move will happen next week. I’d like to thank Maciej (reavertm), Ben (yngwin) and Samuli (ssuominen) for their precious help on this. (P.S. This is one of the very few moments that I felt I did some Gentoo development instead of KDE packaging, if you know what I mean
)
Qt Team meeting Log and Summary
KDE Team meeting Log and Summary
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Πριν πολύ καιρό είχα φιλοξενήσει στο elkosmas.gr έναν μαθητή που ήθελε να εκφράσει τους προβληματισμούς του σχετικά με τα εκπτωτικά κουπόνια που έδινε το Υπουργείο Παιδείας στους μαθητές του Γυμνασίου. Πριν λίγες μέρες μοιράστηκε μαζί μου ένα σύνδεσμο για το φόρουμ της Ελληνικής Κοινότητας του Ubuntu σχετικά με μια συζήτηση που έχει ανοίξει εκεί για τους πίνακες αλληλεπίδρασης. Στην εν λόγω συζήτηση γίνεται και λόγος για ένα άρθρο στο edugate σχετικά με τους πίνακες αλληλεπίδρασης. Στο άρθρο γίνεται αναφορά στους παραδοσιακούς υψηλής τεχνολογίας πανάκριβους πίνακες αλληλεπίδρασης αλλά και σε εναλλακτικές λύσεις που χρησιμοποιούν ένα Wiimote και κάποιο πρόγραμμα όπως το Smoothboard, αν και δωρεάν (ως sharewhare) το Smoothboard βασίζεται εν πολλοίς στο .NET framework μια τεχνολογία που ελέγχεται από την εταιρεία Microsoft και κατά συνέπεια λειτουργεί μόνο στα Windows. Ωστόσο το Smoothboard δημιουργεί μια επιφάνεια με δυνατότητες αλληλεπίδρασης εκμεταλλευόμενο απλές και φτηνές τεχνολογικές λύσεις όπως η χρήση ενός Wiimote για αισθητήρα και ενός στυλό υπέρυθρων για την επισήμανση των σημείων. Αλλά για μια στιγμή…. η τεχνολογία χρήσης του Wiimote ως αισθητήρα στο Linux και σε λειτουργικά όπως του Mac αλλά και στα Windows δεν είναι κάτι πρωτάκουστο. Κάθε άλλο μάλιστα, αν και πρώτος ο Johny Lee πρότεινε την χρήση του Wiimote ως ένα φθηνό αισθητήρα υπέρυθρων και έφτιαξε το πρώτο του interactive board με αυτό, την τεχνολογία αυτή όμως είδα να την χρησιμοποιεί και ο Γιάννης Γραβέζας στο infrael που μπορεί να μετατρέψει οποιαδήποτε οθόνη σε μια επιφάνεια αλληλεπίδρασης και είναι μια αρκετά ενδιαφέρουσα προσπάθεια που νομίζω ότι αξίζει να δούμε λίγο παραπάνω. Νομίζω ότι στην κατηγορία των προγραμμάτων δημιουργίας πίνακα αλληλεπίδρασης με χρήση Wiimote το πλέον διαπλατφορμικό στην παρούσα φάση είναι το Wiimote Whiteboard που είναι γραμμένο σε Java, ο κώδικας του είναι ανοιχτός και μπορεί να αλλάξει ώστε να προστεθούν λειτουργίες και δυνατότητες. Σίγουρα πρόκειται για ένα ενδιαφέρον project που νομίζω ότι με λίγο κόπο από την μεριά ορισμένων developer μπορεί να έρθει στα μετρά του Ελληνικού σχολείου και αύριο-μεθαύριο να χρησιμοποιείται από τα καμάρια μας στις τάξεις όλης της Ελλάδας. Αν θέλετε δείτε και λίγο το βίντεο που ακολουθεί για να πάρετε μια ιδέα: 
elkos says:
digitalnewsgr says:
Δεν ξέρω για ποιο λόγο αλλά εδώ και αρκετό καιρό επιθυμούσα να έχω στο μηχάνημα μου μια από τις παλαιότερες εκδόσεις του Amarok, όπως την Amarok 1.4. Είχα πάντα την εντύπωση ότι ο σχετικά λιτός σχεδιασμός του σε σύγκριση με τις νεώτερες εκδόσεις του Amarok ήταν περισσότερο πρακτικός για εμένα. Αν και δοκίμασα αρκετούς άλλους media player πάντα γκρίνιαζα γιατί ήταν είτε πολύ αργοί είτε απλά δεν μπορούσα να τους συνηθίσω με τίποτα. Τελικά όμως υπάρχουν και άλλη περίεργοι σαν εμένα όπως ο 
CybeRNerO says:
Eleftherios Kosmas says:
Δημήτρης Μιχαλάκος says:
Μερικές ημέρες πριν το Google προχώρησε 
